Financial Times / Hannah Murphy, Cristina Criddle, and Daniel Thomas
Brands spend nominal sums on X to keep Elon Musk happy →“’It’s whatever amount is enough to stay off the naughty list,’ said Lou Paskalis, chief executive of marketing consultancy AJL Advisory and a former media executive at Bank of America. ‘It’s not because the brand safety risk has gone away. But the far greater risk is that a comment [from Musk] in the press sends your stock price tumbling, and instead of a multimillion-dollar risk you’re facing a multibillion-dollar risk.’”
Big Technology / Alex Kantrowitz
The Wall Street Journal / Katherine Sayre
The Atlantic / Elaine Godfrey
Steven Cheung is the voice of Trump →“Trump’s incursion against American institutions is now benefiting from a communications operation that is more effective—and far more withering. Cheung has been the architect of this new messaging era, bringing all that is authentically vulgar, unflinching, and cruel about his boss to official White House statements.”
The New York Times / Lulu Garcia-Navarro
Megyn Kelly is embracing her bias and rejecting the “old rules” →Megyn Kelly: “I’m trying to say to you: Yes, I’m still a journalist, but I’m in this new ecosystem where the old rules don’t apply. I’m in this world with, yes, Charlie Kirk and Dan Bongino and Ben Shapiro, but my world is also Joe Rogan and Theo Von. It’s a very large world, and how the consumer receives it is by going on YouTube.com on their television screen or going to the vertical integrations on Instagram or TikTok and just taking in content. What’s the content that you want to receive? I’m on the list of content creators, and so the fact that I’m also a journalist who breaks news and reports on news is an extra. But what’s most important in my business now is authenticity.”
TechCrunch / Maxwell Zeff
Wired / Zoë Schiffer and Louise Matsakis
The Guardian / Edward Helmore
New York / Charlotte Klein
The newspaper flourishing without a paywall →“There is a real crisis of access to reliable information for people who don’t want or have the means to subscribe to The New York Times. That is a real problem that we have an answer to.”
The New York Times / Katie Robertson
Bloomberg has a rocky start with AI summaries →“One summary was removed from a March 6
article because it inaccurately stated that Mr. Trump had imposed tariffs on Canadian goods last year, instead of this year. Another, on a March 18
article about managers of sustainable funds, ‘failed to distinguish between actively and passively managed funds, providing incorrect figures as a result,’ according to a correction. Other errors have included incorrect figures, incorrect attribution and references to the wrong U.S. presidential election.”