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You might have heard: Discovery agrees to pay $14.6 billion for Scripps Networks Interactive (Deadline)
But did you know: Investors seem underwhelmed by Discovery’s confirmation of Scripps Networks acquisition (AdAge)
Wall Street on Monday reacted to the news of Discovery Communications’ proposed $14.6 billion acquisition of Scripps Networks Interactive with a raised eyebrow, writes Anthony Crupi, as shares of the media company dropped in late-afternoon trading. While there are obvious synergies to be explored in this merger, the Discovery-SNI deal doesn’t immediately address the headwinds that are buffeting the traditional cable TV model: subscriber churn and the steady divestment of the younger viewers who would otherwise assume their rightful place in the heart of the advertiser-coveted 18-to-49 demo.
+ Noted: Corey Lewandowski has been fired One America News Network, a pro-Trump cable channel (The Daily Beast); MTV is reviving ‘Total Request Live’ this fall (The New York Times); Scaramucci interview gives The New Yorker’s website a huge traffic bump, with 4.4M unique visitors, and subscriptions also up 92% over daily July average (Variety); Sean Spicer is taking meetings with major TV networks (Page Six)
How Gay Talese finds his stories (Salon)
The best stories won’t come from an interview with lawmakers in the Beltway or by way of a soundbite on cable news, according to Gay Talese. Talese recommends reporters focus less on soundbites and more on spending time with ordinary people. With six decades of experience as a writer and author who built his career on spending extended time with his interview subjects, Talese says, “If I were running a newspaper today or running a network, I would break up the bureaus and have those people not clustered as you see them every day, at the presidential news conference jammed together in Washington. I’d have them around covering the country from the level of state capitals or from smaller cities.”
+ Editor-in-chief Lydia Polgreen is now running HuffPost’s Facebook Messenger bot in an effort to drive more engagement (Digiday)
Financial Times journalists threaten to strike over gender pay gap (The Guardian)
An email from trade union leaders at the FT to about 600 staff said there was an increasing sense managers at the organization “have not been taking this matter seriously enough” and added that the lack of transparency about pay for executives at the newspaper “does not inspire confidence.” The gender pay gap among the FT’s editorial staff is 13%, the biggest shortfall in a decade, the letter adds. A target of reaching equality by 2022 is slower than the BBC’s aim of closing the gender pay gap by 2020. FT staff will meet to discuss the issue on Wednesday, when they will be addressed by an unnamed BBC female star among those who signed a letter calling for the corporation to close the pay gap.
+ Russia and China clamp down on VPN access (New York Magazine)
How wannabe Instagram influencers use bots to appear popular (Digiday)
Many small influencers and businesses are using automation software to generate likes and comments in order to attract advertisers. Many agencies and marketing platforms promote the idea of “micro-influencers,” who are considered more authentic than those with millions of followers. But this cohort — whose following base typically falls in the 10,000 to 100,000 range — are mostly likely to turn to bots to inflate their authenticity. Many micro-influencers on Instagram are using bot providers (the costs range from $9 to $40 per month) to generate followers, likes and comments based on certain rules in an automated way. For example, a user can ask the bot to comment “I love it!” on posts about travel or like images posted from New York City.
Hungry for video, publishers are repackaging ads as content (The Wall Street Journal)
As online publishers — like Business Insider and Cheddar — scramble to feed video-hungry platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, some have begun repackaging video ads as content, blurring the line between sponsored and editorial posts. Some publishers now frequently employ the tactic, which often involves re-editing a TV commercial or marketing video by a third-party company, adding subtitles and music, and reposting the resulting clip to their own social media accounts.
The New York Times needs two bold moves (The Monday Note)
As murky as the New York Times’ financials are, writes Frederic Filloux — especially when compared to many tech companies — its quarterly statement for the second period of this year confirms one thing: it is time for bold moves at the Times. Filloux suggests two: stop printing the weekday paper and aggressive international expansion. “Offloading the least profitable part of the print operation is more a question of managerial conviction than of objective analysis that can be bent every which way. On this, my take is the vast majority of publishers will wait until the last possible moment to make the move. We know how that usually ends. Given most news companies’ enduring print culture, I don’t see any publisher bold enough to actively anticipate the inevitable.”
The post Need to Know: Aug. 1, 2017 appeared first on American Press Institute.
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