The digital media company Ziff Davis — owner of CNET, Mashable, Lifehacker, and PC Mag as well as a number of shopping and B2B sites — has acquired The Skimm. The Skimm will join Ziff Davis’s health and wellness division Everyday Health Group as part of the deal.

The Skimm will operate as a standalone brand and retain its 75-person staff, according to the announcement.

Former NBC TV producers Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin co-founded The Skimm in 2012 as an easy-to-read email digest geared toward millennial women. The Skimm understood the appeal of email newsletters earlier than most news startups and uses an engaging, often irreverent¹ tone to convey the need-to-know headlines.

There’s been a number of twists and turns in the years since, from volunteer brand reps called Skimmbassadors to raising $29 million in venture capital to the (inevitable?) pivot to video to experimenting with a membership model to multiple rounds of layoffs. The Skimm has been exploring a sale for years.

Despite those twists — and the fact that the email newsletter space is a lot more saturated than it was in 2012 — The Skimm’s pitch to readers doesn’t seem to have strayed very far from the co-founders original vision more than a decade ago. The endorsements on The Skimm’s site today include “It’s so easy to read and I get caught up on all world events in 5 minutes” and “The Skimm is the reason I read any news at all.”

The acquisition announcement on Thursday came with some notable evasions:

• How much did Ziff Davis pay? Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
• Is The Skimm profitable? “Asked if the company is profitable, [The Skimm] founders said they have a track record as a company of profitability,” Sara Fischer wrote in Axios.
• Has The Skimm’s audience eroded over time? The Skimm previously reported 7 million subscribers. That has dropped to 5 million subscribers across six newsletters, including Daily Skimm, Skimm Money, Skimm Shopping, Skimm Well, SKM Report, and Skimm Parenting. When Fischer asked about the drop, one of the founders told her the company’s “numbers reflect consistent and engaged readers.”

Many of the women who began reading The Skimm as “early career professionals” are now “parents and mid-career executives,” as Adweek’s Mark Stenberg noted. Its initiatives include #ShowUsYourLeave, which advocates for better family leave policies in the United States.

The Skimm plans to “lean into” its health and wellness coverage under its new owners, Axios reported. One of The Skimm’s six newsletters — a monthly called Skimm Well — currently focuses on health. When the site republished information outlining women’s rights to abortion and contraception under U.S. law that had been taken down by the Trump administration, the company wrote it was “no stranger to amplifying women’s health stories.”

1. In 2017, The New York Times noted a recent Skimm newsletter had used “when you and your friend both thought the other was making dinner reservations” as a way to introduce the miscommunication around a U.S. aircraft carrier supposedly headed to North Korea. [↩]

After a decade at the helm, Charlie Sennott is leaving the GroundTruth Project, the nonprofit journalism organization he founded in 2014 that also launched Report for America and Report for the World.

Sennott, a 2006 Nieman Fellow, will take part of the GroundTruth Project name and newsletter to launch GroundTruth Media Partners LLC, a for-profit organization with his own reporting and consulting. Report for America and Report for the World will be housed under the yet-to-be-renamed nonprofit led by CEO Rob Zeaske. Sennott had stepped down from the CEO role in 2022 to focus on GroundTruth Project’s editorial efforts. A few GroundTruth Project employees were laid off earlier this year as part of the restructuring, Zeaske said, and may be rehired under Sennott’s new endeavor.

From the announcement:

We’ve developed a pioneering formula that helps newsrooms match our national funding with their local sustainability initiatives. This straightforward business model has allowed the organization to create exceptional and impactful programs that consistently demonstrate excellence through a competitive selection process, high rates of retention for reporters and partner newsrooms, and high levels of satisfaction from program participants.

In order to sustain this momentum, The GroundTruth Project CEO Rob Zeaske is today announcing important changes to continue positioning the organization as a global leader in supporting local news. The organization will further focus on its programmatic work and will begin to sunset the award-winning editorial work we have done under the banner of The GroundTruth Project. This transition will allow us to strengthen our flagship programs, distinguish our Report for America and Report for the World brands and deepen our impact.

Report for America has placed more than 600 journalists in local newsrooms since its inception, and in December, the Knight Foundation gave it $20 million to expand.

Under Sennott, the GroundTruth Project hosted and funded several fellowships for domestic and international reporting. In 2017, Sennott and Steven Waldman co-founded Report for America to place journalists in local newsrooms.

In 2022, Sennott and Kevin Grant launched Report for the World, a similar initiative to get local reporters into local newsrooms in countries like Brazil, India, and Nigeria.

“We’re in a really challenging landscape for journalism,” Sennott told me on Wednesday. “It’s the right time to pour everything into focusing on programs — to make sure we are not just supporting them financially, but that we’re making them the best that they can be, to support the next generation [of journalists] in the field and to serve local communities. That’s the urgent work of the time we are in, and I think this [move] is a recognition of that.”

“As we think about the state of local news, we see a vibrant set of new opportunities amidst all the challenges and pressures,” Zeaske said about the split. “We also see models that are starting to show promise that we want to be there for. For us as an organization to lean into a next generation of journalists and newsrooms that we believe are going to be this next decade’s path to success is really exciting. That’s where we want to spend time. How are we helping provide support? How are we helping to provide a herd that has some safety, support, and a cohort mentality for newsrooms that are trying to grow and meet a next generation of audiences where they are?”

Before The GroundTruth Project, Sennott co-founded GlobalPost, a for-profit U.S. news site focused on reporting international news. GlobalPost was acquired by WGBH in 2015 and acquired again by Sennott’s cofounder, Philip S. Balboni, in 2022. Today, GlobalPost is a subscription newsletter for international news and analysis.

Sennott said that after launching both for-profit and nonprofit news organizations, he wants to see what new opportunities exist on the for-profit side.

“What I’m realizing is the nonprofit world is saturated,” he said. “There’s so much great work being done by nonprofits and journalism, and it’s so needed. It would be very hard to start a new nonprofit now in journalism, because there are many doing so many great things. But where there is a lot of energy and innovation and opportunity is if you shift the model back to an LLC…and find a business model that can make you sustainable is something that also really interests me. I feel like I’ve come full circle on that.”

When ABC shut down FiveThirtyEight early this month, the site’s publicly available polling databases — like a presidential approval rating tracker — shut down, too. Many news outlets, including The New York Times and FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin, had relied on the data for election coverage, and people worried about its disappearance.

“Collecting and maintaining a database of public polls is a lot of work, requiring diligence, meticulousness, and dealing with constant complaints about edge cases from readers and pollsters,” Silver wrote. “But it’s also a public service. Polling has its challenges, but I believe it’s vital in a democracy.”

Luckily, the data has been saved: The New York Times is picking up where FiveThirtyEight left off and has “begun a new effort to track public opinion surveys, starting by collecting all polls on President Trump’s job approval…building on the work of the politics website 538,” William P. Davis, the Times’ director of election data analytics, wrote Monday.

Our goal is to ensure that this resource, which is a foundational tool for many journalists and researchers, remains updated long-term. The data will be made available free for anybody to use as they wish, so long as they provide attribution to The Times. (If you’re still using data collected by 538, you may still need to give it attribution as well.)

To make the transition as easy as possible, we are providing the data in about the same format as 538 did. There are some differences, which are noted at the bottom of this page.

You can see the Times’ polling tracker here.

On Friday, United States president Donald Trump signed an executive order to gut the United States Agency for Global Media, the parent organization of U.S. news agency Voice of America.

More than 1,000 VOA employees were put on indefinite paid leave on Saturday, according to NPR. VOA and its affiliates had reached 420 million people in 63 languages and more than 100 countries each week. Although VOA is funded by U.S. Congress, its journalists have had their editorial independence guaranteed by law since 1994.

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s initiative to reshape the U.S. federal government under the control of the executive branch, had recommended putting VOA under the president’s control or shutting it down entirely. On its website, the White House referred to VOA as the “Voice of Radical America.”

“VOA promotes freedom and democracy around the world by telling America’s story and by providing objective and balanced news and information, especially for those living under tyranny,” VOA director Michael Abramowitz wrote on LinkedIn after being placed on leave. “Even if the agency survives in some form, the actions being taken today by the Administration will severely damage Voice of America’s ability to foster a world that is safe and free and in doing so is failing to protect U.S. interests.”

The order also cuts off grant funding to four international USAGM broadcasters: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Office of Cuba Broadcasting (Martí Noticias and Radio Martí), Radio Free Asia, and Middle East Broadcasting Networks.

No new stories have been published to VOA’s website since Saturday, when some of its journalists tried to enter the Washington, D.C. office to find that they had been locked out, NPR reported. Its 17 local-language WhatsApp Channels sent their last updates on Saturday as well.

News: Journalists at Voice of America were just informed that they’ve been put on administrative leave. Two people there told me this went to all fulltime employees.

“From what we can tell, VOA is effectively shut down from this moment.”

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— David Enrich (@davidenrich.bsky.social) March 15, 2025 at 10:33 AM

Trump has targeted Voice of America since his first term. He appointed Michael Pack, a conservative filmmaker, as USAGM’s CEO. Pack, we wrote in 2020, “fired a huge swath of top management, halted global internet freedom projects, disbanded boards, refused to renew its employees’ work visas, installed Trump loyalists, and issued Juche-style Dear Leader press releases.” Later in 2020, a federal judge found Pack guilty of violating journalists’ First Amendment rights.

Since Trump’s second term began in January, USAGM’s HR office has begun investigating individual VOA journalists over comments that “were perceived as critical of him,” The New York Times reported in February.

“The Trump administration’s dismantling of VOA, RFE/RL, RFA and other outlets under USAGM are part of its efforts to dismantle the government more broadly — but it’s also part of the administration’s broader assault on press freedom and the media,” VOA press freedom reporter Liam Scott wrote on Twitter. “I’ve covered press freedom for a long time, and l’ve never seen something like what’s happened in the U.S. over the past couple months.”

Other governments have dismantled or radically changed their news agencies over the last 15 years. In 2013, Vladimir Putin shut down Russian news agency RIA Novosti and replaced it with Russia Today. In 2015, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán folded state news agency MTI into a larger media conglomerate controlled by his supporters. In 2023, former Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador shut down Notimex, saying it was no longer necessary and could be replaced by his daily press briefings. Argentina’s president Javier Milei similarly shuttered Télam in 2024, calling it a “propaganda agency” for former president Cristina Kirchner.

Press freedom and journalism organizations around the world expressed grave concern about the gutting.

From the Committee to Protect Journalists:

“This suffocation of independent media is already putting the lives of journalists — who have often withstood enormous challenges to bring news to millions living in censored countries — in grave danger,” said CPJ CEO Jodie Ginsberg. “It is really dystopian that the U.S. administration is now posing an existential threat to these historical organizations. We express our solidarity with the journalists put on administrative leave and urge congressional leaders to restore USAGM before irreparable harm is done.”

From Reporters Without Borders director general Thibaut Bruttin:

“By shutting down USAGM and its media outlets, the Trump administration is sending a chilling signal: authoritarian regimes such as Beijing and Moscow now have free rein to spread their propaganda unchecked. This decision is all the more alarming as it betrays the nine journalists currently imprisoned for their work with the agency and leaves thousands more jobless and in danger — because of their past collaboration with USAGM media — worldwide. We urge the US authorities and the international diplomatic community to ensure journalists’ safety. Those detained must be released and granted full freedom without delay.”

From the Inter American Press Association:

José Roberto Dutriz, president of IAPA, stated that “the decision not only affects the journalists of these media but also millions of citizens who depend on these services to access important information that their governments want to hide.”

Carlos Jornet, second vice president of IAPA and president of the Committee on Freedom of the Press and Information, added: “It is alarming to see how a consolidated democracy like that of the United States decides to restrict an agency that provides independent and pluralistic information in countries with autocratic regimes. We urge the authorities to review these decisions that undermine transparency and the right to information.”

Today I, like virtually every other full-time employee at VOA, was placed on administrative leave indefinitely. I'm not allowed to report the news to our hundreds of millions of viewers at this time. Let's hope this is temporary. A silencing of VOA will be celebrated by…

— Carla Babb (@CarlaBabbVOA) March 15, 2025

Had strong sense at least the timing of Trump's illegal shuttering of Voice of America was triggered by his annoyance at a question from a VOA journo. Source flags to me that the EO was so hastily put together they literally forgot to complete the last sentence. www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/…

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— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm.bsky.social) March 15, 2025 at 11:07 PM

If you get rid of Voice of America and these other institutions, as much as it might feel good to punish reporters and leaders who covered global events on the taxpayer’s dime with a left-wing slant, we’re stuck with a world where Russia, China, and Iran are flooding the globe…

— Jim Geraghty (@jimgeraghty) March 17, 2025

US is supposedly in “great power competition” with China and Russia. But Trump dismantles @VOANews @RadioFreeAsia @RFERL — which report on those countries and are denounced by autocrats. We who cover China have relied especially on the work of Uyghur and Tibetan reporters at RFA. pic.twitter.com/fPY048pBQx

— Edward Wong (@ewong) March 16, 2025

Is there any recourse for staffers at Voice of America and other gutted U.S. broadcasters? The American Foreign Service Mission says "unilaterally stripping a congressionally established agency of its core functions amounts to an affront to the constitutional balance of powers…"

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) March 17, 2025