Media

1. A tale of two Bloombergs
2. ‘Shadow hearings’
3. Chuck Todd’s new project
4. New York Times’ op-ed moves
5. Buttigieg’s edit
6. Buying local media
7. Publishers and AI

Welcome to Semafor Media, where we’re always open to disagreement.

As media boundaries dissolve and old formats fade, one thing is becoming clear: Americans are thirsty for moments of comity in this hyperpartisan, hyper-confusing media age.

You see it in Larry Summers and Ezra Klein arguing with David Sacks on All In, in Joe Rogan’s wide-open interviews, and in the youth video juggernaut Jubilee Media, which hosts elaborate debates over subjects ranging from the moronic (whether the Earth is flat) to the complex (Israel and Palestine).

These conversations do not, as far as I can tell, change anyone’s mind. They sometimes put crackpots on even footing with experts, favoring a casual style or a British accent (or both) over expertise, and can distort well-known history (Hitler!) or science (there are no secret power plants under the pyramids of Giza).

And yet, as Jubilee founder Jason Y. Lee argued on Mixed Signals this week, they also offer glimmers of empathy. They suggest a generational desperation to escape our polarized, frozen politico-media conflicts. The tendency of new media forms is to improve and professionalize, and I’m optimistic that some of this new tone can be preserved among people who more regularly know what they’re talking about.

To end on a self-serving note: That’s why we have built “Room for Disagreement” into our Semafor stories, and why we hope you’ll hear robust, civil disagreement on stage at our World Economy Summit next week.

Also this week: Max on Bloomberg’s wild week; our speculation on what Chuck Todd wants to buy; the curse of opinion-writing jobs; troubles with local journalism in New York; “shadow hearings” in the Capitol; and always, more AI news. (Scoop count: 8)

A tale of two Bloombergs

Normally, the X account named “Walter Bloomberg” is a mild nuisance for Bloomberg. The massive international finance data and media company has at times tried fruitlessly to find the owner of the account, which coasts off Bloomberg’s name for clicks, and to revoke their terminal access. But in 2025, someone like “Walter” can shake Wall Street.

Last week, Bloomberg’s main rivals had fallen for a “Walter Bloomberg” post that claimed, apparently out of thin air, that President Donald Trump would pause the tariffs that had just crushed global markets. The fracas sparked some $2.5 trillion worth of market moves, as investors reacted to what they (or some automatic models) assumed was a genuine Bloomberg scoop.

The real Bloomberg did not report on the discussions of a pause until Trump and his Cabinet actually decided to pause a day later. But it was just one surreal moment in a high-energy week in a newsroom that’s been dominating coverage of Trump’s tariff regime.

Democrats stage ‘shadow hearings’ for web content

Being stuck in the minority in Congress hasn’t kept Democrats from trying to get an audience. In recent months, some Democratic members of Congress have held what they’re calling “shadow hearings,” essentially press conferences taped at the Capitol and staged to look like committee hearings.

Footage from an event on the Trump Justice Department’s targeting of law firms, organized last week by California Sen. Adam Schiff and Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, garnered millions of YouTube hits across several channels, including from the anti-Trump online juggernaut MeidasTouch, as well as millions of views on social media from left-leaning news influencers like @Jolly_good_ginger and comedian DL Hugley.

These “hearings” don’t have legal teeth. But they serve as an opportunity for Democrats to demonstrate to angry supporters that they are pushing back against Trump, and for members to develop stronger digital media habits.

What does Chuck Todd want to buy?

The former Meet the Press host Chuck Todd is pivoting to local — something I suspect we’ll see more great journalists disillusioned with national media do. The New York Times recently profiled his “quixotic” plan for a constellation of local sites owned by their communities” and said that he and his bankers are “eyeing a purchase that could cost up to $2 billion” — and is not a major newspaper publisher. So what could possibly cost that kind of money, in or around local news?

Here’s a guess: Nextdoor, the platform whose founder and CEO acknowledged to Max last summer that the product was flailing. The company is in the midst of a yearlong transition and major relaunch slated for later this year that leans into more communities and will likely include some local news partnerships.

Todd declined to comment on the speculation, but said he thinks that consumers and advertisers alike would buy in to “coverage of youth sports and having a platform that helps a community knit itself back together via shared experiences.” Its stock, like most equities, are on sale this week, so Todd could snap the company up for a bargain $575.59 million. A spokesperson for the company said it had no comment on the speculation.

A dozen or so of the world’s greatest business journalists — choose your fighter above — will be joining Semafor’s team to conduct on-stage interviews with CEOs and newsmakers from the US and other governments at the incredibly timely World Economy Summit in Washington next week.

One-way ticket to Opinion

The New York Times is continuing to rethink its op-ed section, moving journalists from the newsroom to the opinion side and vice-versa. But there has occasionally been some awkwardness amid the shuffle. Editorial board member Mara Gay recently sought to return to the newsroom. But editors rejected the idea primarily after reviewing her cable news appearances, I’m told — implying that comments made during her opinion days were too overtly ideological for her to do hard news for the Times again. As Semafor reported previously, the organization also recently offered buyouts to some editorial board members as it reconsiders the frequency and design of its editorials, as well as the makeup of its editorial board, and its policy on endorsements.

The Buttigieg Edit

Here’s another entry for Democrats’ 2024 media postmortem: Biden officials forced Jubilee Media to edit out some of the best parts of then-Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s widely-watched Nov. 3 conversation with 25 undecided voters. “The most ironic thing is the things that folks are most interested in cutting typically are the things that often would do the best for them,” Jubilee founder Jason Y. Lee said in a wide-ranging interview on Semafor’s Mixed Signals. “We did not face very much of that at all on the other side.” (Worth noting: Democrats may also have been trying to comply with the Hatch Act, which attempts to block mixing political and government work.)

Listen to the latest episode of Mixed Signals.

Buying the local news

There’s a running discussion across the US of whether government subsidies — or government advertising — can play a role in propping up local media. For a cautionary tale, look at New York City, which in 2021 mandated that 50% of city government ad spending go to “community and ethnic” outlets. City Comptroller Brad Lander recently reported that the city has ignored those targets, which City Hall disputes.

But perhaps more troubling, the publisher of one independent local site, Greenpointers, wrote that she “received subtle pressure to publish weekly op-eds” from the government, which she rejected because she didn’t want to be a “propaganda mouthpiece.” She wound up getting a mere $7,000 from the city in fiscal year 2023.

Meanwhile, a politically-wired competitor, a chain of community weeklies owned by Schneps Media, received $2.1 million from the city’s program that year. Schneps’ owner had co-hosted a Hamptons fundraiser for future Mayor Eric Adams in 2021, and the group’s flagship, the free print paper amNewYork, is now where the embattled mayor publishes his own op-eds.

The company’s CEO, Joshua Schneps, denied that business imperatives influence the journalism — the organization’s local publications, he said, simply have “the largest print and digital readership of any community and ethnic media throughout the five boroughs,” and possibly “higher than all the others combined.” And City Hall spokesperson Kayla Mamelak Altus said the amount of ad money going to Schneps fell to $1.2 million in fiscal year 2024 — though she also said the city’s overall local ad spending had dropped considerably.

Still: If New York wants to support a vibrant local media scene, they could probably use some more transparency, at least.

— Ben

Publishers and AI

You’ll see publishers go one of two ways as the AI wave approaches: Strong ones will look to build the kind of relationships with their audiences — direct, personal, valued — that AI can’t easily replace. The savvy Dotdash Meredith is scrambling in that direction, launching a splashy new app for People. Weak ones will use AI to cut costs and milk the last cash out of a dying brand on a dying web. Quartz had already moved in that direction, and had two employees at the time of its sale. Patch is handing off its newsletters to AI.

We are very pro-AI here at Semafor, and just rolled out some internal tools for everything from copy editing to predicting mean tweets, and many of our rivals are playing with similar, interesting tools to cut costs and improve the quality of production. But when publishers replace the key human functions — original reporting at one end, connecting with the audience on the other — with ChatGPT, their readers will quickly realize they might as well just chat directly with the LLM instead. (And this newsletter still has a human editor, so if you see any mistakes, you have somewhere to complain.)

— Ben

Chuck Todd is a longtime broadcast journalist and podcaster.

✦ Marketing

• Tariffs will be extremely harmful for the advertising and marketing industries. A note from Citi last week said that companies that rely on advertising were likely to see revenue fall 4% this year.

⁜ Tech

• Business Insider is encouraging staff to use its new internal AI tools. In an email on Friday, the company noted that it had invited staff to use ChatGPT Enterprise, and it would be announcing its generative AI policies for staff in the coming weeks.
• Gamers do not like Trump’s new tariffs, which have already delayed shipments of the new Nintendo Switch 2 and threatened to raise its cost significantly.
• Pro-Trump AI content (and let’s be honest, slop) is flooding YouTube, with videos of imagined scenes like “Judge Fines Karoline Leavitt for Wearing a Cross, Then Realizes She’s a Legal Genius.”

⁌ TV

• Comedian and longtime liberal talk show host Bill Maher was charmed by Donald Trump during a recent visit to the White House. During his show on Saturday, Maher said “a crazy person doesn’t live in the White House,” but “a person who plays a crazy person on TV a lot lives there.” Maher’s longtime fans were not pleased with his comments.

⁋ Publishing

• The Pittsburgh journalist and union leader Michael Fuoco died on Thursday, according to the Office of the Allegheny County Medical Examiner. He was forced out of the union after allegations of decades of sexual misconduct, which both the union and management chose to overlook.

The Trump administration has been turbulent for many CEOs, including Booz Allen Hamilton boss Horacio Rozanski: Cost-cutting measures led by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have put almost all of the company’s roughly $11 billion of annual sales in question.

One of DC’s biggest contractors, Booz Allen is now racing to salvage its relationship with the federal government, the source of 98% of its revenues, Semafor’s Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson writes. One reason why the White House should leave his contracts intact, Rozanski said: “Our stuff works and it saves money.”