breaking_media_logo1New York (January 23, 2015)Breaking Media, the leading digital-first B2B media company in law, finance, energy, defense, government and fashion, is pleased to announce the acquisition of MedCity Media, a digital publisher that covers the business of health care and life sciences innovation through its website MedCityNews.com. The acquisition advances Breaking Media’s successful business model of developing must-read websites, events, research and mobile products for industry insiders.

Integrating healthcare into its popular suite of targeted verticals, Breaking Media will operate MedCity as a stand-alone unit based out of its current Cleveland headquarters. MedCity CEO and co-founder Chris Seper joins Breaking Media as VP, Healthcare, a new position at the company.  Breaking Media will immediately begin producing MedCity projects including three widely-regarded events in the healthcare industry: the Mid-America Healthcare Venture Forum, ENGAGE and CONVERGE.

“The business of healthcare is in a constant state of transformation.  MedCityNews has its fingers on the pulse of the innovation in this market more than anyone,” said John Lerner, CEO of Breaking Media.  “We were attracted by entrepreneurial spirit that Chris and his team bring to this market.  They have created a community where disparate players in the healthcare space can come together and discuss innovation, both online and through their face-to-face events.  We are committed to further invest in the brand under Chris’s leadership.”

“Breaking Media is an elite digital media brand and today’s acquisition is a win both for the company and for healthcare,” added Seper. “Under the Breaking Media umbrella, MedCity can delve deeper, allowing healthcare innovators to touch an even broader array of alpha influencers, and share new approaches to medical breakthroughs and healthcare innovation. The publisher’s track record of success with websites, events, research and custom marketing solutions will allow MedCity to accelerate growth in 2015 and beyond.”

This is the second major acquisition for Breaking Media, having purchased Breaking Defense, Breaking Energy and Breaking Gov from AOL last year.  Breaking Media will migrate MedCityNews—and eventually all of its sites—to a new publishing platform providing a more robust experience for readers and advertisers.

About Breaking Media

Breaking Media runs a network of next-generation business-to-business media brands targeting influential professionals: Above the Law, Dealbreaker, Fashionista, Breaking Defense, Breaking Energy and Breaking Gov. Because of its authentic, inside-the-industry content, Breaking Media reaches over 5 million affluent, decision-making professionals per month and connects brands with this deeply targeted, engaged and influential audience through innovative content integration, custom research products, event marketing and more.  Headquartered in Manhattan, the company was founded in 2006.

About MedCity Media

MedCity Media is the leading online news source for the business of innovation in healthcare, now responsible for healthcare within Breaking Media. It offers insight onto what’s next and what matters with a mix of breaking news and analysis on startups and established industry leaders, personalities, policies and the most important deals. Along with the website, medcitynews.com, MedCity produces three must-attend events in the healthcare industry, The Mid-America Healthcare Venture Forum, ENGAGE and CONVERGE.

breaking_media_logoBreaking Media — the leading online B2B media company and publisher of Dealbreaker, Above the Law, Fashionista, Breaking Defense, Breaking Energy, and Above the Law Redline — announces new staff promotions to leverage its editorial talent across all of its brands.

Elie Mystal (editor Above the Law/Above the Law Redline) is being promoted to Breaking Media Editor-at-Large and Managing Editor of ATL Redline. As Editor-at-Large, Mystal will be responsible for bringing Above the Law’s legal expertise to other Breaking Media brands through weekly columns, and will also work with advertisers and sponsors to create content solutions for their promotional needs. As Managing Editor for Redline, Mystal will continue to bring legal news, insights, and entertainment to non-lawyers across a variety of subjects leveraging Gawker Media’s Kinja platform. Mystal has been with Above the Law since 2008, and will maintain a weekly column there focusing on legal education.

Staci Zaretsky and Joe Patrice (assistant editors of Above the Law) have been promoted to Editors of the brand. Zaretsky has been with the company since 2010, while Patrice joined in 2012. Both editors will continue to focus on the breaking news, industry analysis, and entertaining stories that have made Above the Law one of the most widely read legal publications in the country.

We are also pleased to announce that Nina Frazier Hansen (Creative Director of Fashionista) has assumed the role of Creative Director for Breaking Media. She will continue to work with Fashionista as well as the entire Breaking Media portfolio to enhance the user experience in all of our verticals.

Breaking Media believes that these moves will allow the company to bring new and quality content to all of our readers and fans. Congratulations to Elie, Staci, Joe, and Nina.

— John Lerner, CEO, Breaking Media

A Most Appealing Announcement

If you’re like me, you’ve been reading Howard Bashman’s excellent appellate litigation blog, How Appealing, for years. When I started to write online more than a decade ago, Howard, a pioneer of legal blogging, was a role model and inspiration. (I pay homage to Howard Bashman and How Appealing with shout-outs in my forthcoming novel.)

Given our longtime admiration of Howard Bashman and How Appealing here at Above the Law, we are absolutely delighted to announce this partnership: effective October 1, 2014, How Appealing will be hosted at howappealing.abovethelaw.com. You can read Howard’s announcement of the affiliation here.

For those of you who love How Appealing and Above the Law as they are, there’s nothing to fear. Howard Bashman will continue to run the web’s top blog devoted to appellate litigation, and we will continue to cover the legal profession here at ATL in our inimitable style. We will display headlines of recent How Appealing posts on ATL, and How Appealing will display headlines of recent ATL posts. The primary change resulting from this partnership will be felt by advertisers, who will now enjoy a broader range of options within the Breaking Media family. If you are interested in advertising on How Appealing, Above the Law, or both, please contact [email protected].

Given How Appealing’s record of excellence dating back to 2002, we couldn’t be happier with this partnership. We look forward to working with Howard Bashman and How Appealing in the years ahead.

Announcing the new location of “How Appealing” [How Appealing]

David Lat is Managing Editor of Above the Law, a Breaking Media site.

  • 15 May 2014 at 10:23 AM
  • /
  • Admin, Press

Welcome to the New Fashionista

As you might have noticed, we’ve had a little work done.

Well, more than a little work. In fact, our whole site is different: we’ve got a new site format, a new logo, a new spot color (bye bye, baby pink!), bigger images and a whole new set of site fonts.

Fashionista has evolved a great deal since its founding six years ago, and developing a design that would reflect those changes — and the changes in online media consumption that have occurred in that timeframe — was a fun and challenging project.

We think of ourselves as an industry publication with consumer appeal — a site that is a must-read for the industry, but also speaks to the people who want to work in the industry or are highly interested in it. Thus, we wanted the site and logo to convey “fashion,” “news” (hence the bold upper case font), “industry” and “webby” (thus the use of blue as our spot color, instead of fashion magazines’ typical pink or red). We also like to think of ourselves as personable, that we don’t take ourselves (or the industry we cover) too seriously. That, we hope, comes out in the headlines and the writing itself.

Read more »

  • 29 Jan 2014 at 4:00 PM
  • /
  • Admin

What Is ATL Redline?

Now that we’ve been doing it for a couple of days, we thought we’d tell you what we’re doing.

ATL Redline is a new project for Breaking Media that will represent Above the Law’s presence on Kinja, Gawker Media’s popular publishing platform. Above the Law has established itself as the go-to place for lawyers and law students who want an inside look at the practice of law and the lives of attorneys. With Redline, we’re going to draw on that knowledge to highlight the law behind today’s news for a broader audience. Whether it’s the latest celebrity scandal or the next outrageous campaign speech, there’s usually a law or lawyer somewhere influencing what is happening. Redline will cut out the jargon, so you won’t need a law degree to have an informed opinion and participate in the debate.

Read more »

US special operators are notoriously low-profile “silent professionals.” But lately the Internet’s been abuzz over Special Operations Command’s effort to build a high-tech suit of bulletproof armor – TALOS, the Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit – that the normally understated chief of SOCOM, Adm. William McRaven, actually compared to the metal-clad superhero Iron Man.

Read more on Breaking Defense.

BNP Paribas knows what we’re talking about.

Read more on Dealbreaker.

Go f@ck yourself and die.

Steven M. Regan, a partner at Reed Smith, telling the folks at SCOTUSblog how he really feels, via Twitter.

(What on earth could have inspired Regan to act this way? Keep reading to find out.)

Read more on AbovetheLaw.

The American Petroleum Institute put the below map together, showing the locations of the 21 proposed US LNG export plants, including the 4 that have received DOE approval for exports to non-free trade agreement nations.

Each location on the map includes “a summary of anticipated capital investments, jobs, and export volumes associated with each U.S. site, as well an estimated value of potential exports, based on application documents,” according to API.

Read more on Breaking Energy.

UPDATED: Latest Theory Is The Helo Is From Chinese Museum. No Proof.

A photo of a helicopter that looks quite a bit like an American Apache AH-64 attack helicopter on a truck has surfaced in China. The experts agree on one thing: they aren’t sure what the aircraft is or what it portends.

What do we know? The Chinese have been trying to develop attack helicopters like the Apache for more than a decade. One is a variant based on the Z-9, but it reportedly has limited manueverablity and a pretty light weapons load. The WZ-10 flew at a Chinese air show last year, with its designer claiming it’s already one of the three best attack helicopters in the world.

Read more on Breaking Defense.