The OpenAI acquisition of TBPN was really dumb

PLUS: The last celebrity journalist?

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The OpenAI acquisition of TBPN was really dumb

Jim Louderback has a smart take on OpenAI’s acquisition of TBPN:

Say what you like about the optimistic, Silicon Valley bro nature of the show. They built a media property with a genuine moat against AI, and a tight community of powerful, influential, high-net-worth humans who can’t be algorithmically replicated or easily targeted ..

[TBPN hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays] built something real. Great company, great exit, and a lesson every creator should study. Want to build value in the age of AI? Lead with personality. Build a genuine relationship with a desirable audience. Have a point of view. If your content is primarily delivering information, AI will own your audience within 2 years – just think of what it’s done in the last 2. The winners will be people who are genuinely, defiantly human.

I’ve never been a regular consumer of TBPN content, but I’ve opined a few times over the past few months that Coogan and Hays are extremely smart media operators. A lot of the success of their show is derived from the fact that they’re very clearly having a lot of fun creating it — and that energy is contagious.

They’re also just really good at marketing. For instance, they came up with some clever hacks early on to get huge creators to retweet clips of their show. They also leveraged old-school media tactics — like buying advertising during the Super Bowl and on roadside billboards — to generate earned media coverage.

And to be clear — I don’t blame them for taking the money. If a tech company offers to give you $200 million, you say yes, especially since you’re unlikely to receive that kind of offer from anyone else.

That being said, this was a dumb acquisition for OpenAI. I touched on this a little bit in Friday’s newsletter, but since then I’ve read a lot of analysis of this deal, and none of the offered-up justifications make any sense.

Let’s start with the key man risk. As Louderback touched on in his piece I quoted above, TBPN is a personality-led podcast that has maybe 50,000 regular listeners/viewers. There is not much value that it produces beyond the content output of its two hosts, which means the company is worthless should they choose to walk away or if, god forbid, something were to happen to them.

I’ve seen some compare this to other tech acquisitions for media outlets — like Hubspot buying The Hustle or Starter Story. But those acquisitions were actually well aligned, since Hubspot is specifically trying to attract the SMB leaders who could buy its software, the very people who read The Hustle or Starter Story. OpenAI is a tech behemoth that ultimately needs north of a billion customers to justify its current valuation. There’s no universe where a podcast with a few thousand listeners helps it lower its customer acquisition costs.

Still others have argued that TBPN will help OpenAI shape the conversation around AI among the influencers in Silicon Valley and the wider public. According to this logic, AI is suffering from a PR problem — after all, it polls extremely poorly — and the only way for OpenAI to achieve ubiquity is if people see it as a force for good.

This may be the most delusional argument I’ve seen. For one, OpenAI has already stated that it won’t interfere with the editorial independence of TBPN, so how exactly will the parent company leverage the podcast for messaging without undermining that independence? What’s more, the show is watched by the very tech founders who’ve already embraced AI. It’s simply preaching to the choir.

Finally, I’ve seen takes that both Coogan and Hays will be plugged directly into top-level strategy sessions at OpenAI, and that the company will be able to tap into their marketing savvy when shaping its messaging.

And sure, I guess that’s an argument, but $200 million is a dumb amount to pay for some part-time consultants who have never marketed a trillion dollar company and are mostly preoccupied with other things. The only person who would think that’s a good deal is someone who has no concept of how much $200 million actually is.

So what’s the real reason OpenAI bought TBPN? As I put it on social media today, “Sam Altman saw a shiny new plaything and decided to burn $200 million on it simply because he could.”

Anyway, congrats to Coogan and Hays. Let’s just hope Altman lets you buy your company back after he gets bored with it.

AI’s behind-the-scenes role in Hollywood productions

When people think about AI infiltrating Hollywood, they picture it being used to generate special effects, write screenplays, or even replace actors. But according to the Hollywood Reporter, it’s been most widely embraced by the production assistants who do much of the behind-the-scenes work that never ends up on screen — stuff like writing thank-you notes, summarizing creative meetings, and analyzing screenplays. In many cases, these tools are being used by Gen Z workers without formal approval or oversight from their employers.

Soft power journalism

The Paris Review has a fascinating deep dive into Aramco World, a long-running print magazine owned by a Saudi oil company:

Aramco World was launched in 1949, before the OPEC crisis made Saudi Arabia very rich, “as an in-house magazine.” … Over the years, it evolved into a charming and slightly bizarre enclave of print media, combining the recondite trivia of an almanac with the effortful style of the classical general-interest magazine, like Life. Now in its seventy-seventh year, the magazine is mailed out every two months from Texas. Its basic editorial approach, within its aforementioned domain of dar al-Islam, might be best summed up as: Isn’t this cool? …

Today, the magazine’s contributor guidelines welcome “coverage of any aspect of a cultural, scientific or historical nature that showcases cross-cultural connections within and beyond the Arab and Muslim world.” But they pointedly do not cover “politics, business news, religion, opinions,” or “conflict or controversy, even if they have positive outcomes.” … Aramco World operates in a parallel universe from its corporate parent, evincing a life-affirming cosmopolitanism that many of its independently funded peers do not.

How a former USA Today columnist launched his own travel channel on YouTube

When Jefferson Graham began filming a “video podcast” in 2006, the term barely existed. YouTube was a year old. Broadband penetration was thin. Smartphones were primitive. And yet there he was—propping a camcorder on a tripod in Los Angeles while his USA Today colleague, Ed Baig, did the same more than 2,000 miles away in New Jersey. They couldn’t beam video files across the country, so Baig literally FedExed physical tapes to Graham so he could edit the episodes together.

“We’d tape ourselves in front of our video cameras and have the phone speaker going so we could prompt ourselves,” Graham recalled.

Before livestreaming, before remote recording tools, before the modern creator economy, Graham was already doing what today’s creators treat as obvious.

That early experimentation foreshadowed a second chapter of his career: one in which he would leave a major national newspaper, build a travel-photography YouTube channel from scratch, and ultimately license the show to a national FAST network. It is, in many ways, a case study in how traditional journalism skills can be repurposed into a solo-creator business — and how one veteran reporter reinvented himself as a TV host for the streaming age. [Simon Owens]

That case study actually sits behind a paywall, but if you’re not ready to subscribe, I also included it in an ebook that you can download over here.

Why a tiny podcast can deliver more PR value than a cable news hit

Puck’s Julia Alexander has a good piece on why politicians are increasingly willing to go on livestreams and podcasts that attract relatively small audiences:

As the distinctively Gen X publishing philosopher Brian Morrissey noted the other day in his newsletter, The Rebooting, media executives are increasingly thinking about “fandoms, not randoms” as the defining ethos of the post-scale, engagement-centric era. Part of the reason respectable Democrats like Gavin Newsom, Rahm Emanuel, and Ro Khanna have expressed their willingness to appear on [Hasan] Piker’s livestream despite his occasionally radioactive reputation is because they believe a 30-minute Zoom into his home office will be more impactful than yet another cable news hit, where perhaps only a tenth of the audience is in the 18-54 demo—and because they’d be reaching a swath of the electorate that wouldn’t be caught dead watching Anderson or Lawrence O’Donnell.

There’s also a parasocial dimension: According to Pew research, about 70 percent of adults under the age of 30 who consume news primarily through influencers say that those creators are better than traditional media at helping them understand news events and civic issues. Last week, the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report noted that “the past decade has seen a broad shift across digital platforms toward greater personalization,” adding that “young people are therefore increasingly accustomed to media environments tailored to their individual preferences.” That personalization is now inextricably linked with authenticity—a hallmark of this era of the industry.

I think one of the key differentiators between these creator interviews and your standard cable news hit is the depth of discussion; podcast interviews can sometimes last hours, whereas on TV news you’re lucky if you get a five-minute segment where you’re sharing the screen with at least four other pundits.

That depth matters. If you choose to allow someone’s voice to flow into your phone’s earbuds for an entire hour, the brand recall on that person will be magnitudes higher than if you simply see their face on a talking heads panel as you’re channel surfing.

(BTW, I used a gift link so you can access that article for free.)

The last celebrity journalist?

The New York Times published a fun profile of Patrick Radden Keefe, a New Yorker journalist who has achieved some level of mainstream celebrity, at least enough to appear as himself in HBO shows and occasionally model in fashion ads.

From the piece:

He has modeled for J. Crew, appeared as himself in HBO’s “Industry,” and is, according to David Remnick, his boss for well over a decade at The New Yorker, a “relentless, relentless reporter and a storyteller of the highest order.” He is one of the last household names in nonfiction at a time when the entire future of the enterprise — writing — is up in the air …

… His work often focuses on driven people who in some way fail spectacularly; whole books, including “Empire of Pain,” his exegesis of the family behind OxyContin, and now “London Falling,” are animated by this pattern. He specializes in Icarus stories, moral tragedies that hinge on hubris. Read enough of them and it can start to feel as if Keefe is writing warnings to himself about the danger of success.

I’m not sure I agree with the thesis of the piece that there are no more celebrity journalists — if anything, journalists have more tools at their disposal now than ever before to elevate their personal brands. Being recognizable on the street though probably requires at least some sort of regular video output — even if it’s a podcast.

(BTW, I used a gift link so you can access that article for free.)

A cool news nonprofit in Maine

Editor & Publisher published a great profile of a Congolese immigrant who launched a Maine news site geared toward the African diaspora. Not only does it report on communities that receive scant coverage from other Maine newspapers, but its journalism is also translated into multiple different languages.

From the piece:

Under Amjambo Africa’s vibrant masthead — which features silhouettes of a lion and a natural-haired woman in an African headwrap — stories ranging from immigrant business spotlights and community member profiles to know-your-rights campaigns and service journalism on avoiding scams fill the 32-page tabloid each month. Local reporting about Lewiston libraries and Rockland city ordinances also shares space with international pieces about political prisoners in South Sudan and military actions in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

“When we started Amjambo, we were thinking there are so many things happening from Africa and where we come from,” said Makoko. “So, there were a lot of events happening, but they were not covered here in the U.S. We thought maybe we could be a source of information to bring news from Africa here.”

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AI can fill in some of the gaps left by human-written journalism

The independent journalist Marisa Kabas wrote about her steadfast refusal to use AI in her writing:

As a rule, I’ve tried not to concern myself with AI. As the companies behind these products continue promising us that AI has something for everyone, I still haven’t seen a practical application that makes sense for me. But I’ve been hesitant to weigh in on the use of AI in the past as it typically concerned areas beyond my expertise and in which I do not work. But now that multiple stories from major outlets in recent days have proclaimed not just the inevitability of AI in journalism, but have trumpeted how working journalists are actively including AI-produced work in their finished product, it’s become my problem. It’s exposed a gulf between those who want to have their words remembered and those who just want people to remember that they wrote. We must stem the idea being pushed by tech companies and their billionaire funders who’ve sunk too much into their products to admit defeat that the infiltration of AI into journalism is inevitable; because from my perch as an independent journalist, it simply is not.

I’ll start by saying I don’t think AI writing will fully replace human writing anytime soon. If you look at the reporting coming out of places like The New Yorker, Bloomberg Businessweek, or The New York Times, there’s a level of contextualization that requires synthesizing too many inputs for AI to handle well. There’s no scenario where I feed nine interview transcripts into ChatGPT and it produces a fully formed New Yorker–style article, no matter how strong the prompt is.

That said, it’s hard to ignore how quickly AI writing has improved over the past year. There’s an enormous amount of information that simply can’t be distilled by human journalists alone due to time and resource constraints. And while some journalism is meant to entertain, not all of it needs to. Sometimes the value of a piece lies purely in the information it conveys—and in many of those cases, AI can do a perfectly adequate job of summarizing it.