“‘True crime resonates, and the audience just seems to have an appetite that knows no ends,’ says Liz Alesse, VP of audio for ABC News, in an interview.”

“In the past, podcast deals essentially revolved around controlling who could sell ads on shows. Lately, that’s been rapidly changing. If a ‘podcast’ shows up on Netflix, or stages a live event or gives rise to a merch shop, who sells the sponsorships on those various products and events? And who shares in the resulting profits? Even just selling a show as a video versus an audio program could be complicated.”

“We are now confident that: [David] Holden was no mere foreign correspondent but a spy. He had been recruited by the KGB before he became a journalist. He later became involved with the CIA. There is a strong possibility Holden was a double agent. This is the likeliest reason he was murdered.”

“The best way to think of the slop and spam that generative AI enables is as a brute force attack on the algorithms that control the internet and which govern how a large segment of the public interprets the nature of reality. It is not just that people making AI slop are spamming the internet, it’s that the intended ‘audience’ of AI slop is social media and search algorithms, not human beings…the very nature of AI slop means it evolves faster than human-created content can, so any time an algorithm is tweaked, the AI spammers can find the weakness in that algorithm and exploit it.”

“Trump said he doesn’t think the media’s overall treatment of him has changed so far in his second term, but he is seeing a shift among tech giants.”

“Eight years later, his Tokyo Investigative Newsroom Tansa remains small…But Tansa, which roughly translates as ‘in-depth investigation,’ is finally making a mark. It published a series of articles from 2018 to 2021 that exposed decades of forced sterilizations of mentally disabled people, forcing the government to last year issue an apology and pass a law to pay compensation to the victims.”

“The Guardian has become the latest UK news publisher to begin requiring readers to pay for website access if they do not agree to being tracked by third-party cookies. City AM, GB News and Newsquest’s network of local websites all also appear to have introduced “consent or pay” models in recent months.”

“The Cortland Standard, a family-owned daily, is shutting down in part because of Trump’s 25% tariff on goods from Canada, including newsprint, according to a story on the paper’s website. The 157-year-old paper was one of the five oldest family-owned newspapers in the U.S. The Cortland Standard Printing Co. will file for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection. Seventeen employees have lost their jobs.”

“The most extreme cases of misconduct or wackiness are going to draw the attention of the national players, but the more medium-level cases of iffy behavior or venality or wackiness are probably not going to get attention unless it involves somebody who is in leadership or otherwise extremely high profile.”

“As someone who writes, assigns and edits a lot of stories on música Mexicana, and who genuinely believes that covering it nowadays is what I imagine covering hip-hop in the late ’80s and ’90s must have felt like, I can’t help but feel a kinship with Rodriguez and Ramirez. It’s incredibly heartening to see that the duo are giving the genre the high-end, glossy treatment I think it deserves.”

“What began as a blog with [Lucy Blakiston and] her friends Ruby Edwards and Olivia Mercer in 2018, Shit You Should Care About has since amassed nearly four million followers on social media, including celebrities Bella Hadid, Madonna and, to Blakiston’s surprise, Joe Rogan. It has more than 80,000 newsletter subscribers, and has spawned a podcast series and book titled Make It Make Sense. Nearly half of the platform’s followers are based in the U.S., with another roughly 30% in the U.K., Australia, Canada and New Zealand….Blakiston ‘owes much’ of Shit You Should Care About to loving One Direction. The skills she gained running a One Direction fan account as a teenager were instrumental to the construction of her media company — from editing and Photoshopping to mobilizing large groups.”

“Breitbart’s stock in change hasn’t changed: straight writeups of obviously friendly or unfriendly interviews; screaming headlines; a bloggy and sometimes messy style; cheap and hectic display advertising. But now they’re a kind of MAGA legacy media, holding on to their relationships, bragging about their reporting chops, and keeping a nervous eye on the influencers who threaten to displace them.”

“Some staffers at The Times harbor suspicions that Soon-Shiong is deliberately trying to build separate entities, like LA Times Studios, to shake himself free of traditional journalistic procedures, which he may find to be a nuisance. By doing so, he can leverage The Times’ brand and do what he wants with it, all without facing editorial headwinds from journalists who would, perhaps, not be comfortable reading an advertisement for one of his pharmaceutical companies as a news story.”

Previously: “Smartmatic settled with One America News last year, while a judge recently ruled to allow its $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox Corp. to continue. Fox News agreed to pay Dominion $787 million in 2023.”