Profile
ZYX Publishing owns through You Trust Publishing Group 51.59% of the shares in Universal Impex Company Est, the company that operates the website B365.ro. The rest of 48.41% shares are controlled by Sorin Enache who invested in the development of the site since he took it over in 2020. B365.ro was taken over by the ZYX Publishing in March 2022.
Enache has been a long-time presence on the Romanian media market, holding management positions at the nationwide television stations Realitatea TV and Pro TV in the early 2000s. He then led media groups such as Antena Group or Realitatea-Caţavencu.
ZYX Publishing group was founded in 2018 by the film producer Dragos Vilcu and journalist Razvan Ionescu. The latter was a co-founder of the Recorder video-news focused project.
B365.ro publishes mostly articles of interest for people living in the capital city of Bucharest. It was launched in 2010 by Laura Cernahosci and Costin Ilie.
In September 2022, ZYX Publishing Group also took over HotNews.ro, a news portal that was founded in 2000 under the name Revistapresei.ro that has always functioned as an online-only platform. The transaction was made through the company Multi Media Est, owned by Dragos Vilcu, a shareholder in some of the ZYX Publishing Group’s businesses.
Following the transaction, the websites formerly owned by Media Bit Software, HotNews.ro and StartupCafe.ro, joined the other five websites in the ZYX Publishing Group’s portfolio: TotulDespreMame.ro, LoveDeco.ro, SmartLiving.ro, Panorama.ro and B365.ro.
HotNews.ro: history
HotNews.ro is an independent Romanian news site, which was launched in 1999 as Revistapresei.ro (meaning “press review” in Romanian) by Ioan Margarit Timbolschi, formerly a deputy editor-in-chief at Capital, a business weekly, and Jurnalul national, a daily newspaper.
In the beginning, Revistapresei.ro was providing a digest of the most interesting stories published in the Romanian print media, using content obtained from well-known journalists interested in an online audience. The site quickly became popular due to its concise presentation and because most print newspapers at the time used their websites as selling points for their print edition rather than as news platforms.
After some time, the publishers attempted to restrict access to their stories following a decision of the Romanian Press Club, a local industry organization, to limit republication of more than 500 characters. Meanwhile, Revistapresei.ro started to produce original content. In 2004 it was rebranded as HotNews.ro.
The portal gained a reputation for impartiality and quality that made it known as “a journalists’ publication,” similar to a news agency: a source of news that reporters consulted on a regular basis to gain an overview of the daily news agenda. Hence, it has become influential.
HotNews, in fact, prompted the large Romanian legacy publishers to start looking into the potential of the internet as a news distribution channel. As of 2004-2005, they began to invest hefty sums into web spinoffs of their own flagship brands. However, HotNews managed to compete with the booming online news offering in spite of its relatively small team compared to the human resources working in large media. In 2007, HotNews went through a redesign, but it preserved its original structure: a linear succession of headlines and intros, relatively similar to what RSS feed readers were providing at the time, which internally got to be known as a “news sausage.”
Since then, HotNews has branched out in other areas, launching websites such as Anchete.ro and Startupcafe.ro, a variety of blogs, video production as well as an in-house creative agency known as Smile Media, which offered branded content/native advertising to the portal’s customers, significantly increasing HotNews’ revenues.
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