Veteran technology CEO Meg Whitman has accepted a new job, leading a new media company focused on short, scripted videos. Jeffrey Katzenberg, who founded and incubated the startup via his new WndrCo platform, will serve as chairman.
Bottom line: Whitman will launch the company with a pretty clean slate, giving her and Katzenberg the opportunity to learn from other platforms that are transitioning away from unscripted viral social videos to more thoughtful, episodic content.
The Presidents Club has made the decision to shut down, per Bloomberg's Joe Mayes, after the Financial Times posted a bombshell report yesterday about the London organization's annual Charity Dinner, a men-only event that raised money via auction for causes like the United Kingdom's preeminent children's hospital. But the FT detailed how the dinner's hostesses were encouraged to drink on the job and faced sexual harassment, groping, and propositioning from some of the U.K.'s wealthiest men — all for a night's wage of £150.
The prior fallout: The U.K.'s Charity Commission announced a probe into the dinner as the head of the trust behind the dinner stepped down from a role with the government's Department of Education. The Bank of England revoked its auction lot of a tea with its head, Mark Carney, while Great Ormond Street Hospital and the Evelina London Children’s Hospital said that they'd return all donations received from the dinner.
Nielsen will add Instagram to its Social Content Ratings® (SCR) platform, which measures social engagement with TV shows. Nielsen already measures Facebook and Twitter engagement with TV shows.
Why it matters: Ratings do not always equal social engagement. SCR ratings help brands and networks understand how their content performs across platforms, which is important given that roughly 70.3% of the total U.S. adult population will regularly use another digital device while watching TV, according to eMarketer.
The Dow rose 100 points at the market open Wednesday morning, hitting a new record high after quarterly earnings beat Wall Street's expectations, reports CNBC. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq also hit record highs, both climbing 0.2%.
The bottom line: The Dow continues to crush it in 2018.
Almost 1 million Americans will see their occupations vanish entirely by 2026, and will have to train for a wholesale career change or probably not find equally paid work, according to a report by the World Economic Forum and Boston Consulting. This interactive visual shows what they found.
The bottom line: In all, some 1.4 million Americans will lose their jobs to technological change in the next eight years, including 70 percent whose job type will just disappear. Without new skills, according to the report, 575,000 of them — 41% — will have either minuscule or no chance of finding other work. Women may be disproportionately affected.
Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said that “trade wars are fought every single day” but “the difference now is U.S. troops are now coming to the ramparts” at the World Economic Forum in Davos, per CNBC.
Why it matters: The comments from Ross — already on the outs with President Trump over his work on China — go directly against those of his boss. At a signing ceremony yesterday to issue tariffs on cheap Chinese imported solar panels and washing machines, Trump told reporters: “There won’t be a trade war, by the way. There will only be stock increases for the companies that are in this country.”
The talk of Davos, ahead of President Trump's Friday speech, from Bloomberg's Matt Campbell:
"As much as they’re exuberant about soaring equities and booming economies, many global executives ... are counting the risks that could bring the party to an end."
"Women have Oscars taking notice: Nominations show signs of Hollywood's tide turning," per USA Today's Maria Puente: "The big name and big news was Greta Gerwig, who was nominated for original screenplay and director for Lady Bird."
"And a first-ever: Rachel Morrison became the first woman nominated for cinematography for her painterly photography in Mudbound, the Netflix tale that focuses on the post-World War II era in the Deep South."
The implosion of Big Retail has hit the U.K.'s two biggest grocers, Tesco and Sainsbury, which are slashing thousands of jobs to combat competition and rising wages, Bloomberg reports. Tesco is cutting 1,700 management positions, but adding another 900 "roles with broader responsibilities." Sainsbury is also cutting jobs in management across 1,400 stores.
The big picture: They're facing "cost pressure stemming from a rise in the minimum wage and the pound’s decline following the Brexit vote," per Bloomberg. Competition with discount grocers such as Aldi and online retailers such as Amazon is also keeping Tesco and Sainsbury from hiking up their prices.
The conventional wisdom quickly hardening around the White House decision to impose four years of tariffs on imported solar panel equipment is that it will likely slow solar power deployment to some degree, but is not nearly as aggressive as developers and their allies feared.
Why it matters: The solar trade case has been among the biggest energy policy battles of the young Trump administration and, more broadly, is an early test case of President Trump's willingness to translate his hawkish trade stance, especially toward China, into firm policy.
"The bottom line is it could have been much worse," Ethan Zindler, a top analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, tells Axios.
Telecom companies like AT&T and Verizon are racing into the digital advertising space — currently dominated by Google and Facebook — now that Washington has given them the ability to sell data to third-party advertisers.
Why it matters: The growth rate in the digital ad market is expected to decrease over the next four years, according to eMarketer, meaning that any market share internet service providers are able to gain will eventually come at the expense of other advertising-based businesses, mainly Google and Facebook.
