TGIF! On this longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, we have some big tech headlines, plus the latest on Shou Chew, The Atlantic, Linda Yaccarino, "Elio," Fox Corp, the "Jaws" anniversary, and more... |
Some employees at Mark Zuckerberg's Meta have taken to calling their boss "MAGA Mark." (Surely not to his face, however.) The nickname is one of many details in Hannah Murphy's FT Magazine feature about Zuck's metamorphosis. Her reporting suggests that Meta's recent changes reflect "who Zuckerberg has been all along: hyperfocused on winning."
Zuckerberg didn't speak to Murphy — she "was told he would be focusing on podcast appearances rather than the mainstream media" — but Meta CTO Andrew “Boz” Bosworth went on the record about his longtime friend. "The public is seeing him more how we have, internally, since the beginning," he says.
Another telling Bosworth quote: "We're returning to a very practical era of politics, which I think to some degree has been very liberating for us." (Practical is a useful euphemism for transactional!) Check out the full story here.
>> Speaking of Zuck: CNBC's Kate Rooney has some new reporting about Meta's "multibillion-dollar AI hiring spree."
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"If you've uploaded a video to YouTube, there's a chance it's being used to train Google's AI," CNBC's Zach Vallese writes.
Maybe that seems obvious to you. Or maybe it seems outrageous. Regardless, it's good to have Google on the record confirming that, as Vallese reports, some of YouTube's 20 billion-plus videos are being used "to train its artificial intelligence models, including Gemini and the Veo 3 video and audio generator."
>> The key point: "While YouTube says it has shared this information previously," Vallese "spoke with multiple leading creators and IP professionals" and "none were aware or had been informed by YouTube that their content could be used to train Google's AI models." (Of course, other companies have also trained their models on YouTube videos too, according to previous reports.)
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Today's other AI headlines |
>> AI must take "into account the well-being of the human person not only materially, but also intellectually and spiritually," Pope Leo XIV said in a message to a gathering of Silicon Valley execs in Rome today.
>> "Midjourney has released version 1 of its AI video model, coming a week after the start-up was targeted in a copyright-infringement lawsuit by Disney and NBCUniversal," Todd Spangler reports. (Variety)
>> The BBC is threatening legal action against Perplexity "in its first effort to clamp down on tech groups scraping its vast troves of content to develop the cutting-edge technology." (FT)
>> Music streaming service Deezer said today "that it will start flagging albums with AI-generated songs, part of its fight against streaming fraudsters." (AP)
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About that TikTok extension... |
President Trump's latest TikTok extension is raising lots of legal questions. The White House says its lawyers "strongly believe in the legal rationale," but it's not just Democrats like Sen. Mark Warner who are asserting Trump "is flouting the law and ignoring its own national security findings." Prominent conservative commentators are also pointing out the lack of clear legal basis for the extensions. A Trump War Room post about the extension was flagged with an X community note stating that "the President has no legal authority to extend the deadline another 90 days."
And yet, as the AP notes here, "so far there have been no legal challenges to fight" the repeated extensions.
So TikTok keeps on keeping on, exuding confidence. CEO Shou Chew was in Cannes this week meeting with creators and advertisers. The NYT's Sapna Maheshwari wrote about TikTok's high profile on the Croisette and pointed out how the industry is "operating as though the law did not exist."
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Cue the 'two weeks' montages |
As soon as Karoline Leavitt read Trump's "within the next two weeks" statement about intervention in Iran, video producers started splicing together his past two-weeks pledges, and Shawn McCreesh started cracking on this NYT piece. "Two weeks for Mr. Trump can mean something, or nothing at all," he wrote. "It is both a yes and a no. It is delaying while at the same time scheduling. It is not an objective unit of time, it is a subjective unit of time. It is completely divorced from any sense of chronology. It simply means later. But later can also mean never. Sometimes."
For the latest, check CNN.com. Here's the homepage headline right now: "European and Iranian officials to revive talks as Trump delays decision."
>> Jimmy Kimmel last night: "For a guy whose catchphrase was 'You're fired,' no one has ever given more two weeks’ notice than Donald J. Trump."
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"Israel's far-right ministers are ramping up pressure on foreign media over the filming of impact sites from Iranian missile attacks, threatening to have security agencies investigate the media outlets," CNN's Eugenia Yosef and Oren Liebermann report.
Ben Gvir calls the live broadcasting "a serious national security offense." But the leader of Israel’s opposition, Yair Lapid, says a "sweeping embargo on coverage is unenforceable when everyone has a cell phone with a camera, and pointlessly undermines the global support Israel has received this past week for the just war we are fighting."
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Coming up this weekend... |
Tonight: NBC marks the 50th anniversary of "Jaws" with a prime time telecast of the movie, featuring an intro from Steven Spielberg. Check out Scottie Andrew's related story for CNN here.
Saturday: Nickelodeon's annual Kids' Choice Awards!
Sunday night: ABC airs Game 7 of the NBA Finals and "The Gilded Age" returns to HBO.
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Seven smashing weekend reads |
>> Dick Tofel says "distinctiveness is the best defense" for news publishers in the age of AI search. (Second Rough Draft)
>> Alistair Kitchen, who was recently turned away while trying to visit the US, says "reporting on the Columbia protests led to my deportation." (New Yorker)
>> The White House "wants you to laugh at its deportation memes," Drew Harwell writes, describing its use of "dark jokes, music videos and personal jabs." (WaPo)
>> Peter Kiefer talks with Justin Wells, "the Michael Moore of the MAGA-verse," who sees an opening for "high quality programming" on the right. (THR)
>> Danyel Smith is out with an excellent profile of Stephen A. Smith. (Rolling Stone)
>> Rebecca Rubin looks at "how PG became Hollywood's hottest rating." (Variety)
>> Alex Weprin cautions against expecting Netflix to "save" US broadcasters. (THR)
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The Atlantic's 'contextual approach' |
The Atlantic has added about 30 editorial staffers since January (and named another three yesterday). Charlotte Klein, who took a closer look at the growing operation here, says the publication "has been offering salaries in the $200,000–to–$300,000 range" and estimates that it "has added nearly $4 million in salaries to its annual budget."
By all accounts the plan — "producing a kind of hybrid newspaper-magazine style that likely appeals to readers looking for a more contextual approach to a second Trump term" — is working. Read on...
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My, how far the Post has fallen |
The Washington City Paper got ahold of Alliance for Audited Media's circ numbers for The Washington Post. The #'s tell a specific story about DC's paper and a broader story about a shrinking sector.
"The Post's paid average daily circulation is now down to just 97,000, with roughly 160,000 on Sundays," Vince Morris reports. "That's a fraction of the 250,000 average daily circulation five years ago, when the Post was one of the largest newspapers in the country by circulation." Morris highlights how the Post will be publishing "its final stand-alone Metro section on Sunday."
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L.A. legal fights continue |
The lawsuits over press treatment during the L.A. protests keep coming. The latest suit, against the Department of Homeland Security, alleges excessive force and First Amendment violations. "Since June 6, at least seven members of our organization have been subject to use of force or suffered a serious press rights violation by DHS officers," L.A. Press Club press rights chair Adam Rose, a plaintiff in the case, says.
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When I saw this headline — "Elon Musk's X to offer investment and trading in 'super app' push" — I knew it sounded familiar. X CEO Linda Yaccarino is saying that "users will 'soon' be able to make investments or trades on the social media platform," per the FT, but it's not the first time we've heard this.
Back in 2023, before Musk hired Yaccarino and renamed the company, CNBC reported that Twitter was about to "give users the option to buy and sell stocks and other assets." Back then it was said to be through a deal with eToro, but it was never implemented. Maybe this time?
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🎥 Weekend box office preview |
"Things could could get mighty interesting — and messy — at the June 20-22 box office as Pixar's original animated movie Elio and Sony's zombie pic '28 Years Later' go up against holdover 'How to Train Your Dragon,'" THR's Pamela McClintock reports.
Elio is bracing "for a soft opening, and possibly the lowest in the storied studio's history," she adds. (Come to think of it, my kids loved seeing the "Elio" trailer weeks ago, and we haven't heard a peep about it since. When I tell them it's in theaters now, I bet they'll want to see it ASAP.) Deadline says "the movie itself is its biggest advertisement," so word of mouth will be key in the weeks to come...
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Entertainment odds and ends |
>> In L.A. "the Bob Iger and Willow Bay-owned Angel City FC has taken a stand for immigrants" while most other teams (and studios) "have remained silent," Dominic Patten writes. The team printed up 10,000 "Immigrant City F.C." T-shirts for last weekend's game. (Deadline)
>> The Ankler's Natalie Jarvey says she came away from Cannes Lions with "a sense that some kind of hybrid Hollywood-creator mind-meld is coming." On that note, here's a case study in "the TikToker ➡️ TV Star Pipeline." (The Publish Press)
>> A digital comics store startup called Neon Ichiban is trying to "beat Amazon at e-commerce by catering more intentionally to die-hard comic book fans." (NYT)
>> Fox Corp. is acquiring the Mexican sports broadcasting platform Caliente TV. (CNBC)
>> There's a whole lot of Bruce Springsteen coming soon: The Boss revealed that in addition to next week's "Tracks II" and the biopic this fall, he's got a solo album, a soul covers album, and another box set of vault material all ready for release. (Rolling Stone)
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