☊ Audio DeloitteListen: Podcasts are vibrant — but hard to monetize, as this chart from Deloitte’s 2024 TMT Predictions report vividly illustrates. (h/t Hot Pod) ⁛ NewsOwning the Times: (Corrected): We misunderstood a theoretical conversation with the investor Boykin Curry about buying 10% of the New York Times. He’s not, he says, planning on it. Puzzling for everybody: Iconic Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward recalled recently being confused for neocon folk hero and anti-Trump Republican Bill Kristol. “Are you Bill Kristol?” a stranger asked him, continuing: “You have some ridiculous opinions.” “No, I’m Bob Woodward,” he replied. “That’s worse!” said his interlocutor (!!??). Missing in Beijing: A reporter for Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post has gone dark after covering a security forum on the mainland, Tokyo’s Kyodo News reports. DeSantis beat, RIP: POLITICO’s DeSantis reporter, the talented Sally Goldenberg, has dropped the beat to return to covering the rather more interesting New York Mayor Eric Adams. Switching sides: The Europe-China correspondent for the Financial Times, Yuan Yang, is campaigning for a Labour seat in the U.K. Parliament. Traffic jam: Even at the New York Times, web traffic is often associated with success. In its internal daily note to staff on Tuesday, the paper said: “Dear colleagues, our coverage of the Israel Gaza war isn’t quite as strong as when the crisis flared, which you’d expect.” Several minutes later, the paper sent out an internal correction tweaking the language, saying, “Dear colleagues, reader interest of the Israel Gaza war isn’t quite as strong as when the crisis first flared, which you’d expect.” Whew: The labor journalist Mike Elk has settled his messy lawsuit with the NewsGuild, which had prompted the Guild to seek emails from a journalist (me!) and from sexual harassment whistleblowers. Elk credited the new leader of the Guild’s parent union, Communications Workers of America president Claude Cummings, for “stepping in to resolve this matter” and trying to create “an inclusive atmosphere not just for people of color but for women, immigrants, and even autistics like me.” He said he’d be donating the $10,000 settlement to an immigrant resource center in Pittsburgh, Casa San José, to train young Latino reporters, and said he’ll be celebrating at Murphy’s Taproom in Pittsburgh’s Regent Square. The NewsGuild did not respond to an inquiry about Elk’s settlement. Correction: Individual members of the New York Times tech guild — but not the Guild itself, as our report last week implied — proposed a union resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. We regret the error. ⁌ TVPay to play: Debates are expensive television productions and thus, quietly, a bit of a racket. The right-wing channel Newsmax is balking at demands it cough up $2 million for the privilege of being ABC News’s “junior partner” — and to basically defray some of ABC’s costs.  Ugly hot: Is Adam Driver ugly? Or hot? CNN’s Chris Wallace asks the distinctive-looking actor the hard questions. ✦ MarketingWho will own Cannes? Ascential, the British company that runs the Cannes Lions ad festival, is selling off its assets — notably, a digital commerce division, which went for nearly a billion dollars to Omnicom. MediaLink’s Kassan is hoping to reach a deal with them to buy the festival itself, which he already more or less rules — and told Semafor at the DealBook summit that he thinks he has a “pretty good chance” of closing that deal. Stay tuned: There is one (1) reason to look forward to the 2024 U.S. election: the huge boost it gives to big parts of the media business. Those numbers are expected to be bigger than ever, according to Madison and Wall’s Brian Wieser. He expects political advertising “to account for 4.3% of all advertising next year,” and more than 8% in the fourth quarter of 2024.  | 
