Radhika Jones
Vanity Fair
Jones stepped down as Vanity Fair editor-in-chief after eight years at the helm. During that time, she and the quintessential 1990s celebrity glossy grappled with the collapse of print, decimated budgets at Conde Nast, the publisher once synonymous with sky-high expense accounts, and decreased celebrity reliance on legacy media to plug their projects. VF’s paid circulation held at 1.2 million during Jones’ tenure thanks to digital subscription growth, but web traffic fell 39% since 2021.
Sarah Palin
The New York Times
Palin, the former Alaskan governor and Republican VP candidate, for the second time lost a libel suit against the Times for an article suggesting she incited a 2011 shooting in Arizona.
The Times in 2017 published the piece assigning partial blame to Palin for a shooting that gravely injured Representative Gabby Giffords. The paper quickly issued a correction and apology, but that failed to prevent a legal action that has dragged on for eight years and come to symbolize the growing battle over press freedom in the Trump age. A federal jury first decided against Palin in 2022, but an appeals court invalidated the ruling, which leaves Palin with a chance to appeal the most recent verdict.
Hollywood
Donald Trump
Gavin Newsom
President Trump’s slapdash threat of 100% tariffs on movies made abroad entering the US left an already-anxious Hollywood dumbstruck. Trump’s all but unenforceable suggestion came as Los Angeles continues to hemorrhage film production activity to countries including the UK, Australia and Hungary that offer cheaper infrastructure building and massive incentives.
Shortly after the Trump news, California Governor Gavin Newsom offered to work with the president on federal funding to the tune of $7.5 billion to bring moviemaking back to its historic homebase, and help the many Californians working in show business or benefitting from its good health.
Netflix
The long-reigning streaming champ reported $10.5 billion in first quarter revenue and $2.9 billion in net profit just as ad-reliant media companies braced for a bruising year amid tariffs and general economic chaos. Will Netflix be immune? The company said it would not revise its growth forecast, but some pointed to the first ever exclusion of quarterly subscriber growth as a potential sign of stalling growth.
PBS
NPR
The White House issued an executive order “ending taxpayer subsidization of biased media” at public broadcasters NPR and PBS. Patricia Harrison, the president and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcast in charge of distributing those funds, said the CPB’s non-profit status outside of the federal government makes the EO unenforceable. Most legal experts agreed, but the move was nonetheless another chilling instance of Trump’s threats against a free press.
Sewell Chan
Columbia Journalism Review
In an email late last month to staffers, Jelani Cobb, the dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, announced that Sewell Chan was “no longer with” CJR after just eight months as top editor of the publication. Reasons for the firing, which Chan called “frankly baffling,” remain vague beyond references to “pointed interactions” and what a former editor called Chan’s “hostility” toward staffers.
Those who followed the surprise dismissal are torn between pinning the blame on oversensitive young employees unaccustomed to the toughness of a newsroom vet like Chan or to internal controversy over CJR’s coverage of recent Columbia campus protests and their fallout.
