1. Griffin’s story
2. Rest of World’s fate
3. Skydance’s partner
4. No new press sec
5. Influencer power
6. 2WAY doubleheader

A few months after he was pushed out as executive producer of 60 Minutes, Bill Owens first watched Johnny Harris’ YouTube channel, where the former Vox star makes gorgeously produced documentaries on subjects from China’s industrial sector to the Iran war. Owens “basically cold-called” Harris, he recalled to me. Now he’s going to work as the executive producer of Newpress, Harris and his wife Iz Harris’ ambitious video news startup that just raised $12 million (and which we recently discussed with Johnny Harris on Mixed Signals).

How is media going to change? Will the big players modernize and hold what’s left of their space? Or will they keep getting squeezed from below, as the business-school theory of “disruption” suggests?

Right now, YouTube is driving a wild wave of new shows. Netflix’s efforts to introduce inexpensive formats like podcasts appear to be fizzling. Internet media observer Ryan Broderick noted recently that it’s “easier for a platform full of user-generated content to professionalize than it is for a platform of professional content to expand into user-generated-ish content a la podcasts.”

When it comes to news, cost has until recently been a prohibitive barrier to newcomers. Yet the highest-impact news interview show in the world right now is Piers Morgan’s YouTube production. That’s where Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy goes to respond to Donald Trump, who has taken to speaking to niche domestic outlets like Newsmax.

Newpress is doing some of the most ambitious journalism on YouTube, and it’s also started to mint stars; Max Fisher’s show with Newpress has made his one of the fastest-growing global political channels on the platform, garnering more than 600,000 followers in less than a year.

I noted to Owens that Newpress hasn’t yet driven a news cycle, the way his old employer often did. “We’ll do that,” he promised.

Also today: Rest of World’s dire straits, Elon Musk’s Skydance play, and a story about Amy Griffin.

Times journalist’s children allegedly became billionaire memoirist’s focus

Days after a New York Times investigation raised questions about Amy Griffin’s memoir The Tell, reporter Katherine Rosman received a worrying call: A person seated at an Aspen event with Griffin, whose husband made billions in finance, had heard Griffin threatening to make life difficult for Rosman’s son, a student at the University of Southern California who had tangled online with a friend of Griffin’s daughter. Months later, Griffin spoke to a person with influence over admissions at a major American university and suggested they not admit Rosman’s children, a person directly familiar with that conversation said. Griffin denies she ever threatened Rosman’s children, and a New York Times spokesman said that “if these troubling reports are accurate, this is a stunning abuse of power and influence.” The story has spiraled through Griffin’s social circle, Instagram, and the celebrity media, and offers a glimpse at bitterly feuding American elites.

Rest of World may shutter

Rest of World launched in 2020 with an ambitious goal: to shift Western perspectives by telling stories about technology often ignored by the mainstream US news outlets. Sophie Schmidt, the international tech news site’s founder and primary financial backer, described the outlet as her “life’s project.”

Six years later, the site’s web traffic has fallen off, and it’s looking for a new backer — or, failing that, facing a wind-down date in January, according to two people familiar with the plans. A person familiar with Schmidt’s thinking said she has privately conceded that the site’s shrinking audience has lessened its impact. In anticipation of Semafor’s story on Sunday, the organization emailed its investors saying it was eyeing a potential shutdown date.

In an era of media fragmentation, Rest of World’s struggles are not unique. But one senior leader at the organization said they believe tech news readers who previously expressed liberal values and an appetite for consuming global journalism now prefer an inward-looking information diet of tech podcasts, YouTube shows, and chatbot outputs.

Musk’s Skydance moves

Elon Musk has invested roughly $1 billion in Skydance, Semafor’s Rohan Goswami scooped last week, after reporting on Musk’s interest earlier this year. Musk and Skydance have also held talks about a potential distribution deal, according to people familiar with the matter.

The investment came together at roughly the same time as equity investments from Skydance’s other investors, including board member Laurene Powell Jobs, and provides the Ellison family’s media arm a much-needed financial injection as the company looks to up its stock price.

CEO David Ellison, who poached Mattel’s Ynon Kreiz to serve as co-CEO, could use Musk’s capital to bolster the company’s cost-cutting and technological efforts, given Musk owns xAI and Starlink.

“We are building a true product and tech team,” Ellison said in a CNBC interview earlier this month. “We are a big believer that artificial intelligence is a tool for artists, not the other way around.”

Who will be the next press secretary?

Don’t expect Katie Zacharia’s replacement until after the midterms. Trump’s communications director, Steven Cheung, told Semafor’s Shelby Talcott that the White House’s next briefing would come “soon.”

But Trump is in no rush to name a replacement after Zacharia’s ill-fated stint as press secretary, and one person familiar with the situation said a new pick will “definitely not” be named before the election. Trump is his own best messenger, as his advisers see it, and he’s traveling aggressively in a bid to boost Republicans. Trump and “his team are focused on the midterm elections,” Cheung added.

Influencers take prominence in local media

Political influencers are reshaping elections in smaller media markets, where they can outcompete diminished local media outlets for attention. In New Mexico, Elias Sisneros, a videographer, has gone viral with short-form videos on topics like government waste and the state’s public school system. Much of his focus, though, has been on the political left; his videos decry Democratic political control of the state and the Democratic Socialists of America. New Mexico Republicans have embraced Sisneros, inviting him to serve as the moderator of events including a gubernatorial forum.

The format’s looseness has allowed Sisneros to act in part as an independent media operator, and part as a paid political operative himself. Left-leaning influencers in the state have pointed out that in recent months, Sisneros’ company, Unfiltered Media, has received nearly $30,000 from various Republican candidates there. Court documents showed that before Sisneros was focused on fraud in the state government, he was the subject of local media coverage after being arrested for allegedly participating in a fraud scheme to steal tools, and pleaded guilty to embezzling money from a former employer.

Sisneros did not respond to multiple requests via social media and email for comment.

2WAY and FP team up

The Free Press is partnering with 2WAY, the digital media startup fronted by Mark Halperin, for an election night livestream. The livestream will run from 8 pm to midnight ET, and will feature Halperin and former View host Meghan McCain, along with Larry O’Connor and Kevin Walling, who together will break down results and answer audience questions. Free Press staffers Suzy Weiss, Olivia Reingold, Will Rahn, and Mene Ukueberuwa will also participate.

“Election night is a moment where the entire country is talking at once, and too often viewers are watching from the sidelines,” 2WAY CEO Joe Ruffolo said in a statement. “Partnering with The Free Press for our first election night special allows us to do something different. We are able to pair world-class journalism with a live community that asks questions, pushes back and helps shape the conversation as it unfolds. This is what two-way media looks like.”

In this week’s sponsored episode of Mixed Signals, Semafor’s Ben Smith sits down with Josh Spanier, Vice President of Marketing at Google and host of the Frontier CMO podcast, at Google’s Mountain View campus. In the episode, presented by Think with Google, Ben and Josh discuss the state of modern marketing and what it takes to build an audience in a creator-driven media world.

Josh, who talks with hundreds of marketing leaders each year, explains why the AI-driven shakeup many predicted for CMOs hasn’t happened. He also shares how Google is using AI to plan and measure its own marketing, why he thinks YouTube creators are some of the best marketers working today, and what he’s learned from posting to his own watch channel every day for seven months.

Mixed Signals from Semafor Media is presented by Think with Google. This episode is commercial content produced by Semafor Brand Studio with Think with Google.

Feed Me: Polymarket is sponsoring Substack’s midterms hub, Emily Sundberg writes.

Futurism: Content mills are pumping out AI-slop recipes and using synthetic images of “bloggers,” including an AI clone of Emily Blunt, to draw clicks, Maggie Harrison Dupré reports.

NYT: AI is increasingly mediating how voters get their election information, with bots sometimes citing sites that are fronts for foreign influence operations, report Tiffany Hsu, Steven Lee Myers, and Julian E. Barnes.

CNBC: ABC station owners are irritated with Disney’s recent decision to air the Super Bowl across a handful of different platforms, which may siphon off broadcast ad revenue, Alex Sherman writes.

Status: Oliver Darcy gives the backstory on a Politico piece on Susie Wiles that provoked fury from the White House and a significant correction.

Bloomberg: Netflix’s own data suggests its users are opening the app less often, Lucas Shaw reports.

• Hunterbrook says The New York Times ripped off its reporting on the impact of regulatory rollbacks at the Environmental Protection Agency. The investigative digital outlet said the paper, which published a feature on exemptions for major polluters over the weekend, didn’t initially credit Hunterbrook, despite citing one of the same sources and creating a similar chart. Hunterbrook publisher Sammy Koppelman pointed out to Semafor that the Times even appeared to retake the same photo for its front page.
• The Tow-Knight Center for Journalism Futures, where Semafor Executive Editor at Large Gina Chua has been serving as executive director, published an urgent and timely report last week on the state of AI in journalism and the information ecosystem’s “three-layer cake.”
• Michigan Democratic Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed is running ads featuring positive quotes about him from conservative media personalities like Fox News’ Jesse Watters, with whom El-Sayed somewhat playfully sparred earlier this fall.
• The Daily Caller, the right-leaning digital publication, is defending its critical coverage of Israel from conservatives after a self-described OSINT researcher accused it of hyperfocusing on “Jewish influence.” Pro-Israel conservatives have increasingly complained publicly about the publication; Fox News’ Mark Levin, one of the Iran war’s biggest supporters on the right, recently said that “Daily Caller means Al Jazeera in Arabic.” Last week, the outlet mocked Levin’s “softball” interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
• Democratic Texas Senate candidate James Talarico is set to appear on Diary of CEO to talk about the dangers of AI. The interview was prematurely promoted by Steven Bartlett on YouTube, and had been online at an unlisted link for about a week, but was removed on Sunday.
• The New York Times released an editor’s note acknowledging its polling aggregator had included Wedgewood Polls, which fabricated poll data.
• The paper also disclosed its efforts to verify a quote from Elizabeth Holmes that she disputed in You Can See Everything. (Moral of the story: Always keep your notes!)