Politico sells, Forbes SPACs, and Vice cuts

Equity

TechCrunch

News, Business, Entrepreneurship, Business News, Technology

4.2 • 372 Ratings

🗓️ 26 August 2021

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Equity crew felt that there was enough media news out recently that we simply had no choice but to fire up a Twitter Space and have a chat. The above episode is a discussion of a few things, in a loose and relaxed manner, so don't take any of the Verizon jokes too seriously, Verizon, as we still work for you. For a few more days. Regardless, here's what Danny and Alex got into: Politico sells for $1 billion: Its new parent company Axel Springer also buying the rest of Politico Europe and all of Protocol at the same time. This deal exploded everyone's Twitter feed due to its scale, and the fact that it was one heck of an exit for a media company. One billion dollars? For media? In this economy? Yes! Forbes is going public via a SPAC: Yep, the venerable Forbes magazing and its enormous digital arm are taking the blank-check route to the public markets, which means that we got its numbers and time to stroll through them. Our take is that Forbes has done massive work to take its IRL brand and extend it into the digital world. The company has big plans to boot, and will be worth more than $800 million when it combines. Layoffs hit Vice: As Vice turns its focus to video content — you've heard this story before — it is shedding some of its editorial staff. The layoffs were a stinkbomb on Media Twitter after the other news of the week, but were sadly not a huge surprise. The company's union decried them as something of a yearly recurrance. Not good, not good at all. And there's more media news to come. Our parent company Verizon Media is expected to close its sale to Apollo on September 1 or sometime soon after, which means we will either be hosting Equity regularly as always, or we'll be hosting the RUDE (Recently Unemployed Due to (Private) Equity) podcast. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:14.4	Hello and welcome back to Equity. We are live today over on Twitter Spaces. You might be hearing this a little bit later on, but this is Alex and I am joined by my IRL
0:19.0	Bestie, Danny we are here to talk about all things media, so give us the summary, good news, bad news, where are we?
0:25.8	It's a mixed bag today, so we had Politico, Forbes, and Vice and is going on today.
0:33.2	So at the top of the show, we're going to talk about Axel Springer,
0:36.1	the German media conglomerate buying Politico.
0:38.9	Forbes is spacking and Vice had layoffs and is doing another pivot to video which is not related to the last
0:45.2	pivot to video or the pivot before that. So lots of pivots. So one is up, one is out, and one is down.
0:52.1	So it's a mixed bag. And on top of that next week we're closing, like I said, the Apollo
0:56.0	acquisition for our parent company Verizon Media. So it is just Media Central going on here.
1:00.8	Are we allowed to say that that deal is closing?
1:03.4	Is that allowed?
1:04.4	Yeah, I think it's public.
1:06.0	It's still targeting for September 1st.
1:08.9	And if you followed some of the coverage
1:11.2	in either Business Insider or CMBC, our parent company apparently doesn't know anything
1:15.0	what's going on, which makes us feel very confident about the future.
1:19.9	Yeah, there's nothing more confidence inspiring than not knowing who your CEO will be in four days time.
1:25.6	So, uh, maybe, Danny, maybe they haven't told everyone yet because it's me or you.
1:32.1	Maybe it could be us. Maybe we are the next
1:34.1	v and well Yahoo CEOs apparently. Well maybe the Harry Potter Owl will deliver the
1:39.7	golden envelope this weekend and I'll be pleasantly surprised.
1:43.2	Sadly we're both older than 11 so we're not going to Hogwarts. Let's start with Axel Springer
	...

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