Media

1. PR needs AI
2. OutKick on Mixed Signals
3. White House’s influencer dilemma
4. Dems’ media allies
5. Raving in Riyadh
6. The new 538?

When India and Pakistan slid into conflict last week, it was frankly hard to tell what was going on. Propaganda and censorship limited each country’s press, which had trouble accessing the remote areas where some of the bombs and aircraft fell.

If you were trying to follow on social media, you were soon lost in a “howling wilderness of jingoism, propaganda, misinformation, and unverifiable claims while some terrifyingly real things are clearly happening,” a former top editor of Hindustan Times lamented. “There is so much fog of war now,” an analyst told The Washington Post. “The full picture may never really emerge.”

And so we may have reached the end of a long and uneven march toward transparency in global crises. It began with early war correspondence, accelerating through TV in Vietnam and, later, through social media, from the Arab Spring to Ukraine. That trend stopped in Gaza, where the Israeli government’s limits on outside journalists have let Washington spend its time debating what is actually happening. This shift stems from the full embrace by national governments and their supporters of the idea of “information warfare.”

As one big Indian account posted Thursday: “Perception is the battlefield. If the news damages Pakistan — true or false — amplify it. Post it. Share it. Make it viral. Let panic spread across the border. If the news harms India — even if true — bury it. Suppress it. Disarm it before it spreads. This is not journalism. This is war.”

Also today: AI revives PR, and perhaps journalism; White House influencers bore the conservative press; Ezra Klein briefs the Democrats; a new outlet focuses on data; and Eminem considers Riyadh. (Scoop count: 5)

Chatbots need humans, reportedly

The best way to get your client’s message into the output of ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and the rest is by talking to journalists. PR firms are finding that stories by authoritative publications are shaping the results of chatbot queries about companies far more powerfully than a social media campaign could, Ben reports today.

“Earned media still matters, but not the way people think,” said Carreen Winters, who leads the reputation practice at MikeWorldWide, using the trade term for independent reporting.

Consumers, according to Winters, say, “I’m not going to trust earned media — I’m going to trust the internet.” But these LLMs’ sources lead back to journalism, something she said can sometimes be a hard sell to executives who thought they no longer had to deal with pesky reporters. “Sometimes it’s a small trade publication that your client has said, ‘Nobody reads that anymore,’” she said. “Sometimes it’s a hometown newspaper.”

Dealing with LLMs is “more like traditional PR than it is like SEO,” says Message Lab founder Ben Worthen.

Mixed Signals

Clay Travis started his career with a stunt on his blog involving a pudding strike and NFL streaming rights. From roots in new media, he founded OutKick, a conservative sports and politics site that Fox Corp acquired in 2021. This week, Ben and Max bring on the outspoken media entrepreneur to discuss how sports and conservative politics have become intertwined, how gambling and sports media have become intertwined, and how to attract an audience of men. They also ask about his current role as a Fox News personality and his 11 interviews with Donald Trump. Plus, he and Max duke it out over the NBA’s ratings.

Listen to the latest episode of Mixed Signals now.

How the White House influencer experiment failed

The situation in the White House press room is, in some ways, emblematic of this moment in President Donald Trump’s second term: Trolling and lib-owning got Trump allies this far, but they’re running out of steam. The White House, working from the (accurate) view that the White House Correspondents Association had fallen far behind the times, jammed open the press room to sympathetic influencers who had the immediately satisfying outcome of annoying traditional journalists. A few months in, though, the sycophantic and irrelevant questions have become a bit embarrassing even to the most conservative journalists, and Geoffrey Ingersoll finally writes in the Spectator what many have been saying behind the scenes: that this has gotten fatally boring. “Karoline Leavitt, for the love of your movement, stop bringing podcasters and influencers into the White House briefings,” he writes. “Compliments don’t go viral. Glazings don’t draw eyeballs. Conflict does. If Trump knows anything, it’s what draws the best ratings. This ain’t it.”

Democrats look for second opinions

Reeling from President Donald Trump’s victory in November, Democrats have continued to turn to liberal and progressive commentators for answers. The New York Times podcaster Ezra Klein became the latest high-profile example when he briefed Democratic senators at their annual retreat last week, but it’s a broader trend, Max reports: At a donor retreat earlier this year hosted by the Democratic group American Bridge, media figures like MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough, the Substack author Matt Yglesias, and Bulwark stars Tim Miller and BIll Kristol spoke and hosted panels. Democrats are searching for a way to detoxify their brand with moderates and independents, Max writes, as they try to find a way back to power in Washington.

Raves in Riyadh

Semafor is delighted that Camilla Wright, the founder of the legendary and uncategorizable UK newsletter Popbitch, has been writing an occasional column for us from the Gulf. Her latest is a dispatch from a rave in the Saudi desert where 110,000 people gathered at midnight to hear Eminem declare, “My name is Salim Shadi, and you’ve all made me so at home I’m going to buy a house and move to motherf*ckin’ Riyadh!′

Where did this come from? “MDLBeast, the burgeoning Saudi music and creative conglomerate, started up in 2019 aiming to revolutionize the public entertainment space in the kingdom. Finding a way to enable youth culture to pivot what was happening privately (or outside the country) into the public sphere was going to be a long and not always easy process. But surely no-one back then imagined within five years they’d get Eminem saying that. Or that 100,000 young Saudis, most of whom hadn’t even been born when he made his debut, would be reciting the lyrics from his early hits along with him, word for word. Or that some of these youths would be dressed as if backstage at London Fashion Week; boys in full-length fur coats and fedoras stood shoulder-to-shoulder with girls in skintight catsuits.”

Western eye-rolling about Saudi cultural ambitions has been replaced by something like wonder: “How has the situation moved so fast? Perhaps there’s a lesson for other parts of the Saudi modernization drive. It’s not just about big deals, big names, and big money: Soundstorm’s acceptance needed a bottom-up, local, organically grown culture to break through.” And: “Despite the success of festivals, the kingdom’s club culture faces hurdles — from a ban on alcohol, which puts a natural ceiling on the number of fans willing to come rave in the desert, to navigating mixed-gender spaces in a traditionally conservative society.”

Former 538 chief’s new data news site

G. Elliott Morris — the data journalist who took over 538 in 2023 before it was shuttered by its parent company, ABC — is launching Strength In Numbers, a paid Substack that he plans on growing into a publication to rival his old website. The site, which has been operating for free for the past several months while Morris’ agreement with ABC runs out, will have daily items about national politics grounded in data without punditry. Part of the point, he said, is to offer a corrective to the failures of ABC and other legacy outlets, which in his view have not covered threats to democracy honestly. “We’re going to be really nerdy about the news and talk to you like people, not treat you like idiots, and not try to obscure the story,” he told Max.

Strength In Numbers will start doing some of its own surveys, and is launching a monthly online poll with a partner on Tuesday. Morris hopes to generate enough revenue from paid subscriptions to scale up and hire more staff within the next several months.

An article in this space was published prematurely.

An article in this space was published prematurely.

The Airwaves We’re Losing: Before the internet, shortwave radio connected — and divided — the world. On the Media’s Peabody Award-winning The Divided Dial is back with four new episodes exposing how extremists, cults, and Wall Street predators are battling for control of these public airwaves today. Listen to the series.

Michael Graff is the founder of The Charlotte Optimist, a new nonprofit local media outlet.

⁛ News

• The New York Times laid off a small percentage of its product development team, Semafor reported earlier this week. In a statement, the Times said the cuts only impacted a small number of roles, but “we have to be disciplined in our approach to growth.”
• An oral history of HuffPost’s giant front page.
• New York’s public campaign financing system means politicians have far more distribution than journalists, Norman Oder writes. Meanwhile, the mayor is the biggest media game in town, using a vast public email list and other distribution to push his reelection, Liena Zagare (the better half of half of this newsletter) points out in The Bigger Apple.

☊ Audio

• OK, here’s a well-named show: Broadcaster and correspondent Christiane Amanpour and her former husband, the diplomat Jamie Rubin, have launched The Ex Files to unpack our global crises.
• Musicians are furious at Soundcloud for updating its terms of service in a way that would potentially allow previously uploaded work to be used to train AI.

✰ Hollywood

• Viewership and ad dollars are leaving late night talk shows behind at the same time that video podcasts that look a lot like old late night shows are growing rapidly. Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos hinted that Netflix is looking to get into the video podcast game eventually, at the same time as it tries its hand at its own throwback-inspired version of an actual late night show.

⁋ Publishing

• Penske Media is branching out just a bit beyond the trades: One of its real estate properties, Torch Cay — which boasts the “only airport on a private island worldwide where you can land an ultra-long-range or heavy private jet” — is hiring for a sous chef.

Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley is on a mission to convince Republicans they need to destroy the popular perception that they’re inordinately focused on wealthy people and big business. And he’s starting with the GOP tax bill: “I would try to make it the biggest tax cut for working families in American history,” Hawley told Semafor’s Burgess Everett on Thursday. That’s on top of his vow to fight cuts to Medicaid, a red line that’s already causing huge tension within the GOP. But he has a powerful ally in President Donald Trump, who talks to him regularly.