Extremely surreal and frustrating
Media statistic of the week
One immediate effect of the SAG-AFTRA strikes: The proportion of ad spending on entertainment reruns has jumped to 79% , while the share of spend in new entertainment programming is down to 20.9% as of June. That’s the deepest dip in share for new shows since the pandemic, when studio production was shut down.
This past week in the media industry?
Deeply messed up
The Marion County Record in Kansas only has a circulation of about 4,000, but as Tom Jones writes at Poynter, “this little publication is at the center of a controversy that involves nothing less than democracy, press freedoms and the First Amendment.”
Sherman Smith , Sam Bailey , Rachel Mipro and Tim Carpenter of the Kansas Reflector reported that last Friday, police staged a 'chilling' raid on the newspaper, seizing computers, records and cellphones from the paper’s office and the publisher’s home.?
“Eric Meyer, owner and publisher of the newspaper, said police were motivated by a confidential source who leaked sensitive documents to the newspaper, and the message was clear: ‘Mind your own business or we’re going to step on you.’”
Meyer told the Kansas Reflector that the city’s entire five-officer police force and two sheriff’s deputies took “everything we have.”?
As Ernie Smith put it, “This is deeply messed up.” Adds Margaret Sullivan , “This outrage should absolutely be a national story and a cause for journalistic solidarity. Shame these people …”
Marisa Kabas interviewed Meyer for her newsletter The Handbasket, and Bill Grueskin notices, “In what can only be a total coincidence, the newspaper that got raided by the police chief had been investigating the police chief over allegations of sexual misconduct. Via this excellent @marisakabas2 interview of the publisher.”
“What. A. Surprise,” says Maggie McNeill .
NPR’s Danielle Kaye and David Folkenflik also interviewed Meyer, who told them his team had recently been looking into allegations of misconduct against the police chief who led the raid .
Something has to be done
If the story seems like it can’t get worse, well, it can. A day after the raid, Eric Meyer’s 98-year-old mother, Joan Meyer, the co-owner of the paper, collapsed and died at her home.?
The Marion County Record reported that the illegal raids contributed to her death , as she became “stressed beyond her limits and overwhelmed by hours of shock and grief,” unable to eat or sleep after the police rifled through her possessions, photographed her son’s personal bank and investment statements, and took away her computer and a router used by an Alexa smart speaker.
The Wichita Eagle and Kansas City Star editorial boards published an editorial denouncing the raid as intolerable police overreach and quoting Joan Meyer, who’d been a newspaperwoman since 1953: “These are Hitler tactics and something has to be done.”
“On Sunday, more than 30 news organizations and press groups, including The Washington Post, wrote an open letter to Marion Police Chief Cody condemning the action,” as Sofia Andrade and Paul Farhi report in their Washington Post piece, After a police raid on a Kansas newspaper, questions mount .
Katie Townsend , legal director at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, shared, “Hard to find words to describe how outrageous this is. @rcfp will be looking into this newsroom raid in Kansas & demanding answers.”?
And the Society of Professional Journalists announced it is offering to help cover up to $20,000 in legal fees for the newsroom .
In the meantime, Sherman Smith of the Kansas Reflector reports that police are defending the raid amid backlash over the ‘brazen violation of press freedom.’ ?
Local news that re-humanizes
And now, Renee Chenault-Fattah links to a story that’s “especially poignant given Kansas’ @MarionCountyRecord.”?
Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank profiled the Rappahannock News, a hyper-local weekly in rural Virginia partly funded by the nonprofit Foothill Forum, The country has come apart. Rural America has a cure .
As Milbank writes, “In an age of lost confidence in news media (as in almost all institutions), readers still trust this community paper.”
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Greg Peerenboom calls it “An encouraging piece on local journalism's viability,” while Nick DiMarco adds, “People outside of the journo-sphere need to read this,” too.
“Mae Racer's rice pudding. Chuck & Diane Moore's 43rd wedding anniversary AND reporting on school taxes, broadband etc. The key to saving rural areas (& USA): local news that re-humanizes,” Steven Waldman highlights. “Here via the @rappnews & often @Report4America @Milbank.”
Who benefits?
Mark Schoifet says, “I can't stop thinking about this not-so fun fact in this article: When Netflix shipped DVDs to customers, there were about 100,000 to choose from. Streaming, which has a different economics, has reduced that to about 6,600 U.S. titles.”
For The New York Times, David Streitfeld wrote about Brewster Kahle , who runs the Internet Archive, his legal battles with publishers and the writers caught in the middle: The Dream Was Universal Access to Knowledge. The Result Was a Fiasco .
On Friday, four publishers that won a lawsuit against the Internet Archive claiming “willful mass copyright infringement” said they’d negotiated a deal with the archive that would remove all their copyright books from the site.
Meanwhile, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and other record labels are now suing the archive for copyright infringement over its streaming collection of digitized music from vintage records. Blake Brittain has details on that lawsuit at Reuters.?
“Now the Washington lawyers want to destroy digital collections of scratchy 78rpm records, 70-120 year old, built by dedicated preservationists online since 2006,” Kahle points out. “Who benefits?”
The Lil Tay mess
Even if you weren’t familiar with? Lil Tay before last week, you may have heard about the teen influencer’s “death” and then…not death and wondered what’s been going on. Jason Abbruzzese says, “.@Angela_Y_Yang has what is, for my money, the most complete and thoughtful look at the situation around Lil Tay that you're going to find.”
From Angela Yang of NBC News, it’s the story of Two days in the death, then life, of teen influencer Lil Tay .
“It has been an extremely surreal and frustrating 48 hours for internet culture reporters,” says Kat Tenbarge , who contributed to the piece. “The minute the death announcement went up, it was beyond suspicious — but that didn’t stop major media outlets and new media from falsely reporting Lil Tay’s death.”
“I don’t know how many times journalists are going to keep letting themselves get manipulated by online content. But the Lil Tay mess showed something else - podcasters, creators, & influencers are just as guilty as jumping the gun in our media landscape,” Jessica Maddox points out.
If you’re still looking for more on this mess, Rebecca Jennings of Vox has put together the explainer, Lil Tay’s reported death, explained as much as possible . And as Joshua Benton says, that’s a “good explainer headline” for this one.
So many CBSurprises?
That’s how Variety’s Brian Steinberg summed up the leadership and operational shakeup news this week at Paramount Global’s CBS business. First, Steinberg reported that CBS News president Neeraj Khemlani will be exiting his post unexpectedly and will enter into a multi-year content production deal with CBS that calls for documentaries, scripted series and books for Simon & Schuster.?
Ted Johnson of Deadline confirmed that Wendy McMahon will take on sole duties leading CBS News and stations while adding oversight of the network’s domestic syndication business. Steinberg followed up at Variety with the news that Ingrid Ciprian-Matthews will take direct oversight of CBS News , reporting to McMahon. The CBS News veteran will now have top editorial oversight for CBS News across all platforms.
Elaine Cobbe calls that appointment “Excellent news for CBS News,” but overall, it’s “As the World turns at @CBSNews which is awful at keeping a Prez any longer than two years and ANOTHER restructure,” Rebecca Aguilar notes. “I feel for my friends who work there.”
More notable media stories
From the Muck Rack Team
While there are some overlaps between media relations and public relations, the two are not the same. Learn the main differences between them, as well as how they work in tandem, in our new guide, Media relations vs. public relations: Understanding the differences .
“Media relations is just one part of a comprehensive organizational PR strategy.” — Gregory Galant #quoteoftheday ???????