The editors at conservative magazine National Review on Wednesday urged embattled Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt to resign citing his "bizarre" and "venal" behavior, amid a slew of ethics controversies surrounding his spending and management decisions at the agency.
This is no way for any public official to treat taxpayers. It also makes it practically impossible for Pruitt to make the case for the Trump administration’s environmental policies — a case that we continue to believe deserves to be made.
Despite the uptick in news consumption in America, largely thanks to the Trump bump, the newspaper industry's survival remains in jeopardy, according to the Pew Research Center's newly-released newspaper fact sheet for 2017.
The big picture: The future for newspapers remains bleak. Though web traffic has grown for many news outlets, the industry's subscriber-based audience has steadily declined since the 2000s, per the report. Meanwhile newspapers, which have failed at finding fresh ways to compete with digital products, are using antiquated business models that show no signs of improving their readership.
JD.com, a Chinese e-commerce gargantuan, has built a big new Shanghai fulfillment center that can organize, pack and ship 200,000 orders a day. It employs four people — all of whom service the robots.
What's going on: Welcome to the creeping new age of automation. When the talk turns to Chinese big tech — rivals to Google, Amazon and the rest of Silicon Valley — the names usually cited are Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent. But scrappy JD, with a respectable $58 billion market cap, is investing aggressively to be added to the pantheon.
Today marks 10 years since the death of "Meet the Press" moderator Tim Russert ("a fixture in American homes on Sunday mornings and election nights") at age 58. Betsy Fischer Martin, Tim's longtime executive producer, and former "Meet" producer Erin Fogarty Owen have posted, "Tim Russert: Loss and lessons a decade later":
"A little note goes a long way: So many Washington scrapbooks must be filled with handwritten notes from Tim. 'Congrats on the new job.' 'Sorry for your loss.' 'Thanks for your time.' Rarely more than two sentences and nothing fancy — no engraved Crane’s stationery for him. Just a small sheet from his NBC notepad that likely made a big difference in someone’s day."
AT&T will be allowed to complete its $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner, with a federal judge on Tuesday rejecting an antitrust challenge by the U.S. Justice Department.
Why it matters: The ruling is expected to set off a chain reaction of other mega-mergers, while the AT&T-Time Warner tie-up will remake the media, tech and telecom landscapes by creating a media powerhouse that controls premium content as well as the networks that distribute it.
President Trump's trade adviser Peter Navarro called his Sunday statement that "there's a special place in hell" for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau "inappropriate" at a Wall Street Journal event this morning.
"In conveying that message I used language that was inappropriate and basically lost the power of that message. I own that, that was my mistake, my words."
— Peter Navarro at a Wall Street Journal CFO Network event
Publishers are investing in new technologies to serve users more personalized content based off of their emotional response towards about certain topics and stories.
Why it matters: For decades, dated metrics of marketing success, like click-through rates, have been used to justify ad spending and other marketing investments. Now, AI will help marketers understand what motivates someone to buy or take action on something, and that may not always be a click.
Why it matters: None of Trump's trade policies were intentionally aimed at the American media industry, but their collective impact is creating headaches for businesses, especially those affected by more than one of the trade targets.
A federal judge will decide Tuesday whether AT&T can acquire Time Warner for $85 billion.
Why it matters: Today's court decision will shape the media and telecom landscape, as it will set off chain reactions for other media mergers and will help determine how viewers watch video content for decades to come.
