Ozy Media Shutting Down Amid Major Media Scandal
Its name was Ozy, king of digital-media startups. Look on its works, ye mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains.
Matthew Eisman
Ozy Media, the digital-media startup that publicly unraveled over the past week after The New York Times first exposed some of its deceptive practices, is shutting down for good.
“At Ozy, we have been blessed with a remarkable team of dedicated staff,” the company’s board wrote in a statement first printed by the Times on Friday. “Many of them are world-class journalists and experienced professionals to whom we owe tremendous gratitude and who are wonderful colleagues. It is therefore with the heaviest of hearts that we must announce today that we are closing Ozy’s doors.”
Last Sunday, the Times reported that Ozy’s chief operating officer Samir Rao impersonated a YouTube executive during a fundraising call with Goldman Sachs executives. The exposé opened the floodgates for days worth of new reporting on the fledgling media company’s deceptive marketing, promotional activities, fundraising, and traffic-boosting tactics, as well as an alleged workplace culture of abuse largely at the hands of the company’s CEO and founder Carlos Watson.
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