Media

1. Netflix buys Daily Beast show
2. Kassan vs. UTA
3. Politico’s AI woes
4. Vibe coding
5. AI content rules YouTube

When Donald Trump and Elon Musk started going at it Thursday, reporters and editors scrambled to get the “tick-tock” — the behind-the-scenes story behind their falling out. But Trump isn’t a behind-the-scenes guy. His impulse for public theater follows the argument, as Steve Bannon makes it, that getting the public to trust you in an age of disillusionment requires conducting government, literally, in public. That’s what Trump has done with his chaotic and riveting live encounters with foreign leaders. It’s how the Musk show played out, as I wrote at the time.

The public can’t worry about backroom deals and conspiracies when the whole thing is conducted on a studio set, the thinking goes. There the walls are plywood, the doors lead nowhere, and there are no backrooms. It’s a puzzle for the kind of inside Washington reporting I’ve spent much of my career doing, and requires a different set of priorities.

And, of course, the White House isn’t a stage set. The doors lead to offices and SCIFs, and the decisions at some point spill into legislation and the economy and into people’s lives — a reality that, most days, keeps journalists in business.

Also today: Politico’s AI garble, Michael Kassan and UTA make peace, and Netflix’s Daily Beast deal. (Scoop count: 5)

Join Ben and Max or a special Cannes Lions live taping of Mixed Signals, where they’ll be joined by New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien. Request an invite to join us in-person here.

Netflix inches toward news with Daily Beast deal

Netflix bought the rights to a Daily Beast-branded TV show, as it ratchets up its competition for viewers’ eyeballs, Max scoops. The project is still in its early stages, but the pilot will run about 30 minutes. Episodes will be produced on a tight schedule and will likely be kept topical, avoiding the narrow focus on politics that has scared other media companies away from investing in breaking news. It could be Netflix’s answer to YouTube’s domination of trending video content; Netflix is the clear winner in the streaming wars, with a massive and growing library of expensive, slickly-produced documentaries and shows, but it still sees YouTubers and the content they churn out as a threat in the attention economy, especially as more and more viewers watch YouTube on their living room television screens.

UTA and Kassan near a truce

The United Talent Agency and the advertising dealmaker Michael Kassan appear close to reaching a settlement, Ben and Max report. UTA acquired Kassan’s consulting firm, MediaLink, in 2021, a $125 million investment that seemed logical at a moment when Kassan’s celebrity clients were playing a larger and larger role in marketing. Kassan has long been singularly able to connect marketers and media companies, and UTA co-founder and then-CEO Jeremy Zimmer said the deal would give his firm “a much bigger seat at the table.” But the deal exploded into recriminations in March 2024.

Now Zimmer is out, Kassan is back, and one of the media industry’s biggest beefs may be on ice by the start of Cannes Lions later this month. Both MediaLink and UTA have events planned at the festival this year, and Semafor’s media team will be reporting on location. Be sure to sign up for our pop-up Cannes briefing! Sign up here.

Top Chef, which airs its 22nd season finale next week, has been shaping how we think and talk about food for the past two decades. This week, Ben and Max talk to longtime judges Tom Colicchio and Gail Simmons about how Top Chef has influenced the restaurant industry, how food media has evolved, and why the show has gotten nicer over the years. Plus, they share the social media food trends they hate the most.

Listen to the latest episode of Mixed Signals now.

Artificial Capitol Intelligence

Politico rolled out an AI tool last year to its high-paying Washington subscribers, promising them the ability to generate detailed policy reports compiled from Politico’s wonky “Pro” reporting. But the tool has at times generated garbled text and has invented information in response to queries, Max scoops. The newsroom’s union is arguing the tool violates contract language that requires AI to have “human oversight.” Last week, frustrated staffers printed out and shared instances where the tool appeared to garble the publication’s reporting. A staffer queried the AI about what the fictional “Basket Weavers Guild” and the “League of Left-handed Plumbers” were ostensibly lobbying Congress about. (Per the AI tool, the basket weavers are very worried about data privacy.) Politico told Semafor that the tool is a “work in progress.” Axel Springer, Politico’s parent company, has been aggressively adopting AI technology at Politico and its other brands, like Business Insider.

Coding vibes

When Semafor executive editor Gina Chua helped oversee newsroom tech development at Reuters, she spent most of her time “poring over detailed product road maps, making tedious business cases to prioritize one feature over another, and painstakingly gathering user requirements. And all that made sense: For all of Reuters’ scale, there were only so many developers available, and we had to make sure we made the best use of a limited number of technologists’ time to benefit the most people.”

Now, she and our colleague JD Capelouto are building newsroom tools for Semafor — from copy-editing tools to multi-language research assistants to bots predicting mean tweets. “I spent zero time gathering requirements, didn’t make a road map, and decided on my own which features might be cool to have. I’m not sure how many of my colleagues will find it useful, but I don’t need the whole newsroom to love it; even if it turns out that it’s only really valuable to just two or three people, it may turn out to have been a great use of my time,” she writes. It’s a glimpse at what happens when a scarce resource becomes cheap, and at the trend that’s rolling across our industry and most others.

AI grows on YouTube

“AI is eating YouTube. This month, Masters of Prophecy, an AI-powered muzak channel overtook MrBeast and became the fastest-growing channel on the platform,” the essential Garbage Day newsletter observes, finding that nearly half of the 10 fastest-growing channels are using AI. Meanwhile, the most successful creators are racing upmarket, which is wise, because it’s impossible to compete with AI for low-cost churn. Consider this trend while rocking out to numbers like I’m Only a Dreamer (85 million views) and Let’s Vibe (21 million views).

Alana Newhouse is the editor-in-chief of the Jewish magazine Tablet, which publishes its first print edition this month.

WE HEAR: The All-In Podcast abruptly went on hold as its dads feuded, but fans hope the hosts will be able to parent-trap Trump and Musk back together … Axios renamed its “Drag Story Hour” to “Pride Kickoff.” Cofounders Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen want to “avoid performative DEI and make sure what we do is real and heartfelt,” without walking away from diversity, they told staff in an email: “We were concerned that emphasizing the drag component of the event might make it easier for external audiences to target Axios, our people, and the intent of this program.” … Brian Wieser projects a good year in the ad biz.

David Gitlin turned around US air conditioning and refrigeration group Carrier Global, earning him a reputation as one of the country’s most effective industrial executives — and one of the highest-paid. But when aerospace giant Boeing shortlisted him to be its new CEO, he declined.

“I was flattered to be considered,” Gitlin told Semafor’s Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson of the Boeing nod. But, he said, Carrier was “in the midst of doing something that history will prove is very, very special.”