WCVB Channel 5 names Andrew Vrees as new president and general manager
Kyle Grimes is the new executive vice president of Hearst Television.
Justin Steele
Prior to working at WMUR and Hearst Television as its vice president of new, Vrees served as the WCVB news director from 2009 to 2016. During that time, he oversaw the addition of WCVB's weekend local affairs show 'On the Record' and newscasts at 4 p.m. and 7p.m. The station was awarded a national Edward R. Murrow Award for overall excellence in 2012.
Advertisement
Vrees succeeds Grimes, who in addition to serving as president and GM of WCVB oversaw all of Hearst's New England stations as regional vice president. Grimes will continue to oversee the New England stations along with additional Hearst affiliates.
Aidan Ryan can be reached at
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Cosmopolitan
a day ago
- Cosmopolitan
We Found Olivia Rodrigo's Exact Polka Dot Micro Shorts
Is there anything Olivia Rodrigo can't do? Before checking major milestones like "headline a major U.S. festival" and "collaborate with rock legend David Byrne of The Talking Heads" off her bucket list at last weekend's Governors Ball in New York City, she also further cemented her fashion icon status by nailing not one, but two of the summer's biggest trends in one budget-friendly outfit. Ahead of her headlining performance on Saturday, O-Rod was spotted strutting around NYC in a pair of linen polka dot micro shorts from Reformation. Not only is her exact pair somehow still in stock (although some sizes seem to be going fast!), they're just $98, so you can copy Olivia's look without blowing your budget. While the Sour songstress completed her ensemble with a rugged pair of biker-inspired boots to match her edgy aesthetic, it's easy to incorporate polka dots into preppy, classic, or vintage-inspired outfits, too. Dare we say it's one of the most versatile patterns out there? Not to mention, this isn't the first time the Grammy winner has been spotted wearing polka dots, further proving it's one of this year's hottest trends. If you're more into the micro shorts trend than polka dots, the Ref shorts come in solid colors, too. We've seen everyone from Dua Lipa to Daisy Edgar Jones and Dakota Johnson wear itty-bitty shorts, so it was only a matter of time before Olivia jumped on the trend. And spoiler alert: During her performance later that night, she wore yet another pair of hot pants, this time in a bold red complete with studs. If you're inspired to steal Liv's look but not inspired to dish out $98, we found more polka dot shorts in a variety of cuts starting at just $9. Looking for a denim version? We're big fans of the larger dots on this pair from ASOS. And while there are plenty of similar micro shorts available, we're also loving this longer style, ideal for Old Hollywood-inspired looks. Madison McGee is a commerce editor at Hearst Magazines. For the past year, she has contributed shopping content, gift guides, product testing, and deals coverage across Hearst's portfolio, which includes Good Housekeeping, Women's Health, Men's Health, House Beautiful, Elle, Town and Country, Esquire, Country Living, Oprah Daily, and more. Prior to joining Hearst, she was a staff writer at BuzzFeed and worked in book publishing. Madison is a graduate of the University of Mississippi's journalism program, and holds a Masters in Publishing from New York University. When she's not scouting out the best deals, she can be found reading, cheering on the Baltimore Ravens, or exploring New York City's indie bookstores.
Business Insider
2 days ago
- Business Insider
An AI startup raised $24M to help media companies make high-quality video faster and cheaper. Here's its pitch deck.
Moments Lab is part of a growing number of AI startups raising money to reshape Hollywood and related fields. Moments Lab provides tools that index video libraries and create new videos from raw footage. The company recently raised $24 million in Series B funding from Oxx, with participation from Orange Ventures, Kadmos, Supernova Invest, and Elaia Partners. It plans to use the funding to build on its existing tech and roll out an agentic AI tool. To date, it's raised $37.4 million. Paris-based Moments Lab was founded by twin brothers Fred and Philippe Petitpont in 2016. Philippe was a product manager for French media company TF1 Group, while Fred was a tech lead at French ad holding company Havas' BETC Digital. They say they saw a need for media and entertainment companies to produce more video at a lower cost to feed the growing streaming ecosystem. Their clients include Warner Bros. Discovery, Banijay Entertainment, Fullwell Entertainment, Hearst, Thomson Reuters, Sinclair, and Amazon Ads. Moments Lab's core tool, MXT-2, breaks down and indexes video footage into components, like people who are on screen and what they're doing, and generates descriptions of them. Its key pitch is that it saves users time and money. Philippe Petitpont said the tech can identify soundbites for clips for social media and things like trailers and highlight reels about seven times as fast as an employee could, citing internal research. He also said some clients have reported making twice as much revenue from social media using the product. "For them, it's a way to create new revenue streams," Petitpont told Business Insider, referring to revenue from social media. "Before now, it was very complicated for production companies to create a revenue stream because there was a huge need for humans — it's a very tedious task." Moments Lab's newer agentic AI tool, which it says Hearst is among those testing, takes raw video material and turns it into rough cuts using written prompts. Petitpont said the AI agent can do this at a fraction of the time it takes people to do the work. He said its most promising application so far is in reality TV. Scripted TV is still a work in progress. Petitpont said Moments Lab has gained momentum with Hollywood companies since the beginning of the year, as they face pressure to make more shows at lower costs. He said it's signed a big studio as a client, though he wouldn't name it. "The demand from Netflix, Amazon's Prime Video, Peacock, is so strong that production companies need to produce more content than ever before, and they don't have more money to produce a show," he said. "Being able to produce at lower cost is more important than ever. That's where they're interested in using new approaches." AI tools are widely used in Hollywood to make production processes more efficient and, for now, generate short videos from text. But Hollywood is highly protective of its intellectual property, which is a barrier to adoption. Another is its labor unions, which worry that AI will replace their members. Petitpont said one of the most time-consuming parts of the sales process is assuring companies' legal teams that it won't use their IP to train its model. Moments Lab says its model is trained on a dataset of 1.5 billion assets that it describes as a mix of open-source content and content from partners that are part of its research program (a consortium of research labs, media rights owners, and tech companies). The company doesn't shy away from the idea that automating work done by assistant editors and others can reduce the need for human workers. Petitpont said one US financial media client told him it expects to use fewer editors as a result of using its tech. "The big question is: Will the assistant start to be the senior editor, or will the job disappear?" he said. "We don't know yet." One thing there seems to be broad agreement on in the industry is that AI usage will grow — not only to save time on pre- and post-production functions, but make high-quality original video fast. Other startups that tackle film editing functions include Runway, Filmustage, and Imaginario. Petitpont said the ability for media companies to use AI to help make full-length documentaries based on their video libraries is only several months off, imagining a company building a film on the history of America using decades of news footage. In a year, he expects Moments Lab to be able to provide predictive modeling tools that will let editors maximize the audience a given video will get. "That's what we believe will be the next thing, and we're not very far from that because audience data is very easily available on YouTube," he said. "The tech is not the issue, it's more the rights." Check out key slides from the pitch deck Moments Lab used to raise its Series B, with some confidential information removed. Its clients are in sports, media, and consumer brands Moments Lab Moments Lab lists some of its clients, including Hearst, LVMH, Banijay Entertainment, and Brut. It also gives proof points: 15,000 users 250,000 hours of video 50 enterprise customers 3,000 hours of video processed daily The company touts its expertise and awards Moments Lab It's working to make rough cuts from raw footage It cuts the time it takes to sift through raw footage Moments Lab Moments Lab's key employees and investors Moments Lab
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Yahoo
It Would Be So Funny If Trump Nationalized Elon Musk's Companies
As one of the century's stupidest, most high-profile feuds escalated yesterday, President Donald Trump at one point threatened to cancel the U.S. government's expansive contracts with SpaceX and Tesla, companies that are both at least nominally headed by ketamine enthusiast and Grimes-ex Elon Musk. In response, Musk threatened to 'immediately' decommission SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft, currently America's only means of shuttling astronauts to and from the International Space Station. An X user with fewer than 200 followers then appeared to negotiate some kind of détente on the matter, prompting Musk to back down. The bizarre, petulant, helplessly transfixing back-and-forth was a reminder that, while Musk's time as a 'special government employee' may be over, he's still very much a part of the U.S. government. His business empire has been built on government largesse, whether through SpaceX's expansive contracts with NASA, Starlink satellites, or the clean car rule compliance credits that have accounted for 34 percent of Tesla's profits since 2012. As The Washington Post reported in February, Musk's businesses have over the years received $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits. In many ways, Musk owes his fortune to the U.S. government. A truce between Trump and Musk may be imminent, but, if he wishes to use it, Trump has a powerful wild card for sticking it to Musk: nationalize his companies. A similar idea was floated online yesterday by Steve Bannon, the odious former film producer and Trump confidant, who suggested using the Defense Production Act to 'seize' SpaceX. The wide-ranging Korean War–era policy outlines several steps by which the White House can bypass Congress to intervene in the demand and supply sides of particular industries. Those powers can include directing private companies to prioritize orders from the federal government, issuing loans and loan guarantees, and allocating 'materials, services, and facilities' from corporations. Just this week, Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to boost production of so-called critical minerals and weapons. A waiver published to the Federal Register on Wednesday claims that shortfalls of either would 'severely impair national defense capability.' The Biden administration similarly leveraged the Defense Production Act to spur on the domestic production of graphite, a key component of the lithium-ion batteries used in military energy systems and electric vehicles. Both presidents turned to the law during the Covid-19 pandemic to address medical supply chain shortages and accelerate vaccine production. As the Roosevelt Institute's Todd Tucker has pointed out, the Defense Production Act has been continually updated to give the White House broader authority over energy, in particular. Its 2009 reauthorization specifically excised language in previous versions that restricted the government's ability to directly engage in energy production. After 9/11, the Defense Production Act's definition of 'national defense' was updated to include the protection and restoration of 'critical infrastructure,' a legal designation of 16 sectors deemed essential to the functioning of the economy, including telecoms, information technology, and transportation. In theory, that is, the Defense Production Act offers Donald Trump a massive toolbox with which to intervene in Musk's business. He could stick it to the richest man on earth by ordering Tesla to stop making Cybertrucks and start making electric buses, or forcing Starlink to provide free internet service to everyone in the country. As Bannon hinted, the law also opens up the possibility of requiring recipients of government funding—including those who have received loans and contracts—to give the government equity stakes in exchange. The first Trump administration did just that in 2020, when the Treasury Department sought equity stakes in publicly traded national security contractors, including defense firms, looking to receive the $17 billion set aside for them in coronavirus relief funds. Tying federal funding to public equity stakes is a common practice in other countries that's somewhat rare in the U.S. The most prominent example in recent memory was when the federal government spent $50 billion on a 61 percent equity stake in General Motors, bailing out the automaker after its bankruptcy in 2009. While this move theoretically empowered the White House to enact wide-ranging reforms—correcting for the kinds of mistakes that had plunged GM into financial ruin in the first place—presidential advisers, including Larry Summers, then the head of the National Economic Council, pushed the Obama administration to instead act as a 'reluctant equity owner' and 'not interfere with or exert control over day-to-day company operations.' The concept of the government seeking a 'golden share' in certain companies has already come up during Trump 2.0. Trump obliquely floated the possibility of the U.S. receiving an equity stake as part of Nippon Steel's controversial takeover of U.S. Steel, entitling the government to an advisory role that could allow it to outvote other shareholders on major issues like mergers and asset sales. Given the sheer scale of Musk's dealings with the federal government—business he seemed eager to expand during his disastrous time in Washington—there are any number of options for Trump to bolster government oversight of SpaceX and Tesla, including, potentially, buying up shares. Republican attacks on both electric vehicle incentives and California's clean car rules, moreover, may end up costing Tesla billions of dollars, JP Morgan Chase analysts have found. Tesla is already struggling amid flagging sales in the U.S. and abroad; earlier this year at the White House, Trump even hosted a bizarre infomercial for Tesla, seemingly aimed at boosting the company's fortunes. It's not impossible to imagine that Tesla might at some point come begging for another handout, offering Trump the opportunity to do what Barack Obama couldn't: play an active role in the day-to-day operations of a U.S. automaker. To state the obvious, it is vanishingly unlikely that Donald Trump will use either public equity stakes or the Defense Production Act toward progressive ends. In March, his administration removed solar panels, heat pumps, and other green technologies from the Defense Production Act's purview by rescinding several Biden-era executive orders. Doing so, though, would make Elon Musk really, really mad. If Trump is too afraid to exert that kind of power over Musk—who has demonstrated time and again his alarming sway over the federal government—whichever Democrat makes it to the White House next shouldn't be.
