ME: who called em fish boobs instead of shark hooteries WIFE: no one. no one ever says any of those things

It’s pretty damn funny that the White House has taken over the official DOJ Twitter account just to do real time crisis comms over the Epstein files that are only being released because the current leadership at the DOJ and FBI spent years amplifying every conspiracy related to Epstein.

still amazing to me that one of the few places you can find left leaning compelling video content is tiktok and a *democratic* administration effectively tried to shut it down. so dumb. so, so dumb.

After what we're seeing at CBS, if today is not the perfect day for everyone to find some independent journalism & nonprofit newsrooms to support... what day could be better?

Putting a power parched non journalist — who has zero experience in investigative reporting — in charge of real reporters usually ends like this: ‘60 Minutes’ Pulled a Segment. A Correspondent Calls It ‘Political.’ www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/b...

One thing I’ll just truly never understand is why Tesla shareholders treat it like virtually no other company in existence.

Bluesky’s leadership won’t fix this and the platform’s other myriad problems because it’s too obsessed with recreating Twitter circa 2014 and not building a modern day social network.

As someone who uses white noise YouTube channels a lot for when I'm trying to drown out outside distractions and concentrate on work, I was fascinated with Hank Green's breakdown of how much revenue these videos generate. Because a white noise channel can't have lots of midroll ad breaks -- that wo

I've never understood why Netflix hasn't been willing to just toss filmmakers a bone and give them a 30-day theatrical release. It would not only create an additional revenue stream, but there's data to suggest the buzz around a theatrical release actually drives streaming viewership. Even more imp

This is probably the right move. I've stumbled upon these fake trailers and it's pretty clear that they're deliberately trying to mislead people into thinking their real trailers. deadline.com/2025/12/yout...

If you’re a runner in DC, every six months or so you think, “Why don’t I run on the National Mall more?” And then you hit your first wall of tourists and you’re like, “Oh right, that’s why.”

It doesn’t surprise me that audio podcast ads tend to generate more engagement than YouTube podcast ads. When someone listens to the audio version of a podcast, it’s usually because they intentionally sought it out and subscribed. YouTube viewing, by contrast, is far more algorithmically driven, whi

This is the perfect example of platform enshittification. It's not enough that you content viewing is constantly being interrupted by advertising -- now you have to be bombarded with ads the moment you open the app. There really is very little innovation in legacy media in terms of making better pr

Bari Weiss's I'm-a-heterodox-liberal-who-just-happens-to-only-make-content-that-appeals-to-conservatives schtick is one of the most remarkable and successful media marketing strategies of the 21st century thus far.

This is a pretty fascinating look at all the marketing strategies musicians use to boost their streaming numbers, especially on Spotify. Even if you have a large social media following, simply announcing a new album won’t drive many streams, especially since those kinds of posts often get buried by

I can’t think of a greater symbol for the decline of traditional Hollywood than its preeminent awards show moving to YouTube. www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general...

These Netflix podcast deals seem pretty sweet for the podcasters. They get to maintain complete control over their audio feeds and even continue doing the sponsored ad reads in the video version. The full episodes are taken off YouTube, sure, but they still get to distribute clips there, and the f

Wow, can you believe the FUCKING GALL of this? For the past 20 years, brands and creators have put untold billions of hours of free labor into creating free content for Meta under the guise that at least they get some marketing and distribution out of the effort, only for that company to turn around

Kyiv Independent COO Zakhar Protsiuk explained how the outlet launched a Guardian-style membership offering without a paywall. simonowens.substack.com/p/how-the-ky...

I will go to my grave believing Elon Musk committed genocide and is one of the worst human beings in the history of our species. He'll ultimately be responsible for more deaths than pretty much anyone other than the great monsters like Hitler and Mao.

Traditional publishers and brands are quickly realizing that Substack isn't just a newsletter platform; it's a centralized distribution network, similar to other sites like Instagram, Reddit, and Twitter. But unlike those others, it also allows users to collect email addresses that can then be porte

I mostly agree with this thesis that a major reason that so much of legacy media has struggled financially over the past 20 years is that its leaders ascribed too much value to content while undervaluing user experience. I can't tell you how many times I've been flabbergasted by just how difficult i

I’m not surprised that Instagram is launching a TV streaming app—it can’t ignore the fact that YouTube dominates TV screens—but it’s hard to see why many Instagram users would want to watch its content on a television. Instagram video is optimized for vertical, smartphone-first viewing, and it’s bui

It's interesting that Netflix's video podcast push doesn't involve going after individual podcast stars -- in other words, it's not trying to discover the next Joe Rogan or Alex Cooper -- but it's instead signing deals with large audio podcast networks to basically just license their already-existi

I will share 50% of the revenue with anyone who sells ads on my newsletter/podcast. Right now, I sell very little advertising simply because I don’t have the time to do cold outreach to potential sponsors.

This is horrible. Trump and his crew shut down USAID, which has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and they had no idea what they were doing or what would be the consequences. Completely immoral. (From the VF story on Susan Wiles.) www.vanityfair.com/news/story/t...

The problem with David Ellison's strategy of going to shareholders to overturn the Netflix deal is that at least some percentage of shareholders are going to want to see him fail simply because of his close relationship to Donald Trump. Even if it's a small minority of shareholders who feel this way

god, bluesky is such a fucking joke

When a company is looking to save money with AI, the first role they often consider eliminating is the copywriter. While copywriters still produce superior work product, many companies simply make the bet that AI is "good enough." Freelancers have watched their work dry up, and what clients have stu

It's kind of ironic that HBO was one of the longest holdouts in terms of keeping its shows off of Netflix, and now Netflix will end up just owning the entire studio. While very few people are ever excited about media consolidation, Netflix's enormous distribution powers will no-doubt super charge WB

Netflix has thus far resisted theatrical distribution for most of its movies, but now that it has its own dedicated event spaces I could see it using them not only for movie premiers, but also to debut new seasons of its hit TV series. You could easily imagine a scenario of it sending an email infor

Every few months I stumble across a random YouTuber who has incredible filmmaking skills and not a huge following. I love when that happens. youtu.be/-Bx9jMmcRHU?...

6AM City co-founder Ryan Heafy insists he's not trying to replace human journalists. simonowens.substack.com/p/how-a-loca...

Fuck no. I've always been appalled by this practice.

Substack is best known for its subscription model, but many fashion influencers are now moving their Instagram followers to Substack so they can monetize more effectively through affiliate links. Part of this shift is about diversifying their audiences, but it’s also driven by frustration with Insta

Yikes! When I read earlier today that the Washington Post was rolling out AI-generated podcasts, I assumed it was just producing audio versions of its articles, but it turns out that it was just letting the AI go hog wild in summarizing Post content, which of course meant the AI was inserting unchec

I'm always amazed by how lazy the people behind AI slop businesses are. Like they couldn't take the extra two minutes before hitting publish on each article to read it over and at least make sure it doesn't make obvious references to the chatbot queries? pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/r...

I feel like I haven't read much coverage on how YouTubers leverage the platform's internal membership tool that allows a creator to lock selected videos behind a paywall. This piece about a financial advice podcaster reveals he has between 60,000 and 70,000 members paying $10 a m

This deal with Open AI is not all that different from Disney turning its IP into video games: it gives fans a way to control the characters and create their own stories within a familiar franchise. The difference with Sora is that it lets people generate far more scenarios than a video game ever cou

I think it's safe to say at this point that Neal Mohan is the most powerful person in media. There's been a lot of coverage recently about YouTube's dominance on connected TV's, but I also think the success of YouTube Shorts is a significant story as well -- it ensures that YouTu

Oh joy, TIME magazine has a floating AI chatbot that covers up the text I’m trying read and you can’t get to go away. Now this is true innovation!

For any publisher looking to experiment in AI, using it to generate audio versions of articles is the low-hanging fruit that will probably give you the highest ROI. Not only does AI do a fairly good job of mimicking human speech, but audiences do seem to get genuine value out of audio formats. It al

Bluesky continues to suck ass because it enforces strict charact limits, which then forces its users to break up longer posts into unreadable tweet threads. Why the fuck are we still doing this in 2025?

Too many publishers focus on increasing their audience size instead of developing strategies for keeping their audiences on their channels just a little while longer. A user who clicks on three articles is worth so much more than someone who clicks on just one article -- not only does it drive more

I think it's probably too early to judge Bari Weiss's performance as the head of CBS News, but so far her moves have mostly amounted to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Reversing the outlet's decline will require a lot more than simply swapping in new on-air anchors and tweaking the progr

I've long wondered why the book industry hasn't experimented much with advertising revenue models. Now, some self-published authors are serializing their audiobooks on YouTube, generating money through both YouTube's ad revenue share and by locking new chapters behind a membership paywall. These cha

If you want to know what will be possible on YouTube a half decade from now, look at the TV-like drama series that are starting to pop up. They're still fairly low-brow and geared toward kids, but it's possible to imagine how this type of content will eventually evolve into prestige TV.

I continue to be extremely skeptical that there’s any consumer appetite for website-specific chatbots. Why would I ask a question to a chatbot run by, say, USA Today when I could just go to my general chatbot of choice — whether that’s ChatGPT, Gemini, or some other? Why limit yourself to one news o

This is a fun story about a college student who grew frustrated by the lack of engagement his school newspaper was getting and, in response, launched a curated newsletter that quickly took off, ultimately growing to more than 10,000 subscribers after he began breaking news about staff layoffs at the

It seems pretty clear at this point that David Ellison is just playing with his daddy's monopoly money and has lost all grasp of the underlying business fundamentals of media. Netflix has such a huge distribution platform that it's easy to imagine how it could enhance the value of WBD's huge library