HOUSE OF DYNAMITE was actually quite good, though flawed in the way it was told.

The guy who just received a $1 trillion pay package committed genocide.

So many sports media outlets have staked their entire future on converting their audiences into gambling addicts. It makes you wonder whether, a decade from now, we’ll look back on ESPN the same way we look at cigarette companies or the Sackler family. defector.com/espn-will-no...

Zohran Mamdani's didn't just create incredibly good online content that allowed the candidate to communicate directly with voters; he also inspired a wide range of fan content made by people who had no formal relationship with the campaign. "This form of participatory online fan

A lot of people think his name is Igor, but in the book he’s called Frankenstein’s chief of staff

Is Spotify still launching/acquiring/licensing podcasts? I’m struggling to remember its last major podcasting deal it announced.

It's kind of funny to think back to the music streaming landscape just five years ago. Back then, if you asked anyone who Spotify's biggest competitor was, they'd say Apple Music. Now, Spotify has pretty much left all the other major music streamers in the dust, and its sole comp

Elon Musk is currently raising money for xAI at a $200 billion valuation.

Now that Netflix is finally revving up its video podcast deal machine, it'll be interesting to see whether its contracts allow for the podcasters to continue posting their shows to YouTube. Other podcast companies, most notably Spotify, gave up on forcing platform exclusivity yea

I can't remember the last time I actually wanted to see a biopic.

I think the biggest problem facing many major media companies today is that their leaders aren’t focused on long-term growth — they’re instead focused on positioning the company for a sale, whether to a private equity firm or a larger media conglomerate. There’s no reason MSNBC c

The New York Times is continuing to add more subscribers in a single quarter than 99% of news publishers have in total. www.nytimes.com/2025/11/05/b...

I love it how every time the Democrats lose the White House there are all these panicked stories about how their support is eroding with key demographics, and then the next election cycle happens and it turns out once again that Americans simply have the memories of goldfish.

Second major plane crash during Trump's administration after over a decade of no such crashes.

An ESPN employee was laid off and had two years left on his contract where he couldn’t work for anyone else. He basically used that time to level up his video production skills, and then once the contract was up he poured himself into creating sports video essays on YouTube. Seven months later, he’s

lol. The entire business case for why AT&T acquired Warner Media in the first place was that it would be able to leverage the combined data of its telecom customers and media customers to drive all sorts of synergies. Can someone remind me how that worked out?

I feel like every three months for the past 10 years there's been a story about some new bubble Michael Burry has identified, and then there's no follow-up on whether his bet was correct. Don't get me wrong, I do think we're in an AI bubble, but I don't put much stock in Burry's predictions.

I just fundamentally don't believe a media company can consolidate its way to success. There's just not enough user lock-in, not when the Creator Economy is pumping out millions of hours of free content every day. The only truly differentiated media conte variety.com/2025/film/fe...

I've always thought Famous Birthdays was super smart in how it identified an information vacuum and then did an excellent job filling it. Basically, there are tons of social media influencers who are fairly famous -- in that they have millions of followers -- but don't meet the notability requireme

Media executives have seemed oddly obsessed recently with spinning out media outlets into separate companies -- both WBD and NBCU are spinning out their cable channels, for instance -- and I just don't get it. Wouldn't the distribution of Vox Media's publishing arm help Vox Media's podcasts grow th

I could never be a fitness influencer because I’d be too embarrassed to set up a tripod at the gym.

Tesla has racked up nothing but Ls for the past year, and yet its stock price is still up over that time period. Perfect poster child for how dumb the stock market is.

Microdramas are already an $11 billion industry, and while much of that revenue comes from China, these vertical video series will generate over $800 million in other countries this year. The companies behind microdramas are now spending big on social media advertising, running clips and trailers on

Taylor Sheridan doesn't just produce some of Paramount+'s most popular shows, he's one of the platform's main customer acquisition drivers, with data showing his shows collectively drive millions of paid subscription signups. He's locked into his contract until January 1, 2029, and David Ellison has

As an elder millennial, one thing I’ll never understand the appeal of is livestreaming. Every time I read a profile of a huge Twitch streamer I’ll go over to watch a few minutes of their stream and I’m just instantly bored, especially if all they do is play video games.

Caught the first episode of DAY OF THE JACKAL on Peacock. I like shows that depict extremely competent people behaving competently at their jobs. So far, it’s enjoyable despite its well-tread plot of MI6-agent-pursues-high-paid-assassin-who-operates-in-the-shadows.

It seems notable that one of the most popular podcasts has switched its ad representation from a company primarily associated with audio to one that's primarily associated with video. Pretty soon we're going to start thinking of podcasts as TV shows that also just happen to have audio-only versions

Traditionally, how much a streamer pays to license a movie is determined by its box office performance, but some of the best-performing movies on streaming in recent years were box office duds. Some studios like Sony are contemplating changing up the way they negotiate streaming rights, with a new e

As we're remembering that Dick Cheney killed a million Iraqis, remember that the death toll from cutting USAID funding will be still larger than that. www.npr.org/sections/goa...

Nielsen has had a 70-year monopoly on measuring TV ratings, but networks have long complained of its inconsistent data, especially when it comes to measuring niche audiences. Now, a bunch of competitors are trying to convince advertisers to switch over to their own proprietary platforms, the largest

Kamala Harris has an opportunity to do the funniest thing

This is how bad the Democratic text spam has gotten: I’m now getting random texts from candidates running for something called a “county board” and they don’t even tell me which county. Never donating to a candidate again.

Why does this keep happening to me? This article that was supposed to top out at 5,000 words is showing no signs of slowing down.

40 ACRES streaming on Hulu … very solid film.

That feeling when you start reading a reply to your newsletter and it seems like they’re about to say something mean but they say something nice instead.

Kind of amazing how casually it's mentioned now in news articles that a company's acquisition is likely or unlikely to get approved based entirely on whether the US President personally likes it. This is why the Republicans have succeeded in moving the Overton Window by so much over the past decade.

I know private company valuations are kind of meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but I still think it's notable that what started out as a video podcast is now valued above $400 million. From the press release, it seems like Steven Bartlett is positioning his podcast as merely a launching pa

"Very few publishers are willing to take on distribution themselves—it’s tedious, complex, and a bigger investment. Almost everyone chooses to contract with an existing distributor. And if you’re unfortunate enough to sign on with a weak or failing one, it can be fatal."

A former Navy SEAL has grown a massive fanbase for his novels, which are known for describing modern warfare in excruciatingly minute detail. A substantial portion of his readers are veterans themselves, and multiple books have been adapted into a TV series starring Chris Pratt.

A new kind of AI slop is proliferating on YouTube. Creators are noticing some of their most popular videos have been recreated on a shot-by-shot basis, with their faces and voices swapped out with AI avatars. It's clear the people behind these channels believe they're avoiding copyright infringement

Ed Zitron is one of the tech industry’s most outspoken critics, known for his popular newsletter that frequently takes aim at AI companies and their founders. At the same time, he runs a PR agency whose clients are mostly tech firms. From the outside, it’s difficult to see how he reconciles those t

The New Yorker journalist Isaac Chotiner specializes in lengthy Q&As and has become known for his contentious interviews where he confronts his subjects with their own inconsistencies and logical fallacies. Other journalists wonder why famous people agree to sit down with him given the high likelih

I think this is a bit of a straw man argument. While I agree that subscription-funded newsletters won't single handedly "save" the media industry, I do think they're helping to cushion the blow as legacy media contracts. And while most creators won't be able to generate full-time incomes from their

It seems like Vogue has given up on being a mass market media brand and instead is doubling down on bespoke, invite-only events that showcase its cultural influence. The hope here is that upscale brands will continue to want to tap into that influence, even while the magazine's overall reach is shri

It seems pretty clear that David Ellison's main strategy is spending tens of billions of dollars of his dad's money to gobble up every available media company and just hope that this mountain of IP will make the combined Skyedance-Paramount-WBD behemoth more competitive against the Netflixes and You

The biggest YouTubers are devoting significant budgets toward paying social media "clippers" who are responsible for chopping up longform videos into viral-ready clips made for Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts. Rather than charging a flat fee, these clippers are often paid based on their view c

Taylor Sheridan not only churned out hit after hit for Paramount, he also became one of the few showrunners whose name alone could drive buzz around a new series. Despite this success, industry analysts are divided over whether it's a huge loss for Paramount that he defected to NBCU given that the f

A leftist podcast that originally launched to cover the Epstein case now generates over $182,000 a month on Patreon. They're known by their fans for going deep on issues, releasing multi-part series on topics ranging from Tesla to obscure cults. www.gq.com/story/truean...

Nicholas Thompson, the CEO of the Atlantic, is one of the fastest ultra-marathoners in the world. He wrote a wonderful essay about how running has served as a stabilizing force in both his career and family life by teaching him the benefits of slow and steady progress.

In the 2010s, rightwing media pundits like Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk realized they could create viral video clips by selectively editing debates with liberal opponents -- many of whom were college students and other unknown figures. Now, some liberal pundits are embracing similar strategies, stag