Elon Musk Offers To Buy Twitter

Tara Palmeri is leaving Politico as its national correspondent as The Daily Beast reports she’ll be heading to subscription-based digital startup Puck. 

Palmeri’s decision to exit comes after brass at the political journalism company moved her off its marquee product, “Playbook,” amid reported clashes among the daily newsletter’s stars.

In January, Politico revealed that Palmeri, a former ABC News White House correspondent and Page Six reporter, would depart the “Playbook” team to assume a new role as the chief national correspondent and helm a brand-new Sunday evening product.

However, the product never came to fruition. Multiple insiders informed The Daily Beast that Editor-in-Chief Matt Kaminski trifled with several ideas, but the team never landed on a mutually acceptable vision for the product.

Palmeri will join Puck, but no further details on what position she’ll be taking with the subscription-based new media outlet, which Vanity Fair editor Jon Kelly launched last year and features reporters like Matthew Belloni, Julia Ioffe, and Dylan Byers.

Spotify is seeing the executive that brought over Joe Rogan, the Obamas, and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle to the streaming platform exit. The Ankler reports that Courtney Holt is departing Spotify, ending a four-year run with the company.

Holt’s looming departure as head of studios and videos arrives days after Lydia Polgreen announced that she would be leaving her managing director of Gimlet, a podcast studio at Spotify. 

“A source close to the matter characterized it as an amicable decision prompted by Holt looking for other creative opportunities,” Ankler wrote. 

“According to this source, Holt will stay as an advisor for 12 months; his workflow and team will be overseen by Max Cutler, head of new content initiatives at Spotify, and Julie McNamara, head of U.S. studios.”

The executive turnover at Spotify comes amid increasing internal questions about a string of monster eight and nine-figure podcast agreements supervised by Dawn Ostroff, Spotify’s Chief Content & Advertising Business Officer. 

Despite the spending, these podcast deals, at least so far, have not supplied expected results or driven a commensurate audience. Holt directed a request for a remark to Spotify; meanwhile, a spokesperson for Spotify declined to comment.

The initial investments that would play out over the next four years into CNN+ will reportedly be cut dramatically due to a low adoption rate. 

According to Axios, CNN initially planned to invest around $1 billion in the streaming service over the next four years. The report also states that $300 million has been spent on CNN+, including a sizable marketing investment.

Nonetheless, that will change as hundreds of millions of dollars are expected to be cut from that original investment total. In addition, the company’s new leadership team still has yet to decide the ultimate fate of CNN+ since the network’s new boss, Chris Licht, will start on May 1.

With assistance from consulting firm McKinsey, CNN leaders initially expected to bring in around 2 million subscribers in the U.S. in CNN+’s first year and then gradually bring 15-18 million subscribers after four years.

Axios adds that the subscriber expectations will need to be dramatically reduced if the investments are cut. However, there might be some glimmer of help that can boost the numbers as CNN+ launched this week on Roku, one of the largest smart TV companies in the country, which should help boost subscriber numbers.

Nonetheless, there is some criticism from within, as one top executive stated that there is a sense of disorder internally as to why the cable news channel didn’t move the launch of CNN+ until after the Discovery merger.

The same source told Axios that the debut of CNN+ felt hurried to stake a claim over the streaming service and the network’s future ahead of the merger.