Happy Friday the 13th! I'm heading into NYC for a "CNN News Central" live shot about the VOA. Here's the latest on Evan Gershkovich, Jeff Bezos, BuzzFeed, Carlos Watson, "Matlock," and more... |
In the three months (!) that I've been writing to you on weekday mornings, one big theme has been the trust deficit that is disrupting the media and political landscape. Another big theme has been the power of "influencers" and online content creators writ large. This week a pair of new reports highlighted how online creators can teach the rest of us a thing or two... |
Earning trust through each video |
Up first: Julia Angwin's outstanding Shorenstein Center Discussion Paper about "the future of trustworthy information." Angwin studied what journalists can learn "from the ways that online content creators build trust with their audiences."
You should read the whole thing, but she found that TikTokers and YouTube stars "are working hard to gain trust from their audiences while journalists have been largely taking it for granted." The creators she interviewed demonstrate their expertise, show visual evidence, and engage in a two-way dialogue with viewers. "Seeing creators in their own homes and cars also builds credibility," she wrote. And "unlike journalists, creators also feel more comfortable expressing uncertainty to their audience."
"What emerges most clearly from this comparison of journalists and creators is that journalism has placed many markers of trust in institutional processes that are opaque to audiences, while creators try to embed the markers of trust directly in their interactions with audiences," Angwin concluded. Journalists "could be inspired by creators to rethink how we engage with audiences, moving from casual ad-hoc engagement to more structured and thoughtful connections built around the elements of trustworthiness..."
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Most creators are not 'superstars' |
Richard Florida and his advisory firm the Creative Class Group (with help from Meta) analyzed surveys from social media content creators around the world. The researchers discovered "two distinct worlds of creators."
The first is full of "superstar" publishers with many millions of followers and equivalent incomes. (When you picture a so-called influencer, you picture one of them.) "The second and far larger world," they wrote, "includes the vast majority of digital creators, who have much smaller follower counts, make much less, if any, money, and value personal fulfillment over fortune and fame. Both, however, are culturally and economically important."
Here's a PDF of the report. I noticed that it doesn't mention news or journalism at all, but that's partially the point – social media users are forming relationships with trusted individuals who are informing them almost by accident. The news biz needs to learn more from them...
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Sentencing day for Carlos Watson |
A sentencing conference for Ozy media co-founder Carlos Watson will take place later this morning in Brooklyn, where he's facing up to 37 years in prison on fraud charges. If you aren't caught up on the case, here are two new entry points:
>> "The Unraveling of Ozy Media," a new three-part series by CJR, is about "the trial of Carlos Watson and the excesses of the digital media age." Thanks to Josh Hersh and Susie Banikarim's exemplary work, you can also review exhibits from the trial.
>> "The Wizard of Ozy:" Former Ozy employee Shaan Merchant's new piece for Slate is a revealing front-row seat to the saga.
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A heart-warming WSJ byline |
The Wall Street Journal is out with a new report about the feared spy agency that arrested Evan Gershkovich. And who's the first byline on the article? Evan himself.
"When I was arrested by Russia’s security forces in 2023—the first foreign correspondent charged with espionage since the Cold War—I never stopped reporting," Gershkovich wrote. "On my release I set out to identify the man who had taken me, and to learn more about the spy unit that had carried out his orders." Read all about it...
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Here's president-elect Donald Trump, speaking at the NYSE, after referring to "turmoil" in his first term that was caused "unnecessarily:"
"The media's tamed down a little bit. They're liking us much better now, I think. if they don't, we'll have to just take them on again, and we don't want to do that."
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Politics + tech + media notes |
>> Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai was "expected to fly to the Mar-a-Lago Club" for a meeting with Trump yesterday. No further details have been reported since. (The Information)
>> First Meta, and now: Amazon is donating $1 million in cash to the Trump inaugural fund and making a $1 million in-kind donation by streaming the event on Amazon Video. (CNN)
>> During Trump's visit to the NYSE, he told CNBC's Jim Cramer that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is "coming up next week" for a meeting.
>> BTW, did you see the CNBC interview? Cramer "literally pushing his way through the crowd and somehow getting a 7-minute, unplanned, off-the-cuff interview with Trump on the floor of the NYSE might be the live TV moment of the year," John Hanlon commented. (CNBC)
>> Trump was there with TIME, which treated the opening bell as a big-time marketing moment. Later in the day, the mag's owner Marc Benioff (who has reportedly been thinking about selling TIME) congratulated Trump and said "we look forward to working together." (Variety)
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New info from inside the LA Times |
Katie Robertson's scoop for the NYT on Thursday: Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong killed an editorial with criticism of Trump's cabinet picks and said it "could not be published unless the paper also published an editorial with an opposing view." (This kind of sounds like USA Today's old feature, "Our View" and "Opposing View.")
A person familiar with the matter confirmed to CNN that Soon-Shiong spiked the piece, and said a few recent Opinion section headlines were also "softened" or "made more bland" by editors who anticipated that "anything too harsh would get rejected" by Soon-Shiong. "For the most part," the person said, "we're now just writing about state and local issues," avoiding national politics altogether.
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Hearing the Voice of America |
After I wrote about Trump picking Kari Lake to head Voice of America, I heard from Kate Wright, a professor who co-authored a book about Trump's past meddling at VOA, who said Americans need to recognize "that what happens to VOA matters for U.S. democracy." Wright told me "the laws meant to prevent the network from targeting U.S. citizens are very hard to enforce in practice. So
if the network is captured by an administration with authoritarian leanings, then you have a problem."
Meantime, the current heads of VOA and USAGM have pledged to work with the incoming admin and follow the existing "process" – which, as I wrote yesterday, means a bipartisan advisory board will be involved...
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>> An important win: Oklahoma's oldest television station, KFOR, "has won its legal battle with State Department of Education leaders." (KOSU)
>> Next month "a president will for the first time be the majority owner of a publicly traded company," Trump Media. Is the SEC "up to the job?" (ProPublica)
>> The press is "down and shut out in Palm Beach." Charlotte Klein surveys what it's like to cover the Trump transition in and around Mar a Lago... (NYMag)
>> Trump 2.0 "will feature more media subpoenas, communications seizures, whistleblower prosecutions, and legal threats against news outlets," Asawin Suebsaeng and Andrew Perez write. (Rolling Stone)
>> Jeremy Barr writes about "Fox News and the blurred lines of covering Pete Hegseth." (Wash Post)
>> By Paul Mozur and Adam Satariano: "Ukraine asks if Telegram, its favorite app, is a sleeper agent.” (NYT)
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'Media moguls set the stage for deal mania' |
☝️ That's the headline on Ben Mullin and Lauren Hirsch's new NYT story.
Shares in Warner Bros. Discovery, CNN's parent, surged 15% yesterday thanks to David Zaslav's restructuring of the media giant. In a new analyst note, Citi sees a potential link between WBD's new structure and Comcast's new spinoff: "We think Comcast's and Warner Bros Cable Networks may later seek to merge."
"We are in the unbundling part of cable TV's journey," Business Insider's Peter Kafka writes, "where the people who own cable TV networks jettison them because they are dragging down their stock price. Next up: Bundling all of those discarded cable TV networks into one big company."
>> Also Thursday, Hearst Magazines announced that it is buying MotorTrend Group from WBD.
>> Meanwhile, a costly sign of the times: YouTube TV is hiking its price tag to $82.99 per month, a $10 raise, THR's Caitlin Huston reports.
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BuzzFeed is selling "Hot Ones" and its parent First We Feast "for $82.5 million, easing a cash crunch that has loomed over the media company for months," the NYT's Ben Mullin reports. The asset was picked up by "a consortium of investors led by an affiliate of Soros Fund Management..."
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🎙️ My farewell to 'Inside the Hive' |
Last month's election proved that the "alternative media" is more powerful than ever – so are those sources fully mainstream now? What does the term "mainstream media" even signify anymore? Well, maybe "there are many mainstreams" now, Vanity Fair executive editor Claire Howorth remarked on this week's episode of the "Inside the Hive" podcast.
🔌: This episode was my final turn hosting for VF, now that I'm back at CNN full-time, so I asked Howorth and Michael Calderone to assess 2024 and look ahead to 2025. They also made me answer some questions. You can check out the episode via Apple or your preferred podcasting app...
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>> Love this: "How two nonprofits are demystifying journalism" one postcard at a time... (Poynter)
>> This brought back memories: "StumbleUpon, a tool that led users to random websites, had a stranglehold on millennials in the 2010s. Its influence echoes through everything we do online." (BBC)
>> Don't call it "cancel culture," but "a slew of one-season streamer cancellations ushers in a new normal," Lucas Manfredi reports. (TheWrap)
>> We're all still "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree:" David Bauder profiles Brenda Lee, whose 1958 song is still a holiday staple. (AP)
>> This morning's WSJ A-hed is by Mark Maurer: "After every episode, an army of amateur sleuths sets out to solve one of SNL's few mysteries: who writes each sketch." (WSJ)
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>> A new Pew study found that nearly half of teens reported being online "almost constantly..." (Pew)
>> Threads is "rolling out its own take" on Bluesky's Starter Packs, i.e. "curated lists of suggested accounts that help new users find people to follow." (TechCrunch)
>> Ev Williams is launching a new app, Mozi, "aimed at helping people foster in-person connections with their social circle." (NYT)
>> "YouTube has chosen to degrade the user experience of the embedded player publishers like Vox Media use, and the only way to get that link back is by using a slightly different player that pays us less and YouTube more," Nilay Patel reports. (The Verge)
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In a first-of-its-kind legal action regarding reality show participants, the National Labor Relations Board has "issued a complaint against the producers of hit reality TV show 'Love Is Blind,' arguing that the contestants should be classified as employees and therefore be eligible for worker protections," CNN's Ramishah Maruf reports. Lawyers for the producers did not immediately comment. "The complaint from the NLRB could eventually bring more transparency to an industry that can be exploitative, Cathy Creighton, director of Cornell University's Industrial and Labor Relations Buffalo Co-Lab, said to CNN..."
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>> "Lloyd Braun, Sarah Bremner and Noah Oppenheim are launching their own independent production studio, Prologue Entertainment, with backing from Jeff Zucker and RedBird Capital." (TheWrap)
>> "Moana 2" and "Wicked" are "expected to hold over quite well" this weekend, while new releases "Kraven the Hunter" and "Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim" are expected to underperform, Anthony D'Alessandro reports. (Deadline)
>> "Conclave" and "Wicked" lead this year’s Critics Choice Awards nominations with 11 nods each. (Variety)
>> "CBS has two mega-hits on its hand this season, with Kathy Bates-led 'Matlock' joining the ranks of Justin Hartley's 'Tracker' as the network’s two most-watched series," Loree Seitz reports. (TheWrap)
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Taylor Swift's newest record |
Taylor Swift won 10 trophies at the Billboard Music Awards last night, becoming the most-decorated winner ever "with a total of 49 career trophies," CNN's Alli Rosenbloom writes. And today is her 35th birthday. "This is the nicest early birthday present," she said. "It's exactly what I wanted!"
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