Once the frenzy of Zuckerberg’s 4th of July flag waving while skimming across water (a modern form of walking) tapered off, the week started with one sliver of wealthy media and tech titans jetting into Allen & Co’s Sun Valley boondoggle to make trades and deals that affect the rest of us from cornfields. Meanwhile, the rest of the media insiders were retweeting and celebrating Nicole Hannah Jones’ decision to accept a tenured seat at Howard University to run a $20 million journalism center. The media circus is alive and well.
Here are a few stories that help me better understand the Future of Media. As always, I mostly gravitate to stories about democracy stabilizers and revenue models for journalism… since an independent press leads to democracy, leading to free markets, which leads to innovation and progress for all. Repeat.
Make time for The Atlantic’s piece by Peter Wehner interviewing Jonathan Rauch – You’re Being Manipulated: Political partisans are using social media to divide, dominate, disorient, and ultimately demoralize the people on the other side.
Happy weekend,
Heidi
Is the Rise of the Substack Economy Bad for Democracy? - NYT
But perhaps the most valuable function of the paid newsletter is to remind people that journalism costs money. “Web surfing made us forget this,” Socolow writes. “If Substack can help correct this misapprehension, and ensure that journalists are properly remunerated for their labor, it could help remedy our damaged news environment, which is riddled with misinformation.”
Saudi Arabia funds new digital news platform in U.S., launches White House lobbying effort - CNBC
One of the lobbying disclosures shows that a company called Prime Time Media is helping lead the effort. Prime Time Media’s CEO, Elie Nakouzi, is assisting in the creation of the new digital news organization. His company is getting paid at least $1.6 million, the document shows, to help guide the project.
The purchase order included in the lobbying disclosure describes the work being done by Prime Time Media as “English content for news platform.” More than $75,000 has already been spent on equipment, freelancers, and a Washington, D.C., studio, the documents say.
The lobbying filings were signed by Nakouzi last month and the purchase order included with the disclosure is dated September 2020. The order form is marked by Taqnia ETS’ logo.
The ad market belongs to every business now - Axios by Sarah Fischer
Media companies used to be the biggest sellers of advertising globally. Then tech giants took that title. Now, in a post-pandemic world, every industry that has a digital presence is trying to build an ad revenue line.
Industries are aggressively pursuing advertising:
Delivery: Instacart has competition. Gopuff, the $9 billion food delivery startup, is launching its own ad network, Axios reported last month. DoorDash is reportedly looking to hire a head of advertising.
Retail: All of the retail giants, like Walmart, Target, Best Buy and Home Depot, have built their own ad networks that connect companies to people when they shop. Amazon is by far the largest retail ad giant, with a roughly $20 billion annual ads business.
Grocers:Kroger, Albertsons and even discount grocers like Dollar Tree have all launched their own media networks in the past few years.
Pharmacies:CVS and Walgreens have both launched their own ad-placement programs.
Gaming: A first-of-its-kind in-game ad platform launched last week, giving marketers that are used to running TV ads the ability to target younger demographics with similar types of spots that will run in console video games.
The great unbundling of local news » Nieman Journalism Lab
Even if people didn’t care that much about local politics, they had to get the local paper if they wanted to know where to go, what to do, or what jobs were available in the area. But as this year’s Digital News Report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism shows, audiences no longer think that the local paper is the best source for most of this.
When asked which source was best for the selected local topics, no single source came out strong across all. Rather, people’s preferences varied strongly depending on the type of information they were looking for. Traditional sources are often considered best for politics, crime, and the economy, and the local newspaper remained unrivaled when it came to local announcements. However, a majority of respondents preferred to rely on social media and search when it came to finding local jobs, housing, or information on shops and restaurants.
Twitter loses immunity over user-generated content in India | Reuters
India's new IT rules which became effective end-May are aimed at regulating content on social media firms and making them more accountable to legal requests for swift removal of posts and sharing details on the originators of messages.
Technology minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has slammed Twitter for deliberately defying the law and said all social media firms must abide by the new rules.
Inside The Sun Valley Event Known As 'Summer Camp For Billionaires': NPR
Run by the same family since it was founded in 1922, Allen & Co. may be small, but it has developed some deep relationships that have led to roles in some of the biggest tech and media deals and initial public offerings in the last half decades.
It was an adviser in Comcast's proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable, a $45 billion deal that ultimately failed, and Facebook's purchase of WhatsApp for $19 billion. Allen & Co. was an underwriter on Google's and Facebook's IPOs.
And for almost 40 years, its annual Sun Valley conference has been central to its mission.
Allen & Co. takes care of everything, from the accommodations to the entertainment, and they attract a who's who of the tech and media world. Regulars have included Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, and Oprah Winfrey.
This week, the aggregate wealth of the men and women staying at the Sun Valley Resort is likely to reach more than $1 trillion.
Sun Valley's airport is so overrun with private jets arriving for 'summer camp for billionaires' that the FAA had to delay incoming planes - Insider
This year's guest list includes a typically high-profile crowd: Tech tycoons like Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Satya Nadella, Reed Hastings, and Ted Sarandos have all been invited, while media magnates including David Zaslav, Bob Chapek, and Shari Redstone are also on the list, according to Variety.
Other notable invitees include the billionaire Warren Buffett, NBA commissioner Adam Silver, and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell. The Fox Business reporter Charles Gasparino reported that Bill Gates will be in attendance as well, though his inclusion on the guest list hasn't been confirmed by other media outlets.
Fox’s New Channel Changes the Climate for Weather TV - NYT
Later this year, Rupert Murdoch is set to debut Fox Weather, a 24-hour streaming channel that promises to do for seven-day forecasts what Fox has done for American politics, financial news, and sports. Not to be outdone, the Weather Channel — granddaddy of television meteorology — announced the creation of a new streaming service, Weather Channel Plus, that the company believes could reach 30 million subscribers by 2026.
Amid a waning appetite for political news in the post-Trump era, media executives are realizing that demand for weather updates is ubiquitous — and for an increasing swath of the country, a matter of urgent concern. In the past week alone, temperatures in the Pacific Northwest broke records, wildfires burned in Colorado and Tropical Storm Elsa strengthened into a hurricane over the Atlantic Ocean.
At CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, average viewership for the first half of 2021 fell 38 percent from a year prior. The audience for the Weather Channel was up 7 percent.
TV Executive Who Murdoch Brought to Europe Jumps Ship to Comcast - Bloomberg
Comcast Corp. has hired David Rhodes to lead international business development at Sky, a year after the executive moved to London to head Rupert Murdoch’s U.K. TV business.
Rhodes will report to Andrea Zappia, Sky’s chief executive officer for new markets and businesses
U.S. cable giant Comcast bought Sky in 2018 for $39 billion, extending its media empire to major European markets like Britain, Germany, and Italy. Sky has been pouring money into original content to try to stop viewers drifting away to the streaming services of Netflix Inc., Amazon.com Inc., and Walt Disney Co.
News Corp Shutters Knewz Aggregator After 18 Months - The Wrap
“We started Knewz as an experiment in news aggregation because we wanted to gather a diverse range of quality journalism, to highlight of all sides of every story and to protect and project provenance,” a statement on what was once the site’s homepage reads. “We certainly had provenance, but not profits, and so we bid Knewz farewell. Thank you to the millions of Knewz users who saw the value of the service and supported our mission.”
“Knewz is no more,” proclaims website that tried to take on the news aggregator giants.
USA TODAY launches digital subscriptions for premium journalism -NYT
USA Today’s shift to a digital subscription model, after the rest of Gannett’s roughly 250 daily newspapers had already made that change, signals the definitive end of an era when newspapers relied primarily on advertisements in their print editions for revenue. As readers have flocked to smartphones, laptops, and tablets, causing print readership and the overall value of advertising to decline, newspapers’ most important revenue stream increasingly consists of charging digital readers.
USA Today’s digital destinations (not all Gannett outlets, as previously reported here) routinely receive around 90 million unique visitors per month, the company said. That puts it on a par with rivals with paywalls such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, according to Comscore, a media measurement company. USA Today has among the highest weekday print circulations in the country. It does not publish print editions on weekends.
Corporate media backlash fuels new upstarts - Axios by Sarah Fischer
Enjeti and former MSNBC anchor and political candidate Krystal Ball recently left The Hill newspaper to start their own franchise on YouTube and via podcasts. The duo routinely takes aim at the mainstream media, sometimes using terms similar to those popularized during the Trump era, like the "fake news New York Times."
"Breaking Points" has gained nearly half a million subscribers in one month. It ranks in the top 10 news podcasts on Apple Podcasts in the U.S., ahead of popular shows like NPR News Now and Pod Save America.
State of play: Pundits that have recently launched their own media ventures are running a similar playbook, selling their digital platforms — mostly newsletters, podcasts, and YouTube shows — as antidotes to the institutional media.
Glenn Greenwald, formerly of The Guardian and the co-founding editor of The Intercept, is a key example, as well as fellow Substack writers Matthew Yglesias, formerly of Vox Media, and Matt Taibbi.
Greenwald and popular podcaster Joe Rogan have been vocal supporters of Enjeti and Ball, boosting their audience with Twitter support and media appearances.
BuzzFeed founder pledges ‘financial rigour’ in digital media roll-up - FT
Jonah Peretti says he has learned from earlier ‘mistake’ and promises to grow in ‘sustainable way’
Facebook’s Substack rival Bulletin raises antitrust questions about predatory pricing - Washpost by Will Oremus
A classic play in Silicon Valley: Build your competitor’s product and offer it for free, first. Facebook’s latest product, a newsletter platform called Bulletin, exemplifies a strategy that some critics think should be illegal
Katherine Bell wants to build a better kind of business journalism - MediaLyte
The Quartz editor-in-chief explains why the field needs to ‘break from its conservative past.' Bell, who prior to Quartz served as the online editor and editor-in-chief of the Harvard Business Review and Barron’s, respectively, has presided over all of these pivots. During her time at the helm, she has helped build it into one of the most idiosyncratic business publications on the market. She has done this, notably, without sacrificing its rigor, reputation, or thoroughness; the publication is no gimmick, but rather a business news organization with a personality.
In addition, she has upheld the Quartz tradition of casting a skeptical eye toward business as usual. The publication aims to “make business better,” which includes examining and critiquing the parts of it that work poorly. With Obsessions like Fixing Capitalism and the Future of Work, Quartz has shown that it is the rare business publication unafraid of reminding readers that the systems we have built are the product of choices, rather than some fixed, invisible way of life.
The ugly roots of the violent global crackdown on journalists - WashPost by Margaret Sullivan
Just last month, in a frightening display of authoritarian power, Hong Kong police raided the newsroom of the pro-democracy newspaper, Apple Daily, and arrested top editors as they warned readers not to repost certain of its articles online. The paper, which for years had been a tough critic of the Chinese Communist Party, was forced to fold.
A few weeks earlier, the dissident Belarusian journalist Roman Protasevich, whose messaging-app channel was widely used in last year’s protests against authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko, was jailed after the commercial flight he was on, from Greece to Lithuania, was essentially hijacked to arrest him. He remains under house arrest.
In another blow to Didi, China halts downloads of 25 more of its apps - NYT
In its latest rebuke to the ride-hailing giant Didi, China ordered 25 more of the company’s apps removed from mobile stores on Friday, deepening the regulatory maelstrom that has engulfed the company since it went public on the New York Stock Exchange last week.
The country’s internet regulator said in its 10 p.m. announcement that the apps — which include Didi’s car-pooling app, its finance app and its app for corporate customers — showed problems related to the collection and use of personal data.