New York Magazine has an explosive excerpt from Michael Wolff's forthcoming book, "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," in which Wolff reports that Trump's confidants all expected him to lose — and many thought he deserved to.
Why it matters: Wolff spent 18 months with the Trump campaign and then the Trump administration and conducted more than 200 interviews. "Because no one was in a position to either officially approve or formally deny such access, Wolff became "more a constant interloper than an invited guest'," according to a disclaimer accompanying the story. Wolff says he had "something like a semi-permanent seat on a couch in the West Wing."
E-commerce sales may be twice as high as generally reported, according to a new calculation by Thomas Paulson, who runs Minneapolis-based Inflection Capital Management.
Buzz: Rather than 9% of retail sales — as reported by the Fed and other sources — Paulson says Amazon and other e-commerce companies grabbed 21% of total U.S. retail sales last year. In 2016, it was 18.7% and the last time the rate was still at 9% was in 2010, he added.
An offshoot of the Amazon effect is an explosion in the number of job listings for driving delivery trucks. Listings last year rose to No. 3 on Monster, the jobs site, from No. 11 in 2016. Some 24,000 such driving jobs were listed on the site last year, chief marketing officer Jonathan Beamer tells Axios, a 19% increase over 2016.
Why it matters: Many of these jobs may vanish at some point in the future as autonomously driven trucks take to the road. But, if humans are to be removed from the picture, that will also require a system for smoothly dropping off packages on doorsteps. As of now, the surge in these jobs has come almost out of nowhere — in 2014, they were No. 25 on the Monster list. And the firm expects 110,000 more such truck-driving openings over the coming decade.
Meryl Streep says the public shouldn't be asking about her silence on Harvey Weinstein and the #MeToo movement. In an interview with The New York Times' Cara Buckley, Streep directed attention at the Trump family:
"I don't want to hear about the silence of me. I want to hear about the silence of Melania Trump. I want to hear from her. She has so much that's valuable to say. And so does Ivanka. I want her to speak now."
The impact: Though Risen's stories dealt with Bush administration-era events, the Obama administration continued to attempt to get him to reveal his sources via court filings, ultimately destroying the idea of "reporter's privilege" via an appeal to the Fourth Circuit — which includes Maryland and Virginia, key locations for national security reporting.
The key questions: Risen's inside tale explores the implications of national security reporting in as the War on Terror met the Internet Age:Can our government be trusted to react credibly and responsibly when presented with proof of its own wrongdoing?Who exactly owns the information uncovered via extensive, deeply sourced reporting — the reporter or the publication?Does a news organization have an obligation to defend their employees against the weight of a government investigation?Other eye-openers:
Government intervention: Risen describes being summoned to a West Wing meeting with then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice and then-CIA Director George Tenet, who told them to "forget" the reporting that led to his Iran story. He also relays how the NYT's then-executive editor, Bill Keller, and then-Washington bureau chief, Philip Taubman, received secret briefings from the government on the NSA's wiretapping program that misled them about the program's scope.
The strength of surveillance: After meeting with a sensitive source via an intermediary, Risen started to do research about the source before receiving a call requesting him to stop Googling the source's name.
"Inside an ESPN President's Shocking Exit (and Bob Iger's Possible Role)," by James Andrew Miller, who wrote the book on ESPN, for Hollywood Reporter:
"John Skipper cited 'substance addiction' as the reason for abruptly stepping down in December, but both his actions before the announcement and Disney's incentives to push him out suggest a different narrative."
Four-year-old startup Tenor is trying to capitalize on the rise of GIFs — short looping videos — by letting media companies sell sponsorships of its GIFs to their own advertisers. Tenor tells Axios that its 300 million users now perform 10 billion monthly searches and the company serves "billions" of GIFs every day.
Why it matters: Startups like Tenor are vying to build big businesses out of short videos. And with GIFs' exploding popularity in messaging apps, it's often pitted against its main rival, Giphy.
The Federal Trade Commission said on Tuesday it has given a final approval to a settlement with Lenovo regarding the company's practice of preinstalling an advertising software program on some laptops that caused "serious security vulnerabilities" in order to show ads to consumers.
What this means: In its decision, the FTC said Lenovo is prohibited from misrepresenting any features of software it preinstalled on laptops that would "inject advertising into consumers' Internet browsing sessions or transmit sensitive consumer information to third parties."
Cities with some of the lowest unemployment rates are also now experiencing some of the greatest wage growth in the country, the WSJ reports. Employers are raising wages to attract employees from competitors, like in Minneapolis, Denver, and Fort Myers, where unemployment rate are at or near 3%.
Why it matters: It's a phenomenon that makes sense and is expected in theory, "but one that's been largely absent until now in the upturn that began more than eight years ago," WSJ's Shayndi Raice and Eric Morath write.
A headline for the White House to love, from the (not) "failing New York Times" ... "The Trump Effect: Business, Anticipating Less Regulation, Loosens Purse Strings":
"A wave of optimism has swept over American business leaders, and it is beginning to translate into the sort of investment in new plants, equipment and factory upgrades that bolsters economic growth, spurs job creation — and may finally raise wages significantly."
Gretchen Carlson, former Fox News anchor and 1989 Miss America, was named chairwoman of the Miss America Organization's board of directors yesterday, AP reports.
Why it matters,via the New York Times: "Carlson, ... whose harassment lawsuit against the Fox chairman Roger Ailes led to his departure in July 2016, will be expected to lead the pageant through its own harassment scandal."
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