Paramount's math doesn't add up

PLUS: Are screenwriters actually threatened by AI?

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Bari Weiss seeks more than $200mn for media start-up The Free Press

I'm having flashbacks to 2011 when AOL lit $300 million on fire by buying the Huffington Post. I'm not saying Bari Weiss isn't a talented entrepreneur, but I doubt the Free Press is worth $200 million, and it certainly won't find many synergies with the bureaucratic, traditional newsroom at CBS. The Free Press is a partisan outlet that wears its politics on in its sleeves, and it'll mix like oil and water with Paramount’s CBS News. Any attempts to integrate the two will trigger an immediate culture clash. [Financial Times]

How Much Do Podcasters Really Earn? One Star Pulls Back the Curtain.

Speaking of Paramount, if an independent podcaster with no media conglomerate backing him can generate $20 million a year, then I'm pretty sure Paramount could plug the $40 million hole and get Stephen Colbert's late night show profitable. Colbert’s generated over 10 billion views on YouTube and billions more on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. The reason Paramount is losing money has everything to do with it not effectively monetizing these channels. [NYT]

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Can The Washington Post’s TikTok Guy Make It Without The Post?

I think this guy deserves a lot of credit for pioneering how legacy news outlets can operate on TikTok. When he first started posting, the platform was still dominated by dance routines and memes, and it was unclear at that point whether TikTok's executives were even interested in promoting news in the algorithm. [NYT]

Why You Are Reading Reddit a Lot More These Days

It's kind of strange that the website that most resembles the old school internet forums has become one of the biggest platform success stories in the last few years. Despite the rise of influencer culture, there's still a need for semi-anonymous internet users to hang around and explore their interests without feeling like they have to pump up their personal brands. [New York]

ICYMI: This local news outlet carved out a lucrative niche by serving Indianapolis women

Leslie Bailey explained how Indy Maven grew from a weekly newsletter into an events and coworking company.

Who Is Watching All These Podcasts?

From the New York Times:

According to the Signal Hill survey, about 30 percent of people who consume podcasts “play the video in the background or minimize on their device while listening.” Perhaps this person is folding laundry and half-watching “Pod Save America,” or has “The Joe Rogan Experience” open in a browser tab while they do busy work at the office …

Recently, The New York Times asked readers if and how they consume video podcasts. Many of the respondents said they played video podcasts in the background while attending to work or chores, and still treated podcasts as audio-only products. A few said they liked being able to see the body language of podcast hosts and their guests. Still others said that they didn’t like video podcasts because they found the visual component distracting or unnecessary.

The vast majority of my podcast consumption happens in audio form, but I do regularly dip into video podcasts on YouTube. It's rare that I'll watch an entire episode in one go — it's usually broken up into 10 to 15 minute snippets when I'm eating lunch or taking a break from work. In some cases when I'm really committed to finishing an episode, I'll download it in my podcast app and then skip ahead to wherever I am in the YouTube version. But it's also pretty common for me to sample various YouTube-hosted podcasts without ever subscribing to the audio version on my podcast app.

How a Video Studio Embraced A.I. and Stormed the Internet

While so much of the AI-generated video we see on the internet can be dismissed as "slop," there's a growing group of filmmakers attempting to leverage the technology to produce something closer to real art. They believe AI will open up Hollywood-level production to the masses and lead to a massive boom in creativity. [NYT]

My other newsletter: The best longform journalism we consumed this week

Everyone Wants a Piece of Pedro Pascal

For most of his 20s and 30s, Pedro Pascal struggled to get by with bit parts in TV shows and films, and it wasn't until his 40s when he started to land the meaty roles that transformed him into a star. Now, it's almost impossible to enter a movie theater or open up a TV streaming app without encountering Pascal as a leading man. [Vanity Fair]

Hollywood’s being reshaped by generative AI. What does that mean for screenwriters?

Maybe I'm naïve, but I actually think screenwriters are the last people in Hollywood who should be worried about AI. It's much more likely to impact the production side of a TV show or film than the actual script itself. Generative AI does a pretty poor job of writing any sort of longform fiction, and I doubt it'll get much better at it anytime soon. [LA Times]

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