6 Most Important Things in Business Today

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Mar 13, 3:49PM EDT · Published Dec 15, 5:13AM EST

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6 Most Important Things in Business Today — © Wikimedia Commons (Cebete)

Henry Blodget’s Business Insider, one of the greatest digital media successes, will change its name to Insider, Inc., a sign of its growing influence outside business and finance.

The FCC has killed net neutrality. According to Reuters:

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission voted along party lines on Thursday to repeal landmark 2015 rules aimed at ensuring a free and open internet, setting up a court fight over a move that could recast the digital landscape.

The publisher’s job at The New York Times passed from one generation to another. According to the company:

The New York Times Company announced today that Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr. will retire as publisher on December 31, 2017. He will continue to serve as chairman of the Company’s board of directors, a position he has held since 1997. Mr. Sulzberger, Jr., 66, has been The Times’s publisher since 1992.

Deputy Publisher A.G. Sulzberger, 37, will become publisher of The New York Times on January 1, 2018. Like the publishers before him, he will be the principal steward of the editorial independence, excellence, and long-term prosperity of The New York Times.

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Due to a deal with Rupert Murdoch, Walt Disney Co. (NYSE: DIS) has become the king of all media. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Disney said Thursday it agreed to buy most of 21st Century Fox Inc. for $52.4 billion in stock, in a deal that would give Disney a dominant position in movies and sports and help bolster its flagging television business as it prepares to directly challenge digital giants like Netflix Inc.

Disney is buying the Twentieth Century Fox television and film studios, cable networks including FX and National Geographic Channel, Star India, a 39% stake in Sky, 22 regional sports networks and majority control of streaming-video service Hulu.

Teva Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: TEVA) will slash jobs as it tries to restructure itself into a more profitable company. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. is cutting more than 25% of its workforce, or about 14,000 employees around the world, closing factories and research centers and suspending its dividend—the Israeli firm’s most recent move to cut costs and pare debt.

Teva, the world’s biggest seller of generic drugs, didn’t detail where it is cutting jobs. At the end of the third quarter, it employed about 53,000, most of them in Europe and the U.S.

A major industry organization said that holiday spending was unusually strong. According to the National Retail Federation:

Retail sales in November increased 0.9 percent over October on a seasonally adjusted basis and were up 6 percent year-over-year unadjusted, according to calculations released today by the National Retail Federation. Online and other non-store sales grew 10.5 percent year-over-year, reflecting the growth of online shopping. The numbers exclude automobiles, gasoline stations and restaurants.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.