Media

1. Reevaluating Robert Caro
2. Musk and Substack
3. Bakish on TV
4. Politico’s playbook
5. TikTok for news?
6. Hard Reset
7. Wolff’s book tour

Welcome to Semafor Media, where we’re hoping to see you Thursday.

The summer before Semafor launched, we hosted a news summit that included figures ranging from Washington Post journalists to Tucker Carlson, then at Fox News.

I think those were already the waning days of arguments over whether interviewing someone on stage — “platforming” them — implied a kind of endorsement. I don’t really see the job of journalism that way, but also felt the criticism and came in a bit too hot with Carlson. He responded in a heated manner, and while I felt the conversation was illuminating, the tenor drowned out some interesting exchanges.

More than two years later, Semafor has found its feet as a platform that embraces respectful disagreement, and we’re hosting a summit on “Innovating to Restore Trust in News,” in Washington, DC, this Thursday afternoon, Feb. 27. As my partner Justin suggested last year, we are pulling people from very different perspectives into considering an information environment that deeply troubles most Americans.

We don’t expect everyone to agree — many of the speakers onstage have very different ideas of what trust means to them and their audiences. But in an era of fragmentation, we believe it’s important to honestly discuss the paths towards rebuilding some collective ideas about trust in the digital age.

Max and I are excited for these conversations with a heavyweight lineup of people shaping today’s information space. Alphabetically: Fox’s Bret Baier, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, NBCUniversal News Group’s Cesar Conde, Zeteo founder Mehdi Hasan, New York Times editor Joe Kahn, podcaster Megyn Kelly, NPR CEO Katherine Maher, CNN chief Mark Thompson, and Wall Street Journal editor Emma Tucker.

As a reader of this newsletter, we know you care about where journalism is headed. If you’ve got questions for any of our guests, please send ideas. And if you’d like to attend virtually, you can sign up here.

Also today: The Elon Musk Substack deal that wasn’t, a new history of the history of Robert Moses, and a pair of new media ventures. (Scoop count: 3)

A belated backlash to Robert Caro

In a new book, Why Nothing Works, Marc Dunkelman says the media committed its original sin in the glorious summer of 1974, when the Washington Post took down Richard Nixon and The New Yorker published four parts of a monumental biography of New York’s great builder, Robert Moses. His villain is Robert Caro, the revered, now 89-year old author of The Power Broker, who Dunkelman describes as “Abbie Hoffman in a tweed suit.”

“When, during the Watergate summer of 1974, Robert Caro published his voluminous takedown of Robert Moses, the spellbinding narrative mirrored what was, nay then, an entirely familiar worldview. Moses had been a progressive … a man who believed unerringly in the wisdom of experts,” he writes. The exposé, “released within weeks of Nixon’s resignation, was yet more evidence of power gone awry,” Dunkelman writes, in the course of making the case that Democrats need to redevelop their enthusiasm for power, as well as for their cities.

When Musk tried to buy Substack

Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie elaborated at a Semafor event in Soho last week on reporting in The New York Times about Elon Musk’s 2023 offer to buy the platform. When Substack was launching its product Notes, he said, it approached Musk to give him a heads up about those plans to avoid the appearance that the company was creating a Twitter-killer. Musk responded by hastily proposing that Twitter buy Substack and make Substack co-founder Chris Best the CEO of Twitter, he said.

Ultimately, the Substack founders rebuffed the offer. Musk’s subsequent throttling of Substack links reaffirmed their decision not to get into business with the billionaire.

“I used to work for Elon and I’m not really that eager to do it again,” McKenzie said. “But I think they’re running a different type of business, and it’s an ad-based business and it’s an aggregation-based business, where they control the relationships that the audience and the publishers have. And philosophically, that is opposed to what Substack is all about, which is about writers and creators having ownership and more control over their own destiny and the ability to be supported directly by their subscribers, who are the real customers, and not advertisers.”

McKenzie also said his platform has seen a large increase in subscriptions over the last few weeks, primarily among “people who are looking for some response to Trump.” He singled out the Contrarian, which gained more than 10,000 paid subscriptions in its first 12 hours. He also noted that the former CNN anchor Jim Acosta had seen a large jump from hosting live video on Substack every day, and said the English actor John Cleese’s recently launched Substack had also garnered tens of thousands of subscriptions.

— Max Tani

Bakish looks back

Bob Bakish is bearish on the television business and his former competitors. In a rare semi-public appearance since he was forced out of Paramount, the former CEO last week fielded questions at NYU from business school students (Semafor was in attendance for a different off-the-record panel), where he said that Comcast’s decision to spin off most of its cable assets was the “right idea, wrong execution.”

He noted that Comcast chief Brian Roberts had merged his father’s cable business with a media business, which Bakish said had created an emotional attachment, and recalled the difficulties of being at Viacom when it was spun off from CBS.

“I do worry about the spin because it’s not a spin that structurally makes sense, because they’re holding onto the broadcaster,” he said, referring to Comcast’s decision to keep NBC. “And Bravo — I can’t figure that out. So I don’t know. It’s the right idea, but the way they’re doing it doesn’t seem optimal.”

Bakish also noted that while the traditional broadcast model was not the focus of media attention, local TV stations have been facing the same issues as larger cable companies. He recalled meetings with some CBS affiliates who told him that “if it keeps going this way, we’ll be upside-down by 2028.”

“That’s another reckoning that’s going to happen at some point,” he said.

And in a rapid-fire session of buy vs. sell, Bakish was bullish on companies like Amazon and Disney, but advised selling WarnerBrothers Discovery. If you’re buying, Bakish seemed most impressed with the diversified new New York Times.

— Max Tani

Politicking at Politico

It’s complicated times over at Politico, which has been doing what it can to soothe an X-driven MAGA movement (and gleefully trolling White House) that persuaded itself, nonsensically, that the publication’s trade arm was somehow a recipient of secret USAID subsidies.

The publication sent its White House correspondent to do an interview at CPAC, among other olive branches, but also has its own deep ties to the Musk wing of Donald Trump’s orbit, via its owner. Axel Springer boss Mathias Döpfner’s son Moritz just launched a venture fund in Germany with $50 million from Peter Thiel, the German magazine Manager reports, suggesting the younger Döpfner could follow the path of another Thiel protege and emerge as “a German JD Vance.”

Reporters launch TikTok-like news app

Noosphere, a mobile-first platform news platform with a scrollable full-screen feed a la TikTok, is launching tomorrow. CEO Jane Ferguson, a decorated former war correspondent for PBS, told Semafor that she started the app after she realized that both the audience and the business model for broadcast journalism was quickly shrinking.

The app will charge less than $20 a month to users in exchange for unlimited access to content produced by a network of independent journalists. Per an early demo shared with Semafor, the main Noosphere feed can showcase both vertical video as well as other kinds of content, like audio, text articles and photography.

Labor notes

The pro-labor PR firm The Worker Agency is launching a new media outlet, Hard Reset, staffed by former Washington Post reporter Eli Rosenberg and Ariella Steinhorn, who created a platform for whistleblowers called Lioness. “Hard Reset will reveal the stories that big tech and the billionaires don’t want you to hear,” said Worker Agency founder William Fitzgerald, who, like Steinhorn, started his PR career in big tech. “With thousands of PR professionals spinning their narratives, we’re here to break down what’s actually going on. As former insiders, Ariella and I understand how the game is played, and with Eli — one of the best tech and labor reporters in the field — we plan to hold them accountable.“​​ The platform is funded with a seed grant from the Ford Foundation. The first issue, we’re told, will focus on how Jeff Bezos’ Earth Fund has backed away from “climate equity” nonprofits, and will also include an interview with actor Mark Ruffalo.

Annals of publicity

All or Nothing author Michael Wolff’s publicist at Crown, Dyana Messina, emailed reporters Friday evening to alert us to a statement from Steven Cheung, White House communications director. He said of her client: “Michael Wolff is a lying sack of s**** and has been proven to be a fraud. He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain.” “Please let me know if I can send you a copy of ALL OR NOTHING,” she concluded. Meanwhile, the book received a positive Times review, not the usual treatment for an author who drives many of his peers crazy.

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⁌ TV

Lining up: New MSNBC network chief Rebecca Kutler is wasting no time shuffling the network’s lineup. Longtime anchor Joy Reid’s show is ending this week, while the network plans to nix Alex Wagner’s primetime show and elevate former White House press secretary Jen Psaki into the primetime lineup. MSNBC is also moving its weekend panel show co-hosted by former Kamala Harris aide Symone Sanders to the weekdays. The moves cement Psaki’s status as one of the network’s major stars, and positions MSNBC to capitalize on the growing viewer interest in the network’s anti-Trump programming: Rachel Maddow’s show crossed the 2 million viewer mark for the first time in months last week. Some staff on Reid’s show were reportedly not pleased by the moves.

Strike out: ESPN broke up with Major League Baseball after the league wouldn’t take a haircut on their rights deal — another sign of the downward pressure on certain sports rights, even amid the explosion of sports content.

⁛ News

Friendly media: Perhaps unsurprisingly, the White House’s “new media” seat in the briefing room has not been evenly occupied by creators of different ideological stripes. Instead, the people sitting in the seat have largely been conservative media personalities from X, Rumble, and the podcast world.

✦ Marketing

Ad spend: Retail ad networks are getting even bigger. Walmart announced last week that its ad business grew to $4.4 billion last year, a 27% increase from 2023.

⁜ Tech

Apple gets into food: Semafor wrote last year about the quiet importance of Apple News and Apple News+ for publisher revenue, and how the application was perhaps one of the only rivals to The New York Times’ app. This week, the company announced its New York Times Cooking competitor, Apple News+ Food, a new recipe catalogue featuring thousands of recipes from partners like Bon Appétit, Food and Wine, and Serious Eats, among others.

✰ Hollywood

Going to Disneyland: Disney’s parks and experiences business is doing well on the back of strong overseas growth.

Two weeks after Carl Eschenbach laid off 1,750 Workday employees in the interest of “prioritizing innovation investments like AI,” Eschenbach is not buying the idea that artificial intelligence will replace vast swaths of the workforce, writes Semafor’s Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson.

In a year, Eschenbach predicts Workday may have even more people on its payroll than before, but they will increasingly be focused on AI, and more spread out around the world.