Industry News
SELECTED ITEMS OF INTEREST TO THE MEDIA COMMUNITY
Can the incoming administration defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting?
Semafor Media's long analysis of the most recent efforts to defund NPR and PBS doesn't commit to a prediction (Will they? Won't they?) Yet, the long history of these attempts is worth reading to understand the context of the current potential legislation. It has “been raised by Republicans and successfully batted away by public media defenders with annual regularity for decades.” After all, even the Congress is susceptible to fame; in 1969 Mr. Rogers “convinced a congressional committee on the spot to reverse the proposed cuts.” The question that Semafor raises, but can't answer is: will the structure of media funding and distribution in 2025 fundamentally change lawmakers' belief in the necessity of the programming that public media can provide.
Read the full story on Semafor Media.
#managementconsulting #publicmedia #strategy
Steve Waldman: “In a time of AI and virtual reality, email might help save local news”
Steve Waldman, the champion of local news sustainability, speculates why newsletters, not websites, build monetization faster and more securely for small news operations. Some of the reasoning:
- Emails can be more easily “inserted into the reader news diets”
- There is less dependence on social platforms
- “It’s the one technology that people who are 82 and people who are 22 know how to use.”
To read the full post on LinkedIn, go here.
#journalism #localnews #managementconsulting
Is there a consensus on the status of men and masculinity in society? Not so much. Men and women (predictably) disagree
The status of men in American society has been at the center of recent political conversations. The Pew Center just published nuanced results comparing men to women – as well as Republicans to Democrats. There are details of the analysis which were surprising – and worth diving into. Top takeaways:
- About 40% of women under 30 say social media and TV or movies have had a great deal or fair amount of influence on their views of what it means to be a woman. Among young men, 18% say social media has influenced their views of what it means to be a man
- Only 25% of everyone say people have mostly negative views of men who are “manly or masculine.” 43% have mostly positive views of masculine men
- About 50% of everyone say society doesn’t place enough value on men who are caring, open about their emotions, affectionate or soft-spoken. But larger shares of women than men say this is the case (by margins ranging from 4 to 10 percentage points)
- Women are more likely than men to have mostly positive views of masculine men (49% vs. 36%). And in turn, 33% of men and 18% of women say people have mostly negative views
To read the full report from Pew, go here.
#management #marketing #womenvsmen
