Media

PR agents scramble to work with ‘newsfluencers’

Corporate executives and other public figures emerged from this month’s election with a new task for their handlers: urgently figure out how to make them more like the loose, podcast-friendly Donald Trump, and less like the scripted and corporate Kamala Harris.

Executives used to seeking out slots on CNBC branched out to Fox News and Fox Business after 2016, in hopes of reaching the new president to make the case for favorable policies — leaving the influencer economy to marketing departments selling goods to consumers.

Now, the influence-makers are scrambling after their marketing colleagues into the space, seeking to figure out which business-friendly podcasts, eclectic YouTubers, or right-leaning online comic chat show hosts could provide a venue for getting their message out.

“There are a lot of companies coming to us and saying, ‘OK, in addition to your classic WSJ, Bloomberg, what are the other ways we can reach the audience we want to reach and influence?’” said Nikhil Deogun, CEO of the Americas for Brunswick Group, a critical issues advisory firm. “The election drove that home for a lot of people.”

Collins’ star rises

CNN’s leadership says it doesn’t want to go back to its wall-to-wall 24-hour coverage of Donald Trump when he returns to the White House in January. But the network is considering shifting its lineup in a way that would lean into the spectacle of the president-elect’s new administration.

CNN is considering making network anchor Kaitlan Collins its chief White House correspondent, two people familiar with the discussions said. As part of the change, Collins and her show would relocate, at least part of the time, to Washington, D.C. from New York.

The move, which has not been finalized and is currently still being discussed by the network’s leadership, is intended to better tap into Collins’ network of sourcing within Trump’s White House, which she covered both at CNN and as a White House reporter for the conservative news site the Daily Caller during the president’s first administration.

Thompson’s passion project

CNN chief Mark Thompson has a lot on his plate these days, overseeing editorial for the 24-hour news network and trying to figure out how CNN can survive the cord-cutting apocalypse that is threatening to end cable television over the next several years. But that hasn’t kept him from exploring his creative side. A literary agent representing Thompson has been shopping around some literary short fiction the CNN boss has been writing in his spare time, pitching publications including The Atlantic.

He wouldn’t be the first network boss in recent memory to moonlight as a fiction writer: Former NBC News chief Noah Oppenheim wrote the movie Jackie while running the Today show and left the news business to pursue a TV writing career.

What do David Zaslav, Maureen Dowd, and Bowen Yang have in common? They subscribe to The Ankler – hailed by The New York Times as “Hollywood’s hit newsletter.” Janice Min, Richard Rushfield, and company deliver smart, razor-sharp reporting, offering an insider’s view into what’s happening behind closed sets. Check it out here.

Jodie Ginsberg is the chief executive officer of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which held its annual International Press Freedom Awards gala last week.

✦ Marketing

Tale of two car ads: Jaguar got a lot of attention last week for a head-scratching rebrand that read as a caricature of gender politics. Sir Martin Sorrell texted Semafor to say it was “brave,” declining to say whether that was a compliment. But good marketing is, among other things, surprising, and the surprise hit was a long, cinematic, emotional — but also vertical — Volvo spot.

Twitch ‘adpocalypse’: The streaming platform Twitch is fighting its own wars over politics and other dicey content, as streamers complain their ad money is drying up.

⁛ News

Lopez out: The veteran Business Insider finance editor Linette Lopez has left the news site, where she’d been a defining voice for more than a decade, after managers were alerted to comments critical of Donald Trump on her Instagram earlier this month, Semafor has learned. The tech and business columnist’s posts violated the company’s social media rules dictating the types of political speech its employees are permitted to make.

Lopez was one of the publication’s longest-tenured editorial employees, having joined BI in its early blogging days in 2011. Business Insider and Lopez did not respond to a request for comment.

Buying the Telegraph: The FT has the scoop on a big new investor in Dovid Efune’s Telegraph deal: Sir Mohamed Mansour, a British Conservative Party figure whose Mansour Group includes a massive Caterpillar dealership, Mantrac, based in Dubai. We’re told the Koch-backed philanthropy group Stand Together (also an investor in Semafor), meanwhile, has passed on the deal.

⁜ Tech

Carr’s commands: Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission, top GOP commissioner Brendan Carr, is preparing to test the limits of the agency’s power to reshape the media landscape in the US.

Following Trump’s election, Carr sent letters to Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft saying they would be receiving scrutiny as part of the FCC’s “broad ranging actions to restore the First Amendment rights that the Constitution grants to all Americans.” He also told the Washington Post that the broadcast licenses issued by the FCC to TV and radio networks are not “sacred cows.”

☊ Audio

Ranked: Apple released its most popular podcasts list this week, showing the continued dominance of daily news summary programs (led by The New York Times’ The Daily), men-fronted chat shows (led by Joe Rogan, the SmartLess crew, and the Kelce brothers), and true crime.

✰ Hollywood

New faces: The Hollywood Reporter is getting a new editor. On Tuesday, Semafor broke the news that the entertainment trade publication was bringing in Shirley Halperin to replace co-EIC Nekesa Mumbi Moody.

The move is a partial homecoming for the former Variety executive editor, who worked at the magazine almost 15 years ago, as well as its sister music publication, Billboard. But it is also the continuation of an unusual leadership arrangement that started last year, when owner Jay Penske brought former Los Angeles Magazine editor Maer Roshan in to serve as editor-in-chief alongside Moody.

Halperin’s move also raised some eyebrows internally. Halperin is largely seen as a music journalist, and some insiders privately questioned whether an editor with that background should serve as the editor of a primarily film and television-focused publication.

An incoming president’s first 100 days are typically a time for fast movement on big bills, but Donald Trump might be in for a rougher experience next year, Semafor’s Kadia Goba reported.

That’s in part because of Republicans’ slim hold on the House, but the GOP may also face the troublesome task of funding the government for the rest of the fiscal year and raising the debt limit.