New York / Charlotte Klein
It’s a good time to be The Bulwark →“The Bulwark had its first profitable year in 2024 owing to a combination of paid Substack subscribers, podcast advertising, and YouTube monetization. The Substack, which currently has 76,000 paid subscribers, continues to grow at a rapid clip…Meanwhile, the company’s investment in YouTube content has paid off, bringing in between $150,000 to $300,000 a month.”
Press Gazette / Charlotte Tobitt
At Le Monde, digital subscriber revenue will pay for the newsroom within two years →“The French daily newspaper and online newsbrand ended 2024 with 660,000 subscribers, of which 580,000 were digital…it has in the past two years put effort into international English-language expansion which [CEO Louis] Dreyfus told Press Gazette has reached 12,000 subscribers…Dreyfus told Press Gazette that when he joined Le Monde 14 years ago, it had 310 staff journalists and that today it has more than 560.”
Press Gazette / Dominic Ponsford
The Washington Post / Annabelle Timsit
CBS releases Harris interview materials amid Trump, FCC pressure →“Robert Jensen, an emeritus professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, told The Post…that Trump’s lawsuit was ‘an attempt to undermine the credibility of not only Harris and not only of CBS News, but of all traditional mainstream legacy media.'”
Columbia Journalism Review / Barbara Starr
The reshuffling of the Pentagon press corps is a warning →“According to the memo, The New York Times, NBC, NPR, and Politico are all being evicted from their dedicated workspaces inside the Pentagon’s ‘correspondents’ corridor.’ In their place will be three reliably conservative outlets — Breitbart News, One America News Network, and the New York Post — as well as the liberal HuffPost. (A spokesperson for HuffPost, which does not have a dedicated Pentagon reporter and did not request to be added, told NBC News that the publication is prepared to deliver ‘hard-hitting coverage.’)”
The Washington Post / Jeremy Barr
Presidential daughter-in-law Lara Trump will have her own show in Fox News →“The show, which will debut Feb. 22, will ‘focus on the return of common sense to all corners of American life’ and ‘will feature big picture analysis and interviews with thought leaders,’ according to a press release issued by the network. No family member this close to a sitting president has simultaneously hosted a cable TV news show.”
Press Gazette / Bron Maher
Nearly a third of all New York Times subscribers don’t pay for its news product →“Of those 10.8 million subscribers, 3.5 million (or 32%) subscribed only to either its Games, Cooking, Wirecutter, Audio or The Athletic products. Another 1.9 million had a conventional news-only digital subscription that provides access past the nytimes.com paywall and a further 5.4 million had either an ‘All Access’ bundled subscription, which buys access to all the Times’ products, or some other mix of NYT subscriptions.”
The Wall Street Journal / Melissa Korn and Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg
The war over what makes for “harmful” reading material is heating up →“A group of major U.S. publishers, along with authors, parents, teachers and a public library, are now suing [Idaho] to try to reverse the purge — which has included ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ and ‘The Perks of Being a Wallflower,’ among others — and overturn the law, known as HB 710.”
The Verge / Jess Weatherbed
Google is the latest AI maker to add “reasoning” to its models →“Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking will be available in the model dropdown options on the desktop and mobile app starting today, alongside another, more agentic, version of the model that can ‘interact with apps like YouTube, Search, and Google Maps,’ according to Google. It was introduced in December 2024 and is expected to compete with other so-called reasoning Al models like OpenAl’s 01 and DeepSeek’s R1.”
The Wall Street Journal / Suzanne Vranica and Jessica Toonkel
Press Gazette / Charlotte Tobitt