Confider #76: An Email Rocks D.C., CNN Fully Pivots, and Gutfeld Grouses
Welcome to this week’s edition of Confider, the media newsletter that pulls back the curtain to reveal what’s really going on inside the world’s most powerful navel-gazing industry. Subscribe here and send your questions, tips, and complaints here.
EXCLUSIVE — THE EMAIL ROCKING D.C. MEDIA: It’s the email that has one of D.C’s biggest newsrooms buzzing—and now police are apparently involved. Just over a week ago, several key figures at Axios received a bombshell email from a non-staffer making bold accusations about one of their star reporters’ private life, Confider has learned. Read the full Confider story here.
EXCLUSIVE — LA MAG LATEST: Los Angeles magazine’s new owners, celebrity attorneys Mark Geragos and Ben Meiselas, continue to find ways to piss off their writers. Weeks after Confider first reported that they owed tens of thousands of dollars to dozens of writers, rolled back freelance rates, stripped away author IP rights, and changed the tenor of the mag, the new owners have made further changes to cut costs, angering staffers. Engine Co. No. 28, the Geragos-owned restaurant housed in the firehouse that also acts as his law offices and Los Angeles HQ, used to offer mag staff a 15 percent discount, but that benefit has been nixed, Confider has learned. Geragos, whose other DTLA eatery 10e recently shuttered, had planned to turn Engine Co. No. 28 into a “Los Angeles magazine experience cafe” where past issues of the mag would hang on the walls—a cross between the Hard Rock Cafe and Planet Hollywood. “The food is awful,” a recent visitor to the restaurant, an LA mag insider, told Confider. “I don’t know why anyone other than an employee would eat there.” Meanwhile, the majority of stories featured in last week’s top 15 trending stories on LA mag’s website were features and profiles commissioned and run by former boss Maer Roshan, according to internal data obtained and reviewed by Confider—a reminder of a bygone era that feels increasingly in the rearview mirror for staffers. “All freelancers have been fully paid in compliance with the law,” publisher Chris Gialanella emailed Confider. “Engine Vision Media has added 15 new staff positions, given salary increases to 19 existing employees, and invested millions of dollars in the business.”