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Joni Mitchell joins Neil Young, pulls her music from Spotify over vaccine misinformation — techcrunch.com

In this week's episode (see below) we have a good long chat about the return of the platisher argument. Specifically we ask to what extent platforms like Spotify are responsible for promoting the views of the artists and commentators they commission and distribute. You know, exactly the same argument we had about Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms about five years ago.

As Peter says in the episode, this is an odd way for the discussion to have flared back up again. Nobody expected Neil Young and Joni Mitchell to have expressed strong opinions about Joe Rogan's misinformation even this time last year, for instance. But as Taylor Hatmaker writes for Techcrunch, it's perhaps the most acute this problem has ever been, and demands a proportional response:

"Rogan’s show also happens to be the world’s most popular podcast, bringing in more than an estimated 11 million listeners per episode, with multiple episodes hitting Spotify each week." But if we censure Spotify for allowing Rogan to spout nonsense, where do we draw the line?

Suicide hotline shares data with for-profit spinoff, raising ethical questions — www.politico.com

We sometimes lose track of the real-world harms that come from misbehaviour around user data, but it's hard to think of a worse use case than this. Publishers play in the same ecosystem - so how can we argue that widespread access to this sort of data isn't at least potentially harmful?

Lemonada Media podcast network raises $8M in funding — www.hollywoodreporter.com

Another to add to the pile of 'companies trying to compete with the biggest players in the podcast space'. For newspapers and magazines this is potentially good news in the short-term; more competition means better deals for the biggest podcasts. But in the long-term we're all just building our fortunes upon third parties again. C'est la vie.

Newspaper group Archant up for sale 18 months after private equity buyout — www.theguardian.com

In what sounds like a shock to Archant staff, the local newspaper group is up for sale after only a year and a half. Internal documents claim that RCapital - the current owner - was never to be the group's 'forever home'... but what happened to cause that rapid turnaround?

This week's podcast:

The Ferret’s fact-checking lead Alastair Brian on truth, the media, and trust — voices.media

This week’s guest is Alastair Brian, fact-checking lead at The Ferret. He spoke about out the realities of modern fact-checking, how to win over new readers who don’t have a pre-existing trusted relationship, and how community is at the heart of any sustainable revenue stream.

Buy the Media Voices team a virtual coffee — ko-fi.com

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