Media

Our colleague Justin Smith announced Thursday onstage at the World Economy Summit that we’ll be doing a Fall Edition of the summit this year, designed to coincide with the IMF and World Bank meetings in October. It’ll focus on global finance at a complex moment, and will be the premier public-facing media platform for thousands of global economic and business leaders converging in Washington, D.C.

Highlights from last week’s summit include: New York Federal Reserve Bank chief John Williams on why there is no urgency to cut interest rates; Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg on the department’s internal audit of its oversight of Boeing; Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo on why the U.S. can’t unlink from China; U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt on Brexit consequences and fleas; and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Executive Director Brandon Wales on hacking threats from Beijing.

That’s just part of a wild lineup of interviews that also included the CEOs of Moderna and Intel, the Health and Human Services and Labor secretaries, top White House officials, and finance ministers from Germany and Nigeria. So you can see why we’re eager to do it again.

Axel Springer’s Trump years

The WELT-Wirtschaftsgipfel is a major moment in the German business calendar — and in particular for its host, the media giant Axel Springer. The gathering of political and economic power-players is held atop the company’s 19-story tower along the old Berlin Wall, which its founder built as a middle finger to the Communists to the east.

CEO Mathias Döpfner, who also controls nearly half of the multibillion-dollar company personally, hosts meetings in the summit’s inner sanctum, a floor below the main event space. There, in January 2019, he convened two of the leading figures of the new populist right: The nationalist Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, who had recently retaken his office, and Donald Trump’s ambassador to Germany, Ric Grenell.

Döpfner intended the meeting, two people familiar with it said, as an opportunity to introduce Kurz, a Springer-friendly politician, to a key figure in global finance, Henry Kravis, whose firm KKR would soon invest $3.2 billion in Axel Springer. Grenell, a familiar face in the building and possible future secretary of State, wasn’t an unusual addition, and the conversation was more social than practical. (Kravis, also a Semafor investor, no longer directs KKR’s day-to-day investments.)

But the meeting could only have taken place at Axel Springer, and it showcased how unusual the company had become: a global media giant on the make that was navigating the rise of the new global right to mutual benefit, even as its rivals have come under attack.

Certainly, there was no hostility at the 2019 conference. Upstairs, one Axel Springer executive raised the unlikely fantasy that Kurz, a smooth and handsome figure who had helped bring right-wing populism mainstream, could be chancellor of Germany. (An Axel Springer spokesman said it was a joke.) A star reporter at the Springer tabloid Bild, Paul Ronzheimer, had also written a sympathetic biography of Kurz.

Springer and Döpfner, a towering 61-year old, had built solid connections to a movement that often sought to wage war on establishment media. It’s a relationship that was little-noticed in the United States. But in 2024, it has new relevance, both as Springer deepens its American ambitions and as American media — gathering in Washington this week for the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner — eyes Trump’s possible return.

Eric Schultz is a former White House deputy press secretary and was an adviser on the recently released action film “Civil War,” written and directed by Alex Garland.

⁛ News

Blacklist: The Trump campaign is back to banning individual journalists it doesn’t like from events.

Intelligence: Forensic satellite research, once the province of intelligence agencies and then crowdsourced on social media, is increasingly being professionalized at big news organizations, producing a new kind of open, replicable investigative journalism: “Instead of reporting on a scientist’s research or claims made by an intelligence agency, reporters could now tell their own stories with this data,” Robert Simmon writes.

Dangerous criticism: Paste left the byline off a review panning Taylor Swift’s new album after, the magazine claimed, the last critic to risk such a thing got death threats.

Shaking up Japan: A “relatively niche” Communist newspaper called Red Flag has all the scoops in Japan these days, The Economist reports.

☊ Audio

The Juul Wars: Prologue Projects, the narrative audio company behind the popular show Fiasco, has a new business-focused podcast. On June 20, Audible will release Backfired, a podcast series focused on economies that arise accidentally. The first season focuses on the rise and fall of the vaping company Juul, while the second season will explore the rise of new ADHD treatments.

✦ Marketing

Election spending: A network of local news sites with close ties to the Democratic party are ramping up advertising spending to target progressive voters ahead of the 2024 election.

Iowa Starting Line is a part of Courier Newsroom, a network of Democratic-funded state-focused digital news sites that has received criticism from journalists for relying on “money from interested parties who seek a particular political outcome.” (Its founder’s critique of journalists who attempt to be nonpartisan recently triggered Ben on X.)

In recent weeks, the Iowa page has begun running paid Facebook ads boosting articles about state legislation that would alter the state’s education funding. The legislation was opposed by state Democrats and the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union. The articles do not disclose that the union is a major funder of Courier, having contributed half a million dollars to it since 2022.

The ads are part of a pattern. Semafor analyzed Courier’s spending on Facebook ads over the past several years. As election dates neared in November 2020 and 2022, the network boosted Facebook ads to its articles. Other spikes occurred around other major elections, including the Wisconsin state Supreme Court election in April 2023.

In an email, Courier said it spends money advertising itself “so that we can reach our audiences with factual local news relevant to their lives,” and that it has spent $4 million on boosting non-political content since last June.

“COURIER maintains an editorial firewall between our editorial teams and underwriters, ensuring they cannot influence, review, or approve any editorial content that is not explicitly labeled as sponsored content before publishing,” a spokesperson said.

In recent months, Courier has also bulked up its newsroom offerings, launching state-specific local sites and hiring a slate of experienced, left-leaning journalists and news personalities. As Semafor first reported in November, the organization has added national contributors, newsletters, and a video and podcast series — all aimed at pushing back against Republicans in key states. — Max Tani

Cannes fireworks: The deposed MediaLink co-founder Michael Kassan is already shopping for Cannes. He’s promised to stay in the business of “consulting, convening and co-investing.” That sounds like it would compete directly with his nemeses at UTA — and set the stage for some drama on the beach.

⁋ Publishing

G/O fire sale: A notable Democratic operative is also attempting to purchase older and better-known but troubled digital media outlets. Semafor has learned that Ross Morales Rocketto, the co-founder of the progressive campaign organization Run For Something, has inquired about purchasing some of the former Gawker Media publications from their current owner, G/O Media.

Rocketto recently announced that he would be stepping away from the political organization at the end of the year. In recent months, G/O has sold off several of its digital media brands, including Jezebel, the A/V Club, Deadspin, and Lifehacker.

Backstory: The mother of Hunter Biden’s young child has been quietly shopping a book about her relationship with the president’s son. In recent months, Lunden Roberts has met privately with a number of major publishers to discuss the publication of a memoir that would detail how she met Hunter and the public court fight over their child.

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