Media

Rivals scramble to react to Washington Post endorsement crisis

The Washington Post’s competitors moved quickly to fill the space it vacated when it shifted from being a bulwark against Trump to canceling a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris.

Guardian US editor Betsy Reed sent out an email to readers touting her publication’s endorsement of Harris earlier this month and soliciting membership support. The callout to readers of the American version of the British newspaper worked: They pledged more than $1.1 million between Reed’s email going out on Friday and Saturday evening, the biggest single fundraising day for the Guardian’s US operation.

“A Guardian editorial strongly endorsed Kamala Harris for president earlier this week — and we are unafraid of any potential consequences,” Reed wrote, calling it “an abdication of our duty as journalists to sit out this election out of self-interest.”

Inside the Wall Street Journal, recriminations over Gershkovich’s arrest

The Wall Street Journal’s triumphant, relieved coverage of Evan Gershkovich’s release this August includes a riveting 8,000-word account of the negotiations that freed him. Like most of the Journal’s extensive coverage, the narrative begins with his arrest on March 29, 2023.

Absent is any mention of the Journal’s internal process for approving Gershkovich’s assignment, the details of its security operation, or any of the decisions that led to an ambitious young reporter’s risky trips to the heart of the Russian military-industrial complex in wartime.

Since Gershkovich was grabbed by Russian security agents at a steakhouse in Yekaterinburg, the Journal has been silent on a debate festering among its own staff and the community of journalists who cover Russia: how much a complicated if mundane management mess in Moscow and security decisions in New York may have put him at risk.

How does Fox News work?

Fox has, as Max wrote last week, recovered its central status in US political media with the help of Democrats eager to reach its audience. But what are they thinking inside the culture war factory? We got a rare inside perspective on Mixed Signals this week from producer Nate Fredman, who spent 20 years there. He offers a glimpse at a place driven, above all, by the emotional responses of its own audience.

Sign up for Mixed Signals here to understand the story of how Fox News listens to, and feeds, its viewers.

The ‘Nate Silver effect’ drives a media poll shortage

Poll-obsessed Americans have been disappointed, in the final weeks of the 2024 election, by how few polls media companies are releasing. Part of the blame lies, paradoxically, with the good advice given by the analyst Nate Silver, whose “ biggest influence may be teaching most news junkies to turn to curated averages of polls rather than fret over each one,” Benjy Sarlin writes.

The problem now is that media companies and others who pay for expensive surveys in order to drive attention have realized there’s little point in paying for a poll that will just get tossed into an average. “It does become a problem when there are as many aggregators as pollsters,” the Cook Political Report forecaster Dave Wasserman told Benjy. “As the aggregators gain prominence, the pollsters lose some prominence, and the incentives for polling decline.”

Legacy web department

Business Insider told staff that it is cautiously optimistic about its performance this year, despite a few revenue areas that continue to lag slightly behind the publication’s goals. In a presentation to staff last week, the digital publication, which is in the midst of a yearslong editorial rebrand and pivot, said that its advertising and online commerce businesses were on track to meet their targets this year. However, the publication’s leadership said its subscription and syndication numbers were running “slightly behind” where it hoped they would be at this point in the year.

The presentation noted that the publication’s subscriptions were growing, powered by a new “smart paywall,” and that they could be boosted by an upcoming site redesign, but that overall web traffic has continued to dip. “Business Insider sets ambitious targets because we believe in the importance of sustainable journalism — our results show that our strategy to orient around being the go-to destination for business, tech and innovation coverage is working,” a spokesperson said in an email.

This comes as BI rolls out an AI onsite search tool that will generate bullet points from content from the site. “We must continue to be bold and brave and evolve, and as we continue on our journey to engage our most loyal audience,” CEO Barbara Peng said in an email.

And: G/O Media is continuing to sell off its remaining media properties. As Semafor first reported last week, the digital media company sold auto site Jalopnik to Static Media. G/O, which is involved in a series of costly public legal battles, also quietly laid off several business and tech staffers last week, two people familiar with the situation told Semafor. — Max Tani

An iPhone media coup

New York Magazine amused the media world last week with an issue full of black-and-white headshots of the jabbering, gesticulating Media Elite that made everyone look like ’30s screwball comedy characters. They were shot by photographer Paul Kooiker, unusually, on an iPhone. Was this a stealth Apple promotion, we asked New York’s Lauren Starke?

“The photographer always works on an iPhone, and for this shoot we used some borrowed from Apple given that we had many remote shoots. We agreed to mention the fact that he shot on iPhones both to acknowledge Apple and because we thought it would be interesting to readers,” she responded.

Dave Weigel authors Americana, Semafor’s must-read politics newsletter. Sign up here.

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