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Ah, rum, with its legendary pirates bellowing for grog, tiki umbrellas peeking up from neon-colored cocktails, tequila-spiked punch at college parties. Rum, universally imbibed and yet often scorned. Most rum is “the distilled essence of industrial waste,” in the words of Wayne Curtis, author of And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails. That waste is molasses, the byproduct of sugar production. After the molasses has been fermented, flavorings, colorings and sugar are often added in.

But craft rum — that is an entirely different and savory spirit, says Curtis: “I’ve judged three spirit competitions in the past year, and I’m very bullish on rum.”

Not surprisingly, the South — once a hub for sugar plantations — is spearheading a craft rum renaissance, as small distilleries turn away from molasses and cull fresh sugar cane itself to create smooth liquors with grassy, warm, woody or floral flavors.

“Adventurous drinkers are starting to see rum as a terroir spirit,” says Ann Marshall, who, along with her husband, Scott Blackmore, founded the award-winning High Wire Distilling in Charleston, S.C.

High Wire makes a traditional-style cane rum, inspired by the rhum agricole invented in the West Indies and strictly regulated by the French government there.

“The beautiful thing about agricoles,” says Blackmore, “is that you cannot add flavoring, coloring or sugar. It has to be distilled from raw sugar cane juice. We follow those rules, although since we are not located in the French West Indies, we call ours a Low Country agricole.”

To make its signature agricole, High Wire ferments fresh cane juice from locally grown cane that is distilled and rested in wooden barrels for a year. Says Marshall, “We are taking this crop out of the ground and juicing it in its entirety — with bits of dirt, organic matter, all that delicious cellulose, those natural yeasts. That’s why it tastes so unique.”

High Wire sources its flavor-intense, blue-ribbon variety of cane, with its signature blue-hued stalk, from three local farms. The differences in soil lend taste distinctions to each batch — the coastal cane has more salinity; the inland, a brighter, banana-like flavor. The bottles are appropriately labeled according to the farm the cane came from. “I was talking to Wayne Curtis,” recalls Blackmore, “and he told me that in Martinique, the taste distinctions are so marked that they label each tank by the field or hill it came from, and then create a special blend. I find it more interesting, however, to keep them separate.”

A big challenge with fresh raw cane juice is to get it into the still as quickly as possible — within hours, says Blackwell. Otherwise it will start to ferment on its own. A sip of High Wire’s agricole is indeed astonishing — fruity, earthy, pungent — and lingers on the tongue.

About 350 miles southwest of High Wire, in Richland, Ga., Erik and Karin Vonk of Richland Rum are crafting Richland Single Estate Old South Georgia Rum — the only single estate rum in the country, made from cane grown, cut, distilled and rested on the premises. They grow cane on their 100-acre plantation, cut and juice it, then boil it into a syrup that retains the bright vegetal and floral notes of the original plant. It is that syrup they ferment and distill, in copper, gas-fired stills hand-forged in Portugal. The rum is aged in white oak barrels for 32 to 48 months, with the barrel number printed on the label. (Used barrels go to Terrapin Beer in Athens, Ga., where the rum-infused oak lends a special flavor to aged beer.) International awards and gold medals have poured in for this field-to-glass rum, from the 2014 International SIP Awards to the 2016 Good Foods Award.

A Holland-born transplant, Erik Vonk says his grandfather’s house in Rotterdam “had high ceilings and paneled walls lined with bookshelves and bottles of fine rum. On holidays we’d end our meals with a rum-drenched plum pudding brought in flambé. Fast-forward decades later, and I decided to become a rum-maker.”

The soil in Richland is a loamy sand that grows an aromatic cane. The Vonks have experimented with 17 cane varieties, but their favorite thus far is an heirloom Georgia Red, which they learned to grow with the help of the University of Georgia. The couple plans to craft fresh — rather than aged — rum as well, a silkier, sweeter spirit they will call Virgin Coastal Georgia Rum. They will be opening a second distillery in Brunswick, Ga., a popular tourist destination on the coast, in 2017.

“You make what you grow,” says Kelly Railean, the owner of Railean Distillers in San Leon, Texas, along the Gulf Coast. Rum has a long history in the region, and tiki bars abound. She opened her own rum distillery in 2007, and though many of her craft rums rely on molasses, she, too, makes a cane juice rum, which she calls Grand Cuvee Sugarcane Juice Rum and sells at her distillery only. “I wanted to call mine an agricole,” she remarks, “because it truly is, but the U.S. agency that regulates liquor refused.”

“Rums made from sugar cane are grassy, fresh and herbaceous,” she says. “For those who are regular wine drinkers, I compare this kind of rum to a sauvignon blanc, as opposed to rum from molasses, which might be compared to a chardonnay.”

Nick Detrich, owner of the rum-focused New Orleans cocktail bar Cane and Table, says that “for sheer variety, no spirit holds a candle to rum.”

If the rum you know and spurn is that sticky-sweet schlock, mass produced from molasses, it may be time to taste some Southern sipping-style rums.

“There’s an artistry to rum,” says Railean. “A good rum can be savored just like craft bourbon.”

Jill Neimark is an Atlanta-based writer whose work has been featured in Discover, Scientific American, Science, Nautilus, Aeon, Psychology Today and The New York Times.

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George Curry, the legendary columnist, commentator and champion of black journalists, died of sudden heart failure on Saturday. He was 69.

Curry grew up in Tuscaloosa, Ala., where he was childhood friends with Bernard Lafayette, the current chairman of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. “This is a tragic loss to the movement because George Curry was a journalist who paid special attention to civil rights because he lived it and loved it,” Lafayette told Trice Edney News Wire.

Curry began his career as reporter for Sports Illustrated and The St. Louis Dispatch. In the 1990s, he was the editor of Emerge, an edgy political and cultural publication with the tag line “Black America’s Newsmagazine.” In 1993, the cover depicted Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas wearing an Aunt Jemima-style handkerchief next to the word “BETRAYED.”

Curry was the first African-American to be elected president of the American Society of Magazine Editors.

After Emerge folded in 2000, Curry led the news service for the National Newspaper Publishers Association for nine years. He wrote a syndicated column that was published in black newspapers all over the country, and he frequently appeared as a commentator on television and radio news programs.

NPR’s Karen Grigsby Bates interviewed Curry on numerous occasions. In 2012, she spoke to him about how the media approached the murder of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager who was shot to death by a white man in Florida.

Bates reported:

“Syndicated columnist George Curry says the black media have a long history of highlighting anti-black violence, which mainstream media often picks up on later.

” ‘The black press plays a unique role, because they know right away and can recognize these kinds of stories and the value of them,’ Curry says.

Curry thinks part of the lag between when black and mainstream media began covering the Martin shooting can be accounted for by the communities’ different interaction with law enforcement.

‘I think that stems from the fact that whites have a different experience with the police than blacks and Latinos,” he says. “To whites, he’s Mr. Friendly. To blacks and Latinos, he’s Mr. Unfriendly.’ “

In 2014, Curry told Bates “there is no event in my life that has been more transforming than the murder of Emmett Till,” adding that another major black magazine, Jet, had been crucial to his understanding of the murder as a young man.

In an obituary, the current editors of Jet wrote, “Curry was largely thought of as an unapologetic steward and champion for the Black press and frequently expressed the need for it in the civil rights narrative.”

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The massive container ships that ply the high seas bring us pineapples and mangoes in winter, and computers and cheap t-shirts all year round. But the shipping industry is a volatile, cyclical and ferociously competitive business. There are good years and bad years.

And then there’s this year.

“This is likely to be one of the worst years ever in terms of losses,” says Janet Porter, editor-in-chief of containers at Lloyd’s List, a shipping industry news provider. She says over the years, global shipping companies got used to growth of 6, 7 or 8 percent. This year it’ll be close to zero.

“It is a very simple supply-and-demand imbalance — too many ships and not enough cargo,” she says.

Container ships are vital cogs in the global economy. Jonathan Roach, a container market analyst at Braemar ACM shipbroking in London, says slowing economies in Europe and China are hitting the industry hard.

“China is a big factor in the container industry — where China is really the factory of the world and when the advanced economies slow, we’re seeing less exports coming out of China,” he says.

The economic slowdown comes as fleets of huge, new ships are coming online. The major shipping companies in Europe and Asia began ordering the state of the art, super-sized ships back in 2011, when times were better.

Porter says this is partly a self-inflicted crisis because many of the companies are over-ordering.

“There’s a little bit of ‘boys and their toys’ in the shipping lines,” she says. “One line will order so the next one does and the next one does, and now all these ships are starting to be delivered.”

Now, orders for new vessels have dried up. William Bennett, a senior analyst at VesselsValue in London, which follows the cargo markets, says companies ordered about 1,500 new vessels in 2015.

In contrast, “What we’ve had in the first half of this year, we’re looking at 293 vessels ordered,” he says. “There’s just no appetite for ordering at the moment.”

Bennett says the shipping crisis will have little impact on consumers. He says shelves in your favorite shops will remain stocked.

It’s the ship owners bearing the brunt, he says — they’re hemorrhaging money at the moment.

Because of the glut of ships, freight rates have plummeted over the past year, cutting deeply into profits, says Nils Haupt, the communications director for Hapag-Lloyd, the world’s fourth largest container shipping line.

“I can just tell you that the costs for shipping are enormously low,” he says, adding that transportation costs for manufacturers are at rock-bottom.

“A t-shirt, just for shipping transportation, this is like one or two U.S. cents… a pair of sneakers which is $100 in the shop…ocean transport cost per pair approximately between 20 to 25 U.S. cents. So this is a ridiculous amount of money,” he says.

For oil tankers, the situation is even more dire. Earnings at the turn of the year were around $50,000 to $60,000 per day. Bennett, with VesselsValue, says they’re now looking at $1,000 a day. “So you can see the situation has gone incredibly sour,” he says.

Bennett says shipping lines are looking to be more efficient and cut costs. He says mergers and acquisitions are happening at a record rate. And many ships are heading to scrap heaps, like the one in Alang, India — the world’s largest — to help reduce the number competing for market share.

“We need 1,000 ships to be scrapped in order for a market recovery,” he says.

At least that will be good news for the scrapyards.

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For Gawker Media’s websites to live, Gawker.com, the actual namesake website, has to die. It will be shut down next week by its new owner, a victim of its own poisoned legacy.

Any obituary should start by acknowledging the good the subject rendered to the world. There’s no reason not to do that here, other than the extent to which that impulse might appall some of Gawker’s own writers were it a piece about the demise of another publication.

Gawker itself was born of the insight of founder Nick Denton, who quite rightly concluded that what journalists told one another over drinks was invariably more interesting than what actually appeared in print, online or on the air. He set out to correct that in 2003, with a publication that knit together news analysis and gossip in the same stories. It was, as former Gawker editor Max Read recently wrote, “an endlessly scrolling, eternally accessible record of prattle and wit and venom.”

Its offerings were often brutally satiric and unsparing in their conclusions.

Gawker’s reports that its reporter had viewed video of Toronto’s then-Mayor Rob Ford smoking crack rightly made his rampant substance abuse a topic fit for wider media scrutiny. The site also bird-dogged the powerful who bullied other people with less stature or fewer resources. Gawker was rarely in better form than when, say, writer John Cook showed how Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly used his influence with senior police officials and organizations on Long Island, N.Y., to start an investigation of his estranged (and now ex-) wife’s boyfriend, who was on the force. It proved to be an instance in which a celebrity’s private acts proved newsworthy.

Gawker was built on a cadre of young and often poorly paid writers made to work long hours with little or no access to the people they were writing about or the glamorous worlds they inhabited. It meant they had no fear of offending the subjects of their stories or their layers of publicists intent on steering entertainment writers for established publications to safer topics, with the threat of withholding their presence when the next wave of interviews hit to promote the next big project. At its best, Gawker felt like a corrective to the airbrushed reality fed to readers in glossy magazines or highly curated social media accounts.

From a business perspective, Denton showed a way to profitability for a midsize digital media company, one built on clear voices and identity. He experimented with verticals, adding one here, dropping another there, but catered successfully to the appetites of his young urbanite audiences with sister sites on such topics as gender, tech, cars, lifestyle and sports.

Unbound by the niceties of convention, however, Gawker blurred the lines between public and private, and cast aside such journalistic luxuries as figuring out whether something is actually appropriate to publish. It seemed fixated on the dating lives of celebrities (and the less famous), especially those in the media, and on the question of unarticulated sexual orientation. (CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who later publicly attested that he was gay, was a frequent topic of gossip and mockery.) Gawker’s targets often felt small-bore, its grievances petty.

In 2010, Deadspin, Gawker’s sports blog, posted video of a college student having sex in the bathroom of a bar. She asked A.J. Daulerio, Deadspin’s editor, to take the video down: “I am the girl in it and it was stolen from me and put up without my permission.” His initial response: “Blah, blah, blah.” He later conceded that what the video showed could be “possibly rape.”

The site’s judgment reached another low point last summer when it published the saga of a male New York media executive who, despite being married to his wife for years, was said to have arranged for a weekend in Chicago with a male escort. The story read very much the product of the escort’s inability to extort money from the executive.

Gawker’s corporate leadership had the posting pulled after widespread outcry. Writers fought back, some over the process and others on the merits. A young writer for Gawker’s sister site, Jezebel, tweeted, “Stories don’t need an upside. Not everyone has to feel good about the truth. If it’s true, you publish.”

The tweet betrayed a nihilistic impulse that had been part of the site’s DNA. Denton, the genetic parent, publicly promised a Gawker that would be 20 percent nicer.

He had reason to do so. In 2012, Gawker had published a brief excerpt of a tape of former wrestler Hulk Hogan having consensual sex with the wife of a then-friend who was a shock jock. Hogan (né Terry Bollea) appeared unaware he was being videotaped and sued. The shock was the point — yes, it was brief, and yes, we all think of Hogan/Bollea as a human cartoon rather than a human being — but as it turns out, Hogan proved just as capable as any other human being in getting legal representation.

“We told a real story that cleared a lot up about what was out there,” Gawker’s general counsel and president, Heather Dietrick, told Fortune magazine in defending the decision to post the video. “Hogan himself was out there talking in color detail about his sex life again and again.” She said that public sharing of the video excerpt was necessary to prevent Hogan from denying its contents.

The Florida jury’s verdict totaling $140 million against Gawker Media and Denton forced both to go into bankruptcy and the company to be put up for sale at a court-overseen auction.

Bollea’s case was underwritten by the Silicon Valley billionaire investor Peter Thiel, whom Gawker had outed as gay in 2007 very much against his will. Denton has said Thiel promised revenge for disclosing his sexual orientation. Thiel acknowledged he had subsidized other lawsuits against Gawker and would do so indefinitely.

The Spanish-language broadcasting giant Univision bought Gawker Media this week for $135 million. Univision had first explored buying Gawker last year, according to a person knowledgeable about those discussions, while Bollea’s suit was in the courts but well before the jury verdict in June. Univision wanted the company, including Gawker.com, to round out its suite of digital offerings for English-speaking millennials, which include The Root, The Onion and Fusion. But Univision will instead shut down Gawker.com, a site whose brand is too toxic to touch. The case remains on appeal, but Univision’s executives are trying to insulate their company from any liability that could potentially extend to the new owners.

Thiel’s crusade comes off as a vendetta, and one with ugly implications for press freedom in light of adversaries with nearly infinite resources. Yet Gawker’s demise was almost foreordained by its origin. It proved to be a mix of the irresistible with the indefensible.

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Sumner Redstone and his daughter Shari reasserted their control of Viacom Thursday night, resolving a crisis gripping the media conglomerate by arranging the departure of their renegade executive chairman, president and CEO Philippe Dauman in exchange for a $72 million payout.

The Redstones’ holding company, National Amusements, approved the proposed deal earlier in the week and it was passed by Viacom’s corporate board on Thursday evening. The resolution settles a series of legal proceedings gracing courtrooms in three different states in which Dauman and Viacom were wrestling the Redstones for the right to determine the fate of the company that owns MTV, Comedy Central, Nickelodeon and Paramount Pictures, among other properties.

The deal, which had not been formally announced by late Thursday evening, was described to NPR in separate interviews by two people well versed in its details. They spoke on condition they not be identified.

Veteran Viacom executive Thomas Dooley, currently the company’s chief operating officer, will become its interim CEO and president until Sept. 30, the final day in the company’s fiscal year. Dauman will continue on as corporate board executive chairman until Sept. 13 and will have the chance to present his proposal to the Viacom board to sell a major stake of Paramount to a Chinese investor.

The board, which will soon have five additional Redstone-approved members, is expected to reject Dauman’s Paramount proposal. Five others with ties to Dauman will resign or cycle off as their terms expire. Though Viacom is publicly traded, National Amusements owns 10 percent of Viacom’s equity and 80 percent of its voting shares. National Amusements has already kicked Dauman off its board.

Dauman was for years a trusted lawyer, adviser and chief protege of Sumner Redstone. Dauman cited what he said was Redstone’s support in proposing to sell the stake in Paramount; Redstone’s representatives said he actually opposed the sale, and Dauman later said he had misunderstood.

Redstone also objected to the precipitous drop in Viacom’s stock price: it has lost about 40 percent of its value in the past three years. Additionally, Dauman’s critics inside and outside the company say it has experienced a brain drain among the executive ranks and an astonishing loss of creative talent. Exhibit A: Comedy Central, where the loss of Jon Stewart, John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, Samantha Bee, Jason Jones and Key & Peele sting (even, or especially, in the case of Colbert, now a marquee name at CBS, which is also controlled by National Amusements).

Former Viacom CEO Tom Freston, who was himself fired by Redstone a decade ago next month, told NPR in June that the story of the company was one of decline. “It went from really being number one in its class, as a cable networker and as a creative enterprise, to pretty much the bottom of the barrel,” Freston said.

Dauman had defended the mental capabilities of Redstone, now 93, as recently as last year when it was an issue in a lawsuit filed by an ex-girlfriend of the media mogul. Once that was dismissed, however, Dauman challenged his former mentor’s capacities. This week’s settlement will allow Sumner Redstone to avoid disclosures in court about mental competence, physical frailties and personal peccadillos, as well as the potential loss of control of much of the media empire he assembled.

Shari Redstone, Sumner’s 62-year-old daughter by his first marriage, had long been estranged from her father. The settlement allows her to avoid inconvenient questions about the timing of their reconciliation, which neatly dovetailed with her ability to help take control of Viacom and CBS through National Amusements.

For Viacom, the agreement allows the company’s leadership the chance to unite to take arms against a sea of troubles. Despite Dauman’s lucrative departure, Viacom does not yet pretend to have the answer for them.

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The race for who will come to the market with an auto-piloted car is heating up again. Ford has announced that it will have a fleet of autonomous cars on the road by 2021. The driverless vehicles will be available for ride sharing.

It’s an ambitious goal. The company said it will more than double its team devoted to developing autonomous driving, and invest even more money in its Silicon Valley campus. Ford’s CEO Mark Fields has said that the company will triple its investment in the technology which includes currently available help with parking and avoiding traffic jams.

The program that Ford announced is not quite a self-driving car in every garage. The announcement is for vehicles that have Society of Automotive Engineers Level-Four driving automation. SAE Level Four is when the car is self-controlled in all but a few environments such as severe weather. These Level-Four cars would likely be in closed systems or fixed routes. Karl Brauer with Kelly Blue Book says, “The time frame for privately owned, fully autonomous vehicles, capable of operating anywhere and anytime, remains at least seven to 10 years away.”

Fields says he’s not closing the door on potential partnerships. Ford and Baidu Inc., the Chinese Internet behemoth, announced that both companies jointly invested $150 million in Velodyne, a Silicon Valley company that specializes in sensors. Already Silicon Valley and the auto industry have been in a dating frenzy looking for long-term partners to help develop the technology behind a self-driving car. Volkswagen spent $300 million to get a piece of ride-hailing company Uber’s European rival Gett. General Motors spent $1 billion to purchase Cruise Automation, as well as investing in ride-hire service Lyft. Meanwhile, Toyota invested in Uber.

Randy Visintainer, the head of Ford’s autonomous vehicle program, says the company is ready to meet the challenge of putting a driverless car on the road. “Our mission is to make transportation affordable, efficient and safe,” Visintainer said in an interview with NPR. “The Model T delivered in its time and autonomous vehicles have the potential to do that in the 21st Century.” Visintainer shrugged at the idea that Ford is in a space race of sorts to put an autonomous vehicle on the road. He says that the team had “enough confidence in our development of the technology, the understanding of how to make the vehicles in volume that we would make this claim.”

Ford’s engineers may be confident, but are riders? The announced plan would have cars without not only drivers but obvious vehicle controls. Visintainer says he understands the public’s uneasiness about autonomy. He says the company is looking for ways to convince the public that self-driving cars can be safe. “It’s going to be an education and a journey, being transparent and open about the progress we’re making, and how we’re doing is a key part of that.”

Analysts say discussing the technology is a move to placate the concerns of Wall Street. General Motors, Google and some of Ford’s other competitors have spent the year making announcements and investments in advanced technology. Michelle Krebs with autotrader.com says GM has been grabbing all the headlines recently “and Ford can’t be happy about that, especially as some Wall Street analysts have wondered if Ford is falling behind in future mobility.” Ford’s Mark Fields has said Ford has been setting the pace.

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Insurance giant Aetna will stop selling health insurance through most of the exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act in 2017 because the company said it is losing money in many of those markets.

On Monday, Aetna said it will sell individual insurance policies in only 242 counties in four states, down almost 70 percent from the 778 counties in 15 states where the company markets Obamacare plans this year.

The decision is a blow to President Obama’s signature health care law. Most insurers selling plans through the exchanges have been losing money because the people getting insurance under Obamacare have been sicker than forecast.

But Aetna, which lost $430 million on the Obamacare plans in the first half of the year, said it may re-enter the markets in the future.

“We will continue to evaluate our participation in individual public exchanges while gaining additional insight from the counties where we will maintain our presence, and may expand our footprint in the future should there be meaningful exchange-related policy improvements,” CEO Mark Bertolini said in a statement.

Aetna, which covers about 900,000 people through the exchanges, is the third major insurer to pull back from the Obamacare marketplaces. UnitedHealth Group said in April it planned to pull out of ACA marketplaces in most states, and just last month Humana, which covers about 800,000 people, said it will cut back its offerings to just a handful of counties.

All the companies said they are losing money on the plans. The Department of Health and Human Services has argued that companies have themselves to blame because they set premiums too low. The companies will be able to adjust the premiums in the future.

“Aetna’s decision to alter its Marketplace participation does not change the fundamental fact that the Health Insurance Marketplace will continue to bring quality coverage to millions of Americans next year and every year after that,” said Kevin Counihan, CEO of HealthCare.gov, the federal insurance exchange.

In all, about 11 million people have bought insurance through the exchanges.

A spokesman for HHS said Aetna’s decision was an about-face from its earlier statements about the Obamacare exchanges.

In April, Bertolini called the marketplace plans “a good investment” because it would have cost the company far more than $430 million to try to attract that many customers.

“If we were to build out 15 markets, it would cost us somewhere between $600 million to $750 million to enter those markets and build out the capabilities necessary to grow that membership,” he said on the company’s April earnings conference call with analysts.

Aetna’s announcement comes less than a month after the Justice Department sued to stop the company’s planned merger with Humana, arguing that the combination would hurt competition. At the same time, the government also sued to block Anthem from purchasing Cigna.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, suggested Aetna’s change of heart was in response to the Justice Department’s action. In a post on her Facebook page last week, Warren questioned the company’s motives after it first hinted that it was considering cutting its participation in Obamacare.

“The health of the American people should not be used as a bargaining chip to force the government to bend to one giant company’s will,” she said.

Aetna spokesman T.J. Crawford didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Warren’s statement.

HHS said last week that the per-member health care costs for people covered through the exchanges remained stable from 2014-2015. If that trend continues, insurers should be able to set premiums that better reflect the actual costs of covering people under Obamacare.

“The next ACA open enrollment is key,” tweeted Larry Levitt, a senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation. If insurance sign-ups increase, then deeper concerns about Obamacare will fade. “If not, expect a debate about fixes to the law,” he wrote.

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Comedy Central is canceling The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore after Thursday’s episode.

The announcement came as a surprise Monday with the network cutting loose the politically conscious show a few months before the presidential election.

In a statement, Comedy Central credited Wilmore and his staff with generating conversations “by addressing social issues of great importance to the country, always challenging people’s attitudes, perceptions and bias.”

Comedy Central president Kent Alterman told Variety that despite high hopes, the show never attracted the audience the network expected.

“We’ve been monitoring it closely as for a year and a half now and we haven’t seen the signs we need in ratings or in consumption on digital platforms.” Alterman told the publication. “We’ve been been hoping it would grow.”

The showed premiered in January 2015 at 11:30 p.m. after Jon Stewart’s wildly successful The Daily Show. The coolly analytical Wilmore entered the network’s late-night lineup replacing Stephen Colbert, whose jingoistic blowhard character made The Colbert Report a favorite and eventually landed him David Letterman’s old gig on CBS’ The Late Show.

But Wilmore had trouble repeating Colbert’s success, as Variety goes on to say:

“‘Nightly Show’ premiered less than a month before Stewart announced his plan to step down as ‘Daily Show’ host. Wilmore opened to nearly 1 million viewers but didn’t sustain that audience. After Stewart bowed out on Aug. 6, 2015, ‘Nightly Show’ struggled with the smaller lead-in as Noah took the reins from Stewart.

“In the past few months, ‘Daily Show’ has seen an uptick particularly among the younger viewers that matter most to Comedy Central. In the second quarter of this year, “Daily Show” averaged 278,000 viewers in the adults 18-34 demo, second only to NBC’s ‘The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon’ (364,000). ‘Nightly Show’ averaged 153,000 viewers in that demo.

“Given the importance of ‘Daily Show’ franchise to Comedy Central, it’s no surprise that the cabler would devote more energy and resources to promoting Noah rather than ‘Nightly.’

In his own statement, Wilmore thanked the network, Stewart and viewers for the opportunity.

“I’m also saddened and surprised we won’t be covering this crazy election or ‘The Unblackening’ as we’ve coined it,” the statement reads. “I guess I hadn’t counted on ‘The Unblackening’ happening to my time slot as well.”

Before taking on The Nightly Show, Wilmore had a long history in television as a writer for In Living Color and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and as creator of The Bernie Mac Show.

In 2006, Wilmore stepped in front of the camera playing the “Senior Black Correspondent” on Stewart’s Daily Show.

Stewart served as a producer for The Nightly Show.

Most recently, Wilmore hosted this year’s White House Correspondents Association dinner.

Until Comedy Central schedules a permanent replacement, it will move its @Midnight with Chris Hardwick to Wilmore’s former spot.

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