Top News:
New York Times:
Memo: MLB and ESPN mutually agree to end their national television deal after the 2025 season; ESPN was due to pay MLB around $550M/year in 2026, 2027, and 2028 — Major League Baseball and ESPN have “mutually agreed” to end their national television deal after the upcoming 2025 season …
Discussion:
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Deadline:
Sources: Amazon paid $1B+ to gain creative control of the James Bond franchise and plans to expand it into its own universe akin to Marvel or Star Wars — Amazon originally overpaid on its purchase of MGM in a deal orchestrated by then-MGM board chair Kevin Ulrich.
Discussion:
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Justin Kroll / Deadline:
Amazon MGM Studios, Michael G. Wilson, and Barbara Broccoli form a JV to house James Bond IP rights, under which Amazon gains creative control of the franchise
Discussion:
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Alex Weprin / The Hollywood Reporter:
Apple plans to launch Apple News+ Food in April, for News+ subscribers, with recipes, kitchen tips, and other content from Allrecipes, Serious Eats, and more — The new section will include tens of thousands of recipes from publishers like Food & Wine, Bon Appetit, and AllRecipes.
Discussion:
TechCrunch, The Verge, AppleInsider, Apple, MacRumors and 9to5Mac, more at Techmeme »
Marty Swant / Digiday:
Amazon plans transparency updates for its ad buying system after an Adalytics report found it placed ads on sites hosting CSAM and other problematic content — Amazon plans to more transparency tools for its advertising offering, updates that come just weeks after its demand-side platform …
Discussion:
Adweek
Bron Maher / Press Gazette:
Similarweb: traffic from ChatGPT to the top 14 publishers globally rose 8x from 435,000 in August to 3.5M in January, but is still less than 0.1% of all visits — The amount of referral traffic to top news sites from ChatGPT is increasing quickly, new data from Similarweb shows, but still accounts for a miniscule proportion of visits.
Discussion:
CNBC, Kate Rooney on LinkedIn, Matt Shaw on LinkedIn, The Wrap and TechCrunch
Dan Sabbagh / The Guardian:
The BBC pulls a Gaza documentary from iPlayer to conduct “further due diligence” after criticism for not clearly disclosing narrator was a Hamas leader's son — Show removed from iPlayer as ‘further due diligence’ carried out and critics ask if any Hamas members were paid for filming
Discussion:
BBC, The Wrap, Realscreen, The Times of Israel, The Independent, @robertjenrick, Deadline, @hamza_a96, GB News, Variety, BBC, The Sun, @tamhussein, @archrose90, @garyspedding, Fox News, Mirror, Daily Caller News Foundation and HotAir
Gene Maddaus / Variety:
Senator Warren urges the US DOJ to scrutinize Disney's deal to acquire a controlling stake in Fubo and merge it with Hulu + Live TV, citing antitrust concerns — Sen. Elizabeth Warren has urged the Justice Department to carefully scrutinize Disney's deal to acquire a controlling stake in Fubo …
Peter Kafka / Business Insider:
If X threatened an ad group with US government interference, we've hit a high level of coercion, and conservatives who complained of Big Tech bias should object — - Elon Musk's X — the thing we used to call Twitter — lost lots of advertisers after he bought it.
Andrew Deck / Nieman Lab:
Some journalists are taking freelance jobs with AI training data companies like Scale AI, which recruit them for tasks such as fact-checking and prompt drafting — The gig work platform Outlier is one of several companies courting journalists to train large language models (LLMs).
Discussion:
@tylerborchers.com and Rest of World
Lauren Easton / Editor and Publisher:
Memo: AP is launching its Local Investigative Reporting Program, to be led by Ron Nixon, to support US state and local newsrooms in investigative reporting — In a memo to staff Thursday, Executive Editor Julie Pace announced AP will launch a Local Investigative Reporting Program led by Ron Nixon:
Discussion:
Poynter, Ron Nixon on LinkedIn, @rebuildlocalnews.bsky.social, @sdkstl.bsky.social and TVNewsCheck
Reuters:
Sources: India fines BBC ~£300K for alleged foreign exchange violations over its failure to reduce foreign ownership in a company BBC launched in India in 2023 — India's financial crime fighting agency has fined British broadcaster BBC 314,510 pounds ($397,980) for alleged foreign exchange violations …
Ashley Carman / Bloomberg:
YouTube plans to add a “premium lite” tier, a source says for the US, Australia, Germany, and Thailand, offering podcasts without ads and music videos with ads — - The service will continue to put ads in music videos — The tier will launch in areas that include the US, Australia
Discussion:
The Information, BGR, Ars Technica, TechCrunch, Dexerto, Gizmodo, Music Ally, MacRumors, The Media Leader, Beyond Search, Adweek, Cord Cutters News, 9to5Google, The Desk and The Verge
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