Axios

The Weekly Standard has the inside scoop on yesterday's kerfuffle involving the president, the New York Times and a call to China:

1. Times WH reporter Mark Landler reached out to the White House on Wednesday telling them he was working on a story about China's icy relations with Trump. Times reporter Maggie Haberman also reached out to a White House source on Thursday.
2. Meanwhile, the White House succeeded in booking a call between Trump and Xi that they'd been working on for several days. It told neither of the Times reporters.
3. Landler sent an email an hour before the call, asking about One China. No one responded, so they published.

The rest is public information. The White House released a readout from the call two hours after the Times story published. The Times promptly updated their story, but it was too late to fix the print edition, and Trump reads the Times in print.

Trump then tweeted that the story, which the White House was first informed about two days earlier — and about which it withheld relevant information from the reporters — was "FAKE NEWS."

On Twitter, Trump seems to have the most hatred for "the failing" New York Times. Since the inauguration, Trump has tweeted 6 different times, complaining about NYT's coverage of his presidency and repeatedly pointing out how they had to "apologize" for their bad coverage during the election. But it's not all hate; The Grey Lady and POTUS have a mutually-beneficial relationship...

A new Pew/Knight Foundation study finds that adults 18-29 remember the source to news links they click less than half the time (47%), while adults ages 30+ will remember the source roughly 60% of the time.

Why it matters: As younger generations develop closer relationships with platforms over publishers, their trust has shifted to a news distributors. Case In point: When asked in the survey about the name of the news source that was linked to, 10% of survey respondents wrote in "Facebook" as a specific outlet.

Other key findings:

• Social and search used nearly equally to access news: Adults are almost equally likely to get news by going directly to a news website (36%) as getting news through social media (35%).
• Hard news more likely to be accessed directly: Business and finance news is more likely to be accessed by going directly to a news website or app (53%) than through social media (12%). Community news is much more likely to be discovered through social media (53%) than on a news website (22%).
• Personal communication yields the highest engagement: People are much more likely to share or engage with news via personal communication, like a text, email or from a family or friend than a news site.

Facebook has agreed to an audit by the Media Rating Council (MRC), to verify the accuracy of the information they deliver to publishers and ad buyers.

Why it matters: As Axios noted last month, since the last time Facebook updated its measurement and transparency policies, there have been several instances of Facebook misreporting data to publishing partners. Most notably, Facebook apologized in September for inflating video engagement metrics up to 60% for two years.

Other updates: Along with the audit, Facebook will add more impression-level data, meaning more data for how an ad is consumed on each individual view. They also announced an expanded list of approved third-party vendors that measure traffic and ad campaign data, so publishers can continue to work with their preferred vendors.

What we're watching: Facebook's increase of approved vendors and measurement updates falls in line with an industry trend, and movements by its competitors. Last month, Snapchat announced the addition of new approved third-party measurement providers to its platform. This is not surprising, given that the Interactive Advertising Bureau told media executives in February that an influx of data availability in 2016 will lead data measurement and attribution as the most important issues that face the industry in 2017.

Sears surged more than 50% in pre-market trading after the company announced plans to radically cut costs. The stock has since pulled back, and is up roughly 25% after the market open.

Sears announced the sale of a handful of stores and an agreement to sell more real estate in order to raise $1 billion in cash, as well as a plan to reduce debt and pension obligations by $1.5 billion.