Digital

Here are some keys to creating meaningful engagement with your news audiences.

Ted Sarandos has been promoted at Netflix to Co-CEO, sharing the title with Reed Hastings, who also serves as co-founder. Sarandos joins the company’s board of directors as a result. “Ted has been my partner for decades. This change makes formal what was already informal — that Ted and I share the leadership of Netflix,” Hastings said.

The entertainment business is a big advertiser but has been noticeably silent as other industries protest the social network’s handling of hate speech.

The ruse discovered Wednesday included bogus tweets from Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Mike Bloomberg and a number of tech billionaires including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Celebrities were also hacked. Hackers used social engineering to target some of Twitter’s employees and then gained access to the high-profile accounts. The attackers sent out tweets from the accounts of the public figures, offering to send $2,000 for every $1,000 sent to an anonymous Bitcoin address.

Hulu is making its advertising platform more accessible to businesses with smaller marketing budgets. The streamer, which is courting more advertisers as it’s further integrated into parent company Disney, is opening up a closed beta test of a self-service ad manager to small and medium-size businesses, it said today. It’s the first self-service tool from Hulu and will give marketers the ability to start campaigns on the streamer with a minimum spend of $500.

One of the country’s oldest and most established media companies is starting to look more like a Hollywood studio than a traditional newspaper. Driving the news: The New York Times has 10 scripted TV show projects in development, as well as three feature documentaries coming out this year and several other documentary projects in development and production, executives tell Axios.

Vox Media, the owner of media properties including New York Magazine, The Verge, SBNation and Eater, has informed its worker unions to prepare for company-wide layoffs, according to people familiar with the matter. Vox spoke with union leaders Monday to inform them of their plan to cut staff, said the people, who asked not to be named because the discussions are private. Vox furloughed about 100 employees in April, or 9% of its staff, until July 31 as Covid-19 affected advertising budgets.

Not everyone will see the 30 Rock reunion that will air Thursday on NBC. Multiple station groups are preempting the hour-long special, which will double as an advertisement for NBCUniversal’s 2020-21 programming and its new streaming service, Peacock. The stations that are choosing to preempt the special come from station groups Gray Television, Hearst, Nexstar, Tegna and Sinclair Broadcast Group, an individual with knowledge of the situation told TheWrap. While it’s not clear exactly how many of the stations are skipping the special, those collectively represent about half of NBC’s footprint.

As you know from endless (and endlessly grating) commercials, Peacock is the new subscription streaming service from Xfinity, which is part of Comcast, which is part of NBC, and which debuts Wednesday, July 15. The pluses here include Peacock’s archives (Parks and Recreation, Saturday Night Live, 30 Rock, Cheers, Frasier, The Carol Burnett Show and, in 2021, the complete run of The Office); to that, add hundreds of titles from Universal’s movie library (Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List, Reservoir Dogs). As for original shows, Peacock doesn’t come out on a particularly strong note.

Facebook and other competitors host the same videos, but engineers have made changes that effectively preference YouTube — owned by Google — over other video sources. Wall Street Journal tests show YouTube usually ends up first and takes most of the slots in Google Search video carousels and prime results real estate.

Netflix shares cooled down Tuesday, slipping 2% to about $517, after UBS downgraded the stock to “neutral” from “buy” on concerns about difficult subscriber comparisons in upcoming quarters.

Struggling startup mobile streaming service Quibi won an important court ruling Monday afternoon, when a federal judged denied a plaintiff’s request for a preliminary injunction of the platform’s core technology feature, Turnstyle.

Nine new programs will be released on Peacock’s launch day, Wednesday, bolstered by some 20,000 hours of library fare from its parent company, NBCUniversal, along with outside acquisitions. Besides TV shows and movies that viewers already know and love, including The Office, Cheers and The Matrix, sports and news are an uncommon part of the mix.

The deal includes three distinct podcast business lines: the Midroll advertising rep firm; owned-and-operated podcast networks including the comedy-focused Earwolf; and the Stitcher podcast listening platform.

Facebook executives are considering a temporary ban on political advertising in the final days before the U.S. election in November as the company continues to grapple with a large advertising boycott, employee unrest and other issues related to its policies on hate speech and misinformation, according to two people familiar with the company’s thinking.

The drama among influencers at Hype House and Sway House seems like a natural fit for TV. Will the industry bite?

With the incumbent OTT operating systems at impasse with Peacock and HBO Max, Google finally has its opening into the living room, LightShed Partners says.

Joe Biden has signaled that if he becomes President, his FCC will restore the net neutrality rules and FCC oversight authority the Republican FCC jettisoned in the Restoring Internet Freedom Order, as well as working to undo state laws blocking municipal broadband and invest even more in those projects.