Media

Atlantic stars collide

Jonathan Chait’s move this week from his perch at New York Magazine to The Atlantic was hardly a shock for those who have paid attention to the latter’s trajectory. Over the last several years, the D.C.-based magazine has sharpened its centrist editorial brand, focusing heavily on the drift of the Republican party into pro-Trump authoritarianism and backlash to left-wing campus culture, which have helped push the magazine to over a million subscribers and profitability. Chait, a liberal who often disagrees with Democrats, fits neatly into that vision.

But not everyone in the magazine’s orbit were pleased: We’re told that health journalist Ed Yong, whose COVID reporting for The Atlantic won a Pulitzer Prize in 2021, shared posts on his private Instagram stories this week expressing outrage at the move, and what it suggested about the editorial direction of the magazine. Yong described Chait as a “fucking putz,” expressed frustration at The Atlantic’s skeptical coverage of trans issues and employment of the writer Helen Lewis. Yong also expressed disappointment at the publication’s occasional defense of Israel’s war in Gaza, and suggested that his friends should unsubscribe. (Yong left the magazine last summer.)

In a statement to Semafor, Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey Goldberg defended the publication’s staff. “Jonathan Chait, Helen Lewis, and their colleagues are excellent journalists, and we’re proud of their work,” he said.

Shane Smith’s right-wing rehab

Shane Smith wants to rehabilitate his image with conservatives and get to the bottom of what’s happening in American politics on the right.

In recent weeks, producers for Smith’s new podcast, Shane Smith Has Questions, which is co-produced with Bill Maher’s Club Random Studios, have contacted the publicists of conservative podcasters and manosphere media personalities in an attempt to book them.

The overture has been met with wariness. Conservatives remember Vice’s aggressive journalism in its later years, which unsparingly dug into right-wing figures and media personalities, and its progressive-friendly programming, like a show about feminism hosted by Gloria Steinem and one on queer culture hosted by Elliot Page.

But Smith, his producers have emphasized, was never “woke,” and was always more conservative than the image that Vice drifted towards in the late 2010s. According to his producers, Smith’s previous relationships with corporate media figures during Vice’s heyday — Disney was a major investor — made him sacrifice his male fans to chase an imaginary audience, in their telling.

It’s a savvy strategy to juice engagement: There’s no better way to get people to subscribe to your podcast than appearing with another popular podcast. And there’s some truth to the producers’ argument. While Smith had a relationship with former President Barack Obama during his time in office and then-Vice President Joe Biden, the Vice founder often expressed his admiration for establishment Republicans at the time, including former House Speaker John Boehner.

Ironically, Smith also spent years trying to distance himself from co-founder Gavin McInnes, who he bought out of the company in 2008 as he became an increasing financial liability for what New York politely described as his “noxious brand of humor.” (McInnes would go on to found the Proud Boys.)

“Shane has always been a centrist, and his podcast books guests from both sides of the aisle,” a spokesperson for Vice Media told Semafor. “He’s too left for the right and too right for the left and that’s exactly how his audience prefers it. After only a month, the episodes have over 5 million views and counting.”

Still, it’s less clear whether the conservative media figures Smith is courting will play ball. “These conservatives don’t need Shane,” one person familiar with the meetings who was unimpressed told Semafor. “Shane needs them.”

Fight for the British right

The undercard in the long fight for control of British conservative media, which has largely focused on the Telegraph, was the sale by the same owners of The Spectator, the great conservative magazine long coveted by Rupert Murdoch. It found a buyer in hedge funder Paul Marshal — but while Murdoch didn’t get the Spec, Semafor has learned that one of his companies, News UK, has hired former Spectator editor Fraser Nelson, who will give up his Telegraph column and move to the Times.

News UK is also contemplating a kind of Spectator rival, the Telegraph first reported, an online opinion magazine. We’re told it’s being developed by former Sun editor David Dinsmore, and was for a time being referred to as “Project Spectre,” though for some reason they’ve dropped that name.

Feed Me’s Emily Sundberg and her ‘studio mindset’

One of the most talked-about writers in business and culture journalism last year wasn’t employed by The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg.

She’s the writer of a daily newsletter that launched during Covid as a short-fiction blog and has morphed into a must-read for the young, affluent (or soon-to-be affluent) set in New York.

Emily Sundberg’s business and culture newsletter, Feed Me, publishes every weekday with a mix of aggregated tech and finance news, lifestyle content, media gossip, and NYC restaurant intel, among other topics. Over the last several years it has developed a cult following and over 50,000 subscribers, propelling it to the sixth spot on Substack’s paid leaderboard. The 30-year-old journalist wasn’t included on the New York Magazine power list, but those who were on the list told New York they couldn’t stop reading her newsletter.

Sundberg is saving a lot of the good stuff for a glossy magazine feature to come, but Semafor caught up with her to chat about the newsletter’s two-year anniversary, the announcement of a new podcast, the formal addition of some new contributors and a redesign with slicker, more ad-friendly visual branding and an ouroboros logo to match.

“I’ve been using a bootleg logo of Citibank for the past year, and I was really hoping to get a cease-and-desist from them,” she said. “That would have been really funny to post a letterhead saying that my newsletter was using their iconic logo, but I never got it. I realized I need to have an iconic logo. I can’t take a bank’s logo.”

She added: “It was half-joke, half not. But I am open to all banks advertising with Feed Me, not just Citi.”

Ezra Klein is a New York Times columnist and the host of The Ezra Klein Show.

☊ Audio

Pivot to… Spotify rolled out what it said was its biggest update to podcasts ever last week. During a five-hour-long presentation in Los Angeles, the Swedish audio giant introduced Spotify for Creators, a new platform built to encourage podcasters to use the platform and upload vertical video.

Traffic: It was a big week for insane stats showing just how much digital streaming has grown, particularly on the two biggest streaming platforms. YouTube released numbers showing that more than 45 million Americans watched election returns on the platform. And on Friday, 65 million viewers at one point watched the bizarre boxing match/spectacle between YouTuber Paul and former heavyweight champion Tyson. The stats are flawed and somewhat incomparable to more reliable Nielsen television ratings, but demonstrate the enormous reach of the two biggest streamers.

Booted: Apple has removed Radio Free Europe’s Russian app from its App Store at Moscow’s request, Meduza reports.

⁋ Publishing

Everyone’s a critic: Semafor hears that the owners of the newly revitalized Upper East Side hotspot Le Veau d’Or are steamed about their two-star Critic’s Pick review in The New York Times. The paper raved about the food at the recently-reopened bistro, which was taken over by the team behind Frenchette and Le Rock and relaunched as a midcentury throwback that could appeal to longtime regulars and a younger generation, but reviewer Priya Krishna lamented that the hype has made the service experience uncomfortable.

The restaurant wasn’t pleased, we’ve heard. Neither were some in the comments section, who discovered that Krishna, a popular author and journalist who has reviewed restaurants and written about food for the paper since 2016 and been on staff since 2021, wrote a college thesis a decade ago about French food and imperialism. The former critic Pete Wells’ departure has left a kind of power vacuum, and the culture wars, it seems, can’t be avoided — by us or, of course, by the Times.

⁛ News

High-flying: Some staff at the Intercept have been grumbling about the CEO’s recent use of a small luxury airline that boasts of offering the “perks of private air travel” at a more affordable cost. According to people familiar with the situation, CEO Annie Chabel has shuttled between LA and the Bay Area this year on JSX, a semi-private air carrier that caters to the luxury crowd with fares running double or triple the cost of a seat on an average commercial flight (albeit far less expensive than a fully chartered flight). Meanwhile, the nonprofit organization has laid off staff and attempted to cut costs.

Trump bump redux: While it doesn’t appear that they will reach the heights of the first Trump era, the president-elect’s return to the White House is juicing traffic, subscriptions, and cable television ratings once again. After a sharp drop-off immediately following the election, ratings at MSNBC bounced back on Wednesday following the news that Trump planned to nominate a slew of controversial appointments, including Gaetz.

A Washington Post spokesperson confirmed that the paper was continuing to see demand for subscriptions ticking back up, which the paper said has accelerated post-election. Vox told Semafor that its November page views are on pace to be up about 30% over the prior six month average, and the day after the election was Vox’s strongest day for new members since its paid membership program launched in May.

A tough job: China’s top journalism awards this year went to “servile and anodyne” stories by state-run media outlets, in the words of the California-based China Digital Times — but among the runners-up, there’s “in-depth reporting on topics including crime, corruption, economic inequality, natural disasters, local news, and human interest stories.” A pair of translated essays by Chinese journalists gives a sense of what it’s like to thread that needle.

The rub: The New Yorker has a great piece this week that aligns with what we wrote last week about how changes in media consumption habits shaped the 2024 race. Nathan Heller, one of the few national media journalists who profiled Kamala Harris, wrote that the election was defined by voters who seemed to be increasingly absorbing information ambiently rather than proactively. Americans, Heller wrote, are increasingly “‘rubbed by the news’—rather than by seeking it out. Trump has maximized his influence over networks that people rub against, and has filled them with information that, true or not, seems all of a coherent piece.”

A lobbying group representing the tech industry is urging the incoming Trump administration to broadly review existing federal authorities and rules regarding artificial intelligence, writes Semafor’s Morgan Chalfant, to single out regulations that may be “unnecessarily impeding AI adoption.”