Check out Mini-Mediagazer for simple mobiles or Mediagazer Mobile for modern smartphones.
7:00 PM ET, February 23, 2021

Mediagazer

 Top News: 
ABC:
Australia says Facebook agreed to reinstate news content in Australia in the coming days after the government promised amendments to its proposed media bill  —  We acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Australians and Traditional Custodians of the lands where we live, learn, and work.
RELATED:
Simon Wilkie / The Conversation:
Australia's news media code debate has mostly focused on large media players, but the attention should be on protecting the sustainability of small publishers
Adam Gabbatt / The Guardian:
Al Jazeera is launching Rightly, a digital media channel led by Fox News Veteran Scott Norvell, for those who “feel left out of conservative media”  —  Rightly will be led by a former Fox News journalist and is aimed at Republicans who ‘feel left out of conservative media’
RELATED:
The Information:
Source: ~40%, or 40M, of Disney+ subscribers are in the US, and Disney has said 30% are in India, so Europe and LatAm seem to make up less than a third of subs  —  Disney's flagship video-streaming service, Disney+, has quickly emerged as the only true competitor to Netflix …
RELATED:
Chaim Gartenberg / The Verge:
Star, a new section on Disney+ for international customers that offers content Disney places on Hulu in the US, launches today
Deadline:
Movie theaters in New York City can reopen on March 5 at 25% capacity with health protocols including air filtration, mandatory masks, and social distancing  —  UPDATE AFTER EXCLUSIVE: New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Monday said movie theaters in New York City will be brought into line …
Sahil Patel / Wall Street Journal:
Reuters:
Police in India questioned Amazon India's head of original content for Prime Video over allegations that its show Tandav hurt religious sentiments  —  LUCKNOW, India (Reuters) - Indian police in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh questioned a top Amazon executive for nearly four hours …
Discussion: @adityakalra
Ashley Carman / The Verge:
Q&A with Spotify's Daniel Ek on growing the number of creators on the service and engaging with them, podcast success metrics, Clubhouse, and more  —  Spotify hosted an event on Monday to discuss its ambitions in audio, and one message came through loud and clear: the company wants to play …
Salma Abdelaziz / CNN:
Rights groups call for the release of Yemeni journalist Adel al-Hasani, who has worked for CNN and has been detained since September  —  Yemeni journalist Adel al-Hasani with his two young sons.  He was detained at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Aden last September.
Discussion: @clarissaward
Brian Steinberg / Variety:
NBCU says it will stop selling local commercials based on traditional TV ratings and shift transactions to impression-based deals in April  —  One of the nation's most prominent TV companies intends to — finally — stop selling local commercials based on long-used TV ratings.
Dylan Byers / NBC News:
Spotify launches Renegades: Born in the USA, an exclusive, eight-episode podcast with Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen as co-hosts  —  Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen are making a podcast.  —  Spotify on Monday announced the launch of “Renegades: Born in the USA,” …
RELATED:
Chris Welch / The Verge:
Spotify says it will launch a subscription later this year called HiFi that will offer “CD-quality, lossless audio”; Spotify currently tops out at 320kbps audio
 
 Archived Page Info: 
This is a snapshot of Mediagazer at 7:00 PM ET, February 23, 2021.

View the current page or another snapshot:


 
 See Also: 
Mediagazer: site main
Mediagazer River: reverse chronological Mediagazer
Mediagazer Mobile: for phones
Mediagazer Leaderboard: Mediagazer's top sources
 
 Subscribe: 
Mediagazer RSS feed
Mediagazer on X
Mediagazer on Mastodon
 
 
 More News: 
Lillian Rizzo / Wall Street Journal:
Black News Channel, largely backed by Jacksonville Jaguars owner Shad Khan, has boosted its potential audience to 52M+ households from about 2.5M in July 2020
Todd Spangler / Variety:
Rob Barrett is named president of media at Maven, where he will run Sports Illustrated and The Street; Barrett was previously president of digital at Hearst
Charlotte Tobitt / Press Gazette:
UK's Independent had an operating profit £2.7M, up 18% YoY, on revenue of £30.3M, up 12% YoY; majority of readers are in the US, but UK makes up 50% of revenue
Liz Pelly / Real Life:
Issues with streaming and its distribution of royalties could be resolved with a federal, taxpayer-funded music streaming service, an “American Music Library”
 Earlier Picks: 
Sean Highkin / Bleacher Report:
A look at NBA Top Shot, a marketplace for NBA video highlights, that has over 50,000 users with sales of $60M+ since launching a public beta in October
Kelsey McKinney / Defector:
Internal memo: Slate indefinitely suspended The Gist host Mike Pesca over a Slack discussion; sources: he argued for the use of the N-word in some cases
Brian Stelter / CNN:
Networks like ABC, CBS, and NBC, sticking to “both sides-ism”, still let GOP leaders spread the “Big Lie” that Trump won the election with little or no pushback
The New York Times Company:
NYT: Maggie Haberman will take on a new beat and join Washington bureau's investigative/enterprise team and still track the post-Trump scene with Politics desk
 

 
From Techmeme:

Alex Heath / The Verge:
Meta details Llama 3: 8B- and 70B-parameter models, a focus on reducing false refusals, and an upcoming model trained on 15T+ tokens that has 400B+ parameters

Raffaele Huang / Wall Street Journal:
Apple removes WhatsApp and Threads from its App Store in China, saying it was ordered to do so by China's cyberspace officials citing national security concerns

Ryan Morrison / Tom's Guide:
Microsoft researchers introduce VASA-1, an AI model that creates a realistic talking face video from a portrait photo and an audio file, in research preview

 
Sister Sites:

Techmeme
 Top news and commentary for technology's leaders, from all around the web
memeorandum
 What US political commentators are discussing online right now
WeSmirch
 The top celebrity news from all around the web on a single page