| | | | | Exec summary: President Trump vs. his own FBI is the nation's top story for the second day in a row... Scroll down for details... But first, lots of media biz news, from BuzzFeed to Tronc to Viacom to Meredith... | | #TimesUp for Recording Academy CEO? | | "The call for Recording Academy president Neil Portnow to step down reached a fever pitch on Thursday when prominent women in the music industry issued a letter demanding sweeping changes," Chloe Melas reports.
This draft letter (published by Variety and other outlets) has been signed by more than 20 female music execs. They want Portnow out: "We step up every single day and have been doing so for a long time. The fact that you don't realize this means it's time for you to step down."
--> Will this be enough? Via Chloe's story: On the same evening this effort was made public, Portnow announced an independent task force at the Recording Academy with the aim to promote "female advancement..." | | BuzzFeed News seeking an investment? | | Oliver Darcy emails: For the last several days, there have been whispers about a possible deal between the Emerson Collective and BuzzFeed. On Thursday afternoon the FT's Matt Garrahan landed the scoop: The company founded by Laurene Powell Jobs is in preliminary talks with BF to make an investment in the digital outlet's news division.
A person familiar with the talks confirmed to me that there have been discussions between Ben Smith and a representative for the Emerson Collective about a possible investment -- but the person stressed such talks are early and that a possible deal has not been brought to the board of BuzzFeed. Indeed, after our story published, I got a call from a BuzzFeed board member who told me the company is not fund-raising and not contemplating an outside investment... Other reporters received similar calls. More...
--> Context: Smith and the Emerson exec overseeing media initiatives, Peter Lattman, go way back... | | BuzzFeed's news division is at a crossroads -- with several possible directions being contemplated.
A sale could be one possibility. The Information's Tom Dotan reported this on Thursday night: Last summer, NBCUniversal execs "had a conversation with BuzzFeed about buying control of the media company, according to people familiar with the talks. At least some investors in BuzzFeed were keen for a deal to happen, so they could exit the high profile but unprofitable business." Dotan says "the talks didn't get very far," and "price appears to have been one factor." So: Could BF's news division raise $$$ on its own? Go independent? Get bought?
--> Oliver Darcy adds: A person familiar with the matter confirmed to me that there have been internal deliberations in recent weeks on how to fund BuzzFeed News, but stressed such conversations have been informal...
--> A tweet from Recode's Peter Kafka: "What we don't know, and what's most important: Has BuzzFeed CEO or anyone else encouraged BuzzFeed News to find a buyer or other solution?" | | CBS and Viacom will "evaluate" a deal | | Here we go again: A CBS-Viacom reunion is officially back on the table. The boards of the two companies said Thursday that they are evaluating "a potential combination." Well, make that a re-combination.
Shari Redstone has been pushing for this for a while... Now the boards of the two companies are forming committees to think about it... They say "there can be no assurance that this process will result in a transaction or on what terms any transaction may occur..." But I'd say most observers think it's likely to happen this time. Here's my full story... | | -- NBC's Claire Atkinson tweeted: "The committee will spend a lot of time and money weighing what they're going to be forced to do. IMO"
-- WSJ's Ben Fritz: "CBS and Viacom remind me of that girlfriend I kept talking about getting back together with after we broke up, except if we had the same Dad" | | HBO touts streaming growth | | A headline from Time Warner's Q4 earnings: "HBO posted its best year of subscriber growth as streaming customers more than doubled," the WSJ's Joe Flint reports.
Details: "HBO's direct-to-consumer subscriptions, which include HBO Now sign-ups through internet-based distributors like Amazon and DirecTV Now, have topped five million in the U.S., according to an HBO executive." This time last year, HBO was talking about two million subs. "Across all of its offerings, HBO added five million domestic subscribers in 2017, its biggest year ever, and subscriber revenue climbed 11%, the strongest growth in 20 years..." | | | --> More TWX earnings news via Deadline: "Better-than-expected fourth-quarter earnings due to Justice League box office and continued growth at Turner and HBO..." | | | --> BIG EARNINGS day: At CNNMoney, we have all the details about Alphabet, Apple and Amazon's earnings reports... | | This Newsweek mess keeps getting messier | | Hadas Gold has the latest here: Etienne Uzac, the co-owner and chairman of Newsweek Media Group, and his wife, Marion Kim, who acted as the company's finance director, are both stepping down from their posts. The resignations "come just two weeks after the Manhattan District Attorney's office raided the company's offices, taking several servers with them." Read more...
--> Also on Thursday: BuzzFeed's Craig Silverman reported that "the publisher of Newsweek and the International Business Times has been engaging in fraudulent online traffic practices..." | | -- Our deepest condolences go out to Don Lemon and his family. Lemon's older sister L'Tanya "Leisa" Lemon Grimes died on Wednesday in Louisiana... (People)
-- VF's William D. Cohan has a lengthy new interview with Anthony Scaramucci. Mooch compares Trump to Michael Jordan... (VF)
-- Wired mag's paywall went up on Thursday... (NiemanLab)
-- Friday will be James Warren's last day filing Poynter's morning media newsletter. I'm told the newsletter will be continuing... Details TBA... And the site just posted jobs for a managing editor and a media reporter... | | Tronc cans two NY Daily News editors | | | "Tronc fired Rob Moore, the newspaper's managing editor, along with Alexander 'Doc' Jones, who edited the paper's Sunday edition," following investigations "into harassment allegations made against them by current and former employees," HuffPost reports... | | What went wrong at the Los Angeles Times? | | Dylan Byers' latest: "How did the L.A. Times get here? How did the largest metro newspaper in the nation and winner of 44 Pulitzers become, as a number of sources close to the paper independently describe it today, 'a hot mess'?" Read his full story about the "Michael Ferro crisis" here...
--> The latest: LAT business editor Kimi Yoshino, suspended last week, returned to work on Thursday... | | Meredith's first day owning Time Inc. | | | Staffers took selfies with the Time Inc. sign on Wednesday... | | ...Because on Thursday it was replaced by the Meredith logo. Thursday was the first official day of Meredith's ownership.
"Meredith Chairman Steve Lacy and new CEO Tom Harty were at the former Time Inc. headquarters at 225 Liberty St. on Thursday morning, greeting employees on their way in," the NYPost's Keith Kelly reports. "Behind the smiles of the new owners was knowledge that a grim task is still at hand trying to right Time..." | | Medium's new EIC comes from Time | | "Siobhan O'Connor, most recently executive editor at Time," will "begin a new job as Medium's vice president of editorial on February 5," reporting directly to Ev Williams, VF's Joe Pompeo reports.
She's essentially the new EIC. So what will she be doing? "O'Connor and a small team of editors will focus largely on doing stories and commissioning paid writers to build out Medium's membership program, as well as finding the best stories from Medium's user-base to promote." What sorts of stories will be commissioned? "A mix of essays and reported pieces on a broad range of topics that generally aren't news-driven." More... | | Daniel Funke's headline: "PolitiFact hired Democratic and Republican reader reps. Then it fired one."
What happened? "Tweeters responded mostly negatively to PolitiFact's initial announcement, pointing out" that former Democratic congressman Alan Grayson "was accused of domestic abuse in 2016. He then appears to have pushed the Politico reporter who published the story." Grayson "was taken off the project" within hours. But former GOP congressman David Jolly will remain on board. And PolitiFact is looking for a new Dem. The job title is "reader advocate..." | | POTUS got his #'s right in a Thursday morning tweet about SOTU ratings. But he got the meaning of the #'s wrong. He said the 45.6 million people who watched Tuesday's speech totaled "the highest number in history." Far from it. So where he did get this info? Maybe he heard the #'s on "Fox & Friends First," but Fox's report was accurate -- no hyperbole. So did one of his aides tell him he broke a record? I don't know.
I had a lengthy exchange about this with a White House aide who insisted on anonymity. The aide asserted that Trump was referring to a cable news record -- meaning, cable news channels had the "highest number in history" -- but that's NOT what POTUS tweeted. I repeatedly asked the aide to provide an on-the-record comment, but the person claimed there was nothing that needed to be corrected... | | | From Thursday night's" Late Show" monologue: "It doesn't matter how many people watched. But what does matter is that the president needs to lie about it. And somehow get away with it. This is the new world we live in." | | Speaking of the "new world..." | | The president claims that professional polls are "fake" and concocts a conspiracy theory about corporate interference... And it barely merits a headline.
Mediaite did flag this quote though -- it's from Trump's speech at an RNC meeting in DC -- referring to the SOTU: "Even the haters back there gave us good reviews on that one. It's hard for them to do. They came up with some fake polls. They had fake polls but the fake polls were even good. And they said, 'What are we going to do?' Took them a couple of hours to figure before they went negative, you know. They got calls from the bosses, 'You can't say that about Trump! You can't say good!' But it's been -- we have had an incredible time..." | | -- A court in Myanmar denied bail for Reuters reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo on Thursday. Here's the latest... (Reuters)
-- "CNN is cutting its investment in personalized business app CNN MoneyStream," Steven Perlberg reports, calling the cut "the latest move by CNN Digital to rein in costs and close down digital products that haven't taken off as intended..." (BuzzFeed)
-- Remember the harassment allegation against Ryan Seacrest? E! retained outside counsel to investigate, but the matter is now closed: Counsel "found insufficient evidence to support the claims against Seacrest..." (THR)
-- Fox News has ordered a second season of Harvey Levin's "OBJECTified" series... (Deadline)
-- ICYMI: "The premiere of Angela Rye's four-episode special for BET was a riff on President Donald Trump's first State of the Union..." (The Root) | | The memo, the memo, the memo. "There is memo hysteria, hysteria's at a fever pitch," Erin Burnett said on CNN Thursday evening. There's been a lot of "phony drama" around this issue, Anderson Cooper said an hour later, because "the release of the memo is by all accounts a foregone conclusion. It is, and always has been."
To that point, the WashPost is out with a new story titled "Trump was quickly persuaded to support memo's release." It touches on the role of cable news -- i.e. shows like "Hannity" -- in influencing the prez. The memo is likely to be released on Friday... | | Here's what Fox hosts are saying | | Pro-Trump hosts have been championing "transparency" for weeks. Tucker Carlson's lazy line on Thursday night: "It turns out that when transparency hurts Democrats, the media oppose transparency." Uh, "the media" has been airing a wide range of views about the memo.
It's lazy for hosts like Carlson and guests like Mark Steyn to say stuff like "the Washington Post has come out against the release of the memo" when they know the Post has been covering the story up, down, left, right, sideways... The Post's editorial board has been focused on the motivations of the memo writers...
Meanwhile "Hannity" guests like Mike Huckabee are saying stuff like this: "I'm worried: Did the FBI and DOJ meddle in the election?" | | Presidential adviser Sean Hannity | | On Thursday evening The Daily Beast described Trump's regular phone calls with Sean Hannity, casting him as a key "adviser" about the memo controversy. National editor Justin Miller put it this way: "Trump is siding with Fox News over the FBI and Justice Department." Or to put it another way: "The president listens to a TV show host over the FBI director and deputy attorney general."
Hannity kinda-sorta but-not-really denied the Beast story, claiming, "First of all you can't advise this president. He is such his own man."
During Thursday's broadcast, I noticed Hannity teasing MORE to come... Beyond the memo... And I wondered if he was shifting the goalposts, downplaying expectations, or doing something else altogether: "Sources are telling us tonight that this is just the tip of the iceberg. The memo is only 10 to 15% of information that will be coming out in the days, weeks and months ahead..." | | | Oliver Darcy emails: Former CIA Director John Brennan has been named a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. He will make his first network appearance on Sunday's "Meet the Press," and his MSNBC debut on Monday's "Morning Joe." | | "It's the Michael Wolff self-destruction tour" | | That's the headline on Erik Wemple's latest, documenting Michael Wolff's "self-owning campaign," including Thursday's run-in with Mika Brzezinski on "Morning Joe." Wolff's wink-wink alleging an affair by POTUS has caused a torrent of criticism in recent days. Some people are citing the episode to say "see, we told you so, that entire book is rotten."
Brian Lowry emails: Wemple offers a pretty good dissection of Wolff, but I think he overlooks one key point: The danger of journalists, even sort-of ones, venturing into venues where they feel pressured to entertain. Wolff originally stepped in it, notably, on HBO's "Real Time with Bill Maher," where he seemed eager to titillate the host with a salacious item. His coy handling of it since then has become the story, but the controversy flowed from his desire to yuk it up with a comedian who, despite his aptitude for political commentary, operates under a different set of standards. (Remember the Brian Williams scandal?) | | | For the record, part three | | | By Julia Waldow:
-- In light of a recent NYT expose outing "social media's black market," Poynter reveals "how to tell if you have fake Twitter followers (and how to remove them)..." (Poynter)
-- Another cue from Facebook? Instagram's new stories function is text-only friendly... (The Verge)
-- Want a dog-lens T-shirt? What about a "dancing hot dog" plush? Snapchat is officially rolling out in-app store swag... (TechCrunch) | | Condé's new code of conduct | | Julia Waldow emails: In the weeks following sexual-misconduct allegations against Mario Testino and Bruce Weber, Condé Nast International has released a new code of conduct for models and photographers. (The company has reportedly been working on updating the code since October, when the NYT's Weinstein exposé first broke, the NYT previously reported.) Among the clauses, recapped by British Vogue and the Cut: "All models must be 18 years old," "no shoot participant may be under the influence of alcohol or illegal drugs," and "all models must be provided a private dressing space." Also notable: the company now recommends that a model not be "alone with a photographer, makeup artist, or other contributor participating in a shoot..."
--> Related: Here's a frank assessment by The Fashion Law blog... | | | Brian Lowry emails: On Thursday NBC put out a list of its Trump-interview-free six hours of Super Bowl pregame coverage. And no surprise, it's chock full of self-promotion, including a Winter Olympics preview and interviews with Blake Shelton and the cast of "This is Us," which will air following the postgame show... | | Here's what to expect from Sunday's "This Is Us" | | | Megan Thomas emails: Maybe you won't need an entire box of tissues to get through Sunday's "This Is Us" episode in which -- no spoiler here -- Jack dies. "It's one of the most emotional episodes we've ever done, but there is a silver lining to it, and there's an uplift to the episode," "This Is Us" executive producer Isaac Aptaker tells EW. "While it's incredibly intense in a lot of ways, there is beauty to it, and there is optimism to it. That's so important to us -- to always find the lighter side of things too." | | If there are protests on the field... | | | "NBC will show players who kneel during the performance of the National Anthem at Super Bowl LII. But it might not be an issue," Ahiza Garcia writes. "Among the NFL players who continued to protest throughout the season, none made it to the Super Bowl..." | | HBO orders new J.J. Abrams series | | | "J.J. Abrams' mysterious new sci-fi series has been ordered to series at HBO," Variety's Joe Otterson reports. "The project was the subject of a bidding war between HBO and Apple. Details of the plot are still being kept under tight wraps, but the title of the series is 'Demimonde.' It is described as an epic and intimate sci-fi fantasy drama that deals with a world's battle against a monstrous, oppressive force. Abrams will write and executive produce..." It's "Abrams' first TV writing gig since 'Fringe,' which ended in 2013..." | | Lowry reviews "Altered Carbon" | | Brian Lowry emails: Netflix has again sunk a small fortune into a sci-fi series, "Altered Carbon," and come away with a convoluted mess to show for it, one whose excess overwhelms its attractive elements.
Ouch. Here's Lowry's full review... | | Delightful interview of the day | | | Megan Thomas emails: Vulture's Kyle Buchanan talked with Tiffany Haddish about her new Groupon commercial that's debuting during the Super Bowl... and about meeting Beyoncé... | | | For the record, part four | | | By Lisa Respers France:
-- Connie Sawyer, Hollywood's oldest working actress, has died. She was 105.
-- The DJ who lost the Taylor Swift groping case has a new job and the man who hired him told me he believes David Mueller's claims of innocence and has no intention of firing him despite the social media uproar...
-- Octavia Spencer plans on treating some lucky fans to see "Black Panther..."
-- In a nod to how times have changed, some fans are upset that a beloved character will not be portrayed as gay. J.K. Rowling has responded to the gay Dumbledore controversy involving the "Fantastic Beasts" sequel... | | | Email brian.stelter@turner.com... I love the feedback, corrections, suggestions, and tips. Thank you... | | | Get Reliable Sources, a comprehensive summary of the most important media news, delivered to your inbox every afternoon. | | | | | |
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