Following a conference with Judge Joel M. Cohen earlier this week, the lawsuits between former Foundry partners Peter McGuigan and Yfat Reiss Gendell are scheduled for a lengthy process of litigation. Without ruling yet on any of the preliminary motions, the court set a discovery process that will end in late November, with motions for summary judgment due by January 3, 2022.
McGraw Hill Reports Q4
In advance of the closing of their pending sale of McGraw Hill to Platinum Equity, the company reported fourth quarter and full-year results. As of March 31, their total debt had a face value of $2.159 billion. They paid debt service of $227 million in the fiscal year, and ended the year with $354 million of cash. The risk factors section notes plainly, “We are a leveraged company that has substantial indebtedness.” Higher ed sales were $649 million in the year, and K-12 sales were $584 million. Like HMH, Pearson and other education companies, McGraw Hill touts its digital transformation […]
Initiatives
Wattpad has paired with AST in Russia for a co-branded AST Wattpad line publishing some of the site’s top Russian-language stories. AST will also publish Wattpad Books titles in Russian, and will translate some popular Wattpad stories into Russian.
And the Next Thing
Thanks for the nice feedback on our updated Lunch design (and remember to expect Weekly and Daily Deals to switch over to the new format next week). Our development pipeline has been especially busy lately and today we are rolling out a new site refinement we hope you will find useful. Ever since we launched the Dealmakers interface, it has been our most-visited data collection in the aggregate. All along, the Dealmaker lists have surfaced the most active buyers and sellers across about 70 categories and sub-categories. As the industry has finally started to diversify more meaningfully, we wanted to […]
Hilderbrand to Retire from Fiction Writing in 2024
Elin Hilderbrand tells the AP that she plans to retire from writing novels in 2024, indicating that she wants to stop while her work is in demand. “A lot of people will follow a writer for a long time and then inevitably they will turn out a book that is not as good as the others,” Hilderbrand told the AP last month. “I’ve always said to myself, ‘I will not do that. I will make each book better and better or different in some way.’ I feel myself coming to my natural end of my material.” While Hilderbrand will definitely […]
Behold
Yes, as noted briefly last week, this looks different. And with luck, better! After many months of development, we are pleased to introduce a fresh look and improved coding for our daily newsletters. The initial, and primary, goal was to make Lunch display better on mobile viewports and across the wide variety of common email services (all of which have their own special ways of mangling email code). As with most renovations, that starting point quickly turned into an opportunity to rethink and revise a lot of our common features and ways of presenting information every day. At the same […]