Happy Monday! Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by Chris.

Google signs copyright agreements with six French newspapers — www.reuters.com

Platform and publisher priorities will never align for very long. That's the reality of our situation, and the best we can hope for is to eke out as much from the relationship as long as it remains stable. Recent pressures and threats of regulation on the platforms have made them as tractable as they've ever been recently, keen to curry some good favour with publications. Google's latest effort is to sign copyright agreements with six French newspapers and magazines, including national dailies Le Monde and Le Figaro:

"The agreements with the six French newspapers are based on criteria such as the publisher’s “contribution to political and general information,” the daily volume of publications, the monthly internet traffic and the use of their content on Google’s platform, Google said." Well that doesn't sound open to abuse whatsoever.

In this week's podcast - handily linked below - we discuss why this is probably a sop to publishers. Notably, the payment is coming from the Google News Showcase, which already has agreements with leading publications in neighbouring Germany. And, you'll never guess, it comes less than a month after Google was ordered to begin talks with publishers in France about the long-brewing snippet tax.

BuzzFeed’s Jonah Peretti on why the New York Times can’t be "the paper of record" — www.vox.com

You might be Peretti'd out after the BuzzFeed/HuffPost news last week, but here's some food for thought from him that we don't want to get lost among the noise. The bifurcation of news into subs-based and free is (as we've previously argued) potentially leaving the have-nots out in the cold. Peretti argues that means that even the NYT doesn't fully reflect society as it should.

Introducing Typerighter: making life easier for journalists – and stories better for readers — www.theguardian.com

We like learning about internal newsroom tools here at Media Voices. Everything from analytics tools to new content management systems. This time it's Typerighter, a new tool at the Guardian that seeks to streamline the process of creating and editing stories by its journalists and sub-editors.

The Week Junior turns five and launches kindness initiative — magnetic.media

A nice one to finish! The Week Junior has turned five years old - not bad for a counterintuitive bet that young people would want to read current affairs content - and is launching a campaign to spread a little bit of happiness over the festive period. That's the sort of campaigning publishing we like to see.

This week's podcast:

Inc. Editor-in-Chief Scott Omelianuk on how 2020 has changed the magazine — voices.media

Scott Omelianuk talks about how starting his new job just before lockdown affected Inc.’s plans for change, how their content strategy has shifted in response to a momentous year in politics, and the thinking behind their new texting subscription service.

The Publisher Podcast Awards — publisherpodcastawards.com

Entries for 2021's Publisher Podcast Awards close this Friday! Do you have a podcast, or do you have colleagues and friends in publishing who are running brilliant podcasts? Make sure they know that entry is free - and to enter so we can hear their brilliant podcasts.