Media

1. Venezuelan embargo
2. The new Evening News
3. Mixed Signals
4. The UK’s upvotes
5. Ways to pay

For all the talk about AI, I’m not sure the US media has really reckoned with the degree to which humans are already competing head-to-head with artificially generated content.

Last year, AI music charted, AI videos consistently topped social platforms, and a third of connected TV ads were produced with AI tools. Newsrooms routinely use the technology for translation, transcription, and summarization. Instagram head Adam Mosseri acknowledged last month that his company was in some ways unprepared for how dramatically AI would shape its content, especially as Instagram increasingly becomes a platform for discovering strangers’ posts.

It’s a terrifying prospect for an industry hurtling from one disruption to the next, but an exciting storyline for a media briefing like this to cover.

And yet, for the highest-stakes journalism, this weekend was a reminder of how dependent we are on a few humans for good information.

As the stunning capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro sparked wild theories and meaningless speculation on social media, serious news outlets with old-school reporting values and on-the-ground sources kicked into gear and began driving the conversation. Politicians and brands may turn to friendly creators to get their messages out. But when real news happens, they still rely on real journalism.

Also today: Our chat with Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary and what’s next for CBS Evening News.

NYT, WaPo held Venezuela raid scoop

The New York Times and Washington Post learned of a secret US raid on Venezuela soon before it was scheduled to begin Friday night — but held off publishing what they knew to avoid endangering US troops, Semafor first reported on Saturday.

The decision to maintain official secrecy aligns with longstanding American journalistic traditions — even amid unprecedented mutual hostility between the American president and a legacy media that continues to dominate national security reporting. It also offers a rare glimpse of contact and even cooperation over some of the highest-stakes American national security issues.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio confirmed Semafor’s reporting in an ABC interview on Sunday, giving a rare hat-tip to the legacy media organizations with whom the administration has frequently clashed.

Dokoupil sets the tone for ‘Evening News’

Before he even sat down in the anchor chair for his first official week leading CBS Evening News, Tony Dokoupil had already started skirmishing online with academics, fellow journalists, and a reality television celebrity — and he promised not to go easy on the new owners of his network.

In his opening monologue, Dokoupil lamented that his colleagues in the news business had “put too much weight in the analysis of academics and elites,” and not enough on the perspectives of “the average American.”

“You come first. Not advertisers. Not politicians. Not corporate interests — and yes, that does include the corporate owners of CBS,” he said.

His remarks prompted significant backlash, and he returned to X after a long hiatus to push back against his critics. In one Instagram comment, Dokoupil promised that he would be “more accountable and more transparent than [anchor Walter] Cronkite or any one else of his era.”

(That transparency hasn’t extended to speaking to media reporters just yet; the network declined to make him available for Semafor or for other national media reporters’ requests for interviews this week.)

O’Leary on ‘Shark Tank’

Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary joins Mixed Signals to talk about his buzzy turn as a ruthless tycoon in Marty Supreme — and how it felt playing a fictionalized version of himself. Max and Ben dig into what lessons he took from working with Josh Safdie and Timothée Chalamet, why Mark Cuban isn’t on Shark Tank anymore, and why he believes movie theaters aren’t going anywhere. They also talk about O’Leary’s media omnipresence, how his defense of Trump helped him influence the Republican tax bill, what he told Zohran Mamdani when they met in New York, and why he thinks respect is more valuable than being liked.

Listen to the latest Mixed Signals now.

Reddit on the rise

As the web is increasingly dominated by video-first, platform-driven personalized feeds, one relatively old-school player has grown its share of attention and managed to hook the next generation with the written word.

Reddit overtook TikTok last year as the fourth-most visited social media site in the UK, an increase that has mirrored the platform’s growth in the United States over the past several years. According to Ofcom, the uptick has been largely powered by changes in Google search algorithms that have given the site a boost, as well as the site’s popularity among younger users, many of whom are searching for human information, recommendations, and reviews.

More than a year removed from its IPO, the platform has become a favorite of some analysts on the strength of its revenue numbers and its status as a content feeder for major AI players. But its importance to AI search could have one drawback: It’s also becoming a magnet for scammy companies hoping to use Reddit’s heavy influence over language models to game recommendations algorithms.

Subsidies, subscriptions, scoops

One of the perennial unanswered questions about the media industry is how to get people to pay. In the opening days of 2026, two stories offer two different paths: For Politico, Tyler Katzenberger recaps the byzantine saga of California’s troubled partnership with Google to subsidize the state’s struggling local newspapers, a program that has secured a mere $20 million of its promised $250 million in funding and has yet to cut a single check to a newsroom. (“None of this is ideal,” remarked the state legislator who helped lead the effort.) And in The Wall Street Journal, Alexandra Bruell looks back at the Year of the Newsletter, which saw an explosion of interest in Substack and its increasingly diversified competitors (even if, she reports, Substack itself still isn’t profitable). Of course, a third way is just having new information first. To cover big stories like Venezuela, the “Substack journalist writing takes” will still be reliant on dispatches from the front lines, as reporter Melissa Chan noted.

• Reporters have been calling Trump’s cell phone throughout his time in politics, but he’s been doing more seemingly spontaneous phone interviews in recent days. Over the past two weeks alone, Trump has taken on-the-record cold calls on a variety of topics from Politico, The Atlantic, and The Wall Street Journal. The New York Times got him on the phone after three rings at 4:30 am on Saturday, right after the operation to capture Maduro; the paper contrasted Trump’s willingness to chat with reporters on his personal phone with the horrified response reporter Tyler Pager got from former President Joe Biden’s staff when he called Biden’s cell.
• The indie streamer and movie distributor Mubi is in the midst of an identity crisis — partially triggered by its own success in building a community of avid film fans willing to pay for arthouse work. A $100 million investment in the streamer from Sequoia Capital, which also invests in an Israeli defense company, last year set off a wave of subscriber cancellations as filmmakers pulled their work from the platform. The backlash has left Mubi’s employees and longtime fans wondering about the direction of the streamer, and whether it can win back some of the cinephiles who made it a cult success.
• Former Semafor editor Benjy Sarlin is joining Vox’s opinion page, where he’ll be editing staff writers and soliciting outside op-eds, Semafor has learned.
• The Atavist Magazine has started reprinting enterprise stories that originally appeared in now-defunct publications, in an effort to combat “link rot.”

Correction: Due to an editing error, a prior version of this newsletter mischaracterized The Atavist’s program.