Meta is preparing to block news for some Canadians on Facebook and Instagram in a temporary test that is expected to last the majority of the month. The Silicon Valley tech giant is following in the steps of Google, which blocked news links for about five weeks earlier this year for some of its Canadian users in response to a controversial Liberal government bill. Bill C-18, which is currently being studied in the Senate, will require tech giants to pay publishers for linking to or otherwise repurposing their content online.
Facebook parent company Meta is threatening to remove news content on its platforms Instagram and Facebook in California if the state legislature passes a new proposal that would make tech companies pay publishers for news content. “If the Journalism Preservation Act passes, we will be forced to remove news from Facebook and Instagram rather than pay into a slush fund that primarily benefits big, out-of-state media companies under the guise of aiding California publishers,” reads a statement posted to Twitter by Meta spokesperson Andy Stone.
Bret Baier, chief political anchor at Fox News Channel, will moderate the third installment of The Senate Project series, which features senators from different ends of the political spectrum debating key issues. Sens. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) are featured. It takes place Monday, June 12, at 11 a.m. ET at the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate in Boston. The event will run live, commercial-free on Fox Nation and will air on Fox News Channel Sunday, June 18, at 10 p.m. ET.
CNN will shift the bulk of its operations behind its Spanish-language efforts to Mexico City, scaling back production of content for linear television in favor of work aimed at reaching a younger audience that favors mobile video. The move is likely to mean the elimination of jobs in Miami and Atlanta, but will also result in a ramp-up of jobs in Mexico and Los Angeles, where CNN will aim to add more than staffers, according to a person familiar with the plans, which were disclosed to employees Thursday afternoon.
The media start-up’s new backers include Henry Kravis, a founder of the private-equity giant KKR, and Jerry Yang, a Yahoo founder.
The company’s high-volume approach to digital publishing has led to duplicated stories and alienated some of its journalists. At least one editor has already resigned.
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The findings in two new reports raise fresh concerns over how artificial intelligence may transform the misinformation landscape online.
Just weeks after benchmarking the number of AI-generated news and information sites at 49, NewsGuard has updated the figure to 125 — a 155% increase, according to a new report published by the news and information ratings service. “The number of AI-generated content farms continues to proliferate,” NewsGuard states, adding a new classification of “unreliable AI-generated news site,” or UAIN to the lexicon of questionable news and information content being tracked by the service.
Kyle Rogers, news director of Gray Television’s Local News Live, explains how the streaming news service has upped its game and its polish since its relocation to Washington, D.C., and settling into a more conventionally anchored approach to stitching together local reports from around the U.S. A full transcript of the conversation is included.
Vice Media Group, popular for websites such as Vice and Motherboard, filed for bankruptcy protection on Monday to engineer its sale to a group of lenders, capping years of financial difficulties and top-executive departures. Vice said that the lender consortium, which includes Fortress Investment Group, Soros Fund Management and Monroe Capital, will provide about $225 million in the form of a credit bid for substantially all of the company’s assets and also assume significant liabilities at closing.
Amid continued erosion of the cable bundle (and therefore the reach of cable news channels), NBC News is embarking on a fresh pitch for its NBC News Now streaming offering. The free, ad-supported streaming service (which the company says is profitable) launched four years ago, but NBC News EVP Janelle Rodriguez, who oversees News Now, thinks there is more to do. “We want to keep reintroducing ourselves to new audiences who are seeking out that kind of 24-hour news accessibility,” she says.
Puck News co-founder and CEO Joe Purzycki is leaving the company, according to an internal note sent from co-founder and editor-in-chief Jon Kelly to staff Monday obtained by Axios. Purzycki exits as Puck looks to finalize a new financing round. In his note to staff, Kelly acknowledged that Purzycki was “incredibly gifted at operationalizing start-ups during the incredibly fraught zero-to-one stage,” and that now the company is looking for a chief executive who can lead Puck through its “next phase of execution.”
Staffers at NBCUniversal Local’s experimental unit LX News got word Wednesday that they’d be shutting down. Some worry that it bodes darkly for news innovation that will connect with new generations of viewers.
Ousted Fox News host Tucker Carlson is seen on newly revealed video bashing the network’s streaming service, which he produced a bevy of content for during his tenure at the company.
Kate O’Brian, president of Scripps News, explains how the bulk of its weekday broadcast hours will go to live as of May 1 and how the network manages its complex web of collaborations between its own reporters fanned out across the U.S., Scripps’ local stations, its hubs in Denver and Washington, D.C., and Scripps-owned Court TV. A full transcript of the conversation is included.
Vice News Tonight celebrated its 1,000th episode this past March, and now the award-winning weekly news program is being canceled. The cancellation, which will officially take place in May, comes as Vice Media Group begins layoffs within its Vice News unit.
Comcast has natively integrated 21 FAST (free, ad-supported TV) channels into its Xfinity Stream app. Stream users now have free access to NBC News Now, Sky News and 19 Xumo-branded channels spanning comedy, crime TV, black cinema, lifestyle, reality TV, game shows, kids and more. These channels are now integrated natively into the Stream UX and are available to all Comcast subscribers, regardless of whether they pay for Xfinity TV.
FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver is exiting ABC News as Disney ramps up layoff. ABC News will hold onto the FiveThirtyEight brand with plans to streamline the statistics-driven news and analysis site. The network plans to create a more efficient structure for FiveThirtyEight leading into the 2024 presidential election and beyond. Silver sent a message to his team in a company Slack channel warning that the Disney layoffs would impact FiveThirtyEight, and that Silver is not planning to return after his contract ends.
May 1 will see the introduction of America Decides, a weekday panel program featuring a phalanx of correspondents from its Washington bureau. The move is part of a bid to assert the organization as the nation prepares for the 2024 election cycle to start heating up with more candidates declaring their intentions to run and a wave later this year of primary debates.
Have you cut the cord and don’t really want a live TV streaming service but want access to a ton of news networks? Recently a new news streaming service called Level News has launched, offering 10 live news channels for just $5.99. With Level News, you get access to CSPAN, CSPAN2, CSPAN 3, NewsNation, Bloomberg Television, Bloomberg Quicktake, NHK World Japan, France 24, Euro News and Law & Crime Trial Network.
In this repeat of the Talking TV episode from Nov. 18, 2022, Andrew Craft, senior digital journalist with Fox’s LiveNOW streaming channel, shows TVNewsCheck’s Michael Depp how to multitask as producer, director and anchor while on the air for hours at a time.
BuzzFeed News, which earned as reputation as a scrappy news-breaking digital rival to legacy media brands, is shutting down. Jonah Peretti, the CEO of BuzzFeed, announced to staffers in a memo on Thursday that they will concentrate their news efforts on HuffPost, “a brand that is profitable with a highly engaged, loyal audience that is less dependent on social platforms.” BuzzFeed bought HuffPost from Verizon Media in 2020.
Grand Knighthawk: Infiltrating the KKK, produced by George Stephanopoulos Productions and ABC News Studios, premieres on Hulu Thursday, April 27.
On Monday, Spectrum News announced the launch of Spectrum News+, a new streaming news network that provides localized reporting and storytelling from Spectrum News’ 30+ local news channels — spanning the country in California, Florida, Hawaii, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Missouri, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Wisconsin, as well as coverage of weather and broader topics and headlines.
Americano Media, the first national Spanish-language conservative radio and streaming news service, aims to nudge more Latinos to the right.
Fox-owned Tubi has partnered with Vice Media Group to produce eight investigative documentaries exclusively for the ad-supported streaming service. The first doc, The Cult of Elon, which will delve into the “cult of personality” surrounding controversial Tesla and Twitter owner Elon Musk, will debut on Tubi April 26. That will be followed up by the May 6 Tubi premiere of Vigilante, which examines the emergence of online vigilantism through the investigation of a Los Angeles-based serial arsonist.
Samsung TV Plus users can now stream local Spanish-language news through Noticias Telemundo California and Noticias Telemundo Florida, with Noticias Telemundo Noreste and Noticias Telemundo Texas set to join in April.
An Axios reporter in Tampa said he was fired this week after he responded to a Florida Department of Education email about an event featuring Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), calling the news release “propaganda.” Ben Montgomery said he received a call on Monday evening from Jamie Stockwell, executive editor of Axios Local, who asked Montgomery to confirm he sent the email before saying the reporter’s “reputation in the Tampa Bay area” had been “irreparably tarnished.”
Dafna Linzer is leaving after disagreeing on strategy with the publication’s top editor.
A new report by the Media Insight Project finds that 60% of Americans between 16 and 40 pay for or donate to news. Those rates are higher for older millennials than Gen Z, according to the project, which is a collaboration between The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the American Press Institute. Researchers surveyed nearly 6,000 people and found that 51% of Gen Z pay for or donate to some type of news content, compared to 67% of older millennials.
Operators of The News Movement (TNM) , which has been operating for more than a year, hopes to succeed despite journalism being littered with years of unsuccessful attempts to entice people in their 20s to become news consumers. The brainchild of former Dow Jones executives, TNM is using a staff of reporters with an average age of 25 to make tailored news content for sites like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter. Above: John D’Amico, TNM deputy executive editor (l), reviews video with reporter Kimberly Avalos. (Bebeto Matthews/AP)
Angelika Albaladejo and Jessica DeLeon are two former print reporters currently going through the Google-sponsored Journalism Journey Initiative to transition their skills to TV at E.W. Scripps stations. They share the tougher parts of the transition, the fresh-eyes advantages they bring to TV and how other former print reporters may follow in their stead. A full transcript of the conversation is included.
As part of an ongoing commitment to “reinvest” ad budgets supporting “credible” news publishers who practice “responsible” journalism around the world, GroupM on Tuesday announced a deal using a nonprofit organization to vet the quality of local, national and international news sites for programmatic media buys. The initiative, which GroupM describes as an “industry first,” is part of its ongoing “Back to News” push, and gives GroupM clients access to vetted and high-quality ad inventory on news sites vetted by global nonprofit Internews.
Nancy Dubuc revealed on Friday she was leaving Vice Media Group as CEO after five years. She will be replaced by Bruce Dixon (l) and Hozefa Lokhandwala. The pair will become co-CEOs. Hozefa has been chief strategy officer at VMG since October 2018, and Bruce has been chief financial officer at VMG since 2021 and was previously CFO of Vice Studios.
