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Confused about the Meta/Wire saga? Read these stories, it’ll help — www.niemanlab.org

I know both these companies, but I confess that the nuances of this controversy totally passed me by. But as Laura Hazard Owen explains, "once you recognize that someone's pulling an elaborate con, the Meta/Wire saga makes a little more sense". Now if that doesn't make you want to read the story I don't know what will.

Effectively, some indeterminate person or persons within or without The Wire planted what appears to be a fake story claiming an Indian government official had the power to get Instagram posts he deemed offensive taken down. This was swiftly refuted - but the damage to The Wire's reputation appears to be done. And as Nitish Pahwa writes for Slate:

"What’s more, Meta and its spokespeople tell so, so many lies about their work, and they’ve done such awful damage to India in particular, that it’s crushing to see the Wire forced into ceding the high ground here."

Netflix reverses subscriber decline with help from Stranger Things and Dahmer — www.theguardian.com

I might have thought twice about thanking Dahmer in the headline, but this is still very relevant to our discussion about subscriptions in the latest episode. As ever, it's not a zero sum game, and as disposable income shrinks competition for consumers' revenue favours entertainment companies over news publishers.

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Elon Musk’s management style is a threat to global democracy — www.theinformation.com

There are some truly horrifying testimonials in here. If you ever needed proof that this man-child is unfit to have any influence over online discourse, well, here you go. This man should be nowhere near a telephone, let alone ownership of Twitter. The same goes for you, Ye.

'With change comes opportunity': Industry responds to end of Facebook Instant Articles — pressgazette.co.uk

The conversation around the end of IA is more interesting than the fact itself. Its introduction was an attempt by Facebook to take control of the wider internet ecosystem, but as this post-mortem demonstrates the attempt ultimately failed.

This week's podcast:

The year retention became paramount for subscription and membership publishers — voices.media

Our latest episode looks at how publishers with subscription and membership schemes are handling increasing pressure on consumer budgets, and subscription trends going into 2023 and beyond. To discuss this year’s subscription trends, we’re joined by Anthony Ribeiro, Audience Conversion Consultant at Poool.

The Publisher Podcast Awards 2023 are now open for entries! — voices.media

It feels ridiculous that it's come round again so soon, but we're delighted to announce that entries for the Pub Pod Awards 2023 are open. They're always a joy to judge and the night of the awards themselves are a highlight of my year. If you have a potentially award-winning podcast, we want to hear from you!