On Sunday, AG William Barr delivered to Congress a filtered four-page summary of “principal conclusions” from Robert Mueller’s two-year investigation. No word yet on when the full findings will be released. Read more…
Category: Media & Communications
Apple’s magazine subscription service is starting to take shape. The tech giant is expected to announce the service at a March 25 press event. Analysts also expect the iPhone maker to unveil a TV streaming service that will compete more directly with Netflix and Hulu. Read more…
Chinese news agency Xinhua’s first female artificial intelligence (AI) news presenter signals a threat to human news readers.
Other reading:
The Fight to Be a Middle-Aged Female News Anchor: “The average age of the anchors who lost their jobs was 46.8, while their replacements averaged 38.1 years. In one case, the difference was more than two decades,” reporter Steve Cavendish writes in the New York Times.
Older women on US television send subliminal message, Gillian Tett writes in the Financial Times.
Fewer Americans rely on TV news; what type they watch varies by who they are, according to Pew Research Center.
% of U.S. adults who get news on each TV segment
| 2017 | 2016 | |
| Local TV | 37% | 46% |
| Network TV | 26% | 30% |
| Cable TV | 28% | 31% |
% of U.S. adults who get news often on each platform
| 2018 | 2016 | |
| TV | 49% | 57% |
| News website | 33% | 28% |
| Radio | 26% | 25% |
| Social media | 20% | 18% |
| Print newspapers | 16% | 20% |
AT&T’s managerial shakeup at its WarnerMedia unit marks one of the first times in recent memory that media industry job cuts aren’t happening at an embattled publisher. Read more…
That’s a welcome development, especially as publishers face declining ad sales as Facebook, Google and Amazon take over the digital media economy. Read more…
Toymaker Lego is the launch sponsor of a mobile gaming app from Turner’s Cartoon Network that lets viewers collect digital cartoon figures by watching the network’s shows. Read more…
Percentage of Streaming Viewers Who Use Another Subscriber’s Account
| Group (Birth Years*) / Service | Netflix | Amazon Prime Video | Hulu |
| Millennials (1981-1996) | 18.1% | 17.7% | 20.0% |
| Generation X (1965-1980) | 8.9% | 12.7% | 16.7% |
| Baby Boomers (1946-1964) | 10.9% | 19.5% | 17.8% |
| Total | 15% | 16.5% | 19.2% |
Source: CordCutters.com survey of 1,127 people using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk; 50.9 percent of survey participants were men, and 49.1 percent were women. Participants ranged in age from 18 to 81 with a mean of 37 and a standard deviation of 11.9. Respondents were disqualified from the survey if they didn’t use a video streaming service.
*Birth years from Pew Research Center.
Pandora debuted a tool called Pandora Stories that lets creators make playlists that combine music tracks with their audio commentary. Read more…
Percentage of U.S. adults who get news on social media
| Response | Percentage |
| Never | 32% |
| Hardly Ever | 21% |
| Sometimes | 27% |
| Often | 20% |
Percentage of U.S. adults who get news on each social media site
| Site/App | Percentage |
| 43% | |
| YouTube | 21% |
| 12% | |
| 8% | |
| 6% | |
| 5% | |
| Snapchat | 5% |
| 2% | |
| Tumblr | 1% |
Google and Facebook Worsen Media Bias
Google and Facebook have gained editorial influence over the press with content guidelines for participation in advertising services, writes Mark Esptein in the Wall Street Journal.
The Stark Political Divide Between Tech CEOs and Their Employees
Media outlets have failed to differentiate the people who own the industry from the people who work in it is causing the media to misread the rising wave of rank-and-file rebellion, write Moira Weigel and Ben Tarnoff in the New Republic.
Amazon’s extensive relationship with the NSA, FBI, Pentagon and other surveillance agencies in the west is multi-faceted, highly lucrative and rapidly growing, writes Glenn Greenwald in the Intercept.
UK Cairncross Report
Online news sites need ‘code of conduct’, says UK media review
Technology groups should be forced by a new regulator to ensure their platforms distribute quality news, according to a U.K. government report. “As long as tech giants continue to completely dominate the market it’s difficult to see how a sustainable financial footing for journalism can be achieved,” Tom Watson, Labour’s shadow culture secretary, said.
Public funds should be used to rescue local journalism, says report
Dame Frances Cairncross’s report on ways to support high-quality journalism in Britain concluded there should be a public investigation into the dominance of Facebook and Google in the advertising marketplace.