Media

1. What we’re watching
2. AI vs. news publishers
3. TikTok keeps ticking
4. The ‘Podfather’ and Spotify
5. Bremmer on media

Welcome to Semafor Media, where we feel like we’re staring directly into the sun.

You campaign in poetry and govern in prose, Mario Cuomo said 30 years ago. For Donald Trump, I suppose you’d say you campaign in memes and govern in screenshots, or campaign in ALLCAPS and govern in more conventional punctuation.

The corollary for journalism is about narrative. Politics, and particularly the centralized American presidential campaign, is a story, and a choice for voters of which story to believe. Presidencies are facts, and modern presidents have notoriously quickly lost control of their grand stories. Trump now has a week, maybe more, in which he will dominate the narrative and blot out the sun, but pretty soon he’ll be running the sprawling US government.

And as newsrooms mull how to cover the next four years, I hope we will do our best to avoid either clinging to hackneyed, comfortable narratives or getting seduced by the shiniest new ones, in favor of trying to help our audiences follow the biggest story in the world of the next few years: what the hell is going on in Washington.

A few things are predictable — Trump’s promises that he clearly plans to keep; a certain degree of open conflict and chaos. But there are going to be so many facts to report, so many questions which haven’t yet been answered, so many surprises. Elon Musk’s DOGE will succeed or fail at cutting and modernizing the US government. Trump will deliver the economic populism he promised or merely pay lip service to it. Inflation will return or subside. US chipmakers will compete or fade.

Those questions, behind the storytelling and the noise, are pretty good reporting targets. (Max is on the loose in Washington all week, please give him scoops!) Journalists should get used to answering them with provisional first drafts, subject to change, not confident narratives. And the writers and talkers who we should trust least are the ones most confident about what is going on.

In today’s edition, Max flags three big media stories to watch, and scoops a development in the big, messy conflict unfolding between publishers and AI companies. Also, Ian Bremmer talks about the media’s place in the world order, and Bill Simmons sticks around. (Scoop count: 4)

Want to know what the global elites think of all this? Follow Semafor’s on-the-ground coverage of Davos this week. Sign up here.

What we’ll be asking for the next 4 years

When Donald Trump takes office for the second time on Monday, he will face a much friendlier, much more decentralized media landscape than the one he navigated in his first term.

The eternally tough business environment, coupled with a wave of lawsuits and threats of regulatory action, has already sent a number of media companies and publishers racing to make preemptive concessions to the new president. The public’s changing media consumption habits and Trump’s closeness with Musk, the owner of one of the most influential social media platforms in the world, have also given Trump a major leg up in his ability to control the American political dialogue.

The biggest media stories of the second Trump administration will revolve around how legacy institutions will (or won’t) adapt to this new environment — and how younger upstarts will (or won’t) overtake them.

Inside publishers’ fight with AI companies

The key Washington lobbying group for news organizations and publishers is gearing up for legal action against a major artificial intelligence company that it believes has been egregiously copying publisher content to power its large language model.

The News Media Alliance, whose members include newspaper publisher Gannett, magazine publisher Condé Nast, Atlantic Media, Hearst, Vox Media, and others, has been putting together what its members see as a strong case of copyright infringement and violation of intellectual property laws by a notable AI player. According to four people who participated in a strategy call around the announcement on Wednesday, the complaint will likely be filed in the coming weeks and will show large amounts of text that, the publishers claim, an AI model has essentially copied and pasted without attribution or license.

Publishing executives declined to say which AI company would be the focus on the complaint. Reached for comment, the NMA did not confirm or clarify to Semafor who the litigation is being brought against. But many members of the NMA have ongoing licensing deals with OpenAI that make it difficult to bring any direct legal action against the company over how it uses their content. Not all members of the NMA have agreed to participate in the forthcoming lawsuit.

TikTok skips a beat

The US was TikTok-less for just 14 hours. After a national ban went into effect and the app went dark, Donald Trump said Sunday that he would issue an executive order after his inauguration that extends TikTok’s timeline to be sold. He also vowed that TikTok’s service providers wouldn’t be subject to penalties for violating the ban. Even as some US lawmakers signaled they would push for the ban to be enforced, TikTok could, as The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson wrote, become the equivalent of “digital marijuana” — technically illegal, but tolerated amid “a deliberate and widely understood refusal to enforce the law.”

The ‘Podfather’ likely to stick with Spotify

Spotify is set to renew Bill Simmons, quieting chatter that “the Podfather” planned to leave the Swedish streaming giant when his deal ran out this year. Last year, the New York Post reported that Simmons had expressed frustration about Spotify’s corporate structure and his ability to add talent he wanted, prompting him to have “exploratory conversations with other companies about the possibility of launching a new platform.”

Both Simmons and Spotify downplayed the report at the time. Now, according to two people familiar with the situation, Simmons is poised to renew his current deal, which is up in February, and very likely intends to stay at the streaming giant. One person familiar with Simmons’ plans told Semafor that he has recently been engaged in long-term projects that take him beyond his current deal. Simmons, Simmons’ spokesperson, and Spotify did not return multiple requests for comment.

Mixed Signals

As Trump’s second inauguration approaches and global leaders head to Davos for the World Economic Forum, Mixed Signals asks: What will the media’s role be in an increasingly unstable era? Will it bring more order or disorder to global politics?

Ben and Max invite Ian Bremmer, president of Eurasia Group, to explore how global leaders interact with new media and whether digital media is shaping global politics or vice versa. They also discuss Ian’s run-in with Elon Musk in 2022 and how Donald Trump’s second term could influence media leaders like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos.

Listen to the latest episode of Mixed Signals now.

Andrew Ross Sorkin is founder and editor-at-large of DealBook at The New York Times.

⁌ TV

Settled: CNN was forced to settle a defamation lawsuit in Florida after a jury ordered the network to pay $5 million for a critical story it wrote about a security contractor in 2021.

Dominance: As the rest of cable continues to experience viewership decline, Fox News has been chugging along largely unscathed. Multiple times a week, the network blasts out updates on its ratings wins, which in recent days have reached fairly comical heights over their cable news rivals. The network noted recently that all of the top 400 cable telecasts during the month of December were Fox News shows. The network hasn’t seemed to suffer any serious ratings hits over the departure of numerous staff for White House posts, either. Trump has already hired 19 current or former Fox News on-air personalities to join his administration.

⁛ News

Walk off: In keeping with his presidency-long aversion to engaging with the press, President Joe Biden decided against holding the final press conference that outgoing presidents have traditionally held (Trump also opted against holding one as well when he left office in 2021). The press, in turn, has returned the favor by showering the president with negative headlines about his extremely low popularity and deeply-reported stories about his final days in office and how his diminishment played out behind the scenes during his presidency.

Op-ed edits: The New York Times laid off several notable staffers this week and shuffled around some editors. As Semafor reported, the Times is taking a broader look at its opinion coverage and is weighing whether to make further changes to its editorial board endorsements.

Staycation: Washington Post executive editor Matt Murray canceled plans to travel to Davos for the World Economic Forum, Semafor has learned, opting instead to oversee the paper’s coverage of the inauguration and meet with the paper’s owner, Bezos. The Post’s owner dined this week with Murray and Washington Post CEO Will Lewis this week at LA’s Osteria Mozza.

✦ Marketing

All about timing: Xiaohongshu has hoped to capitalize on its brief surge in popularity, buying ads targeting users specifically looking for TikTok in Apple’s App Store and Google Play.

Hot desk: Apple’s Severance did a clever piece of stunt marketing this week, recreating an office behind plexiglass in Grand Central Station and having the show’s stars perform mundane office tasks. The whole thing went viral and received praise by the ad trade press.

⁜ Tech

Wii throwback: The Australian Open is exploiting a loophole in its broadcast licensing deal by streaming its games on YouTube in real time with animated cartoon tennis avatars of the athletes.

Backup plans: India’s TikTok ban gives clues to how US users may react long term if the American ban stays in place. After India banned TikTok, many of its users migrated to YouTube.

✰ Hollywood

Spotted: A tipster sent us a photo showing Brett Ratner, director of a documentary about Melania Trump now in the works, at a table with Musk at Mar-a-Lago.

Fire aid: All the major streaming services will stream an upcoming charity concert to benefit victims of the LA fires. The simulcast event, the first collaboration between the major streamers, will feature Billie Eilish, Lady Gaga, and other megawatt musicians.

⁋ Publishing

Open Gates: The Gates Foundation announced it is funding Britain’s Independent Media Group to cover stories in underreported parts of the world.

John Thune and Trump are texting buddies now, Semafor’s Burgess Everett and Shelby Talcott report. The new Senate majority leader and the president-elect have very different personalities, but these days, Republican leaders are well aware that a lack of close coordination will spell political disaster — so Thune and Trump are building a harmonious relationship.