Streaming-news platform Cheddar, which you can catch at a gas station near you, announced on Tuesday that it had been purchased by Altice USA, a cable company, for $200 million. Altice seems to have purchased Cheddar, which describes itself as a news network for millennials (at gas stations), to raise the profile of its news offerings, and Cheddar’s CEO Jon Steinberg, a former president of BuzzFeed and CEO of the Daily Mail North America, was named head of Altice’s news division. The sale raises many questions about the future of digital media, not least of which: Why is the logo for Cheddar a block of orange Swiss cheese?
Writer and host of the podcast Who? Weekly, Bobby Finger, noted this on Tuesday afternoon:
Which, in turn, prompted a few Cheddar employees to crawl out of the woodwork and weigh in. Here’s reporter Alex Heath pointing out that the logo has since been updated. (The Swiss hunk is still the logo listed on Cheddar’s Wikipedia page, Finger later pointed out.)
Melissa Rosenthal, Cheddar’s executive vice-president, also had things to say about the logo. First, she replied to Finger’s tweet saying the Swiss was a “strategic decision” and that a piece of cheddar wouldn’t have worked aesthetically.
She later explained the strategy was getting Cheddar away from its first logo which was, apparently, a hot dog? I am confused but, okay, let’s continue.
Honestly, it seems fitting that an internet beef should come with cheese.
But, really, congrats to our friends over at Cheddar. I am hopeful Altice USA will continue to be supportive of ChedHER, the platform’s show about millennial women in business, which I still contend should be renamed Womanchego.
