The WNBA's rise has been fueled as much by a love for hoops as for the politics of it all. The league is obviously predominated by women who are black or queer or both and who are also really politically outspoken and all of that helped draw in lots of new liberal fans. But it also helped make the W a target of conservatives and the volume of that tension has really ratcheted up this year.
The answer engines are giving the answers and people aren't following the footnotes. You're actually trusting that AI systems are giving you the right answer, and that's destroying media. Across the board, we're seeing reported numbers of between a 90 and 30 percent decline in the traffic to their sites.
The answer engines are giving the answers and people aren't following the footnotes. And this was 18 months ago. What's happened since, has it gotten better or worse? Do you trust AI more today than you did 18 months ago? The answer is most people do, and as a result, it's actually gotten twice as hard to get traffic to content that's there. You're not following the footnotes anymore. You're actually trusting that AI systems are giving you the right answer, and that's destroying media.
What is it with OpenAI? 750 times harder. What is it with Anthropic? 32,000 times harder. The answer engines are giving the answers and people aren't following the footnotes.
Disney animation, once the shining pillar of the American can do spirit and the core of Disney's beautiful flywheel business model, has become a rotting carcass of its former self.
It's a family-friendly audiovisual spectacle like an elaborate 4th of July fireworks display with about the same level of narrative and emotional depth.
It felt like we as a culture were finally on the same page. In fact, it felt like a return to monoculture. The idea of having a shared understanding and experience of culture with common reference points, values, and opportunities to connect. But if we're all in this together for the good, we're definitely all in this together for the bad.
the stars of today are going from making media to making products of their own. Not all of them can do it, so I wanted to know how Raina and Ali help their clients make the jump and what makes them successful at it.
The bloggers at the time were people who were building these communities directly with their audience. I'd come from fashion and marketing and I was used to the top-down relationship with the consumer, and it was so exciting to see at the time all these street style women who were building this relationship with their audience and who were essentially the next generation of editors and the next generation of media properties and they just didn't know it yet.
On the winding canals in the hidden parts of Venice, we learn about the nearly 1000-year old tradition of the Venetian Gondolier, and how the global media created a 20-year battle between that tradition and a supposed feminist icon.
We have digital content that has never been made physical. And often these things are, you know, behind streaming services and, you know, other kinds of platforms, these proprietary platforms, and we subscribe to access them, but we don't actually own them. And so when those things go away, we lose access to that.
Now sports fans at the tip of their fingers through their phones can bet on pretty much anything as it relates to professional sports, college sports, and has driven a lot of money into the sports industry. It has changed the way sports is broadcasted, the way we watch it, and ultimately how fans behave.
I can't figure out any strategy other than the Ellisons are either themselves very politically motivated to change the tone and tenor of CBS and 60 or they see more money incurring favor with the Trump administration who seems to be — I've heard — was incandescently enraged by the interview with Marjorie Taylor Green.
Their approach of trying to disrupt it from a position of strength doesn't make any sense. They're basically trying to perform open heart surgery on the healthiest person, you know, in the franchise. For 50 consecutive seasons, 60 has been the number one rated news program and garnering about 9 million viewers.
It doesn't even have to necessarily be made by millennials but was clearly made for millennials as a part of the youth culture and would stick out like a sore thumb for any generation coming after that would be like, "Oh, what what is this?"
Its biggest-ever size, of course, at nearly $2 trillion dollars. But also because all kinds of rules that keep our markets fair are being bent, if not outright broken, along the way.
Media rights fees are no longer built on ratings. They're built on subscriptions. And subscriptions are based off of churn, retention, and new subscriptions.
The creator and influencer economy works very differently than journalism does. If you take a high-level look at the business of most creators, they all kind of look like little ad agencies, doing brand deals and negotiating rates in a way that has always felt incompatible with journalism, at least to me.
You know, when I came up, I could watch a show like Johnny Carson or Merv Griffin. And for weeks at a time, maybe never see a minority perform. And, you know, they're out there. So my dream was to one day grow up and show the other side of show business.
There were so many things I loved about working at the Wall Street Journal and there were so many things that I thought I'm never going to be able to leave this. But then there were so many things that I also saw happening in media, you know, places like you guys uh included that I was jealous of.
In the media space, I would say the biggest northstar that we have is we're trying to effectively constrain the power of the large national programmers while empowering local TV stations.
You sound smarter when you catastrophize. It sounds scarier and more interesting. And you put some bar charts around you talking about the zombie apocalypse in a downward spiral doom loop.
Formula 1 is the world's premier motorsports series. And shockingly to me as an American, it is actually the world's most popular annual sporting series with 827 million viewers.
The story of Warner Brothers is a recurring masterclass in ego-cosplaying corporate synergy. The company has undergone seven sales, mergers, or structural separations since 1967. The script remains the same. A new CEO decides Warner Brothers is the missing piece of their legacy, only to find they've partnered with a high-maintenance spouse who, after several years, leaves with half of everything the acquiring company used to own.
6mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
