Cumulus Media New Holdings Inc. v. The Nielsen Company LLC
- Vargas
- 1:25-cv-08581
- U.S. District Court · Southern District of New York
- 3
Cumulus Media v. Nielsen: Judge Vargas granted several sealing motions, granted one in part and denied it in part, and ordered public refiling.
Cumulus Media New Holdings Inc. and The Nielsen Company (US) LLC, whose filings were partly sealed or unsealed; third-party declarants whose names and employment positions had been proposed for redaction; and the public’s access to the court records.
What happened
In Cumulus Media New Holdings Inc. v. The Nielsen Company (US) LLC, the parties asked to seal or redact materials connected to Cumulus’s request for a preliminary injunction.
The court found that most of the information involved sensitive business information, including financial information, contract negotiations, business plans, and internal analyses. It concluded that protecting this information outweighed the public’s qualified First Amendment-based right to access court records.
Judge Jeannette A. Vargas granted the motions at ECF Nos. 58, 87, 90, and 94. She granted the motion at ECF No. 59 in part and denied it in part, requiring certain passages and the names and employment positions of third-party declarants to be made public. Cumulus must refile public versions of ECF Nos. 60 and 61 by December 11, 2025.
The detailed version
- Cumulus Media New Holdings Inc. v. The Nielsen Company LLC · No. 1:25-cv-08581
- Vargas
- Dec. 4, 2025
Type of Order
This was an order on motions to seal court filings. The opinion did not decide Cumulus’s motion for a preliminary injunction or the underlying dispute between Cumulus and Nielsen.
Requests to Seal
Nielsen and Cumulus filed motions seeking to seal or redact materials. The requests at ECF Nos. 58, 87, and 90 concerned confidential business information in papers related to Cumulus’s preliminary-injunction motion. The court found that the materials included nonpublic and sensitive financial information, ongoing contract negotiations, business plans and strategies, internal business analyses, and competitively sensitive information.
The court determined that disclosure could cause a significant competitive disadvantage and that the interest in protecting this confidential business information outweighed the qualified First Amendment presumption that judicial documents should be accessible to the public.
Nielsen’s motion at ECF No. 94 concerned ECF No. 92, a public and redacted version of a sealed filing that Nielsen had mistakenly filed without removing certain metadata. Because Nielsen later publicly filed a corrected version without the metadata at ECF No. 95, the court granted that motion.
Ruling on Cumulus’s Motion
Cumulus’s motion at ECF No. 59 sought to seal portions of its pre-hearing documents, including portions of its pre-hearing brief, declarations, and related exhibits. The court granted the motion as to most of the material because it contained internal business analyses and confidential business plans and strategies.
The court granted the motion at ECF No. 59 in part and denied it in part. It ordered that certain passages in the last paragraph on page 1 through page 2 of ECF No. 60 be unredacted, including passages discussing Nielsen’s comparison of the dispute to a customer seeking a discounted Coke without purchasing the rest of a McDonald’s meal and Cumulus’s response concerning individual and bundled prices.
The court also denied Cumulus’s request to redact the names and employment positions of third parties who submitted declarations under penalty of perjury in support of Cumulus’s preliminary-injunction motion. It concluded that any privacy interest was outweighed by the public’s interest in access to judicial documents.
Disposition
The court granted the motions at ECF Nos. 58, 87, 90, and
- It granted in part and denied in part the motion at ECF No.
- Cumulus was ordered to refile public versions of ECF Nos. 60 and 61, with the specified information unredacted, by December 11,
- The Clerk of Court was directed to terminate ECF Nos. 58, 59, 87, 90, and 94.
Read the full 3-page opinion on CourtListener, the free public archive maintained by the Free Law Project.