Politico / Steven Waldman
There’s already a solution to the crisis of local news. Just ask this founding father. →James Madison: “Whatever facilitates a general intercourse of sentiments, as good roads, domestic commerce, a free press, and particularly a circulation of newspapers through the entire body of the people, and Representatives going from, and returning among every part of them, is equivalent to a contraction of territorial limits, and is favorable to liberty.”
All Access / Perry Michael Simon
The New York Times / Lydia DePillis
Local TV news is at center of the fight over noncompete clauses →“‘The vast majority of people who work in this country, if they find themselves in a bad situation and they don’t like it, they have options to leave, and they don’t have to move,’ said Rick Carr, an agent who represents broadcast workers. ‘And TV doesn’t allow that.'”
Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism / Maurice Oniang'o
Financial Times / Anna Nicolaou
Is “Succession” the end of Peak TV? →“With Wall Street cheering them on, America’s largest studios threw tens of billions of dollars towards producing new shows and movies in a land-grab for streaming subscribers. It was halcyon days for any half-decent script idea, and allowed consumers to enjoy more television than ever before at a fraction of the costs of traditional TV. That extravagance came to an abrupt stop last year, seemingly in lockstep with the beginning of the US Federal Reserve bank’s most aggressive streak of rate rises in decades.”
Bloomberg / Ashley Carman
Tensions flare inside NPR after staff layoffs and town halls →Executives said NPR had “stopped production on the seasonal podcasts because they weren’t generating enough revenue to justify their limited production. People I spoke with noted this feedback had never been shared with the editorial teams prior to that moment.”
The Washington Post / Mike Hume
Looking back at Launcher, The Washington Post’s just-closed gaming vertical →“Start with the definition of a ‘gamer.’ A gamer is anyone who plays video games. Full stop. There are no other conclusions to be drawn about their social habits, profession, culinary tastes, education level, anything. Gaming is one aspect of a person’s life. We wouldn’t regard ‘TV viewers’ as some kind of monolith. Why do so with games?”
The Guardian / Nadeem Badshah
The New York Times / Maya Salam
Why the interview questions on “Hot Ones” are so good →“If you’ve pictured [host Sean] Evans going into hiding for a week before each interview to consume every part of his upcoming guest’s career, you wouldn’t be wrong. But he also gets a lot of help from his brother, Gavin Evans, the show’s researcher, who compiles a dossier on each celebrity that might be 50 pages long — no magazine profile, podcast interview, IMDb entry, Wikipedia page or archived local news story is left unplumbed.”
NBC News / Dareh Gregorian and Jane C. Timm
The New York Times / Michael Crowley, Ivan Nechepurenko, and Anton Troianovski
The Verge / Mitchell Clark
Press Gazette / Charlotte Tobitt
The U.K. site Gal-dem closes after eight years →“Gal-dem, an online magazine brand staffed by and telling the stories of women and non-binary people of colour…told readers on Friday afternoon that ‘continuing to operate as a business is unfortunately no longer feasible.'”