Media

1. Musk’s reach
2. MrBeast’s book bomb
3. Mixed Signals
4. AI op-eds
5. Axel Springer’s expansion
6. Everything is podcasting
7. Yes, even TV

It’s easy to be a smug legacy media person these days. The tech industry, whose tools helped demolish central journalistic authority over the last 20 years, is struggling to persuade people that data centers aren’t absorbing the Earth’s supply of water. The Pentagon has been at war with one of Elon Musk’s favorite muddled X personalities, whom administration staffers loved when she was publishing paranoid theories about USAID but hate now that she publishes paranoid theories about them.

It may be satisfying to taunt technologists or conservatives with memes about reaping and sowing, but in most cases, that’s probably giving them too much credit. The tech-driven return to a splintered media is reversion to the historical norm. And journalists in particular should be careful what we wish for.

The longtime internet person Taylor Lorenz (with whom I agree on few things) appeared on Mixed Signals last week to ring the alarm that the cure to digital chaos may be worse than the disease. The preferred antidote to an out-of-control internet is, well, control. That often comes in the form of a de-anonymized online world in which every form of speech, every action, is tied to your real identity.

A raft of reasonable new measures, mostly related to protecting kids, have Americans increasingly sharing their identities on the web. We might miss the digital freedoms of the early 21st century, even for the dumbest people on X, when they’re gone.

Also today: Semafor tracks the spread of AI-generated op-ed writing, Axel Springer expands in the UAE, and MrBeast’s book sales outlook isn’t great.

How Elon Musk still pays the piper

The early days of the Trump administration saw Musk amplify and drive his assault on government agencies through an array of commentators on his platform X, whose theories about everything from deep-state plots to USAID thievery he elevated. Musk has moved on, but he left a cottage industry in place, and its most successful small business is the account DataRepublican. The account pushed groundless USAID theories in the early days of DOGE and, with Musk’s help, built one of the top businesses in X’s (modest) subscription program.

The analyst Travis Brown discovered last week that she’s currently the third-biggest subscription account on the platform, with 9,659 subscribers paying $36 per year. That adds up to something north of $300,000 by X’s typical payment scheme. That’s better than government work — which is notable because the account’s author, Jennica Pounds, is also now employed by the Trump Pentagon. (She didn’t respond to an inquiry about her media business.)

And in a sign of the extent to which the power and money involved with social media are more powerful than more traditional forms of patronage, last week, Pounds turned her paranoid eye on the administration itself, accusing State Department official (and former Mixed Signals guest) Sarah Rogers of participating in an elaborate plot to frame her, before walking back the allegation.

Politicians — not just this administration — dance to the tune of social media these days, and the moment was a sign of how fully they’ve lost control of the piper.

— Ben Smith

Not big readers

Good news for the subset of MrBeast fans who love to read mystery novels: The YouTube giant’s collaboration with James Patterson is out Tuesday, accompanied by a flurry of marketing on MrBeast channels. Read My Book, You Could Win $1,000,000, promises one short.

Bad news for publisher HarperCollins: The book-buying subset of MrBeast fans appears to be vanishingly small. Two people close to the project say The Most Dangerous Games is on track to be a historic bomb, with preorders numbering in the four digits as of last week, a tiny fraction of what the publisher will need to justify Patterson’s and YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson’s hefty fees. It was at a limp #20 on Amazon’s new releases list by Sunday.

Publishers chasing digital audiences is a tale perhaps as old as time, but this one will go down as a demonstration of that strategy’s limits.

Taylor Lorenz on ‘Mixed Signals’

Is the bipartisan push to get kids off social media less about child safety than it looks? Taylor Lorenz thinks so. On this week’s episode of Mixed Signals, the internet reporter and YouTuber joins Max and Ben to discuss where the actual line is between moral panic and legitimate concern, why she thinks the academic consensus on social media and youth mental health is being drowned out, and her at times surprising anti-anti-AI stance. Plus, how she logs 17 hours of screen time.

AI in the op-ed pages

Legacy media hasn’t reached a consensus on AI use yet, but it’s getting there. Billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller’s admission that he used AI in drafting a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed — and editor Paul Gigot’s defense to Max of AI as “a fact as modern life” — provoked some pointed reactions. So to get a sense of how widespread AI op-eds are becoming, Semafor analyzed every guest column from the Journal, The New York Times, and The Washington Post over the past month. All three are regularly publishing AI-generated content in their opinion sections, even though two of the three strictly prohibit it.

In the short term, Semafor’s Reed Albergotti writes, the net effect is to raise the bar for professional writers. “People can identify cheesy, AI-generated slop, just like they can with poor grammar or sentence structures written by people, and there’s nothing wrong with calling it out. But if someone spends time to write something thoughtful and valuable using AI and puts their name to it, we should judge the ideas it puts forth on their own.”

Still, it’s likely text from large language models will someday be indistinguishable from human writing. When that happens, he asks, “will we still prohibit it, giving every writer an impossible choice between cheating and refusing to use a powerful new tool?”

Axel Springer in Abu Dhabi

Axel Springer announced last week that it is investing in The Circuit, an Abu Dhabi-based publication founded by Max Neuberger focusing on tech and business in the Middle East.

The move makes the German conglomerate the latest Western publisher to take a greater editorial interest in the business story in the region; Semafor launched its Gulf edition last year, and Axios is exploring a Middle East launch, two people told Semafor. But its investment in an outlet operating in the UAE will also test one expression of the principles that guide its news business.

Speaking onstage in Washington at Semafor’s Trust in News Summit earlier this year, CEO Mathias Döpfner noted the company’s longstanding policy that it does not operate in countries without free speech protections.

In a statement this week, an Axel Springer spokesperson clarified that The Circuit was technically incorporated in the US, with staff located around the world. And while the spokesperson said Döpfner stands behind his comments, they said the company conducts a “case-by-case assessment” of each location it invests in, “taking into account the direction in which a country is developing and then aligning our activities there accordingly.”

“We have done this in the case of the UAE, where there is clearly a positive trajectory. We will continue to monitor developments closely,” the spokesperson said.

Publishers go all-in on video podcasts

News companies want you to watch their podcasts on YouTube, or at least consume the video clips.

Puck is launching a new video podcast on Sept. 8 focused on the upcoming presidential elections. The Making of a President will be hosted by the former Snap and CNN journalist Peter Hamby, who told Semafor the podcast will “pressure-test our assumptions about how campaigns operate and the rules of running for national office, which are being rewritten in real time.” The first episode will feature the ubiquitous former Chicago mayor and onetime ambassador Rahm Emanuel, who has been discussing a long-shot presidential bid with seemingly anyone who will listen.

The Atlantic plans to announce tomorrow that it is launching a weekly video podcast with David Brooks called Permanent Questions. The show, the magazine says, seeks to “return our attention to the fundamental questions of human life that every generation, and every individual, must attempt to answer.” The podcast will drop new episodes every Sunday, starting Sept. 13, with interviews with “the world’s deepest thinkers in conversation about what makes us human, what gives life meaning, and how we can build richer relationships and a more just society.”

The Atlantic has been expanding its video podcast offerings in general, shifting from the more documentary-style content on its YouTube channel to always-on interview shows with writers like Charlie Warzel and David Frum. Brooks’ video podcast will be the fifth the magazine has launched in the last year.

Podcasts are really turning into TV

The share of people ages 13 and up who say they most often consume podcasts on their TVs is growing fast, from a mere 1% in 2021 to 13% as of this quarter, a share almost tied with computers (14%). That new data, from Edison Research at SSRS, is yet more evidence for the ongoing audio-video convergence. But for now, the smartphone remains most audiences’ screen of choice: Sixty-three percent of podcast consumers this quarter said that’s where they tend to get their shows.

— Graph Massara

NYT: The Treasury Department snubbed requests from Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and New York Times reporters to cover the G20 summit this week, Benjamin Mullin writes.

Bloomberg: True crime podcast titan Audiochuck is going through significant turnover, tanking morale among the workers who remain, Ashley Carman reports.

Variety: President Donald Trump called for FCC Chairman Brendan Carr to punish NBC’s Kristen Welker for observing that Trump will “loom large over these midterms,” Brian Steinberg recaps.

The Guardian: Amol Rajan, an ex-BBC presenter who’s leaving to start his own creator brand, warned that his old network is doomed to “get smaller at an accelerating rate,” Michael Savage writes.

The Hollywood Reporter: To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen purchased preshow ads ahead of screenings of Primetime, an A24 movie about him and his show, directing moviegoers to Hansen’s own streaming service, Seth Abramovitch reports.

• GQ ended its contract with How Long Gone co-host and multi-hyphenate media personality Chris Black after considering him to be the next person to take over the magazine. Black was among those in the running for the top editorial job at the magazine when editor-in-chief Will Welch abruptly announced his departure in January, Semafor has learned. Black met with Anna Wintour and others at Condé, but the publication ultimately elevated British GQ editor Adam Baidawi, who announced the magazine’s new commitment to “discovery” in a note earlier this month. Still, its choice to cut ties with Black is unusual: In the era of fragmentation, it’s hard to find popular podcasters willing to file regular columns for a relatively small paycheck. (Black told Semafor on Mixed Signals last year that he preferred writing for respected brands over Substack because it was cooler.) The publication also recently lost its highest-profile writer, Sam Hine, who announced this week that he is launching a menswear newsletter with New York Magazine. Black may also end up landing at another magazine; the Hanover founder is also in talks for a senior role at Esquire, Semafor has learned. A spokesperson for Condé Nast declined to comment.
• A few months back, we first reported that the newly relaunched Gourmet Magazine was being sued by Condé Nast, which did not appreciate the worker-owned media company Goulash Unlimited LLC exploiting the magazine’s failure to realize that it had let its trademark lapse. Goulash has settled the lawsuit and agreed to change its name, rebranding as Buffet. “Buffet Magazine is/was/will continue to be what we’ve always been doing: reporting fun, weird food-related stories; talking to fascinating characters; publishing recipes for people who actually like to cook,” the company said in a statement. “The new name is only that — a new name — but we’ve been having so much fun for the last eight months that there’s no way we’d throw in the towel.”
• Readers of this newsletter almost certainly already know that RedBird is in advanced talks to buy out most of Puck’s institutional investors, recapitalizing the company at a reported $250 million valuation (several media operators had thoughts on this target). Puck and RedBird are declining to share specifics on the potential deal, but multiple people familiar with the details told Semafor they expect Puck to likely use RedBird’s backing to roll up other media companies and creators.
• The hosts of The Ringer’s Big Picture podcast registered their discomfort with founder Bill Simmons’ incorporating a ChatGPT-generated Roger Ebert review of current films on their podcast (ChatGPT, according to Sam Fragoso, is a sponsor of the show).