| 1. MGM RESORTS TO PAY VEGAS FESTIVAL SHOOTING VICTIMS UP TO $800 MILLION: MGM Resorts International will pay up to $800 million to settle lawsuits filed by victims of the mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest music festival in 2017. The settlement will resolve claims that MGM was negligent in letting the shooter bring weapons and ammunition to the Mandalay Bay hotel. The New York Times: “Another lawyer for the plaintiffs, Craig Eiland, said that the settlement was expected to cover up to 4,500 people, which he said would include everything ‘from death cases all the way down to those who had P.T.S.D.’ … All of the settlement — or nearly all—will be funded by MGM’s insurers, who have agreed to pay $751 million to resolve the cases. So the most MGM will have to pay out of its own pockets, depending on the final settlement amount, would be $49 million.” 2. INSIDE EATER’S EVENTS EXPANSION: Eater, the food and restaurant website owned by Vox Media, has debuted 11 new event programs in 2019 in an effort to grow its revenue and target younger audiences. New events have included restaurant industry discussion series Eater Talks and the Eater Young Guns Summit in New York. Digiday: “The events are all executed by Vox Media Experiential team, which is currently made up of 10 staffers but is in the process of growing, in collaboration with Eater’s editorial team who looks to their audience for new ideas. According to vice president of experiential marketing Vanessa Fontanez, every event that Vox Media puts on is brought to sponsors, though Eater would not disclose how much revenue its events business would generate this year." 3. ZOLA WILL LET COUPLES PLAN THEIR HONEYMOONS: Wedding planning website Zola is moving into travel. The company is launching a platform called Honeymoons, which will let couples plan, book, and raise money for their post-wedding trips at the same time they plan their ceremony. TechCrunch: “Zola’s business today is based around pre-wedding organization: Users can set up free websites, design and print (paid) wedding invitations, and create Zola-based gift registries for family and friends to buy goods for the couple through the site—a business that has been successful enough to net the company more than $140 million in funding and a $650 million valuation. But the average time spent planning weddings is 13-18 months, and so Honeymoons will be one way for Zola to extend that relationship not just in terms of money spent—honeymoons is estimated to be a $12 billion industry in the U.S.—but time spent using Zola, which in turn can help build a tighter relationship for whatever moves the company might make in the future.” | 