The numbers (they ain’t good)
Media statistic of the week?
Collectively, ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC and The CW averaged 77.4 pilot orders a year over the past decade. This season, however, they combined for only 35 pickups, a 10-year low. Total series orders across the networks also hit a decade low. But, as Scott Roxborough notes at The Hollywood Reporter, they’re not done ordering new shows, which is also a sign of the times:?
“ABC, Fox and NBC still have multiple shows in consideration for a midseason series pickup as the development cycle continues its evolution to a year-round process…You could call the move broadcast taking a page from streaming (and basic cable),” he writes. “But it’s also an admission that the free-spending days where networks would buy a combined 300 comedy and drama scripts every season weren’t financially or qualitatively the best approach.”
This past week in the media industry?
After Buffalo
In Buffalo and everywhere, it’s time for local journalists to reckon with the racism we overlooked, writes Margaret Sullivan in her Washington Post column. She looks at how the Buffalo massacre exposed not just violent racial hatred but the legacy of inequitable policies from years ago.
Dan Froomkin of Press Watch believes the replacement rhetoric is the litmus test the media has been waiting for. He urges media outlets to call it what it is when reporting on replacement theory: “Don’t say it’s being ‘sanitized’ or ‘mainstreamed.’ Say it’s an abhorrent racist trope and that anyone who’s spreading it is a malicious racist.”
And at the New Yorker, Kyle Chayka explores The Online Spaces That Enable Mass Shooters. Chayka shares, “I wrote about the online spaces that enabled and encouraged the Buffalo shooter and other attackers, the disturbing software kit of terrorists.”?
He adds, “Many people want more private social-media spaces like Discord, but that can also make private groups harder to monitor, requiring more moderation investment from tech companies to catch such hateful content.”
After George Floyd
“After the George Floyd killing in 2020 there was [a] wave of hirings: Black, Brown and Asian executives moved into powerful positions in media companies. @THR had the bright idea to check in with them and ask how it’s going.”?
Jay Rosen links to Rebecca Sun’s piece at The Hollywood Reporter examining How the Current Wave of More Inclusive Leadership Is Changing Newsrooms. “Multiple editorial leaders emphasized their perception of inclusive coverage not as a niche, but rather a lens to be applied across all reporting,” Sun notes.
Miles Moffeit of The Dallas Morning News reports that a freelance photographer arrested during the George Floyd protests in Dallas has sued the city. Chris Rusanowsky was arrested in 2020 after capturing a Dallas police officer blasting a BLM protester at close range with pepper balls. He’s the 50th U.S. journalist to bring such a suit since the protests erupted two years ago.
A Substack deep dive
Joe Pompeo profiled Substack for Vanity Fair’s June issue, Substack’s Founders Dive Headfirst Into the Culture Wars: The newsletter company is on a mission to disrupt the attention economy away from “cheap outrage and flame wars,” but its refusal to engage with hate and disinformation means controversy is never far behind.
“‘This year we passed a million paid subscriptions, which is a crazy number. But it’s also a confidence-giving number,’ Substack’s @hamishmckenzie says. Here’s why,” tweets Brian Stelter.
In addition to interviewing Substack co-founders Jairaj Sethi, Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie for this piece, Pompeo spoke with journalists like Luke O’Neil and Emily Nunn, as well as Patti Smith, George Saunders, Salman Rushdie and others about their experiences with the newsletter platform.
On Twitter, he highlights this “Fun tidbit: when @hamishmckenzie agreed to do an Elon book, he started by trying to back-channel to Musk’s mom, whose email was on her personal website. She promptly dimed him out to Tesla PR. But then Elon offered him a job (He later did the book anyway).”
Speaks for itself
Elon was the subject of some bombshell reporting last week by Rich McHugh of Business Insider, who discovered that SpaceX paid a $250,000 settlement in 2018 after a SpaceX flight attendant alleged sexual misconduct against Musk.?
Musk denied the allegations in a series of late-night tweets, as Rob McLean and Jackie Wattles reported at CNN. Insider editor-in-chief Nicholas Carlson tweeted in response, “We stand by our story, which is based on documents and interviews and speaks for itself.”
Carlson also went on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” to talk about why he decided to publish the sexual harassment allegation against Musk, a move Sam Whitmore says “took big courage.” Ramishah Maruf has highlights from Brian Stelter’s interview with Carlson.
Meanwhile, “What a headline. What a throughline. Good job & looking fwd to your book @dgelles!” Rachel Sklar links to David Gelles’s New York Times piece, How Jack Welch’s Reign at G.E. Gave Us Elon Musk’s Twitter Feed, an excerpt from his new book on Welch, “The Man Who Broke Capitalism.”??
Richard Bradley describes it as “A searing and important reevaluation of Jack Welch’s leadership and legacy.” In it, Gelles argues that the notion that Jack Welch was the greatest C.E.O. of all time is “one of the most enduring bits of disinformation of all.”
Multiple things can be true
Speaking of disinformation, in his Galaxy Brain newsletter, Charlie Warzel writes that The Disinformation Board Is the Latest Cursed News Story. This piece is about the reactions to Taylor Lorenz’s scoop at The Washington Post, How the Biden administration let right-wing attacks derail its disinformation efforts.?
On Twitter, Warzel explains, “Wrote about the Disinformation Board saga & how it’s an example of a kind of viral Cursed News Story, where multiple things are true at once but there’s little room for that in the discourse (another Cursed News Story: The Hunter Biden Laptop).”?
He adds that “you should read it first but if you’re looking for more context...i newslettered on it last summer in relation to newsrooms getting played and also today re: the disinfo board situation.”
领英推荐
Nothing is true
Masha Gessen of The New Yorker spoke with current and former employees of Russian state television for a piece that takes us Inside Putin’s Propaganda Machine. “In which nothing is true (except what’s in this story),” tweets Gessen. You’ll also find, as Brian Katulis says, “Good insights into Russia’s troll power machine.”
At Defense One, Kevin Baron writes that Putin’s Propaganda Machine Is What America’s Far-Right Wants. “WARNING,” he tweets: “National security leaders ignore the far-right’s fake journalism machine at our peril.”?
Baron adds that “I wrote about the last CPAC meeting (in Orlando) and how the right wants to replace journalism with total propaganda. Now they’re doing it on Putin’s doorstep.”?
As David Gilbert reported at Vice, U.S. journalists were barred from the conservative conference last week, where the star attraction was Hungary’s authoritarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. This was despite repeated assurances from the American Conservative Union that access would be provided.
Meanwhile, for the Steady newsletter, Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner wrote about Fox News and its relationship with the GOP in a piece headlined, Crossing the Line.?
“Dr. Oz’s admission of [Sean] Hannity’s help is stunning in what it makes clear. There is not even a fig leaf of a pretext of separation between the politicians and those who purportedly report on them. Fox News is an organ of the Trumpian Republican Party,” they conclude.
As Michael Kodas puts it, “Oz’s thanks to Hannity for campaign advice and election help exposes what’s been obvious for years - Fox is a propaganda arm of the radical right Republican Party.”
This absurd story
At Current, Leigh Giangreco reports that Stel Kline, a former Morning Edition host for South Dakota Public Broadcasting, has filed a wrongful termination appeal against the state network.?
In a Twitter thread last month, Kline, who is transgender, said that “through this very first day on the job, it was just glaringly evident to me that personal bias clouds judgment in this workplace.”?
Tweets Wesley Lowery, “another journalist loses their job not because of any issue with any of their journalism but because their personality identity and something they did on social media theoretically could lead some theoretical reader to see them as not objective.”
“But, bc I am trans I have been verbally harassed. When I have shared this, the director of journalism content tells me I have lost credibility. That I am not objective,” Lewis Wallace quotes Kline from the Twitter thread, adding, “PLZ read and share this absurd story.”
Or as Sopan Deb puts it, “Wow, this is awful.”
Desperate times…
Kaya Yurieff dug into the story behind the layoffs and declining numbers at celebrity shoutout app Cameo for her piece for The Information, At Cameo, Boom Times Give Way to Sharp Sales Slowdown.
Jessica Toonkel urges, “Come for the hard numbers (they ain’t good) and stay for the kicker featuring convicted criminals.” Or as Sarah Krouse puts it, “Come for the detailed Cameo financials, stay for the Santa suits, remote work backtracking and convict courting.”?
Yes, “This is how desperate it’s gotten at Cameo,” tweets Amir Efrati, Overall, a “Wild, deep read,” as Mark Di Stefano says.
Not a requiem
Last up, here’s one more from Vanity Fair’s Joe Pompeo that’s worth checking out: With the Wind Out of Its Sails, a Battered BuzzFeed News Forges On.?
In which “BuzzFeed’s newsroom is getting gutted while it’s simultaneously churning out some incredible investigative journalism,” tweets Simon Owens.
“This isn’t a BuzzFeed News requiem—at least not yet,” Pompeo notes. After the buyouts, the newsroom’s head count will fall from around 250 to somewhere between 70 and 80. But the investigations team isn’t going down without a fight.
Executive editor Ariel Kaminer tweeted, “Today @BuzzFeedNews investigations desk published the last of FIVE major investigations in FIVE weeks. I, for one, am a wee bit exhausted! As are the astoundingly talented reporters. ???? to see it memorialized here. But don’t count @BuzzFeedNews out!”
“Buzzfeed News built an absolutely killer operation. Imagine if the way we financed teams of smart ambitious journalists was with public funds instead of capital markets demanding returns it is impossible for good journalism to deliver,” tweets Brian Edwards-Tiekert.
Scott Pham is “Proud to have been a part of this savage, ambitious team. What a year. What a newsroom!"
A few more
From the Muck Rack team
We’re still hard at work analyzing data from the 2022 State of PR report, but we wanted to give you a sneak peek at just a few of the survey results. We partnered with organizations like PRSA, NBPRS, HPRA and more to make this our most comprehensive State of PR yet. Head over to the blog for an infographic with a sneak preview of the State of PR 2022 survey results and to sign up to get first access to the report.