Category: Misc

When asked about the future of X, Elon Musk spins a fanciful tale of an “everything app” where hundreds of millions of users not only post videos but do their online banking, bet on sporting events, hook up with other users on dates, and even search for jobs a la LinkedIn. Is any of this actually happening? No (apart from users posting videos, that is). What is happening—a reality Musk may be trying to obscure with his flights of fancy—is that ad revenue has tanked, brands are staying away, and, according to Fidelity, X’s market value has likely declined by over 70 percent since Musk bought it.

One of Musk’s first big bets is on a pivot to video. To draw attention to this effort, he convinced Jimmy Donaldson, the YouTuber known as MrBeast, to post one of his videos on X last month. While Donaldson said the video made him $263,000 based on more than 150 million views, he also said the stunt was “a bit of a facade,” and that some advertisers likely bought ads on his video only after it was promoted. A number of X users said they saw the show in their feed multiple times, CNBC reported, but it was not marked as an ad.

According to a blog post by the company, a new video feature similar to TikTok’s infinite scroll has over 100 million daily users and more than half of them are from Gen Z, which X says is the fastest growing audience on the platform. The company also talks about letting users publish longer-form videos, and bragged that in December, users watched 130 years’ worth of videos 30 minutes or longer (although it’s not clear what “watched” means). X has announced video deals with celebrities such as CNN news host Don Lemon, and of course former Fox News host Tucker Carlson has a show on X.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune magazine

Continue reading “Elon Musk’s desperate search for revenue at X”

Cottage Life magazine recently republished a great piece from 2012 about the Kee to Bala, a legendary music venue perched on the edge of Lake Muskoka, a former 1920s dance hall where everyone from Count Basie to Snoop Dogg have played. For some strange reason — maybe the location, on a beautiful lake two hours north of Toronto in cottage country — it became a must-play location for tons of great bands over the years, some of whom would fly to Canada specifically to play the Kee. Maybe part of the attraction, as the article explains, is the feeling when the venue is packed to the rafters and the whole structure (which is made entirely of wood) is literally bouncing up and down.

It’s embarrassing to have to tell him, but the sound check was, well, impenetrable. “That’s the sound check,” Sam Roberts says, looking remarkably unconcerned. “As soon as the people come in, something magic happens. It’s literally a chemical reaction. You’ll see tonight.” A buzz goes up, and suddenly, it seems, the main floor is thronging with people, a true crowd for the first time. Sam and the boys have been spotted coming in by boat to the Kee dock. Five minutes later, the buzz becomes a roar, and the pit area is packed. At precisely 11 p.m., the Sam Roberts Band walks onto the stage and hits its opening chord. It is as the leader himself said it would be. The bodies absorb the reverb, oscillating in the pit, bobbing in place and holding their hands up like a giant grade one class, and the band’s sound is loud and pure. 

The article quotes Steve Manchee, whose family owns a trio of old cottages on a point across the bay from the Kee — the bands often rent one of the family’s cottages, and Steve often drives them across to the venue in his boat. As it happens, our family rented one of those cottages for a couple of weeks in the summer for a number of years, and we could often hear the bands warming up and performing, the sounds wafting across the bay to Manchee Point.

I remember sitting on the point listening to David Wilcox (I think it was) playing one night on a crystal clear evening when the wind was just right. And more than once, I paddled my kayak the 20 minutes or so across the bay — with a bike light on so people could see me — and sat bobbing in the lake underneath the deck, listening to whoever was playing.

A friend of a friend said he did some work for one of the bands playing at the Kee (I think the mirror got knocked off the Tragically Hip’s tour bus and he had to weld it back on), and he got invited to stay for the show. So he sat backstage and watched as a couple of guys periodically had to shove these huge wooden shims into the stage to keep it level, because the bouncing of the building during a show was so violent that the stage was literally coming apart. Amazing place!

From the air, it looks a little like a Cape Cod cottage, or at least the very rich version of such a thing, complete with 12-foot ceilings and a tower with three floors and a tiny cupola. But it’s not in Cape Cod, or anywhere else near the ocean for that matter, it’s on the roof of an apartment building in the East Village of Manhattan. Oh, and it’s listed for $9.5 million — or at least, the entire package is, which includes the top two floors of the building. The condo building is known as the Minthorne House, named after the family whose farm used to cover most of what is now the East Village in the 1800s. The farm was split up and one of the offspring built the five-story apartment building.

New York being what it is, of course, the building only has three apartments over five floors, and they are all worth north of $2 million at this point. The penthouse cottage was last sold in 2017 for $3.5 million, but that was before a wholesale, top-to-bottom restoration of the interior (here’s what it used to look like before). The previous owners were the artist Henry Merwin Shrady III and his family — Henry designed the cottage and had it built, and his son used it while he was going to college. Only possible downside: the Hell’s Angels clubhouse is just a few blocks away.

This performance was mesmerizing — more than 35 years after its debut in 1988, Fast Car is just as great as it was when I heard it for the first time. Tracy Chapman, who hasn’t performed in public in almost a decade, did it with Luke Combs at the Grammy Awards and got a standing ovation. Combs’ version of the song won a Country Music Association award for Song of the Year, and hit #1 on the country charts, making her the first Black woman to have a solo songwriting credit on a country music #1 hit.

And here’s one of the first public performances of that song, at a concert at Wembley Stadium in honour of Nelson Mandela’s 70th birthday. Chapman wasn’t even supposed to perform it — Stevie Wonder had flown in from the US and was supposed to play a surprise set, but the hard drive containing all of his synthesizer backing tracks did not make it to England and so he refused to go on. Scrambling to fill the void, the concert organizers asked Tracy Chapman if she would agree to perform — she came out in front of 70,000 ornery concertgoers, played Fast Car with just her voice and an acoustic guitar and the stadium went crazy. She sold about two million records in the next two weeks.

The Messenger, a news startup that Jimmy Finkelstein launched last spring with $50 million in funding and 175 journalists stationed in New York, Washington and Los Angeles, has shut down less than a year later, after running out of money. When it launched, the company said it would bring in more than $100 million in revenue this year, but by the end of 2023 it had less than $2 million of its initial funding left, and just $3 million in revenue. Earlier this month, Semafor reported that The Messenger‘s board of directors had considered shutting it down, since it was expected to run out of cash soon. And soon is now.

Coming as it does amidst a litany of layoffs and shutdowns in the media— including broad cuts at Time magazine, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and Business Insider —it’s tempting to see The Messenger‘s sudden shutdown as yet another symptom of a broader media decline. But this particular death is in a category by itself. Yes, the ad downturn and other macro effects no doubt had an impact, but The Messenger was doomed from birth. As I noted in a piece for CJR when it launched, its entire model felt like a blast from the past—and the past is about the only place where it might have survived.

From Finkelstein’s evocation of the glory days of Walter Cronkite and Vanity Fair to the hiring of Neetzan Zimmerman, a specialist in generating “viral” traffic, The Messenger seeemed almost prehistoric. As I wrote for CJR, the startup’s model seemed to be “harking to a time when social traffic from vast quantities of viral clickbait articles could bring in millions of dollars in advertising revenue.” Those days, as BuzzFeed could no doubt testify, are gone. And the route that The Messenger chose to get there clashed with its lofty goals. Jon Christian, the editor of Futurism, wrote that despite its talk about revolutionizing journalism, the site was “churning out viral dumpster juice” from day one.

Note: This was originally written for the Columbia Journalism School, where I am the chief digital writer.

Continue reading “I wish I could say that The Messenger’s failure came as a surprise”

via xkcd

If you read my daily email newsletter, When The Going Gets Weird (and if not, what is wrong with you?!) then you might recall a bizarre tale from Graydon Carter’s Air Mail entitled “The Grift, the Prince, and the Twist.” Written by Hannah Ghorashi and editor George Pendle, it told the story of Amar Singh, a descendant of a well-to-do Indian family (in other words, a “prince,” depending on your definition of that term) who said he was conned by a woman named Liza-Johanna Holgersson, who claimed to be from a rich Swedish family and took advantage of him. Pretty straightforward so far. But as the story continues, it gets more and more bizarre, until it’s almost impossible to tell what the real story is. And now there is an update, via an email to me — read on.

After giving Air Mail reams of documents and evidence of Holgersson’s scams, including her affairs with other men, some of whom also gave interviews to Air Mail, the only thing missing was a comment from Holgersson herself. Finally, the writer was able to get hold of Holgersson — who turned the tables on Singh, saying he wasn’t who he seemed, and that he had been threatening her, playing an audio tape of him making threats and calling her horrible names. Sure enough, there seemed to be some holes in Singh’s background as a philanthropist who had donated millions of dollars worth of paintings and art to support LGBTQ rights. One art dealer called him an outright fraud.

Continue reading “The grift, the prince, the twist, and the truth (maybe)”