Noodling over one line in particular
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
According to ad intelligence company Guideline, linear TV ad spending fell 7% in the fourth quarter , marking the biggest decline since it started tracking U.S. ad spending in 2017. On the plus side, Jon Lafayette of Next TV reports, “Linear TV’s bright spot was live sports, which were up 3.4% in the quarter. National Football League programming led the way, drawing 22% more in ad spending than a year ago.”
Another notable exception to the downward trend in ad spend, the Oscar telecast. Last Thursday, Alex Weprin of The Hollywood Reporter reported that Disney had sold out its Oscars advertising inventory for Sunday’s telecast on ABC.
This past week in the media industry?
What the polls indicate
With the 2024 presidential race now officially a 2020 rematch, you might assume the voting public is pretty well-informed about the candidates, their track records and what they stand for. But that’s not exactly the case, according to some of the recent polling.?
The question is, why? Dan Froomkin of Press Watch says, “It seems like every poll result these days is an indictment of the corporate media: a clear indication that it has failed to create an informed electorate.”?
For the journalists and outlets interested in turning that around, he’s found 21 story assignments about Trump’s authoritarian threat in the 21-point “American Autocracy Threat Tracker” launched by Just Security.
As Froomkin puts it, “I find it highly unlikely that any of today’s newsroom leaders will look back some day and regret they didn’t write more about Biden’s age. But they may very well regret it if they stood by as we lost our democracy.”
Creating chaos and distrust
That new “local” news source in your area may not, in fact, be close to home at all.
In what Thomas Lin warns is a “Frightening new front in foreign disinformation campaigns and election interference,” Steven Lee Myers of The New York Times reports on the spate of mock news sites with Russian ties popping up in the U.S.
“Into the depleted field of journalism in America, a handful of websites have appeared in recent weeks with names suggesting a focus on news close to home: D.C. Weekly, the New York News Daily, the Chicago Chronicle and a newer sister publication, the Miami Chronicle,” Myers writes. “In fact, they are not local news organizations at all. They are Russian creations.”?
As Timothy Caulfield points out, “Much of the misinformation that drives polarization flows from state actors. The goal of Moscow (et al) is to create chaos and distrust — in public health, the democratic process, media and journalism, research — and they are winning.” A reminder to “Be careful what you read,” says Rosa Townsend .?
More on the collapse of Vice
The Vice post-mortem continues. Diana Moskovitz shares, “Did a Q&A with @MargotSusca, who has studied private equity in journalism for years, on Fortress Investment Group, the group that gutted Vice—or, as she said, ‘the locusts of the newspaper world.’”
Read Moskovitz’s interview with Margot Susca, author of “Hedged: How Private Investment Funds Helped Destroy American Newspapers and Undermine Democracy,” at Defector, "The Locusts Of The Newspaper World": How Fortress Investment Group Decimated Newspapers Before Gutting Vice .?
“More on the collapse of Vice, which had nothing to do with journalism and everything with greed,” says Derek Beres . Soraya Roberts dubs it a “really illuminating piece about private equity taking over newspapers (and the case of vice specifically) in which moskie (@dianamoskovitz ;)) interviews margot susca (@margotsusca), author of HEDGED, a book on this exact subject.”
Ownership shapes everything
In a Q&A with Sarah Scire of Nieman Lab, FT Group CEO John Ridding suggests, “Don’t expect help from the disruptors”: The FT’s chief executive on AI, “loyalist” readers, and its U.S. expansion .
He also talks about the benefits of being owned by Nikkei, and Ben Whitelaw says, “The most interesting part of this interview are the comments on the FT's ownership. Ownership shapes everything a media org does — if you've worked for one that chases quarterly subs or ads numbers, you'll know what I mean — but is so rarely discussed.”
Real numbers
As Josh Marshall says, “You've all seen news abt digital news sites going under. Maybe you've lost yr job because of it. If you follow that news you know in general abt the role of platforms, the collapse of the ad business. But few pubs will show you real numbers.”
In his piece, Why Is Your News Site Going Out of Business? Marshall has put together a case study of his own outlet, Talking Points Memo, and “shares a stunning graph of the implosion of programmatic advertising to his site—a 95% decline in just 8 years,” as Derek Thompson points out.
The princess, the palace and the press
After the Kate Middleton conspiracy theories shifted into high gear last week, Nieman Lab’s Laura Hazard Owen shared, “i went looking for a smart and fascinating story about Kate Middleton coverage and boy oh boy did @ellievhall provide. (now sending it to all my group chats).”?
She links to her Q&A with Ellie Halls , former royals reporter for BuzzFeed News, “This is just weird”: BuzzFeed News’ former royals reporter on Kate Middleton, Palace PR, and distrust in the media .
Halls says, “Over the past week, a LOT of people have been asking me when I was going to write something about Kate Middleton's ‘disappearance.’ I talked to @NiemanLab about the princess, the palace, and the press — and laid out a timeline of the entire saga.”
“Great article on the reporting surrounding the Royals at the moment, and I'm going to be noodling over one line in particular for a while,” Michael Andersen says.
As if things weren’t weird enough, the first official photo of the princess since her surgery was released on Sunday to coincide with Mother’s Day in the UK. Credited to William, the Prince of Wales, the photo shows Kate sitting in a chair surrounded by her children. But that pic didn’t exactly put an end to all the speculation.?
In fact, the mystery deepened as the “manipulated” Kate Middleton picture was pulled by the four big photo agencies , Reuters, AP, AFP and Getty Images. Abid Rahman of The Hollywood Reporter has more on the agencies’ “photo kill” notices.
AP’s Brian Melley explained why the organization retracted the image . And then on Monday, as Melley and Jill Lawless reported, Princess Kate apologized, saying she was experimenting with editing . That ought to put an end to it.
More notable media stories
From the Muck Rack Team
PR coach Michael Smart recently hosted a Muck Rack webinar all about how to follow up after pitching. Attendees submitted more than 100 questions during the webinar, and Michael spent nearly an entire hour answering them. Head over to the blog to access the webinar recording, download a complementary ebook and read Michael Smart’s answers to 10 FAQs about following up on pitches .
Storyteller, Thought Follower, and International Man of Mystery
8 个月So I've been looking at your daily and weekly newsletters, looking for something about how Road & Track pulled Kate Wagner's brilliant piece about Formula 1 racing minutes after it was published, and so far, nada. What gives? Isn't this kind of bread and butter for you guys? Did I miss this somehow? WaPo covered it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2024/03/05/formula-one-road-track-kate-wagner/