In this issue: AdobexFigma canceled / RIP Showtime + more!
Welcome to Context Collapse, the world’s best comms newsletter. I’m Neal Ungerleider. I run Ungerleider Works and used to work as a reporter for Fast Company, write op-eds for the LA Times, and work as a senior copywriter for R/GA. This newsletter helps readers navigate the weird new world of media and gleefully ignores all the conventional wisdom about journalism, public relations, marketing, and advertising.
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“Adobe has called off its planned $20 billion acquisition of the collaboration-software company Figma, weeks after a U.K. regulator warned that the deal would likely harm innovation.
Adobe and Figma said Monday morning that they have mutually agreed to terminate the cash-and-stock transaction because they couldn’t see a clear path to receiving regulatory approval from the European Commission and the U.K. Competition and Markets Authority.”
”The show is over for Showtime as a standalone brand.
As of Jan. 8, 2024, Paramount Global will rebrand the linear Showtime cable network as Paramount+ With Showtime — the same name as the company’s top-tier streaming package. With the name change, the premium cable network will add select Paramount+ original series.
Confusingly, however, some subscribers of the linear Showtime channel will not have access to the Paramount+ With Showtime streaming plan.”
”While much has been made of Twitter’s tangible amenities — the salad bar, the yoga rooms, the Eames chairs — what set Twitter apart was always the intangibles: the accessibility of its executives, the cultural influence of the platform, and the overwhelming sense that, for better or worse, money wasn’t the focus.
(“We weren’t communists,” a former executive told me. “We had houses and mortgages like everyone else.”)”
”The media industry saw several waves of high-profile layoffs in 2023. We had layoffs in January, Gawker shut down in February, Buzzfeed cut 15 percent of its staff in April, Condé Nast laid off staff (including at the New Yorker), NPR cut ten percent of its workforce, and Vox Media laid off four percent of its staff on November 30, after a prior round of layoffs. Last year also closed with a bunch of media layoffs, which came on the heels of pandemic layoffs, so it’s been a brutal few years.
Because the journalism industry is so high profile relative to its economic significance, the business of journalism tends to attract a lot of bad takes.
On the one hand, people who don’t like the product for various ideological reasons want to attribute any economic struggles to their (often somewhat imagined) political beefs with writers. On the other hand, because the average person working in journalism is to the left of the average American, there’s a lot of internal disdain for the idea of taking basic business issues seriously.”
”TikTok is a foreign country: they do things differently there. Popularity on the social media platform, which enables users to create and share videos up to three minutes long, has shot Miguel’s 2011 single Sure Thing into the UK Top 10 a dozen years after its release, made Edison Lighthouse’s 1970 hit Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Grows) a generation Z standard, and given the formerly niche Californian slowcore trio Duster more monthly listeners than Sonic Youth and Pavement put together. And nobody really understands why.”
”It turns out there’s a fine line between an Everything App and a Nothing App. On the one hand, despite various sorts of dysfunction on the platform and general distress within the company, X has, in the past year, shipped a bunch of new features. There’s a subscription tier and a limited revenue-sharing system. There are longer posts, longer videos, in-progress livestreaming features, and voice and video calls. There are fewer links, no headlines, and more Community Notes. There’s a job-listings feature, sort of. X is a licensed payment processor in a dozen states with more in process. There is evidence, in other words, that X’s significantly reduced workforce has been instructed to pursue various Everything App features and that those features are showing up in the product.
On the other hand, while many of these features are live, most of them are available only to subscribers to X’s paid subscription plan. Granted, if anyone wants to use X to do things other than posting and reading short messages, it’s the sort of people who are already paying $3, $8, or $16 a month to subscribe to it. But those people represent a minuscule fraction of X’s users.”
”Shari Redstone has a decision to make: fight or flight.
The media mogul, who controls Paramount Global through her family holding company National Amusements, is considering whether to sell the company or keep it and find a way to change its fortunes.
In recent weeks, Redstone has met with Skydance Media Chief Executive David Ellison and Activision CEO Bobby Kotick about a potential sale, according to people familiar with those talks.
Meanwhile, Paramount is bracing for further cost cuts. The company has discussed laying off more than 1,000 workers early next year, people with knowledge of the discussions said.”
”The Nation, the progressive magazine that has published since 1865, will publish monthly instead of every other week starting in January.
As part of the change, the magazine will now be a “bigger, richer” 84 pages, instead of the current 48 pages, Bhaskar Sunkara, the president of The Nation, said.”
”Feminist publisher Jezebel, which reports on reproductive politics and celebrity culture with a biting humor, relaunched Monday after being acquired by independent publisher Paste Magazine last month.
Jezebel struggled to turn a profit under its former owner, G/O Media, in part because of brand safety concerns that throttled the open-exchange demand for its programmatic inventory.
To counter those challenges, the title will take a slightly different commercial tack as part of the Paste portfolio, placing more emphasis on video sponsorship, live events and film and entertainment advertisers, according to Paste cofounder and editor in chief Josh Jackson.”
Benedict Evans: “Every year, I produce a big presentation exploring macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. For 2024, ‘AI, and everything else’.”
”Walmart’s 23-episode holiday rom-com series “Add to Heart” features more than 330 products consumers can buy while watching on TikTok, YouTube and Roku. A number of companies like Amazon, Home Depot and Vizio have dabbled in this social commerce space, but the trend has yet to take off in the U.S.”
“Imagine destroying all of your Diabetes meds because you trusted Google's highlighting”