Media

An extremely nerdy — too nerdy even for our social media editor Josh Billinson — plan to remake the internet is gathering steam. The ActivityPub protocol is extremely wonky, but the web is falling apart in front of us. And the core idea that social networks could be more like email — in which different platforms flow into the same two-way feed for consumers, perhaps with all their rich formatting — is gathering momentum. Its embrace by Meta is a big deal. It’s a plan in need of a popularizer, and I’d nominate The Verge’s Nilay Patel, who has said he’ll make the short posts on the site’s homepage compatible with ActivityPub.

Democrats built an influencer economy. Can it save Joe Biden?

When the Environmental Protection Agency opened public comments this month, they were flooded with more than 60,000 comments from people who support Joe Biden’s new power plant regulations — and had learned about the issue from micro-celebrities they follow on Instagram.

“So join me and let’s get LOUD!” one influencer, Ariana Jasmine Afshar, exhorted her 46,000 Instagram followers. “Let’s show them that we are serious about the young generation’s future.”

This was not a spontaneous outpouring of digital passion for energy regulations, however. Some of the social media celebs, including Afshar, were being paid to speak out by political influencer marketing firm atAdvocacy, which was working with environmental awareness client Evergreen Action to push the president to the left on climate issues. Afshar speaks regularly on social issues to a following that also includes 200,000 people on TikTok, and her posts about the regulations helped inspire some of them to write to the EPA.

Influencer marketing, pioneered years ago by the culture industries and fashion and beauty brands, is now big business. And 2024 is shaping up as the first serious influencer election. Both parties have cultivated networks of informal spokespeople who can reach younger voters or supporters who may not see or be moved by traditional television advertising. An ecosystem of companies on the left including Vocal, atAdvocacy, and Social Currant have emerged to connect candidates to influencers and help those influencers get paid for speaking out on behalf of causes and candidates.

“The young people under 35 that watched the [Republican] debate is in the tens of thousands,” Stuart Perelmuter, the CEO of the influencer network atAdvocacy told Semafor. “We’re reaching them by the 10s of millions every single day.”

And they’re reaching them in an ecosystem that occasionally makes it difficult to tell which posts are paid and which aren’t, as Federal Elections Commission rules are ambiguous on online influencers in elections.

Perelmuter told Semafor that his organization is “very cognizant” of the rules, and noted that the company has been successful because it connects “values-driven” influencers who are already passionate about certain topics with organizations and campaigns that share those interests. But he also acknowledged that placing tags in posts disclosing that they are paid also can weaken their impact.

“Several of our creators put it on there anyway, we encourage them to do what they’re comfortable with. A lot of our creators would happily disclose they’re being paid, and do, in other ways. But sometimes those tags mess up the algorithms, and they just don’t get seen by as many people. So the regulatory world of paid, user generated political content is virtually non-existent at this point,” he said.

Masha Gessen argued recently in the New Yorker that Germans (and everyone else) should face analogies between Israeli treatment of Palestinians and the Holocaust. This is, for obvious reasons, an extremely sensitive subject in Germany, where Gessen’s piece imperiled their receiving the Hannah Arendt prize. This produced a wave of coverage — but, Gessen grumbled on X: “Not one German journalist has reached out for comment. One US journalist did. All reporting has happened with no input/reaction from me. Inaccuracies pile up.”

⁛ News

🟡 Getting the message:

“I can’t think of another way to get this across but in a group slack. Jimmy does not want any Trump trial coverage on the HP, period. I’m repeatedly getting calls on it. Please make sure we don’t slip one in,” The Messenger Deputy Editor Michelle Gotthelf wrote in a Slack message with a handful of editors in November, referring to the site’s founder and publisher Jimmy Finkelstein.

The editorial directive sparked immediate backlash among some editors in the newsroom, who noted that the publication had prominently featured major stories about Hunter Biden’s legal issues, Max writes. It also prompted speculation from the group about the reason for Finkelstein’s repeated calls to remove the stories from the homepage.

In an email to a group of editors shared with Semafor, Finkelstein said that editors had misunderstood his instructions around placement for Trump stories, saying that there needed to be more balance on the homepage. He also added that he didn’t want breathless Trump trial coverage every day.

“You absolutely don’t know what you are talking about. All I said is you can’t lead every day with 21 day, 22 day etc. You can put it up top but can’t always lead. It looks completely one sided. Despite the fact that I said that it continued so I merely said firmly you need balance, that’s what we are about,” he wrote.

A spokesperson for The Messenger reiterated that the internal drama was merely confusion: “The Slack messages in question are clearly being misinterpreted. The editor clearly clarified later that the headline didn’t reflect the story and needed to be changed, and the story remained on the site. The Messenger has covered the Trump trial sagas more than any other U.S. publication.”

🟡 Assange on Trial: The U.S. government’s 13-year- old attempt to bring Wikileaks founder Julian Assange here to face Espionage Act charges could reach a pivotal moment in U.K. court next month, and Reporters Without Borders is making the case with increasing urgency that charges against him could pose a threat to journalists and publishers. The group, we’re told, met recently with the White House to make its case. “At any point the US government could close the case, offer Assange a plea deal in consideration of time already served in prison, or reach a diplomatic solution with Australia, Assange’s own government. The bottom line is that the country of the First Amendment should act to protect journalism and press freedom rather than making a dangerous example of a publisher for revealing information in the public interest,” RSF Director of Campaigns Rebecca Vincent told Semafor.

Independence Day: New York Times reporters worried about their union’s activist direction have formed an “independence” caucus. Megan Twohey, one of its founders, described it in the NewsGuild Slack as a vehicle for pushing back, among other things, against “statements that align the union with one side of a war or other divisive issues.” One objection came from Travel’s Stephen Hiltner, who wrote back that he worried the plan was “only risks fanning the flames of an advocacy battle — a battle that we, as proponents of independent journalism, have in effect already won” since the union rejected calls for a statement on Gaza. The union “will always support workers coming together debating issues and making our union stronger,” NewsGuild national president Jon Schleuss told The Wall Street Journal.

Death in Gaza: Gaza remains the deadliest conflict in memory for journalists and media workers, with 64 deaths according to the Committee to Protect Journalists: 57 Palestinian, 4 Israeli, and 3 Lebanese. Al Jazeera cameraman Samer Abudaqa bled to death after he was hit in a drone strike and bombardment prevented paramedics from saving him, the network said. “The number of journalists killed in Gaza is unprecedented. It is a stain on our humanity and to any civilized country that values a free press. It must stop,” NBC News’s Ayman Mohyeldin, who had worked with Abudaqa, wrote on Instagram.

✰ Hollywood

Power Law: The analyst Ben Thompson spots a media paradox: In this long tail era, every platform — including Netflix, is full of random niche content, much of it trash. And yet the vast bulk of the audience still consumes mostly the same stuff: “Network effects and algorithms …. elevate what is good into the stratosphere.” This is less true in emerging, fragmented media like newsletters and audio, but power laws still rule the internet.

Selling out: Among the content that will likely be topping Netflix: “Dune” and “Young Sheldon,” as WarnerBros Discovery and Disney find they can’t afford to starve the rival service.

🟡 Holiday fears: Media companies found a place to cut costs this year: holiday parties. The mega talent agency CAA, which once rented out the Beverly Hills see-and-be-seen spot Bouchon and served champagne and caviar, held its holiday party at the Britely Bowling Alley. In Washington, things were even bleaker: A staffer for the Washington Post’s national desk accidentally reserved a nearby bar for the wrong day, resulting in a last-minute relocation to … the company’s office, catered by Chipotle. Other events were scrapped altogether: Mediaite’s annual gathering of current and former high profile cable news personalities, was canceled. (Here at Semafor’s New York HQ, Max mixed drinks before a spirited, globally-oriented game of trivia. Not at all suspiciously, Ben’s team won.)

To Big to Decouple: The Eras tour movie has won a release in China, through Alibaba Pictures.

☊ Audio

Audacity: Perhaps the last big podcast investment, a £5 million slug into the U.K. studio Novel this January, pretty much immediately collapsed into a bitter lawsuit. The London-based investor, VGC capitol, is suing Novel, which produced The Bellingcat Podcast and Superhero Comple, for £15 million claiming they lied during the fundraising process. Honestly, a bit hard to see how they ever thought the “podcast-to-screen” plan was going to pay off big.

⁜ Tech

🟡 TikTok vote: Blueprint, the Democratic strategy group funded by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, has a new YouGov poll out showing that political TikTok users are 10 points more likely to see Biden as conservative than their non-TikTok using peers on certain issues. American voters who report that they get their news from TikTok felt that Biden’s foreign policy, immigration, and business and gas regulation policies were more conservative compared to people who get their news from traditional news sources.

Another Google lawsuit: An obscure Arkansas publisher is leading a class action lawsuit against Google, focused on the content in its “knowledge panels.” The suit says Google “siphons off” publishers’ content for its own profit. Google spokesperson Jenn Crider called it “meritless” and said “people have many ways to access information and news content today – through publishers’ websites, dedicated apps, social media platforms, print papers and more.”

✦ Marketing

Flack attack: In what will inevitably be a commentator on journalism as well as P.R., a longtime Washington flack, Phil Elwood, promises to “come clean” in this forthcoming book, “by exposing the dark underbelly of the very industry that’s made him so successful.”

Eavesdropping: A marketing company run by Cox Media says it’s doing “what a huge swath of the public has believed for years”: listening in from smartphones and other devices to serve you ads. The company, on further reflection, says the data is anonymized.

• COP28 President Sultan al-Jaber has achieved something unprecedented for an oil executive: Winning fans among climate activists.
• The U.S. is considering striking Yemen Houthi’s militia, Jay Solomon reports, balancing their attacks on Israel with the threat of a widening war.
• The BRICS economic bloc of countries is aggressively expanding its media presence in Africa through its Moscow-headquartered broadcast network to counter Western narratives in the Global South,” Semafor’s Martin Siele reports.
• Semafor Tech showed up at the hottest annual machine learning conference in New Orleans this week to find that Chinese tech companies and Wall Street trading firms were among the most prominent participants.