via @Laurie_Garrett
It is what it is. Also, re: Ye, Parler isn’t what it used to be (if it ever was at that): “According to a source familiar with the discussions, Parler’s parent company, Parlement, has been trying to offload its social media platform to potential buyers over the last few weeks,” Makena Kelly writes for Vox. “One prospective buyer described Parlement’s asking price for the platform as wildly inflated, and said they were stunned by the site’s low number of daily active users.” Further: “Comscore data analyzed by The Righting shows Parler attracted just 137,000 unique visitors in August, a dramatic plunge from the 12.3 million it saw in January 2021, when the platform was used to plan the January 6 attack on the Capitol,” Oliver Darcy writes for the Reliable Sources newsletter. “(By comparison Twitter, also a small social platform compared to giants like Meta, has more than 237 million daily active users.)”
It’s white knuckle time, and the recent New York Times/Siena College poll had me more then a little bit worried about Democrat prospects against Republicans in the 2022 midterms, with independent women voters in particular. According to the poll, 49 percent of likely voters in the poll planned to vote for a generic Republican candidate over 45 percent that said they planned to vote for a generic Democrat in the midterms. Yikes. “The consensus argument was that any national poll doesn’t factor in various dynamics of individual races,” Daniel Strauss writes for TNR. “Beyond that, some of the most significant public policy events of the last year have added an unpredictable element to the 2022 midterms that polling has a hard time picking up.” The abortion issue, which was an unpredictable variable in the Alaska at large race and, of course, the Kansas referendum, were cited.
The 8th annual installment of McKinsey’s Women in the Workplace 2022 is out. They “surveyed more than 40,000 employees, and conducted interviews with women of diverse identities—including women of color,1 LGBTQ+ women, and women with disabilities—to get an intersectional look at biases and barriers.” The result? “Despite modest gains in representation over the last eight years, women—and especially women of color—are still dramatically underrepresented in corporate America,” the article states. “And this is especially true in senior leadership: only one in four C-suite leaders is a woman, and only one in 20 is a woman of color.” Also in the report: Women leaders are leaving their companies at the highest rates in years. And: “Latinas and Asian women are more likely than women of other races and ethnicities to have colleagues comment on their culture or nationality—for example, by asking where they’re ‘really from.’” Pretty disgusting.
I am the third generation in my family to listen regularly to BBC. My grandfather on my mother’s side listened to it religiously and my mother, who loved him deeply, came to relish the time spent with him listening to the news together. I listen to them almost every weekday morning and love their international coverage, something largely missing in American cable news. BBC reporting is one of the reasons I have been obsessed with the media, politics and the transmission of information to the public throughout my life. Today they turn a century. According to Jon Alsop at CJR:
Today is an atypical day for the BBC: the special content marks one hundred years since the broadcaster was born. The BBC began life as a private company, albeit a monopoly set up with government approval; “industrialists were trying to sell radio receivers to the general public,” The Guardian’s Jim Waterson explains, “but no one wanted to hand over money for an expensive piece of kit if there wasn’t anything to listen to.” If today is the BBC’s formal birthday, it did not actually broadcast anything until a month or so later, when an announcer read a short news bulletin, twice, in case people were taking notes. (Per Waterson, the bulletin featured a story on a flailing new prime minister whose days would soon be numbered. Plus ça change.) Even this first broadcast didn’t generate much coverage from the rest of Britain’s media. It would be several more months before the BBC even got its own offices.
The BBC is 100, while the New York Times is over 170 years old and experiencing something like an identity crisis. Ben Smith, former Times media reporter, asks in SEMAFOR where the Times, culturally, is headed:
The culture wars are playing out in the newsroom now in far subtler ways these days. And in classic Times fashion, management is pushing them in two directions at the same time. They’re trying to deliver some staffers’ hopes from the summer of 2020 of a more progressive workplace and broad-minded journalism, while also doing what they can to ensure that the insurgency of 2020 never happens again.
But nobody seems entirely to know where the place is headed, ambitious internal figures are hedging their bets, and what began as a civil war has slid into a kind of frozen conflict, a distracting identity crisis at the heart of a company that Wall Street would like to transform.
On the progressive side of the ledger, the Times has installed a new administrative layer in the newsroom aimed at implementing a modern workplace culture. The new roles are neither reporters nor editors, but university-style administrators, focused variously on culture, careers, trust, strategy and DEI.
People I spoke to in those jobs find their own mandates confusing, however, in classic Timesian fashion.
The Cuomo family, once prominent in politics and cable news, are getting deep into the nascent podcast game. Former CNN employee Chris Cuomo is back with his podcast and now his brother, former Governor Andrew Cuomo, who resigned in the wake of a sexual harassment scandal, is getting a podcast, according to Sara Fischer of Axios. His first guest will be Anthony Scaramucci, who recently appeared on his brother’s embattled News Nation TV program.
Terry Nguyen of the awesome, must-read newsletter Dirt is not a big fan of the new Spotify, despite the fact that they just landed TikTok’s former Head of Content Partnerships. She writes:
Lots of changes have recently come to Spotify in design and content. My takeaway from this interface shift: Spotify wants me to listen to its recommended podcasts and random pop playlists, while hiding my own curated selections from sight. I struggle to find playlists that I’ve made and albums I’ve recently listened to. Even the “recently played” section requires some scrolling to find. Instead, the app’s home page delivers a mishmash of suggestions for podcasts and music that Spotify thinks I would like.
My music tastes are diluted and algorithmically slotted into categories. It also prompts me with moods, like “romantic jazz” (after listening to some Eartha Kitt and Frank Sinatra) or “hmu for a good time” (likely inspired by how often I’m playing Drake’s latest album). The implicit message? We know what you like, your preferences, how you’re feeling. You don’t even need to tell us.
Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka wins 2022 Booker Prize (NPR)
Why Oakland Parents Are Flocking to the Yu Ming Charter School. (NewYorker)
Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya and Uganda are among the ten African nations that had the highest ratio of debt interest payments to government revenues. (Yinka Adegoke/SEMAFOR Africa)
A Fox and NewsCorp merger? (NYT)
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette union authorized a strike against the company. (PGB)
Former Wall Street Journal reporter Jay Solomon is accusing a major U.S. law firm of having used mercenary hackers to get him fired and ruin his reputation. (Reuters)
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Microsoft Corp., the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Davis Wright Tremaine are teaming up to expand the Protecting Journalists Pro Bono Program (ProJourn). (RCFP)
James Corden is unbanned from Balthazar. Escargot and steak frites on the prima donna. (NYMag)