Has Netflix peaked as a cultural force?

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CJR reports on how the NYT Opinion section has expanded into more original reporting, a shift that’s rankling news reporters who cover many of the same beats:

At the Times, the liberal tilt of the editorial board has long complicated the work of the paper’s reporters, often on the Politics desk. What has changed lately, though, are the prominence and resources of Opinion in the digital era, as well as the scale of its original reporting, leading to more overlap between the Times’ divisions and, inevitably, more hard feelings. This spring, Nicholas Kristof’s report on Israeli soldiers sexually assaulting Palestinian detainees set off a major round of recriminations. Newsroom journalists offered anonymous quotes to Puck (“I am sick of being embarrassed by the Opinion section,” an aggrieved Times employee said). Similar blowback greeted an Opinion profile by a freelance contributor, Ankush Khardori, of Kathy Ruemmler, a former White House counsel during the Obama administration and senior lawyer at Goldman Sachs, who had refused to talk with the newsroom’s reporters about her friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. In both cases, outraged observers have sought to diminish Opinion’s reporting by stoking an abiding misapprehension that its writers do not have to follow the same standards of accuracy as their peers in the newsroom.

I was recently surprised to learn that executive editor Joe Kahn has no sway over the opinion desk; I always assumed someone with that title would oversee all editorial content.

It’s kind of interesting to consider that a news organization can grow so large that it develops its own shadow newsroom, one that operates almost like a completely separate news outlet. So what happens if the Opinion section eventually overtakes the newsroom in influence? Will the two start competing with each other for reporting talent?

Founder Patrick Trousdale explained his growth and monetization strategies.

From the Boston Globe:

Letters from an American is the most-read politics newsletter on Substack, according to a dashboard assembled by politics and media writer Kyle Tharp. The competition isn’t even close. Richardson’s estimated 2.9 million readers on Substack are nearly double that of The Free Press, the center-right site founded by Bari Weiss and now owned by CBS. That likely gives her the largest audience for any topic on Substack, and puts her ahead of every newspaper in the country not named The New York Times (13.35 million subscribers) or The Wall Street Journal (4.7 million subscribers).

She’s also third among political Substacks in revenue, behind The Free Press and The Bulwark, a news site launched by “never-Trump” conservatives. That’s impressive given that the top two are full-fledged newsrooms with reporters and editors. It’s extraordinary when you consider that Richardson’s newsletter is free; revenue comes from readers who voluntarily pay for subscriptions (which also gets them the ability to post comments). She declined to provide revenue figures, but hinted that estimates of $5 million in annual Substack income may be low.

$5 million in annual revenue would already put her in the upper echelon of nonfiction writers. But the fact that she generates that much from subscriptions alone, without a paywall or sponsorships, has to put her in the running for the most popular nonfiction writer alive, no?

To generate the equivalent amount from book sales, an author would need to sell roughly 3.8 million copies a year. Individual books certainly reach that level, but it’s rare for an author to sustain that kind of volume year after year. The only comparable example I can think of is James Clear, who reportedly sells more than 4 million copies of Atomic Habits annually.

Wired reports that it was scooped on a major piece of news about the OpenAI hacking by an AI company that monitored the livestream of a cybersecurity conference and quickly published an article about the revelations. The entrepreneur behind the AI site “spotted an OpenAI executive posting about the conference while scrolling on X, then fed the stream’s transcript to his agents while it was still ongoing. Publication took ‘about six minutes’ from the time he sent over the transcript.” [Wired]

I’ve written before about various local newsrooms employing similar tactics for government meetings — feeding the transcripts into an AI and then tasking it with finding newsworthy stories. Given the sheer amount of taped footage that’s out there, there are probably a lot of opportunities for AI to identify stories that would have otherwise gone unnoticed.

Of course, identifying a story and getting it right are two different things. The publishers I’ve noticed using this as at the local level — outlets like Chalkbeat and Connecticut Public — always have a human in the loop who’s actually responsible for reporting out the story. In those cases, the AI merely alerts the journalists that something newsworthy was discussed.

BTW, after I posted the Wired story to social media, reader Sharon Goldman piped in with this observation:

This was not true, anyway. A human (me!) was in the room for the OpenAI briefing at Black Hat and I had my story up exactly one hour later (at 2:48 pm PT) with more than just the transcript - I also spoke to people in the room after to see what they thought. I was at least neck and neck with the bot, if not ahead. It was also not a surprise briefing - attending media got a heads-up that morning and I had already heard about it the day before. AND the AI newsroom only got access to the briefing because it hacked a QR code through a photo posted on X. Original on-the-ground reporting still matters!

Nate Stone was still in high school when he built a YouTube channel with hundreds of thousands of subscribers by filming science and engineering experiments in his garage. But unlike many creators who stumble into a large audience, Stone never had much interest in turning that audience into a full-fledged media business. He eventually walked away from YouTube, studied physics, math, and computer science, worked on AI at Amazon, and then teamed up with his brother to build DittoDub, an AI-powered dubbing platform designed to help YouTubers reach audiences in dozens of languages.

In a recent interview, Stone explained how his frustrations as a teenage YouTuber helped inspire DittoDub, why the company focused on winning over large creators through product quality and word of mouth, and how multilingual audio can trigger enormous audience growth on YouTube.

Check out the interview on YouTube.

If you want to listen to an audio version, subscribe to the Business of Content wherever you get your podcasts: [Apple] [Spotify]

Here’s what I have on deck for paid subscribers:

1. Has Netflix peaked as a cultural force?

2. Are affiliate platforms helping to build the Creator Economy’s middle class?

Let’s jump into it…