When New York Media and Vox Media told The New York Times announced Tuesday night that they were merging, the publishers' respective heads, Pam Wasserstein and Jim Bankoff, set off on a small press tour, touting the all-stock deal as a "compelling model for the media industry" that would allow them to complement and build on their positions of strength. While the deal has earned endorsements from some industry observer, many in the industry also see it as a sign of the strain that mid-sized media companies are under. Read more below.

• Because of growing demands from marketers, many in the industry see the merger of New York Media and Vox Media as a sign of the strain that mid-sized media companies are under.
• Advertising Week this year felt like a week of dissonance. Well, four days of dissonance.
• From Digiday magazine: Mocktail culture is taking over, and sobriety may be more popular than it has ever been with millennials and Gen-Z reportedly drinking less than the generations before them.
• In this edition of Making Marketing, Atoms founders Sidra Qasim and Waqas Ali joined Shareen Pathak to discuss how the couple plans to keep that personal touch as their company grows.