How we got to Elon Musk buying Twitter
Media statistic of the week?
More than half of people in four former communist central European countries—Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia—fear media freedom is in danger, with significant majorities wanting government or EU measures to protect it, according to a new survey of 4,000 people across the four countries. Fifty-two percent voiced concern about media freedom, 71% backed government safeguarding legislation and 59% supported granting the EU more powers to protect media liberties .
This past week in the media industry?
And just like that…Twitter has a new owner
The week started with the big news that Twitter accepted Elon Musk’s bid to take over the company , a $44 billion deal that would give the world’s richest man control over the social-media network where he is also among its most influential users, as? Cara Lombardo , Meghan Bobrowsky and Georgia Wells reported at The Wall Street Journal.
In case you were having trouble keeping up, Lombardo tweeted out the “The mind-blowing timeline: 4/9 Musk backs out of joining board, 4/14 Musk unveils bid, 4/21 Musk details financing, 4/24 Musk & Twitter meet , 4/25 Deal announced.”
The New York Times had extensive coverage on the deal and what it might mean . Eric Deggans thinks you can “Expect the amount of misinformation and disinformation in our media ecosystem to explode. Sigh.”
Adam Satariano notes that while Musk made a centerpiece of his bid the need to restrain what he sees as overly aggressive content moderation policies that limit what people can say on the site, less moderation could conflict with new European regulations .
Satariano reported last week at The New York Times on Europe’s Digital Services Act, E.U. Takes Aim at Social Media’s Harms With Landmark New Law . The landmark legislation would force social media companies to combat misinformation and restrict certain online ads.
At Wired Magazine, Chris Stokel-Walker wrote about How Elon Musk Won Twitter and considered “what the hell comes next?” He describes it as “a tick tock on how we got to Elon Musk buying Twitter - and how the next days and weeks could play out.”
And “On why he might’ve done it,” Steven Zeitchik links to Rachel Lerman’s piece at The Washington Post, Why did Elon Musk buy Twitter? And what will he do with it? She says, “I think everyone here knows what is going on today but IF YOU DON’T, then boy do I have the faq for you.”
Meanwhile, Matt Pearce of the Los Angeles Times takes a closer look at Elon Musk’s paradoxical vision of running Twitter: Less democracy, more freedom . “Twitter’s status as a publicly traded company without dual-class shares made it an outlier in the tech industry; power is more widely distributed among investors,” he notes. “Elon Musk’s arrival as a Zuckerberg-like corporate dictator would be a reversion to the mean.”
Last week, Kevin Dugan wrote in New York Magazine that Elon Musk’s Twitter Bid Is His Rupert Murdoch Move , and Brad Stone came to a similar conclusion, writing in his Bloomberg newsletter about how Twitter Would Elevate Elon Musk to New Media Mogul Status : More than just an economic takeover, “It’s also a political takeover, akin to Rupert Murdoch’s 1976 deal for the New York Post and 2007 purchase of the Wall Street Journal.”
Whatever happens, Evelyn Douek , writing in The Atlantic, believes Running Twitter Is Going to Disappoint Elon Musk . Or as Yoni Appelbaum puts it, “Elon Musk just spent $44 billion to acquire a rude surprise.”
Things fall apart
Another big media story over the past week was the news that CNN+ will shut down at the end of April , just a month after launching. CNN’s own Oliver Darcy and Brian Stelter reported that the decision was made by new management after CNN’s former parent company, WarnerMedia, merged with Discovery to form Warner Bros. Discovery earlier this month.
Before CNN’s confirmation came in, Variety’s Brian Steinberg had published news that Warner Bros. Discovery was Expected To Shut Down CNN+ .
There are a number of stories dissecting what happened and why, and as Donna Peters notes, “Most decisions aren’t simply about right vs wrong. They are judgment calls. The recent decision to kill CNN+ is a fascinating case study on judgment and decision-making.”
Peters links specifically to the piece by John Koblin , Michael M. Grynbaum and Benjamin Mullin of The New York Times, a deep dive Inside the Implosion of CNN+ . Or as Jim Rutenberg tweeted, “Things Fall Apart for $300 million.”
Jason Whittaker says it’s a “Good inside account on the collapse of #CNNPlus. There’s nuance to it - new owners, legalities that prevented action before launch - but it ultimately goes down as one of the most spectacular bombs in western media history.”
And there’s a lot of collateral damage. Highlighting, “For the rank-and-file, it was a brutal blow,” Lisa Fung urges, “As you read this story about the demise of @CNNplus, think about this quote from @kasie: ‘They left stable jobs, some of them moved across the country, they all took huge risks.’”
For more on the demise of CNN+, David Higgerson says, “This is a fascinating read by @NiemanLab on CNN+. Sesame Street references and the phrase ‘Wolf Blitzer Stan’ for good measure.” That’s Joshua Benton’s Nieman Lab piece, CNN, Plus or Minus: The news network’s new streaming platform is dead, and that’s okay .
“It wasn’t hard to see this day coming on the day CNN+ was announced. It didn’t take blowing hundreds of millions of dollars to figure it out,” Benton argues.
And with CNN+’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold , Dylan Byers of Puck seems to agree. As he points out, “Months before the deal closed, Discovery executives made it clear to both AT&T chief John Stankey and WarnerMedia chief Jason Kilar that they had questions and doubts about CNN+’s strategy, its cost, and the product itself.”
Not too big to fail
“If there is a single lesson to be learned here, it is that the marketplace for online communications, entertainment, and news media is never stable, and even the most powerful players can be dethroned.”
That’s Peter Suderman , writing at Reason about Twitter, Facebook, Netflix, and the Myth of Permanent Platform Power . “Today’s big powerful companies could become tomorrow’s also-rans, no government action required,” he warns.
And speaking of Netflix, Joy Press has a new piece for Vanity Fair on The Netflix Nightmare: What Happens When an Industry Becomes a Squid Game . She says, “I wrote about how the wild adventurous stage of streaming is giving way to more risk-averse ‘elevated broadcast’ programming.”
In other words, the edge is on the way out. As one writer “who specializes in prestige television” told her, “All those weird little shows streaming executives used to want to take a risk on a few years ago—it’s just not happening anymore.”
A very reasonable step
Led by OpenNews, more than 50 organizations representing journalists across the U.S. sent an Open Letter to Pulitzer Prize Awards last week, calling on the Prizes to “help improve diversity and transparency in the news industry” after seeing “crushing resistance” to reporting on newsroom diversity.”?
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They’re asking the prize committee to add one requirement starting in 2024: In order to be eligible for a Pulitzer Prize, a news organization must publicly share data about staff demographics.
In her piece about the letter, Journalism groups: Make the Pulitzers open only to news orgs that are transparent about their diversity , Nieman Lab’s Sarah Scire noted that the letter cited Nieman Lab’s recent reporting that just 303 of 2,500 print and online news organizations responded to a News Leaders Association survey.
Michael Corey thinks “Contests have reinforced some of journalism’s worst instincts: giving too much credit to individuals, rewarding internal gatekeepers, unequal access to who is able to do the best work. This is a very reasonable step in a better direction.”
The Russian media landscape
The Kremlin is trying to persuade Russians to quit Western social media for homegrown alternatives. But those options are turning out to be a tough sell, as Sarah E. Needleman and Evan Gershkovich of The Wall Street Journal report in their story, From YouTube to Rutube. Inside Russia’s Influence Campaign .?
But at least John Donnelly says this “Made me laugh: Russia, after blocking many foreign social media sites, has tried lamely to replace them with substitutes with names like RuTube, Fiesta and … Yappy.” And Peter W. Singer has “Immediate thoughts of Coming to America…”
Not nearly as laugh-inducing, Maria Repnikova’s piece for The Atlantic on how Russia’s Isolation From the West Will Outlast the War . Restrictions on press freedoms are unlikely to be rolled back when the war in Ukraine finally ends, she says.
Media biz news
Last week, Kim Bellware and Elahe Izadi of The Washington Post reported on how a fight over a vaccine column could kill one of the oldest alt-weeklies . The owner of the Chicago Reader objected when the staff raised concerns about the claims in his column, with the paper left facing financial ruin.
“They hate it when you fact-check them because ‘owners’ believe they are entitled to their own facts,” Brian Clarey tweeted, and Andrew Nelson added, “Losing the Chicago Reader over something this dumb would be a tragedy.”
Fortunately, tragedy has been averted. On Tuesday, Robert Channick of the Chicago Tribune reported that the Chicago Reader owner has stepped down amid employee protests, freeing the alternative newspaper to go nonprofit .?
In a piece for Nieman Lab, Luke Winkie observes that More digital media companies want to go public. Can their newsrooms survive? He says this is about “the BuzzFeed SPAC, the haunting specter of ‘Going Public,’ and the growing sense that Wall Street investment and, like, a functioning digital media newsroom are incompatible.”
Mark Stenberg shares, “I got to offer my thoughts to @luke_winkie for a @NiemanLab piece exploring the ramifications of the BuzzFeed News layoffs. Whether they want to or not, every digital media company that took venture capital will be forced to exit, and it could get ugly.” Which is why Sewell Chan says, “Today was one of those days in which I feel deliriously lucky to work in nonprofit news.”
But on that note, Rick Edmonds of Poynter wrote about how a $20 million commitment to create a new nonprofit news outlet in Houston is being met with skepticism from the city’s existing media ecosystem. As Edmonds points out, “Houston is not exactly a news desert.”
“Want to know what I called ‘the height of billionaire arrogance,’ and why I railed against ‘self-described venture philanthropists.’ I had some thoughts about the future of journalism in Houston when I spoke to @RickEdmonds,” tweets Chris Tomlinson .
The future of the Times
With Dean Baquet’s successor now determined, James Fallows offers up Two New Possibilities for the ‘Times’ in his Breaking the News newsletter: (1) Bring back a Public Editor, and (2) Re-examine coverage of 2016 and beyond. That piece includes, as John Warner highlights, “A reminder from @JamesFallows that the Times once INVITED the public to be its ombudsman, and they’ve now entirely reversed course.”
While she doesn’t believe Joe Kahn will bring back her old job of Public Editor, current Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan does think Joe Kahn can be a great New York Times editor . And “Here’s @Sulliview nailing the core challenge facing NYT and its new top editor,” Lisa Tozzi says.
Jay Rosen agrees: “This, this is the question. Thank you, @Sulliview, Those in the trade who do not want to face this question allow it to be misheard: as how much ‘opinion’ is permitted, as the prohibition on ‘taking sides,’ or as the scourge of ‘advocacy.’”
So, what did we learn from Kyle Pope’s sitdown for the CJR podcast with both the incoming and the outgoing editor, Dean Baquet & Joe Kahn: What’s next for the New York Times?
Wade Lambert thinks, “This is great interview by @kylepope -- the tension over Wordle was a surprise, and funny following Kahn’s comment about not wanting to just offer addictive features to hook readers: ‘Joe, you bought Wordle’--insightful on broader questions too.”?
Back to Rosen’s point, though, Dan Froomkin says, “Wow. This, from Joe Kahn , the next editor of the NYT, is the smarmiest most deceitful and clueless straw-man depiction of what critics are asking for I’ve ever seen. Ever. NOBODY has said anything remotely like that. For shame. This is fake news.” Welp.
The power of comedy and media
Devin Gordon has a lengthy piece in The Atlantic that attempts to untangle the question, What happened to Jon Stewart? (Gordon admits, “jon stewart was my first favorite late night host, which means that 17-year-old me feels deeply betrayed by this piece.”)
Steve Daniels says it’s an “Insightful piece that says as much about today’s media and entertainment landscape as it does about Jon Stewart’s struggles to get back in the game.” “Very thought-provoking piece examining the power of comedy and media,” adds Indrani Sen .?
Quoting from the piece, “In her casually insulting way,” Amanda Katz says that “does really capture one of the power modes of my lovely wife. Also, I still think Jon Stewart is cool. 2004 was a formative political year.”?
The subject, Kara Swisher , weighs in and clarifies, “Casually insulting is kinda my brand. That said I ?? @jonstewart and he is undoubtedly a comedy legend who set the stage for a still powerful genre of the medium. So, congrats on the well deserved Mark Twain Award this coming weekend.”
Adrienne Wichard-Edds of The Hollywood Reporter covered the big night, and reported that in his acceptance speech, Jon Stewart Warned “Authoritarianism” Is the Greatest Threat to Comedy .
He continued, “comedy is the bellwether, we’re the banana peel in the coal mine… Authoritarianism is the threat to art, theater, poetry…. What we have is fragile and precious, and the way to guard against it isn’t to change how audiences think, but to change how leaders lead.”
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