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Thursday, May 25, 2023

The long weekend is almost upon us! Reminder: This newsletter will be off for the federal holiday and return Tuesday. Now, onward to the news: Sean Hannity will conduct a pre-taped town hall with Donald Trump, Jimmy Finklestein expresses confidence in The Messenger, Fox News offers scant coverage of the Oath Keepers sentencing, Mark Zuckerberg rallies the Meta troops, and MoviePass returns. But first, the A1.

THE A1

A.I. Apprehension

CNN Photo Illustration/Robert Downs/INMA

Publishers are sounding the alarm about the dangers of A.I.

At the annual INMA World Congress of News Media on Thursday, News Corporation chief executive Robert Thomson and The New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger both spoke in plain terms about how the rapidly developing technology will inevitably disrupt and transform the news business.

"The quest to protect provenance has entered a fresh phase ... with the rapid evolution of generative AI, which certainly has the potential to be degenerative AI," Thomson said. "The task for all here is to ensure that we are AI alchemists and that it becomes regenerative AI."

Sulzberger echoed Thomson's concerns, telling the audience that artificial intelligence "is almost certainly going to usher in a torrent of crap into the information ecosystem, totally poisoning it."

There are already plenty of examples of A.I. authoritatively passing along false information to readers. The CNET fiasco, in which the outlet quietly used the technology to help write stories, dozens of which later had to be corrected after errors were discovered, being perhaps the most prominent.

As the technology driving the A.I. revolution becomes more advanced, and as media companies fall under increased pressure to minimize costs, there will certainly be temptation to wield the technology in a way that slims budgets. BuzzFeed has, for instance, already announced how it will begin using the technology to produce content — though chief executive Jonah Peretti has insisted he doesn't want the technology to supplant human workers.

It's not hard to see how other outlets might go down a path that leads to them using A.I. to publish actual stories, which could ultimately result in misinformation being peddled to the masses as fact, just like in the CNET case. But unlike CNET, which does have editorial standards, content farms that are not concerned with the truth will be less likely to have guardrails in place to catch errors and/or correct them.

On the financial side of the equation, newsrooms might ironically be adversely affected by A.I., despite effectively helping to train the machines. In recent weeks, Google demonstrated it will soon integrate A.I. into its ubiquitous search engine, placing A.I. generated answers at the top of search results, over the usual list of links, potentially cutting off a major revenue source for news publishers.

"As for the future, and it is the near future, there are three areas in which our collective IP is under threat and for which we should argue vociferously for compensation - the emerging picture is what you might call a tech triptych," Thomson said.

"Firstly, our content is being harvested and scraped and otherwise ingested to train AI engines," he continued. "Secondly, individual stories will be surfaced in specific searches. And, thirdly, our content will be synthesized and presented as distinct when it is actually an extracting of editorial essence. These are super snippets, containing all the effort and insight of great journalism but designed so the reader will never visit a journalism website, thus fatally undermining that journalism."

"We are accustomed to defining coal or copper mining as an extractive industry," Thomson added. "Content mining is an extractive industry."

And while A.I. developers and industry leaders are openly calling for the government to step in and enact regulations on the nascent technology to avoid a potential "existential risk," Thomson said he did not expect that to happen.

"I don't think there is going to be regulation of AI anytime soon," Thomson said. "There won't be any coherent, cogent response in a regulatory way."

——— BELOW THE FOLD ———

CNN Photo Illustration/Ethan Miller/Getty Images

The Next Trump Town Hall: Fox News announced Sean Hannity will host a town hall with Donald Trump on June 1 — the first town hall with the disgraced former president since CNN's widely criticized event. Given Hannity's long history of peddling propaganda on behalf of Trump, this event is likely to be far less contentious. But Hannity will still have to navigate some tricky minefields, given the legal hot water Fox is still in over Trump's election lies. To that end, it is notable that Fox will not be airing the Trump town hall live. Instead, the network said in a press release that it will pre-tape the event earlier in the day and broadcast it at 9pm. That gives the right-wing channel the opportunity to make sure that whatever is aired is squared away legally.

► Meanwhile: CNN announced another Republican town hall. This one with former Vice President Mike Pence, which will air June 7 and be moderated by Dana Bash.

THE BUSINESS

CNN Photo Illustration/Sean Zanni/Patrick McMullan/Getty Images

Meeting The Messenger: Media mogul Jimmy Finklestein is confident as ever that his new digital media outlet, The Messenger, will be a success. That's according to a new interview he gave Vanity Fair's Joe Pompeo, where he predicted the news site will generate "tens of millions of dollars" in direct advertising sales in the first year. Finklestein countered criticism the outlet, which launched last week with a flurry of aggregated articles, has faced. When Pompeo said that his impression was the outlet would mimic the Daily Mail, Finklestein replied: "Your impressions are wrong." He added of The Messenger: "Not a tabloid. That's a mistake. It is a very serious publication that will also have lots of fun articles in it." Read Pompeo's full piece here.

IN THE INDUSTRY

CNN en Español will move most of its operations to Mexico City, "scaling back production of content for linear television," Brian Steinberg reports. The move will "mean the elimination of jobs in Miami and Atlanta, but will also result in a ramp-up of jobs in Mexico," Steinberg adds. (Variety)
Emma Hurt writes about CNN departing downtown Atlanta for the long-planned move to its original Techwood campus. (Axios)
Two of The WSJ's deputy editors in chief — Neal Lipschutz and Jason Anders — will leave the company, according to an email from new boss Emma Tucker. No new deputy has been identified, though Tucker said the replacement "will be announced in due course." (NYT)
Jessica Toonkel and Amol Sharma go "inside Disney and Comcast's fight over the future of Hulu." (WSJ)
DirecTV has inked a deal to continue distributing the NFL Sunday Ticket to restaurants and bars, even though the rights for consumers have been snagged by YouTube TV. (Deadline)
"CBS is marking its 15th consecutive season as the most watched broadcast network, and Fox claimed the 2022-23 season among adults 18-49," Rick Porter reports. "Each of the seven top broadcasters, however, lost some audience amid the ongoing shift from linear to streaming viewing." (THR)
"Lionsgate came in above market expectations as it reported results for its fiscal fourth quarter Thursday," Scott Mendelson reports. "It topped $1.1 billion in revenue, a 17% year-to-year jump, a net loss of $96.8 million, and adjusted net income of $49.2 million or 21 cents per share." (The Wrap)
Cineworld says that it expects to exit Chapter 11 in July. (Deadline)

MEDIA MOVES

Sean Spicer joined NewsNation as a contributor. Spicer also announced that he will be launching his own show separate from the network this summer. (The Hill / Twitter)
Reshma Kirpalani joined The WaPo as a video journalist. (WaPo)

THE INFO WARS

CNN Photo Illustration/Jim Urquhart/Reuters

Forgotten on Fox: It was one of the big stories covered Thursday on CNN and MSNBC. But over on Fox News, it received almost no attention. The right-wing network barely mentioned the sentencing of Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes, all but ignoring the first seditious conspiracy sentence handed down in over a decade. When I searched Fox News transcripts, I only found two mentions of Rhodes, which occurred in the 1pm and 6pm hours. That's it. Of course, this comes from the network that mainstreamed 1/6 trutherism, so it's not a surprise. But it's worth noting the network continues to bury news of Trump supporters' complicity in the attack.

IN THE BATTLEFIELD

Ron DeSantis continued his presidential launch media tour, appearing on a number of conservative talk radio programs throughout the day, defending his deceision to launch on Twitter Spaces. (NYT)
Behind the Spaces debacle: "Over the past several months Musk cut the Spaces team, which once numbered as many as 100 employees, down to roughly three people," Zoë Schiffer and Casey Newton report. (Platformer)
Elon Musk and David Sacks don't seem to understand the difference between Nielsen television ratings and internet video views. The former measures the average number of concurrent viewers in a given hour, the latter is the total number of cumulative views. (Twitter)
Fox News' "response to the debacle shows that the network is not willing to be easily displaced by the rising alliance of Musk and the right-wing stars who have said they plan to make his platform their home," Matt Gertz writes. (MMFA)
Ryan Mac and Tiffany Hsu point out that the Twitter event fell "short of the reach of past livestreams" on the internet, including when BuzzFeed placed rubber bands around a watermelon in 2016, a moment that drew 800,000 concurrent viewers on Facebook Live. (NYT)
The Musk-DeSantis fiasco "shows they didn't realize Twitter needs TV," Elizabeth Lopatto writes. (The Verge)
Switching gears: "Right-wing media attacked Fox News for trans policies. They all have the exact same policies," Colby Hall points out. (Mediaite)
Jeremy Barr's latest: "Fox's Tucker Carlson firing is boosting Newsmax's ratings. Will it last?" (WaPo)

THE VALLEY

CNN Photo Illustration/Laure Andrillon/Reuters

Mark Rallies Meta: Mark Zuckerberg "attempted to rally the [Meta] troops on Thursday, following multiple rounds of layoffs that have decimated the social media giant's workforce," The WaPo's Naomi Nix reported. According to Nix, Zuckerberg told employees that he hopes the company will be more stable heading into the future. Over the past eight months, Meta has cut about a staggering 24% of its workforce, or one in four employees. "Going through restructuring and layoffs and changes like this is obviously a very difficult thing," Zuckerberg told Meta staffers, per Nix. "So it's not like we're going to end up in exactly the place that we were before because that wasn't my goal. I wanted to get to a scrappier place." Read Nix's full story here.

🔎 Zooming in: "The layoffs at Meta arrive as the company is battling a series of threats to its business model," Nix noted. "Upstart apps such as the short-form video network TikTok have intensified the competition among social media companies for advertising dollars and users. Broader challenges in the digital advertising industry, such as new privacy rules from Apple and slowing growth in the e-commerce market, have hurt Meta's coffers. Meanwhile, the company's long-term bet to build out immersive digital worlds known as the metaverse shows no immediate signs of paying off."

TOO MANY TABS

TikTok is testing its A.I. chatbot, named "Tako," in the Philippines. The chatbot, still in its infancy, aims to help users discover content through conversation — though users are urged not to take the chatbot at face value when it comes to medical, legal, or financial advice due to possible inaccuracies. (Bloomberg)
Google is officially opening up access to Search Labs, allowing users to experiment with the company's A.I. features. (The Verge)
Microsoft President Brad Smith proclaimed that A.I. leaders must be held accountable for any damages their products wreak on society and urged legislators to develop guardrails around A.I. being used to control critical infrastructure. (NYT)
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced the company could end its business in the E.U. should European authorities pass legislation that would require A.I. companies to share the copyrighted materials their engineers used to develop their respective systems. (BBC)
Twitter is rolling out a new API tier for developers that costs $5,000 a month. (TechCrunch)
YouTube, putting its focus on Shorts, is shutting down YouTube Stories on June 26. (TechCrunch)

CURTAIN CALL

CNN Photo Illustration/Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images

MoviePass, The Sequel: MoviePass is back. Well, sort of. The company, under new ownership, resurfaced on Thursday after bankruptcy and launched its new subscription service. The newly revamped service will be accepted at more than 4,000 theaters across the U.S. — but it will no longer offer the magical deal it once did, which allowed for unlimited films at a mere $9.95 a month. Instead, new passes will start at $10 a month for up to 3 movies, and $40 a month for 30 movies. Variety's Todd Spangler has more here.

OFF STAGE

Barack Obama voiced support for the striking writers during a live-stream event for Netflix: "My hope would be that in a time of big technological change, where you've got big mega corporations that are doing really well, that they keep in mind the creative people who are actually making the product that consumers appreciate." (Variety)
The "Fast & Furious" franchise has now raced past $7 billion at the global box office. (Deadline)
Pamela McClintock notes that "Fast X" continued the series' trend of doing well overseas, while preforming not as great domestically. (THR)
Quentin Tarantino discussed his upcoming 10th and potentially final film, "The Movie Critic," during the Cannes Film Festival. Tarantino revealed the film will center on a film critic who wrote reviews for a porn magazine in the late '70s. (The Wrap)
The season finale — and possibly series finale — celebration for AppleTV+'s "Ted Lasso" has been canceled "due to unforeseen circumstances" amid the ongoing WGA strikes. (Deadline)
The first reviews are in for "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse" and they're almost all overwhelmingly positive. (The Wrap)
Warner Bros. Discovery dropped the main trailer for the much-anticipated "Barbie." (YouTube)
Sony Pictures released the second trailer for "No Hard Feelings." (YouTube)
HBO is ending "How To With John Wilson." (Variety)

Thank you for reading! This newsletter was edited by Jon Passantino and produced with the assistance of Liam Reilly. Have feedback? Send us an email here. We will see you back in your inbox on Tuesday.