Media

1. Spotlight on Spotlight
2. Mixed Signals
3. Old man memoirs
4. The left’s Playbook?
5. Longread Bungalow

Can the owner of a popular anti-woke, pro-Israel Substack save one of the country’s oldest news channels?

The new owners of Paramount appear to think so. Over the last few months, David Ellison’s desire to buy The Free Press and install founder Bari Weiss somewhere atop CBS News has leaked out in bits, in Status, The New York Times, and Puck.

When I checked in with sources this weekend, the deal apparently hadn’t been finalized. But that hasn’t stopped Weiss from beginning to think about who she may bring in to help her overhaul CBS News. One idea she has floated, according to people familiar with the conversations: James Bennet, her former editor at The New York Times’ opinion desk.

In an alternate timeline without COVID-19 and the cultural upheavals of 2020, Bennet might be the executive editor of The New York Times. Hiring him would be the most conventional aspect of a very unconventional media strategy. Acquiring a digital media startup largely reliant on reader revenue at a moment of subscription fatigue is risky — to say nothing of The Free Press’ price tag, which Puck put somewhere nebulously between $100 million and $200 million. Integrating The Free Press’ staff into one of the most old-school newsrooms in America has little precedent in modern media, unless you count Barry Diller’s short-lived attempt to merge Newsweek and The Daily Beast. And there’s the political contrast of an openly ideological news organization created in opposition to the mainstream media, and an outlet that is textbook mainstream.

But as television news viewership continues to evaporate, perhaps the new Paramount regime will be a bit ahead of the curve. In this moment of wild experimentation, cable and broadcast news alike are struggling to prove they need to exist in a digital world — but digital is starting to look an awful lot like TV. At the very least, we here at Semafor Media will be busy.

Also today: Mehdi Hasan comes for Playbook, Ravi Somaiya’s new media venture, Amy Coney Barrett ghosts Jodi Kantor, Keith McNally pulls ahead in the memoir wars, and two of our recent Mixed Signals guests are beefing.

The Globe investigates itself

The Boston Globe backed the star editor of its legendary Spotlight investigative team, Brendan McCarthy, after internal complaints over his management style, Max Tani reports exclusively today in a revealing story on America’s shifting newsroom culture. The New England paper’s HR department looked into claims that McCarthy berated two Globe journalists over perceived editorial differences, they said, cursing at his team and at staff working on Spotlight-related projects. The Globe concluded the investigation, it said, with a finding that “no further action” was needed, and top editor Nancy Barnes gave McCarthy her full-throated backing, saying she is “incredibly proud of the important and difficult work that Spotlight is tackling under Brendan’s leadership.”

The Globe’s decision to stand by McCarthy is the latest in a series of indications that newsroom culture is transforming to match this backlash moment. Last year, the new executive editor of The New York Times, Joseph Kahn, told Semafor that his newsroom would not be a “safe space” and that reporters who didn’t want to cover people they found distasteful “should work somewhere else.” And Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos has stood by the paper’s CEO, despite outcry and leaks from staff over a decades-old ongoing investigation in the UK.

Mixed Signals

What does it mean to run a paper for the elite in the age of populism? This week on Mixed Signals, Ben and Max sit down with Financial Times editor Roula Khalaf to discuss who the paper really serves, how veteran journalists are thriving on social media, and the FT’s own experiments with AI. Plus, Khalaf shares insights from her conversations with tech leaders like Sam Altman and how she approaches covering Donald Trump.

The left’s Playbook?

Zeteo, Mehdi Hasan’s news site, is launching a morning political newsletter, a progressive competitor to down-the-middle link roundups and tipsheets like those from Politico, Axios, Punchbowl News, and Semafor. He’s bringing on Peter Rothpletz to write the newsletter most weekdays, while Hasan will author the Monday edition himself.

Hasan told Semafor that Zeteo’s coverage of Israel and the war in Gaza has defined the publication’s early output and helped distinguish it from outlets that he felt were often overly deferential to Israel. But he said there was a large amount of audience interest in the publication’s political coverage, and he’s gearing up now for the midterm elections, hiring political reporters like Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng from Rolling Stone. Major political events such as Trump’s election have corresponded with spikes in Zeteo subscriptions, he said.

“Independent journalism cannot afford to be defined only by the ‘hot take’ factories out there and so we at Zeteo are proud to be investing in old-fashioned reporting and investigative journalism,” Hasan told Semafor. He said Zeteo, at just over a year old, would cross 500,000 total subscribers on Substack within the next few weeks; more than 50,000 of them pay.

Media memoirs, ranked

It was the summer of Big Memoirs from men whose careers began in the 1970s and never stopped: the movie-turned-digital mogul Barry Diller, the iconic Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, and the restaurateur and scenemaker Keith McNally. I particularly loved Diller’s, with its tour through elements of media history I’d only faintly grasped, like “Mad Austrian” Charles Bludhorn’s Gulf and Western conglomerate, and Diane von Furstenberg reading her own love letters aloud in the audiobook version.

The books should be sold as a box set, and for now have so far sold remarkably similar numbers, according to a source with access to Nielsen BookScan. McNally, though, seems to be building on his lead: He sold more than the two others combined last week, a fact that may be attributable to the power of his unfiltered Instagram.

A new place for long reads

A seasoned journalist wants to take a new approach to longform storytelling.

Next week, the former New York Times media reporter Ravi Somaiya is launching Bungalow, a project promising to delve deep into stories outside of the daily (and sometimes hourly) news cycle. Bungalow will publish ten digital editions a year, with subsequent updates on the developments, narratives, and tidbits that shake out after the reporting.

“I want to harness the thing we all end up doing as a guilty antidote to that churn: diving very deeply into one story, and following all of its tangents and inspirations to uncover a world that you could never otherwise have seen,” he says in an announcement set to publish next week.

Bungalow is the second media venture Somaiya has launched in the last two years. As Semafor reported in 2024, he co-founded Breaker, the media and New York-focused newsletter and website. But Somaiya left the startup after just a few months after the partnership unraveled. In the months since, Breaker has doubled down on its media coverage.

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Sam Feist is CEO of C-SPAN, which last week struck a deal with YouTube and Hulu to allow subscribers to stream its three cable channels.

Mixed Signals summer guests Mark Cuban and Pablo Torre sparred over Torre’s reporting on Los Angeles Clippers star Kawhi Leonard’s $27 million ‘no show’ job. Torre’s reporting, which prompted an NBA investigation and a denial from the Clippers and owner Steve Ballmer, is an interesting test for The New York Times and its sports brand, The Athletic. Torre’s show is not subject to the editorial guidelines of The Athletic, an Athletic spokesperson confirmed, but his bombshell claims were heavily distributed across the Athletic’s channels … CNBC quietly laid off some international staff in London and Singapore last week … Noah Smith says he left Bloomberg to write freely about China … Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett backed out of a Daily interview with Jodi Kantor … John Malone’s book tour is yielding incredible tidbits of business wisdom like “never praise Hitler (zero upside).”