Business of Media
How Twitter’s new drastic changes will affect what users can view on the site
Twitter has limited how much content users can view each day in a move the company’s owner claims is about addressing “system manipulation”, report The Guardian’s Josh Taylor and Dan Milmo.
Does this latest move spell the end of the social media platform for good – and where can people go now?
Musk’s Twitter rate limits could undermine new CEO, ad experts say
Elon Musk‘s move to temporarily cap how many posts Twitter users can read on the social media site could undermine efforts by new CEO Linda Yaccarino to attract advertisers, marketing industry professionals said, reports Reuters’ Jody Godoy.
Musk announced Saturday that Twitter would limit how many tweets per day various accounts can read, to discourage “extreme levels” of data scraping and system manipulation.
Users posted screenshots in reply, showing they were unable to see any tweets, including tweets on the pages of corporate advertisers, after hitting the limit.
Ad industry veterans said the move creates an obstacle for Yaccarino, the former NBCUniversal advertising chief who started last month as Twitter’s CEO.
Yaccarino has sought to repair relationships with advertisers who pulled away from the site after Musk bought it last year, the Financial Times reported last week.
The limits are “remarkably bad” for users and advertisers already shaken by the “chaos” Musk has brought to the platform, Mike Proulx, research director at Forrester, said on Sunday.
“The advertiser trust deficit that Linda Yaccarino needs to reverse just got even bigger. And it cannot be reversed based on her industry credibility alone,” he said.
News Brands
We’re not ‘abandoning TV for TikTok’: ABC
It has now been more than a fortnight since the ABC’s shock decision to make its political editor Andrew Probyn redundant, to enable the public broadcaster to, in its own words, generate “digital and social content” in the Canberra bureau, reports The Australian’s Nick Tabakoff.
But ABC news boss Justin Stevens felt compelled to write to staff on Thursday afternoon to address what he sees as a false narrative that has popped up around the axing of Probyn and other news reporters and producers in favour of digital.
In recent interviews to explain the cuts with the likes of ABC Radio Melbourne’s Raf Epstein, Stevens referenced video-sharing platform TikTok as part of his thesis that the ABC needs to enhance its presence on social media to engage a younger audience.
But in a Thursday email to news staff, Stevens was keen to set the record straight, amid internal claims that social platforms like TikTok were a higher priority for the ABC than traditional broadcasting platforms like linear TV.
“I’ve seen it claimed the ABC is ‘abandoning TV viewers for TikTok’,” he wrote. “Implied is that we care more about attracting younger audiences than existing or older audiences. Neither contention is true.”
Publishing
Tipping point in decline of magazines as one large printer remains in UK
As readers indulge in the comforting routine of browsing their favourite magazines, they will be oblivious to being part of a crucial tipping point, as all bar one of the nation’s top-selling titles move to being printed by Walstead, headquartered in London, the last remaining UK-based operation with the scale to handle them, reports The Guardian’s Mark Sweney.
In recent months, companies including Rupert Murdoch’s News UK and the German magazine giant Bauer have moved to strike new printing deals – for titles including Heat and Grazia, all the weekly newspaper supplements and magazines for the Times, Sunday Times and Sun on Sunday – ahead of the closure of Liverpool-based Prinovis on Friday.
Prinovis, which is owned by the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann, told clients in November that it was shutting due to the “significant decline” in the UK magazine market and the soaring cost of paper.
The closure has resulted in a de facto monopoly for its rival Walstead, which now prints nine of the top 10 magazines in the UK, from the nation’s biggest seller, TV Choice, and the Economist to Good Housekeeping, Private Eye and almost every other title with a major print run.
Television
Germany to produce The Block
Germany will get a local version of The Block, to be known locally as Wettkampf in 4 Wänden – Die ultimative Bau-Challenge, reports TV Tonight.
Producers Banijay Germany subsidiary Good Times will feature four couples competing on an unloved apartment, turning it into a high-end property.
The Nine Network format has been adapted in 14 territories including New Zealand, Belgium, the Netherlands, the US, and Denmark, where its eighth season won the slot on all demos.
Good Times managing director Shona Fraser said: “We love The Block – it’s such a strong format and we can’t wait to bring it to RTL in Germany with our own special reality twist. It is so exciting watching the teams create completely new rooms from a blank canvas.”
NSW Corrective Services to lodge complaint over Seven story
NSW Parole Authority and Corrective Services will lodge a complaint to media watchdog the Australian Communications and Media Authority following a story on a parolee living in Sydney, reports TV Tonight.
In June Seven News reported on convicted baby killer Martin Saunders now living in Sydney’s south-west.
in 2019 he confessed to shaking his 10-week-old son, pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sentenced to a minimum of three years in jail.
Media Watch last night reported he was released on parole in December 2022, with the NSW Parole Authority and Corrective Services telling ABC he was not considered a threat to community.
The mother of the child Rochelle Kennedy, also spoke to Seven a third time describing him as “a monster.”
But ABC said their report on Saunders was media playing judge and jury and encouraging a lynch mob.
Controversy for controversy’s sake? The Idol ends by dividing audiences
When viewers mourned the end of Succession in May, The Idol was largely slated as the next big thing for prestige TV. But now that its five episodes have wrapped up, truncated from an original six-episode run, plenty of viewers are feeling cheated. After such grand promises, was the show such a critical bomb, asks Nine Publishing’s Nell Geraets?
The HBO series – which follows struggling pop star Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp) as she falls into the dangerous arms of nefarious club owner Tedros (Abel Tesfaye) – was advertised as a stylised critique of modern stardom and toxicity within the music industry. Critics have instead labelled it twisted torture porn, as some viewers tuned out by the second episode and others “hate-watching” its entirety.
Its flat reception raises a key question about the state of TV today: are we so over-saturated with new content that shows are veering blatantly into controversial territory just to avoid being missed?