What We’re Reading

“It was not something I could put in front of FT readers (or the legal departments of the companies it named).” —SS

“Across six major partners — City Cast, Defector, The Dispatch, Slate, The Verge, and Vox — subscribers who had activated their audio benefits churned at an unweighted average of 1.3% a month. Subscribers who hadn’t activated churned at 3%. Depending on the partner, listeners were somewhere between 28% and 81% less likely to cancel.” —SS

Two interim measures require Meta to “negotiate with French press organizations, provide them with information about the revenue of its ​social media platforms, and the use of protected content ​and not to degrade the manner of displaying content from the press.” —HT

“It wasn’t just R-rated words or raunchy stories that have disappeared: Articles with headlines mentioning the word abortion — a focus of Jezebel’s coverage over the years — are also missing.” —SS

“Lisa Aiken, senior vice president of commerce for Condé Nast, said 60% of the company’s commerce revenue in the U.S. comes from repeat audiences, underscoring the value of loyal readers. ‘We’ve sort of stopped measuring ourselves on traffic, and we’re more interested in measuring ourselves in what a reader is or what an audience is worth to us and the level of engagement.'” —SS

“[Bluesky’s] community guidelines bar sharing ‘home addresses, personal contact info, financial or medical data, or identification documents.’ (A preview of the DHS leak analyzed by WIRED apparently contained work-related contact information one expert described as details that would be printed ‘on a business card.’) The same guidelines explicitly protect ‘factual reporting’ on matters of public interest that are “related to government transparency and public officials.” —SS

Podnews found copies of Bloomberg News Now, Acast’s Canadian True Crime, Audiochuck’s Crime Junkie, Vox Media’s Criminal, two copies of History Hit, SiriusXM’s Hidden Brain, The New Yorker’s In The Dark, Wave’s Not Gonna Lie with Kylie Kelce, Goalhanger’s The Rest is Politics, and many more. (One podcast creator and host wrote about the experience of realizing an unauthorized copy of her podcast was charting.) —SS

The six-month-old streamer “bills itself on LinkedIn as ‘chronicling the singularity’…The project, funded by venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz and angel investors, is the latest in a long line of attempts by Silicon Valley to bypass ‘legacy’ media and tell the tech industry’s story on its own terms.” —JB

“Robinson, a former member of the British National party and co-founder of the English Defence League, had said before the trial that his legal bills were being paid for by the billionaire tech mogul and owner of [Twitter], Elon Musk.” —JB

“The iconic magazine, known for its red-box logo and devotion to visual storytelling, will start publishing again next month as a quarterly print magazine. It enters a fractured media landscape that is worlds away from the publication’s midcentury heights of acclaim, before the internet, social media and artificial intelligence upended the business model of magazine publishing.” —JB