Today at the Upfront Summit I'll be interviewing actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Not because he recently played Edward Snowden in a film — or Robin, for that matter — but because he's CEO of a startup called HitRecord that today will announce $6.4 million in Series A funding.
Driving the news: The company has actually been around since 2010, but this is its first round of outside funding.
A new study shows the consistent loss of local newspapers and journalists has contributed to political polarization, AP reports .
The big picture: Fewer local newspapers means people have to turn to national news sources like cable news to understand national politics, according to the research published in the Journal of Communication. People are applying those issues to their own city councils or state legislatures, leaving more local topics to the wayside.
Hulu is rolling out "pause" ads, or ads that appear on your screen when you hit the pause button while watching a show.
Why it matters: It's part of a broader effort by Hulu to make advertising for TV content less intrusive and more relevant. The majority of Hulu's subscribers pay for the ad-supported tier, for which Hulu just recently lowered the price.
Jerome Powell finally got the markets on his side. The S&P 500 fell after each of his first seven FOMC meetings as chairman (by far the longest on record), but the market jolted higher on Wednesday.
One big quote: "The big pivot in FOMC communication was not just the introduction of the word ‘patient,’ but also the removal of forward guidance explicitly signaling that the next change [will be a rate increase]," said Ian Lyngen, head of U.S. rates strategy at BMO Capital Markets.
The number of people who get sick while they're in the hospital is falling pretty significantly, saving lives and also billions of dollars, according to the latest figures from HHS' Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) from 2014 to 2017.
By the numbers: Hospital-acquired conditions fell by about 13% over that three-year period. AHRQ estimates that roughly 86 out of every 1,000 hospitalizations involves a hospital acquired condition, down from 99 out of every 1,000. That reduction helped prevent more than 20,000 deaths and saved roughly $7.7 billion.
Fox News announced Wednesday it signed former Republican congressman Trey Gowdy of South Carolina as a contributor, adding to the slew of recently retired politicians making their TV debut in 2019.
Why it matters: TV news is giving its viewers some fresh faces ahead of 2020, and as Axios' Mike Allen noted Tuesday, some of the loudest political voices are becoming those who lost in the 2018 midterms.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon told CNBC Wednesday that he has "no problem paying higher taxes to address some of the fundamental challenges and inequities in our society," but that government spending must be efficient.
Flashback: Dimon told Axios he supported the 2017 Republican tax bill that lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% because he believed corporations would reinvest capital to create jobs. But a new survey from the National Association for Business Economics shows the $1.5 trillion tax cut package "appeared to have no major impact on businesses' capital investment or hiring plans," according to Reuters. The government's growing budget deficit, meanwhile, will force the Treasury Department to borrow $1 trillion for the second straight year.
Taiwanese electronics company Foxconn is reconsidering its plans to manufacture flatscreen panels at a $10 billion Wisconsin plant that promised to bring in 13,000 jobs, Reuters reports.
Why it matters: Foxconn's 2017 pledge to build the plant, which drew billions of dollars in subsidies from state taxpayers, has been touted by President Trump as one of the largest manufacturing investments by a foreign-based company in U.S. history. A Foxconn representative told Reuters that steep labor costs at the Wisconsin plant would make it impossible to compete with manufacturers outside the U.S., and that three-quarters of the plant's eventual jobs will be in research and design — rather than "blue-collar manufacturing jobs."
GameStop, a Grapevine, Texas-based video game retailer, said it has abandoned efforts to sell the company after failing to get an adequate bid, sending shares down more than 20%.
Why it matters: Because this seems to validate short-seller arguments that physical retail for video games is anachronistic, as more and more product is downloaded directly via mobile and consoles. There had been some hope that a buyer would bet on increased interest in things like VR hardware and collectibles, but apparently not.
The private sector added 213,000 jobs in January, topping the 178,000 that economists had expected, according to ADP's national employment report released on Wednesday, signaling that the labor market has yet to dry up.
Between the lines: Jobs growth surged despite the "severe disruptions" businesses saw during the government shutdown, Moody's Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi said in a statement. Friday's non-farm payrolls report, which includes government workers, is expected to be negatively impacted by the shutdown.
