Weekly Media News
Tech earnings reconfirmed platform companies are titans of the world. Good for America, if we can curb polarization and figure out how to direct people to trust and consume evidence-based news! Audio and Substack-like features are now fully embedded in Twitter and Facebook. Not sure how this fares for Clubhouse. As I heard on Twitter Spaces, “audio is a feature, not a company.” As these news mediums for distribution for user-generated content grow, there’s no shortage of content… What we need is a backbone of evidence-based news.
As a result of the tech platform earnings and their movement to encourage individual reporters on platforms, Emily Bell wrote a great piece for CJR reminding the media crowd, “With Facebook and Google deciding the shape of the journalism market, now more than at any point in the past, news organisations signing deals with them and journalists benefitting from this scheme, have to reckon with the economic foundation of this Faustian pact.” Speaking of Facebook, it apologized for mistakenly taking down the "#ResignModi hashtag and the information disorder continues. It also announced in the U.S. it will hand out $5M to local writers who want to write on Facebook and “priority will be given to Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian or other audiences of writers who identify as Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian or another community of color.” Meanwhile, many are awaiting their Facebook Oversight Board decision on Trump’s suspension from the public digital square and what qualifies as “newsworthiness”.
In other news…Verizon is looking to sell parts of Yahoo and AOL, Newscorp has rolled up its regionals in Australia under one paywall (likely appeals to Gatehouse and Alden), Joe Rogan is minting money for and on Spotify, and don’t miss a fascinating read from Popular Information’s Judd Legum on transfer fees to Fox versus everyone else when you pay your cable bill.
Tow Center’s Emily Bell on the Faustian Pact with Platforms and News - CJR
Are Google and Facebook really the future of journalism? New Policies risk making it so. As the implications of Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code start to sink in around the world, the subject of how technology companies like Google and Facebook support journalism is an issue of growing interest to both newsrooms and policymakers.
Rupert Murdoch scales back plan for News UK TV channel - The Guardian
News UK chief Rebekah Brooks says the focus will be to reach audiences via shows on streaming platforms
Tucker, Lachlan, and subsidized speech - Popular Information
Here's how it works. Cable companies pay "carriage fees" to networks for the right to carry their channel. These fees are then passed on to users in their monthly bills. In 2020, Fox News made more money from carriage fees ($1.6 billion) than advertisements ($1.2 billion).
Other channels, of course, also receive carriage fees for their content. But the Murdochs have negotiated exorbitant fees for Fox News that are far greater than any other non-sports programming.
According to a survey conducted late last year, about 14% of cable TV subscribers watch Fox News regularly. But every cable TV subscriber pays an average of $1.72 a month to receive Fox News. In contrast, 31% of cable TV subscribers regularly watch FX (owned by Disney) but the channel adds just $0.81 to an average cable bill.
Tribune suitor eyes plan to put up more of his own money - Chicago Business
Hotel billionaire Stewart Bainum Jr. is looking at doubling his stake in a potential bid to $200 million and tapping an additional $100 million in debt financing, a source tells Bloomberg.
Facebook claims it mistakenly removed the hashtag #ResignModi - The Guardian
A hashtag calling for the resignation of the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, was briefly blocked on Facebook on Wednesday, hiding more than 12,000 posts critical of the Indian government as the coronavirus pandemic spirals out of control in the country.
Facebook Crushes Earnings - Barrons
Shares of Facebook surged into record territory after the company crushed Wall Street profit and revenue expectations. Facebook (ticker: FB) said its first-quarter net income nearly doubled to $9.5 billion, or $3.30 a share, compared with a net profit of $4.9 billion, or $1.71 a year ago. Revenue rose 48% to $26.17 billion. Analysts had expected earnings of $2.60 a share on revenue of $23.71 billion.
Facebook offers $5M to diverse local news writers in the U.S. - Facebook
Creating More Opportunities for Independent, Local Writers to Thrive. Priority will be given to Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian or other audiences of writers who identify as Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, or another community of color.”
How big tech won the pandemic - Shira Ovide, NYT
In the last year, the five tech superpowers — Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Facebook — had combined revenue of more than $1.2 trillion, as I wrote for The Times on Thursday. It was a strange and amazing year for Big Tech. I can’t believe it, but some of the companies are growing faster and are more profitable than they have been in years.
Tech giants show no sign of slowing down - Axios
Inside the WSJ’s push for new subscribers - DigiDay
The Wall Street Journal is going on a subscriber acquisition spree in the two months before its fiscal year ends on June 30, having debuted a new brand marketing campaign this week, and next month temporarily dropping its paywall for the first time this year.
Called “Trust Your Decisions,” the campaign launched this week and focuses on the role the WSJ plays in readers’ decision-making processes in business, finance and in their personal lives.
Verizon Explores Sale of Media Assets, Including Parts of Yahoo + AOL - WSJ
Private-equity firms including Apollo are among possible bidders for Verizon media assets, sources say. The sales process, which includes private-equity firm Apollo Global Management Inc., could lead to a deal worth $4 billion to $5 billion, according to people familiar with the matter—assuming there is one. Other details couldn’t be learned.
Verizon splashed out billions of dollars assembling a portfolio of once-dominant websites, including AOL in 2015, and Yahoo in 2017, paying more than $9 billion in total to acquire the pair.
Spotify reports strong Q1 as Joe Rogan podcast exceeds expectations - Axios
The Swedish tech giant noted that increased subscriber growth and user engagement can be attributed in part to the better-than-expected performance of "The Joe Rogan Experience," a podcast it acquired exclusively for over $100 million.
Reuters paywall launch: Interview with CMO Josh London - Press Gazette
Global news agency Reuters is confident readers will pay for “news in context” as it prepares to compete with Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal and others for digital subscribers behind a paywall. I’d add The Information to this competitor list for my age and peer group.
News Corp Australia merges more than 20 regional newspapers with capital city masthead - The Guardian
Local websites absorbed by the Daily Telegraph and Courier-Mail in what it calls ‘world-class, hyperlocal news technology’. This roll up on one site with one paywall is incredibly smart from a business perspective. If there is diversity of media in the system as well.
Newsworthiness, Trump, and the Facebook Oversight Board - Columbia Journalism Review
The Facebook Oversight Board, a company-appointed body tasked with making content moderation decisions, is modeled on the American courtroom. The board aspires to objective standards and delivers irreversible judgments; borrowing legal vocabulary, it speaks of “appeals” and “eligible cases” and promises to issue explanations styled in the manner of judicial opinions. In the case of Donald Trump’s suspension from Facebook, soon to be decided, the board will evaluate a key concept from American jurisprudence and journalism: “newsworthiness.” The term is due for an update.
Most popular newspapers in the UK. National press ABCs - Press Gazette
Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday have almost 1M print subscribers while the FT, Sunday Mail and The Guardian only have 100K and change. We know it is all moving digital but these numbers fascinate me in a country of 66M. In Boston, we have just over 5M people and the Boston Globe print is around 100K. The Times has not reported print numbers in a while. Print circulation in millions:
NBC’s News Chief Pushes Streaming, Bets on Post-Trump Story Lines - WSJ
EU Charges Apple With App Store Antitrust Violations in Spotify Case - WSJ
European Commission accuses Apple of forcing many apps to use its in-app payment system
Is This News Allowed? Facebook Alone Decides - New York Times (I have pulled a few direct paragraphs from Ben Smith to help you scan the story.)
A winding read from Ben Smith - The New York Post has complained that Facebook is blocking and downplaying its stories. But the platform doesn’t pay any special deference to journalists. Is it because of bias or because the NY Post uses people’s addresses and photos to in their stories?
“Facebook also blocked an article speculating (as many others have) that the coronavirus could have leaked from a lab, and it ensured that The Post’s reporting on emails from Hunter Biden couldn’t be widely shared across the social network. Blocking the Covid-19 op-ed, a Facebook spokeswoman, Sally Aldous, said, was a “bug.” The company’s action on the Hunter Biden story was the result of yet another policy, in which professional “fact checkers” — mostly junior journalists — have a week to rule on whether something is true or false while Facebook prevents a story from being shared widely. (The fact checkers were not, in this case, able to get to the bottom of an epically puzzling and messy story in a week.)
Facebook’s usual critics have been strikingly silent as the company has extended its purview over speech into day-to-day editorial calls. “We don’t have anyone who is closely plugged into that situation right now so we don’t have anything to say at this point in time,” a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union, Aaron Madrid Aksoz, said in an email. The only criticism came from the News Media Alliance, the old newspaper lobby, whose chief executive, David Chavern, called blocking The Post’s link “completely arbitrary” and noted that “Facebook and Google stand between publishers and their audiences and determine how and whether news content is seen.”
The Post’s editorial board wrote that Facebook and other social media companies “claim to be ‘neutral’ and that they aren’t making editorial decisions in a cynical bid to stave off regulation or legal accountability that threatens their profits. But they do act as publishers — just very bad ones.”
What Facebook’s clash with The Post really revealed — and what surprised me — is that the platform does not defer, at all, to news organizations on questions of news judgment. A decision by The Post, or The New York Times, that someone’s personal wealth is newsworthy carries no weight in the company’s opaque enforcement mechanisms. Nor, Facebook’s lawyer said, does a more nebulous and reasonable human judgment that the country has felt on edge for the last year and that a Black activist’s concern for her own safety was justified. (The activist didn’t respond to my inquiry but, in an Instagram post, called the reporting on her personal finances “doxxing” and a “tactic of terror.”)”
Both Gannet and NY Daily News (owned by Tribune) are also having union and wage disputes. In this Twitter thread, Gannett outlines its wage dispute around a study they believe is misinformation around wages and diversity. While workers at the Daily News voted to join the New York Newsguild union.
As always, most of this is not original material and cut verbatim from the articles listed.