Variety owner Penske Media Company has bought a controlling stake in Rolling Stone parent company Wenner Media for $100 million. Jann Wenner will stay on as editorial director and his company will maintain “majority control and editorial oversight” of the magazine. In an earlier article about the company’s possible buyers, Joe Pompeo noted that Penske was one of the prospective buyers that current employees were “cautiously optimistic” about. “They are a company that understands how to straddle the print and digital landscape and has had some success in breathing new life into legacy brands,” one unnamed journalist explained.
“Cat Person” author Kristen Roupenian has landed a seven-figure, two-book deal with Scout Press in the US. The first book, a collection of short stories titled You Know You Want This, is planned for release in 2019.
Ruth Franklin, Sigrid Nunez, and other Paris Review contributors list their favorite books of 2017.
The New York Times has finished its investigation of reporter Glenn Thrush, who was accused of sexual misconduct. Thrush will remain on suspension until January, when he will return to the paper but be taken off the White House reporting team. “We understand that our colleagues and the public at large are grappling with what constitutes sexually offensive behavior in the workplace and what consequences are appropriate,” editor in chief Dean Baquet said, in explaining why Thrush would return to work. “Each case has to be evaluated based on individual circumstances. We believe this is an appropriate response to Glenn’s situation.”
BuzzFeed has obtained internal emails from Twitter that show even the company’s leadership struggled to understand the platform’s rules on abuse and trolling. After the company removed Milo Yiannopoulos’s verification checkmark in 2016, the former Breitbart editor requested that it be reinstated. In an email discussion, employees attempted to define the function of the blue checkmark and understand whether or not Yiannopoulos was qualified to have one. “I want to make sure we are doing the right thing here and not responding to external pressure or attacks from him,” one staffer wrote. “We’ve already taken the PR hit, so let’s make sure we are focused on getting this right!”
