Founder of A Media Operator, a digital media company about building digital media companies. Former @morningbrew & @coindesk
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Articles by Jacob Donnelly
Informa to Acquire Clarion Events in $2.96 Billion Deal
Informa said it will acquire Clarion Events from Blackstone in a deal valued at $2.96 billion and separate its academic business, Taylor & Francis. The deal makes the world’s largest events company much larger and ends a formal sale of Clarion process that started in 2024. The addition of Clarion gives Informa scale in new categories: electronics through IFA Berlin; defense and security through DSEI; and gaming through ICE Barcelona. It also adds depth in technology and energy.
Jacobs Media Separated Profitable Events Brand From Rest of Company
In late 2025, Jacobs Media Group quietly moved its most profitable events business into a new company. The £15 million-revenue B2B media and events group covering travel and hospitality transferred its Connections brand—which generated £3.8 million in revenue that year—into a newly created entity ultimately owned by a Dubai free-zone company in which founder Clive Jacobs holds a controlling stake.
Buying Traffic Isn’t the Problem. Buying the Wrong Traffic Is.
In the Google Zero era, what is the role of buying traffic for publishers? It’s not a new tactic by any means. Arbitrage of heavily programmatic pages has been a tactic publishers have used for years; putting paid spend around social and multimedia content is a way of ensuring you deliver on the right number of views; and entire businesses like 1440, Morning Brew and others have grown massive email lists on cheap Meta ads.
What the Puck?
If Puck can close its latest fundraising round from RedBird Capital Partners, it’ll be worth approximately $250 million, which is up from $75 million three years ago. According to Reuters: The deal with RedBird, a well-known investor in media and entertainment, will value Puck at around $250 million and involve the company’s existing institutional investors selling to RedBird.
The $800M Line Between Media and Intelligence
Stock.adobe.com What happens when your legacy is as a media company, but you’ve actually turned into a data business? We saw that play out last week with the announcement of CoStar Group, a commercial real estate data analytics company, completing its $800 million acquisition for Zonda’s data platform.
Moving Down the Funnel: How Media Companies Can Facilitate Direct Buyer-Seller Connections
stock.adobe.com Talk to many event operators and they’ll tell you that one of the new lines of business at their shows is one-to-one meetings. It has become a hallmark of some of the biggest festivals out there, in part because it more closely links the buyer and seller, helping the event to prove it drove business. But for media companies, we’ve historically struggled to do the same thing with our advertising products.
Lee Enterprises Generates Largest Net Income Since Fiscal 2022 in Q3 2026 Results
stock.adobe.com 2025 was a tumultuous year for local news operator, Lee Enterprises, with Florida-based investor David Hoffman making a play—and winning—to replace management and become majority owner of the business. 2026 results show that the strategy worked. On Thursday, Lee Enterprises reported strong fiscal Q3 2026 financial results with net income of $5.2 million, up $6.9 million from the prior year, the first time it has had a positive net income since 2024 and its largest since 2022.
Dow Jones Reports 7% Full Year YoY Revenue Growth; News Media Continues Contracting
News Corp reported its Q4 2026 & full year financial results on Wednesday and the business experienced strong growth, with book publishing and digital real estate services expanding—areas AMO historically does not cover. On the Dow Jones and News Media sides, both saw top line growth with the former generating $2.497 billion, up 7% year-over-year, while the latter grew 3% to $2.227 billion, after shrinking in the 2025 fiscal year.
People Inc. Reports Growth in Q2 Digital Revenue; Session-Based Sales Drop
Picture: mindea – stock.adobe.com People Inc., a subsidiary of People Incorporated, reported 6% growth in digital revenue and 18% growth in digital adjusted EBITDA year-over-year for its Q2 2026 financials, thanks entirely to performance marketing and licensing revenue. But session-based revenue, a category People Inc. started reporting in Q1 2026, saw a 1% contraction due to a 22% drop in core sessions, in big part because of a 40% drop in Google Search year-over-year.
Newsletter Ads Have a Click Problem. Workweek Has a Solution
The way newsletter ad performance gets reported is fundamentally misleading, and fixing it will reward the publishers who have earned their audience’s and advertisers’ trust while exposing the ones who haven’t. So believes Workweek CEO Adam Ryan. Workweek announced the launch of its Partner Platform with the stated goal of bringing proof to newsletter advertising.
Arkaea Buys Decoding Bio, Pushes Into Video as Revenue Hits $3.1M
Arkaea Media Group, a b2b media company that currently covers the space and defense sectors, announced today the acquisition of Decoding Bio, a research and events company at the intersection of artificial intelligence and biotech. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Business Insider Needs to Get Smaller on Purpose
Postmodern Studio – stock.adobe.com Years ago, I started asking a question that I come back to whenever I’m feeling a bit existential about this industry: would your readers miss your publication if it disappeared tomorrow? For most digital media companies built over the last 15 years, the honest answer is no. They’d shrug, open another tab, and find the same story somewhere else within the hour.
Apollo Should Put Questex Team in Charge of Newly Combined Emerald Company
Questex CEO Paul Miller at AMO Summit 2024 | Photo by Victoria Jempty After owning Emerald Holdings for as long as it has—13 years—Onex appears to have finally reached the point where it has thrown in the towel. As we wrote this morning, Apollo is acquiring Emerald and Questex with the plan to merge the two brands.
CloserStill Trades: What’s Next?
Maks_Lab – stock.adobe.com If you had spoken to any PE-backed operator in private before today, they would have all said something similarly: “We just need something big to move to help price the market.” In 2025, that was supposed to be Clarion, but for a number of reasons, that deal didn’t culminate.
Endeavor Sues Stagwell Subsidiary Over $350,000 in Alleged Unpaid Invoices
burdun – stock.adobe.com B2B media and marketing company Endeavor Business Media LLC is suing a subsidiary of ad agency network Stagwell, alleging the company owes more than $350,000 in unpaid bills. EndeavorB2B, which covers markets including construction, aviation, energy and healthcare, said in a complaint filed with the New York State Supreme Court on Tuesday that MMI, a Stagwell agency now known as Crispin, failed to pay for a series of ad buys taken out between January and October 2023.
Future, Ziff Davis to Struggle Most From Traffic Drops
Stock.adobe.com What does one do when your site’s organic traffic drops by 40%, 50% or even 90% from a couple of years ago? Teams at Future and Ziff Davis are probably both asking themselves this as they look at some of their largest tech sites contract by an average of over 50%. Growtika, an SEO agency, released research using Ahrefs data to show just how impacted some of the largest technology sites have likely been by the introduction of Google AI Overviews. The results are incredible.
Axel Springer Buys B2B Real Estate Media Co. Bisnow: Exclusive
aquatarkus – stock.adobe.com Axel Springer, owner of Politico, Business Insider and German-based Bild, acquired Bisnow, a B2B commercial real estate media and events company from PE owner The Wicks Group, AMO learned exclusively. As part of the transaction, Axel Springer has created a new division, Brew Media Group, which will be headed by Morning Brew Inc.’s Chief Executive Officer Robert Dippell.
Axios Could Save Millions with AI
Robert – stock.adobe.com This was originally published in the AMO Newsletter. Axios’ CTO, Dan Cox, wrote a piece over the weekend about how his product and technology teams are using artificial intelligence and the immediate impact on the business. A number of things jumped out: Last year, it [a large project] took three weeks. This past week, he [engineer on staff] used AI-based “agent teams” and completed the same amount of work in 37 minutes.
One-to-One Connections to Build Fandom
stock.adobe.com In December, we ran a deep dive into what many industry leaders were expecting in 2026. We’re about a month in and one of the contributions that I’ve been thinking a lot about is what Skift’s founder, Rafat Ali, said about human-to-human becoming exponentially more valuable. These two paragraphs, in particular, matter: Events can’t just be editorial gatherings anymore.
Is a $330m Valuation Insane for Semafor?
Leviathan – stock.adobe.com It’s not everyday that a media and events company gets to raise $30 million on a $330 million valuation after achieving $2 million in annual EBITDA. When I saw the news in the AMO Slack that Semafor had raised at that valuation with that kind of EBITDA—165x by the way—I wrote, “That is an insane valuation.” And, to be honest, it is. But as I thought about it, I found myself questioning that initial response just a little bit.
Food52: A Cautionary Tale on Content to Commerce
Postmodern Studio – stock.adobe.com If you rewind five years ago, content to commerce was one of the strategies most discussed as the future of media. We wrote about it multiple times. And The Chernin Group (TCG) invested hundreds of millions of dollars with that as its primary thesis. That strategy, as Adweek reported in late December, has almost entirely failed. Case in point? Food52, which was forced into Chapter 11 last month. According to Bloomberg: … On Dec.
What I Got Wrong in 2025
Photo by Victoria Jempty Semafor invited me to participate in their annual “What media leaders got wrong” piece—to be included with folks like Mark Cuban, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Scott Galloway, Pam Wasserstein and others was really cool. What I had expected last year was that publishers would do more to foment environments where top-tier talent, i.e., creators, could thrive. Instead, legacy media companies have largely failed to deliver.
Lee Enterprises Accepts Hoffmann Investment; CEO Ousted
The Buffalo News, a brand of Lee Enterprises | JHVEPhoto – stock.adobe.com In a move that was both entirely predictable and resisted immensely by management, Lee Enterprises announced today it entered into a stock purchase agreement with David Hoffmann, a Florida-based investor who has long been trying to acquire more—or all—of the local newspaper publisher.
Funding a Nonprofit Newsroom? Documented's Got Advice
Arthon – Stock.adobe.com The number of new nonprofit newsrooms in the U.S. jumped over the past few years with traditional media companies struggling to thrive on the ad-based business model and philanthropies increasing funding for news. The Institute for Nonprofit News launched an index of such news organizations in 2016 with about 100 groups identified. Today, there are nearly 400 nonprofit news organizations indexed by INN.
What Newsroom Product Managers Want the C-Suite to Know
Picture: Gorodenkoff – stock.adobe.com Newsroom product managers are a little frustrated. Arguably the newest professional discipline in the news industry, the number of product jobs at publishers has grown considerably over the past decade. But, they say, in too many organizations they are starved for influence and resources.
Politico Launches in Spain, Acquires Stake in CEO Conference Organizer
The Palacio de las Cortes in Madrid, where the Spanish Congress of Deputies meets. Picture: EnginKorkmaz – stock.adobe.com Politico is set to expand into Spain next year, marking its fourth launch into a European national market. News of the expansion comes shortly after the Axel Springer-owned brand announced it had acquired a minority stake in the European Business Leaders’ Community (EBLC), which organizes the high-rolling annual Northern Light Summit.
Online Foodie Magazine Died with Anthony Bourdain, Rebranding as Community-Driven Travel Platform
Photodrive – stock.adobe.com Roads & Kingdoms has always run on passion before profit. It launched in 2012 as a digital journal and magazine exploring food, hospitality and humanity around the world. It was co-founded by New York Times bestselling author of Eat This, Not That Matt Goulding and Time Magazine vet Nathan Thornburgh who, at the time, saw the company as an editorial endeavor only.
AI Firm ProRata Strikes Licensing Agreement With Almost All Danish Publishers
Picture: Sergii Figurnyi – stock.adobe.com AI firm ProRata inked a partnership with Denmark’s collective licensing agency which will mean the country’s publishers will get paid revenue when they appear in ProRata’s AI search results. ProRata, which has sought to distinguish itself from other AI companies by giving web publishers credit and compensation for the use of their content, hopes the new deal will serve as a template for future collective agreements.
Lee Enterprises Needs a New Owner
The Buffalo News, a brand of Lee Enterprises | JHVEPhoto – stock.adobe.com Back in February, I asked a simple question: “What’s up with Lee?” The local newspaper brand—it owns St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Buffalo News and hundreds of other brands—was going through its supposed digital transformation and revenue continued to shrink. And it has the rough financials to show how the transition is going.
What Young Media Companies Need Most? It's Not What You Think
Stock.adobe.com News organizations that participated in LION Publisher’s three-year Sustainability Audit and Funding program saw median revenue growth of 60% in that time. Revenue at the Excelsior Citizen, which started out as a Facebook group in 2015, went from $8,500 to $157,000—a majority of that from grants—and the company saw a 170% increase in newsletter subscribers.
Courting the Next Generation: Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine Hosts Inaugural Teen Girl Event
DALLAS, TEXAS – NOVEMBER 15: (L-R) Sophie Flay and Kiernan Shipka speak onstage during Hello Sunshine’s Inaugural Sunniefest at Pegasus Park. (Photo by Richard Rodriguez/Getty Images for Hello Sunshine) Reese Witherspoon’s media company Hello Sunshine staged its first-ever Sunniefest last month as a one-day takeover of Dallas’ Pegasus Park, transforming the business district into a 75,000-square-foot playground of panel programming, workshops and branded touchpoints.
India's EssentiallySports Claims a Big Game in the US. Have You Heard of Them?
The EssentiallySports homepage on Wednesday 3 December 2025. Screenshot: AMO EssentiallySports, an independent sports publisher founded over a decade ago by three college students in India, boasts some 30 million unique visitors a month—although, as you’ll see, we haven’t exactly been able to stand that up.
3 Unique, Real-Life Use-Cases for AI at Events
Gorodenkoff – Stock.adobe.com A new layer of invisible infrastructure is emerging at events. For event organizers embracing artificial intelligence, the technology is fast becoming the most reliable assistant in the room.
FT Invests in AI Financial Data Aggregator in Deal That Prioritizes Attribution
Picture: joyfotoliakid – stock.adobe.com The Financial Times Group invested in a strategic partnership allowing investors to use AI to find market indicators in the publisher’s coverage. Deal terms were not disclosed. RavenPack, a financial data and analytics firm founded in 2003, specializes in aggregating data and finding patterns “that could indicate a signal for an investment house” to enter or exit a position, said FT Professional managing director James Mann.
India's Fairfest Media Buys First US Show in Miami, Eyes Expansion
Gabriele Maltinti – Stock.adobe.com Indian trade show organizer Fairfest Media acquired WTE Miami, a travel trade show, last month, its first foray into the U.S. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. The move signals ambitious growth plans, with WTE Miami 2026 set to double in size and Fairfest eyeing additional U.S. acquisitions and expansions, Fairfest said.
Easyfairs Makes First US Purchase, Enters Energy Industry
zorandim75 – Stock.adobe.com European events organizer Easyfairs made its first U.S. acquisition, more than a year after receiving a cash infusion to expand the company, particularly in North America. Easyfairs bought EPC (Energy Projects Conference & Expo), which holds five simultaneous conferences in the energy industry in Houston—it also marks an entry into the energy industry for Easyfairs.
Will the Daily Mail Publisher’s Bid to Buy the Daily Telegraph Go Ahead?
Picture: ifeelstock – stock.adobe.com More than two decades after he first took a swing at it, Daily Mail proprietor Lord Rothermere is on course to acquire The Daily Telegraph—if he can get over a few hurdles first. Rothermere’s Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT), the holding company for both the Mail and sister titles The i Paper, Metro and New Scientist magazine, was last week given three weeks to finalize its £500 million bid for the paper by the UK’s culture secretary.
Survey Product Adds to Endpoints’ Subscription & the Bottom Line
Andrey Popov – Stock.adobe.com Endpoints, the biopharma industry news company majority owned by the Financial Times, launched a new intelligence product, Endpoints Signal, today, bolstering its subscription offering and creating a new revenue stream. The product allows Endpoints to survey its expert readership for insights and bridge any knowledge gap reporters may have, resulting in both better insights and stories.
Semafor, Dow Jones, Skift Lead Wave of US News, Event Expansion in the Middle East
American media companies are increasingly looking eastward, where the Middle East has become synonymous with deep-pocketed investment funds and rapid economic expansion. Dow Jones, for instance, will open a new hub in Doha, Qatar, in early December, coinciding with the inaugural WSJ Tech Live event at the Waldorf Astoria Doha Lusail from Dec. 2-4.
Traffic Dropped, Data Dried up: How This Media Company Pivoted
Farm Journal got hit with a double whammy in the past couple of years: Traffic from social media took a nosedive (as with most of us) and the government data it had built its intelligence product around stopped being collected. The agriculture industry media company brought in a consultant who, in a throwaway line, said that maybe they should think about social as brand building instead of traffic building. So they did, focusing on attention instead of page views.
Demand for Stories Drives Stacker's Revenue Beyond Expectations
Companies from financier JP Morgan Chase & Co. to real estate group Redfin are increasingly seeing the value of creating content and distributing it with Stacker—which is seeing that business soar beyond expectations this year. The company originally forecast a 2025 annualized run rate of $5 million for the earned distribution of stories written by journalists employed at brands, up from $3 million in 2024. Instead, it’s expecting to hit somewhere between $7 million to $8 million.
1440 Goes Evergreen
1440 started as a general news-focused newsletter curating stories from Bloomberg, Politico, The Independent and primary sources like the National Museum of Damascus and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. This year, it started adding evergreen encyclopedia-style entries to its website on a bet that its more than 4.5 million newsletter subscribers are curious enough to take trips down rabbit holes of knowledge.
Katie Couric Explains How She’s Growing Katie Couric Media Beyond Katie Couric
Katie Couric says that Katie Couric Media, the venture the former Today Show host launched in 2018 after leaving Yahoo, has 40 employees and is profitable (although she wouldn’t share details on its revenue or how profitable it is). “This is not a vanity project for me, just trying to figure out how I can continue doing what I’m doing just by myself,” she said onstage at the AMO Summit last month.
Hearst Cuts 26 Positions At Newly-Acquired Dallas Morning News, Guild Says (To Taunts From Alden)
Hearst Newspapers has told employees at The Dallas Morning News that it is eliminating 26 positions at its newly-acquired newspaper, according to the Dallas News Guild. The cuts target the publication’s entire copy desk and will see print page production work outsourced, according to the guild.
How We’re Actually Using AI: SmartBrief Enriches Its Audience Data For Advertisers
SmartBrief, Future’s B2B newsletter business, says it’s using AI to develop richer advertiser data about each of its audience members by analyzing the kind of content they engage with. SmartBrief publishes around 300 newsletters in industries as diverse as telecoms, travel and education, all of them free to read.
Newest DC Media Company Notus Joins the Fray
Politico founder Robert Allbritton launched digital news outlet Notus—an acronym for “news of the United States”—last year, targeting an insider audience of senior White House officials, lawmakers, policymakers and their staffers.
Looking to Add Community? This Is How Axios Did it
Media companies are increasingly trying to add the concept of community to their offers in a bid to keep readers engaged. Axios, owned by Cox Enterprises, is doing so through a merger of a newsletter business and an existing community. Recently, Axios’s Communicators Pro newsletter combined with community host Mixing Board, owned by Axios HQ (which is not owned by Cox). This was not a financial transaction.
Scrutiny Intensifies on Security at Events Amid Incidents, Near-Misses
Two high-profile incidents in the past two months have put renewed focus on whether the events industry is adequately prepared for worst-case scenarios. Conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated on Utah Valley University campus on September 10; a month later, a gunman made it to the stage of the Wiki World’s Fair, a conference for Wikipedia editors, before two attendees prevented the person from an apparent attempt to shoot himself.
Airstrips And Wasp Larvae: Adventures In Alternative Media Monetization
Look, paywalls, new ad products and white label e-commerce marketplaces are all well and good when it comes to developing new revenue streams. They have their place! But maybe we’re dreaming too small: Maybe the most lucrative media monetization demands a little imagination. Maybe there’s money in wasp larvae. Well, probably not in your specific case.
Hyve Adds Health Network to Improve Year-Round Engagement
Hyve bought health plan advisory network HGAN, its sixth acquisition since July last year. HGAN will help the events group to develop a year-round relationship with its customers away from its events. Hyve declined to share information on the deal terms or size. HGAN, which stands for Health Growth Advisory Network, connects healthcare startups and organizations.
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