8:05 PM ET, July 26, 2024
July 26, 2024
5:55 PM
George Hammond / Financial Times:
Freelancer.com, iFixit, and others say Anthropic's crawler has aggressively scraped their websites, potentially breaching their terms of service
4:40 PM
CBC News:
Canada's Postmedia plans to buy the SaltWire newspaper chain, which has been under protection from creditors since March, and hopes to close the deal in August
4:25 PM
Bloomberg:
How TikTok is trying to fend off a potential US ban, including through ad campaigns, lobbying, and funding lawsuits by creators
3:40 PM
Etan Vlessing / The Hollywood Reporter:
Charter lost 393K residential pay TV subscribers in Q2, compared to a loss of 189K in Q2 2023; overall video customers were 13.3M, down 9.5% YoY
3:20 PM
Alex Weprin / The Hollywood Reporter:
WBD sues the NBA over the league's “unjustified” decision to sell a package of media rights to Amazon, to which WBD claims to have a “contractual right”
2:35 PM
Jim Waterson / The Guardian:
Keir Starmer says reviving the second part of the Leveson inquiry into the relationship between UK media and police is not among his government's priorities
2:20 PM
Alex Weprin / The Hollywood Reporter:
A US judge rules Disney must face Gina Carano's wrongful termination lawsuit, denying Disney's claim of a 1A right to employ actors to promote certain values
1:45 PM
Amanda Meade / The Guardian:
Journalists strike at outlets owned by Australia's Nine; ~20 of the company's journalists who traveled to Paris to cover the Olympics are among those striking
12:15 PM
Brent Lang / Variety:
Amazon MGM Studios signs a deal with Netflix's ex-head of film Scott Stuber to release movies from his new production company under the United Artists label
11:05 AM
Maia Spoto / Bloomberg Law:
A US judge rules Disney must face Gina Carano's wrongful termination lawsuit as it failed to establish that it employs actors to promote values like inclusion
10:10 AM
Chris Morris / Fortune:
Warner Bros Discovery reportedly sues NBA after $77 billion TV and streaming deals with NBC, ESPN and Amazon
July 25, 2024
11:00 PM
The Marshall Project:
The Marshall Project launches Investigate This!, an effort to share data and tools with local newsrooms to support strong, original stories on criminal justice
9:55 PM
Washington Post:
A look at the flood of “fancam” Kamala Harris videos and memes on short-form video platforms, echoing the “meme armies” that backed Donald Trump's campaigns
7:10 PM
Carl Sullivan / Flipboard:
Flipboard adds feeds for 60+ US-based local and regional publications to the fediverse, including Texas Monthly, Honolulu Civil Beat, and CalMatters
5:55 PM
Sam Levine / The Guardian:
A bankruptcy judge throws out The Gateway Pundit's case, saying the company is solvent; the outlet faces significant defamation cases over false election claims
4:55 PM
Jake Rudnitsky / Bloomberg:
Russia says it will throttle YouTube download speeds on computers by 70% by the end of next week, as “a consequence of the anti-Russian policy of the host”
3:54 PM
Sarah Parvini / Associated Press:
SAG-AFTRA announces a strike starting on Friday against major video game studios, including EA, after talks for a new contract broke down over AI protections
2:55 PM
Deepa Seetharaman / Wall Street Journal:
OpenAI says it partnered with publishers such as News Corp and The Atlantic to build its SearchGPT search tool; publishers can manage how their content appears
2:45 PM
Jorja Siemons / Bloomberg Law:
Ozy Media drops its lawsuit claiming Ben Smith used trade secrets from Ozy to create and launch Semafor
2:35 PM
Samantha Cole / 404 Media:
Source and doc: Runway scraped thousands of videos from YouTube creators and brands, including Disney and VICE News, to train its Gen-3 AI video generation tool
1:45 PM
Kendra Barnett / The Drum:
Publicis Groupe announces it will acquire Influential, the world's largest influencer agency by measure of revenue; Influential has a network of 3.5M+ creators
12:45 PM
David Gilmour / Mediaite:
The AP removed a fact check debunking the claim that JD Vance admitted he had sex with a couch; AP said the post didn't go through its standard editing process
12:10 PM
Cagan Koc / Bloomberg:
UMG shares fell as much as 30% on Thursday, the biggest decline since company's IPO, and closed down 21%, after revenue growth disappointed investors
11:45 AM
Michael M. Grynbaum / New York Times:
A US judge rejects ABC News' motion to dismiss Trump's defamation suit filed after George Stephanopoulos said Trump was found liable for raping E. Jean Carroll
10:50 AM
Catherine Perloff / Adweek:
Six ad firms are limiting their clients' exposure to streaming ads from Pluto TV because they say Pluto exploits auctions using bid duplication to raise prices
9:20 AM
Todd Spangler / Variety:
The new Disney+, Hulu, and Max streaming bundle goes on sale in the US for $16.99 per month with ads and $29.99 per month without ads
7:55 AM
Max Goldbart / Deadline:
ITV reports H1 adjusted EBITA up 40% YoY to £212M, revenue down 3% to £1.9B, ad revenue up 10% to £889M, ITV Studios down 13% to £869M due to strikes in the US
7:10 AM
Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch:
The Oversight Board urges Meta to refine its policies around AI-generated explicit images, following investigations into how the company handles such images
2:30 AM
Alex Weprin / The Hollywood Reporter:
An interview with Time Studios President Dave O'Connor on merging Time's branded content division with its in-house production company to make original content
July 24, 2024
10:05 PM
John Otis / Washington Post:
Lewis Lapham, the editor who revived Harper's magazine in the 1980s by publishing writers including David Foster Wallace and Barbara Ehrenreich, dies at 89
9:55 PM
Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Land:
Microsoft says Bing stopped crawling Reddit after Reddit updated its robots.txt file on July 1
6:31 PM
New York Times:
Doc: Rupert Murdoch wants to change his family trust to ensure Lachlan Murdoch stays in charge of the media empire; three other siblings are fighting the move
6:18 PM
Rick Porter / The Hollywood Reporter:
The WNBA's deal with Disney, NBC, and Amazon, which is reportedly worth ~$200M/season, includes more national telecasts and an increased global reach
5:43 PM
Bloomberg:
Together, the NBA's deals with Disney's ESPN and Comcast's NBC are expected to generate $76B over 11 years, with Amazon paying about $1.8B annually
5:01 PM
Todd Spangler / Variety:
MLB launches a streaming service for MLB Network in the US for $5.99/month, no cable TV subscription required; live games will be subject to local blackouts
4:33 PM
Alex Weprin / The Hollywood Reporter:
The NBA declines WBD's effort to join the set of rights packages built for Amazon, Disney, and NBCUniversal, saying WBD's proposal did not match Amazon's offer
4:25 PM
Adam B. Vary / Variety:
San Diego's Comic-Con, from July 25-July 28, is expected to draw more than 130,000, after back-to-back pandemic cancellations and the SAG-AFTRA strike
2:44 PM
Emanuel Maiberg / 404 Media:
Reddit appears to be blocking search engines that don't rely on Google's indexing; Bing, DuckDuckGo, and others are not showing recent results from Reddit
2:15 PM
Variety:
A Prime Video India-commissioned report finds that India is attracting ~$6B per year in local content investments, or $4 per head vs. $370 per head in the US
1:15 PM
Amanda Meade / The Guardian:
Journalists at Nine newspapers Sydney Morning Herald and the Age plan to strike during Olympics if their demands, including a higher pay rise, aren't met
11:55 AM
Amanda Meade / The Guardian:
Some of News Corp's most experienced journalists in Australia, including Sue Dunlevy, have been made redundant, as the outlet cuts its national reporting team
10:35 AM
Melanie Goodfellow / Deadline:
France's Arcom regulator will not renew the TNT frequencies of Canal+ Group's controversial channel C8, which was fined €7.6M for lack of political plurality
9:15 AM
Laura Dubois / Financial Times:
The EU raises concerns over the independence of Italy's public broadcaster Rai after budget cuts and alleged “intimidation” by Giorgia Meloni's government
8:20 AM
Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:
Twitch introduces new policy and moderation updates to curb sexual harassment, including making its policy “easier to understand” and adding moderation tools
8:00 AM
Jess Jones / City A.M.:
LADbible owner LBG Media reports H1 2024 revenue up 55% YoY to £42.3M, adjusted earnings up 240% YoY to £10.2M, and a global audience of 493M; LBG jumps 11%+
7:15 AM
Jim Waterson / The Guardian:
BBC reports UK households paying the £169.50 licence fee fell by 500K to 23.9M in 2023/2024; 69% of Britons under 16 consume any BBC content in an average week
6:05 AM
Reuters:
A Moscow court finds Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar guilty in absentia of distributing false information about the Russian army and sentences him to 8.5 years
July 23, 2024
9:50 PM
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
6:50 PM
Chris Welch / The Verge:
Daniel Ek says Spotify is working on a deluxe Spotify tier, costing around $17 to $18, that has “a lot more control, a lot higher quality across the board”
6:05 PM
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
5:20 PM
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
4:30 PM
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
2:35 PM
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
2:00 PM
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
1:10 PM
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
10:45 AM
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”
10:05 AM
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
9:00 AM
Reuters:
The US calls on Russia to free Russian-American RFE/RL journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, who was jailed last week in what RFE/RL said was “a mockery of justice”
8:35 AM
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
8:05 AM
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
7:55 AM
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
7:25 AM
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
6:20 AM
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%+
July 22, 2024
11:10 PM
Mark Sweney / The Guardian:
Vivendi plans to list its French TV business Canal+ in London and advertising company Havas in Amsterdam, as part of a drive to break up the media conglomerate
5:10 PM
Meera Pattni / Semafor:
Semafor plans to launch Semafor Gulf on September 16, led by veteran journalist Mohammed Sergie, following the success of the US and sub-Saharan Africa editions
4:00 PM
Alex Weprin / The Hollywood Reporter:
WBD says it intends to match one of the offers for NBA rights; a source says it is targeting the package from Amazon, which is for about $1.8B per year
3:30 PM
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
2:40 PM
Bloomberg:
Sources: AMC Entertainment reached an agreement with creditors that includes restructuring its debt and moving US theaters into a different unit of the company
1:35 PM
The Information:
Condé Nast sends a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity, accusing it of plagiarizing its content, a month after Forbes sent a similar letter to the AI company
12:25 PM
Wes Davis / The Verge:
The EU tells Meta its “pay or consent” model for Facebook and Instagram may violate consumer protection laws, giving Meta until September 1 to propose changes
11:35 AM
Dylan Donnelly / Sky News:
A Russian court sentences Russian-American RFE/RL journalist Alsu Kurmasheva to six and a half years in prison for spreading “false info” about the Russian army
10:20 AM
Charlotte Tobitt / Press Gazette:
Free London paper City AM says Christian May will return as EIC after four years away, and signs a deal to provide business and financial news to Reach titles
9:15 AM
Sahil Patel / The Information:
Reddit COO Jen Wong says the company has revenue sharing deals with the NFL, NBA, MLB, and others to get video and other content, hoping to draw advertisers
8:30 AM
Rebecca Robbins / New York Times:
A Florida judge refuses to dismiss Donald Trump's libel lawsuit against the Pulitzer Board over its 2022 statement reaffirming awards for Russiagate coverage
7:40 AM
Mark Kleinman / Sky News:
Source: former UK Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi approached billionaire backers like the Reuben family to prepare a £600M bid for The Daily Telegraph and Spectator
6:50 AM
Alex Ritman / Variety:
Amazon MGM Studios buys the UK's Bray Film Studios, used to make season two of The Rings of Power, its first acquisition of a physical studio in the UK
6:30 AM
Daniel Thomas / Financial Times:
WPP-owned ad agency Ogilvy unveils Influence Shield, a new service that aims to help clients deal with reputational issues arising from social media influencers
5:55 AM
Elahe Izadi / Washington Post:
A profile of John Paul Vranesevich, the owner and only full-time reporter for the Beaver Countian who beat the national media on a Donald Trump shooting scoop
5:30 AM
Amanda Meade / The Guardian:
Australian Financial Review Editor-in-Chief Michael Stutchbury plans to step down after 13 years, as AFR owner Nine Entertainment cuts 200 jobs to save $30M
July 21, 2024