Meta’s layoffs make it official: Facebook is ready to part ways with the news
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Monday, November 14, 2022
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Meta's layoffs make it official: Facebook is ready to part ways with the news“Meta had the resources at its peak to do incredible things. Not just the dollars, but the encouragement to think of the best outcome possible, to make the biggest impact we could.” By Sarah Scire. |
What We’re Reading
The Washington Post / Drew Harwell
A fake tweet sparked panic at Eli Lilly and likely cost Twitter “millions of dollars in ad revenue” →
“Company officials scrambled to contact Twitter representatives and demanded they kill the viral spoof, worried it could undermine their brand's reputation or push false claims about people's medicine. Twitter, its staffing cut in half, didn't react for hours…By Friday morning, Eli Lilly executives had ordered a halt to all Twitter ad campaigns.”
The Verge / Makena Kelly
The midterms turned politicians into content creators →
“More than 8 million young people became eligible to vote this year. They want the same authenticity they seek online from their elected representatives.”
Puck
Sam Bankman-Fried, the failed crypto billionaire, had been investing in/donating to a lot of news organizations lately →
“The then-billionaire hired a team of advisers who have been making investments in nonprofit and for-profit newsrooms over the last year, including in Vox, The Intercept, ProPublica, The Law and Justice Journalism Project, an international affairs podcast, and most prominently, Semafor.”
The Verge / Makena Kelly
Why can’t pollsters reach Gen Z? →
“By and large, pollsters rely on people picking up their calls or clicking through the links they send out over text to complete their surveys… ‘Young people are more astute and ignore those links more than other people,’ John Ray, director of polling at YouGov Blue, told The Verge this week. ‘Their discipline with their devices is much better.'”
Press Gazette / Bron Maher
How the BBC plans to crack U.S. news (without getting sucked into U.S. culture wars) →
“BBC News believes it can be ‘an antidote’ to disinformation and polarization in the U.S. news landscape…’Because we have no dog in the fight, because we're not fearful of anyone…'”
Freedom of the Press Foundation
In Ohio, a newspaper editor has been arrested for doing something the Supreme Court says is constitutionally protected →
Derek Myers of the Scioto Valley Guardian “was charged with felony wiretapping for publishing audio that a source recorded during a high-profile murder trial…[ignoring] the Supreme Court's recognition over two decades ago that reporters are not to blame for unlawful recordings by sources.”
Bloomberg / Lucas Shaw
Media companies are having their worst year in three decades →
“Shares in the largest US media companies have dipped more than 50% in 2022, far worse than the broader market. (Tech companies aren't faring much better.)…The rate of cord-cutting has accelerated dramatically in the past few years, according to MoffettNathanson. Cable companies are now losing close to 10% of their customers a year.”
The New York Times / Katherine Rosman
“The last grown-up in Washington journalism” prepares to sign off →
“It was her last time as an election night anchor, but Judy Woodruff was not in the mood to talk about how she was feeling. With Congress hanging in the balance and election denialism in the air, she was too busy, too focused on the task at hand, to reflect on how she had gotten to this moment in a career that began more than 50 years ago.”
The Guardian / Zoe Williams
Maria Ressa: “In 2024, democracy could fall off a cliff” →
“It's like that Martin Niemöller quote. In the Philippines, as a joke, we've been saying since 2017: ‘First, they came for the journalists. We don't know what happened next.'”
The Guardian / Alex Hern
Joining the herd: What’s it like moving from Twitter to Mastodon? →
“The service is also suffering more prosaic technical pains as its user base grows by millions each week: larger instances are struggling to update posts in real time, admins are watching the moderation backlog grow, and costs are mounting for volunteer hosts who never expected to be absorbing an appreciable fraction of the traffic of a $44bn social network.”
Media Maelstrom / Margaret Sullivan
Margaret Sullivan has a Substack now →
“Coming soon.”
The Ankler / Richard Rushfield
Turns out Michael Lewis has spent the past six months hanging out with Sam Bankman-Fried for a book →
“Of course, the events of the past week have provided a dramatic surprise ending to the story.”
Semafor / Max Tani and Liz Hoffman
Sam Bankman-Fried had plans for a Matt-and-Nate-heavy Substack competitor →
“The Substack writer Matt Yglesias confirmed that he had spoken to Bankman-Fried about the project, saying he was ‘flattered but not interested.’ The 538 founder Nate Silver told Semafor that he spoke to an FTX executive about the project, and was similarly not interested. Other names Bankman-Fried floated included Bloomberg's Matt Levine.”
New York / Shawn McCreesh
“I’m, in the best sense, hopefully, unpredictable”: A profile of Axel Springer CEO Mathias Döpfner →
Politico “plans to add 100 to 150 new employees over the next year to staff up in foreign and domestic capitals and power centers.”
Substack / Corey Hutchins
Colorado’s Lauren Boebert once again confounds the state press corps →
“Throughout the 2022 campaign, other state and national journalists trekked through ‘Boebert Country’ checking the pulse of voters or muckraking about her personal history, and yet apparently didn't learn enough to forecast a close race — much less her potential defeat.”
Digital Content Next / Esther Kezia Thorpe
Why the U.K.’s New Statesman turns a long-read features into a podcast every week →
“The performance element is not to be underestimated. It only works if you've got people who are really good at reading out loud.”
Journalism.co.uk / Jacob Granger
A U.K. local news outlet’s two-year roadmap to breaking even →
“As a newsletter-first publication, that means keeping close tabs on how often emails are forwarded on.”
Popular Information / Judd Legum
Political media is broken →
“Prediction-based coverage comes at a high cost because it crowds out the coverage that voters actually need. To make an informed decision, voters need to know the practical impact of voting for each candidate.”
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