Making the internet a tiny bit better
Media statistic of the week
According to a new Pew Research Center study of top-ranked podcasts in the United States, the world of podcasts is a diverse one, covering a wide range of topics, but overall, there’s “A whole lotta true crime,” as Larry Dignan says.
Indeed, true crime is the most common topic, making up 24% of the 451 top-ranked podcasts. The researchers also found that 15% of the top-ranked podcasts are focused primarily on news and current events, and 18% are affiliated with a news organization.
This past week in the media industry?
Penalized for doing their jobs
After the homes of New Hampshire Public Radio journalists were vandalized following an exposé involving a prominent businessman in the state, federal prosecutors have charged three men in the case, which spotlights attacks on the media.?
David Enrich of The New York Times has details on the criminal charges, “which highlight the intensifying pattern of physical and legal assaults on journalists for investigating the wealthy and powerful.”
David Chen notes from the story that “Feds say ’Subject 1’ -- who had been the subject of an @nhpr investigation into sexual misconduct -- was in frequent contact with the person accused of directing the 3 men charged in the case.”
Attacks on the media have also come in the form of financial blows. As Enrich says, “Here’s another example of journalists getting penalized for doing their jobs.”
In her New York Times piece, How Local Officials Seek Revenge on Their Hometown Newspapers, Emily Flitter wrote about how Delaware County, New York, stripped The Reporter of a lucrative contract to print public notices after an official complained that the county government was not being portrayed “in a positive light.”
“Absolutely shameful behavior from Delaware County officials against the @waltonreporter (deftly exposed by @FlitterOnFraud). Kudos to the paper’s publisher for not backing down!” says Asher Stockler.
It’s not just Delaware County. Per Flitter: “In recent years, newspapers in Colorado, North Carolina, New Jersey and California, as well as New York, have been stripped of their contracts for public notices after publishing articles critical of their local governments. Some states, like Florida, are going even further, revoking the requirement that such notices have to appear in newspapers.”
The mess at Reddit
After thousands of subreddits went dark last week to protest Reddit’s API changes, Hayden Field and Jonathan Vanian of CNBC report that Reddit is in crisis as prominent moderators loudly protest the company's treatment of developers.
Per Field and Vanian, this latest controversy underscores the fraught relationship between Reddit’s leadership team and its community ahead of a coming IPO.
Their piece takes us “Inside the mess at Reddit: Jonathan Vanian and @haydenfield talked to a bunch of moderators about why they're joining the protest and shuttering their communities,” Matt Rosoff shares. “The mods don't think Reddit's API should be free, necessarily, but…”
Jason Ng points out, “Reddit's moderators are volunteers. Yes, they have FREE LABOR, the kind that Facebook spends millions on. Somehow, Reddit still couldn't make money.”
Not to mention, “I like how the Reddit CEO thinks he can win a fight against nerds with nothing else to do,” tweets Ben Collins. “Good luck buddy.”
In his Substack newsletter, Ed Zitron says Reddit is symbolic of Tech's Reckoning. Like Reddit, many startups took too much VC money “despite never having any path to profitability,” he argues. “The bill always comes due, and Reddit's investors have put the company in a hole that will destroy Reddit's product.”
A sprawling metropolis of garbage
In an eye-opening piece for The Verge — The store is for people, but the storefront is for robots — Mia Sato reports on how “the SEO arms race has left Google and the web drowning in garbage text, with customers and businesses flailing to find each other.”
The rise of generative AI tools for producing SEO bait means it’s only going to get worse.?
“The result is SEO chum produced at scale, faster and cheaper than ever before,” writes Sato. “The internet looks the way it does largely to feed an ever-changing, opaque Google Search algorithm.”
“Yes to all of this,” tweets Joshua Topolsky. “Google has allowed search to become a sprawling metropolis of absolute garbage.”
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In fact, Srivats Lakshman thinks, “The internet is broken. There’s no other way to say it. Search engines have ruined search with SEO & keyword requirements, and businesses are now straddled with useless tasks just to be visible, not even make a profit.”
But Nicholas Jackson suggests that “It doesn't need to suck to create content w/ SEO in mind. And SEO doesn't need to be the only thing you have in mind. It's just another skill you need in publishing. You can win a SERP w/ great reporting, making the Internet a tiny bit better for everyone.”
That’s a wrap
After just 12 episodes, the deal between Archewell, the podcast company owned by Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, and Spotify has come to an end. Anne Steele and Sarah Krouse of The Wall Street Journal report that the Sussexes haven’t “met the productivity benchmarks required to receive the full payout” from the roughly $20 million multi-year deal they signed in 2020.
Bill Simmons, founder of The Ringer and now a senior Spotify podcast executive, had some choice words for Megan and Harry, calling them ‘grifters’ on his own podcast, as Sian Cain reported at The Guardian.
James Cridland of Podnews rounded up some of the other reporting on the deal’s end in Spotify breaks up with Meghan.
Sonny Bunch allows that “Podcasting is a weird biz in that a handful of people can get rich, a decent number of people can make a living, and several magnitudes more can make extra $ as a side gig, but companies spent billions trying to force inorganic superstars into that world.”
Box office uh-oh
Pamela McClintock of The Hollywood Reporter covered the weekend’s mostly dismal Box Office: Ezra Miller’s ‘The Flash’ in Trouble, Pixar’s ‘Elemental’ Gets Iced.
Borys Kit was already headlining it “Box office uh-oh,” and then the actual numbers came in: “It's worse than anyone imagined. #Flash opening to $55.1M, #Elemental debuting to $29.5 over 3-day weekend, lower than even yesterday's muted numbers.”
For more context, Peter T. Chattaway offers these comparisons: “From the '90s to today: #TheFlash's $55mil opening is a *little* higher than the $45.7mil opening for Michael Keaton's last appearance as #Batman in 1992, while #Elemental's $29.5mil narrowly beats 1995's #ToyStory ($29.1mil) for lowest Pixar opening ever.”
“Elemental is bombing with a $29.5m opening…it’s time for Big Questions to be asked at Pixar,” says Matthew Belloni: “What price quality and making things that are GREAT?”?
Belloni tackles the big question of whether Pixar has lost its magic touch in his latest for Puck, The Troubling Pixar Paradox.
Remembering Daniel Ellsberg
Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers, died last week at 92. Robert McFadden wrote the New York Times obit for Ellsberg, noting that the Pentagon Papers disclosure “set up a First Amendment confrontation between the Nixon administration and The New York Times, whose publication of the papers was denounced by the government as an act of espionage that jeopardized national security. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the freedom of the press.”
David Cloud calls this “The definitive obit of this massively significant person whose deep involvement in the national security state and decision to close its secrets to the NYT and others for the good of the country was one of the most important events of the 20th century.”
Harrison Smith and Patricia Sullivan wrote the Washington Post’s obituary for the military analyst and whistleblower whose release of a trove of papers in 1971 exposed the secret history of lies and deception behind America’s military operations in the Vietnam War, hastening the end of the war.
The leak led Henry Kissinger to call him “the most dangerous man in America.” Luke Savage calls Ellsberg “A true American hero.”
“The leaker of all leakers and a reminder that most journalists do not obtain information without the bravery of people like him,” tweets Jonah Owen Lamb. “Probably the most influential whistleblower ever,” adds Jack Power.
Ellsberg went on to co-found the Freedom of the Press Foundation. In an essay for The Guardian, the foundation’s executive director, Trevor Timm, remembers Daniel Ellsberg as one of history’s most consequential figures and takes inspiration from both how he lived his life and how he faced death.
More notable media stories
From the Muck Rack Team
Muck Rack’s annual state of PR report reveals how PR pros are spending their time, the most effective ways they’re engaging with journalists, their current challenges and more. We recently hosted a webinar to analyze the survey’s results with three panelists: Brandi Boatner, manager of digital and advocacy communications at IBM, Danielle Cerasani, VP of enterprise technology at Weber Shandwick, and Michael Brito, global head of analytics at Zeno Group. Head over to the blog for a few key takeaways from the webinar, including the top 4 PR challenges in 2023 (and how to overcome them), and to access the on-demand recording.
Corporate Engagement at LinkedIn
1 年I love that you lead with a stat Gregory.