They stuck the landing

Media statistic of the week

Despite big blockbuster hits like “Top Gun: Maverick,” movie ticket sales are still down almost 40% from before the pandemic. 

The reason why is quite interesting: “Not enough movies in theaters. Or, at the very least, not enough movies people want to see in theaters. The share of movies released on more than 2,000 screens is down more than 30% from both 2018 and 2019,” reports Lucas Shaw for Bloomberg News.

Check out this telling graph:

This past week in the media industry 

They stuck the landing

Nearly 17.7 million television viewers tuned in last Thursday to the second prime-time hearing in the House select committee’s investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, according to the Nielsen rating service.

Did you tune in? Less people did than the first hearing in June.

The Washington Post's Sonia Rao has more details: “The number, which encompasses 10 broadcast and cable networks, represents a slight drop from the more than 20 million people who watched the first prime-time hearing in June.”

For The New York Times, James Poniewozik outlines why the hearings made such great TV:

“They drew an audience for public-affairs TV in the dead of summer. They reportedly prompted further witnesses to come forward. Polling suggests they even moved opinion on Mr. Trump and Jan. 6 among Republicans and independents. They created riveting — and dare I say, watchable — water cooler TV that legitimately mattered.

And make no mistake: The hearings, produced by James Goldston, the former president of ABC News, succeeded not just through good intentions but also by being well-made, well-promoted TV.”

Poniewozik goes on to compare the elements the hearings had in common with any good drama. He tweeted, “They stuck the landing.”

“The Jan. 6 committee hearings made for great summer TV. The only thing missing was a Kate Bush soundtrack,” tweets Edward Wong.

Making sense of the controversy at The New Yorker

Poynter’s Tom Jones makes sense of the controversy at The New Yorker over the firing of former archives editor Erin Overbey after raising concerns about inequality and accusing its editor-in-chief of adding mistakes to her work.

Jones explains that things heated up on Monday with a Twitter thread from Overbey sharing the news that she’d been fired.

You can check out his piece for the full account of what has happened up until now.

‘No one in PR wants a doc like this to end up in public’

In a massive scoop for Gizmodo, Chris Stokel-Walker obtained PR documents from TikTok that reveal “how the company games out responses to tricky questions—and highlight what the company thinks its biggest public perception problems are. Chief among them: China.”

Here’s a snippet from the obtained document:

“‘Downplay the parent company ByteDance, downplay the China association, downplay AI.’ All three bullet points are the second, third and fourth lines of the document, second only to ‘Emphasise TikTok as a brand/platform.’ Further down, the company advises its employees to stress that, though young people love TikTok, ‘the app is only for users aged 13 and over.’”

Stokel-Walker spoke with a PR rep from a competing big tech company who said, “No one in PR wants a doc like this to end up in public, but the revealing thing here is not how many difficult topics the TikTok team are dealing with, rather it’s the lack of basic information the company is willing to let its PR team use to answer simple questions.”

Also on the TikTok front, BuzzFeed News’ Emily Baker-White has details on former employees of ByteDance (TikTok’s parent company) claiming the company placed pieces of pro-China content in its now-defunct US news app, TopBuzz, and censored negative stories about the Chinese government. “ByteDance says it did no such thing,” she writes. 

“This is like five stories in one from @ebakerwhite. God damn,” tweets Ryan Mac. “ We probably should not be ok with this,” adds Bryan Walsh.

A new kind of partnership

Nieman Reports’ Sarah Stonbely highlights a practice that “upends the industry’s drive for neutrality in journalism”—journalists and civil society organizations teaming up.

Stonbely describes an effort started in 2017 between journalists from eight newsrooms in five African countries and Code for Africa to collate data on the toxicity of the air and use that information to drive local reporting on the topic.

She explains more about the unique partnership:

“This project, and so many others like it around the world, exemplify the growing trend of cross-field collaboration, which we define as a partnership involving at least one journalism organization and one civil society organization — usually an advocacy organization but not always — in which they work together to produce content in the service of an explicit ideal or outcome. It’s similar to collaborative journalism in that it brings multiple organizations together and addresses many of the same resource limitations facing journalists, while providing similar benefits. However, unlike a partnership between newsrooms, cross-field collaborations surface complicated ethical questions about the line between journalism and advocacy, especially for journalists schooled in the tradition of objectivity.”

“Love this. With transparency and careful ethical consideration, journalists can partner with all kinds of *gasp* advocacy organizations to produce...impact,” tweets Carrie Brown.

Very online

In a special report for the Columbia Journalism Review, Karen Maniraho spoke with five journalists on “covering the internet in search of meaning, not viral trends.”

She explains the project, writing: “The best of these journalists are immersed in the internet but do not obsess over viral moments, which fly by too fast and seem, in isolation, to be trivial. By focusing on creators, communities, and the algorithm-based platforms that drive trends, these writers find ways to cut through the noise—and surface a deeper understanding of life, online and off.”

Check out her full interviews with Rebecca Jennings (Vox), Jason Parham (Wired), Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day newsletter), Rusty Foster (Today in Tabs newsletter) and Taylor Lorenz (The Washington Post).

The problem with ‘fun in the sun’ visuals on stories about extreme heat

In what might be one of the greatest headlines of all time (Maybe don’t illustrate your stories about lethally hot weather with fun beach pics), Nieman Lab’s Sarah Scire outlines new research that finds the visuals of heat-wave news coverage are more likely to put a positive spin on extreme heat than the articles themselves.

She explains: “In a newly released pre-print, researchers looked at how newsrooms were visually representing climate change and extreme heat by analyzing roughly 250 pieces of online news coverage about the 2019 heat waves in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and U.K. (That’s “canicule,” “hitzewelle,” “hittegolf,” and “heat wave,” respectively.)

For the research, both the image and text were evaluated for positive, negative, or mixed valence. A negative valence presented the heat wave as worrying, risky, dangerous, and/or inconvenient, while a positive valence invoked concepts like vacation, leisure, and relaxation.”

Scire poses an interesting question: So what can journalists do? Is there something especially difficult about finding photos for stories about heat waves?

What do you think?

Make Instagram Instagram again

If you’ve been on Instagram this week, you’ve probably seen this post reading “Make Instagram Instagram again” shared around widely: 

The New York Times’ Kalley Huang explains further: “The photo-sharing app, which is owned by Meta, found itself under fire this week over how it has changed over time … On Tuesday, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, tried to tamp down ire from users over how the app has rolled out features that make it more like TikTok, the hugely popular Chinese-owned video app. Instagram has been concerned that TikTok is stealing attention from its users.”

Even Kylie Jenner shared the image on her Instagram story. 

“Can Kylie Jenner take down another social media app? Instagram doesn't want to find out,” Huang tweeted.

A few more

• Find any good Amazon Prime Day deals? Many publishers had record Amazon Prime Day sales on July 12 and 13 compared to previous years, according to Digiday’s Sara Guaglione. You might be wondering how. Guaglione explains: “Publishers can make money from Amazon Prime Day through an affiliate marketing model, where they get a commission from Amazon from sales driven through links and ads on their sites.”
• Q2 results are in, and many social media companies are making big changes based on the numbers. 
• Snap announced plans to “substantially reduce” hiring and shake up its strategy, reports Hannah Murphy from the Financial Times.
• Here’s what Annie Palmer from CNBC reports on Twitter’s results: “Twitter said revenue slid 1% year over year to $1.18 billion. Wall Street had expected $1.32 billion, representing 10.5% growth year over year. It marked Twitter’s biggest revenue miss ever, with results coming in 11% below estimates, according to Refinitiv.”
• Sheila Rayam has been named executive editor of The Buffalo News. She’s the first Black journalist and the second woman to hold the position in The News’ 142-year history, reports Jon Harris for the Buffalo News.
• Interesting scoop from Axios’ Sara Fischer: “CNN CEO Chris Licht met with a handful of senior congressional leaders from both sides of the aisle on Capitol Hill on Tuesday in an effort to strengthen the network's relationships with key lawmakers, many of whom have turned sour on cable news, sources familiar with the meetings told Axios.”
• MEL Magazine laid off its entire staff again, reports Erin Taylor for Observer. She writes, “In an emailed statement, Recurrent Ventures spokeswoman Cathy Hebert said the company decided to ‘pivot our editorial and acquisition focuses away from the Lifestyle vertical’ which includes MEL.”
• Are you ready for some football? NFL+ launched on Monday, reports Alex Weprin for The Hollywood Reporter. “NFL+ will have two subscription tiers, a base tier for $4.99 per month ($39.99 per year) that includes live local and national primetime games on mobile devices, and out-of-market pre-season games on all devices,” he writes.
• Did you notice the new section of the Sunday New York Times? It’s called the Sunday Opinion, and though the name is new, the section has a long history, according to opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury.
• Disney confirmed to Axios’ Sara Fischer “that it would allow political issue ads—in addition to candidate ads—on Hulu's streaming service, effective immediately, bringing Hulu's ad policies to parity with Disney's cable networks.”

From the Muck Rack Team

Last week, we published The State of PR Salaries 2022, a survey of 1,800+ PR pros in partnership with PRSA, NBPRS, HPRA, BusinessWire, Spin Sucks and Michael Smart PR.

This report is based on a subset of our annual State of PR survey, and includes a deep dive into PR salaries, budgets and hours worked across PR titles and company types. 

Click here to see the survey highlights.

PR pros are some of the most successful salespeople at Muck Rack. 

We’re looking to bring on a new class of Account Executives, and there’s no one better positioned to sell Muck Rack than folks who currently use it, love it and know what it takes to be successful in PR. No SaaS sales experience required. 

To learn more, check out the open role here.