Media

1. Gulf blackout
2. Mixed Signals
3. Lessons from Budapest
4. Moore hits back
5. Generational gaps

I headed down to Washington this morning for the largest exercise in what we call live journalism that I’ve ever been part of, Semafor World Economy. Semafor’s journalists, along with friends from ABC, CBS, BBC News, Fox Business, CNN, NBC, The Wall Street Journal, and others, will spend the next five days conducting hundreds of interviews on three parallel stages about this wild global economic moment. Semafor World Economy is the largest event of this kind I can recall any news organization ever putting on. It’ll be a festival of news — carried on our website, Reuters, AP, and everywhere else.

I hope you’ll join us in person, or check out our rolling coverage. But Max also suggested I reflect on the experience of building a media company in 2026 that interlocks scoopy, aggressive, and (we hope!) insightful journalism with this very ambitious form of live journalism.

The main thing I’ve learned is that journalism isn’t just the product. Great reporting and great reporters are what give you authority in the first place to host a group like this — including more than 500 top global CEOs, nine Cabinet secretaries, a dozen top White House officials, 20 G20 finance ministers and central bank governors, about 20% of the US Senate, and more than 300 journalists.

Journalism powers the machine, but it’s wildly far from sufficient: I’m in awe of my colleagues who organize, design, wrangle, secure, promote, commercialize, deliver, and produce across an array of disciplines I didn’t entirely know existed, including massive physical installations for a new report, Semafor Signal Shift, we’re releasing with our partners at Gallup. (I talk a lot about all the “surfaces” our journalism lives on. Walls are a new one.)

Only once you’ve built the stage and built the audience do you have permission — and pressure — to make news.

At Semafor, we’re intensely focused on building a virtuous circle in which the journalism and the convenings power one another and build a growing, sustainable business. But lest you get too excited, let me do my best to scare off would-be competitors: This stuff is hard. I come from the sector of digital journalism in which the most difficult daily logistical decision is whether or not to put on pants. Convening on this scale requires excellence across a dozen different disciplines, of which journalism is just one. So I’ll go back to frantically preparing for my interview with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent tomorrow, and hope to see you in Washington — or, if not, on the internet.

Also today: How the UAE and its Gulf peers are keeping images of drone and airstrike damage out of the press.

The Gulf tries to sanitize war

Last month, a few photojournalists were arrested in the UAE, prompting some global newswires to stop publishing original images showing damage from Iranian missile and drone strikes on the country, Semafor Gulf’s Kelsey Warner reports. The arrests, and the disappearance of on-the-ground conflict photography, are just one example of a media crackdown that has swept the Gulf, as well as Israel and Iran, since the start of the war. The blackout coincided with increasing pressure from UAE authorities — initially seen as targeting social media users — to control the news coming out of the country, and mirrors regional restrictions and crackdowns on visual media around Iranian attacks.

Bluesky’s COO on ‘Mixed Signals’

Bluesky has a reputation as a politically charged platform — but COO Rose Wang says the company is reimagining social media through a more decentralized model. On this week’s episode of Mixed Signals, Max and Ben sit down with Wang to examine Bluesky’s rapid growth, its evolving identity, and the challenge of turning a utopian vision into a real business.

Moore laments Sinclair takeover of Sun

In our last edition, we reported on the behind-the-scenes battle between the Sinclair-owned Baltimore Sun and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore — and scooped that the Sun’s owner, David Smith, is directly involved in the Sun’s reporting. The story made the rounds in political circles; Democrats and Moore allies expressed dismay at the legal threats Sun reporters made in their emails, while Moore skeptics said the emails’ publication was a cheap attempt to front run what could be damaging stories about the governor.

When Semafor’s David Weigel caught up with Moore at Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network conference in New York last week, the rumored 2028 hopeful compared Smith’s handling of the Sun to other media titans who’ve steered their news outlets rightward.

“I have no problem taking tough questions. I have no problem if people want to poke and prod on our policies or issues,” Moore said. “But that’s not what Sinclair is, or Nexstar, or this new purchase group for the LA Times.”

The top editor of Spotlight on Maryland, the joint Sinclair venture that has been pursuing the governor, responded to Moore publicly last week, teasing a forthcoming series on him and saying his office threatened to “send files to every media reporter to try and discredit us.”

Keep the forints

The columnist Fraser Nelson recalled in the Times last week the day “when a charming Hungarian official came to see me, with a strikingly attractive assistant. He was a big fan of The Spectator, which I then edited — such a fan, he said, that he had been authorised to offer us a deal. He’d pay to have the magazine translated into Hungarian.” This obviously did not make any sense, but it would have paid the bills. The only downside was “we would, in effect, be in the pay of Viktor Orbán.”

Nelson’s story reveals a thread of Hungarian influence in right-wing politics in the Anglosphere. It also hints at just what cheap dates we media types are. Hungary is the 23rd-largest economy in Europe, just below Greece and Finland, but even a small government can easily ingratiate itself to journalists with a translation deal here, a junket there. This isn’t to say that the right-wing romance with Orbán — whose party was blown out in Sunday’s national election — wasn’t sincere. But, as Nelson concludes, “when power, money and the media fuse, the system ceases to serve the public and begins to serve itself.” The appeal of the “rule-breaking strongman,” he writes, always ends in “corruption and decay.”

Writing for the eye

A Reuters Institute report on young people’s news habits, out last month, contains a few bad omens for the old-fashioned habit of consuming text. One in three 18-to-24-year-olds prefer watching the news to reading or listening to it, the highest percentage of any age bracket surveyed — even if a 42% plurality still say they prefer reading. (Audio was a distant third, for all the talk of podcasts lately.) And just over half of those young people say they pay the most attention to “creators or personalities” online, versus a third who look most to traditional news sources. Those proportions roughly flip for the oldest age group surveyed, news consumers 55 and older. President Donald Trump’s apparent fondness for Iran war briefings in the form of TikTok-length highlight reels may just mean he’s ahead of the curve.

— Graph Massara

Vogue: Director Greta Gerwig jointly interviews Anna Wintour and Meryl Streep on the eve of The Devil Wears Prada 2, with Wintour successor Chloe Malle serving as “stenographer.” (The photos alone are worth your time.)

Puck: Bob Iger has hired Gawker-slaying media lawyer Charles Harder to “push back” on an upcoming unauthorized biography, Matt Belloni reports.

Axios: The AP and the Lee newspaper chain are embroiled in a contract dispute as AP has had to cut jobs, Sara Fischer writes.

LA Material: Amy Kaufman surveys Hollywood insiders on the unwritten rules of appearing on (or making) big-name podcasts.

New York Times: Iran is flooding the internet with information and propaganda about the war, as Stuart A. Thompson, Steven Lee Myers, and Tiffany Hsu detail.

• Trump’s media company is dropping its defamation lawsuit against several media companies over reports on Trump’s ties to a Russian oligarch. In a legal filing on Friday first shared with Semafor, Trump Media & Technology Group said it was dropping its lawsuit against The Guardian, Penske Media, and others after the company disputed reporting that New York prosecutors had examined its acceptance of $8 million with suspected Russian ties. The case had previously been dismissed after a Florida judge said TMTG, the parent company of Trump’s platform, Truth Social, could not prove the Guardian acted with “actual malice” in its reporting, but allowed TMTG to refile an amended complaint. The parties had been scheduled to meet in court on Monday.
• Democrats want answers about the Pentagon’s decision to take greater editorial control over Stars and Stripes, the long-running military news organization, which has previously operated with fairly broad editorial latitude. Last week, we first reported on a letter to the Pentagon and the newspaper’s editorial leadership from Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., arguing that the Pentagon’s new rules violated editorial policies intended to safeguard the paper’s independence and ability to publish, on occasion, unflattering information.
• Soros Fund Management took a stake in MeidasTouch, confirming our reporting from last fall that the YouTube-first media company was in talks with Soros and others about potentially expanding via outside investment.
• Amid a legal dispute with Elon Musk, OpenAI’s lawyers have instructed the talent agency WME to preserve its communications about the ChatGPT-maker and to explain the nature of its recent work for Musk and his lawyers. According to a Tuesday letter first reported by Semafor last week, OpenAI also wants WME and Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel to disclose whether WME is working with Meta or other OpenAI competitors, suggesting Musk is coordinating attacks on the company alongside Meta and its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg.
• In addition to a roster of Cabinet secretaries and global finance ministers, Ben and Max are interviewing a host of American media executives onstage at the convening of Semafor World Economy, including Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch, Twitch CEO Dan Clancy, Versant’s Mark Lazarus, SpringHill CEO and longtime Lebron James business partner Maverick Carter, and Dhar Mann CEO Sean Atkins. Send us your questions!