Media

1. Democrats “losing hold of culture”
2. Axios prepares for Trump
3. Convergence watch
4. Convergence watch, part 2
5. Cloudy skies at Bluesky

Welcome to Semafor Media, where you’ll be waiting a long time for our endorsement.

There’s a time warp quality to this year’s newspaper endorsement meltdown, which Max kicked off with his reporting on the LA Times in late October and which now continues unabated. They obviously don’t move voters in presidential campaigns, and my co-founder, Justin, eloquently addressed the idea that the hoary institution is the root cause of the crisis of trust in media. (We’re hosting an event next year that’s aimed at looking forward, not back.)

But as newspaper endorsements (and the newspapers that carried them) wither, they’ve left a hole in local civic life. This was particularly clear to me Thursday when the New York Editorial Board, an informal group of journalists I helped start to interview (but not endorse) local candidates, met New York City Comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander.

He offered us a glimpse through the looking glass at what was lost when The New York Times got out of the business of vetting candidates for mayor:

“On the campaign trail, we are going to have a lot of pulls in particular directions. We’re going to talk to unions and neighborhood groups and issue groups, and their job is to pull us to their thing,” Lander said. “What’s missing is a set of people who pull in the direction of the public interest.”

The “public interest” like “objectivity,” is easy to make the subject of tiresome philosophical debates. But it is also, similarly, an ideal that serves an actual function in public life.

OK, enough high-minded ranting. Please enjoy Max’s big interview with a key Kamala Harris aide, and let us know what you think of our spruced-up design. You have no idea how long it took to figure out a map of the media world. One discarded draft was based on Middle Earth.

Also today: YouTube data, newsletter news, signs of convergence, and a worried email from Axios’ lawyer. (Scoop count: 4)

The second season of our media show, Mixed Signals, is underway. Subscribe here to join us in exploring this shifting landscape through conversations with some of the people leading those changes.

Harris aide on Democrats ‘losing hold of culture’

Soon after Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty turned his attention to sports.

The campaign needed to introduce Harris quickly to people who aren’t obsessed with politics. Sports is perhaps America’s last remaining monoculture, and Flaherty and the Harris team decided to book her on sports shows and podcasts.

But one by one, the biggest personalities and shows politely turned them down.

“Sports and culture have sort of merged together, and as sports and culture became more publicly and sort of natively associated with this Trump-conservative set of values, it got more complicated for athletes to come out in favor of us,” Flaherty, 33, told me in an interview last week. “It got more complicated for sports personalities to take us on their shows because they didn’t want to ‘do politics.’”

“That’s not to say Steph Curry and Steve Kerr and LeBron [James] coming out wasn’t impactful or important,” he said. “It was more impactful because it had gotten so much harder. But certainly the culture that has been associated with heavy sports-watching has become associated with right-wing culture in a way that makes it harder for us to reach people.”

Faherty declined to say who turned Harris down, but she didn’t appear on key shows hosted by sports figures sympathetic to Democrats, like Colin Cowherd, Bill Simmons, or the Kelce brothers. (As Semafor first reported at the time, Harris did appear on All The Smoke, a popular but more niche basketball podcast, and NFL hall-of-famer Shannon Sharpe’s Club Shay Shay podcast.)

The campaign’s failure to completely crack the sports sphere was, to Flaherty, ominous, and part of a larger trend in which some influencers who had felt comfortable engaging with the Biden White House demurred when asked to help Harris make her case to their followers. “When it’s not cool to talk about politics,” he said, “you’re kind of afraid of the audience.”

“Campaigns, in many ways, are last-mile marketers that exist on terrain that is set by culture, and the institutions by which Democrats have historically had the ability to influence culture are losing relevance,” he said. “You don’t get a national eight-point shift to the right without losing hold of culture.”

— Max Tani

Axios braces for future Trump legal action

News organizations are bracing for the incoming Trump administration to go after journalists’ sources and take legal action against them.

In an email shared with Semafor, Axios’ senior counsel told staff that the news organization anticipates the new administration will attempt to force reporters to out their sources, will ramp up lawsuits against news organizations for defamation, and could charge journalists with crimes using the Espionage Act.

“We anticipate more aggressive government efforts to investigate leaks — which could include a wave of subpoenas seeking journalists’ phone records, documents, and testimony,” senior newsroom counsel Brian Westley wrote in an email to staff. “Of particular concern: [Stories] involving unnamed sources that disclose government information without authorization — including sensitive conversations including the president or other top officials.”

“This stuff is NO JOKE. The framework of legal protections for journalists we live under is relatively recent and under real threat. One bad court case could have a big impact, so it’s important for everybody to be careful and aware of the risks,” the company said.

Media organizations are increasingly on high alert as multiple incoming members of the administration have expressed a willingness to use the tools of their office to pursue legal action against journalists.

Brendan Carr, Donald Trump’s pick for Federal Communications Commission chair, said he wants to explore whether to strip local stations of their broadcast licenses, while Kash Patel, who Trump has tapped to lead the FBI, has said he wants “to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections.” As has been well documented, Trump’s nominees could also have broad license to interfere in the major media mergers many companies are itching to do over the next several years.

At least one news organization seemed to want to get out of Trump’s way preemptively. On Saturday, media insiders were shocked when ABC News agreed to pay $15 million to settle a defamation suit brought by Trump over inaccurate claims made by anchor George Stephanopoulos, one most media lawyers thought the organization could have won in court.

Convergence watch

Last week, YouTube announced a range of new data points suggesting more and more people are watching it on their big screens. The company announced on Wednesday that viewers watched over 400 million hours of podcasts monthly on living room devices, which they watched actively or had on in their homes as they did chores or other activities.

In an interview with Semafor, Kurt Wilms, the platform’s senior director of product management, said that online creators had noticed the spike — and a corresponding jump in their revenue. According to Wilms, the number of creators who are making the majority of their revenue from these living room devices is up 30% year-over-year. Categorically, the company noted that sports viewership was growing particularly strongly: TV watchtime of sports content, which is primarily game highlights, commentary, and clips, was up 30% year over year.

Other signs also pointed to a continuing interest in YouTube viewership on TV. The company said that users were increasingly uploading high-quality 4K videos, which are best viewed on compatible TVs. Wilms said that while most of what users see on their TVs is similar to what they see on their phones or computers, the company slightly tweaks its recommendation algorithms on connected TVs to prioritize that high-quality 4K content. Creators, too, are increasingly making content intentionally designed to be consumed on a television.

“They’re making content that’s made for TV,” he said, noting the rise in 4K-quality uploads. “Creators are leaning into making content built for the TV.”

Convergence watch, part 2

On Mixed Signals this week, we talked to Colin Rosenblum and Samir Chaudry, whose eponymous YouTube show and popular newsletter, The Publish Press, cover YouTube. They’re living in the middle of the convergence between linear and streaming, studio and digital, old and new, scrappy and high-budget — and that’s all set to come together when the dominant YouTuber MrBeast debuts his huge-budget Beast Games, which comes out on Prime Video Thursday.

That creates the question of what the word “digital” really even means anymore. A reasonable definition, per Chaudry: It “has to do with who you asked permission from, or if you needed to get permission to distribute your content or create your content.”

Cloudy skies

Some journalists recently defected from X, whose owner is openly hostile to the profession, to Threads, which is more passively hostile. Many, including Jesse Singal, then moved over to Bluesky, which promptly entered a debate over whether to ban him. Singal has spent years in heated arguments over trans kids, and his views, agree or disagree, are well within the mainstream of US and UK politics. (A Politico writer was also briefly banned after taking a wave of criticism for saying, “Leaving X because you don’t like Elon is the kind of purity politics that landed Democrats in this mess to begin with.”)

Most of the calls for a ban seem to come from non-journalists on the platform, though the tone is captured in a bizarre time capsule of a TechCrunch piece, which ignores both the details of the Singal story and the possibility of disagreement. Sample: “People are demanding that Bluesky take a stand: It’s either a place that promises it won’t host bad actors, or it’s a place that promises not to inflate the reach of bad actors thanks to its various moderation tools. It cannot be both.”

Journalism is a naturally unlikable profession, at its best telling people things they don’t want to hear and exposing them to other people’s points of view. So it seems appropriate, and maybe even for the best, that at least some of us will be unwelcome on basically any social platform.

— Ben Smith

Stu Loeser is the founder of a media strategy and corporate intelligence firm.

⁛ News

Substack defection: The competition to lure journalists to independent platforms is heating up, which is a good thing for journalists. Seamus Hughes, the publisher of the quirky, scoopy, and useful newsletter Court Watch, will leave Substack to become a member of competing newsletter platform Beehiiv’s new “Media Collective,” in which Beehiiv provides a legal backstop, advertising support, and other tools for journalists. Hughes writes that “the vibes are off in Substack. From our humble vantage point, it’s increasingly not a place for journalists but instead a bug light for influencers. Or journalists trying to be influencers. Or influencers masquerading as journalists.” Tag yourself!

‘We need to talk about Salt Typhoon’: Politico’s national security team rang the alarm about the lack of interest from lawmakers and the media in the sweeping Chinese hack of US telecoms systems — that is, your texts — which Florida GOP Sen. Marco Rubio called “the most disturbing and widespread incursion into our telecommunications systems in the history of the world.” The subject, they surmise, “does not feel very merry” to a checked-out media/political class.

⁋ Publishing

Strategizing: New York Magazine plans to name Lauren Levy as the new editor of the magazine’s e-commerce and recommendations site, The Strategist, on Monday, Semafor has learned. Levy, a veteran of Apple News who helped develop its growing News+ subscription service, will help further develop the editorial vision for the site, which relies on a team of journalists hunting for deals and testing clothing, home, and electronics products. She joins the publication as media companies with e-commerce businesses are beginning to face increased competition from artificial intelligence-driven recommendations and changes to Google search.

In an exclusive interview with Semafor’s Reed Albergotti, Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai said he’s ready to work on a “Manhattan Project” for AI when Trump moves into the White House next year.

“I think there is a chance for us to work as a country together,” he said. “These big, physical infrastructure projects to accelerate progress is something we would be very excited by.”