Heat St. Website Folding; Greta Van Sustern Leaving MSNBC

It started out as a decent internet venture, until co-founder Louise Mensch began, well, let's say "her episodes."

Apparently those episodes were part of the reason Fox News didn't want to buy it. (Though it's still owned by News Corp, Fox's parent company -- it will be folded into News Corp's "MarketWatch.)

News Corp's conservative digital media site Heat Street is folding in August, the company told BuzzFeed News on Thursday.

...

Heat Street, which has about 15 employees, launched as a right-of-center digital media upstart in an increasingly crowded conservative media field, taking on sites like Breitbart, the Daily Caller, IJR, and the Blaze.

Fox News had explored acquiring Heat Street, The Wall Street Journal reported in May. Two people familiar with the matter confirmed the talks to BuzzFeed News. One of the people said that Rupert Murdoch, who controls both News Corp and 21st Century Fox, pushed for the deal, but that Fox didn't want to take on the property, in part because Mensch's recent Twitter crusade.

Meanwhile, MSNBC and Greta Van Susteren are splitsville:

[A] few days shy of her six-month mark on air, Van Susteren’s business is finished on MSNBC, according to people familiar with the situation. The anchor, whose show struggled to gain traction even as the rest of her colleagues were buoyed by anti-Trump hysteria, has parted ways with the network. She will not appear on the show on Thursday evening. She will be permanently replaced by Ari Melber, the network’s chief legal correspondent and host of the The Point on weekends. He will continue to appear across NBC and MSNBC shows as he takes over the 6 p.m. slot next month. (MSNBC and NBC News declined to comment. Reached by phone Thursday afternoon, Van Susteren had no comment.)

posted by Ace at 06:18 PM

| Access Comments