Weekly Media News
Best reads of the week: Kevin Roose’s story on Facebook data wars and the WashPost’s Pegasus Spyware were both insightful reads.
CNN+ is pretty interesting to think about as we look for models for quality journalism with a sustainable revenue stream… if they prioritize quality news and robust newsrooms. President Biden’s Facebook is “killing us” comment took over a few days of the news cycle and welcomed response, along with his walk back that they are “not actually killing people”. Erik Wemple has an OpEd today discussing the Wolff-Stelter exchange on trust in media, which also went viral. Google and Philip Smith say they can help you launch a news outlet in 8 weeks (groan) while France sues Google 500M euros for copyright over news content. France is championing why newsrooms are not being paid properly for their news from platforms, even after the $76M deal with 122 news outlets in France they signed earlier this year. The stories in aggregate gave me some hope! – Heidi
Inside Facebook’s Data Wars - NYT
Executives at the social network have clashed over CrowdTangle, a Facebook-owned data tool that revealed users’ high engagement levels with right-wing media sources.
Private Israeli spyware used to hack cellphones of journalists, activists worldwide – Washpost and Guardian
Private Israeli spyware used to hack the cellphones of journalists, activists worldwide around the globe, can infect phones without a click. The editor of the Financial Times is one of more than 180 editors, investigative reporters, and other journalists around the world who were selected as possible candidates for surveillance by government clients of the surveillance firm NSO Group, the Guardian revealed. Over 80 journalists from 16 outlets created a consortium to break this story.Wolff blames CNN’s Stelter for “Why People Can’t Stand Media” – Erik Wemple OpEd – WashPost
Wolff called the show “incredibly repetitive,” among other unfavorable characterizations. “You are one of the reasons people can’t stand the media,” said Wolff to Stelter. “Sorry.”
CNN announces CNN+ – CNN
“The most important launch for the network since Ted Turner” claims its chief digital officer, Andrew Morse. CNN is hiring hundreds of people and developing dozens of programs for a subscription streaming service that will launch early next year.
The new venture, called CNN+, was formally announced on Monday morning. It will exist side by side with CNN's existing television networks and will feature eight to twelve hours of live programming a day.
Jeff Zucker, the chairman of WarnerMedia News and Sports and president of CNN Worldwide, portrayed CNN+ as the evolution of video news and the start of a new era for the company.
"CNN invented cable news in 1980, defined online news in 1995 and now is taking an important step in expanding what news can be by launching a direct-to-consumer streaming subscription service in 2022," Zucker said in a statement.
The executive in charge of CNN+, chief digital officer Andrew Morse. Tens of millions of people worldwide access CNN through a cable subscription. The company generates more than a billion dollars in profit annually, largely from cable subscriber fees and advertising.
"It's not going to be a news headline service," he said, citing opportunities for "more deep dives" into subjects like climate change; space and science; and race and identity. He said the latter will give subscribers the ability "to engage directly with our talent and experts about the issues that matter most to them."
Biden says Facebook is killing us… then walks it back – BBC
Biden warned that the spread of Covid-19 misinformation on social media is "killing people". He was responding to a question from a reporter about the alleged role of "platforms like Facebook" in spreading falsehoods about vaccines and the pandemic. Jen Psaki then doubled down until less than 48 hours later, Biden walked it back. Facebook’s refuted the claim by touting that it had helped one percent of Americans with its vaccine locator tool. So there’s that.
Comcast CEO Brian Roberts and ViacomCBS Chairman Shari Redstone Met to Discuss Streaming Partnership – WSJ
The late June meeting in NYC also included ViacomCBS CEO Robert Bakish; focused on the potential to join forces in international markets. The executives discussed a variety of possible business partnerships that would allow the companies to enter non-U.S. markets together, the people said.
Foundations fund almost 50% of revenue for global publications – Nieman Lab
Foundation support is crucial for nonprofit news organizations of all sizes. A recent INN report, for example, found that grants from foundations accounted for an average of 47% of revenue across local, national, and global publications.
With foundation funding disproportionately going to publications with a national focus, however, local news can get left out. There’s a growing belief that community foundations (as well as local individual donors) will have to step up.
Report for America, which asks that the host newsroom raise at least a quarter of the reporter’s salary from the community or in American Journalism Project promoting local journalism to “local philanthropists who used to donate to the opera or museums.” And you can see it throughout a new report from Media Impact Funders, which highlights the role of community foundations in media-related grants.
About $1.6 billion of the media-related grants — about 5% — came from community organizations. Just $124 million of those funds were directed toward journalism.
Twitter sees jump in govt demands to remove reporters/news content– Reuters
In its transparency report published on Wednesday, Twitter said verified accounts of 199 journalists and news outlets on its platform faced 361 legal demands from governments to remove content in the second half of 2020, up 26% from the first half of the year.
Twitter ultimately removed five tweets from journalists and news publishers, the report said. India submitted most of the removal requests, followed by Turkey, Pakistan, and Russia.
The social media platform did not previously track such data on requests pertaining to journalists or publishers.
Founding family plan $1.1 B bid to take Daily Mail owner private - Reuters
The founding family and leading investor in the publisher of Britain's Daily Mail newspaper is considering taking the group private in a $1.1 billion deal as part of a break-up of the business.
The Rothermeres, who own 28% of the company, are ready to make a cash offer to buy the group outright, provided it sells its RMS insurance risk business and that the listing of online car seller Cazoo, which it partially owns, goes ahead.
The Daily Mail was first published in 1896 by the ancestors of current DMGT chairman Jonathan Harmsworth, the Viscount Rothermere.
The Mail has weathered the long-term decline in newspaper sales better than rivals, overtaking Rupert Murdoch's Sun to become the UK's top-selling newspaper last year, and wields political clout as the voice of conservative "middle England".
The group's website - MailOnline - is among the most visited English-language news sites globally thanks to its celebrity-focused formula.
If they sell the other businesses they will focus on news publishing and its events and property information businesses.
The company's stake in Cazoo could be worth $1.35 billion after the flotation, expected in the current quarter.
The original Substacker discusses what it takes – Press Gazette
How to build a subscription news business and what he thinks about the future of paid newsletters. Substack says its top ten writers collectively now make more than $15m a year through paid subscriptions. (reminder the NYT has a market cap of $6 billion.)
Bishop, an American media entrepreneur (co-founder of CBS MarketWatch (which is now part of Dow Jones/News Corp) who lived and worked in China between 2005 and 2015, describes himself as an “analyst, commentator and meta-editor”. His newsletter, Sinocism, had 30,000 free subscribers (built up since 2012) when it launched on Substack, and a fair few of them decided to start paying immediately.
“On the first day I was at over $100,000 in revenue for the year,” says Bishop, who became an early investor in Substack after launching his newsletter. “So it was a great start. And it grows every year.”
Several high-profile writers and public figures – including Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, and Dominic Cummings, the former chief adviser to UK prime minister Boris Johnson – have launched their own newsletters on the platform.
Inside the Conservative Book Publishing World – Slate
Interesting Q&A with Eric Nelson, the vice president and executive editor of Broadside Books, an imprint of HarperCollins dedicated to publishing books by political conservatives. A self-proclaimed libertarian who says he doesn’t really care for either libs or conservatives joined Broadside the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, after working for the conservative and business imprints at Penguin Random House.
“White audiences who will pay” – Nieman Lab OpEd by Nikki Usher
Usher has a new book out called News for the Rich White and Blue. She’s also a senior fellow at the Open Markets Institute’s Center for Journalism and Liberty – a think tank that backs much of the anti-platform lobby work in DC supporting the careers of Lina Khan and Tim Wu, previous fellows.
“Both explicitly and implicitly, the future of journalism, at least as imagined by white news media executives, is serving white, paying audiences, a preexisting problem made far worse by the market failure of local newspaper journalism and the distortions of the digital advertising market.”
In other cases, pre-existing wealth gaps feed into the whiteness of a digital subscription base. The Boston Globe was the first metropolitan newsroom to sign up more digital subscribers than print ones. A Globe digital subscription costs $360 a year after initial discounts.
In Boston in 2015, the average white family had a median net worth of $247,000, while “Dominicans and U.S. blacks [had] a median wealth of close to zero.” It’s hard to imagine anything other than a white subscriber base fueling a newsroom whose customer service page notes that the print Globe is indeed compostable. (It should be noted that The Globe has recommitted to anti-racist coverage, appointed Black newsroom leaders, and is engaging in an experiment to recreate a contemporary abolitionist newspaper.)
A News Media Alliance survey on the willingness of audiences to pay in 2019 found that Minnesota residents would still consider paying for local news — but of the 500 or so people surveyed, 90% were white. Perhaps this reflects the makeup of the state (which is 83% white); de facto, the audiences willing to pay are white audiences.
France fines Google 500 M euros over copyright row – Reuters
France's antitrust watchdog slapped a 500 million euro ($593 million) fine on Alphabet's Google (GOOGL.O) on Tuesday for failing to comply with the regulator's orders on how to conduct talks with the country's news publishers in a row over copyright.
The fine comes amid increasing international pressure on online platforms such as Google and Facebook (FB.O) to share more revenue with news outlets.
The U.S. tech group must now come up with proposals within the next two months on how it would compensate news agencies and other publishers for the use of their news. If it does not do that, the company would face additional fines of up to 900,000 euros per day.
Facebook Users Said No to Tracking – Bloomberg
Now Advertisers are Panicking. People give iOS apps permission to track their behavior just 25% of the time Facebook advertisers, in particular, have noticed an impact in the last month since the new prompt from Apple Inc. explicitly asks users of each app whether they are willing to be tracked across their internet activity. Most are saying no.
Media buyers who run Facebook ad campaigns on behalf of clients said Facebook is no longer able to reliably see how many sales its clients are making, so it’s harder to figure out which Facebook ads are working. Losing this data also impacts Facebook’s ability to show a business’s products to potential new customers. It also makes it more difficult to “re-target” people with ads that show users items they have looked at online, but may not have purchased.
Jared Kushner’s Observer, in a family trust, is relaunching – Axios
The Observer, formerly the New York Observer, plans to relaunch in the next few months with a new editor-in-chief, Axios has learned.
Details: Meg Marco, most recently a senior editor at ProPublica and also served as editor at Axios and WSJ, has been hired to help the outlet reclaim its identity as a chronicler of powerful people and influencers and to cover issues such as business media, arts and real estate.
Observer, formerly the New York Observer, went digital-only in 2016. It was formerly run by Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, who stepped down as publisher in 2017.
Upon stepping down, Kushner transferred ownership of the publication into a family trust. His brother-in-law Joseph Meyer was named publisher and CEO.
In 2019, Meyer hired Michael Rose to replace him as CEO of Observer Media. Meyer became chairman of Observer Media, the parent company to Observer and its sister company, Commercial Observer, a B2B real estate site. Kushner bought The Observer in 2006 for $10 million.
I want to help you launch a digital news site in eight weeks – Philip Smith
Google reveals its need for silo news feeds. Philip Smith, the longtime news entrepreneur, teams up with Google News Initiative to offer an 8-week Bootcamp alongside Lions Publishers (also receives funding from Google). He uses examples of newsletters focused on gender, race, and geography as other news startups he has helped launch. Eight weeks seems a little light for building strong, standard-driven newsrooms… but here we are! Does anyone want to weigh in on why Google is so driven for micro-news startups versus funding large, robust newsrooms?
UK publishers could be hit by 'right to be forgotten' requests – Press Gazette
LA Times thinks its new daily news podcast can go big – Nieman Lab
The Daily has been a major success story for The New York Times, consistently one of the most popular podcasts in the U.S. and boasting an average of 4 million downloads per day in 2020.
Podcast listeners, including those tuning into The Daily, tend to be young and well-educated, prompting publishers to see audio as key to attracting the next generation of subscribers – an audience the Los Angeles Times covets.
The LA Times currently has 400,000 digital subscribers, and the newspaper aims to grow that number to 1 million — and beyond. (“There are 40 million people in California alone, and there’s no reason why we can’t get 1 in 10,” owner Patrick Soon-Shiong told CNN in June.)
Nikkei and FT to open Houston bureau for energy coverage – Nikkei
MIT Tech Review named Buzzfeed’s Mat Honan new editor – MIT Tech Review
Honan brings a track record of building and running award-winning digital reporting teams to storied, 122-year-old MIT Technology Review.
How a Twitter thread sparked a lawsuit against Harvard Nieman Lab’s founder – Columbia Journalism Review
As always, this is not original journalism and most of the content is cut and pasted verbatim.