“For a company that was all about Isaac, where everything was Isaac, all of a sudden, it’s as if he’s vanished.” A person familiar with Lee’s thinking said, “Isaac is mad that they blew up his company. “Nobody has even mentioned Isaac,” one executive told me. For the past month or so, according to multiple insiders, Lee has been explicitly uninvolved. Lee, who serves as Univision’s chief content officer, became less involved in F.M.G.’s day-to-day operations starting in January 2017, when he took on an additional role as chief content officer of the Mexico City-based Televisa, which owns a 40 percent stake in New York-based Univision. But the most notable figure who has dropped out of the F.M.G. Raju Narisetti announced this week that he will leave at the end of April. of Fusion Media Group, and Daniel Eilemberg, president of the Fusion cable network, were among 20 employees laid off several weeks ago Gizmodo Media Group C.E.O. Meanwhile, Lee’s lieutenants have been dropping like flies as Univision brass consolidate authority. Buried in that same Journal article was an anonymously sourced tidbit that might as well have been a “for-sale” sign: “As Univision works to improve the returns from Fusion Media Group, it would likely be open to in-bound interest for all or part of the group.” plans last month and is now preparing to bid farewell to C.E.O. The anticipated downsizing is part of a companywide cost-saving exercise at Univision, which scrapped its I.P.O. The company has been targeted for “steep cost cuts,” as The Wall Street Journal put it in a March 16 article, revealing that number crunchers from Boston Consulting Group had recommended a 35 percent budget reduction. Less than two years after that acquisition, and seven years since Lee first started assembling his fiefdom, Univision is letting the air out of the Fusion Media Group balloon at a fairly rapid rate. “I expect the addition of these digital-first media assets,” which were collectively renamed Gizmodo Media Group, “will help FMG exceed the demands of the young, cross-cultural influencers we serve,” Lee said in a prepared statement at the time.
The deal met with a mix of curiosity and skepticism-“a desperation play for millennials,” snarled Michael Wolff-but it seemed a significant boon in terms of Lee’s ambition to build a scalable content portfolio that could compete with the BuzzFeeds and Vox Medias of the world, while infusing its legacy parent company with some of the young digital mojo that could help Univision adapt for the future.
(The flagship, now defunct, was deemed too radioactive was rebranded as, an online home for the cable channel specifically.) Univision bought the sites for $135 million in a bankruptcy auction that played out in the wake of Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel’s legal jihad against Gawker founder Nick Denton. His biggest coup was the August 2016 acquisition of a half dozen orphaned Gawker Media brands, including Gizmodo, Jezebel, and Deadspin. But Lee, the empire builder, forged ahead. Club), while also creating a few new Web properties of its own (Project Earth, TrackRecord, The Takeout).įusion, which was wholly acquired by Univision in 2016 as losses from the cable channel piled up, endured some struggles with audience growth and, less tangibly, the conundrum of people not quite understanding what it was trying to do or be. ( Felix Salmon, the financial columnist, was reportedly making more than $400,000 a year, likely a multiple of what he would have earned at another digital-first player.) Over the next several years, Lee got Univision to buy a handful of other buzzy Web properties (The Root, The Onion, A.V. The enterprise generated buzz by nabbing big-name recruits with big salaries. It all began with Fusion, a general-interest Web site and corresponding cable channel launched in 20, respectively, in partnership with Disney’s ABC.
#Gawker univision series
So Lee and Univision made a bold, some thought outlandish, series of bets. It was around 2011 when Isaac Lee, then a 40-year-old news executive at the Spanish-language broadcaster Univision, saw the writing on the wall, and it read: multicultural millennials.
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