Washington Post / Jeff Stein, Drew Harwell, and Jacob Bogage
The New Republic / Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling
Alex Jones’s media empire is literally being auctioned out from under him →“On Tuesday, the virulent conspiracy theorist — who lost a $1.5 billion case for claiming that the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre that claimed the lives of 20 first graders and six adults was a hoax — announced that his right-wing media empire, InfoWars, was being staged for a federal auction.”
The Guardian / Angelique Chrisafis
French news titles sue X over allegedly running their content without payment →“The joint action against the company run by the US billionaire Elon Musk is being led by several daily newspapers – Le Figaro, Les Echos, Le Parisien and Le Monde…France has been fighting for years to protect the publishing rights and revenue of its press and news agencies against what it terms the domination of powerful tech companies that share news content or show news stories in web searches.”
Semafor / Max Tani and David Weigel
The old media grapples with its new limits →“Trump’s victory isn’t a result of a failure by news outlets to sufficiently hold him accountable. The real answer is one that is a lot more uncomfortable to grapple with: The national news media is more limited in its reach and influence than ever in the modern era…The coverage itself is also likely to change as legacy news organizations end internal arguments about ‘normalizing’ Trump, and acknowledge that his victories were not a fluke but a sign of a political realignment in America.”
Aftermath / Luke Plunkett
G/O media cuts Kotaku to the bone as more writers are laid off →“G/O Media’s management is once again punishing workers for its own bad decisions”, Managing Editor Carolyn Petit wrote on Bluesky. “Management mandated that some writers stick to ‘service’ posts, and now that the numbers aren’t panning out (surprise, surprise!), two of those writers have been laid off. Cruel and misguided.”
The New York Times / Benjamin Mullin
Nicholas Carlson is starting a video-oriented media company →“The new company, Dynamo, is betting big on the growing popularity of video on platforms such as YouTube, TikTok and LinkedIn. It will produce ‘cinematic’ video stories for those platforms, Mr. Carlson [a former top editor at Business Insider] said, focusing on business journalism for a core group of strivers that he calls ‘dynamos’…he is quick to assert that his new company has more in common with Mr. Beast, the mega-popular YouTube star, than it does with Facebook Watch, a video service that was shuttered after struggling for years.”