Media

1. Paramount hesitates
2. White House social stats
3. Slate staffs up
4. Vanity Fair’s EIC hunt
5. Margin Call
6. Psaki’s primetime pivot

Welcome to Semafor Media, where we… sorry… hope you’ll check out our podcast!

Max and I just finished our second season of Mixed Signals, and it’s true what they say about podcasts and TV shows alike: They take a little while to find their voice and focus.

Through some 40 conversations, we’ve found a clear through-line in the story of today’s media — an unsettled convergence. “New media” is flowing into traditional spaces from ESPN’s air to the White House briefing room, while “old media” figures like Piers Morgan have reemerged as dominant digital players.

In the last several weeks, we’ve spoken to people straddling that line, like Morgan, Ezra Klein, and Jen Psaki, and two of the entrepreneurs on the edge of the new media business. Red Seat’s Chris Balfe built a new kind of media company serving stars, and sold it to Fox. Jubilee’s Jason Y. Lee was among the first to realize that in a world of podcasts, innovating with new formats was a lost art. Journalists and marketers, techies and entrepreneurs are all trying to figure out the same big questions, from the shape of new bundles to the role of AI.

We’ll be exploring those issues more here and on Mixed Signals, and we’d love your suggestions for stories and guests — and, of course, your theories on what’s next. You can reply to this email or email me at ben.smith@semafor.com.

Also today: Paramount’s precautions, the White House’s social media stats, and The Sun’s new US whisperer. (Scoop count: 5)

And what else is next? Reed Albergotti’s biweekly Semafor Tech briefing offers a deeply knowledgeable look into our AI future.

Paramount delays ‘Daily Show’ political initiative

Executives at Paramount — the media giant whose news arm, CBS, has been the target of lawsuits by the Trump administration, as the rest of the company pursues a merger — held off on launching a Daily Show-branded civic engagement initiative to get viewers to run for office, Semafor’s Max Tani scoops.

Paramount had partnered with the veterans group New Politics Leadership Academy, the progressive group Run For Something, and the right-leaning group Women’s Public Leadership Network on the initiative, which had been in the works for months and was set to launch last week. But at the last minute, executives halted the idea.

The company declined to comment. A person familiar with the plans said the initiative hasn’t entirely been scrapped; when it goes live later this month, it will have a different, nonpartisan political nonprofit as a partner. But the episode shows how cautious Paramount is willing to be to get its deal with Skydance through President Donald Trump’s FCC.

Trump’s social strategy, by the numbers

The Trump administration is continuing its campaign strategy of trying to focus on new media: In the first 100 days, the administration told Semafor, its White House account on X (the social media platform conveniently owned by President Donald Trump’s top special government employee) saw more than 2 billion impressions. Add that data to the 40 affiliate accounts and the number grows to 6 billion impressions. On Facebook, Trump’s White House says it had a net gain of 2 million new followers in the first 100 days and reached 86.2 million accounts. Trump’s social media team is also focusing on Instagram (804 million views since taking office, they said) and YouTube, where they saw 366,400 new subscribers added and 35 million views added up on White House videos. Trump officials see these platforms now much like they did on the campaign trail: as key to bypassing traditional media and reaching new, oftentimes younger audiences.

— Shelby Talcott

Slate staffs up

Slate is bringing on a new executive producer of podcasts. Mia Lobel, the former VP of content and production at Pushkin Industries, is joining the digital magazine-turned-podcasting company on June 2, to better merge Slate’s text and audio teams.

“Mia has a strong history of supporting meaningful editorial work, helping teams grow, and navigating the shifting audio landscape — she’ll be a key part of our efforts to expand our slate of podcasts in exciting and creative ways,” Editor-in-Chief Hillary Frey said.

While it launched in the late 1990s as an online magazine, Slate’s early investment in audio has allowed the media organization to outlast many of its digital peers. In an interview with Semafor in 2024, Slate did not disclose its concrete financials, but told Semafor that 2023 had been the most profitable year in its history.

Global press freedom has reached a new low, according to the 2025 World Press Freedom Index from Reporters Without Borders (RSF), with conditions for journalism now considered “bad” in half of the world’s countries. Less than 0.7% of the world’s population lives in a country where press freedom is fully guaranteed. Explore this and other findings from the 2025 World Press Freedom Index here.

Vanity Fair’s EIC-stakes

Ankler CEO Janice Min has long been seen as a likely pick to run Vanity Fair. But she told me in an interview at The Newsletter Conference last week that she still doesn’t want the job, which appears to be heavy on every editor’s least favorite corporate acronym: KPIs. Instead, she had another name to recommend: “Tina Brown should come back and do it for two years and resurrect that thing,” she said. “Amazing advertisers would come out of the woodwork. It could be fun.” I texted Brown, who revived and shaped the magazine from 1984 to 1992, but she demurred: “Oh please! I don’t want to be the VF Bob Iger. Never go back!”

— Ben

The story of ‘Margin Call’

We tracked down the writer and director of Margin Call, the favorite film of a certain breed of Wall Streeter — just young enough not to have had their careers tarnished by 2008, but still feel like they missed out on a great war. (Nos. 2 and 3 on that list are Michael Clayton, which stars George Clooney as a corporate fixer, and, for reasons passing understanding, Master and Commander, Russell Crowe’s Napoleonic-era high seas drama.) “It’s a ticking-time-bomb movie, but about 25 minutes into the movie, the fact is laid out for everyone to know that there is no way to defuse the bomb,” JC Chandor says of the plot, which follows a Wall Street firm through a single climactic day of the 2008 financial crisis, beginning with an analyst’s realization that they are catastrophically exposed to mortgage-backed securities. “That’s the only question of the movie: ‘Do we jump on it ourselves? … Or do we f*cking save ourselves and throw this thing out the window into the town?’

Mixed Signals

Jen Psaki has gone from being a behind-the-scenes political staffer, to running the White House briefing room under Biden, to now hosting a primetime show on MSNBC. This week, Ben and Max bring on the former press secretary to talk about what it means to be a cable news host in 2025, how podcasts are changing how TV works, and why she went from being a spokesperson to a primetime anchor. They also ask her what she thinks of the current administration’s press tactics, how she reflects on the 2024 race, and what she makes of the idea that there was a cover-up of Joe Biden’s condition.

Listen to the latest episode of Mixed Signals now.

Harry Cole has been appointed editor-at-large for The Sun. Based in the United States, he’ll have a new online evening politics show, write a monthly column for the New York Post, and appear on Fox News.

☊ Audio

• After Trump’s election, Semafor reported that leaders in public media were worried Republicans could make good on their threats. Last week, Trump made it official, signing an executive order directing federal agencies to cut off their funding to NPR and PBS. During an interview on Face The Nation on Sunday, NPR CEO Katherine Maher said the organization was exploring its legal options in response to the executive order, but if federal funding is cut, local NPR stations could suffer. “The impact of this could really be devastating, particularly in rural communities,” she said.

⁌ TV

• MSNBC has been promoting its new weekend lineup and flagship news show, which launched on Saturday. But in a surprising move, one of the co-hosts, Jackie Alemany, announced during the show’s first weekend that she would be stepping back for the next several months to return to maternity leave.

⁋ Publishing

• New York Magazine is one of the few publications still trying to engage both Boomers and Gen X audiences. The outlet noted to Semafor that this week’s upcoming issue features both a cover story by up-and-coming Zoomer journalist Brock Colyar on West Village Girls taking over the neighborhood and social feeds, and a revealing essay from longtime Chelsea regular Barry Diller on his sexuality and marriage to Diane von Fürstenberg.

Snowflake found success by allowing its clients to scale up their computing power without buying more data storage. But by February last year, its shares had fallen below their 2020 price, as it became clear that artificial intelligence was ushering in a period of disruptive technological change.

Rethinking the company’s product was the top priority for newly installed CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy, as Semafor’s Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson writes. But just as important was figuring out Snowflake’s future: “How do we take new products to market in a company that has been enormously successful with an old product?”