Top News:
Wall Street Journal:
How Spotify's $1B+ bet on podcasts has not paid off: most shows aren't profitable and the company has considered an ad revenue-sharing model akin to YouTube's — The prospect of podcast riches led to aggressive investments in celebrity deals and original programming for what appeared a sky's-the-limit media frontier
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Ashley Carman / Bloomberg:
Email: Spotify raises the listener threshold for creators in Ambassador Ads from 100 to 1,000 over 60 days, and plans to cut ad support for white noise podcasts — - Ambient sound shows will no longer be eligible for certain ads — Company raises listener threshold for ambassador ads program
Discussion:
CMU, @bartona104, @ashleyrcarman, Insider, Engadget, The Verge, Podnews, Music Ally and Digital Music News
Financial Times:
eMarketer expects US podcast ad spending to hit $2.2B in 2023, up from $1.7B in 2022, or ~10% of radio; Edison: 80%+ of Americans listen to radio weekly — The rise of podcasts has not fully cannibalised other forms of entertainment — The audience for podcasts is younger …
Discussion:
RAIN News and Inside Radio
Georg Szalai / The Hollywood Reporter:
Filing: WBD forecasts 2023 adjusted EBITDA down by $300M-$500M to $10.5B-$11B, citing strikes, and $1.7B+ in Q3 2023 free cash flow due to Barbie and strikes — “The company now expects to exceed $1.7 billion in free cash flow for the third quarter of 2023, in part due to the strong performance …
Discussion:
SlashFilm, Variety, CNN, Los Angeles Times, Fortune, @howardrodman, Forbes, IGN, @rfaughnder, The Wrap, CNBC, @joerussotweets, @joerussotweets, Wall Street Journal, @richlightshed, @raypride, @mattbelloni, @stevendeknight, Deadline, TheStreet, Associated Press, Media Play News and 98 Rock Online
Rebecca Bellan / TechCrunch:
Elon Musk threatens to file a defamation lawsuit against the ADL for “falsely accusing” X and him of antisemitism and blames the ADL for X's falling US ad sales — In the newest uproar you might have missed, Elon Musk says X, formerly Twitter, will file a defamation lawsuit against the Anti-Defamation League.
Discussion:
@elonmusk, Mediaite, @elonmusk, Los Angeles Times, @anandypaul, Deadline, The Verge, @elonmusk, Breitbart, @elonmusk, @jgreenblattadl, @stuarth2o@threads.net, Vanity Fair, @markloundy@threads.net, @marcuswoitas@threads.net, @oliverdarcy@threads.net, @baccellij@threads.net, @corybe@threads.net, @dkiesow@threads.net, The Times of Israel, CNN, @sethcotlar, CNBC, Axios, The Wrap, Quartz, @mossbergwalt@threads.net, MIT Technology Review, The Hill, CBS News, Reclaim The Net, @seldo@alpaca.gold, @elonmusk, @andrewpaul.bsky.social, @ezraklein@threads.net, Techdirt, New York Post, The Guardian, Ars Technica, Boing Boing, @elonmusk, @jh_swanson, Reason, @mossbergwalt@threads.net, The Daily Beast, Insider, The Information, Forbes, The Forward and Bloomberg
Ted Johnson / Deadline:
NPR President and CEO John Lansing, who has led the organization since 2019, plans to retire at the end of 2023; NPR plans a national search for his successor — - U.S. Economy Adds 187,000 Jobs In August, Entertainment Employment Continues To Decline Amid Strikes
Discussion:
NPR, NPR, CNN, The Desk, @benmullin, The Wrap, @hollyedgell, Current and Inside Radio
Jessica Toonkel / Wall Street Journal:
Antenna: MLS Season Pass had 110K+ US signups on July 21, the day of Messi's first MLS match, up from 6,143 on July 20; July was TV+'s best signup month in 2023 — Soccer superstar attracts over 110,000 sign-ups to MLS Season Pass on day of first game — Soccer superstar Lionel Messi helped drive a surge in U.S. subscriptions to
Meta:
Meta plans to deprecate the Facebook News tab in the UK, France, and Germany in early December 2023 and won't sign new deals for news content in those countries — Today, we are announcing that in the UK, France and Germany we will deprecate Facebook News - a dedicated tab on Facebook …
Discussion:
NBC 7 San Diego, Financial Times, @obrien, Bloomberg, @mgeist, The Verge, @obrien, TechCrunch, Engadget, Press Gazette, MediaPost and The Messenger, more at Techmeme »
Miles Klee / Rolling Stone:
Sean “Diddy” Combs returns the music publishing rights from his label Bad Boy Records to artists, including the Notorious B.I.G.'s estate, Mase, and Faith Evans — In an “unprecedented” move, the estate of Notorious B.I.G. is among those to reclaim songs from the iconic label's catalog
Discussion:
@phil_lewis_, The Fader, Forbes, New York Post, Deadline, Variety, The Wrap, Billboard, Digital Music News, Variety and Next TV
Ben Werdmuller / Werd I/O:
Organizations like Tiny News Collective could help build a “wide news” commons of smaller specialized newsrooms and perspectives of individuals in a community — Doc Searls writes about what he calls wide news: … Doc's argument is that a local commons of publications can …
Discussion:
Local News Initiative, Doc Searls Weblog and @ben@werd.social
Eva Hartog / Politico:
Politico Europe's reporter in Moscow, expelled after 10 years in Russia, on how journalists from Western countries are being slowly squeezed out of the country — Moscow is quietly cracking down on the country's last independent observers. — During my 10 years as a Moscow-based journalist …
Reuters:
Indian police file criminal charges against four journalists covering ethnic violence in the country and accuse their reporting of trying to “provoke clashes” — Indian police in Manipur state have filed criminal charges against four journalists, accusing them of misrepresenting facts …
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