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Thursday, February 22, 2024

Volodymyr Zelensky rips Tucker Carlson's "bulls**t" interview with Vladimir Putin, CBS News says it will return Catherine Herridge's documents, OpenAI's Sora already starts costing Hollywood jobs, journalist Timothy Burke is indicted in the Tucker Carlson leaked tapes case, extremism was on full display at CPAC, Reddit files to go public in an unusual IPO, the trial of "Rust" armorer Hannah Gutierrez Reed, Wendy Williams is diagnosed with aphasia and dementia, Andy Cohen apologizes for "inappropriate" behavior, and so much more. But first, the A1.

THE A1

The Vice Versa

CNN Photo Illustration/Mario Tama/Getty Images

The digital media revolution is over.

Its two leaders, Vice Media and BuzzFeed , are in a frenetic retreat, surrendering much of their online empires as they try to protect what remains of their core assets. Having once threatened to upend the entire industry and usher in a new era of news distribution and monetization, the former digital media darlings are now merely attempting to survive in any form they can.

As they retreat, their large newsrooms once filled with rows of journalists are now shutting off the lights and closing their doors. BuzzFeed, already slimmed down after several waves of layoffs, announced this week that it will slash another 16% of its staff as it undergoes "planned strategic restructuring" to reduce costs. And Vice Media said Thursday that it will lay off hundreds of staffers as it ceases publishing on its own website and pivots into a business that resembles a studio.

"It's devastating to have a group of reporters who have made such a significant impact in the world have their jobs end in this way," one senior Vice Media staffer told me about the ugly state of affairs.

All digital publishers have struggled in recent years as they navigate brutal industry headwinds, brought on by a softened advertising market now dominated by Big Tech titans and plummeting referral traffic. Not to mention, the looming threat of artificial intelligence, also brought on by Big Tech titans.

Both Vice Media and BuzzFeed have been avatars for the entire industry, having served as the two highest-profile pioneers that paved the (short) road for other digital-first upstarts. At one point, the outlets inspired fear in their legacy media competitors, with each valued at billions of dollars while making splashy hires and threatening further disruption.

Now they're struggling to keep their head above water.

The demise of Vice Media as we know it is a particularly hard pill to swallow. Staffers at the outlet, who I'm told will receive severance if they fall under the knife, caught wind that something was awry many hours before chief executive Bruce Dixon delivered his memo. Ahead of the announcement, the mood inside Vice Media was grim. Staffers struggled to work amid rumors circulating about the outlet's fate, with one staffer telling me that it was like watching "the violinists playing aboard the sinking Titanic."

Then, late in the 3pm ET hour, The NYT's Benjamin Mullin confirmed their worst fears, reporting that mass layoffs were en route. Finally, at around 5pm ET, Dixon officially informed his workforce of the excruciating decision and drastic changes that the company would implement under its new private equity owners, led by Fortress Investment Group.

Dixon said in his note that Vice Media had determined it was "no longer cost-effective" for the company to distribute its digital content on its own. Instead, he said, it will "look to partner with established media companies to distribute our digital content, including news, on their global platforms, as we fully transition to a studio model." No word on who those partners might be.

The company also has to determine what to do with Refinery29 and Motherboard. Dixon said that Vice Media is in "advanced talks" to sell the former. And I'm told a number of discussions are underway about what to do with Motherboard, with one possibility being to license the tech-focused vertical to another company that would operate it, a la the Sports Illustrated model. From what I gleaned Thursday, executive are not certain whether the content the site has published through the years will remain online.

Meanwhile, the hundreds of staffers left wondering their fate will have to suffer through the weekend to learn whether they are out of a job. A cruel move, to say the least. Regardless, staffers on the digital publishing side have largely already accepted their fate.

"I think most of us have seen the writing on the wall: there are simply not enough lifeboats, and highly unlikely that the skeleton crew of us on digital news will be invited onboard one," the employee, who likened Vice Media to the sinking Titanic, told me.

In the wake of the mass layoffs, it's hard to imagine the brand will be the same. They never are. The internet is littered with zombie publications, carrying familiar names but lacking the souls they once had, transformed into mere shells of their once vibrant selves.

Strikingly, as the Vice Media staff received the devastating news Thursday, co-founder Shane Smith, whose salesman-like bravado made him more than $100 million from the outlet, was nowhere to be found.

IN THE VICE

If you want to read the full ChatGPT-sounding note from Vice Media boss Bruce Dixon to staffers, Maxwell Tani has posted it here. (Threads)
Amid the chaos, Vice Media communications chief Jonathan Bing exited the company to launch a new shop. (Deadline)
WIRED Editorial Director Katie Drummond , who previously worked as senior vice president of news and entertainment at Vice, posted on X: "VICE did stories nobody else would touch or tell as transparently, from around the world, and broke news like it was nobody's business. And everybody was hilarious. On the best days it was the best place ever. On the other days it was a lot of trauma bonding."
Right on cue, a number of right-wing media personalties celebrated the outlets demise, highlighting their true colors.
"Far-right and extremists celebrating the decline of VICE is testament only to the work that VICE journalists have been doing for years, long before most outlets paid any attention to this problem," Vice disinformation reporter David Gilbert wrote on X. "But these celebrations will be short-lived as those journalists will be back soon."
Meanwhile, 404 Media, the tech-focused publication started by former Vice Media journalists, celebrated its six-month anniversary. Co-founder Joseph Cox said that he believes it has become "the most impactful tech publication on the internet." (Threads)
✂️ Cuts, cuts, cuts: Engadget also laid off staffers amid its own plans to restructure. (TBN)

——— BELOW THE FOLD ———

CNN Photo Illustration/Fox News

Zelensky Zings Carlson: Suffice to say, Volodymyr Zelensky doesn't think highly of Tucker Carlson. During an interview with Fox News' Bret Baier, the Ukrainian president was asked about the chat the right-wing extremist had with Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier this month. Zelensky replied bluntly: "I don't have time to hear more than two hours of bullshit about us. About the world, about the United States, about our relations." Mediaite's Colby Hall has more.

THE INDUSTRY

CNN Photo Illustration/Shedrick Pelt/Getty Images

Conceding Catherine's Cache: CBS News said Thursday that it will return documents to Catherine Herridge after the national security correspondent was laid off last week as part of cost-cutting measures that hit the broadcast outlet. Questions about Herridge's personal belongings were raised by Jonathan Turley in a piece for The Hill , which accused the network of having seized her files. It was a characterization that CBS News strongly denied to me, but which prompted the Freedom of the Press Foundation and SAG-AFTRA to release statements denouncing the move.

Regardless, by Thursday afternoon, the matter appeared to be well on its way to being resolved. A CBS spokesperson told me, "Catherine's personal belongings were delivered to her home one week ago, and we are prepared to pack up the rest of her files immediately on her behalf – with her representative present as she requested. We are awaiting a response from Catherine and/or her representative to do so. We have respected her request to not go through the files, and out of our concern for confidential sources, the office she occupied has remained secure since her departure."

THE FOURTH ESTATE

Substack will officially announce Thursday it has more than 3 million paid subscriptions, Sara Fischer reports. (Axios)
Nicholas Quah profiles Matthew Belloni, the Puck author he dubbed as the "must-read columnist for Hollywood's executive class." The piece reveals that Belloni has 15,000 paid subscribers and 35,000 more unpaid ones. It also features a great photo of Belloni sitting in his California office with his dog, who sports the brilliant name, Oliver. (Vulture)
Instagram as a news source? Sapna Maheshwari and Mike Isaac take a look at Mosheh Oinounou's Mo News and report that "more people are turning to Instagram for news," even as the Meta-owned platform does its best to hide political content. (NYT)
A Reuters Institute study showed that by the end of 2023, 48% of the most used news websites in 10 nations blocked OpenAI's crawlers. (Reuters Institute)
Affluent Americans living in cities have access to more local news — though roughly half the country has only one news outlet or less, per a depressing new study from The State of Local News Project at Northwestern University. (Nieman)
Press Forward — an initiative looking to support local outlets with over $500,000 that launched last fall — added eleven communities. (Poynter)
A bit of fun news: Brian Stelter was able to obtain unaired footage of his wedding for his 10th anniversary with Jamie by asking for an assist from Warner Bros. Discovery, which had the tapes somewhere in a Scripps archive: "Thank you, thank you to the execs who went out of their way to retrieve these amazing memories." (Instagram)

IN THE MARKET

Sora hasn't even been released and the A.I. video generating bot is already killing Hollywood jobs: Tyler Perry said told Katie Kilkenny that his $800 million studio expansion has been put "indefinitely on hold" because of OpenAI's Sora: "I had gotten word over the last year or so that this was coming, but I had no idea until I saw recently the demonstrations of what it's able to do. It's shocking to me." (THR)
Winston Cho wrote about how Sora might will most definitely displace crew members. (THR)
Jose Alejandro Bastidas, Loree Seitz, Kayla Cobb , and Lucas Manfredi "asked a half-dozen executives running television production and distribution how they measure success in this precarious time for the industry." The answers, they report, varied. (The Wrap)
Powered by tours from Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, LiveNation said concert attendance rose 20%, delivering it its biggest year ever. (THR)

MEDIA MOVES

The NYT added George Pierpoint to Opinion's audience team. (NYT)

THE INFO WARS

Timothy and the Tucker Tapes: Former journalist Timothy Burke has been charged with 14 federal crimes over the alleged hack and leaking of a series of unflattering behind-the-scenes clips of then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson. That's according to a grand jury indictment unsealed Thursday, which accused Burke of working with an unidentified second person. The charges against Burke, who through his lawyers denied breaking the law, followed a Justice Department criminal hacking probe opened last year after unaired videos from Carlson's former show surfaced online. In one unaired clip posted by Vice in 2022, Kanye West was seen making antisemitic remarks to Carlson. The following year, after Carlson was fired from Fox News, the progressive watchdog Media Matters posted embarrassing behind-the-scenes footage of Carlson making crude remarks while joking with staff and denigrating the Fox Nation streaming service.

🔍 Zooming in: The fact that previously unaired footage found its way to the outlets confounded media observers, who wondered who could have been behind the leaks. Megyn Kelly even floated a conspiracy theory suggesting that the right-wing network was actually behind the leaks to embarrass Carlson, whom it had just fired. But according to this federal indictment, it was Burke and an unidentified second person. Here's my full story.

IN THE BATTLEFIELD

Matt Schlapp was slapped with several subpoenas in a sexual battery and defamation lawsuit Wednesday, the same day that CPAC kicked off, Roger Sollenberger reports. Schlapp has denied wrongdoing. (Daily Beast)
Meanwhile, the extremist nature of CPAC was on full display. Far-right troll and conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec said attendees had gathered to "overthrow" democracy "completely," despite having not gotten "all the way there on January 6th." (Mediaite)
That was far from the only ugly comment at the annual conference, which has been hijacked by radicals. Another CPAC panelist suggested Michelle Obama is a man, prompting some cheers. (Rolling Stone)
Switching gears: The NYT said that it did not publish a racist cartoon that depicts President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva as a monkey, despite claims on the internet. (NYT)

THE VALLEY

CNN Photo Illustration/Dado Ruvic/Reuters

Reddit's Unusual IPO: It's happening! Reddit on Thursday filed to go public — and in a bit of an unusual way. The company, which will become the first social media company IPO since Pinterest in 2019, said in its S-1 filing that it wants its die-hard users' "deep sense of ownership" to be "reflected in real ownership." Which means that the company will "invite the users and moderators who have contributed to Reddit to buy shares in our IPO, alongside our investors." CNBC's Jesse Pound noted that the arrangement "could make the deal riskier for investors." Read Pound's full story here.

🔍 Zooming in: In the filing, Reddit said it had $804 million in sales in 2023. The company said it is working on infusing its advertising with A.I., which should add a considerable boost. Regarding ownership, the filing revealed that OpenAI boss Sam Altman owns 8.7% of the company's stock, making him the third biggest investor, behind Condé Nast parent Advance Magazine Publishers (34%) and Tencent Cloud (11%). THR's Alex Weprin has more on that here.

TOO MANY TABS

Can you hear me now? Millions were without cell service nationwide as AT&T's network went down. It later blamed a software glitch. (CNN)
Free speech warrior Elon Musk's X suspended a number of accounts in India after orders from the country's government. (CNBC )
The Oversight Board announced it will also oversee decisions Meta makes about Threads. (TechCrunch)
Threads also now lets users save drafts! (The Verge)
Bluesky opened up the gates to its federation tool, allowing any user to run their own server connected to the social platform's network. (TechCrunch)
Google is temporarily halting Gemini's image generator after users reported historical inaccuracies. (NBC News)
Some 60% of ChatGPT 3.5's responses contained some degree of plagiarism, according to a new report from Copyleaks. (Axios)
A Pew Research study shows that one-quarter of TikTok's adults are responsible for the vast majority of the app's content. (Pew)
TikTok rolled out its "Add Music app" feature to 163 more countries, allowing users to add songs they see in videos on the platform to playlists on Apple Music and Spotify. (TechCrunch)
Instagram announced it is expanding its marketplace tool. (TechCrunch)
Mia Sato took a look at the Flip shopping app, "a TikTok knockoff filled only with videos earning affiliate revenue." (The Verge)
"Crying in Apple Vision Pro": Lauren Goode wrote about watching "a steady diet of sad movies" wearing the $3,500 headset and that while it was "strangely emotional" the weight of the goggles "distracted" from the experience. (WIRED)

CURTAIN CALL

CNN Photo Illustration/Eddie Moore/Getty Images

The 'Rust' Trial: The armorer who was responsible for the firearms on the set of "Rust," Hannah Gutierrez Reed , is officially on trial. The jury trial commenced on Thursday, with prosecutors accusing her of involuntary manslaughter after a gun Alec Baldwin fired on the set killed the film's cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins . A key question: who is responsible for six live bullets making their way onto the set and into the gun? Her defense attorney agreed negligence led to the tragic 2021 accident, but laid the blame at the feet of Baldwin. The trial is expected to last about two weeks. CNN's Christina Maxouris and Eric Levenson have details here .

OFF STAGE

Wendy Williams has been diagnosed with aphasia and dementia. (CNN)
Andy Cohen was accused by Brandi Glanville of sexual harassment in a letter to NBCU, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Shed Media. Cohen said the remarks in question were "meant in jest" and that Glanville was "in on the joke." But, he said, "It was totally inappropriate and I apologize." ( THR)
A district judge tossed out a sexual assault lawsuit brought against Aerosmith's Steven Tyler. (Reuters)
A Jason Reitman-led group of 35 filmmakers — which includes J.J. Abrams, Bradley Cooper, Christopher Nolan, and Steven Spielberg — purchased Westwood's historic Village Theater. ( THR)
HBO renewed "True Detective" for a fifth season, with Issa López still at the helm. (THR)
Paramount+ renewed "Frasier" for a second season. (TheWrap)
James Gunn shared the first cast photo for his upcoming superhero, "Superman: Legacy." (Deadline)
Olivia Munn will star alongside Jon Hamm in Apple TV+'s upcoming drama series, "Your Friends and Neighbors." (Deadline)
Eva Longoria will join the cast of "Only Murders in the Building" for the series' fourth season. (THR)
Josh McDermitt will star in NBC's "Suits L.A." pilot opposite Steven Amell. (Deadline)
Kings of Leon announced their new album, "Can We Please Have Fun," will drop on May 10. (Pitchfork)
Netflix released the official trailer for Guy Ritchie's upcoming gangster romp, "The Gentlemen." (YouTube)
The reviews for Netflix's live-action "Avatar: The Last Airbender" are out and are mixed, with critics much harsher than the audience. (Rotten Tomatoes)

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. You can follow us on Instagram, Threads, and LinkedIn. We will see you back in your inbox next week.

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