The company had an ambitious goal: To do for tech news coverage what Politico had done for politics coverage a decade earlier.
July 09, 2020

Protocol had an ambitious goal: To do for tech news coverage what Politico had done for politics coverage a decade earlier. But just a few months after its launch, the company laid off 13 employees across the editorial and business sides, reducing the newsroom size by about half. Four of those forced out were people of color, leaving the already non-diverse Protocol almost entirely white. More than a dozen current and former Protocol staffers and people familiar with its leadership paint a picture of an ambitious operation full of early struggles, in part due to coronavirus but also of the company’s own making. Read more below.

  • Inside the Allbritton empire, some have been openly wondering just how much runway will be extended to Protocol by the largely easygoing magnate.
  • The overall goals of civil rights advocates organizing the Facebook boycott differ slightly from those of advertisers. While everyone wants hate speech to be purged from the platform, advertisers also want a lot more control of their relationship with the social giant.
  • Pernod Ricard may have pulled its media dollars from Facebook for the month of July, but U.S. CEO Ann Mukherjee doesn’t think a boycott will be enough to push the social network to make any lasting change to how it moderates content.
Other things to know about
  • ICYMI: On a recent episode of The New Normal, Gina Joseph, VentureBeat’s vp of strategic partnerships, discussed their quick pivot to virtual events, including how the value of the event goes up when hosting it online. Watch the on-demand recording and view a breakdown of the key takeaways here.
  • According to new findings, linear TV’s impressions are at least 8 times higher than those of ad-supported OTT. Increasingly, advertisers are using data and analytics to properly allocate spend across the two platforms. Sponsored by Simulmedia.
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