Media

Food critic Pete Wells looks back at his Times tenure

Food and food media are often ground zero for the forces that shape the future of media, and Pete Wells spent 12 years as New York Times food critic navigating those forces, from his 2012 confrontation with reality TV celebrity chefs in the form of Guy Fieri to keeping his seat at the table as influencers have begun to displace critics. He talked to Ben and Nayeema about all that, and about whether the Times’ ultimate gatekeeper also has a role in opening the gates.

Catch up with the latest episode of Mixed Signals.

New York Times’ tech staff threatens strike

Leaders at The New York Times are concerned that protracted contract negotiations with the paper’s unionized tech employees could disrupt its election coverage.

The Times Tech Guild — a union of 600 members, largely software engineers, which operates separately from the newsroom union — voted overwhelmingly to authorize a potential strike, Axios reported earlier this week, dangling the possibility that workers could walk off the job during the election in November.

The threat has rattled the paper’s management, including some leaders in the newsroom, which relies heavily on tech. The paper receives peak volumes of traffic around the elections, including on specialty products such as its election needle.

And the threat of a strike on Election Day appears serious: In an internal Guild meeting last month, some Times Tech Guild employees defended the move by saying there are numerous other news sources that people could use around the election if the Times faced serious bugs mid-strike.

“NYT has credible competitors, so it’s not a matter of whether news from trustworthy sources is going to be available,” one staffer said, according to a source familiar with the details of the meeting.

Recent negotiations between different employee unions within the Times have at times been acrimonious and public. Times journalists walked off the job for a day in 2022, while Wirecutter staff staged a five-day strike during the Black Friday shopping season in 2021. But multiple people familiar with the bargaining process told Semafor that negotiations between the Tech Guild and the Times have been particularly contentious as the Guild advocates for a more favorable contract. Both sides have accused the other of engaging in a lengthy negotiation process that has stretched over two years.

TikTok liked Harris’ debate performance

A top social analytics firm, Zelf, found TikTok users were speaking more positively about Vice President Kamala Harris in the days after this month’s presidential debate.

In data first shared with Semafor, the firm, which looked at 30,124 videos on TikTok between Sept. 7 and Sept. 13, found that net positive sentiment about Harris increased from 34% to 54% in the days after the debate. Zelf also found that while Donald Trump continues to be mentioned negatively at much higher rates on the platform, positive mentions of the former president still jumped 7%.

The analysis found that mentions of Harris’ fitness to serve as president were higher than Trump’s, and Trump videos on TikTok generated more negative sentiment than Harris across issues including women’s rights, foreign policy, and immigration. According to Zelf, a large number of posts also mocked his perpetuation of the unproven claim that migrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating pets.

“Kamala Harris clearly won the popular vote on TikTok after her performance at the presidential debate against Donald Trump,” CEO and co-founder Pepijn van Kesteren said in a statement. “TikTok is a hotly contested electoral battleground and users are seriously engaged. With over 170 million Americans using the platform — 40% of whom turn to it as their main source of news — this is the TikTok presidential election.”

Who will get the rights to #FreeEvan?

There’s a bidding war going on behind-the-scenes for the rights to Evan Gershkovich’s life story. The Wall Street Journal is repped by the talent agency CAA, which as Deadline reported last month has been receiving significant inquiries from Hollywood players to turn the incredible story of efforts to get Gershkovich home into a movie or television series.

Gershkovich himself hasn’t signed with any agent yet, but Semafor has learned he has been receiving overtures from literary talent agencies, including Wiley and Janklow & Nesbit, to publish his own account of his time in Russian captivity.

The Gulf prefers Trump — but can’t afford him

We hope you’ll join us in the launch of Semafor Gulf tomorrow, a new, thrice-weekly look at one of the world’s most dramatic stories of contemporary finance, power, and change.

In the first edition — live tomorrow morning — Al Arabiya’s chief international anchor, Hadley Gamble, delivers her first column on the geopolitics of the Gulf, and makes the surprising argument that while Gulf monarchies largely prefer Donald Trump in the US election, they also realize they can’t afford him. The former president is tough on Iran, but his promises to produce yet more American oil could upset the region’s delicate balance by lowering the oil prices that have fueled its economic transformation. The “Harris-Trump spread” is crucial to understanding this complex moment.

Join thousands of industry leaders who get Semafor Gulf in their inbox.Sign up here.

Jessica Tarlov is a co-host of “The Five” on Fox News, and this week announced a new show, ”Raging Moderates.” She’ll be co-hosting with prolific podcaster Scott Galloway, who’s also tech journalist Kara Swisher’s partner on Swisher’s show, “Pivot.”

⁋ Publishing

Mag on mag violence: The new Harper’s cover, featuring antitrust strategist Barry Lynn’s essay on big tech, adds a villain to the usual cast of tech characters. There, impaled by a sword, are Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon and … The Atlantic.

Telegraph latest: Semafor scooped a previously unknown bidder for the Tory paper, which RedBird IMI has been forced to unload: a group led by Dovid Efune, publisher of the New York Sun. The others are right-wing hedge fund mogul Paul Marshall and regional publisher David Montgomery.

And if you haven’t read former Spectator chairman Andrew Neil’s parting blast, it’s a doozy: “We managed to stop the takeover by know-nothing Americans bankrolled by Arab potentates with their own agenda,” he wrote, before expressing his doubts that the buyer, Marshall, would guarantee the magazine’s independence. “RedBird didn’t care about who they sold us to and had no interest in demanding editorial safeguards. They just wanted to get shot of us for the highest price.”

Media mogul: Axel Springer boss Mathias Döpfner is closing in on a split with his big investor, KKR, that would hand off the company’s tech assets and leave him with the fun part, media, the FT reports.

⁛ News

Job posting: The Washington Post is ramping up its search for a new executive editor. Earlier this year, CEO Will Lewis abruptly parted ways with executive editor Sally Buzbee, installing former Wall Street Journal top editor Matt Murray as the paper’s interim executive editor through the election while the paper launched a search for a new leader. Several internal candidates, including Murray and Post managing editor Matea Gold, have been in touch with the paper about potentially pursuing the role.

The next editor will face some significant challenges, including reversing declines in subscriptions, working with Lewis to keep costs low, and improving newsroom morale, which has ebbed in recent years amid layoffs and turbulence. The new top editor will also have to contend with owner Jeff Bezos, who I’m told has been more engaged with the paper in recent months.

Still, there have been some small improvements lately. In an email to staff on Friday obtained by Semafor, Lewis said last week was the paper’s highest-trafficked of the year. The paper also said it was seeing positive signs from its recently launched flexible payments program.

In a statement on Sunday, a Washington Post spokesperson said that the paper has “a formal process underway and have appointed a headhunting firm. There is strong interest coming in from a range of high quality internal and external candidates.”

It gets worse: Hong Kong journalists have faced a wave of harassment from self-styled “patriots.” The campaign, which includes sharing false and defamatory content and death threats, “damages press freedom in Hong Kong and we should not tolerate it,” says Hong Kong Journalists Association chair Selina Cheng, herself pushed out at The Wall Street Journal after a tussle over her role defending journalism in the Chinese special administrative region. “HKJA and I believe all journalists in Hong Kong welcome criticism and debate. This is not it.”

Cook to WSJ: The Wall Street Journal is bringing on John Cook as its new deputy investigations editor, Semafor has learned. As we previously reported, Cook recently left his job leading Business Insider’s investigative team, which published numerous scoops during his tenure — including plagiarism allegations against Neri Oxman, the wife of billionaire businessman Bill Ackman. The hiring signals Journal editor-in-chief Emma Tucker’s dedication to aggressively pursuing tough and at times controversial stories. Cook also famously helped edit Gawker’s reporting on Hulk Hogan. The Wall Street Journal did not return a request for comment. — Max Tani

New media: Jessica Testa has joined The New York Times’ media desk. When we worked together at BuzzFeed News, she wrote one of the best things we ever published and one of the best pieces of media writing of the decade: a deeply reported reflection on a televised car chase that ended in tragedy. — Ben

✰ Hollywood

Live Ones: Netflix is in talks with BuzzFeed to stream Hot Ones, an incredible franchise that — like virtually all media ventures on YouTube — has never quite been the blockbuster business it should obviously be.

✦ Marketing

A bargain at that price: For a mere $500,000, the creators of Emily in Paris will write your brand into the show’s storyline, The Ankler’s Claire Atkinson reports, as Netflix uses the series to pioneer new forms of advertising and brand integration.

Apple intelligence: There’s an argument that Apple’s focus on privacy positions it to win the AI contest with consumers. A new series of intimate, family-focused spots featuring the actor Bella Ramsey drive that point home.

Go n-éirí leat: Tourism Ireland is trying to reclaim … Halloween.

⁜ Tech

Last canary in the coal mine: My own metric for whether journalists would really leave X has been the writer Tom Gara, a capable global journalist (now working for a rival tech firm) who has long been an absolute virtuoso of the medium.

“Always thought I’d be a Twitter lifer, never bought into the various Elon-era waves of people leaving. But I think I’m done here. The ambient level of vile, repulsive stuff has reached a point where I think it’s probably bad for me, even if I try to deny it,” he wrote last week. “The Haitian stuff was my last straw. The absolute scum of the earth are thriving here pushing the darkest and ugliest shit humans are capable of. I want nothing to do with it.” — Ben

Travels with Max: Sophisticated travelers are increasingly trying to avoid overrun tourist traps and bad recommendations from paid TikTok and Instagram travel influencers by relying on shared private Google docs and maps. (Ask Max about Norway.)

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