Wednesday, December 4, 2024 | “If media companies can’t figure out how to be the bundlers, other layers of the ecosystem — telecoms, devices, social platforms — will.” By Ben Smith. |
| “A great deal of language that looks a lot like Christian Nationalism isn’t actually calling for theocracy; it is secular minoritarianism pushed by secular people, often linked to rightwing cable and other media with zero meaningful ties to the church or theological principle.” By Whitney Phillips. |
| “The key is inviting everyone who touches a story from beginning to end to be a part of the conversation.” By Kendall Trammell. |
| “Going into 2025, we need an industry-wide assessment of how our value chain functions because technical and regulatory forces will conspire to make our strategic position less defensible.” By Sam Guzik. |
| “If you are a journalist or a journalism student, you should play with it, a lot, while it’s still open and cheap.” By Marie Gilot. |
| “The standalone Audience team/department/function, as we know it, is dead.” By Ryan Kellett. |
| “2025 will be the year when sports journalists start to really reckon with the fact that teams and players don’t need them anymore.” By Brian Moritz. |
| “The gap between mainstream media readers, people who get most of their news through influencers or partisan social media, and people who barely think about news at all will create a fundamental schism in how Americans see the world.” By Alice Marwick. |
| “It won’t be long before AI is used to generate new metrics and new analysis, and to push user behavior further away from curated editorial experiences.” By Margarita Noriega. |
What We’re ReadingThe New York Times / Daisuke Wakabayashi and Su-Hyun Lee
Martial law didn’t silence South Korea’s news outlets. It empowered them. →“But when faced with censorship by the military, the Korean press did not acquiesce. News organizations spanning the political spectrum — even right-leaning publications more aligned with Mr. Yoon’s conservative People Power Party — stood united in criticism of his actions and any efforts to limit a free press.”LinkedIn / Aditi Mukund
What Election Day taught the Chicago Sun-Times about its audience →“Our school board voter guide was an effective tool for recirculation and conversions, with readers navigating to candidate questionnaires and our general voter guide afterward. In addition to community outreach, the guide was designed with search audiences in mind, targeting candidate names and school board districts. Between Sept. 1 and Nov. 6, it was the primary entry point for readers who donated.”Wired / Andy Greenberg
He got banned from Twitter. Now he wants to help you escape, too →“Now, [Micah] Lee wants to help you achieve that same cleansing release. Today, he launched Cyd — an acronym for ‘Claw back Your Data’ — a desktop application designed to give users more control over their X history: archiving it, trimming it to their preferences, or destroying it altogether.”Variety / Todd Spangler
Joe Rogan once again had the No. 1 podcast on Spotify this year →“Rounding out the top 10 were: This Past Weekend with Theo Von (on which Trump also made an appearance); Crime Junkie; the New York Times’ The Daily; The Tucker Carlson Show; Huberman Lab; Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard; Smosh Reads Reddit Stories; and the Shawn Ryan Show.”Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism / Gretel Kahn
Kate Conger and Ryan Mac wrote a book on Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. Here’s what they think happens next for journalism there →“The real test for Bluesky will happen now, when you start to see it becomes a mainstream platform and a place where my mom or dad might congregate.”The Verge / Sarah Jeong
What it’s like to cover the South Korean declaration of martial law while “fairly drunk” (er, “completely blasted”) →“I pace inside my Airbnb, running through a list of potential freelancers I can commission to write about what’s happening in Korea, but no one is available. I do not report on Korean politics, nor do I have enough language proficiency to interview people on the street. Also, I am completely blasted, though maybe not unusually so in Seoul on a weeknight.”The Guardian / Julie Posetti
Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and the threat to press freedom →“Journalists in the U.S. — a country long at the forefront of global press freedom advocacy — now find themselves facing threats more familiar to their colleagues in the Philippines, Hungary or Venezuela. And it is from journalists in such countries that the US press must now learn how to defend press freedom and fight for facts.”The Wall Street Journal / Drew FitzGerald
Giving up on the media business has been excellent for AT&T’s stock price →“Shares of the telecommunications giant have rebounded — including a 35% gain so far this year — since Chief Executive Officer John Stankey reversed course and spun off its Warner Bros. unit and unloaded satellite company DirecTV. On Tuesday, Stankey and his team will outline new long-term financial goals powered by its wireless and broadband services as it works to wind down its legacy landlines.”Threads / Ashley Carman
Bloomberg is offering a paid subscription to a bundle of its tech newsletters →For $12 a month, it includes Tech Daily, Power On, Game On, Q&Al, and Soundbite, plus access to all Bloomberg articles linked in those newsletters.Business Insider / Peter Kafka
BuzzFeed could be on the hook for $124 million this week. Does it have a plan? →“Earlier this year, BuzzFeed was shopping First We Feast — its business that owns ‘Hot Ones,’ the viral hot-chicken-wing interview show (Yup! I just typed that!) — for a reported $70 million. In September, Bloomberg reported that BuzzFeed was in talks with Netflix about some kind of deal. I’ve asked Netflix for an update on those chats, which it has never publicly acknowledged.”Wired / Lily Hay Newman
With threats to encryption looming, Signal’s Meredith Whittaker says “we’re not changing” →“‘We don’t want to be the outlier that proves the rule, we want to be a new set of rules leading the way to a much more open and diverse tech ecosystem,’ Whittaker said, ‘that isn’t reliant on like five companies and 15 guys and a paradigm that is very, very stale and ultimately not healthy for the world and the future.'”Poynter / Jennifer Orsi
How the Mississippi Free Press built an inclusive newsroom to connect with a statewide audience →“I go to conferences and people stand up and say, ‘I hired a Black person’ — this is my favorite thing — ‘I hired a Black person once, and they left’…And then I respond that, ‘You hired a blonde once, too, and they left, but it didn’t stop you from hiring blonde people.'”Political Communication / Curd Knüpfer, Sarah J. Jackson, and Daniel Kreiss
Political communication research is unprepared for the far right →“Our discipline is fundamentally shaped by and within post-World War II Western liberal democratic systems, giving shape to conceptual frameworks based on an idealized view of political engagement. The field assumes a general adherence to democratic norms and practices. Yet, we now face a political landscape where historically dominant illiberal formations are resurging across democratic systems, challenging not only specific forms of politics but the consensus within which these take place.”The Washington Post / Erik Wemple
Who still trusts legacy media? Fox News, that’s who. →“Nowhere is the influence of major news providers more robust, after all, than on the airwaves of Fox News. Across the daily schedule of the No. 1 cable news network, that influence is inescapable, with host after host citing stories from The Post, the New York Times, Reuters, CNN, Politico, Axios and so on — all outlets heavy with reporters who bring scoops to bear on topics dear to Fox News viewers.”The Verge / Jess Weatherbed
Google’s new generative AI video model is now available (unlike OpenAI’s) →“Google says Veo and Imagen 3 carry built-in safeguards to prevent them from generating harmful content or violating copyright protections — though we’ve found the latter wasn’t difficult to bypass.”Press Gazette / Charlotte Tobitt
The right-wing British network GB News passed Sky News in on-air audience last month →“GB News is currently embroiled in a legal battle with broadcast regulator Ofcom which has fined it £10,000 for ‘serious and repeated’ impartiality breaches.”Press Gazette / Charlotte Tobitt
Ofcom: The BBC is one of the challenges U.K. local news publishers face →“In the past two years, the BBC has cut the amount of bespoke programming at its local radio stations and created new jobs online instead. Rival commercial publishers banded together to warn that their reporting could not compete with licence-fee funded stories that can carry no advertising, providing a better user experience and often getting picked up as a result in search.”
Nieman Lab / Fuego
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