When 'legacy' means left behind
The phrase “legacy media” is often deployed as an insult these days. But “legacy is not a word we shy away from. It’s our superpower,” NBCUniversal ad sales boss Mark Marshall said earlier this week. He called NBC’s 100-year legacy “our greatest competitive advantage.”
Other media execs are talking the same way at this week’s upfront presentations, spinning “age as its advantage,” as Axios put it.
It can be — but legacy media brands are in danger of being “left behind” right now, former BBC News chief Deborah Turness warned in a powerful speech in London last night.
Turness, who also ran NBC News in an earlier life, argued that “established media hasn’t confronted the hard truth — that this revolution isn’t just about consumers moving to different platforms. It’s that they are choosing more direct forms of journalism.”
Like… newsletters! And podcast hosts, YouTube creators, Substack startups, and Instagram influencers. I was complaining the other day to Mosheh Oinounou, founder of Mo News, that there’s no catch-all name for this new type of news content. Oinounou is a podcaster and a video maker and a newsletter publisher and an all-around narrator of the news.
But you know this type of news when you see it in your feed. “This creator journalism is not a sideshow. It is fast becoming the show,” Turness said last night.
Her concern, shared by countless others across the news industry, is that traditional outlets haven’t totally faced up “to the consequences of the shift of trust and attention from institutions to individuals; from programs and platforms to people.”
“The reason why this matters transcends the impact of any one organization,” she said. “It matters because this new media diet is, in the main, driven by commentary and conversation. And because the established media has not yet broken into this new world at scale, it isn’t yet the home of frontline reporting by courageous journalists from dark and dangerous places across the globe. Or, with notable exceptions, the home of risky undercover investigations.”
What newsrooms can still offer… |
News organizations are trying. (Hey, this newsletter has been around for ten years.) TV networks are signing digital creators as on-air contributors. The publications formerly known as newspapers are churning out podcasts. But Turness argued last night that news bosses need to go further: They’re “going to have to be more prepared to liberate their talent. To strike a ‘new deal,’ with a compelling offer that outweighs the value of going it alone in the new ‘talent economy.’” On stage at Milken last week, Puck CEO Sarah Personette told me that journalists from “legacy” outlets like the middle ground Puck is offering — a place where they can “move faster” and “try new things” while getting healthcare benefits and equity in the company. Turness laid out many ideas in her speech, which The Guardian excerpted here. For further reading/listening along these lines, Substack just started an interview show with independent media founders. |
Important point about influencers: |
Anytime I write about this topic, I feel compelled to add this huge caveat, which Evan DeSimone expressed really well last week: “Almost all of these news influencers build their brand by commenting on reporting done by real journalists at legacy outlets.” “To be clear,” he added on X, “my point here isn’t that influencers are bad, but rather that anyone who posits them as the future of the media business needs to reckon with how they’ll function once the actual reporting they rely on repackaging dwindles away.” Indeed, which is what makes the Turness argument so urgent. |
“It’s hard to explain just how detached from reality President Trump’s conspiracy-theory-filled social media posting spree” was, CNN’s Daniel Dale wrote yesterday. He was reacting to Trump’s 75+ posts Monday night into Tuesday, which led him to write this crucial fact-check. On “OutFront,” Erin Burnett highlighted the volume of overnight Truth Social posts and asked, “Do you know anybody who does that, including posting a picture of $100 bill with his own face on it? He posted that. He also posted Mount Rushmore with his face being etched into the stone, and then he posted an AI-generated image of former Presidents Obama and Biden, along with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, swimming in sewage.” “He’s tweeting about me when I’m sound asleep,” James Comey told Kaitlan Collins last night, saying of Trump, “You seem nuts, buddy.” I was about to tell editor Andrew Kirell that this box feels repetitive, because Trump has had so many of these unhinged posting sprees, but that’s precisely the point… |
What it tells us about Trump |
Last week, NPR’s Danielle Kurtzleben published an excellent look at the “narrow obsessions” of our “extremely online president.” She used a Trump-post data scraper from CNN (which I didn’t even know existed!) to compile four months of posts and then classify them by topic. “To the degree that his posts measure what he’s thinking about, the president’s social media feed suggests he is as preoccupied — or even more so — with his personal projects and vendettas than he is with pressing policy matters,” Kurtzleben wrote. Conspiracy theories… TikTok memes… “inane posts” of people fighting… it goes on and on. But as she pointed out, it’s mostly just treated as “background noise” now: “Most Americans (and perhaps even journalists) never see most of those posts.” Is that a problem? I’d say yes… |
…especially because the president is increasingly using “treason” rhetoric. Yesterday afternoon he accused unspecified journalists of “virtual TREASON” for reporting that “the Iranian enemy is doing well, Militarily, against us.” He added, “They are aiding and abetting the enemy!” The context for the post became clear moments later when the NYT’s Adam Entous, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan reported that “The Trump administration’s public portrayal of a shattered Iranian military is sharply at odds with what U.S. intelligence agencies are telling policymakers behind closed doors, according to classified assessments from early this month that show Iran has regained access to most of its missile sites, launchers and underground facilities.” >> The latest reporter insult: Trump called MS NOW’s Akayla Gardner ‘a dumb person’ for “accurately pointing out that the cost of his ballroom had doubled since it was first announced.” |
Hitching a ride to Beijing… |
”Brett Ratner hitched a high-profile ride to China aboard Air Force One in the latest show of support President Donald Trump has bestowed on the controversial director,” THR’s Pamela McClintock notes. The director “will use the trip to scout out locations for ‘Rush Hour 4,’” a movie that Trump reportedly urged Paramount to make. |
Final day of the upfronts |
Netflix and YouTube are holding huge upfront presentations this afternoon and evening, but (CNN’s parent) Warner Bros. Discovery is up first today. The event opened with a tribute to Ted Turner by Anderson Cooper. WBD’s sales execs acknowledged the “Ellison, sorry, the elephant in the room” — Paramount’s pending takeover — but said, “There’s change across the entire media industry.” >> In today’s NYT John Koblin has a great new look at how YouTube, knowing that its homegrown video makers are being wooed by Netflix and TikTok, is playing “matchmaker for sponsors and stars.” >> In charts: Streaming platforms are “gobbling up a growing share of ad dollars” from traditional TV platforms, the WSJ’s Suzanne Vranica and Nate Rattner show and tell here (gift link). |
Kimmel’s first upfront after Trump’s attacks |
Andrew Kirell writes: “I didn’t think I’d ever see you guys again,” Jimmy Kimmel quipped at the start of his Disney upfront speech yesterday at the Javits Center, the first of several overt references to Trump’s attempts to get him fired. “I’ve been through so much bullshit this year, it actually made me appreciate this bullshit,” he told the room full of ad execs and Disney stars. “The president has tried to get me twice over the last six months,” Kimmel went on. “That’s one way to look at it. Another way, you could also say I’ve generated unparalleled engagement across a variety of platforms this year. Largely thanks to our partners in Washington, we are up 25% among viewers…” |
NYT defends Kristof column |
The New York Times “is standing by Nicholas Kristof’s article detailing how Palestinians are regularly abused in Israeli prisons after sharp criticism and calls for the column to be retracted,” TheWrap’s Jacob Bryant reports. Kristof’s Monday column, titled “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians,” was reported “based on conversations with 14 men and women who said they had been sexually assaulted by Israeli settlers or members of the security forces.” The column was condemned by Israel’s foreign ministry and is being heavily scrutinized online. After David Shuster claimed to have heard the NYT was considering retracting the piece altogether, the paper’s spokesman flatly denied that. “There is no truth to this at all,” Charlie Stadtlander said, adding that Kristof “traveled to the region to report firsthand” and that the column “collects accounts in the victims’ own words, backed by independent studies.” |
>> Bari Weiss gave Benjamin Netanyahu “a choice” between Major Garrett and Lesley Stahl while trying to book him for a “60 Minutes” interview, Alexandra Steigrad reports. CBS characterized it as an ordinary booking negotiation and reiterated that “it’s the editor in chief’s job to make decisions about bookings and interviews.” (NY Post) >> Speaking of CBS: Tony Dokoupil will be anchoring from Taiwan tonight as Trump arrives in China. >> This just in: MS NOW has announced the names and mid-June launch dates for its new daytime news programs. (Deadline) >> “ProPublica is launching a new regional reporting hub in California as part of a broader effort to grow its investigative footprint across the country. (Axios) >> Paramount’s legal chief Makan Delrahim wrote a letter to Rob Bonta last week arguing that Paramount’s takeover of WBD is good for Hollywood, Rohan Goswami reports. (Semafor) >> “Salem Media has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by The Christian Community Foundation, doing business as WaterStone, in a transaction that will take the company private,” Adam Jacobson reports. (RBR) |
“After a string of AI controversies, The New York Times emailed a ‘periodic reminder’ to freelancers on Tuesday reminding them of the paper’s AI policy,” Futurism’s Maggie Harrison Dupré reports. In summary: All submissions “must be the product of human creativity and craft, and all submissions must consist solely of their original reporting, writing and other work.” >> The timing of the reminder email was curious because last week, a “substantial correction revealed that an article bylined by the NYT’s Canada bureau chief contained an AI-fabricated quote…” |
More of today’s tech talk |
>> “A Texas couple whose son died of an overdose in 2025 after using OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool to get information about drugs sued the technology company on Tuesday, blaming the AI platform for his death,” Megan Cerullo, Jo Ling Kent, and Emily Paradise report. An OpenAI rep called the situation “heartbreaking” but also said the man “interacted with a version of ChatGPT that has since been updated and is no longer available to the public.” (CBS) >> TikTok is launching TikTok GO, “a way for users to discover and book hotels, attractions, and experiences directly within its app.” (TechCrunch) >> Speaking of TikTok, the head of the European Commission is calling for “more protections for children against the ‘addictive designs’ of social media platforms… raising the possibility of an age limit on teens accessing them.” (Reuters) |
A new AI licensing standard for Hollywood? |
“Hollywood actors and producers are standing behind a new AI licensing standard that will tell AI systems whether they’ll need to pay to use a person’s likeness, creative work, characters, and designs,” The Verge’s Emma Roth reports. “With the Human Consent Standard, people can set terms for the use of their work or likeness, including giving AI systems full permission to use their content, allowing access with certain requirements, or restricting access entirely.” The new standard “is backed by talent such as George Clooney, Viola Davis, Tom Hanks, Kristen Stewart, Steven Soderbergh, and Meryl Streep, along with organizations like the Creative Artists Agency and Music Artists Coalition,” Roth writes. But will AI systems participate? That’s always the key Q… |
Around the entertainment world… |
>> Conan O’Brien will host the Oscars for a third straight year. (LateNighter) >> “In what NBC is touting as ‘a sign of late-night solidarity,’ ’The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon‘ will air a repeat Thursday, May 21 — the night that Colbert’s ’Late Show’ (and CBS’s 33-year-old franchise as a whole) fades to black.” ABC already said Jimmy Kimmel is doing the same. (LateNighter) >> “’Dare to Be Stupid: The Weird Al Musical,’ a new musical featuring the songs of Weird Al Yankovic, is being developed for the Broadway stage.” (Deadline) >> And last but not least, Paul McCartney turned down a chance to be roasted live on Netflix. (Variety) |