6 Most Important Things in Business Today

July 24, 2018 by Douglas A. McIntyre

The Google search unit of Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) posted earnings results that were much larger than the possible effects of a fine from the European Union. According to The Wall Street Journal:

Google’s advertising machine keeps racing ahead even as regulators try to construct new guardrails to curtail the internet giant’s global dominance.

Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent, reported sales and profit surpassing analysts’ estimates on Monday, a sign the company’s strength in online ads will help offset the impact of sweeping new European regulations for online privacy and perceived abuses of its position in the market.

Nike Inc. (NYSE: NKE) will raise the compensation of many of its employees. According to The Wall Street Journal:

Nike Inc. is raising salaries for more than 7,000 employees after an internal pay review and changing how it awards annual bonuses to its global staff, part of a broad overhaul of compensation at the sportswear giant.

The changes, announced Monday in an internal memo, are the latest example of efforts by Nike management to address concerns about pay equity and reshape the company’s culture, which was jolted this spring by complaints of inappropriate workplace behavior and an executive purge.


Newspaper publisher Tronc Inc. (NASDAQ: TRNC) cut the newsroom staff of The New York Daily News by half. According to The New York Times:

The meeting lasted less than a minute. By the time it was over, reporters and editors at The Daily News, the brawny New York tabloid that was once the largest-circulation paper in the country, learned that the newsroom staff would be cut in half and that its editor in chief was out of a job.

In the hours that followed, journalists in various departments, from sports to metro, received formal notification that they had been laid off by Tronc, the media company based in Chicago that bought the paper last year.

The trade wars have hit newspapers. According to the Financial Times:

Newsprint tariffs send costs soaring for US newspapers Industry urges Trump administration to reconsider in trade dispute with Canada.

Russian hackers may have hit the U.S. electric grid. According to The Wall Street Journal:

Hackers working for Russia claimed “hundreds of victims” last year in a giant and long-running campaign that put them inside the control rooms of U.S. electric utilities where they could have caused blackouts, federal officials said. They said the campaign likely is continuing.

The Russian hackers, who worked for a shadowy state-sponsored group previously identified as Dragonfly or Energetic Bear, broke into supposedly secure, “air-gapped” or isolated networks owned by utilities with relative ease by first penetrating the networks of key vendors who had trusted relationships with the power companies, said officials at the Department of Homeland Security.

Tronc will cut more newspaper jobs after chopping staff at The New York Daily News:

Tronc laid off half the staff of the New York Daily News on Monday. Astonishingly, the cuts are not over yet.

The newspaper publisher is laying off staffers at some of its other papers “today and tomorrow,” according to a Monday afternoon memo from Tronc CEO Justin Dearborn.

The announcement immediately spooked staffers at papers like The Baltimore Sun and The Chicago Tribune.

Dearborn said the cuts will not be as severe as in New York.

“The Daily News is unique in that local leadership determined a complete redesign of its structure was needed post-acquisition,” he wrote. “We do not expect reductions of this scale in any of our other newsrooms.”

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