Top News:
Edward Ludlow / Bloomberg:
Disney's streaming strategy and losses led to Nelson Peltz's proxy fight, but placating Peltz in April 3's vote to shuffle the board likely won't fix the issues — Who's the hero and who's the villain in this tale of Walt Disney Co.'s battle with activist investors?
Discussion:
Reuters, @tvgrimreaper, New York Post and Quartz
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Wall Street Journal:
Sources: Disney has pulled ahead in its proxy battle against Trian with more than half of all shares voted; BlackRock and T. Rowe Price are backing Disney — BlackRock and T. Rowe Price among major investors backing Disney; voting continues through April 3 meeting
Discussion:
@rwhelanwsj, MediaPost and Reuters
Deepa Seetharaman / Wall Street Journal:
Sources: OpenAI discussed training GPT-5 on public YouTube video transcripts; AI companies struggle to find quality training data as publishers block access — Firms such as OpenAI and Anthropic are working to find enough information to train next-generation artificial-intelligence models
Discussion:
@jeffjarvis, @dkobia, @carnage4life, @davidclinchnews, @chronotope.aramzs.xyz and @alex, more at Techmeme »
Reuters:
Israeli parliament approves a bill allowing the temporary closure of foreign broadcasters, like Al Jazeera, considered a national security threat — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revived moves on Monday to shut down Qatari satellite television station Al Jazeera in Israel …
Elizabeth Lopatto / The Verge:
A look at the fall of Vice, thanks to wild expenses, shady deals, greed, “fanfiction finance”, and a lack of understanding of how newsrooms work — Vice was once promised to become the brash young voice of news. But wild expenses, shady deals, and greed turned it into ‘a fucking clown show.’
Discussion:
@reckless1280@threads.net, @alexeheath, @alexyablon and The Guardian
Reuters:
Trump Media & Technology Group closed down 21% on April 1, wiping out the gains from last week, after disclosing a $58M+ loss on $4.1M in revenue in 2023 — Shares of Donald Trump's social media company plunged 21% on Monday, wiping out the gains from its debut last week …
Discussion:
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Brett Martin / New York Times:
A profile of Matt Farley, who has released thousands of songs under ~80 pseudonyms on music streaming services with the goal of matching nearly any search query — Matt Farley has released thousands of songs with the goal of producing a result to match nearly anything anybody could think to search for.
Trishla Ostwal / Adweek:
AI search engine Perplexity, which touts on its site that search should be “free from the influence of advertising-driven models”, says it will sell ads — The AI search engine must prove ad scalability and address brand safety concerns — Generative AI search engine Perplexity …
Daniel Thomas / Financial Times:
An interview with Sony Music CEO Rob Stringer on AI's role in the industry, licensing concerns with TikTok, working with Sony for over two decades, and more — The executive on the streaming boom, the challenge of AI — and taking Harry Styles to see Luton FC
Todd Spangler / Variety:
Steven Miron and Steven Newhouse resign from WBD board after the US DOJ informed them it launched an antitrust probe about serving on the boards of competitors — Miron, CEO of media company Advance/Newhouse Partnership and a senior executive officer at the Newhouse family's investment business Advance …
Todd Spangler / Variety:
Q&A with Paramount Streaming CEO and Pluto TV co-founder Tom Ryan on Pluto's first decade, Viacom acquisition, Paramount+ being profitable by 2025's end, more — Tom Ryan co-founded the free, ad-supported streaming service Pluto TV, which launched 10 years ago with a linear TV-like grid and a cluster of …
Wall Street Journal:
Ampere: seven movie adaptations of video games were released broadly in 2023; Comscore: movies based on video games grossed $712.2M at the US box office in 2023 — Studios seek the wisdom of die-hard gaming fans. ‘Every design now is vetted within an inch of its life.’ — Sonic's teeth were creepy.
David Bauder / Associated Press:
NBC News' controversy around Ronna McDaniel sparks debate over political contributors' role in TV news and the challenges in representing diverse viewpoints — One of the nation's most prominent news outlets has found itself in an embarrassing mess over the hiring — and quick firing …
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