The Addition

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...

QAnon started out as bored teenagers having fun online… and ended up with a riot at the US Capitol. There may be more to come. We now have politicians, including former and potentially future president Donald Trump, who openly promote the conspiracies that have emerged on the 4chan message boards. It is dangerous and the virus is spreading, including to the UK. How on Earth did we get here? James...

Newsletters have become one of the hottest topics in media in recent times, with publishers and individuals building huge readerships with them. That’s why the Media Voices team launched the Publisher Newsletter Awards to go alongside the already successful Publisher Podcast Awards. This year’s debut event was great, with some of the biggest publishers proudly showing off their newsletter products...

Podcasting has come a long in a relatively short space of time. Things have contracted somewhat in more recent times, but generally, the industry is a positive place. Few people know more about it than Bryan Barletta of Sounds Profitable, an organisation advocating for, and producing research on, the podcast industry. He joined this week’s show to explain how podcast advertising really works and w...

It is fair to say that Elon Musk’s time owning Twitter has been… eventful. The latest developments have seen view limits imposed. Yes, Twitter wants you to see fewer tweets. The limits are set higher for this who pay for Twitter Blue but still exist. Perhaps we should all be grateful that Elon is helping us to spend less time scrolling, but it all rather feels like he is trolling his users. Jeff G...

In the latest episode of “TV+ Talk” we discuss in depth Apple’s approach to live sport and that of its rivals. We also explore the non-live sporting content that Apple has, such as the “Super League” documentary. It is clearly trying to challenge things like Amazon Prime Video’s popular “Drive to Survive” and “Full Swing”. Away from sport, there was also a look at the Academy’s new rules for the O...

Facebook has always had a somewhat changeable relationship with the news media. There have been times when the two have engaged and valued each other, and times when things have been rather more tense. The reality, though, is that parent company Meta basically makes no meaningful money from having news content on its various platforms. That’s why, in the face of a new Canadian law demanding it pay...

It has been another chaotic and fascinating six months in the world of streaming. We’ve seen Netflix accelerate its battle against password sharers, but not much take-up of its ad tier. Some services, such as Disney+, are even starting to remove content, something previously unthinkable. Furthermore, consumers feeling the financial squeeze are having to make decisions as to which services they wan...

Prince Harry headed into The Rolls Building of the High Court in the UK the other week in an almost unprecedented step. He was there to be cross-examined, alleging the newspapers owned by the Mirror Group had hacked his phone over the period of some years. His appearance was part of a wider case featuring several different celebrities, but the Duke of Sussex attracted the most attention. The newsp...

For over a month, screenwriters in America have been on strike after talks between their union, the WGA, and the studios broke down. Amongst other things, the writers have concerns over the rise of so-called mini-rooms, being locked into smaller series, declining residuals and the potential impact of AI. None of this is straightforward to fix - it requires a dramatic change to the current working...

It’s been a somewhat tumultuous time in the world of Web3 recently (isn’t it always?). Lauren Ingram, the founder of Women of Web3, joins the show to explain what is really going on and how things can get better and more inclusive. The Women of Web 3 podcast is set to return with its second season in the coming days. AI might be grabbing all the attention recently, but it is really important to ha...

It’s that time of the month - Chuck Joiner and I reconvene to discuss Apple TV+. On this episode of “TV+ Talk” we finish off our chat about “Shrinking” before analysing the recently released “Silo.” We finish off by looking at the… mixed… reactions to “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which has finally premiered at Cannes. However, most of us are going to have to wait a little bit longer to see it.* “...

B2b publishing is a big, but all too often overlooked, segment of the media. It might not be as sexy as the big-name, consumer-facing brands, but it really matters. The Audiencers is a new b2b publication aimed at those within the media industry that run all manner of publications. It is run by Poool, the membership and subscription technology suite. On this week’s show, Editor-in-Chief Madeleine...