⚡Weekend Links
Crisis PR everywhere and damn it I need coffee: The Neal Ungerleider Newsletter #86
Weekend’s here!
Time for some media consumption.
New Futures:
Maggie Koerth has a Twitter thread about confusion around COVID vaccines and why scientists and public health officials are so damn bad at communicating with the public.
How to challenge vaccine misinformation in non-white communities.
Veteran science writer Charles Schmidt on how politics are complicating research into possible accidental lab-release origins for the pandemic.
Jay Caspian Kang on anti-Asian violence.
Axios on the case for returning to work in the office and Target’s corporate office officially switching to a hybrid remote work-office work model. (Previous coverage of why companies love hybrid work models + hot topic in Ungerleider Haus right now = my wife wishing she was working in the office because the clicking sounds from my mechanical keyboard are too loud. Pandemic life!)
Advertising/Marketing/PR:
GSMA is planning an in-person Mobile World Congress convention for the end of June, which seems wildly optimistic but I’m just a simple country lawyer.
Twitter’s allowing advertisers to choose who can reply to their tweets.
Angie’s List is rebranding as Angi, leaving Craigslist as the last Web 1.0 List Legacy Business Standing. Hail!
Jane Friedman on whether writers should do an email newsletter or focus on a blog instead. TLDR = Newsletters are more effective but way harder to build an audience.
The New York Times is washing their hands of moderating their wildly popular 75,000+ member New York Times Cooking Community Facebook group, and Erin Biba has the backstory. Laura Hazard Owen @ Nieman Lab has the context for what the heck happened.
Media:
Newsletter wars heating up with Facebook offering creators paid deals to launch newsletters. Good luck on that!
The Caliphate podcast mess and ‘performative transparency.’
Left-wing-turned-right-wing YouTuber Tim Pool allegedly took a cat hostage, and, yeah… the article goes downhill from there.
TikTok now gives users personalized ads whether they want them or not.
You can now sell ebooks, music and other digital products direct on YouTube.
Shaan Puri has a smart take on Clubhouse’s existential challenges. I’m more optimistic about Clubhouse than Shaan, but agree it’s going to face some big issues in the next year.
Everything Bundle is moving off Substack and rebranding as Every.
Speaking of that, Substack is in the center of controversy these days—which you never want to be if you’re a platform! Peter Kafka has a good overview of WTF is happening with Substack these days, Annalee Newitz (writing, like me, on a Substack newsletter) says Substack’s business is a scam, and Rick Paulas is assembling a list of writers who are paid to be on Substack. More thoughts on this later ‘cus it’s a whole thing.
Facebook is building an Instagram for kids under the age of 13. There’s no way this can go terribly wrong!
Why Amazon is paying $10 billion dollars for streaming rights to NFL games, and why paying Scrooge McDuck’s Money Bin levels of cash for pro sports streaming onward is gonna be the norm.
Ex-TikTok CEO, former high level Disney exec and current DAZN chairman Kevin Mayer gave a really, really unguarded interview to CNBC with about 100x the candor you’d expect from a corporate suit (I mean, I’m sure it was calculated, but… hey! Strategies inside strategies, etc.).
All-things-awesome talk show host The Kid Mero has COVID. Swift recovery!
Tech:
Karen Hao at MIT Technology Review has a must-read article on how Facebook’s use of AI algorithms led to devastating real-world consequences, and former Tech Review editor Gideon Lichfield has the backchannel conversation on the PR strategy Facebook used to manage the story afterwards.
A little bit before the Tech Review story broke, Facebook published their own story about Facebook Reality Labs and FB’s research into human-computer interaction, which… maybe was an attempt to get some favorable coverage ahead of a negative story they knew was coming but is still a really good, useful read into where the giant tech company is investing their R&D $$?
Amazon’s Amazon Fresh grocery store has been growing massively during the pandemic.
Protocol did a huge survey of tech employee sentiment in 2021 that’s kind of amazing.
Social media management company Sprinklr began filing for an IPO, and then quickly Streisand Effected themselves over, yes, a tweet.
Wikipedia parents Wikimedia are starting an enterprise product for corporate/institutional clients to leverage Wikipedia data. Sounds boring but gonna keep a close eye on this space.
Google is reducing the commission they take from developers in the Play app store, shortly after Apple did the same. I wrote back in November about Apple’s App Store Revolt, and from my perspective it seems that the smaller developers (including big companies like Epic who nonetheless aren’t FAANG big!) won this round.
Ben Thompson looks at how content moderation decisions figure into tech stacks.
Eric Newcomer on the 120 most influential former employees of Uber.
Fun:
John Oliver asks Alexa about Amazon labor conditions and Jimmy Fallon panics.
Things I’ve Enjoyed Lately:
This epic obituary for JD Power, who turned surveys about how people feel about their cars into an absolutely massive business.
Patrick McKenzie on how writers can think like business owners.
Carl Hiaasen uses his last Miami Herald column to explain why Florida will always be so awesomely weird.
That’s it for this issue. As always, discussion in the comments + click/like/subscribe etc. etc.
Love and coffee,
Neal
About This Newsletter: Neal Ungerleider is a strategic communications consultant who works with individuals, brands and agencies. He writes this weekly newsletter about the media communications industrial complex and hopes you find it useful. Check out his bio, his portfolio, and current projects.
Connect on Twitter or LinkedIn and learn more about at nealungerleider.com. To reach Neal, reply to this email or drop a line in the comments.