Media

1. WaPo’s personal podcasts
2. The AI president
3. ‘Post-news’ Axios?
4. Xinjiang source’s hearing
5. Mixed Signals
6. WBD’s week ahead
7. BBC’s headhunt

Media companies have talked a big game about embracing AI. Now, we’re beginning to see what that actually looks like.

Entertainment brands have started licensing their content to generative AI companies, to be molded and altered by users — such as in a new megadeal to put Disney characters in Sora, OpenAI’s short-form video platform.

In news, AI has largely meant increasing personalization. The Washington Post last week rolled out AI-generated podcasts, ignoring internal reviews that found errors in AI scripts, like fabricated quotes, and had deemed more than two-thirds of them unpublishable.

Media is no different than other industries here: Executives are racing to prove to boards and investors that they’re on top of the big new trend. AI companies, flush with cash and perpetually on thin ice when it comes to intellectual property laws, are eager to deal.

Two questions at this point remain unanswered: Will the revenue media companies get from working with AI be meaningful enough to support their original work, like big-ticket movies and shows and impactful journalism and reporting? And will any of the AI-generated content actually be any good?

Also today: Axios’ CEO on the post-news era, a quick WBD update, and what’s next for the BBC.

Post pushed error-prone podcast feature

The Washington Post began putting out AI-generated podcasts even after internal tests found that the AI tech introduced errors and bias into the publication’s reporting. More than two-thirds of scripts generated by the feature, dubbed “Your Personal Podcast,” failed a metric intended to determine whether they met the publication’s standards, according to a readout of the tests shared with Semafor.

“Testers were asked to rate the quality of scripts on a pass/fail basis (news used the categorization of publishable vs. not) in order to give us the most comprehensive list of issues to examine,” the company said in its internal review. The review added that when in doubt, testers were told to fail scripts “as a precaution.” In three rounds of testing, between 68% and 84% of scripts failed, but the feature went live anyway.

The Post’s struggles with AI are in some ways a distraction from its basic crisis, Max writes tonight: a collapse in its subscriber base after owner Jeff Bezos shifted both his own politics and the paper’s toward President Donald Trump.

Trump’s bet on AI

The great mystery of the Trump administration is: When did he decide to become the AI president? He barely engaged with the issue during his campaign (apart from a surprisingly deep discussion with YouTuber Logan Paul), but since his return to the White House, he’s been putting the full weight of the American state behind AI and against state and federal efforts to restrain it. His AI czar is a top figure in Washington. What happened?

One administration official offered me an answer last week, as I wrote in my weekly column, available for Media subscribers now: Trump’s interest in the technology accelerated when he saw the numbers. A big car company might promise a $5 billion or $10 billion investment. The big AI companies can raise and spend orders of magnitude more — and Trump is good at counting zeroes.

— Ben Smith

VandeHei’s warning

Axios CEO Jim VandeHei is warning the company’s journalists that if newsrooms want to survive, they’ll need to rethink the role they will play in an information landscape dominated by AI and algorithmic video feeds.

“Your reality — how you see the world — is no longer defined by ‘the news,’” Jim VandeHei wrote in an internal memo shared with Semafor. “Instead, it’s shaped by the videos you watch, podcasts you hear, the people you follow on social media and know in person, and the reporting you consume. We’ve entered a period where everyone has their own individual reality, usually based on age, profession, passions, politics and platform preferences.”

His prescription: original reporting, with an emphasis on tectonic changes in tech, governing, and media. Axios is also staffing up its local news branch, bringing on ABC’s Liz Alesse as general manager and expanding to suburban areas in Colorado and Ohio.

If you like Semafor, you should take a look at Numlock News. Numlock is a daily newsletter that pops out fascinating numbers buried in the news. Each issue is full of great stories that you’re missing out on, including under the radar science and culture news as well as amazing data journalism that’s drowned out by the loud stuff. Sign up for Numlock and you’ll enjoy catching up on the world each morning, it’s free to read and subscriber-supported. Check it out today.

Xinjiang source faces deportation

“Journalists can’t go to Xinjiang — but I can,” Guan Heng says at the beginning of an October 2020 video showing detention facilities in the Chinese province. He released the videos in 2021 and provided “ground truth,” writes Alison Killing, who shared a Pulitzer Prize at BuzzFeed News for making the map of detention facilities that Guan had followed. Guan fled China to seek asylum in the US, and this August, he was caught up in an ICE raid in upstate New York; he’s now in ICE custody facing possible deportation, with a hearing set for Monday.

“His fate hangs in the balance, depending on one question,” writes Human Rights in China’s Lu Jingwei. “Will the free world he ran towards no matter the cost ultimately choose to protect him, or will it send him back to the homeland where he risked his life to expose its dark secrets?”

— Ben Smith

Andy Richter, jack of all trades

Over three decades on screen, Andy Richter has adapted to every twist in the media world. The comedy veteran and longtime Conan O’Brien sidekick joins Mixed Signals this week for an existentially funny conversation about surviving three decades in entertainment. Max and Ben ask Andy about how he became late night’s most adaptable performer, whether he ever worried about becoming “the next Ed McMahon,” and why acting work has become so elusive in Hollywood. Andy also talks about the decline of late night as a cultural force, and how Dancing With the Stars accidentally turned him into a TikTok phenomenon.

WBD prepares to seal the deal

Warner Bros. Discovery’s board will make a decision on whether to switch horses — trading Netflix’s done deal for one with Paramount — by this Friday. WBD is widely expected to reject Paramount’s offer, which is the same one Paramount CEO David Ellison made privately and which WBD already said no to. Paramount is expected to bump its bid up as well, although some investors Semafor spoke with expressed concern about a sharp slide in Oracle shares over the last week. They’re down about 15% over the last month, and while the Ellisons are only putting up around $12 billion of the $108 billion they’ve offered, every penny will count.

Netflix, for its part, has been mum apart from brief comments co-CEO Ted Sarandos made early last week. But lawmakers — including Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C. — have blasted the Netflix-WBD deal as anticompetitive, something the Ellisons reminded shareholders of in meetings and calls last week.

— Rohan Goswami

Who will run the BBC?

The resignation of the BBC’s director-general and BBC News CEO in an inevitably Trump-related editing mess opens up one of the hardest and most consequential jobs in media. It requires “experience in creative leadership, a tight grip on editorial issues, knowledge of running a large administration, political nous, experience of commercial affairs, and a grasp of the global media perspective,” per … the BBC. There’s a familiar list of usual suspects, including Tortoise’s James Harding and UK TV execs Charlotte Moore and Alex Mahon, as well as two of the figures in the recent British invasion of American media: former BBC chief Mark Thompson, now at CNN; and former Telegraph editor Will Lewis, now at The Washington Post. But a well-placed London source suggests it might be time for His Majesty’s Government to bring back perhaps the most clearly successful transplant, Wall Street Journal editor Emma Tucker.

— Ben Smith