Media

On this week’s Mixed Signals from Semafor Media, Veep executive producer and genuine polymath Frank Rich offers his notes on that last crazy month: “Completely unbelievable, cardboard characters, unmotivated story events, pretty bad direction. Get that Trump speech down, for heaven’s sakes.” Also, Max finds RFK’s phone-free farming program surprisingly tempting.

Catch up with the latest episode of Mixed Signals.

A more media-friendly Kamala Harris runs for president

THE NEWS

Kamala Harris has spent her last two years as vice president repairing a difficult relationship with the national media — an investment that paid off when her sudden ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket came with a wave of positive press coverage.

It’s a striking turn for a politician who just a few years ago seemed stuck in a perpetual cycle of negative headlines. Her 2020 presidential campaign ended in finger-pointing in The New York Times. Her policy portfolio has at times left her with few tangible wins. And in a White House that has prided itself on its lack of leaks, the internal drama in her office has still managed to spill out into public view.

But since early 2022, the vice president has worked to develop better and more personal relationships with parts of the news media that set the agenda for Washington. Publicly, she’s become the more accessible alternative to her stage-managed boss, sitting for on-the-record media interviews with numerous outlets. Privately, she’s been more willing to mix it up with journalists assigned to cover her.

She’s invited a parade of prominent television anchors and media executives to dine with her at the Naval Observatory, given personal tours of her garden to journalists from diverse backgrounds, and shaped trips to do media appearances with the outlets serving Democratic-leaning groups the White House refers to as “coalition media.”

CALIFORNIA ROOTS

Harris is a relative newcomer to Washington’s small-town media scene, but arrived with decades of experience as a California public figure and long relationships there.

Former California aides recalled that she appeared on television often enough to know local San Francisco news camera crews by name and sought to build relationships with influential Bay Area media figures.

John Diaz, the former head of the editorial board at the San Francisco Chronicle, recalled that she attended one of her first editorial board meetings flanked by established San Francisco politicians. While Diaz said she hardly needed the support of the paper in her race for district attorney, he said it suggested how important Harris’ allies thought it was for her to receive the support of institutional media.

“It was as if she needed training wheels, which clearly she didn’t,” Diaz said. “But I told those politicians that they’re welcome to sit and watch, but the candidate has to speak for herself.”

That moment showed up in the copy in a positive light: In the Chronicle’s endorsement of Harris over the Democratic incumbent, the paper wrote that she had “the support of a disparate group of politicians and established leaders from around the city.”

Diaz said he was impressed by how she reacted to critical pieces about her tenure as district attorney and California attorney general over the years. “There were times when we criticized her over various issues. And she never stopped talking to me. She never stopped being accessible.”

Rich Greenfield is a partner and TMT analyst at LightShed Partners.

⁜ Tech

Place your bets: A popular blockchain startup that allows betting on news events is upping its editorial offerings ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

Axios reported earlier this month that polling guru Nate Silver was advising Polymarket, the venture-backed predictions market that over the past several years has expanded online betting around political and national news events.

On Monday, the company is rolling out several new editorial features to add to its election betting offerings and enhance stories written about Polymarket odds. Among them: The Oracle, a twice-weekly Substack newsletter that will summarize markets around topics and share breaking news from Polymarket’s new in-house editorial team. The company is also partnering with Substack on a feature allowing publishers and media outlets to embed forecasts within articles (including in Silver’s own Substack). Two other major media partners will begin embedding Polymarket forecasts in their pieces in the coming days.

“Polymarket is transforming how people engage with the news. We are living through the most volatile election in memory and our forecasts are helping people understand what is happening in real-time,” Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan said in a statement. “News organizations are already using Polymarket as a tool online, in print and on air — having live market embeds will further help press meet the growing demand for data-driven, real-time information that people are craving more than ever.”

Remove the squid: I was growing a little blasé about AI until I saw Ethan Mollick’s efforts to persuade Anthropic’s Claude to “remove the squid” from All Quiet on the Western Front. Genuinely pretty mind-blowing.

Listening: Spotify has, finally, turned all your hours of listening into a profitable business.

⁛ News

LIPV service: Business Insider is pushing its journalists to change the way they think about their audience. In an email to staff earlier this month, Deputy Editor-in-Chief Matt Turner said the company was beginning to track logged-in page views in order to bolster its newsroom against changes made by platforms to distribution.

“It will create a large audience of loyal readers who seek out our journalism, regardless of whatever else happens on the internet. This new metric, LIPVs, will measure engagement from these loyal readers,” Turner wrote. “By paying close attention to the journalism they’re spending time with, we can produce more of it.”

Good news: “Majorities of both major parties say local media in their area are doing their jobs well,” Pew finds… even if most aren’t consuming it or paying for it.

Off the hook: Washington Post CEO Will Lewis’ critics had hoped that the new Labour government might reopen questions about phone hacking. No dice, reports Jim Waterson. Between that and Joe Biden having, uh, changed the subject, Lewis is having a pretty good month.

✦ Marketing

WBD vs. NBA: Puck’s John Ourand sees Warner Bros. Discovery’s basketball rights meltdown as “the culmination of a subtle breakdown in relations — missed signals, bad communication, frustrated dealmaking, and a couple negotiating misplays.”

Growing influence: The ad giant Publicis made another big acquisition, reportedly paying $500 million for the influencer marketing company Influential.

⁋ Publishing

RIP: Lewis Lapham, Christian Lorentzen writes, was, among other things, a pioneer in the trade of witty aggregation/distillation/curation/whatever you want to call it. “Someone asked him the secret of editing. He said he’d learned it from his editor at the Saturday Evening Post, and it could be summed up in one word,” which was: “steal.”

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