Month: June 2021

“I actually think it’s easier now than ever for athletes and celebrities to secure their financial security for the long-term,” said Simon Oliveira, md of talent and creative IP sports business Kin Partners. Top-level performers have never had so much wealth or so many investment options. That said, we live in a world where agents, financial advisors and businessmen target young and impressionable talent with significant riches, so seeking the right guidance is key.

Saha’s own experiences bear this out. As a player, Saha found out that his own agent had agreed to a six-figure commission to be paid to someone associated with a club he was about to sign for. He struggled to understand why he had to pay an eye-bulging sum to an individual he had never even met. Saha constantly had to “gamble,” in his words, with the advisors he employed bereft of his own expertise.

While talking about these hardships over the years has raised awareness, Saha wanted to do more. So he created the AxisStars platform in 2014 — a place where elite athletes and entertainers can go for all manner of advice, potential business deals, and networking opportunities away from the pitch. And despite being around for several years, AxisStars couldn’t be more pertinent than it is now.

“The era of social media has intensified the connection with athletes and fans, for better or worse, but athletes aren’t always best equipped to understand this influence,” Saha told Digiday. “Sure, there are sites and PDFs people can access, but that’s not always digestible for athletes and artists. It’s hard for them to get a grip on their affairs.”

In AxisStars, Saha, alongside business partner and marketing consultant Kate Hamer, is building a platform to change this. In a world where it’s all too easy for athletes to have their lack of financial acumen exploited or be constantly at the end of bad advice, there are few places they can repeatedly turn to for sound judgment on what’s best for their finances. Think of AxisStars as a cross between LinkedIn and Tinder for athletes and entertainers looking to link up with business opportunities.

“There are lots of advisors, supporters, federations, even player unions around athletes that all have their own agenda,” said Hamer. “AxisStars is more focused on how we use the technology to create the ideal career journey based on their interests and where they are in their career, for talent to make sure they get the best from it.”

When it launched, AxisStars was only open to former athletes. Eventually, current athletes were also allowed in. Once there, users could talk to one another about issues related to career-related issues, from lifestyle to finance, insurance to physical fitness. There’s even a place they can go and manage their commercial deals.

“We want athletes and artists to see the platform as a safe space they can trust; where all the information is there for them or they can get access to contact they don’t have,” said Saha. It’s a place that’s built for them and is governed by an internal logic that will grow with the regulation of technology, not commercial greed. The experience is private so there’s no need for people to feel ashamed asking about something they think others would expect them to know.”

This experience has evolved over time. What started out as a site is now also an app. Over the years, Saha and Hamer have introduced small groups of athletes and entertainers from different fields into the app in stages to get their feedback and insight as to what they need. That’s why the platform is now at 65% soccer. Naturally, Saha has the most connections there.

Rugby has been another focus. It now accounts for around 15% of AxisStars’s user base. Cricket is another growth area for the future at around 4% of the platform as are female athletes at 22%. Five in 10 (52%) of its members are in the U.K., a third (33%) of them are in France, 10% Rest of Europe and 3% in the U.S.

“Athletes don’t always get the support they need because so much of the industry is short-term focused,” said Hamer. “The social media training a footballer gets, for example, will be focused on not getting the club in trouble. Footballers rarely get any training on how to develop their own brand.”

Athletes and entertainers share their interests with the app while creating a profile. Those interests are then used to inform commercial offers they receive via the app. All those offers are from companies that have paid a fee to join AxisStars where they are vetted by an internal board. Consultants, agents, and lawyers on the app also pay a fee and go through the same vetting process.

Members give those companies and individuals a rating, much like they would do an Uber driver or an Airbnb host, so others have an idea of the quality of service. “It’s one thing earning the money, but it’s a very different ball game knowing where, when and how to invest it,” said Oliveira. “If you surround yourself with the right people, who are smart enough to know when they need to bring in external expertise to oversee investment opportunities, that is half the battle. Ultimately, all investments carry risk but you are mitigating those risks if you seek top-level specialist advice as a good management team would do.”

The idea is that AxisStars isn’t just a platform for the most popular talent from the world of sports and entertainment. Someone who doesn’t have companies queuing up to sponsor could use it to get in front of more sponsors. 

“We’re more focused on education but we think of the platform as a hub where people can find pretty much anything on how they can develop their own interests,” said Saha.

Data from mobile ad tech startup Branch bears this out. Adoption of those newer versions was at 70% on June. 20 (see graph). 

More devices pushing ATT means more chances people will see a prompt when they open an app asking whether they want it to share their data with other apps and sites via the mobile identifier otherwise known as the Identifier for Advertisers. And if this happens then there are more chances for more people to decline to share their data. 

Previously, this wasn’t an issue as the ATT versions of iOS weren’t at critical mass. So the number of ad impressions available to marketers where they were automatically given access to someone’s data outweighed those where the ATT safeguard was presence. It was pretty much business as usual for many marketers.  

Now, marketers have no other choice but to take their heads out of the sand and tackle ATT head-on. 

Naturally, this is causing a reevaluation of where media dollars are spent. And increasingly those dollars are trickling through to Google’s Android devices where marketers aren’t limited in their ability to track which users click on what ads and whether those interactions lead to an install, purchase or some other downstream action. 

“I concur with the same observation where we’re seeing an increase of competition on Android with more and more budgets being allocated,” said Jean-Sebastien Laverge, svp of growth at mobile game publisher Tilting Point.

The trend could become even more acute over the coming weeks. Before ATT arrived, clients of mobile intelligence business Appsumer, which tracks $500 million of annual ad spend across over 100 apps, spent a 60:40 split in favor of Android. Over the last two weeks (from May 31 to June 13), that split has edged up to a 62:38 ratio.

Smaller advertisers are driving at least some of this shift in spending. Marketers for those businesses have slashed spending on Apple’s iOS devices by seven percentage from a pre-ATT 2021 average of 31%. Similarly, Appsumer’s mid-size clients have dropped spending on iOS devices by 11 percentage points. However, the mobile intelligence firm did see a surge of iOS spending from this mid-size category before the ATT rollout, which does lift this average slightly above normal levels. 

Still, that money is moving over to Android isn’t a surprise. 

In fact, it was inevitable that advertisers would move at least some of their ad dollars from iOS where targeting and measurement is getting harder by the day to Android where advertising is easier. They were doing this as early as last August ahead of the original September 2020 launch date for ATT, per Adexchanger. The trend became more pronounced in the run-up to the revised spring 2021 date and has hardened ever since.

Between February 2 to February 7, marketers spent 56.16% of their budgets on Android app install campaigns and 43.84% on iOS, according to mobile measurement platform Singular global ad spend data totaling more than $1.5 billion. But last week, from June 14 to June 202, the split was 70.29% to 29.71%. Some of this swing can be attributed to artificially inflated iOS spending in the weeks and months before Apple released iOS 14.5. Marketers doubled down on iOS inventory while the IDFA mobile identifier was ubiquitous. But that spending spree only explains part of the story. Once ATT spread to more devices, marketers had to react.

“While we’re only just now seeing 14.6 being pushed hard by Apple for users to upgrade, 14.5 didn’t really have a huge impact on spend,” said AdColony’s vp of global marketing and communications Jonathan Harrop. “In fact, the increase in spending on Android far outpaced the mild single-digit decreases on iOS which means spending is currently higher than usual. As more users upgrade their OS, and developers continue to update ads to invoke ATT, advertisers will continue to test, learn and adjust their strategy, especially to optimize SKAdNetwork campaigns.”

Unsurprisingly, ad prices are shifting as a result of media dollars being moved between the main operating systems.

“Now, part of this is to be expected because we’re always pushing toward that unified auction in-app where we’re making constant changes to make those auctions efficient to push CPMs up,” said Mike Brooks, svp of revenue at Groundtruth-owned weather app WeatherBug. “But the fact that our Android CPMs are higher now than they are on Black Friday tells us the at least some of that is being influenced by what’s happening in the wider ecosystem thanks to ATT.”

Recent data from mobile ad tech vendor Blis backs this observation. Here’s a three-month view of Android CPMs the ad tech vendor observed, for example (Blis redacted the price as it’s sensitive).

Take a closer look at the week ending June 6 (when the proliferation of iOS 14.6 really started to grow) and compare it to the week ending June 20 (when Blis saw around 50% of the iOS bid volume arriving with the newer ATT-enabled versions of iOS). Global Android CPMs are up around 2%; CPMs in the U.S. were up 12% and in Great Britain those prices rose 16%

As ever with all things ATT, however, nothing is straightforward. Sure, CPMs are on the rise — that much is true. But ad tech vendors like Blis were paying more for impressions back in March than now — likely the result of some specific campaigns. Standard shifts in bidding strategies like this could have as much of an impact on swings in CPMs as ATT. 

“Basically, the CPMs we pay are a result of the CPMs we bid, and each campaign bids a bit differently,” said Blis’ chief technology officer Aaron McKee. 

Bidding strategies aside, there are also the actions of publishers to consider here. Bid requests — the piece of code that tells a marketer there’s an opportunity to buy an impression on a site — are a good proxy for this. 

Indeed, the volume of bid requests on all versions of iOS dropped in comparison to those on Android (in blue below) for the four weeks to June 20., according to Blis. Here’s how this trend played out in the U.S.

The volume of bid requests has been as much as 32% lower than Android over the past couple of weeks, with the delta coming from a reduction in iOS volume. Historically, the Android and iOS lines have been much closer for Blis — typically within about 5 to 10% of each other. 

“We’re seeing a similar trend in the UK, as well, with around a 20% gap (iOS volumes lower),” said McKee. “We’ve not yet had a chance to complete analysis to say ‘why’ this is happening. It may be a result of some publishers shifting away from ad monetization and either not showing ads, or showing fewer ads, but it may also reflect choices made by SSPs over what type of inventory to send to auctions.”

Nevertheless, it remains to be seen as to whether these spending shifts are permanent. 

Usually, performance marketers don’t tend to see too much difference between what they buy on both operating systems. In many ways, marketers bought ads on both iOS and Android to reach similar goals via similar audiences. That’s becoming harder. Measurement on iOS devices is blunted when marketers don’t have a mobile ideniifier to call on, which means its more expensive to reach users who are likely to click on an ad.

Now, marketers are having to ask themselves whether it makes sense to separate the two operating systems moving forward. 

Olympic trials

With just a month until the start of the Olympic Games in Tokyo, Japan, sports desk editors are still adjusting their plans for coverage of the event — which has been mired by constant changes — and remaining flexible in their editorial and sales initiatives to deal with the many unknowns around this unusual Olympics season.

“It’s going to be very different going into the Olympics this year in comparison to previous Olympics,” said Jo Lambert, head of consumer at Verizon Media, which owns Yahoo Sports.

Uncertainty has clouded this year’s Summer Olympics ever since it was postponed last year because of the pandemic. That uncertainty remains, with coronavirus cases in Japan rising this year and leading to calls for the Games to be canceled. As it stands, the Games will commence on July 23, and sports media companies, including ESPN, Sports Illustrated, the Los Angeles Times and Yahoo Sports, are preparing to be as agile as the athletes. 

The key hits:

• Sports publishers are sending fewer people to cover the Summer Olympics on-site in Tokyo.
• A lack of athlete access is also pushing publishers to adjust their coverage strategies.
• Media outlets have already had to tweak their Olympics ad sales strategies because of lower-than-usual advertiser demand.

Coverage challenges

One of the biggest challenges to sports media outlets’ Olympics coverage this year will be access to athletes. Because of health and safety restrictions, journalists will not have free reign of the Olympic Village — which houses the athletes — in Tokyo, making it more difficult to secure interviews on the ground, before and after games.

Further complicating matters, publishers had to decide how many people to send “before we had a complete picture of exactly what the experience was going to be like on the ground, in terms of access to events and athletes,” said Stephen Cannella, co-editor in chief of Sports Illustrated.

As a result, some outlets like SI have opted to scale back their on-the-ground operations. “We weren’t sure it would be worthwhile to send as big of a contingent as we have there,” Cannella said. He added, “Our hope for our audience is that they don’t notice any differences in our coverage from past Olympics.”

• ESPN’s plans for the Tokyo Olympics are still being finalized, but they are “tentatively” planning to send 15-18 reporters, producers and other staff from its TV and digital teams to the Tokyo Games, according to a spokesperson.
• Sports Illustrated is sending four writers and a photographer to Tokyo, about half the size of the group they sent to the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, and roughly 20% of its total staff. 
• The Los Angeles Times is sending 12 journalists and photographers, about half of its “core writing staff.” For the Rio Olympics, the LA Times sent 10 people, who were part of a combined bureau under former owner Tribune Publishing; five were sent from the Chicago Tribune, one from the Baltimore Sun and one from the San Diego Union-Tribune — 17 people total. (The San Diego Union-Tribune will send one person to Tokyo this year to collaborate with and supplement the L.A. Times’ coverage).
• Yahoo Sports does not yet know how many people it is sending to Tokyo next month. Lambert initially said the outlet would send four people but acknowledged the number is being “negotiated at the moment.” The company later described the figure as a “handful” and is “still in flux.” Whatever the amount ends up being, it will be “a much smaller crew than in times past,” Lambert said.

Those numbers do not include support staff like translators and guides. A lot of Olympics coverage will be handled remotely — a system journalists are used to after working from home for many months due to pandemic-related lockdowns, Lambert said.

Coverage changes

Given the expected lack of on-the-ground access, sports publishers are giving themselves a wide berth for covering this year’s Olympics.

Yahoo Sports is prepared with pre-produced content, such as features on past and present Olympics athletes, an editorial series called “Beyond Gold,” which has secured a sponsor that Verizon will announce closer to the Games and an interactive map that shows all the medals each country has ever won at the Olympics. 

“We wanted to make sure we had the right profiles in place ahead of time, knowing we won’t be able to do as much on the ground,” Lambert said. For the first time, Yahoo Sports is enabling sports betting on the Olympic Games in the nine states where it’s legal, thanks to an affiliate deal with BetMGM, which will also produce daily quizzes and polls.

The Los Angeles Times is rolling out new digital products around the Olympics, including a daily newsletter dedicated to Olympics coverage, a live blog, interactive maps, and trackers on Southern California athletes at the Games and medals (all of which can be sponsored by advertisers). The Los Angeles area “produces a tremendous amount of Olympics athletes and is a hotbed for training,” said Iliana Limón Romero, deputy sports editor at the Los Angeles Times. “We are tapping into that connection.”

Rather than write about “every single event in minute-by-minute detail,” SI will focus coverage on “things that people won’t be seeing on TV,” Cannella said. However, the coverage plans he described — “an analysis of who performed well, a feature story about athletes you’re seeing on TV, and context to the performances you’re watching,” Cannella said — sound very much oriented around what people will be seeing on TV.

Or what they will be seeing on a connected TV. NBCUniversal — which holds the U.S. broadcast rights to the Olympics and announced it had sold $1.25 billion in national advertising for the Tokyo games in March 2020 — plans to use the Games to attract more audiences to Peacock, the streaming service it launched nationally last July. On June 23, the Comcast-owned media conglomerate announced that it will stream popular Olympics sporting events — including men’s and women’s gymnastics, men’s and women’s track and field and men’s basketball — live on Peacock. Gymnastics and track and field will stream for free, but viewers will need a Peacock premium subscription to watch basketball coverage live.

Sponsorship shifts

The uncertainty around this year’s Olympics has also affected publishers’ businesses and how they are handling sponsorship deals around Olympics content. Olympics-related ad spending is down compared to previous Games, pushing publishers to count on other sports to make up the difference.

The “levels of advertising” at SI “are not at pre-pandemic levels,” said Danny Lee, Sports Illustrated’s publisher. He anticipates improvements in ad spending into the summer and fall, with the football and baseball seasons gearing up. While ad spending around the Tokyo Games won’t compare to previous Olympics seasons at SI, it is a “consistent improvement” coming out of last year, he said. “This Olympic platform will probably be the best platform that we’ve had since the pandemic started,” Lee said.

Advertisers like Toyota were scheduled to sponsor 2020 Olympics content at SI, and will continue to support SI’s 2021 Olympics coverage, in addition to other print and digital sponsors, said Lee. SI’s Olympics preview magazine issue, which goes on sale July 8, will have the most ads sold year to date, according to Cannella.

However, other advertisers have been wary of committing to sponsor Olympics coverage, leading publishers to make compromises.

For example, the L.A. Times wanted to produce video segments on Southern California athletes going to the Olympics, but it did not receive enough upfront ad commitments, so instead, they created Olympics trackers, which was less of a production lift for staff, according to Myra Marayag, vp of partnerships at the L.A. Times.

Now, rather than pitching advertisers specifically on its Olympics content, the L.A. Times is tying that coverage into its overall sports portfolio, said Marayag. “We’ve been reaching out to partners, and saying: here’s how we’re adapting to every changing landscape with the Olympics… If things change beyond our control, we can allocate funds to other areas of sports coverage,” she said. — Sara Guaglione

What we’ve heard

“I wish they would just do it. Stop just — excuse me — dicking around the whole industry. Let everybody get to a new normal. It’s hard to strategically plan this way.”

— Publishing executive on Google’s heretofore fuzzy timeline for disabling third-party cookies and slow rollout of cookie alternative FLoC

Subscribers as subscriber acquisition tool

Metered paywalls and lookalike targeting can be fine subscriber acquisition tactics, but don’t sleep on simple word of mouth.

This week The New York Times rolled out a program for its existing subscribers to help the publisher recruit new customers. Each month, a subscriber will be able to “gift” 10 articles to non-subscribers to circumvent the site’s paywall. The shared links, which are unique to each subscriber, are live for only 14 days, but anyone given access to the links will be able to read the article for free. This means if a subscriber shared their link on Twitter, it could be read by hundreds or thousands of people during that two-week period.

“We really believe subscribers are advocates for the Times and over time, our access model has made it a little bit more difficult for subscribers to start conversations around our journalism in the form of article sharing,” said Anna Mancusi, product director at The New York Times. 

Other publishers have similarly enlisted subscribers to build up their overall subscriber bases. In 2016, The Wall Street Journal tested a program for subscribers and WSJ staffers to give non-subscribers 24-hour free access to shared articles. In the past, The Information had similarly allowed subscribers to share articles with non-subscribers, though it’s unclear where that program stands currently.

More recently, publishers are offering subscribers the ability to give subscriptions and free trials to friends or family with the purchase of their subscription, but not individual articles.

• The Information gives its subscribers five free 30-day subscription trials to share.
• The Atlantic gives its premium members, who pay $100 for one year of the magazine and website, a free, year-long digital subscription, which is priced at $50.
• The Washington Post has a similar member benefit for its premium digital subscribers who pay $15/month the ability to share one $100 year-long digital subscription with another reader, as well as one 30-day digital pass per month to share.

In addition to potentially winning over new subscribers, the subscriber perk has the bonus benefit of possibly adding registered users to publishers’ first-party databases, according to Mancusi. She said that was not the intention when creating the product, though.

For the gifted articles, anyone clicking on these links will also be asked to register, though it will not be a required step, she said. The Times has over 100 million registered users, according to the company, with an average weekly audience in the first quarter of 2021 of 76 million.

Once a publisher has access to that new reader’s email, however, they are given an insight into exactly what can trigger this person into becoming a loyal reader, said Kerel Cooper, chief marketing officer at email marketing company LiveIntent. By knowing which emails are being opened, publishers like the Times can determine who needs more engagement to make the conversion into a subscriber and what type of content, in particular, they are interested in.

“Non-subscribers who come to our site from the link that we shared with them are more likely to start a relationship with us by registering compared to folks who arrive on site from other avenues. There’s something powerful in peer-to-peer sharing,” said Mancusi. — Kayleigh Barber

Numbers to know

3: Minimum number of days per week that The New York Times expects its employees to work from the office starting in September.

21%: Percentage of people in the U.S. who paid for any form of online news in the last year.

1.12 million: Number of people who subscribe to The Economist, an increase of 90,000 subscribers in the past year.

3 questions with BuzzFeed News’s Mark Schoofs

A little more than year after Mark Schoofs took the reins from Ben Smith to be editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, the news outlet nabbed its first Pulitzer Prize on June 11 for an investigation into China’s detention of hundreds of thousands of Muslims by reporter Megha Rajagopalan and contributors Alison Killing and Christo Buschek.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter himself, Schoofs acknowledged that social and celebrity news, as well as cultural reporting, continue to be parts of BuzzFeed News’ journalism. But investigative work, like the Xinjiang series or Krystie Lee Yandoli’s reporting on the toxic work culture at “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” is “at the heart of what we do,” he said.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity. — Tim Peterson

When you joined BuzzFeed News, you said in an interview with Annenberg Media that you want the outlet to “lean harder into the biggest stories of the day, be more focused and deliberate about the choices that we make, the stories that we go after, and use the full power of the newsroom in a more coordinated way.” What have you done to put that into practice?

It is certainly my sense that we do more collaboration now than we ever have done. We are mighty but small, so we cannot afford to not collaborate because we don’t have anybody to waste. Second, we created an inequality desk, which has done absolutely terrific work on a whole variety of subjects, everything from how Black Capitol police felt during the January 6 insurrection to incredible stories on hate crimes against Asian-Americans. And we really like to leap into the news, where we can bring a reporter’s expertise and sourcing and knowledge to bear at a moment. We’ve been doing more of that.

Are there any new areas of focus for you this year in terms of coverage, or areas that you particularly looking to grow coverage in?

We just hired two new politics reporters, and so we’re looking to grow the way we cover politics in particular. We’re interested in this moment when not just a policy or 10 policies are under discussion but the very essence of democracy and whether everybody’s vote will be counted hangs in the balance. We’re very interested in covering race and particularly racism. We’re very interested in and are doing great coverage of white nationalism. We are continuing to look at fresh ways into inequality, fresh ways into covering the largest tech companies and their influence on American life. And we are continuing to cover the greatest human rights violation in the world at the moment, which is the genocide of Muslim people in Xinjiang.

You mentioned the equality desk and the coverage of race and racism. What all are you doing at BuzzFeed News to improve internally when it comes to the level of diversity, equity and inclusion inside your newsroom?

There are three main things I focus on every single day. One is the journalism; the second is diversity; and the third is making sure that we’re financially in a good place. On diversity, we now have a phenomenal program. When we go to hire, we almost always now are engaging a journalist of color with deep networks to act as a headhunter. We’re not hiring some fancy firm with a shingle out but that doesn’t really know journalism. We’re hiring actual journalists of color, who have fantastic and extensive networks in the business, to help us surface talent that — despite all of our outreach to all of the different groups, tweeting and everything else — we somehow might miss. And we call people who we know from past searches or from just reading and being people who are aware. We call them and say, “Hey, we have this position open. Would you be interested in applying? Or do you know anybody who would be interested in applying?” And we have a really sophisticated interview process, which involves people from across the newsroom. Quite frankly, it’s a lot of work.

What we’ve covered

Digiday Guide: Everything you need to know about Gen Z’s media consumption habits:

• Despite being a growing force on the internet, Gen Z remains an enigma for many media companies and brands.
• Video is critical for publishers and marketers to introduce their brands to this generation.

Read more about Gen Z here.

Nielsen studies show ‘light’ listeners make up nearly half of podcast audience:

• An increase in light podcast listeners indicates a lot of people are dabbling into audio-based news and entertainment.
• Comedy is the most popular genre of podcasts, as of May 2021.

Read more about podcasting here.

Publishers have checked out on platforms:

• Outside of Facebook, no platform was described by more than a third of publishers as valuable for driving revenue.
• Other than Instagram, no platform was described by more than half of publishers as valuable for building a brand.

Read more about publishers here.

How GNI Startups Boot Camp is giving journalists the tools for media entrepreneurialism:

• The Google-provided virtual online course is meant to give 24 journalists the tools to form their own media companies.
• The boot camp is opening up for its second cohort, which will begin on Sept. 7.

Read more about GNI Startups Boot Camp here.

How publishers are handling the Juneteenth holiday this year:

• Some publishers designated Juneteenth as an official holiday for all staff, while others told employees they can use their extra PTO days.
• Media companies also produced special coverage and programs to commemorate Juneteenth.

Read more about Juneteenth here.

What we’re reading

How Jonah Peretti plans to turn BuzzFeed into a media conglomerate:
2021 is setting up to be a big year for BuzzFeed, which is looking to get bigger, according to The Information. After closing its acquisition of HuffPost in February, the company is reportedly looking to go public via a SPAC IPO and use the money raised from the offering to purchase Complex Networks. The acquisition is supposed to further boost BuzzFeed’s burgeoning commerce business and push its expected 2021 revenue past the likes of Vox Media and Group Nine Media.

Why The New York Times lost out on a GameStop movie deal:
ViacomCBS’s Paramount wanted to adapt reporting about the GameStop stock market fiasco from The New York Times’ Nathaniel Popper into a movie, but the publisher effectively squashed the opportunity because it wanted to negotiate its own deal, according to The Daily Beast. The situation is another example of how content ownership is becoming an increasingly fraught issue as media companies look to take a more active role in how their journalists’ work is adapted into movies and TV shows.

Why a UNC donor opposed Nikole Hannah Jones receiving tenure:
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill donor and newspaper publisher Walter Hussman didn’t want Nikole Hannah-Jones to receive tenure because…of reasons that sound like a bunch of BS. In a piece ostensibly about journalistic objectivity, NPR’s David Folkenflik lets the facts of the matter reveal that journalistic objectivity doesn’t really seem to be the reason that Hussman — whose newspapers’ editorial boards had supported former President Donald Trump — didn’t want the person behind “The 1619 Project” to be a tenured professor at the journalism school bearing his name.