This horror show of a story
Media statistic of the week?
According to internal documents, Netflix estimates “Squid Game,” which cost $21.4 million to produce, will create almost $900 million in value for the company. In that scoop for Bloomberg News, Lucas Shaw reports that more than 130 million people have watched at least two minutes of the Korean show in the first 23 days, and 87 million people have finished it.?
Mike Isaac tweeted that this was “another fascinating leak on user numbers picked up by Lucas. Netflix is big mad and now threatening Bloomberg over it.” As Ethan Gach says, “you know you’ve got a scoop on your hands when it’s the lawyers answering the request for comment.”
This past week in the media industry?
Owner & threat
McKay Coppins’ cover story for the November issue of The Atlantic on Alden Global Capital, the Hedge Fund Killing Newspapers just came out last week but it’s already been getting a lot of well-deserved attention.
Carter Sherman shares, “One of my favorite things to do at parties is explain to non-journalists just how threatened the journalism industry is. Now, I can just send them this horror show of a story. (Yes, I am a joy at all parties, invite me to yours.)”?
There are plenty of disturbing details in Coppins’ piece, including, as David Folkenflik highlights, “In deep dive on Alden, the owner of & threat to some 200 papers, @mckaycoppins notes its takeover of Tribune was financed by Cerebus— a private-equity firm which owned security outfit that trained Saudi operatives who helped murder Jamal Khashoggi.”
Coppins also spoke with hotel magnate Stewart Bainum Jr., who tried to take on Alden by attempting to buy The Baltimore Sun from the hedge fund before ultimately failing in a bid for all of Tribune Publishing’s newspapers.?
Bainum said he’s launching an all-digital, nonprofit news outlet, The Baltimore Banner, next year with an annual operating budget of $15 million and plans to hire 50 journalists. It’s one small glimmer of hope at the end of what Rui Kaneya calls “A super engaging -- and profoundly depressing -- piece.”
[Blink, blink]
Bojan Pancevski reported last week at The Wall Street Journal that Politico’s New Owner Plans to Grow Staff and Launch a Paywall. Alex Springer says it plans to immediately boost Politico’s head count by more than 10% once the deal to buy the company closes.
Sewell Chan says it’s “Hard to imagine a media owner in the US saying this: ‘There will be no restructuring, no synergies, no mergers and no cost-cutting.’”
And Andrew North highlights, If you don’t back ‘a united Europe, Israel’s right to exist and a free-market economy’ you can’t work here, says new owner of Politico. Maybe a glimpse of the near future -- and a mandatory code of values for all journalists?”
But to understand why Adam Serwer is saying “the staff of politico should unionize, quickly,” you have to read Ben Smith’s latest New York Times column, At Axel Springer, Politico’s New Owner, Allegations of Sex, Lies and a Secret Payment.?
“[blink, blink]” tweets Olivier Knox. As Edmund Lee says, it’s “a doozy.”?
Jacob Rubashkin praises the “Sharp reporting on the new owner of Politico and the questionable culture at the German media empire's flagship publication, Bild. (I like to think that every @benyt column from now on is required to include at least one Ozy reference — this one’s in ?20).”
Yes, as Richard J. Tofel says, “It’s been quite a run for @benyt lately.” And Andrew Feinberg can only wonder, “Is there a long German compound word for having your media company’s juiciest dirty laundry aired by @benyt?”
In fact, it’s probably best to follow Eric Alterman’s lead: “Hi, It’s Ben Smith, mind if we talk? Click.” Because in a followup on Tuesday, Smith and Melissa Eddy reported that Axel Springer removed “Bild” editor Julian Reichelt on Monday, a day after Smith’s column came out. As Chris Seper says, “People pay attention to accurate, independent reporting. No wonder so many try to suppress it.”
How bad the conflict is
As much as we savor those columns, Smith still has a big unresolved conflict of interest, which is why at Slate’s Justin Peters is wondering, Why Hasn’t the New York Times Made Ben Smith Sell His BuzzFeed Options Yet??
It’s a question quite a few journalists are asking, and in fact, Adriana Lacy is “happy someone finally wrote what I’ve been raging about for months in my group chats lol.” Adds Tom Scocca, “I like Ben and enjoy his media coverage but this very good piece if anything undersells how bad his conflict is.”
Choire Sicha goes with the obvious answer: “How high would you have to be to turn down millions of BuzzFeed SPACbucks for a NYT blogging job.” And Benjamin Goggin tweets, “Gonna play devil’s advocate here… maybe it is okay to let him make some money in a few months on something he worked very hard on?”
However, as Emma Carew Grovum points out, “The Slate piece breaking down Ben Smith’s massive conflict of interest is very good, but doesn’t address the fact that a non-straight/white/male journalist would NOT be given the same privileges and leeway.”
Deep and troubling
From Deepa Seetharaman, Jeff Horwitz and Justin Scheck, it’s another installment in the Wall Street Journal’s Facebook Files series. This time we learned that while Facebook Says AI Can Enforce Its Rules, the Company’s Own Engineers Are Doubtful.?
In fact, AI has only minimal success in removing hate speech, violent images and other problem content, according to internal company reports. As usual, it gets worse: “Facebook was unhappy with the hate speech removal rate on its platform. To improve this metric, it made it harder to report hate speech. #DeleteFacebook,” Benjamin Curry urges.
On Twitter, Seetharaman says, “I hope you’ll read this piece, which is less about Facebook’s effects on the world and more about how it’s trying to manage harms with minimal success,” and adds, “Oh, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that @selenagomez plays a role in holding Facebook to account for violence on the platform. Sheryl Sandberg sends her the company points on proactive detection and takedowns. This is how she responds.”
“It’s a deep and troubling report that deserves your attention,” tweets Jason Kint. “Side note, I’m impressed by @selenagomez as the report indicates she used her influence to draw attention to these issues at Facebook. Need more like her. Thanks ????”
Trolls in Zuckworld
From there we take you to Marianna Spring, who’s a specialist reporter covering disinformation and social media for BBC News, and her story on online abuse against women, I get abuse and threats online — why can’t it be stopped??
To find some answers, Spring conducted an experiment for BBC Panorama. She created a fake online troll persona called Barry and signed him up to the five most popular social media platforms in the UK. After just a week, “Barry” was recommended more and more anti-women content by Facebook and Instagram, some involving sexual violence.
“Far from stopping Barry engaging with anti-women content, Facebook and Instagram appear to have promoted it to him,” Spring writes. “By contrast, there was no anti-women content on TikTok and very little on Twitter. YouTube suggested some videos hostile to women.”
She also reports that research conducted for the BBC Panorama program by the Centre for Countering Digital Hate showed 97% of 330 accounts sending misogynistic abuse on Twitter and Instagram remained on the site after being reported.
“This tracks with what FB whistleblower reported last week, but with the additional observation: females are at the bottom of the food chain in Zuckworld. They just hate us,” says Nina Burleigh.
Behind the media mill
A new investigation by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism examines the Metric Media network’s financial ties and the nonprofits funding them. Priyanjana Bengani reports on the findings at Columbia Journalism Review, The Metric Media network runs more than 1,200 local news sites. Here are some of the non-profits funding them.?
领英推荐
Their investigation reveals that Metric Media has ties to founders of the Tea Party movement, to a non-profit described by Mother Jones as “the dark-money ATM of the conservative movement,” and to a Catholic political advocacy group that launched a $9.7 million campaign in swing states against Joe Biden six weeks before the 2020 election.
Peter Himler guesses, “When @HillaryClinton called out a ‘vast right-wing conspiracy,’ she couldn’t have envisioned a media mill that publishes 5 million misinformative articles a month.”?
Part two of the investigation looks at how advocacy groups and Metric Media collaborate on local ‘community news.’ “[W]hat appeared to be grassroots news is part of a sprawling network that promotes political agendas and corporate interests, without disclosing those ties to the public,” Bengani writes.
Behind 2020’s online #FakeNews
In Ax Sharma’s exclusive for Ars Technica, “Hacker X,” the American who built a pro-Trump fake news empire, unmasks himself. For two years, Robert Willis ran websites and Facebook groups that spread bogus stories, conspiracy theories and propaganda.
“‘Hacker X’—the American who built a pro-Trump fake news empire—unmasks himself. He says he was the ‘original punk rock right-wing millennial.’ Forget Russian involvement in Trump’s rise. Check out what he and his deep-pocketed backers birthed,” tweets Douglas John Imbrogno.
Ross Kaminsky says, “This is a truly fascinating story about one of the primary builders of 2020’s online #FakeNews,” and Byrne Hobart calls it “Further evidence for the thesis that fake news is hard to stamp out because producing it is incredibly fun.”
But Stephanie Lee (and others) noticed, “....all these words, except the name of the fake news company in question.”
After the piece came out, Ars Technica acknowledged, “The piece generated a fair bit of pushback from readers over a host of perceived issues. The feedback was sustained enough that Ars editors spent the weekend tracking it all, and a[n] update addressing some of the most common concerns seemed far more productive than a host of individual responses.”
Among those updates, Disinformation guru “Hacker X” names his employer: NaturalNews.com, a site The Atlantic named one of the top producers of anti-vax content on the Internet
Ars Technica’s Nate Anderson explains, “In his initial conversations with Ars, Willis made it a condition of publication that we not publish the real name of the site to avoid possible legal problems for Willis. (In the article, the site was referred to as Koala Media.) But after the article appeared, he changed his mind.”
The depth of deflection
Moving on to a story that doesn’t involve a hacker, despite what officials in Missouri seem to think.?
As Jack Suntrup and Kurt Erickson reported at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Gov. Mike Parson has issued a legal threat against the St. Louis Post-Dispatch two days after the newspaper informed the state of a data risk that left 100,000 Social Security numbers vulnerable to public disclosure.
The background: Josh Renaud reported the story in question, Missouri teachers’ Social Security numbers at risk on state agency's website, noting that the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education removed the affected pages from its website after being notified of the problem by the Post-Dispatch.
The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education then released statements describing the journalist as a “hacker.”
In a news conference the next day, Parson said, “We will not let this crime against Missouri teachers go unpunished. And we refuse to let them be a pawn in the news outlet’s political vendetta. Not only are we going to hold this individual accountable, but we will also be holding accountable all those who aided this individual and the media corporation that employs them.”
As Ryan Hoffman says, “Weird. @GovParsonMO says he’ll ‘utilize all legal methods available’ to hold @stltoday reporter ‘accountable’ when a simple ‘thank you’ is called for.”
In response to Parson’s statement, Republican state Rep. Tony Lovasco tweeted, “it’s clear the Governor’s Office has a fundamental misunderstanding of both web technology and industry standard procedures for reporting security vulnerabilities. Journalists responsibly sounding an alarm on data privacy is not criminal hacking.”
Back to Suntrup and Erickson’s story, Chuck Raasch says, “You have to read this to fully understand the depth of deflection and CYA that some politicians stoop to.” Adds Jason Buch, “There’s just so much to unpack with this, but the story pretty much covers all of it.”
Media biz news
For her Washington Post column, Margaret Sullivan interviewed Gus Wenner and Noah Shachtman about the plan for reviving Rolling Stone. Wenner, who’s Rolling Stone’s president and CEO and the son of co-founder Jan Wenner, hired the former Daily Beast editor this summer, and Shachtman told Sullivan he’s pushing for “a ‘more immediate, more visceral’ presentation, the kind of approach that the Internet demands.”
Tripp Mickle of The Wall Street Journal gives us a look at How YouTube Copied Hollywood to Win Video Makers’ Loyalty. The site has spent more than a decade building an in-house agency for digital superstars, drawing ad sales, sponsorships and other revenue.
Kayleigh Barber of Digiday reports that Axios has made $1M in revenue from its eight-month-old software licensing business. The software-as-a-service business is designed to teach companies how to write in its trademarked editorial style of “Smart Brevity” for internal communications.
At Nieman Lab, Sarah Scire wrote about OneLog, which brings together some of the largest and most trusted Swiss media companies with a single sign-on solution that will reach 2 million active accounts in 2022 — representing one in four inhabitants in the country.
#JournoLife
Many journalists have been sharing Alexandra Laughlin’s essay for Study Hall, Ghostwriting, about the “invisible structures built to prop up a select few voices that are deemed valuable in the media industry.”?
“This piece by @alexlaughs really drives home why the media industry needs to radically re-examine how to credit — *publicly* credit — all the types of journalists who work in newsrooms today. Nowadays, there's no such thing as a one-byline story,” notes Kayla Epstein.
Herman Wong says, “What I have long admired about @alexlaughs is that she is principled and willing to speak up, even at a cost. Her essay is perceptive and her voice valuable to journalism.”
Adds Brandon Wall, “This, by @alexlaughs, is vital reading for everyone in a newsroom. For those who do invisible work like social, so you feel seen, but especially those in bylined or leadership roles, so you know what it’s like.”
For her column in The Cohort, Poynter’s newsletter that centers conversations about gender in media, Alex Laughlin spoke with some recent and soon-to-be grads. As her piece reveals, the next generation of journalists is here. And they think we can do better.
Nicki Mayo says, “IDK about the next generation of journos, but I can speak many of my #JournoLife peers. If y’all only knew the number of ‘grateful to be here, but no thanks’ convos I’ve had in the last 2yrs w/ journos UNDER 40. These newsrooms are getting the wake-up call.”
A few more
From the Muck Rack Team
Investigative journalists play an important role as watchdogs, holding individuals and organizations accountable for their actions. We recently combed through our database to find the most viewed investigative journalists on Muck Rack in 2021. Head over to the blog to find out who made the list of the top 10 investigative journalists in 2021.