Mediagazer: An interview with WaPo CTO Vineet Khosla on its Climate Answers chatbot, and how it's been built with “adversarial testing”, newsroom feedback, and fine-tuning (Andrew Deck/Nieman Lab)

9:50 PM ET, July 23, 2024

Top News:

Ashley Carman / Bloomberg:

Spotify reports Q2 revenue up 20% YoY to €3.8B, MAUs up 14% YoY to 626M, subscribers up 12% YoY to 246M, above est., and €266M operating income; SPOT jumps 12%+ — Spotify Technology SA shares surged to their highest in more than three years on Tuesday after the Swedish audio …

Chris Welch / The Verge:

Daniel Ek says Spotify is working on a deluxe Spotify tier, around a $17-$18 price point, that has “a lot more control, a lot higher quality across the board” — The saga of Spotify HiFi has many twists and turns. First announced over three years ago, the music service's higher …

Discussion: TechCrunch, Music Business Worldwide, The Media Leader, Digital Trends, 9to5Mac, Billboard and RAIN News, more at Techmeme »

Alex Weprin / The Hollywood Reporter:

YouTube Q2 ad revenue grew 13% YoY to $8.66B, vs. $8.93B est.; Google's subscriptions, platforms, and devices unit that includes YouTube TV had revenue of $9.3B — The Google-owned video platform still saw its ad haul rise by 13 percent compared to last year.

Discussion: The Desk, Reuters, MediaPost, The Information, CNBC, The Wrap, Next TV, Variety, Deadline, Wall Street Journal, Alphabet Inc., 9to5Google and TVNewsCheck, more at Techmeme »

Robbie Whelan / Wall Street Journal:

Former Marvel chairman Ike Perlmutter, who backed Nelson Peltz in a failed proxy fight for two Disney board seats, sells his stake of nearly 26M Disney shares — Isaac “Ike” Perlmutter, the former Marvel Entertainment executive, who for the last decade and a half has been one of Disney's …

Discussion: Variety, New York Post, Gizmodo, The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline

Georg Szalai / The Hollywood Reporter:

Comcast reports Peacock Q2 revenue up 28% YoY to $1B, and a $348M loss, down from $651M in Q2 2023; paying subs were up 38% YoY to 33M but down from 33.5M in Q1 — Comcast and its entertainment unit NBCUniversal report second-quarter results, including the “best year-over-year improvement” …

Discussion: Variety, Comcast Corporation, Next TV, The Desk, The Desk, The Streamable, @alexweprin, Cord Cutters News, The Information, The Wrap, Variety, Barron's Online, CNBC and MarketWatch, more at Techmeme »

Dade Hayes / Deadline:
Comcast President Mike Cavanagh says NBCUniversal expects an 11-year rights deal with the NBA, starting with the 2025-26 season, will be announced “soon”

Discussion: Variety, Next TV, Sportico, The Wrap, The Hollywood Reporter and TVNewsCheck

Bloomberg:
A look at Comcast's bet on the Paris Olympics, which executives hope will greatly elevate Peacock against Netflix and Disney+; Peacock has exclusive US rights

Discussion: The Streamable, Next TV, Business Insider, Reuters, Slate, @lucas_shaw, E! Online, IndieWire and Rolling Stone

The Information:

Internal messages: Meta staff complained about Threads' algorithm limiting political posts, after the For You page was slow to show news of Biden dropping out — Shortly after Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential election Sunday, an employee at Meta Platforms posted in the company's internal forum …

Discussion: @katieharbath@threads.net, @theinformation, @fridaghitis@threads.net, @_hadasgold@threads.net and @drewharwell@threads.net, more at Techmeme »

Natasha Lomas / TechCrunch:

Though the UK's ICO says it's “disappointed” with Google's not deprecating third-party cookies, the regulator has only weakly enforced data protection laws — In a material development that will likely have a big impact on online business models, Google is no longer proposing …

Discussion: Mumbrella, Street Fight, Digital Trends, Security, Privacy & …, Criteo, LifeHacker, MarTech, @Privacymatters@mastodon …, Ad Age, RTÉ, Press Gazette, Inside Radio, Electronic Frontier Foundation, The Register, Reuters, Axios, Adweek and MediaPost

Digiday:
Google says it won't be “deprecating third-party cookies” in Chrome and will instead keep working on “privacy-preserving alternatives” via Privacy Sandbox APIs

Discussion: Privacy Sandbox, Nieman Lab, Information Commissioner's …, Wall Street Journal, The Drum, Search Engine Land, @pedrodias, Neowin, @levie, Marketing Dive, The Cyber Express, Emil Protalinski on LinkedIn, MarTech, AdExchanger, PRWeek, Caitlin Halpert on LinkedIn, Bloomberg, Gizmodo, @cmagovuk, Tech Xplore, Silicon Republic, @edzitron, @ariellesgarcia, @dalmaer, @ngriffin_uk, @simonw, @vtoubiana, @jdaykin, @aripap, @aripap, @mattlanza, @jeffjarvis, @torgo@mastodon.social, @sarafischer, @murakamiwood, @rowan_m, @alextcone, @michaelmiraflor, @chronotope, @keithepetri, @samueljscott, @incloud, @thezedwards, @paperghost, @kendraebarnett, @glenngabe, @ryanbarwick, @lukolejnik, @simoahava, @robinberjon, @lukolejnik, @wolfiechristl, Google Help Center, The Verge, Mark McEachran on LinkedIn, The Information, Financial Times, GOV.UK, Search Engine Land, Fast Company, James Rosewell on LinkedIn, Marc Majewski on LinkedIn, Mahesh Narayanan on LinkedIn, Hello Partner, @mysk@mastodon.social, Simo Ahava on LinkedIn, @wchr@mastodon.social, W Media Research, The Drum, The Media Leader, Angelina Eng on LinkedIn, Matthias Cada on LinkedIn, Engadget, Oliver Klander on LinkedIn, Rio Longacre on LinkedIn, @lauren@mastodon …, 9to5Google, @jaffathecake@mastodon.social, Paul Bannister on LinkedIn, Alex Cone on LinkedIn, The Drum, AdExchanger, Ad Age, @LukaszOlejnik@mastodon.social and CBS News

Max Goldbart / Deadline:

BBC plans to lay off 500 more staff by March 2026 and reports a £263M operating deficit in 2023/24, up from £193M in 2022/23, projected to be £492M in 2024/25 — The BBC will lay off 500 more staff by March 2026 as its annual report paints a worrying financial picture including …

Discussion: Press Gazette, Variety, The Business Times, GB News, The Independent, The Sun, The Desk, The Hollywood Reporter, London Evening Standard, Financial Times, BBC and TVNewsCheck

Naman Ramachandran / Variety:
BBC reports BBC Commercial revenue of £1.9B in 2023/24, down from £2.1B in 2022/23, and 3.8M BritBox International subscribers, with a 25% annual growth rate

Discussion: Broadband TV News, Broadcast, BBC, Advanced Television, The Hollywood Reporter, The Hollywood Reporter and WORLD SCREEN

Charlotte Tobitt / Press Gazette:
Huw Edwards tops the list of BBC's highest paid journalists for 2023/24 despite being off-air since July 2023; 46 BBC journalists earned above £178K

Discussion: The Sun, The Mirror, GB News, Telegraph, RTÉ, Daily Mail, The Mirror, The Mirror, London Evening Standard, Metro.co.uk, LBC, The Times, The Independent, The i Paper, Daily Express, The Independent, Sky News, Reuters, The Sun and Deadline

Judd Legum / Popular Information:

A look at Sinclair's Rapid Response Team, which produces biased short articles; affiliates must include at least three RRT stories nightly — Eugene Ramirez, the lead anchor of Sinclair's national evening news broadcast, resigned in January over concerns about the accuracy and right-wing bias …

Mike Scarcella / Reuters:

A US judge rules that Nina Jankowicz, a former Biden anti-disinformation official, could not back up her defamation claims against Fox News and parent Fox Corp — Fox News Media and its parent Fox Corp (FOXA.O) won a ruling on Monday dismissing a lawsuit by a former Biden administration official …

Discussion: ABC News, New York Post, Deadline, The Hill, Mediaite, NPR and Los Angeles Times

Georg Szalai / The Hollywood Reporter:

TelevisaUnivision reports Q2 revenue up 3% YoY to $1.3B, ad revenue up 6% YoY to $785M, and operating expenses up 6% YoY to $896M — The Spanish-language media giant, led by CEO Wade Davis, reports its second-quarter financials. … The company also reemphasized that its streaming business …

Discussion: New York Times, The Information, Variety, WORLD SCREEN, TelevisaUnivision, Next TV and TVNewsCheck

Todd Spangler / Variety:

Amazon begins rolling out a new UI for Prime Video to help distinguish content included with Prime, update its navigation bar, manage subscriptions, and more — And the new UI specifically addresses something that's annoyed Prime Video users for years: Now, according to Amazon …

Andrew Deck / Nieman Lab:

An interview with WaPo CTO Vineet Khosla on its Climate Answers chatbot, and how it's been built with “adversarial testing”, newsroom feedback, and fine-tuning — “For Google, that might be failure mode...but for us, that is success,” says the Post's Vineet Khosla

Discussion: Deborah Carver on LinkedIn, Craig McCosker on LinkedIn, @washpostpr and @phoebedoris