Weekly Roundup – March 11th, 2025

"The AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act (S. 315) grew its Senate majority last week to 54 as Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) added his name to the list of co-sponsors to the bill. Every name counts as the bill is still shy of the 60 backers that would guarantee it clearing any potential hold on a floor vote. During his appearance at the NAB conference last week, bill sponsor Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said he was confident the bill would be brought up for a vote, and that if it reaches President Trump’s desk, he will sign it.
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Broadcasters corralled a lot more names for the Local Radio Freedom Act (H.Con.Res.12). It puts members of Congress on record opposing a change in federal copyright law to force radio stations to pay a performance royalty for on-air music use. The list of House members siding with the radio industry grew to 135 last week, as several additional lawmakers added their name. They included Reps. Ken Calvert (R-CA), Greg Landsman (D-OH), John Larson (D-CT), Marcy Kaptur (D-OH), Laura Gillen (D-NY), David Taylor (R-OH), Harold Rogers (R-KY), Michelle Fischbach (R-MN), John Brecheen (R-OK), Stephen Lynch (D-MA) and Shomari Figures (D-AL)."

"Spotify just opened up a new stream of revenue for podcasters. That is, if they’re uploading video.
What was once an audio-first medium, podcasting is now increasingly filmed and produced. That started on YouTube, which is now racking up one billion podcast viewers a month. While Spotify has hosted podcasts for a decade now, the company is suddenly racing to stay competitive, rolling out new features and monetization tools. That includes their Partner Program, which allows podcasters to earn money directly from the streams of premium subscribers, so long as they’re using a video aspect."

"It was a slow and staggered end for FiveThirtyEight, the site that made everyone into armchair experts on the art of data modeling. Less than two years ago, Nate Silver, the site’s founder and editor, made his exit, and some two-thirds of the staff were laid off. On Tuesday, Disney—its corporate owner, via ABC News—announced company-wide layoffs that closed FiveThirtyEight for good. That hardly kills America’s polling obsession, or statistics nerds’ pursuit of just-right renderings—Silver, for one, has a Substack, Silver Bulletin, on which he wrote, in response to FiveThirtyEight’s demise, “‘Data journalism’ has a bad name but a bright future.” It does mark the end of a certain frenzied political chapter marked by popular attention to the work of finding answers in numbers."

"If you were searching Google for SpaceX news ahead of this week's delayed Starship launch, be warned! You might have run into AI slop masquerading as news — which often floated to the top of Google results ahead of real journalism.
Google has been promoting an AI slop-filled "science" site titled Science Magazine — which publishes bizarre, error-ridden articles alongside fantastical AI-generated images of nonexistent spacecraft and other oddities — in coveted positions in Google results, including top positions in its News tab and "Top Stories" feature.
Our testing showed that the automated site's content permeated the top search and News results for multiple Google queries, where it held rank alongside real publishers like Ars Technica, NBC News, and CNN, while crowding out other outlets."

"Politics/Culture take…
So I’ve got this problem. I don’t know how to square my overall belief that political parties should meet the wants of a populace with my other belief that most of politics is just whoever runs Twitter/X. Politicians are advised to seem “normal” to the median voter, but the ruler of the network has so much say in what the “normal” information diet is. In theory, I trust that the public is smarter than they’re given credit for, but also in theory, I believe that whoever controls the best propaganda machine has the power to frame what matters.
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Twitter just doesn’t have that many users, relatively speaking; the users it has, though, are extremely influential, particularly given the important of Twitter in media, tech, and finance. For this group Twitter is completely irreplaceable: there is no other medium with a similar density of information or interest-driven network effects.
This, by extension, drives Twitter’s cultural impact: no, most people don’t get their news off of Twitter; the places they get their news, though, are driven by Twitter. Moreover, Twitter not only sets the agenda for media organizations, it also harmonizes coverage, thanks to a dynamic where writers, unmoored from geographic constraints or underlying business realities of their publications, end up writing for other writers on Twitter, oftentimes radicalizing each other in plain sight of their readership."