Good morning! Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by Chris.

Six months in, News Corp's 'Knewz' aggregator has big ambitions — digiday.com

You remember Knewz? News Corp's purported 'bias-free' digital news aggregator that launched six months ago? No? How about nausea, do you remember that? If the answer is no to those questions, visit knewz.com and be reminded of both.

Writing for Digiday+, Lara O'Reilly takes a look at Knewz's entrance into the market, revealing that "Knewz.com’s total unique monthly visitors hovered between the 1 million and 1.7 million mark between February and May". Its boss Noah Kotch - formerly of MailOnline and Fox News - argues it's ahead of expectations in terms of audience.

Elsewhere in the piece, however, the knewz is decidely less rosy. Downloads of the app have tailed off and there is currently no revenue strategy in place. It drove just 0.0000079% of pageviews to publishers between Jan and July 15, which seems like a misfire for a news aggregator meant to act as balance and competitor to the platform-led aggregators. O'Reilly's article is well worth a read - but the stats beg the question: "what's the point of Knewz?"

How Vox Media and The Atlantic are building reader revenue — digitalcontentnext.org

The question publishers should be asking themselves around Covid-19 isn't "when will things return to normal?" but "will things return to normal?" There's no guarantee that news habits formed during the pandemic will last when it's all over. This article on DCN posits that Vox Media and The Atlantic are focusing on more foundational, less uncertain means of growing reader revenue - though as these stories show that doesn't mean they're immune to the impacts of coronavirus.

Apple News adds audio news stories, daily news podcast and local news — www.cnbc.com

This article states that Apple News+ "has gotten off to a slow start", which is certainly one way of putting it. Nevertheless, some of the products announced by Apple today seem interesting and ambitious - even if the central proposition of Apple News+ remains imbalanced.

Hackers convinced Twitter employee to help them hijack accounts — www.vice.com

On Wednesday, a spike of high profile accounts including those of Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Uber, and Apple tweeted cryptocurrency scams in an apparent hack. It's a reminder that our means of mass communications are perilously vulnerable to attacks - which has implications for how publishers reach and interact with users on social platforms.

This week's episode:

The BBC's Specialist Disinformation Reporter Marianna Spring on proactively countering conspiracies — voices.media

Marianna takes us through the responsibilities of broadcasters to counter disinformation, whether it's a losing battle to engage with conspiracy theorists, and the role of platforms like Google and Facebook when it comes to the spread of lies, damn lies.

Buy us a coffee! — ko-fi.com

It's the end of another long, long week, and we're knackered. If you fancy buying us a coffee to help us through it (and to cover our tech costs), you should also know that it makes our day and helps us power up to record the podcast on the weekend.