Media

1. The shade room
2. Rethinking Googling
3. Data breach threats
4. Mixed Signals
5. Memorable moments

“We’re the canary in the coal mine.”

That’s what someone working for Tom Steyer told me this week when I talked to them about the most fascinating story roiling California politics right now: the millions of dollars the billionaire hedge fund investor has poured into creator marketing to boost his campaign for governor. California’s unique disclosure laws allow a rare look into the tactic redefining digital communication — paid creator endorsements — and show how many prominent and mid-level creators are now active, paid participants in the battle to win an election.

Steyer’s camp doesn’t necessarily like this playbook. But this campaign staffer said it has become standard practice in modern politics, and his campaign has taken heat in the press because of its transparency. His critics disagree, saying Steyer hasn’t done enough to ensure his long roster of independent content creators label their posts.

Reporting out this week’s story, I came away agreeing with the staffer’s diagnosis. Outside of California, paid political marketing goes largely undisclosed. And the market for political creators has ballooned, filling up the feeds of Americans who haven’t yet realized that a huge share of what looks like organic online political passion is now just paid advertising.

Also today: Proton’s cybersecurity warning to journalists and Google’s vision for the future of search.

Inside Steyer’s paid influence machine

The California governor’s race has shown how creator marketing has infected political campaigns, revealing how influencers and creators accept sums small and large to promote candidates on their platforms.

Last week’s financial disclosures showed payments to various popular social media accounts, including The Shade Room and Foos Gone Wild, which initially failed to disclose their paid connection to the campaign. Pro-Steyer creator briefs, shared with Semafor, showed how the campaign hoped to reach young, nonwhite audiences, as well as progressives in Los Angeles and San Francisco, through posts in voters’ algorithmic feeds. For its part, the Steyer campaign has argued that its opponents have deployed swarms of fake accounts to boost anti-Steyer messaging.

Remaking Google Search

Three things surprised Nick Fox about ChatGPT’s breakout success in November 2022: how slow it was, how inaccurate it was, and how consumers embraced it anyway. “It was surprising to see there was appetite there,” said Fox, Google’s senior vice president of knowledge and information and a two-decade veteran of the search business.

I asked him if, in retrospect, Google should have released its own products sooner, #YOLO-style, and thrown caution to the wind over trust, speed, and reliability. “I don’t think it would have been the right thing for us to #YOLO,” he responded drily.

Fox was speaking to me on a big stage at Google Marketing Live last Wednesday, the company’s annual showcase for the big advertisers who drive much of its revenue. The event, and the tech event, Google I/O, the day before, had a celebratory, nearly triumphant tone: Google had clawed its way back to the front of the AI boom through a combination of its technical depth and its broad reach across consumer platforms.

That’s partly because the core product values that turned Google into a juggernaut in the first place have reasserted themselves, Fox said. “We’ve seen this play out over time. People do care about quality of information. That’s very, very important. People don’t want incorrect information. People do care about speed,” he said, adding: “It’s been clear that people don’t want incorrect information — and so that bedrock of trust and accuracy has served us well.”

— Ben Smith

Journalists’ data exposed to dark web

Swiss privacy and security company Proton and Constella Intelligence found more than 116,000 instances where employees at The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post had their data exposed to the dark web.

Across all three organizations, the company behind Proton Mail found exposure to the dark web over the past five years associated with more than 35,000 individual email addresses, according to a study conducted earlier this month. Proton said that more than half of the exposures contained personal information such as names, phone numbers, dates of birth, and addresses, which cybersecurity experts say creates heightened risk for phishing and blackmail. The breaches also included thousands of passwords.

“The reporters and their organizations are not to blame here. It’s a structural problem that affects everyone who uses the internet,” the company said in a post first shared with Semafor. Spokespeople for the Times and the Journal didn’t respond to requests for comment; the Post emphasized that the paper itself had not experienced a security breach.

From NPR to podcasting

Audie Cornish and Ari Shapiro spent years together in the buttoned-up, professional audio journalism world of NPR co-hosting All Things Considered. Now, they’re reuniting at CNN for something very different — podcasting. On this week’s episode of Mixed Signals, they join Max and Ben to talk about turning their off-mic chemistry into a show, navigating the pivots and shifts of today’s media landscape, and the surprising lessons amateur podcasters can learn from the audio pros who came before them.

Good game

Ads that run after the most exciting moments of sporting events tend to stick in viewers’ brains longer, a new study from sports media company Genius and research firm MediaScience found. The study used neurometrics to track fans’ emotional arousal in real time during a sports broadcast and then asked them about commercials they’d seen during ad breaks. Respondents had about twice the brand recall if they’d seen an ad immediately after an especially dramatic play (14%) versus after a “low-surprise” moment (7%). Fans were also 17% more likely to remember what they’d seen if their team was winning.

“The difference isn’t driven by break timing alone, but by the emotional state viewers are in as they enter the break,” Genius’ report reads. As tech giants like Apple increasingly vie for sports rights (and the gap between “tech” and “media” companies narrows), it’s possible to imagine ad slots priced dynamically based on, say, how close a game is getting or how hot a player is performing.

— Graph Massara

NYT: Fox is paying a mere $500 million for the rights to broadcast this year’s FIFA World Cup, thanks to a deal the network struck with the football association a decade ago, Tariq Panja reports.

CoStar: The Washington Post is planning to halve its office space, Katie Burke scoops.

Puck: Paramount leaders have had “informal discussions” about scaling back Bari Weiss’ involvement at CBS News, Dylan Byers writes.

Business Insider: Jim Bankoff told Peter Kafka that the leftover Vox Media properties “can go to market together from a sales proposition and get plenty of scale. But they’re all in a position to really thrive.”

Adweek: Mark Stenberg says Penske Media, already an investor in Vox, is looking at acquiring those properties.

Bloomberg: A new research report found three-quarters of the growth in the red-hot US podcast market came from video-related revenue, Ashley Carman and Lucas Shaw write.

Futurism: A startup misled The Wall Street Journal when it suggested it had debuted a fully AI-generated $500,000 feature-length action film at the Cannes film festival, Frank Landymore writes. (It screened the movie in Cannes, the town.)

Semafor: Senate Democrats are planning to introduce legislation restoring the Stars and Stripes’ independence from the Pentagon, we scooped last week.