Tuesday 15th June: 'Anti-Woke' GB News launches to mixed reviews

June 15, 2021

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

We don't do too much broadcast on Media Voices, but the launch of GB News is too big to ignore (I wish it wasn't). So... the UK's new 'Anti-Woke' news channel went live on Sunday night to what can best be described as mixed reviews.

For some media commentators, the debut was a promising start; the channel got more viewers than Sky News and BBC News (seems it was a hit with white men, relatively well off and over 65). For others it was, predictably, an opinion-fest with populism outweighing objectivity and personalities replacing reporting. It seems like the audience mostly just scratched their heads at a host of technical problems.

Personally, I despair at the bad faith of well-platformed journalists railing against cancel culture. I hope the commentators giving GB News a year are being overly optimistic, but there is a danger this 'new voice' of Britain will pick success from the very deep pockets of it non-British investors. Ad bookings might be abysmal, but this isn't about money, it's about fueling the culture wars the way FOX News did in the US. And we all know how that ended.

Remember Twitter bought our newsletter provider Revue? Well they're getting going on making it easier for Twitter users to grow their subscriber bases. The plan is to let newsletter producers add a subscription button to their profiles profiles to help them leverage their existing Twitter followers. Nice one!

No that's not a value judgement, that's a fact. Following a torrid 12 months that resulted in a £200 million loss, Rupert Murdoch has written down the value of the Sun newspapers to zero. COVID crushed ad sales, but more than 80% of the Sun’s losses were one-off charges, mostly related to phone hacking karma.

United Robots has created a Content-as-a-Service platform, building robots to send the automatically-generated content they produce straight to a publishers’ CMS. I have just one question... can these robots take on the Media Voices Roundup for a Monday? I for one would welcome help from our robot overlords to ease the Sunday night burden.

This week's episode:

This week, we hear from Mohamed Nanabhay, Deputy CEO of the Media Development Investment Fund. He talks about his work in the early days of online publishing bringing ‘new media’ to Al Jazeera, how the MDIF decides which businesses to invest in, and why he thinks the pandemic has provided an opportunity for independent media to thrive.

My sound has gotten better thanks to a new mic, sound panels and a lovely Media Voices orange windshield, all funded by Ko-Fi contributions. Thanks to everyone that's given us cash, monthly or one off. If you've not chipped in yet, get on over to Ko-Fi and help Esther get some new kit*.

*Money can't improve US, but it can improve our sound...