MediaNews Group, the local newspaper company owned by Alden Global Capital, has shut down all of its comment sections as of July 1st, due to difficulties in moderating them, executives told Axios.
Why it matters: Comments were a staple of early internet blogging, but professional news websites have reeled them in to prevent spam, abuse and harassment.
Last August marked the arrival of a new monthly jobs report that had great potential. On Thursday, that potential was proved, as the ADP report sent 10-year Treasury yields spiking above 4%, while stocks ended the day down.
Why it matters: The big question surrounding the ADP report has been whether traders would take it seriously as an independent dataset. That question has now been decisively answered.
A remarkably robust U.S. labor market is coming into better balance.
Why it matters: That's the broad takeaway from not one or two, but three reports out Thursday morning that show what's happening beneath the surface of the economy.
The Barbie PRand marketing teams have been working overtime to make it feel like we are living in a Barbie world.
In the lead up to the release of the new Barbie movie, directed by Greta Gerwig and starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling, the Mattel and Warner Bros. Discovery teams have generated Barbie-mania through social media campaigns, experiential marketing and brand partnerships.
Why it matters: This strategy has proved to be a buzzier and possibly more cost-effective way to market the movie over the traditional media spend route.
As senior vice president of marketing and communications for the Seattle Mariners, it's Kevin Martinez's job to shape the fan experience for 81 home games a year.
Why it matters: Martinez and his team are responsible for cementing fan loyalty while also attracting new fans to the Major League Baseball franchise.
Bluesky, a decentralized Twitter rival whose directors include Jack Dorsey, raised $8 million in seed funding led by Neo.
Why it matters: Everyone seems eager to topple Twitter, particularly as the app changes under Elon Musk's ownership, although no one has yet figured out how to eat into its network effects.
Chicago-based private equity firm GTCR on Thursday announced that it will acquire a 55% stake in Worldpay from Fidelity Information Services for more than $10 billion.
Why it matters: This is the year's largest private equity deal by enterprise value ($18.5 billion), and also the largest in GTCR's 43-year history.
Venture capitalists looked at dwindling M&A activity in Q2 and said, "Hold our fleece vests."
Driving the news: Global VC disbursements decreased by a greater percentage between April and June than did global M&A, with $87.4 billion representing a 42.8% year-over-year decline, per data released this morning by PitchBook.
Last week, Bored Apes creator Yuga Labs released its latest NFT-gated game, HV-MTL Forge, but it hasn't yet helped the dragging performance of the company that owns several of the top NFT collections.
Why it matters:Yuga Labs is the standard-bearer for the industry of non-fungible tokens. It owns Bored Apes, Mutant Apes and CryptoPunks, along with a number of other important NFT collections.
For the past decade, tech companies have been trying to recruit more women — part of a push for diversity — and one way they've done that is by offering generous (by American standards) paid leave benefits.
The big picture: Those efforts had a bit of a dark side in this round of layoffs. Axios heard from 10 women and three men who lost their tech jobs over the past year or so while they were out on parental leave.
The tech industry skews male, but tech layoffs paint a different picture: A disproportionate percentage of the workers laid off since last fall appear to be women.
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