By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Donya Blaze on FishbowlLA, April 2013
On April 29, 2013, FishbowlLA ran one of its Morning Media Newsfeed roundups. The lead story was the death of Mary Thom, the longtime Ms. magazine editor, who had died at 68 in an upstate New York motorcycle accident. The roundup also covered the HuffPost Live cable-television expansion, AOL Music’s shutdown, and a substantial set of other day-of media-business developments.
Then
Mary Thom had been one of the foundational editorial figures at Ms. magazine. She had joined the magazine in its 1972 founding cycle and served as executive editor across decades — building substantial institutional editorial infrastructure around feminist long-form journalism. Her death at 68 in an April 27, 2013 motorcycle accident ended one of the longer-tenured American feminist-press editorial careers.
HuffPost Live had launched in August 2012 as Arianna Huffington’s video-streaming venture. The April 2013 cable-television expansion was substantively a pivot.
AOL Music’s shutdown was part of the broader AOL portfolio-rationalization cycle that had been ongoing through Tim Armstrong’s CEO tenure.
Donya Blaze’s FishbowlLA framing was, characteristically for the Morning Media Newsfeed format, a substantively comprehensive cross-property digest.
Now
Ms. magazine has continued operating across the years since Mary Thom’s death. Ms. itself has continued as the longest-running American feminist magazine.
HuffPost Live wound down in 2016 — the cable-television expansion did not produce a sustainable cross-platform model. The November 2020 BuzzFeed acquisition of HuffPost further reduced the HuffPost video operation’s footprint.
AOL itself went through the 2015 Verizon acquisition, the 2017 merger with Yahoo into Oath, and the 2021 sale to Apollo Global Management.
The Morning Media Newsfeed format has continued in modified form, distributed via subscriber-newsletter infrastructure (Axios Media, Semafor’s Media newsletter, Status by Oliver Darcy).
The April 29, 2013 piece reads now as one of the documented daily snapshots of how the post-2010 American digital-media-business landscape was reorganizing in real time.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.