Media

Vibe shift: Young adult literature has for years been the most hypersensitive part of American culture to insane social media drama.

The genre went through a familiar round of intense and confusing infighting on X, Instagram, and Goodreads (who knew!) last month over whether Molly X. Chang’s To Gaze Upon Wicked Gods romanticized colonizers, encouraged doxxing of Goodreads reviewers, both, or neither. There seem to have been lots of hurt feelings, but no book cancellations, per an exceedingly deep Blocked & Reported deep dive. It’s part of a broader shift that raises the question of whether American culture is headed into a moment of backlash, or merely away from overt politics.

Soros fund is building an audio empire

George Soros thinks it’s good business, and perhaps good politics, to be in your ears.

Over the last two years, Soros Fund Management, the firm founded by the billionaire investor and now controlled by the Open Society Foundations, has become an increasingly key player in the oldest electronic mass media: radio.

In February, the company became the largest shareholder in Audacy, the bankrupt second-largest radio company in the U.S., with more than 230 U.S. stations and a podcast arm that includes Cadence13 and Pineapple Street Studios. In 2022, Soros invested an undisclosed amount in Crooked Media, the liberal podcast network behind the ultra-popular Pod Save America. And a Soros-backed firm played a crucial role in Univision’s $60 million sale in 2022 of 18 Hispanic radio stations to a new firm run by veterans of Democratic politics. The deal, which included conservative Cuban powerhouse broadcasters in Miami, drew opposition from Republican members of Congress.

The move into the troubled radio business could be the beginning of a bigger audio buying spree, three people who have been involved in discussions with Soros executives said.

The fund has also privately discussed acquiring other major radio companies, such as the limping, publicly traded Cumulus Media. (Regulations limiting ownership of radio stations put limits on such mergers.)

The fund’s lead media investor, Michael Del Nin, met with a number of major figures in digital media and audio over the last year, including the podcast company Project Brazen. It has also eyed several potential companies for acquisition, including Pushkin Industries, the podcast company from Malcolm Gladwell and Jacob Weisberg, and Lemonada, the network best known for its interview show hosted by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, people familiar with the conversations said. Another podcast industry insider told Semafor that Lemonada is in the midst of a formal process to find a buyer, but that some potential suitors have balked at its high asking price.

Lindsay Peoples is editor-in-chief of New York Magazine’s The Cut, which has published a number of widely-discussed essays of late, including one on the perks of “marrying an older man” and a woman’s story of being scammed out of $50,000.

A media scoop from Semafor: We’ve appointed veteran marketing, media, and public affairs leader Bennett Richardson to the role of General Manager and Global Head of Public Affairs, based in Washington, D.C. This is a newly created position for Semafor. Richardson, most recently Director of Policy Marketing at Google, and a co-founder of Politico Europe — will be responsible for driving revenue growth in the D.C. market and policy capitals around the world.

Reporting to Chief Revenue Officer Rachel Oppenheim, Richardson will spearhead client partnerships and develop strategic initiatives spanning advertising, events, content, and partnerships. He brings legendary experience to our outfit as Semafor’s brand continues to ascend in the beltway, with our Washington-focused newsletter, Principals, tripling its subscriber base year-on-year.

✦ Marketing

Age of Ozempic: Snack food companies are worried about drugs that cut cravings to help people lose weight. But the CEO of yogurt titan Danone is bullish: “We see ourselves as extremely complementary to GLP-1s.”

⁛ News

Goldberg vs. Remnick: The Atlantic ran the table at the National Magazine Awards, “triumphantly fulfilling C.E.O. Roger Lynch’s 2022 promise that [New Yorker parent] Condé is ‘no longer a magazine company,’” snarks Rusty Foster.

Civil war: The American left continues to burn its own institutions to the ground. Guernica editor-in-chief Jina Moore resigned after her staff rebelled over an essay by an Israeli writer. In her farewell note on Friday, Moore wrote that she saw the piece as “an example of the difficult work that Guernica is known for: capturing, with complexity and nuance, how such violence is normalized, and how a violent state extracts complicity from its citizens.”

Party’s over: In previous years, news media organizations jockeyed to host the most opulent and buzzy afterparty for the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. But this year, attendees won’t have many options to choose from: CBS News, which in recent years hosted its event at the French Ambassador’s residence, declined to host one this year.

NBCU News chief Cesar Conde and others lobbied the French Ambassador to use the space for the NBCU News Group afterparty instead, citing the collaboration between France and NBC as the chief broadcaster of next summer’s Olympics in Paris. But the event will have a much smaller and more selective guestlist than the network’s party last year — which may also tamp down the potential for further drama in the wake of the network’s recent upheaval surrounding the hiring and immediate firing of former Republican National Committee chief Ronna McDaniel.

Overseas: It can be hard, in these post-Twitter-as-“Twitter” times, to see how much the Gaza conflict continues to trouble media institutions. But that was visible at the Overseas Press Club, Claire Atkinson reports, where naming an award after the Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was shot dead in 2022 by an Israeli soldier while on assignment for the Qatari-owned news channel Al Jazeera, spurred a “fractious debate.”

Public notice: The least glamorous, simplest and most longstanding form of U.S. government support for news has long been public notices. Those pages of odd legal filings (changed names, incorporated businesses, etc.) used to fill inside pages of major and midsized publications, and now appear in papers that lurk around odd corners of media, existing largely to collect rent on the fact that many laws still require those notices to appear in print. That’s why a Virginia bill signed into law last week by Gov. Glenn Youngkin, allowing online-only news outlets to also run public notices, is a pretty big deal:

“The average reader won’t recognize it, but this is a tipping point in community journalism that will help sustain small, independent publishers across the state,” said Randy Arrington, publisher of the Shenandoah Valley’s Page Valley News. He said the law “provides another financial lifeline to small town publishers fighting off news deserts in rural areas.”

⁜ Tech

Training race: Google and Meta have pushed legal boundaries in the race to train their AI models, The New York Times reports. Meta discussed buying Simon & Schuster for its books and “weighed the possibility of putting copyrighted works into their A.I. model, even if it meant they would be sued later.”

Labeling: Meta plans to add a “Made with AI” tag to users’ posts.

⁋ Publishing

Perils of commerce: A real cautionary tale about the luxury watch site Hodinkee, which raised $40 million and bought a used-watch retailer — and found its customers reluctant at best, and suspicious at worst, of the products it was hawking. Hodinkee is now pivoting back to media.

Still BuzzFeeding: My former colleague Matt Stopera, author of the then-legendary 2011 list “20 Stunning Photos of the Damage Caused by the East Coast Earthquake,” is still on the job in the meme mines 13 years later, and Thursday published “22 Wild Photos Showing The Damage Caused By The East Coast Earthquake.” (The gist: “That poor iced coffee.“) — Ben

Warning: The new Center for News Technology and Innovation, a media-tech collaboration whose impressive board includes former Washington Post editor Marty Baron and Rappler CEO Maria Ressa, has a new report out that warns of the creep of innocuous-seeming bills to crack down on fake news in capitals around the world. The legislation “does little to protect fact-based news and in many cases creates significant opportunity for government control of the press.”

✰ Hollywood

Financial engineering: A planned deal between families Redstone and Ellison to merge Paramount and Skydance may be tough for shareholders to swallow on financial terms. But it would “align voting and economic control in a way that hasn’t been the case with the Redstone family,” which runs the company despite owning only about 10% of the equity, Alex Sherman notes. The combined company would include everything from CBS to the Paramount film studio lot to a content library including titles like Titanic and The Godfather.

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