Here’s what’s on my radar.
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The media’s ancient conflict of interest (Ross Barkan)
Why DirecTV dropped conservative channel Newsmax (LAT)
“The dumb money era is over,” said Eric Nuzum, a podcast strategist and co-founder of the independent studio Magnificent Noise. “People had been throwing money at things just to see if they could get in and scale up audience quickly, but now everyone’s being a little bit more conservative.” (Reggie Ugwu / NYT)
Roku had a good quarter but wants to cut corporate costs further (Tiyashi Datta / Reuters)
“Activision Blizzard's new head of corporate affairs, Lulu Cheng Meservey recently raised eyebrows with a series of tweets directed at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). In a thread viewed more than 1 million times, she made the case that the breakout success of HBO's "The Last of Us" was proof the FTC didn’t need to block Microsoft’s $69 billion Activision bid to preserve game industry competition between Sony and Microsoft.” (Eleanor Hawkins / Axios)
Russian mercenary chief says he is also behind global information war (Aaron Gregg, Andrea Salcedo & Natalia Abbakumova / WaPo)
“Her (TikTok) videos also reached the coaches of the college water ski program she hoped to join. They sent her an email saying her videos were “too negative,” she said. And she was denied a spot on the team.” (Tatum Hunter / WaPo)
“Several former Twitter employees, including some with direct knowledge of the issues he prioritized, said Musk’s changes were often geared toward improving his own user experience. Data has emerged showing how he has benefited from the changes, and examples have piled up month after month of specific actions geared toward improving his personal experience on the site.” (Faiz Siddiqui & Jeremy B. Merrill / WaPo)
“This was no accident, Platformer can confirm: after Musk threatened to fire his remaining engineers, they built a system designed to ensure that Musk — and Musk alone — benefits from previously unheard-of promotion of his tweets to the entire user base. In recent weeks, Musk has been obsessed with the amount of engagement his posts are receiving. Last week, Platformer broke the news that he fired one of two remaining principal engineers at the company after the engineer told him that views on his tweets are declining in part because interest in Musk has declined in general.” (Zoë Schiffer & Casey Newton / Platformer)
“Automation technology has ushered in a fleet of secret workers behind screens, machines, and smiling robot faces. The robots and chatbots aren't replacing humans, they're just keeping the people out of sight and out of mind. And while separating the customer from the workers serving them may be good for the companies, there's mounting evidence it's a terrible deal for the employees.“ (Paris Marx / Insider)
“Set aside the image of the floating mind waking from its uneasy dreams to find itself transformed into a chatbot and instead consider what a machine fed the past 50 years of discourse about AI — not to mention recent and even current news coverage and criticism of AI — might come up with as a statistically likely set of words to follow questions about its real “feelings.” Consider, also, how it might talk about its darkest desires. The prevailing narrative about AI is basically from the movies: It’s Terminator; it’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.” (John Herrman / New York)
Ridley Scott’s 1984 Apple Super Bowl ad digitally restored (Retro Recipes / YouTube)
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