Media

Los Angeles: Ugh: “A basket of the top US streaming services will cost $87 this autumn, compared with $73 a year ago.” — FT

Maui: The Maui times is trying to rebuild. — The Gambit

Oxford: A giant new study finds no evidence for the assumption that Facebook causes mental health issues. — OII

Kansas: “So the backstory that we haven’t told, because we don’t wanna get in trouble, is that we’ve been investigating the police chief,” says the publisher of the Marion County Record, which was raided by the small town’s entire police department. — The Handbasket

Republicans find safe media spaces

THE SCENE

DES MOINES – The Gannett-owned Des Moines Register is one of those medium-sized American dailies hanging on in a tough environment. Its signature political event is the annual Political Soapbox, long the premier venue for speechifying on the main drag of the Iowa State Fair.

But this year, the Register has a new rival. Republican Governor Kim Reynolds is hosting a series of “Fair-Side Chats” with presidential candidates on the other side of a set of stalls selling pork-on-a-stick, Spam-burgers, and other delicacies.

And Reynolds has the better bookings: Governor Ron DeSantis and Senator Tim Scott, seen as among the campaign’s top tier, are skipping the Register’s wide-open public platform in favor of Reynolds’ safer stage. (Trump, in a snit with Reynolds, did neither.)

Reynolds is a star of retail politics who practically lives at the fair, and a welcoming public presence — but a rookie interviewer. In her first outing Thursday, the radio host and candidate Larry Elder cheerfully rolled over her attempt to ask questions. Friday, she mixed up the state from which North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum hailed, and found herself chiming in “yep, yep” to inanities like Miami mayor Francis Suarez’s declaration, “we’re ideators, we generated ideas.” She got out of the frame for Vivek Ramaswamy’s performance of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself.” It was the safest political space.

Thursday evening, DeSantis and former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley visited the other main media event of the day, a live taping of the “Ruthless” podcast, founded by former aides to Senator Mitch McConnell. Its name refers to the GOP-dominated Supreme Court after Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The podcast is raucous and beloved by the party’s political class, and the Des Moines bar was full of staffers for various campaigns. But its hosts aren’t looking to put their guests in a bad spot —the Republican consultant Eric Wilson called it a “trusting, safe space.”

Thursday night at Johnny’s Hall of Fame in Des Moines, the Ruthless hosts played a game with DeSantis called “Dem or Journo,” reading quotes calling DeSantis things like “fascist dictator” and asking him to guess which quote came from a political enemy, which from the main enemy, the media. He guessed right. “History has shown that siding with Governor DeSantis is has to be the right move when you face a crisis,” one of the co-hosts, who goes by the name Comfortably Smug on Twitter, concluded.

BEN’S VIEW

Public figures’ migration away from neutral or adversarial public platforms and toward safe spaces is a long-running trend, hardly unique to the right. President Joe Biden prefers progressive influencers to tough TV interviews, Elon Musk talks to friendly podcasters like Lex Fridman, and the list goes on.

The shift in Iowa, however, is one more body blow for the role the local media used to play in national campaigns, pulling them away from the polarized national discourse and toward more grounded local issues.

The Register, like virtually every American newspaper, has denounced Donald Trump on its editorial pages. But Reynolds’ move on her hometown paper is new, and the Register has not always been an automatically Democratic outlet. The paper endorsed Mitt Romney over Barack Obama in 2012, and its lead political reporter, Brianne Pfannenstiel, is well-regarded by the local Republicans on whom she regularly breaks news. (When Reynolds “gets the inevitable Fox News show, this will have been good practice,” grumbled a top State Senate Democrat, Zach Wahls.)

But Iowa, which seemed at times to set the culture of presidential politics, is now mostly subject to the same national trends of a new era of hyper-polarized politics and partisan media. The notion of a neutral platform has nearly dissolved, and — particularly in primary season — the leading candidates see no rewards in reaching toward the center. And Trump helped shift Republicans from hating the legacy media to merely mocking it, the theme of Ruthless.

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Mark Lazarus is the chairman of NBCUniversal Media Group.

The New York Times has decided not to join a group of media companies attempting to jointly negotiate with the major tech companies over use of their content to power artificial intelligence.

The move is a major blow to efforts to Barry Diller’s efforts to establish an industry united front against Google and Microsoft.

Diller said at a Semafor media event in April that publishers should sue major tech companies that have trained their AI models on data produced by media organizations. As the Wall Street Journal and Semafor reported, his company IAC has been spearheading an effort to form a group of key publishers that would press for legislative and potential legal action to force the tech companies to pay billions of dollars back to those publishers. The presence of the two pillars of American news — the Times to the center-left and Journal to the center-right — would have been a powerful statement for that coalition.

Diller and IAC CEO Joey Levin had discussed the group with media organizations including Axel Springer and News Corp, which believed that the others were on board for the effort, and that the Times would also participate.

But three sources with knowledge told Semafor that the Times is no longer a part of the effort. One person said that the Times had discussed joining the group, but never committed.

The decision by the Times makes it more likely that publishers may cut their own separate deals. Earlier this year, the Associated Press announced an agreement to license the AP’s archive of news stories to ChatGPT-maker OpenAI for two years. — Max

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Swipe In, Swipe Out: The Times is also ramping up its efforts to push staff to return to the office. Last year, the paper of record told staff that they were required to return to the office for a few days each week. Members of the editorial union pushed back against the paper’s mandatory return-to-office plan, but now, according to two people familiar with the plans, the Times has indicated that it will ask managers to monitor key-card swipes, and factor attendance into staff performance evaluations.

Inside: Russia’s malice and corruption have bred a generation of stellar investigative journalists, including the team behind The Insider — Roman Dobrokhotov and Christo Grozev, the latter best known for unmasking Russian secret service agents at the investigative group Bellingcat.

Now the publication is expanding into English, with a new vertical led by Michael Weiss, a former senior correspondent for Yahoo News who is working on a history of the GRU. The company is also in talks with PBS special correspondent Simon Ostrovsky about producing videos for the outlet, whose Russian-language revelations — including about the hackers who targeted Hillary Clinton’s campaign — often found a small audience before being retold and contextualized by big US outlets.

“We saw how American reporters get their Pulitzers rewriting our investigations and investigations of our colleagues, and understood that there is indeed great demand on the stories about Russia and everything that relates to Russia,” said Dobrokhatov in a Signal message from an undisclosed location in Europe. (He and Grozev, like others who have angered the Russian authorities, are cautious about disclosing their locations.) Now, said Weiss, they’ll “bring the superb investigative journalism that the Insider has done to an English-speaking audience.”

Good Riddance, eh?: Facebook has begun blocking news in Canada rather than pay news organizations for their content — fearing that a trend that started in Australia could become global and expensive. But Facebook, burned by politics and pivoting to video, had already cut most text-based news off the platform, and PostMedia CEO Andrew MacLeod said his publications, including the National Post, have seen only a “​​fairly minor” effect on their traffic.

“I welcome the fact that the ecosystem is fundamentally starting to alter itself,” said MacLeod, who joined other publishers in supporting Bill C-18, which provoked the confrontation. “What we really need is an environment in which the landscape isn’t dominated by two platforms.”

MacLeod said he believes Google — for whom news is more core — will take a more “constructive” approach to negotiations with Canada and other countries for licensing fees.

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