Katie Couric's New Media Venture Looks for Partner Companies With 'Ethos'
*By Madison Alworth*
Katie Couric is all in with new media. Since the journalist left Yahoo roughly one year ago, she's expanded her own production company, Katie Couric Media, joined forces with theSkimm newsletter, and entered the fight for gender equality.
“I’ve sort of been staffing up, and we are doing a number of interesting projects," Couric, a seasoned vet of the more traditional CBS and ABC networks, said this week in an interview on Cheddar.
"We’re teaming up with companies that have kind of an ethos and social responsibility side that resonates with me. So companies like Procter and Gamble, I’ve been working with them because they’ve been on the forefront of gender equality, and \[chief brand officer\] Mark Pritchard is an amazingly enlightened individual in corporate america. And P&G is a fantastic company, so I'm proud to be associated with them.”
P&G ($PG) is sponsoring one of Couric's first video projects with new media company theSkimm.
"I’m doing a series called 'Getting There' with theSkimm, because it’s really designed to inspire younger women to show how very successful women got there ー from Ina Garten to Issa Rae to Eva Chen to Bozoma St. John to Jennifer Fisher to Bethenny Frankel ー all really successful women in their own right."
TheSkimm, which was founded in 2012, has since grown to [6 million subscribers](http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/11/with-video-and-audio-the-skimm-pushes-further-into-the-daily-routines-of-its-6-million-readers/), according to the latest estimates. The newsletter company expanded into video and audio last year, a natural extension for the millennial-focused start-up.
Once the star of the "Today Show" and the "CBS Evening News," Couric is well aware that media was vastly different at the start of her career. “I always thank my lucky stars I went into television news when I went into television news, because it is completely different today,” she said.
But Couric isn't intimidated by change ー she's inspired by it.
“You have a lot of different platforms, you have to iterate the content to match the platform. I think it's challenging, because it is so fragmented and so niche and there is so much content out there," she said.
"On the other hand, that is presenting really exciting opportunities to do different things. I always like to be forward-thinking.”
For full interview [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/katie-couric-media).
Joseph Gordon-Levitt, CEO and co-founder of HitRecord, and Jared Geller, president and co-founder of HitRecord, join Cheddar News to discuss the platform's 'Class Projects'. Gordon-Levitt also talked about playing Jiminy Cricket in Disney's live-action 'Pinocchio.'
One e-commerce company is putting diverse beauty brands first. 'thirteen lune' was launched last year and carries 100 brands, 90% percent of which are founded by Black, indigenous, people of color (BIPOC). The company has grown tremendously within the past year and just landed a $3 million funding round led by Fearless Fund, a venture capital firm created by women of color, for women of color. Nyakio Grieco, co-founder of thirteen lune joins Cheddar News to talk about the new funding.
Evan Vandenberg, the founder and CEO of Dibbs, a sports card trading platform, joined Cheddar to break down how his company allows sports fans to buy and sell fractions of sports cards. The physical trading cards are typically held in a vault while fans are provided with a digital representation of that card that they can go on to sell or even buy more fractions of the item. Vanderberg also talked about the company's $13 million Series A funding round and investments from major sports figures like the NBA's Chris Paul and NFL's DeAndre Hopkins.
Johan Grahn, Head of ETFs at Allianz Investment Management, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss today's market close which saw all major indexes reaching record highs on the back of a strong October jobs report, low-interest rates, and more.
Earlier this week, crypto investors who got in on a 'Squid Game'-inspired coin were shocked when the asset turned out to be part of a scam. The people involved made off with close to $3 million after the Netflix-inspired coin's valuation went from $0.01 to $3,000 and back down to $0 within several days. CoinDesk Anchor Christine Lee joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss the pump-and-dump scheme, how investors can be on the lookout for similar scams, and what crypto platform Binance is doing to investigate the incident.
Nela Richardson, Chief Economist at ADP, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell, where he discusses the sector growth in the October Jobs report, and how labor shortages and wage growth will impact the economy going forward.
More American tech companies continue to pull their businesses out of China as the Communist Party cracks down on firms — both foreign and domestic. Yahoo and Fortnite have become the latest companies to withdraw from the country, and the withdrawals come just days after Microsoft announced it would take LinkedIn offline. Shehzad Qazi, managing director at China Beige Book International, joined Cheddar to provide some insight into how the crackdowns in China would also impact the tech companies at home in the United States.
Yelp reported Q3 earnings on Thursday, matching its best quarterly performance in company history, according to CFO David Schwarzbach who joined Cheddar's "Between Bells" to break down the report and business forecast. He also talked about the impact that the pandemic has had on marketing campaigns on the platform and noted that while service pros are doing well, campaigns for restaurants, retail, and other sectors continue to face challenges.
