Media

1. Soon-Shiong’s Trump whisperer
2. Hayes on media
3. Shawn Ryan’s success
4. Another Trump bump?

Welcome to Semafor Media, where moguls can still learn a thing or two.

The big media story of the year kicked off with a vestigial piece of content: the unsigned newspaper editorial.

Nobody would have noticed a Los Angeles Times endorsement of Kamala Harris — until Max Tani revealed that its owner had spiked it. Ditto the Washington Post. Their rush decisions, much more than the substance of those choices, are emblematic of a generation of power brokers unused to politics. It’s contagious. The powerful executives gathered in Davos last week would literally run away when you asked them about the president’s new cryptocurrency, $TRUMP.

Those would-be moguls could take a lesson from a real one: Rupert Murdoch.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page is saying what even the business leaders excited by Donald Trump’s economic promise haven’t — that they are worried about the rule of law and the Trump family money chase. The Jan. 6 pardons, the Journal wrote, were “a stain.” The TikTok extension was “illegal.” The “crypto caper” was the “howling” product of “cowed” advisers.

Newspapers will probably stop running editorials. Publishing and journalism don’t need to be entwined in power politics.

But if you want to be a mogul, as the Murdochs have learned over the decades, you can’t make yourself quite that easy to bully.

Also today, a real sign-of-the-times litany of scoops: Quartz goes AI, UFO news is big news, Shawn Ryan is having a moment, and Leslie Berland talks creators and advertising. (Scoop count: 3)

Soon-Shiong finds his MAGA whisperer

The owner of the Los Angeles Times has been leaning on a veteran Republican who ran a pro-Trump super PAC to shape the future of one of the West Coast’s biggest news organizations.

The pharmaceutical billionaire who owns the publication, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, has publicly expressed a desire to revamp the editorial board and appointed Scott Jennings, CNN’s pro-Trump commentator, to a role with the paper. And he’s enlisted Eric Beach to help recruit new voices to join the editorial board and a new opinion forum that the LA Times is forming that will sit alongside it.

A veteran of California Republican politics, Beach ran Great America PAC, the pro-Trump super PAC that supported the Republican presidential candidate in 2016 and 2020, and paid a large FEC fine after accepting a contribution from undercover journalists from the Telegraph posing as representatives of a Chinese donor.

Soon-Shiong’s plans — for Jennings and Beach, but also, more generally, for the paper’s opinion section and editorial direction — remain slightly opaque, even to senior members of the newsroom.

Attention overload

“Look, I understand that there’s a kicking-the-dog impulse here. You don’t feel like you can control Trump or the voters that voted for him, but the media is adjacent to that,” MSNBC host Chris Hayes, author of The Sirens’ Call, told Semafor’s Dave Weigel in an interview set to publish tomorrow morning.

“And there are lots of totally legitimate criticisms of the way the mainstream media covered the campaign and cover Trump. Some I agree with, some are overstated. But what people are experiencing is this inability of the media to set a focal agenda when it pertains to Trump. They also see some asymmetry here, when it came to Joe Biden. The media was able to set an agenda after the first debate.

“But I’ve explained this to people: That was fueled by internal Democratic dissent. Trump never has that internal party problem now, and these stories get stamped out much faster. Another part of this is that everything is metabolized faster now. I was on air during the Boston Marathon bombing, which killed four Americans and injured a whole bunch of other people. There was a week-long manhunt and that was the number one story in the country for weeks, maybe a month. A dude with an ISIS flag kills 14 Americans on New Year’s Eve in New Orleans, and that’s metabolized and gone from the national consciousness in maybe 24 hours.

“Independent of the events or the ideology, nothing sticks. Some things do stick to Trump; I think the Jan. 6 pardons are hurting him, politically. But the general complaint I see is: Why can’t you set the agenda and make stuff stick to him? That’s a totally reasonable frustration, but also is part of a much broader set of circumstances and dynamics.”

The full interview will be linked in tomorrow’s Semafor Principals. Sign up here.

Shawn Ryan’s podcast success

Just a few years ago, Shawn Ryan was teaching himself how to run video and audio equipment so he could film a show about veterans and the military. The former US Navy SEAL set up a low-budget studio in his attic with cameras that could only record 30 minutes, and asked his wife to help monitor the video and audio. Now, 160 episodes in, he has one of the most listened-to podcasts in the country every week, with the previous election’s presidential candidates banging down his door to appear on the show — and the power to (accidentally) nearly sink a nomination for secretary of defense.

“I know we’re on the cutting edge of this, and I think this is a historic time in journalism and media in general, and we’re at the forefront of it,” Ryan told Semafor in a telephone call recently. “I want to be able to continue to be a big part of that and to help form the new landscape.”

With very little attention or promotion in legacy or conservative media, Ryan’s show has rocketed to the top of the Apple and Spotify podcast charts over the past two years and basically stayed there. The show focuses largely on the lives and experiences of famous and totally obscure veterans, with hours spent during each episode telling individual combat stories, discussing war trauma and PTSD, and occasionally reflecting on military policy today.

Some of the episodes dabble (or dive head-first) into conspiracy theories: In a recent episode, Ryan interviews a man who claims he encountered aliens; in another, he interviews an exorcist. But with Trump’s ascension to the White House, Ryan’s show has gained greater attention.

Signs of another Trump bump

Some news organizations and news media outlets are starting to see a bump in traffic, subscriptions, and viewership in the wake of the inauguration, a sign that opponents of Trump are starting to tune back into the news en masse. This week, MSNBC appeared to slightly pull itself back out of its ratings doldrums, noting slight gains among key viewers and in the key advertising demographic, and host Rachel Maddow’s show posted its largest viewership bump since the election. (Still, no cable network is performing stronger than Fox News, which continues to hold strong against cord-cutting trends with its dominant audience numbers.)

A spokesperson for the Guardian told Semafor it saw a 250% increase in fundraising last week, garnering $4 million in pledges compared to $1.6 million in the same period last year. The Guardian’s largest fundraising day was Jan. 21, the day after Trump’s inauguration, as stories about Trump’s executive orders and Elon Musk drove a major uptick in traffic. Substack told Semafor that its mobile app had repeatedly set daily active user records over the past several days, and the week of Jan. 13 was its biggest week ever in new paid subscriptions.

Former Washington Post opinion writer Jen Rubin’s new Substack, The Contrarian, garnered 10,000 paid sign-ups in its first 12 hours, according to figures shared with Semafor. Sam Stein, managing editor at the Bulwark, did not disclose the publication’s growth numbers but told Semafor that it had experienced “robust growth since the election in paid subscribers and YouTube subscribers,” both of which accelerated rapidly last week. A spokesperson for The Atlantic similarly did not offer specifics, but said the recent “dramatic growth” in subscribers had continued since the election, particularly tied to democracy-related and accountability journalism.

Despite internal tumult, a person familiar with the Washington Post’s subscriber information told Semafor that the paper experienced week-over-week bumps in subscribers. The Post has been attempting to claw back some of its losses — a spokesperson for the paper said it won back at least 20% of the subscribers the paper lost post-endorsement, and 74% of subscribers who are still in ‘cancelled’ status continue to engage with Washington Post content.

To really see where the media is heading, you need to follow the money. On this week’s episode of Mixed Signals, co-hosts Ben and Max bring on the CMO of Verizon and former CMO of Twitter, Leslie Berland, to talk about how creators have changed marketing and what she thinks is coming next. They also dive into how social media has rewired the minds of those who built it and how advertisers can stay relevant without crossing into cringe territory. Listen to the latest episode of Mixed Signals now.

Mark Cuban is an investor and entrepreneur.

⁛ News

Quartz AI: G/O Media head Jim Spanfeller is ramping up Quartz’s AI-generated stories, referring to the program internally as a “second newsroom” with the goal of publishing hundreds of stories a day, Semafor has learned.

Quartz previously used AI largely as a tool for regurgitating earnings reports, which it shared under the byline Quartz Intelligence Newsroom. But in recent days, the site has begun rewriting news stories under that byline, aggregating information from other news sources for its own semi-automated rewrites. Many of the stories written “with the help of generative AI,” ironically, have been about AI.

At the same time, the future of G/O’s physical New York newsroom is in question. The company’s sixth floor offices are up for rent in the coming weeks, according to a listing on Vornado. A spokesperson for G/O Media declined to comment.

Bundling: Jacob Donnelly, the writer of the excellent A Media Operator newsletter, published a piece casting doubt over The New York Times’ strategy of bundling games and cooking subscriptions with smaller publishers such as The Ankler. Instead, Donnelly suggested, the Times should bundle with local papers, many of which have been edged out by the Times even in their own markets.

Pardoned: Trump’s pardons last week included 11 people who were convicted of crimes against journalists on Jan. 6, 2021, per a press release shared this week by the organization Reporters Without Borders.

⁌ TV

More bundling: Comcast is launching its own $70/month sports and news bundle, filling the vacuum left when Disney and Fox decided to abandon a plan to launch Venu. The move is intended to help the company double down on one of the last advantages TV has over streaming: live event broadcasts.

Unexplained phenomena: UFO content continues to perform well for NewsNation, which took the UFO congressional hearings live last year and has garnered viewership on the weekends for its UFO documentaries, outpacing some of its cable news competitors on MSNBC.

Chin up: Sen. Bernie Sanders is pressuring CBS News not to settle the defamation lawsuit Trump brought against the network, arguing that it is winnable and the network should stand up for its free speech rights. Sanders’ call highlights the cautiousness in recent days some major news networks have shown when reporting on Trump, as many standards divisions have increasingly scrutinized anything that could give the president cause for filing another defamation lawsuit.

✦ Marketing

House ads: Substack doesn’t sell ads on its users’ newsletters and websites, so many of its top journalists and creators sell their own newsletter ads and sponsorships.

⁜ Tech

Good content: Senate Democrats held a private briefing this week in which they discussed the way that the party is behind in communicating in a new media ecosystem. The solution, they argued, was to create more content like that 2020 video of Virginia Sen. Mark Warner making a tuna melt in his kitchen…

Meanwhile: Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., joined Kat Abughazaleh on a stream this week to talk about military spending and Elon Musk.

Jubilation: Jubilee Media is Mr. Beast-ifying the political debate format to wild viral success. Its cage-match-esque political video series — which asks, for example, “Can 1 Woke Teen Survive 20 Trump Supporters?” — was responsible for some of the biggest viral moments of the 2024 election. Now, the group says it wants a 2028 presidential debate.

Google has found a cheaper way to run AI models, Google DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis told Semafor’s Reed Albergotti. That efficiency could give the company a long-term edge in Big Tech’s high-stakes innovation race.