The Addition

Apple tried to upstage the goings-on at CES by announcing more details about its AR headset the Apple Vision Pro. The $3499 device will shortly be arriving with customers who pre-ordered it. Apple has largely promoted it as a collaboration and productivity device, as well as highlighting how it might be used for fitness. However, on this show, we’re interested in how it might be used to consume me...

The social web is fracturing and subscription fatigue is real. Could this allow blogging to make its return in 2024? Maybe! Robb Dunewood of DTNS and The Tech Jawn has been making blogs and podcasts for decades. He returns to the show to discuss the potential revival. One thing is for sure, owning your content is importantWhatever kind of content you make, monetising matters too. Affiliate links a...

AI dominated the discourse for much of 2023 and it looks like it is going to be the same in 2024. I’m wary of making The Addition another AI-dominated publication. However, the story really matters. Furthermore, not all publications are prepared to sit back while the bots scrape their work to train Large Langauge Models (LLMs). For free. Indeed, the New York Times is engaged in a legal battle with...

Few people are in any doubt that 2024 is going to be another tumultuous year for the media industry - for good and bad. There is certainly going to be a lot to discuss on this show! To start the year, ‘The Addition Podcast’ looks ahead with Adweek’s Mark Stenberg, who shares his predictions for the 12 months to come. The way AI develops is going to be fascinating to watch. It is also going to be r...

Merry Christmas! Things are winding down for the year, and I hope you’ve enjoyed what I’ve been doing at The Addition. I love having you as a listener! But keeping this up is hard work. The only real way this newsletter and podcast can continue in 2024 is if readers take out paid subscriptions. It would mean a lot if you did so. Think of it as a Christmas present for both of us - you get access to...

The BBC is always under huge scrutiny. That will only increase over the next 12 months as it has to navigate coverage of both the UK and US elections. There are also issues surrounding local coverage and flagship shows like “Newsnight”, both of which are being reduced in various ways. Adam Sherwin, who reports on arts and media for the i, joined the show to discuss all the controversies plaguing A...

It’s a two-podcast week - the final “TV+ Talk+” 2023 is here. It's a special show this month as Chuck Joiner and I assess the year that has been in Apple TV+. This includes a final review of "The Morning Show" (spoiler alert) and discussions about "The Buccaneers" and "Monarch: Legacy of Monsters". “The Morning Show” was quite chaotic, with a lot of storylines going on all at once. They wrapped it...

This week’s show is a bit different. I joined Chris Sutcliffe and Esther Thorpe from the Media Voices team for a special crossover episode. We discussed the state of broadcast media - both how things stand as 2023 comes to an end and what might be next. It is all on the back of me having had the pleasure of writing the broadcast chapter of their soon-to-be-released “Media Moments 2023” report. The...

The world of tech is rarely quiet, but it has been particularly frantic over the last few weeks. Firstly, we had Web Summit CEO Paddy Cosgrove resign over comments relating to the Israel-Hamas conflict. The major conference in Lisbon did go ahead successfully, but some of the world’s companies had already pulled out by then. After that, we had the Sam Altman/OpenAI drama, in which the story seemed...

After all the OpenAI chaos in recent days, it seemed valuable to return to a conversation about AI from earlier this year with Adweek’s senior media reporter Mark Stenberg. Of course, we don’t discuss the Sam Altman brouhaha - because it hadn’t happened! However, much of what we touch on has only become more pertinent. It is clear that AI tools are going to seriously disrupt journalism. We’ve alre...

It has been seven very trying few months in Hollywood, with first the writers, and then the actors, going on strike. Thankfully, unions representing both groups have now struck agreements with the studios and everyone is back at work. Sean McNulty, author of The Wakeup at The Ankler, joins the show to explain how the difficult deals were done and where we go from here. Even though the strikes are...

Life as a foreign correspondent can seem daring, dangerous and… fun. Often, it is! You get to travel the world and meet fascinating people, but there are also huge risks that come with the job, especially if you are a freelancer reporting on war zones. We are seeing those issues in real-time right now with the imprisonment of Evan Gershkovich and the deaths of journalists covering conflicts in Ukr...

On his company’s latest earnings call, Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg said that Threads had almost 100 million monthly users. It’s no mean feat, given that the app has only launched in July. It clearly launched unfinished, but has consistently added new features. However, the app doesn’t totally replicate the good bits of Twitter (hello, tweeting through a football match).Jeff Gamet of “The Context Mac...

This month, Chuck Joiner and I discuss the news that Ridley Scott has decided Apple TV+ viewers need a four-hour director’s cut of his movie “Napoleon”. Are we worthy of such genius? Talking of overly long films, “Killers of the Flower Moon” has made it to cinemas. We look at the numbers. (Spoiler alert: Taylor Swift did better.)Recently, there has been a bust-up between Jon Stewart and Apple TV+,...

Disney is celebrating its centenary. The company was founded by brothers Roy and Walt on 16 October 1923. Legal wrangling and decades of creativity and innovation followed. The conglomerate we see today is nothing like what the brothers could have envisioned. It consists not just of animated films, but of theme parks, merchandise and the world’s leading sports broadcasting brand too. There is also...

“Community” has become a somewhat overused, and sometimes misused, word in recent times. However, when done right, it can become a really important element in engaging existing readers/listeners with a publication, as well as helping to attract new ones. It is not straightforward though. Picking the right platform really matters and it takes a lot of hard work to make these spaces self-sustaining....

I love blogging. It is how I got into digital media and journalism. (There’s a reason The Addition has a blog.) Blogging used to be quite a big deal back in the day! There are still people producing what we would recognise as conventional blogs, and platforms like Substack are helping people write in their own voice and connect with an audience via an easy publishing mechanism. Robb Dunewood was a...

The end of September is rapidly approaching, but writers and actors in the US remain on strike. Neither group has managed to come to a new agreement with the studios and streamers… and now it is getting really messy. At the time of recording, there had been no official talks between the various parties for weeks. (The writers and studios are set to meet the day this episode comes out - September 2...

Mason Greenwood was one of the most exciting young talents in English football, having broken into both the Manchester United and England first teams. Then, in January 2022, disturbing audio and images appeared online and the forward was arrested on charges of attempted rape, controlling and coercive behaviour, and assault occasioning actual bodily harm. He has always denied all the charges agains...

The days in which (most) digital publishing companies think that the way to success is making content available for free are long gone. Subscriptions are becoming crucial to publishers of all sizes, from all over the world. From the New York Times to…well, this newsletter, publishers are looking at ways to get consumers to pay directly for content. Bron Maher, senior reporter at Press Gazette, has...

It is clear that AI tools are going to seriously disrupt journalism. We’ve already seen some publications try and get Large Language Models (LLMs) to create content. It did not end well. But we are only at the start. There are also concerns about what the AI revolution will mean for journalism jobs, especially the more junior ones. Adweek’s senior media reporter Mark Stenberg returns to the show t...

You might just have noticed that there have been rather a lot of changes at Twitter recently. So much so, that it isn’t even called Twitter any more. (No, I’m not calling it X.) In various outbursts, owner Elon Musk has threatened to remove the block feature and change how headlines are shown on the platform. He has also limited how the DM feature works for unverified (i.e. free) users. Tweetdeck...

This week, I’m rerunning the conversation I had last year with Rolling Sone UK news editor Nick Reilly. Rolling Stone is one of the iconic media brands, covering the crossover of music, culture and politics in a unique way. A couple of years ago it was announced that there was going to be a UK sister to the US-based publication. The small team behind it was, at the time of originally recording thi...

The content creator space is constantly evolving, but how on Earth does it work? How do you even start? Is there a difference between a creator and an influencer? There are so many different elements to it all and more and more platforms to create for and try and build an audience on. Shannon Morse, a top YouTube content creator, joined me last year to discuss how she began making videos for YouTu...

RTÉ is Ireland’s national broadcaster, its equivalent of the BBC (albeit with a domestic commercial element). Presenter Ryan Tubridy is its biggest star and one of the country’s most beloved public figures. Or he was. Recently, he has been engulfed by a scandal over his pay, a huge chunk of which was initially not revealed to the public. Following the first wave of revelations, there were parliame...