“The communications researcher Pablo Boczkowski has noted that people increasingly take in news by incidental encounter—they are ‘rubbed by the news’—rather than by seeking it out. Trump has maximized his influence over networks that people rub against, and has filled them with information that, true or not, seems all of a coherent piece.”

“It was when Serrano’s trainer, Jordan Maldonado, uttered the hilarious line ‘Katie is a beautiful person, but has an extremely huge head’ that my feed really started to come alive.”

“While the Dotdash Meredith tie-up has been widely reported, the size of the payment has not. In fact, with the exception of News Corp., which is receiving up to $250 million over five years for use of its content, OpenAI has kept hidden the financial details of its publisher partnerships.”

“Morse has doubled down on print, for the moment. To advertise the Journal-Constitution’s coverage and its revived ambitions, it’s offered for free at stores in the Georgia cities of Athens, Macon and Savannah — all places where the local papers have declined in staffing, circulation and breadth of coverage.” (See our coverage of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s ambitious growth goals here.)

“To be as clear as I can be, the second Trump administration with Elon Musk embedded within it represents the most direct and sustained threat to the First Amendment and the freedom of the press any of us will ever experience. If you’re a media executive or editorial leader and you haven’t met with your legal team to understand the current landscape of First Amendment threats, let alone the ones to come, you’re already behind. Get on it.”

“The AP is approaching 121 eligible employees with buyout offers, but the organization will also eliminate some positions across the organization.”

“I have over 50,000 readers. I would say over 10% of those readers are paid. And then on top of my subscription business, I sell ads on my newsletter. Somebody asked me the other day, is that just a nice cherry on top? And I said, that would be an awfully large cherry. My ads have been some of my top-performing posts, from engagement standpoint and traffic standpoint.”

“A federal bankruptcy judge has paused the Onion’s acquisition of Alex Jones’s Infowars pending a court review of the auction process, after lawyers for Jones and the company affiliated with him complained about how the auction was conducted and how their $3.5 million bid was handled.” (Read our coverage of the acquisition here.)

Substack’s “four-million-strong paid digital subscription base exceeds that of influential publications like The Washington Post, The Atlantic and The New Yorker. But Substack, which brings in money by taking a 10 percent cut of each publisher’s earnings, generates less revenue per customer than those publications.”

“While I expect the leading conservative news brands and stars, like Fox News, the Washington Examiner, the National Review, Ann Coulter, and Tucker Carlson to continue to unofficially govern and shape right-wing political discussion and news coverage, several lesser-known players and outlets are poised to raise their profiles.”

“At the end of last year, we bought Electo Analytics, a congressional data startup. We then redesigned the entire platform, using our deep knowledge of what Capitol Hill and K Street need every single day. This became The Portal, which will include integrated news, congressional directories, legislative text, regulations, real-time alerts and much more. The Portal members will also receive a weekly Monday newsletter and a mid-week update to keep them ahead of the game when it comes to legislative news.”