It might not be your imagination

The Muck Rack Weekly newsletter includes some of the most talked about stories in the journalism and public relations communities over the past week, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial opinion of Muck Rack.

Media statistic of the week

Netflix added 5 million subscribers in the third quarter of 2024, for a total of 282.7 million subscribers worldwide, cementing “its status as subscription streaming TV’s dominant platform,” writes Alex Weprin of The Hollywood Reporter. Profits and margins also soared in Q3: “Netflix reported revenue of $9.83 billion and operating income of $2.91 billion, both up substantially from a year earlier, and each beating Wall Street expectations.”

This past week in the media industry?

The election and the war on truth

As we head into the final weeks of the 2024 election, Brian Fung of CNN has a new deep dive on how Republicans pushed social media companies to stop fighting election misinformation.?

“Writing this felt like a notebook-dump of the last five years,” Fung shares. “It explains the decline of social media's trust and safety era, tying together GOP attacks on content moderation; Elon's X; and the rise of tech VCs who reject social responsibility. All raised the costs of fighting election misinfo.”

For Politico Magazine, Calder McHugh interviewed PolitiFact founder Bill Adair, who made the case for fact-checking, even in an age of disinformation and polarization. Here’s that Q&A: ‘Lying Used to Have Greater Consequences’: A Fact Checker’s Dispatch From the War on Truth.

In an exclusive for The Washington Post, Geoffrey Fowler investigates how Meta’s platforms suppress election-related content, Don’t say ‘vote’: How Instagram hides your political posts.?

In other words, “If you’ve suspected that you’re yelling into a void about the election on Instagram, Facebook or Threads, it might not be your imagination,” Rachael Myrow says. “Meta has complete control over three of the most widely used tools for self-expression.” As Aditya Jha puts it, “How democracy dies on Instagram?”?

Meanwhile, the disinformation continues to flow. Derek Johnson of CyberScoop explains how Spanish-speaking voters are in the crosshairs of disinformation agents. And Steve Mills links to a story of yet “More disinformation for swing state voters. This time, newspapers purporting to be from the Catholic Church. But they're pink slime -- fake, phony and not from the church.” That investigation comes from Jennifer Smith Richards and Megan O’Matz of ProPublica, Who’s Mailing the Catholic Tribune? It’s Not the Church, It’s Partisan Media.

As Derek Cressman says, “Fake political content is in print as well as online. It’s moments like these when voters need news sources they can trust.”

In light of all of the above, Ty Rushing files this under “Things we love to see”: Sara Fischer of Axios reports Google will block election ads after polls close, a policy that’s “meant to prevent misinformation about voting, including candidates prematurely claiming victory before a race is called.”

On a recent episode of The Poynter Report Podcast with Tom Jones, NBC News’ Steve Kornacki explained Why America’s decentralized voting system is a good fail-safe against election fraud.

Calling it

The Associated Press has called winners in elections for more than 170 years, and once again this year we’ll see “[t]housands of news organizations rely on the AP for reporting who won, including NPR, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Univision, Google and Apple,” as Elahe Izadi writes at The Washington Post.

Izadi spoke with AP Executive Editor Julie Pace about how the organization is adding more transparency to its vote-calling process to combat misinformation: Who won? How AP calls the election, in ‘single largest act of journalism.’?

In another Politico Magazine Q&A, Steven Shepard talked with Arnon Mishkin, the director of the Fox News election night decision desk, about what he expects for the 2024 election: He Runs Fox News’ Decision Desk. Here’s How He Sees Election Night Coming.

As for when the news will be official, Mishkin says, “The over/under is Saturday.”

News teams, streams and screens

As Meta has backed away from news, LinkedIn has become the news publisher’s new best friend. At The Information, Sahil Patel takes a look at how LinkedIn is leaning into news, including testing a mobile news feed banner and expanding a video ad program with news publishers.

Amazon is “dipping its toe into the news business” with live election coverage from Brian Williams, as Nicole Sperling reports at The New York Times. “Election Night Live With Brian Williams” will deliver election results and analysis on November 5 from a studio in Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, “Some of TV news' top execs -- CBS' Wendy McMahon, NBC's Rebecca Blumenstein and Valari Staab and ABC's Debra OConnell -- talk to @Variety about efforts to break down walls between local and national personnel.” Brian Steinberg links to his piece in Variety about TV News’ Big Squeeze: Suddenly, Local and National Anchors All Play for Same Team, Stream and Screen.

The pressure to consolidate forces is driven in part by “a need for fresh content across most of the day, not just a few parts of it,” Steinberg writes. “And in an era when more Americans are inclined to distrust traditional media, local journalists still command favor.”

A freaking charming story

Would it surprise you to learn that Costco Has a Magazine and It's Thriving??

Is it ever. Costco Connection is now the nation’s third largest magazine (behind AARP: The Magazine and The AARP Bulletin). Mattie Kahn of The New York Times went to Issaquah, Wash., to see where “the merriest band of magazine makers in America…sets about producing a monthly print periodical that is delivered to more households across the United States than Better Homes & Gardens, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic combined.”

As Leslie Kelly puts it, “What a freaking charming story about... Costco, whaaa? Yup and @jimmykimmel is in the lede, so there ya go!” There ya go.

More notable media stories

• Final numbers show that Kamala Harris‘ sit-down with Fox News’ Bret Baier last week drew 7.8 million viewers. Deadline’s Ted Johnson notes, “By comparison, Special Report [with Bret Baier] averaged 2.51 million viewers in the third quarter.” And: “Earlier in the day, Donald Trump’s town hall with Fox News’ Harris Faulkner drew 3.1 million viewers.”
• “An internal Truth Social complaint reviewed by ProPublica calls for the firing of CEO Devin Nunes, alleging he has pursued an ‘America Last’ hiring policy, ‘consistently lied’ and made the company vulnerable to action by regulators.” That story, by Justin Elliott, Robert Faturechi and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica, Trump Media Whistleblower Blasts Company for Outsourcing Jobs Abroad as Betrayal of “America First.”?
• Deepak Adhikari links to “A must-read piece on the attack on the world's largest repository of webpages,” by Sarah Gotfredsen at Columbia Journalism Review, The organization that safeguards the internet’s history is under attack.
• Here’s more from Daniel Wu of The Washington Post on the organization “whose outsize cultural importance belies a small budget and lean infrastructure”: The world’s largest internet archive is under siege — and fighting back.
• Will Sommer of The Washington Post reports The New York Times and ProPublica are saying John Grisham poached their reporting for his new book ‘Framed.’ The dispute centers on a 2018 two-part series written by criminal justice reporter Pamela Colloff, who works jointly for the Times and ProPublica. ProPublica Editor in Chief Stephen Engelberg says they’ve found more than 50 examples from Grisham’s book that are similar to passages in Colloff’s articles.
• Los Angeles film and TV production has fallen to historically low levels, according to the latest report from FilmLA. “Every category of scripted production trails the five-year averages on both a per-quarter and year-to-date basis,” writes Winston Cho of The Hollywood Reporter.?
• Jesse Hassenger links to “this very comprehensive and informative (if maybe balanced-to-a-fault) Wrap piece” from Drew Taylor of The Wrap, Who Needs Critics When You Have Influencers? “Studios are leaning on social media influencers to create buzz for their films, and critics aren’t happy about it.”
• As he celebrates three years of his Read Max newsletter, Max Read offers some advice and lessons learned in How to Substack.
• Last up, for Columbia Journalism Review, Lucy Schiller documents the end of an era as Hemisphere, United’s in-flight publication, goes digital: The Final Flight of the Airline Magazine.

From the Muck Rack Team

Muck Rack for Educators is helping professors teach relevant public relations skills to their students. Among other things, “Muck Rack for Educators allows my students to see in real time what it’s like to pitch a journalist as opposed to running through hypothetical scenarios,” says Alexandrea Thrubis Stanley, an instructor at Michigan State University and director of undergraduate studies for the Department of Advertising and Public Relations. Head over to the blog to learn more about how this Michigan State University instructor is using Muck Rack for Educators to prepare her students for their first jobs in PR.