Media

1. John Thornton’s legacy
2. Piers Morgan’s circus
3. National Press Club drama
4. EU vs. Silicon Valley
5. Lessons from Deadwood

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I spent last week talking to some of the people in and around Brexit, Britain’s crashing out of the European economic system and the closest parallel to what the US did with global trade last week. Then, the media and political class vastly overestimated how much voters cared about the “economy.”

“British voters were told Brexit would hurt them in the wallet but they voted for it anyway,” Sun political editor Harry Cole, a pro-Brexit voice, said. “They either didn’t believe the doomsday warnings or they didn’t care, because the message they wanted to send the elites trumped the short-term pain.” The politics, he said, “defies the usual logic and playbook of ‘it’s the economy, stupid.’”

For some Brits, the trade-off — a prouder, more independent, poorer, and weaker nation — may have been worth it, said Tim Shipman, the Sunday Times commentator who wrote the book on Brexit. Others “didn’t believe it would make them poorer — or more to the point, didn’t believe that the things that countries measure to decide whether they’re richer had any impact on them.”

Last week, Brexit’s architects could finally point to a dividend, as one of them, Matthew Elliott, noted to me: Britain got hit with smaller Trump tariffs than did the EU. He said that Trump is succeeding one place where Boris Johnson failed — in being “very, very clear with the rest of the world why you’ve done this and what you want the outcome to be.” So far so good, perhaps.

But another lesson of Brexit is that politico-media bubbles burst. Today most Brits think Brexit was a mistake, though there’s little political will to rejoin the EU. And the people who rebelled against immigration and globalization, said Shipman, “are still looking for someone who can deliver for them.”

Also this week: The tragic loss of a local news champion, Piers Morgan’s expansion, a spat at the National Press Club, the Post looks at micropayments, and doubts about European content moderation. (Scoop count: 3, counting generously. Can’t wait for Max’s return next week.)

Semafor’s biggest event yet, the World Economy Summit in Washington, DC, is just weeks away. On April 23-25, hear from top business executives like Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos and political leaders like Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. Sign up to attend virtually or in-person.

Remembering John Thornton

Nobody — no editor, publisher, politician, philanthropist, or star — did anywhere near as much for American journalism in this century as John Thornton, a warm, hectic, and diminutive Austin investor who pretty much invented nonprofit local news, and who died last week at 59. In 2008, as the decline in local newspapers accelerated, Thornton pioneered the idea that the kind of local donors who supported the opera or the governor should also fund vibrant, energetic, fair, fun, local political journalism. The Texas Tribune enriched his state’s civic life, and it provided the framework for the rare bright spots amid the catastrophe of the American newspaper business: Calmatters and the Baltimore Banner, The City and Mississippi Today. Thornton had a hand in those projects, too, and he raised hundreds of millions of dollars for the cause with his American Journalism Project, acting with massive impact as the rest of us wrung our hands.

“It’s not an exaggeration to say John Thornton saved American journalism,” Tribune cofounder Evan Smith wrote. I was lucky to count Thornton as a friend, and as a partner in Semafor. I’m shattered by his loss, but also stunned by the scope of his legacy.

— Ben

Piers Morgan gets it

Joe Rogan and one of his podcast guests, the comedian Dave Smith, last week paused to marvel at Piers Morgan and the “circus” he’s created on YouTube: “He’s probably the only one from the old guard of corporate media who figured it out,” Smith observed. Morgan, who just turned 60, is a big beast of UK media who recently went independent from News Corp. He made news on Mixed Signals this week about raising money to expand his Uncensored brand. But the most interesting part of the conversation was this year’s great media theme: the collapse of old and new media into one wild scramble, one embodied by his show. On Uncensored, on any given day, a congressman is debating a YouTuber or a serious academic is talking to a Rogan regular. I’m not sure if this makes his audience smarter or dumber, but Morgan has clearly felt his way to the near future, and it’s working.

Listen to the latest episode of Mixed Signals now.

Journalism organizations don’t get it

Politicians have learned that you can win by fighting for ideas and values, but you lose by merely defending sclerotic 20th century institutions for their own sake. It’s a lesson journalism organizations would do well to learn. The White House Correspondents Association made itself vulnerable to Donald Trump’s attacks by failing to modernize a system that prioritized fading broadcasters, and it has struggled to respond to him, beyond asking its members to wear First Amendment pins and contemplating a sit-in.

Last week, the National Press Club (“The World’s Leading Professional Organization for Journalists™”, according to its website) rejected the MAGA show War Room’s lightning rod White House correspondent, Natalie Winters, from membership. I can understand the instinct to exclude someone whose coverage focuses on cheerleading power and mocking her rivals (and whose clips at the War Room-adjacent National Pulse include headlines like “Biden Foundation Promoted Transgenderism for 18-Month-Old Babies”). But of course, Winters dined out on her exclusion. The club declined to explain its decision beyond citing the “standards of journalism” and its president, AP’s Mike Balsamo, didn’t respond to my suggestion that journalistic organizations don’t get to be this opaque. DC’s establishment media really seems to be whistling past the graveyard in a radically changing world.

EU vs. Big Tech

The Trump administration has reportedly made clear that it wants Europe to drop content moderation requirements for US tech giants. Vice President JD Vance offered hints of the crusading approach at the February AI summit in Paris, where he denounced two European laws: the privacy-focused GDPR (“endless legal compliance costs”) and the Digital Services Act (“policing so-called misinformation”), and negotiators have followed up. The big US platforms are likely to win these fights, the German legislator and Big Tech critic Franziska Brantner told me. The companies “do not pretend any more that they want to comply,” and the Digital Services Act depends on their compliance, while her government has more urgent priorities, like auto exports.

The bigger question for Big Tech now may have to do with another piece of European regulation, the trust-busting Digital Markets Act. It remains unclear to Silicon Valley’s giants whether Trump wants to make the US a shining MAGA city on a Hill, crusading against speech regulation (good!) and against Big Tech (uh-oh) around the world — or whether the US government’s relationship with tech in Europe will be like its partnership with, say, the United Fruit Company in Guatemala. Mark Zuckerberg, who recently bought a place in DC, is hoping for the latter approach, The Wall Street Journal recently reported.

Speaking about the DMA on Thursday, European Commission Executive Vice President Teresa Ribera suggested the EU isn’t likely to back down, per Semafor’s Mathias Hammer. “What is very important for us is to ensure that there is an increasingly credible response to ensure thorough compliance with the regulation,” Ribera said.

Netflix’s ‘Deadwood’ moment

When Netflix content chief Ted Sarandos began to worry that nervous rivals were cutting the service off from licensing their shows, he ran one last test before turning to the expensive business of original content in 2012. “I said, ‘Let’s pick a show that would be impossible for them to sell anywhere else, and let’s offer an enormous amount of money, and if they say no to that, then we’re never going to get there,’” he told me in an interview last month that Semafor just put online. The show was Deadwood, with language “so filthy” that no broadcaster would take it. When HBO’s Richard Plepler turned his offer down, Sarandos knew: “We’d better get good at this ourselves.”

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Liz Hoffman is Semafor’s business and finance editor. Read her reporting on all things tariffs in Semafor Business: Sign up here.

✰ Hollywood

• Quibi was ahead of its time: “Micro-dramas” are booming in Asia, and with them a new wave of apps, Deadline reports, listing players including “Dramabox, Goodshort, Reelshort and Shortmax — which offer episodes lasting for around 60 to 90 seconds.”

⁜ Tech

• Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie has the latest essay trying to make sense of this media moment, with an optimistic vision of a “media garden, where biodiversity flourishes.” In that context, “rewards flow to those who respect relationships rather than gaming algorithms.”
• Bloomberg isn’t backing away from its AI summarization feature. (An earlier version of this item reported, incorrectly, that it was.) “We publish thousands of stories a day,” a spokesperson for Bloomberg told Semafor. “Currently, 99% of AI summaries meet our editorial standards. We’re transparent when stories are updated or corrected, and when AI has been used. Journalists have full control over whether a summary appears — both before and after publication — and can remove any that don’t meet our standards. These summaries are a service to readers, meant to complement our journalism, not replace it. Feedback has been positive, and we continue to refine the experience.”
• An Indian court is demanding Wikipedia remove allegedly defamatory content, a new threat to one of the last good parts of the web.

⁛ News

• CEO Will Lewis arrived at the Washington Post last year with talk of charging readers small, variable amounts for different amounts of content. “We’re actively talking about it internally,” executive editor Matt Murray told Axios’ Sara Fischer at SABEW’s annual conference in Washington last week.
• The Jerusalem Post editor-in-chief was questioned, then released, in a widening inquiry into Qatari influence in Israel.
• The Trump administration ended the contract for the satellite broadcasting its Russian-language news. A senior European official told Semafor the decision was “very bad news,” and weakened efforts to “strengthen the interest in establishing democracy” in Russia.

⁌ TV

• Fox Nation, the company’s streaming platform, released the documentary Rebound: A Year of Triumph and Tragedy at Yeshiva University Basketball; its producers include hedge funder Dan Loeb.

With Bilt Rewards, Ankur Jain thinks he’s hit on one of the “category-defining” startup ideas — that renters should be able to earn credit card-style rewards for paying their landlords on time and boost their credit score in the process. And the CEO is hoping to turn Bilt into a $10 billion business with fewer than 200 employees.

“Every step of the way, we keep asking ourselves, why do people throw people at problems?” he told Semafor’s Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson. “And how do you do that in a way that’s automated [instead]?”