If you follow, work in, or care about the media industry, make sure to sign up for my free weekly newsletter, On Background. Every Wednesday, subscribers receive a pleasantly readable email stuffed with scoops, original reporting, and emerging trends. preferences.adweek.com/on-ba…

RedBird Capital Signs Deal to Acquire Majority Stake in Puck, Valuing Media-Biz Outfit at $250 Million variety.com/2026/biz/news/re…

News -- among the handful of suitors who have expressed interest in acquiring Letterboxd: A24, Sony and....The New York Times Company! Bidding starts at $300 million. w/@LaurenSHirsch nytimes.com/2026/09/24/busin…

Fascinating first-person account in @_capermedia about the New York chef behind Bartolo and Ernesto going on Ozempic. caper.media/p/ryan-bartlow-c…

Per a note to Boston Globe staff today, the lesbian bar story generated 1,000 subscriptions to the paper yesterday. The Globe’s managing editor said it was “by far our best performing story of the year,” and appears to be “on pace to shatter all sorts of Globe records.”

Texas might end up having the hardest schedule in college football HISTORY this season: The Longhorns are scheduled to play 8 of their 12 games against teams currently ranked in the Top 25. 🤯

An absolutely *stunning* chart via @axios on how search has collapsed as a traffic driver for legacy media

If the proper protocols for replay weren’t followed then the FBS Oversight committee should overturn the result of the game and make Western Michigan the winner of the game against Michigan. Period. End of Story. Saying “hey they got it wrong, but we won’t fix it” only makes it worse and is a slap in the face to the fans of football everywhere.

.@Wikipedia has spent 25 years building a reputation as one of the most trusted sources on the web. Now, as answer engines rewrite how people find information online, that reputation faces a threat familiar to many publishers: ubiquity without credit. adweek.it/3T2n2eh

Top staff at OpenAI and Microsoft knew that scraping news websites to train their AI models may eventually damage those publications, according to a legal filing wsj.com/tech/ai/tech-compani… via @WSJ

Blood boiling. Not a good look for OpenAI or Greg Brockman here: "ah nice" in response to "a hack to get around nytimes paywall" in his efforts "to scrape" The Times website. After many points on his bragging about OpenAI's substitution for news. /4

woah. Court just unsealed Summary Judgment motions in New York Times v OpenAI / Microsoft. Easy to see why the AI companies had so many redactions (pink). Their own people wrote the lede for NYT, the "largest theft of labor in human history"... "more and more substitutive..." /1

Texas vs. Ohio State: The Mini-Movie 🎬🍿

Newton and @kevinroose have licensed their show to NPR. @dee_bosa has licensed hers to Yahoo Finance. I’ve licensed mine to NBC News. This is the future of journalism: own your work, build independently, distribute and partner with others.

Good time as any to re-read this profile of Michael Hirschorn I wrote almost 20 years ago for the NYO. observer.com/2007/10/mr-bad-… Mr. Bad Taste!

meeeeee as fuck

Commerce platform Howl, which powers affiliate businesses by connecting content creators to retailers, quietly sold the creator division of its business to Connexity in August. adweek.it/4cIKWlC

From this exact moment, Texas outgained Ohio State 208-43 and outscored them 21-3.

Since 2004, AP No. 1 teams are 197-0 when holding a 20-point lead at any point in the 4th quarter. Until Texas happened 🤘 (via @TexasFootball)

.@WPP is facing mounting legal troubles, with three separate court cases reference an alleged illegal rebate practice carried out by WPP executives for years through media buying arm GroupM (now @WPPMedia).

NEW: Huge layoffs across McClatchy newspapers today, with some newsrooms gutted by a third. An internal email from management says consumer revenue has dipped 41% and "we cannot continue investing where subscriber interest does not support the investment"