Media

Can Kamala keep it up? Ben and Nayeema tape from the Democratic National Convention, breaking down the positive vibes, rise of the credentialed TikTok creator, and what Donald Trump is up to on the outside of this bubble. Tommy Vietor joins them to discuss what sway he and his fellow Pod Save America hosts have with Barack Obama, why the DNC is tuning out Gaza protesters, and whether the party’s newfound unity around Kamala Harris can last through Nov. 5. Finally, fresh off a GQ photoshoot, Max joins the podcast to talk style and the viability of a Chick-fil-A streaming service.

Catch up with the latest episode of Mixed Signals.

538’s model mystery

The most scrutinized election forecast model in the US is back online after a mysterious month-long hiatus. But its return has raised even more questions among election data nerds.

The 538 model had drawn intense criticism from other analysts — including the site’s founder, Nate Silver — in July, as Joe Biden’s campaign sank but the model continued to show him likely to win. Semafor reported that the model was built to weigh Biden’s incumbency heavily, and to discount state-based polling far before the election.

When Biden withdrew, 538’s model abruptly vanished, then stayed offline for nearly a month.

It reappeared Friday with a forecast showing Harris winning 58 times out of 100. The results largely mirror those shown by other election forecasters, including the Economist.

The polling world’s Nates (Silver and Cohn), who don’t always agree with each other, both pointed out on Twitter that it appears the model has been altered significantly, and they criticized 538 and its owner ABC News for not explaining the changes to readers.

According to two people with knowledge of the situation, the model has in fact been adjusted, though there has been internal disagreement within ABC over whether and how much to explain those methodological revisions.

Network sources said 538 staff have had the model largely ready for publication for the past several weeks, but were prohibited by ABC News and the network’s communications team from discussing or disclosing many details about the changes publicly.

Kamala’s media-owning ‘first friend’

Kamala’s media-owning ‘first friend’: The billionaire owner of The Atlantic could also be the “first friend” in a Harris administration. Laurene Powell Jobs and Vice President Kamala Harris haven’t advertised their relationship, but Jobs, chief of Emerson Collective and the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, has been supporting Harris’ campaigns since her first race for San Francisco district attorney in 2003.

Aides fully realized how close their relationship had become in October 2011, when a staffer slipped a note to then-attorney general Harris in the middle of a meeting: Powell Jobs’ husband had just passed away. Harris rushed back to her office to call her. Harris “really tried to be there for Laurene” after Steve Jobs died, recalled Debbie Mesloh, a Harris aide at the time.

In 2017, journalist Kara Swisher persuaded Powell Jobs to sit for an interview at Vox’s Code Conference. “She was nervous since it was her first big interview,” Swisher recalled. “She asked to bring a friend and it was Kamala.”

A few years later, Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, would host Powell Jobs at the vice-presidential residence in the Naval Observatory whenever she was in town, said one associate. (Powell Jobs “loves Doug,” they added.)

And when Harris abruptly secured the Democratic nomination, Powell Jobs made no secret of her elation. “She’s overjoyed,” said San Francisco Democratic powerhouse operative Susie Tompkins Buell. Aides have begun to ask delicately whether Powell Jobs will write her friend a check for, say, $100 million.

Pop Base pops off

Pop Base pops off: Readers of this newsletter likely already know that the 2024 Democratic National Convention was the first convention to build much of its infrastructure around digital content creators and influencers. The DNC and the Harris campaign credentialed 200 influencers and gave them a workspace and food so they had energy to keep posting all week.

Semafor wrote earlier this week about how the decision to pack the arena full had created a scarcity situation that made it difficult for many journalists to watch the convention in-person, generating friction between some journalists and the influencers who’d taken some of their spots.

It remains to be seen whether engaging lifestyle influencers will have any measurable impact on voting in November. (I’m curious, for example, whether widely-viewed meme videos by Disney adults translate to votes for Democrats or just engagement for those specific accounts.) The DNC did a dance to both show that it was on the cutting edge of communications strategy while also downplaying the idea that influencers were replacing the waning number of legacy print reporters.

Multiple DNC officials emphasized the disproportionately small number of influencers (200) compared to members of the “traditional” news media (15,000). But even if the DNC won’t say so directly, convention organizers wagered that it was worth it to annoy a few journalists for the sheer reach of some friendly influencers. And they may have a point: Many influencers’ accounts immediately reach much more massive, and different, audiences than some midsized legacy outlets.

On Thursday, we spoke with the two moderators of Pop Base, the viral news aggregator with over 1.5 million followers on Twitter. Their account was one of the 200 that was invited by the DNC to cover the convention. (In order to participate in the interview, the duo required Semafor to agree to not publish their identities.)

They said that since Harris’ ascension to the top of the ticket, the account’s audience has been increasingly interested in election content, citing the Charli XCX connection, the Harris coconut memes, and the vice president’s use of Beyoncé’s music during campaign events. So when the DNC reached out to offer media credentials, Pop Base decided to dispatch an editor to post content from the event, given the number of celebrities who would be there.

Pop Base’s managers told Semafor that the DNC was the first event the account covered in-person, and was part of its upcoming expansion to cover more events on the ground, to “grow and make sure we start to get ourselves in the rooms that really matter.” But they also saw it as an opportunity to encourage the account’s younger audience to participate in the political system.

“In addition to our audience being interested in the convention, it’s also an opportunity for us to motivate Gen Z, younger people, to go out and vote,” one of them said. “We really care about pushing that as well.” — Max Tani

Inside Megyn Kelly’s YouTube success

When then-host Megyn Kelly was pushed out of NBC News in 2019, many television network insiders thought her broadcast career was likely over. Instead, now Kelly is nearly as popular as ever.

According to audience figures highlighted by Kelly’s team for Semafor, Kelly’s show is now not only one of the most listened-to programs on SiriusXM, but it’s also one of the top ten podcasts in the country and its viewership is eclipsing that of some mainstream news outlets on YouTube.

Kelly boasts that despite the fact that she only has six staffers, she has managed to get numbers that put her in the range of the accounts of legacy media outlets. The Megyn Kelly Show’s YouTube channel, which has 2.3 million subscribers, had 116.8 million views in July — more views than the official channels for NBC News (78 million) CBS News (83 million), Sky News (87 million), the BBC News (72 million) and CNBC (17 million).

“On-camera is how people are used to getting their news from me, so it likely feels familiar,” Kelly said of her growth on YouTube. “I am also half Italian, half Irish, so if you choose to watch the show, you will definitely glean something from the hand gestures and facial expressions that you might not always pick up on from listening alone. With the news what it is these days, sometimes an eye-roll, forehead slap, or pen-throw is absolutely required.”

In an interview with Semafor last year, Kelly said that after she was forced out of NBC News, she met with the conservative pundit Ben Shapiro, who suggested she turn to podcasting. But she was scared that she wouldn’t be able to find an audience in digital media.

The post-cable independent route has given a second life to some other former personalities who’ve found themselves without a home on linear television. Former MSNBC anchor Mehdi Hasan left the network to start his own publication, Zeteo, which has quickly garnered a strong subscriber base and nearly 370,000 subscribers on YouTube since launching less than six months ago. While his post-CNN tenure has been a bit bumpier, former anchor Don Lemon has proved that he can still attract big-name guests and audience attention with his interview-focused YouTube show.

Caitlin Thompson is the co-founder of the tennis magazine Racquet.

Samuel Levine, Director, FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection, will join Semafor’s editors to explore how online platforms can play a constructive role in communicating age restrictions for certain goods and services and the responsibilities and strategies of policymakers in effectively regulating social media use among young people.

RSVP for in-person or livestream.

⁛ News

Big in Texas: A group of media veterans and Democratic political operatives are launching a new for-profit digital news outlet in Texas.

The Barbed Wire is a new state digital news outlet that on Monday will begin churning out Texas-focused stories on culture, politics, and entertainment. The project was the result of almost a year and a half of planning by Jeff Rotkoff, the Texas state director of Democratic-aligned super PAC Forward Majority, and Olivia Messer, a former Texas reporter and alumna of the Daily Beast (and a former colleague of this Semafor reporter at the Beast).

In an interview with Semafor, Messer, the outlet’s editor in chief, said she knew Rotkoff from her time covering Texas politics, and had worked with him on some media consulting work. Last year, Rotkoff approached her with the idea of starting a new publication; the two agreed over a shared view that there was an opportunity in the state for a free, quick-twitch digital publication that’s nonpartisan — but won’t necessarily be neutral on issues like climate change or abortion.

“We have so many incredible outlets in Texas, but there are millions of Texans who don’t subscribe to any of the available outlets and don’t read major dailies,” Messer told Semafor.

The Harris bump: A common refrain among a certain set of left-leaning critics is the idea that many members of the news media are biased in favor of Trump because they believe his return will help with television ratings and online audience numbers. There was a degree of truth to this in 2016, but all recent data suggest the narrative needs a serious correction.

Washington Post CEO Will Lewis shared an internal memo this week saying the paper has seen a surge in subscriptions over the past month. Another prominent political news figure called Semafor this week to emphasize just how much stories about Harris were driving reader interest, compared to pieces about Trump.

Television network data showed intense audience interest as well. Harris’ convention was a massive ratings winner last week for MSNBC and CNN. Over four days, the DNC averaged 21.8 million viewers a night in prime time, an improvement on 2020’s four-night average of 21.6 million viewers, and a notable increase over the RNC’s 19.1 million average viewers in prime time over four nights. Online traffic for stories about Harris at both networks are up across the board. MSNBC led all networks in viewership and in the key audience demographic of 25 to 54-year-olds over the four nights, making it the network’s largest audience for a Democratic convention since it began broadcasting.

Casualty: Ryan Evans, a member of Reuters’ safety team covering the war in Ukraine, was killed Saturday when a missile struck the hotel where he was staying.

⁋ Publishing

Biography of a biography: Just how close did a legendary biographer get to his legendary subject? That’s the question I’ve been wondering about since Saturday morning, when the New York Times published an excerpt from reporters Ryan Mac and Kate Conger’s new book on Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter.

Earlier this year, I reached out to Isaacson after receiving a tip that while he was shadowing Musk for his own 2023 book about the eccentric billionaire, Isaacson had informally advised him on how to roll out the subscription service that would eventually be dubbed Twitter Blue and how much it should cost.

“I wanted to get in touch because we’re including an item in this week’s Semafor media newsletter reporting that you actually set the price for Twitter Premium,” I wrote to Isaacson in March. “We’ve heard that while you were shadowing Elon Musk for your book, he told Twitter staff that you had advised him on what the price should be, and he thought it was a good idea and implemented it.”

“Hah! That’s the first I’d heard of this. It’s not true. I’m not even sure what the price is. Sorry,” he replied.

Having only heard about it from one source, and trusting Isaacson’s emphatic denial, I left it at that. So I was surprised on Saturday to see that Mac and Conger had obtained emails showing Isaacson weighing in on the topic back in 2022.

Per the Times: Mr. Musk also turned to the author Walter Isaacson for advice. Mr. Isaacson, who had written books on Steve Jobs and Benjamin Franklin, was shadowing him for an authorized biography. “Walter, what do you think?” Mr. Musk asked.

“This should be accessible to everyone,” Mr. Isaacson said, no longer just the fly on the wall. “You need a really low price point, because this is something that everyone is going to sign up for.”

In its most generous reading, Isaacson was evading us on a technicality. Musk ultimately set the price of Twitter Blue at $8 per month, and Isaacson never specifically offered a price point. But his response was at best misleading. And it raises questions about what else passed between Isaacson and the boundary-free Musk that perhaps didn’t appear in his 688-page volume. (One other oddity: There’s no mention of Musk’s drug use in Isaacson’s book, since widely reported.)

Isaacson did not respond to a request for comment. But do you know what else is missing from the story of this story? Let me know at mtani@semafor.com. — Max Tani

Reigning champ wins fact-checking competition: The New Yorker’s fact checking department’s still got it. That magazine and its rival, New York, each published Ezra Klein profiles (the week’s second and third, we’d note) last week, and each reported on his new tattoo. New York said it reads, “Is That So?” and is on his inner bicep. But former juicebox mafioso Brian Beutler reports that The New Yorker had it right — it reads, “is that so?” and is on his forearm.

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