Ozy Media will stop

Ozy Media, the digital media company that has come under scrutiny for its business practices in recent days, announced its closure on Friday.

“At Ozy, we are fortunate to have a remarkable team of dedicated staff,” the company’s board of directors said in a statement. “Many of them are world-class journalists and experienced professionals to whom we owe immense gratitude and who are wonderful colleagues. It is therefore with a heavy heart that we must announce today that we are closing the doors of Ozy.

The company, led by former MSNBC presenter Carlos Watson, was founded in 2013. It has attracted top investors including Emerson Collective, the organization led by Laurene Powell Jobs, and Marc Lasry, hedge fund manager and co-owner of the Milwaukee Bucks Basketball Franchise.

In a statement released last week, Emerson Collective distanced himself from Ozy, saying he “was not involved in Ozy’s latest investment round and has not served on its board since 2019 “. On Thursday, Mr. Lasry resigned as chairman of the board of directors of Ozy.

The announcement of the shutdown came five days after the New York Times ran an article that raised questions about the company, including detailing an episode in which a senior Ozy executive appeared to have impersonated a YouTube executive on a conference call with Goldman Sachs bankers as the company tried to raise $ 40 million.

Ozy’s success depended to some extent on the performance of the company’s YouTube videos. During the conference call, the impersonator told the Goldman Sachs team that Ozy was a big hit on the platform.

After the call, Google, the owner of YouTube, alerted the Federal Bureau of Investigations, and Goldman Sachs received an investigation from federal law enforcement officials, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. The FBI field office in San Francisco has neither confirmed nor denied the existence of an investigation.

The board said on Tuesday it had hired Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison, a large international company headquartered in New York City, to conduct a review of Ozy’s business activities. The board also said it had asked Samir Rao, Ozy’s COO and the person who apparently posed as a YouTube executive, “to take time off while waiting for survey results “.

After the article was published, Ozy lost one of his biggest stars, when former BBC presenter Katty Kay, who had joined the company earlier this year after nearly three decades with the UK broadcaster, announced that she had resigned. Ms Kay wrote on Twitter that she handed in her resignation Tuesday morning, adding that “the New York Times allegations, which took me by surprise, are serious and deeply disturbing and I had no choice but to end my relationship with the company. “

On Thursday, the Times released another report that last year Ozy hired a crew to create a talk show for cable network A&E – “The Carlos Watson Show,” hosted by Mr. Watson. Guests have been told the show will air on A&E, and the show’s executive producer has been told it will air in August 2020 during prime time.

The problem: A&E said such a deal does not exist. The executive producer resigned after finding out, writing to Ozy executives: “You are playing a dangerous game with the truth. The consequences of giving guests an A&E show when we don’t have one are catastrophic for Ozy and for me.

When executive producer Brad Bessey resigned, he told show staff that the show was not, in fact, going to air on A&E. Mr. Watson then told people on the Zoom call that “The Carlos Watson Show” would eventually end up on A&E, according to Mr. Bessey and another person on the call. Until then, Watson added, the show would appear on YouTube as part of its YouTube Originals, a list of programs made by professional studios and paid for by YouTube.

“The Carlos Watson Show” ended up appearing on Ozy.com and YouTube, but not as a YouTube original. A YouTube official confirmed that the show was not a YouTube Original. Mr Watson and a spokesperson for Ozy did not respond to requests for comment.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.