1. Weiss and El-Sayed
2. White House vs. press corps
3. Cable struggles
4. Mixed Signals
5. Found and lost
6. NYT’s Insta ads

I hope you’ll forgive me on Semafor’s fourth anniversary for talking our own book, and for sharing here a lightly edited version of a note I sent Semafor’s staff earlier today:

Semafor CEO Justin Smith and I have been asked a lot lately: When we launched Semafor four years ago, is this what we were expecting? Did we think it would get this much traction, this fast? What has surprised us?

The truth is that we would have been pleased four years ago to know the current state of Semafor — a respected brand, a brilliant newsroom, a strong, profitable business. But surprised? The honest answer is no. It took a lot of optimism to launch a new media company in 2022. This was informed optimism, however: We share a deep belief in how much the talented people we hoped we could hire could accomplish through incredibly hard work. And we were always thinking big.

What’s so exciting right now is that Semafor is starting to emerge clearly as the thing that we hoped it would become — shaped and driven by our growing team in ways we couldn’t have imagined.

We launched with the insight that a leadership audience — CEOs and political leaders alike — was, paradoxically, the most desperate for efficient, fair, and sophisticated news. Then, no CEO or head of state had heard of us; now, we have 1.2 million subscriptions to our briefings, and more than 16,000 people have attended our convenings around the world.

We launched with global ambitions — but footprints only in the US and Africa, a start in the world’s most developed media market and one in its fastest-growing. Now we have journalists in 11 countries, scoops and email briefings and events with deep audiences in Africa and the Gulf, and we’re sprinting toward a launch in Asia next year.

Our thesis at launch was that “events” was a journalism business that could help power the business of journalism. Our biggest upside surprise is how fast that’s happened, and the extent to which we quickly outgrew the category of “media events” and moved into another one: signature convenings that set the global agenda and serve both as festivals of news and crucial spaces for conversation and connection.

Perhaps most important, we launched with a deep sense that audiences — buffeted by the hyper-polarizing, hyper-toxic environment in which social media had become the tail wagging the dog of journalism — wanted a new approach. And we’re so proud to have defined a style and brand of journalism that separates facts and opinion, has an eye on its own blind spots, and leaves space for reasonable disagreement, on stage, on the page, and in the other places our journalism appears.

This moment feels to us the way it did in 2022 — the bullet train has just left the platform, and everyone here at Semafor is finding their feet again. We anticipate closing this year substantially bigger than the last by tangible and intangible metrics — revenue and profitability and reach, impact, and brand. And, as everyone here can feel, we’re pressing for a defining fifth year, in which we start to feel the promise of a true global journalism brand that convenes the most important conversations in the world, starting this November in Silicon Valley.

We launched this project in 2022 with some ideas about what could be done. But as our colleagues have heard us both say: This is a business of people and execution. The ideas on paper are worth little. And none of it matters much without you, our community. Thank you for joining us here and please keep all of it — the ideas, tips, criticism, and feedback — coming.

Also today: Max reports from the front lines of the war over CBS News’ Middle East reporting, plus news from our Washington team on the White House’s involvement in the antitrust probe of TV networks, and Kevin Roose talks AI funding.

Concerns at CBS News over Michigan Senate coverage

A year into Bari Weiss’ stint as editor-in-chief of CBS News, the politics of the Middle East and the conflict in Israel and Gaza remain red-hot topics internally. Rank-and-file staff have clashed with editors installed by Weiss over Gaza coverage, leaking embarrassing internal network discussions along the way. And in recent weeks, according to three people familiar with the situation, she has been particularly focused on one midterm race.

Weiss has been pushing her newsroom to pursue numerous stories related to the Democratic Senate candidate in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, and his purported familial links to the Muslim Brotherhood. She has discussed the topic on editorial calls, tasked CBS News’ investigative unit with combing through El-Sayed’s background for a potential link to the organization, and was directly involved in a controversial story about his previous posts comparing the COVID-19 death toll to 9/11. The network’s investigative team is preparing to publish a story in the coming days on the subject, though two people familiar with the reporting said that as of Sunday afternoon, it was unclear whether the story will include new revelations.

Meanwhile, some CBS News staff have privately grumbled that Weiss hasn’t extended the same enthusiastic scrutiny to other candidates on the right.

“Bari’s ideas routinely come from social media influencers or from opposition research that’s been placed in conservative outlets, and those stories usually leave out important context and facts,” one CBS News staffer in New York told Semafor. “She seems more suited to editing at publications like City Journal, The Free Press, or The [Washington] Free Beacon, which take a clear side on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and match her views.”

A spokesperson for the network defended its “rigorous” coverage, and argued that its journalists have been reporting aggressively on other competitive Senate races, like Maine’s.

White House involved in antitrust probe of TV networks

After major TV networks moved to suspend their pool coverage in solidarity with CNN, MS NOW, and Politico, which the White House has sought to ban, the Justice Department announced an investigation into their boycott as a potential violation of antitrust laws. That investigation came at the White House’s urging, people familiar with the matter told Semafor’s Shelby Talcott and Ashley Gold last week. Even some administration officials are skeptical it’ll work; two former DOJ sources said they think the networks are likely protected by the First Amendment.

A DOJ official disputed that the White House first raised the idea of a probe, saying that “seasoned attorneys within the Justice Department, including the antitrust division, first discussed this.” But at least one person outside the administration was pitching the idea: Laura Loomer tweeted last month to ask why the DOJ hadn’t “filed an antitrust lawsuit” against outlets that “colluded to refuse to cover” President Donald Trump.

Dual-channel memories

ESPN and Fox News are the only networks slowing down cable’s inexorable decline. Ad revenue across basic cable overall fell 6.7% year-over-year in 2025, to its lowest level since 2006, according to an S&P Global Market Intelligence Kagan analysis, as cord-cutting continues apace. But those two are still going strong, with rising viewership; ESPN saw 7% higher ad revenue last year versus 2024, while Fox’s rose by 7.5%, even as the news category overall shrank.

— Graph Massara

AI reporter Roose on ‘Mixed Signals’

The tech journalists Kevin Roose and Casey Newton had always gotten amused attention for the disclosures in their podcast — that Roose’s now-former employer, The New York Times, was suing OpenAI, and that Newton’s fiancé works for Anthropic. Now they’re building a new show together, Machine Gods, and weighing another potential conflict of interest: The project received a $480,000 grant from the Tarbell Center to cover AI. Critics in the industry see Tarbell, a huge new funder of journalism, putting a thumb on the scale for the safety side of the AI debate. But Roose, whose new book, The AGI Chronicles, is a scoopy and wild-eyed take on the technology’s growth, said Newton’s experience with a past Tarbell fellow had reassured them that there were no strings attached.

“I don’t think it’s that weird and shadowy,” Roose said. Tarbell’s backers “feel like there has not been enough rigorous, independent AI journalism that is high-quality,” he added, “and they’re trying to address that by funding more of what they want to see in the world.”

Lost and Found

Found, the food, leisure, and real-estate media startup launched by Curbed Media founder Lockhart Steele and former president Josh Albertson, is getting easier to find. The site is launching a digital hub, dubbed One Found, that will allow paid subscribers to access all of Found’s content across the seven cities where it currently operates standalone local sites, which feature intel and recommendations from tastemakers and notable residents. “We’ve become a sort-of accidental travel companion,” Steele said

The company, which has 135,000 subscribers, is also expanding its city offerings, launching Found Chicago on Friday and ramping up coverage of Boston, Charleston and Austin next week. Albertson said the brand has been praised by many readers as a welcome addition amid a decline in quality local media coverage.

“Given the contraction of the local media landscape, especially in the categories FOUND operates in — restaurants, real estate, shopping, culture and leisure, getaway travel, the modern workplace — we’re finding there’s a lot of built-in enthusiasm for what we’re doing,” said Albertson.

New York Times’ ad strategy

The New York Times is advertising in its Instagram Stories. On Monday, the paper ran a digital ad campaign for financial services organization TIAA, sharing several images in video stories on Instagram with an “advertising” label affixed.

It’s a notable move for the paper, which enforces hard lines between its editorial and commercial operations — its podcast hosts don’t read advertisements on their shows, and partners’ messages are kept at a relative distance from the New York Times brand.

Jordan Cohen, a spokesperson for the paper, noted that the practice has been in place since 2024 (though no one has remarked upon it). He told Semafor the “advertising team manages these placements independently of the newsroom, and advertisers have no influence over the account’s editorial coverage.”

The Hollywood Reporter: Disney inked a major creator deal with Dude Perfect that “will span entertainment sports, consumer products and experiences,” Alex Weprin writes.

Puck: Netflix booted chief content officer Bela Bajaria amid sluggish growth, replacing her with former Disney exec Peter Rice, Matt Belloni reports.

WSJ: YouTube has discussed potentially offering audiobooks, a potential challenge to Spotify and Audible, Alexandra Bruell and Anne Steele report.

Politico: White House chief of staff Susie Wiles set up short-lived press secretary Katie Zacharia’s surprisingly contentious interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Sophia Cai, Will Steakin, and Connor Stringer report.

Awful Announcing: ESPN chair Jimmy Pitaro and Fox Sports CEO Eric Shanks successfully lobbied for changes to a college sports bill that would protect their existing TV contracts, Jon Loesche writes.

• The Daily Caller posted and then deleted a strange cartoon image of Bill Gates, the devil, and Jeffrey Epstein wearing a Speedo with an Israeli flag on it. On Thursday, the right-wing digital media outlet shared an aggregated piece about Gates’ concerns about the power of artificial intelligence. In a post quoting the piece, the organization posted the image along with the caption, “We trust you Bill!” The post was quickly deleted, but not before someone could flag it to Semafor. A Daily Caller spokesperson told Semafor: “The post reflected poor judgment and was quickly removed. The matter has been addressed internally, and while we don’t believe there was any malicious intent, we made clear that the post fell short of our standards.”
• CNN announced a new AI partnership last week with Google that will compensate the cable news network for information “discovered” by the search engine’s AI. In an email to staff shared with Semafor, the company noted that CNN’s articles will now “help inform AI-generated responses to news-related searches across Google’s products, with attribution to our original reporting.” The deal also opens the door for the news organization to develop future AI features with Google.
• New York Public Radio parted ways with CEO Christy Tanner after less than nine months, the company said last week. Semafor reported earlier this year that Tanner’s tenure was rocky from Day 1; she had quickly forced out a series of key players upon assuming the job, surprising staff and other top figures within the organization.
• InStyle, the once-ubiquitous ’90s beauty magazine, has had a runaway hit in its branded Office-esque microdrama, The Intern.
• TikTok removed the advertising account for Musk, the new documentary from Alex Gibney about the billionaire businessman, citing its apparent violations of the platform’s political advertising restrictions. Gibney’s team has savvily used the advertising bans as free publicity for Musk; he discussed friction with the tech platforms over advertising for the movie on last week’s episode of Mixed Signals.
• You Can See Everything made $15 million in its opening weekend, the second-best opening for a non-music documentary in history.