⁛ NewsVietnam Ministry of Foreign AffairsGood morning, Vietnam: The US shift away from China has made Vietnam a growing commercial hub and an increasingly interesting setting for stories. The country’s foreign ministry seems delighted by the attention, as a celebratory official article on the latest development — the opening of a New York Times bureau led by Damien Cave — suggests. Good data: Americans love to argue about whether crime is up or down, and have long done it with slow, bad data the FBI gathers from local cops. The Real Time Crime Index seems to have fixed that, and “allows anyone to see the numbers and trends in novel ways without having to wait for final estimates to be published months later,” project overseer Jeff Asher told Semafor. Tough work for gatekeepers: The Institute for Nonprofit News rejects more than half of its applications for membership, Nieman Lab reports, including partisan websites that present themselves as independent local news. Media news news: Natalie Korach is joining the media beat for Vanity Fair. She was a media reporter at The Wrap. ⁜ TechEnd of an era: The online culture writer Ryan Broderick offers a provocative observation: “Virality is decoupling from popularity.” In place of viral online moments that cross into mass culture, he predicts “silos of popularity, online and off, global and regional, real and fake, and none of them will quite add up correctly, but all seem vaguely huge.” Telegram’s free-for-all: It’s easy to wax poetic about free speech, harder to defend the illegal marketplaces on Telegram spotlighted in a huge Times article. The best business in digital media: It’s still OnlyFans, which reported $1.31 billion in revenue over the last year. ✰ HollywoodDept. of unintended consequences: I was the new New York Times media columnist — and still pretty clueless about Hollywood — when I wrote about Bob Iger’s role helping Disney through COVID-19. That column, James Stewart and Brooks Barnes write, prompted a falling out between Iger and his successor, Bob Chapek, leading to Iger’s departure and, later, his return: “Mr. Iger denied that he had spoken to Mr. Smith, which only further enraged Mr. Chapek, who pointed out that Mr. Iger’s quote came directly from an email. Mr. Iger said he didn’t understand why Mr. Chapek was so upset. What was wrong with saying he was reasserting control in the midst of a crisis? ‘You’ve cut my legs out from under me,’ Mr. Chapek said. ‘I’ve never felt worse in my life.’” ☊ AudioRe-explained: Vox is launching a new franchise, Explain It to Me, hosted by Jonquilyn Hill. The product — a call-in podcast, newsletter, and some video — is the successor to The Weeds, a podcast hosted by Ezra Klein before he left for The New York Times. This version is shifting the emphasis from wonky policy conversations to broader topics, which could include “whether your dentist is scamming you” and “why you say ‘like’ so much,” said Vox editor-in-chief Swati Sharma. “It’s about really reaching those non-news obsessives,” she said. “Policy is also so personal and it can be easy for people who aren’t following all the white papers to understand.” They’re launching with a sponsor, the e-commerce marketing software company Klaviyo. |