On Tuesday, a number of Hollywood and NYC execs shared a stage with their Silicon Valley counterparts at an event hosted by Variety magazine to discuss how their worlds collide. It was cheekily named "Silicon Valleywood."
The big picture: As tech providers get into the content business and the content makers spin up their own streaming services, Hollywood and Silicon Valley are looking to learn from each other — and even unite for shared battles.
The Markup, a well-funded journalism nonprofit launched last year to produce exposés of Big Tech's power, fired its editor-in-chief yesterday before it had published a single article. 5 of its newsroom of 7 quit in protest.
Backdrop: Julia Angwin, a Pulitzer-garlanded former ProPublica and Wall Street Journal reporter whose work has watchdogged Facebook and Google on issues like privacy and discrimination, had been The Markup's most prominent public face.
Job growth was flat for the third straight quarter in what have seemed to be some of the economy's least automatable occupations, such as AI, cybersecurity and environmental work.
Why it matters: The trend suggests these occupations, too, are susceptible to economic cooling.
Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and 2020 presidential candidate, will attend a town hall hosted by Fox News on May 19, the third Democratic contender to appear on the network that has a majority of conservative viewers, The Daily Beast reports.
Backdrop: The DNC has banned Fox News from hosting any upcoming presidential debates. The organization told Axios last week it still believes the network is ill-equipped to be objective toward Democratic candidates when up against President Trump.
Dan and Axios media reporter Sara Fischer dig into Sinclair Broadcasting, which has been scooping up former Fox News personalities and may be poised to win the multi-billion dollar auction for Disney's regional sports networks. It's a big turnaround story, and one that Fox News executives should be paying attention to.
DouYu, a Chinese live game-streaming platform, on Tuesday filed for a $500 million IPO.
Why it matters: This may be the largest of what is about to be a flood of highly-valued Chinese companies going public in the U.S. This week features road-show launches for both So-Young (online plastic surgery marketplace) and Yunji (social e-commerce), while yesterday came an IPO filing from Luckin Coffee (whose $150m fundraise was our BFD just last week).
President Trump tweeted on Tuesday that the U.S. would "reciprocate" against tariffs on Harley Davidson motorcycles imposed by the EU, which the company has partially blamed for a near 27% drop in first-quarter profit.
"Harley Davidson has struggled with Tariffs with the EU, currently paying 31%. They’ve had to move production overseas to try and offset some of that Tariff that they’ve been hit with which will rise to 66% in June of 2021." @MariaBartiromo So unfair to U.S. We will Reciprocate!
President Trump provided a look at his current media diet in a pair of Tuesdaytweets, saying that "Fox & Friends" is "the best of the morning political shows" while branding MSNBC's Joe Scarborough "Morning Psycho" and calling CNN a "disaster."
"Morning Psycho (Joe), who helped get me elected in 2016 by having me on (free) all the time, has nosedived, too Angry Dumb and Sick. A really bad show with low ratings - and will only get worse."
The backdrop: In 2017, the president took his ongoing feud with "Morning Joe" to a new level when he made sexist remarks about host — and Scarborough's now-wife — Mika Brzezinski by claiming she was "bleeding badly from a face-lift" at Mar-a-Lago earlier that year.
E-commerce is colliding with digital advertising and forcing traditional ad agencies to embrace data and distribution around specific platforms like Amazon and Google.
The big picture: Today’s marketing landscape revolves around the major platforms (Google, Amazon, Facebook) that make money by offering brands a wide variety of advertising opportunities — from search and social media ads to sell to consumers directly, to video campaigns to improve a company’s reputation.
Sinclair Broadcast Group, the massive local conservative broadcaster that's been criticized for pushing Pro-Trump talking points, has been hiring a slew of ex-mainstream news anchors as it pushes into national news coverage. It's also reportedly in the running to buy up a handful of Fox's regional sports networks.
Why it matters: Sinclair's hiring spree suggests that it's looking to position itself as a national news competitor to Fox News ahead of the 2020 election, and as an overall competitor to big broadcasters with its foray into sports coverage.
Some of the extraordinary investigations and features from college and high school journalists over the past few months suggest that the future of journalism is in safe hands.
The latest: Student journalists from Lexington, Ky., took to their paper's editorial page over the weekend to report about being shunned from a Betsy Devos education roundtable the was marketed as "open press," The Washington Post reports.
In the U.S., 37 states require schools to teach abstinence as part of sex-education. Zero states mandate that they address drug-facilitated sexual assault, otherwise known as date rape.
Why it matters: This isn't like getting struck by lightning. Having a tasteless, colorless rohypnol — a "roofie" — dropped in your Merlot is a pervasive problem for women and men of all ages, yet students aren't taught about it. So tech companies are stepping in to help people identify and handle the problem.
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