Media

1. Newsom and MeidasTouch
2. Nick Denton’s return
3. RIP, movie theaters
4. Moscow dispatch
5. Audacy amps up

Welcome to Semafor Media, where we’re still betting on newsletters.

Today’s edition reflects conversations with some of the key figures reacting to a reshaped media world: Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos, who told me he’s now spending more than 90 days a year outside the US as content globalizes; California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is finding booking for his podcast surprisingly hard; Gawker founder Nick Denton, who’s trying to use AI to predict (and trade on) the future; and the lawyer Ben Meiselas, riding a rocketship of American liberal dismay.

Semafor business editor Liz Hoffman wrote recently that “for most of the post-2008 era, there wasn’t a lot to be gained by being smarter than others, or even having a point of view. Everything went up. Investors’ best bet was to do what everyone else did (buy stocks, occasionally dumb ones), lever up, and shrug.” In media, something like the opposite was true: Across digital, print, and broadcast news organizations, smart and dumb leaders often rode the same steep downward curve.

But this new moment features leaders with wildly different hypotheses. Newsom is betting on cross-partisan conversation, while MeidasTouch is betting on partisan fury. Sarandos is planning for a networked, globalized media world in which Hollywood remains preeminent, while Denton is shorting Tesla and investing in BYD. Not all of them can be right.

Also today: A blogger goes to Moscow, Audacy has a new podcast chief, the Trump bump returns, Signal gets a boost, and Ted figures Amazon’s Melania Trump doc must be really good at that price. (Scoop count: 3)

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Newsom and Democrats debate their media future

As Democrats reel from their November losses, media figures on the left are trying to find a way back into voters’ good graces — and their social media feeds. One strategy, epitomized by California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s provocative new podcast, involves sitting down with the enemy for a friendly chat; the other, pioneered by the outlet MeidasTouch, calls for churning out a steady stream of furiously anti-Trump content. Newsom and MeidasTouch founder Ben Meiselas both talked to Semafor about why their strategy will be key to clawing back power and influence from Donald Trump and the media ecosphere that supports him.

“I’m not trying to own the conservatives like these guys try to own the libs,” Newsom told Max. “I’m not trying to go in and kick their ass and get a viral moment.” Meanwhile, MeidasTouch has scored more than its share of those, with its daily videos racking up six- and seven-digit view counts.

Gang of 500 nuts

Twenty years ago, the political journalist Mark Halperin used to talk about the “gang of 500” insiders who run American politics. The digital media pioneer Nick Denton, in an interview with us on Mixed Signals, said he believes the power has shifted when it comes to Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and their allies, and been captured by their most extreme followers on X. “They’ve fallen for audience capture, just like Joe Rogan has in the podcast world, just like the Gawker writers did in the peak of lefty Twitter. Elon Musk is doubling down and doubling down on the most right-wing elements in his audience,” he said. “Rubio, Musk, Vance, Trump — they’re all competing for the applause from these 500 nuts on X.”

Listen to the latest Mixed Signals for more on why Denton returned to posting, why he’s moving to Hungary, and the outlines of his new AI company.

Movie theaters still dead, per Netflix boss

Sorry, cinephiles: The post-Covid rebound of live events is all the more evidence that movie theaters are never coming back, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos told me in an interview at the Paley Center for Media Friday.

“Nearly every live thing has come back screaming,” Sarandos said. “Broadway’s breaking records right now, sporting events, concerts, all those things that we couldn’t do during COVID are all back and bigger than ever. The theatrical box office is down 40 to 50% from pre-COVID, and this year is down 8% already, so the trend is not reversing. You’ve gotta look at that and say, ‘What is the consumer trying to tell you?’”

The trades picked up Sarandos’ line on Amazon’s Melania Trump doc (“For $40 million, I hope it’s great!”) and his denial that the president has had a chilling effect on programming. I was also struck by Sarandos’ view of YouTube as a place to “cut your teeth on or develop an idea on” before coming to Netflix for better monetization — a view YouTube, which shares revenue directly with creators, would dispute. He says he’s keeping an eye on creators in the “pro-am category that are making really interesting, compelling programming to watch, and YouTube doesn’t give them any money up front to make it, so they’re doing it all, all at their own risk.” The pitch: Come to Netflix, get paid, and de-risk.

A blogger in Moscow

The blogger and former CIA agent Larry C. Johnson, once a cable news regular and now a fringe figure, sat down with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov last month, and returned with a strong feeling that nobody in American politics will “listen to what the Russians are saying.” The main thing they’re saying: They aren’t interested in anything close to the peace deals President Donald Trump and his envoy have been proposing. Johnson was joined in Moscow by a former Fox Business host and by an Elon Musk favorite. And he’s got a point about the general deafness in the US to Russia’s worldview: “Tucker may have a handle on it. I’m not sure about anybody else.”

Audacy rolls out new podcast advertising tools

Audacy is tapping Leah Reis-Dennis, its current VP of podcasting, to be its new head of podcasting, and expanding its advertising offerings for podcasters and emerging creators, Semafor has learned. On Tuesday, the podcast and radio company plans to announce Audacy Creator Lab, a new suite of tools aimed at helping new podcasters generate more ad revenue by allowing some host-read sponsorships and dynamically inserted pre-recorded ads. It’s the latest company-wide ad change to emerge out of Audacy’s 2021 acquisition of Podcorn, a podcast ad marketplace, and comes amid a broader executive shakeup at the radio and podcast company following its bankruptcy and restructuring last year. In last week’s newsletter, Semafor first reported that chief digital officer JD Crowley was leaving Audacy, and that the company was appointing Kelli Turner to be CEO permanently.

Susie Banikarim is a host of the podcast In Retrospect. Max asked her about Carlos Watson, the Ozy Media founder whose fraud sentence was recently commuted by President Donald Trump.

⁛ News

• The political news site The Hill saw a nearly 20% jump in traffic last month, according to Similarweb stats shared with Semafor by a spokesperson, making it the latest to benefit from a latent Trump bump.
• Long gone is the tradition in the White House of first calling on The Associated Press during White House briefings. This week, the White House press secretary gave the first question to a reporter for Dr. Phil’s news app. Now, the White House is reportedly working on taking over the media seating chart within the press briefing room.
• Democratic national political figures rushed to praise Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy for his criticism of the Trump administration’s Signal leak.

✦ Marketing

• Meta is putting money behind advertising its safety tools, as Congress considers legislation regulating social media platforms’ policies in order to strengthen protections against harm to minors.

⁜ Tech

• The Atlantic’s remarkable story about how Trump administration officials coordinated a military strike via Signal has unsurprisingly boosted downloads of the encrypted messaging app.

✰ Hollywood

• In a handful of instances, major studios are not trying to take down some of the fake, AI-generated movie trailers that have flooded YouTube. Instead of claiming copyright infringement, studios like Warner, Sony, and Paramount have asked the platform to send them a cut of ad revenue generated by these counterfeit commercials.

⁋ Publishing

• An increasing number of legacy media publishers are moving some or all of their services to independent publishing platforms in order to outsource email services or tap into large pre-existing audience networks. Last week, Allure announced that it was launching on Substack, telling Embedded’s Kate Lindsay that it wanted to reach Substack’s growing fashion and beauty audiences. And Time Magazine’s chief technology officer explained to A Media Operator why the 100-year-old magazine moved all of its newsletters to Beehiiv.

Glenn Fogel joined the online travel startup Priceline.com 25 years ago this month, just days before the dot-com crash. That has given him some perspective, he told Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, as travel firms’ stocks fall amid concerns over weakening US consumer confidence and foreign tourists being deterred by an America First administration.

Asked whether he thinks this is the toughest time to run a company, the CEO of Booking Holdings shoots back: “Which decade would you prefer to have lived in that was so much better?”