Media

The Nobel laureate Maria Ressa dropped by Semafor for an interview with our colleague Gina Chua last week and crystallized a difficult question at the intersection of AI and the news: “Every time you personalize, you tear apart the public sphere.”

The Intercept is running out of cash

THE SCOOP

The Intercept, the left-wing U.S. newsroom that’s been a thorn in Joe Biden’s side and a hub for pro-Palestinian coverage, is nearly out of money and facing its own bitter civil war, with multiple feuding factions battling for power and two star journalists trying to take control.

At the heart of the crisis is a nonprofit whose founding donor, Pierre Omidyar, decided in late 2022 to end his support for the organization. Now spun off from Omidyar’s First Look Media, The Intercept is losing roughly $300,000 a month, is on track to have a balance of less than a million dollars by November — and could be completely out of cash by May 2025, according to data shared internally in March.

The Intercept’s CEO, Annie Chabel, told Semafor in an interview this week that those projections were a worst-case scenario, and that the Intercept had a “stretch revenue goal that would allow us to continue into a longer horizon.”

The Intercept was born a decade ago in a very different moment for media and politics. Two of its founders, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, broke the story of Edward Snowden’s leaked surveillance files in 2013, which reshaped how Americans thought about the government and their privacy. Omidyar, a leftish billionaire with no known appetite for political combat, rapidly pledged deep support for an organization that would combine that anti-establishment mission with a combative form of online journalism born out of Gawker Media.

Bozorgmehr Sharafedin is head of digital at Iran International and a former Iran correspondent for Reuters.

Jina Moore Ngarambe is a veteran global journalist who resigned as volunteer editor-in-chief of Guernica after contributors revolted over an essay by Israeli writer Joanna Chen. She spoke to Ben in her first interview since then.

Ben: The thing I’m thinking about a lot in this context is how left institutions in the U.S. are just burning themselves to the ground. As someone who just went through this firestorm, what do you make of that?

Jina: There does seem to be a kind of hardening, a flattening of nuance or complexity, or even of history. I suppose one of the things that institutions are having to think our way through now is, how do we function in a space that is increasingly governed by competing orthodoxies? That’s probably hardest to figure out in a space like independent publishing, where multiplicity is usually part of the value proposition.

⁛ News

Mehdi staffs up: Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo is launching this week with a slate of high-profile left and center-left contributors and a flagship interview show hosted by the former MSNBC anchor.

On Monday, Zeteo will release the first episode of Mehdi Unfiltered, featuring interviews with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and former Trump White House official Anthony Scaramucci. The new publication will announce that it has brought on Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, activist and actor Cynthia Nixon, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen as regular writers and contributors. Hasan has also enlisted a number of journalists who will also contribute work to the publication, including Spencer Ackerman, Naomi Klein, and former CNN personality John Harwood, who will write a weekly newsletter.

In a phone call over the weekend, the former MSNBC host told Semafor that the publication has already tallied up 150,000 free subscribers before, which he said was one of the largest pre-launch signups for publications on Substack. “I’m glad we have both the resources, but also the support,” he said. — Max Tani

Fresh Lemon: The veteran cable executive Jonathan Wald is now the executive producer of The Don Lemon Show, which would have been a scoop had Wald not put it on his LinkedIn. (Contacted via text, he was skeptical that it was big news.) The show is being produced by EverWonder Studio — a property of Jeff Zucker’s Redbird IMI.

NYT pushback: The New York Times sent The Intercept and its legal team an email requesting a correction and apology over a fundraising email.

The Intercept described to its would-be donors a “stunning admission about how little the paper values Palestinian lives” on The Daily. But in its email to The Intercept, the Times pointed out that the discussion — between Daily host Michael Barbaro and Jerusalem correspondent Adam Rasgon — had been mischaracterized, and that the Times reporters’ comments were in fact sympathetic to the Palestinian point of view.

Israel’s quick apology for killing World Central Kitchen workers “has to do with the people who were killed, most of whom were Western foreign aid workers,” Rasgon said. “Frankly, I don’t think we would be having this conversation if a group of Palestinian aid workers had been killed.”

“Nor, perhaps, would we be having the reaction that we have had so far from the Israeli government,” Barbaro replied.

✦ Marketing

E2E: Accenture Song’s acquisition of the British customer engagement agency Unlimited points to a major trend in marketing, as the big agencies try to turn themselves into “end-to-end” platforms that can manage everything from creative strategy to direct relationships with customers.

⁜ Tech

AI voices: The radio company Audacy says it’s working with Eleven Labs to build “a robust library of voices for Audacy to deliver custom experiences for listeners and advertising clients.”

☊ Audio

Pitching and catching: A Shark Tank-style investment podcast is gaining popularity with investors. In 2022, hosts Josh and Lisa Muccio purchased their investment podcast The Pitch back from Spotify-owned Gimlet Media. Each season, the show assembles a panel of investors who hear pitches from entrepreneurs selling new apps, services, and products.

In a phone call with Semafor this week, the hosts said that the decision to go independent allowed them more freedom and flexibility, and was already paying off for investors. They said that investors who appeared on the show committed $2.4 million to companies this season, more than many previous seasons, with more than 90% of the investments going to founders from underrepresented communities. The hosts also told Semafor that although they were disappointed by the collapse of Gimlet, their departure allowed them to pursue a concept that Spotify had blocked. The show set up its own pitch fund, which offered listeners the opportunity to invest in companies featured on the show. In less than a year, it had raised $1.2 million from its audience.

“On season 11, it’s deal after deal after deal,” Josh Muccio said. “They’re real deals and they’re actually raising money. We’ve been doing this for eight years. We’ve never had a founder raise $1.4 million in the room.” — Max Tani

⁋ Publishing

Beastly: Barry Diller has been trying to unload The Daily Beast for many years — and may have found people willing to run it, in Ben Sherwood and Joanna Coles, Dylan Byers reports. Former editor-in-chief Noah Shachtman tells us, “I continue to believe that, pound for pound, [the Beast] is the best news operation on the internet.”

✰ Hollywood

Big hair: “I find a lot of my character through hair,” actor Michael Douglas tells Matthew Garrahan in a delightful Lunch with the FT piece.

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