Media

Apple didn’t need stars before, but it needs them now. Although the company was the first publicly traded American firm to be valued above $1 trillion, its most recent earnings report showed flat profits and falling revenue. So the plan now is not only to sell devices, but to fill them with content. That has led the company into the alien territory of Hollywood, where local customs can clash with Silicon Valley folkways. – The New York Times

The company deems a community unsuitable for Today In if it cannot find a single day in a month with at least five news items available to share. But the social media giant said it has found that 40% of Americans live in places where there are not enough local news stories to support it. – The Guardian

It survived bankruptcy, the threat of closing and the death of its charismatic founder. In 2014, it became a nonprofit. And now, after 30 years, with more than 132,000 titles — many on VHS, laser disc and DVD — it is as much a cultural warehouse as anything else. – New York Times

More people are creating than ever before, and they’re using the tools that Article 13 will punish to do so. When people have fewer places to share their content or to make money from their content, that’s not helping creators or the “creators industry.” Sure, it might help a very small number of old gatekeeper companies — record labels, book publishers, movie studios — be in a position to demand more money from internet companies, but thinking that those old gatekeepers represent the “creators industry” is ludicrously out of touch. – TechDirt

So The Perfectionists – a show on Freeform “about a scandal involving college students striving for excellence by any means necessary” – premiered Saturday night. The pay channel’s president said, “We have the best marketing and PR team in the business, but even I was not sure that they would be able to create a college cheating scandal this big to launch our show. … But we’re very grateful that they did.” – Variety

As true-crime podcasts, books, and films explode onto Netflix and many, many other platforms, ethical questions should arise. “It may be impossible to make documentaries or write about horrific crimes without causing someone distress. Should that stay the hand of film-makers?” – The Observer (UK)

The CBS Corporation’s directors agreed to a payout of $1.25 million for an investor lawsuit over money paid to Redstone after his health deteriorated in 2014. Is this the last lawsuit around Redstone, his daughter Shari Redstone, Viacom, and CBS? Maybe. – Bloomberg

And yes, it’s in Captain Marvel too: White superhero, POC sidekick. To be fair, “The characters would probably balk at the classification of ‘sidekick.’ Yet they’re designated by the films as such, by virtue of their stories ultimately working to support the main character’s arc. All of them exist to help the lead work through some issue or trauma and provide logistical backup.” – The Guardian (UK)

One of his accusers “said that this case was ‘always the word of a low-level assistant and a perceived eccentric woman of color against an extremely powerful and wealthy TV personality,’ so she was not at all surprised by the news.” – The New York Times

There are spoilers in this article, just FYI – but not in this excerpt: “In addition to [experienced cat actor] Reggie and another experienced animal actor, Archie (yes, they’re named after Archie Comics characters), Brauner found two more orange tabbies, named Gonzo and Rizzo in a nod to the Muppets, at a shelter. Each one had a specialty.” – The New York Times

James Gunn’s firing from the Marvel movie Guardians of the Galaxy 3 was controversial because Disney fired him when “two far-right provocateurs, Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec, threw a spotlight on the [offensive tweets] — written between 2009 and 2012 — after Mr. Gunn harshly criticized President Trump online.” – The New York Times

Famous people who spend a lot of time online become especially defensive; experts point to the explosion of social media for the increase in conflating bullies with critics. After all, bullying has been around forever. Now, there are just more opportunities for anyone to weigh in on any subject they want, and it’s far more likely the intended target will see or hear the criticism. – Washington Post

The studio judges that its “Bandersnatch” project was a success and it’s exploring extending its experiments in letting viewers have more control of the stories they’re watching. But what kinds of stories should these be? – The Guardian

“The new streamer, [called PBS Living and] costing $2.99 per month after a seven-day free trial, will offer classic PBS series like The French Chef, This Old House and Antiques Roadshow, along with more recent series like No Passport Required and Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street. The new channel will offer subscribers hundreds of episodes of PBS series across the food and cooking, home, culture and travel genres, with new content to be added each month.” – The Hollywood Reporter

“The 83-person staff of Gimlet Media, a podcasting startup acquired by music streaming service Spotify for $230 million in February, is unionizing with the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE). Gimlet was founded in 2014 and produces popular podcasts including Reply All, StartUp, and Crimetown.” – BuzzFeed

People in a Quebec town and across the province were shocked after learning in January that footage from a derailment and explosion that killed 47 people was used in the drama starring Sandra Bullock. – Toronto Star

The nightly two-hour show, which is carried on nearly 200 radio stations nationwide and boasts an estimated audience of 1.3 million, might not identify as ideological or political, at least not overtly. But Lee Habeeb has clearly positioned it as a right-of-center alternative to NPR, whose programs such as Morning Edition and All Things Considered also emphasize skillful story-telling, but which many conservatives perceive, rightly or not, as inhospitable to anything that isn’t progressive or politically correct. – The Daily Beast

The service’s parent company revealed in its third-quarter financial report “that the money-losing subscription service has fewer subscribers than previously disclosed, causing the firm to restate its revenue downward by 8.2 percent [$6.6 million] and its losses upward by 7.7 percent [$6.7 million].” – The Hollywood Reporter

The embargo was instated by Pakistan’s Association of Film Exhibitors following last month’s flare-up of armed conflict in and around Kashmir. It may seem a patriotic gesture, but there’s a real question whether Pakistan’s roughly 120 remaining cinemas can survive without Indian films to show. – BBC

Lindsay Ellis has recently emerged as one of the medium’s breakout stars. She earns more than $10,000 a month on Patreon, the crowdfunding site that’s her primary source of revenue. It helps pay for a small staff of mostly part-time employees and allows her to turn out video series like last year’s three-part deep-dive into the Hobbit trilogy, which cost nearly $20,000. Ellis and some of her team went to New Zealand as part of the production, which she feared her supporters would find excessive; instead, the videos gave her the biggest Patreon boost ever. And in the last year, the number of her YouTube subscribers and Twitter followers has doubled. – Wired

There are a few reasons. A presidential budget is essentially a messaging tool these days, a way to show your supporters that you’re addressing their priorities; Congress has to actually decide where real money will go. Just about every member of Congress has a public radio or TV station in his or her district; any transition from rhetoric to reality would be felt back home. But it’s also because public broadcasting is actually pretty popular and pretty trusted by Americans. – NiemenLab

As Fox’s film and television operations (not including Fox News and Sports, or the lot itself) prepare to go to Disney, “The Los Angeles Times spoke to dozens of actors, executives and other Fox veterans to reminisce about the studio’s 106-year legacy, its family atmosphere, its moguls, its filmmakers and the magic they made.” – Los Angeles Times

In what seems a twist worthy of season 65 of the Netflix show The Crown, the BBC has started mocking the numbers, or rather lack of numbers, Netflix shares about one of its most expensive shows. The Beeb’s director general acknowledged that Netflix had a huge budget compared to the BBC, and also urged the BBC to get ready for people never to watch live TV. – The Guardian (UK)

Duh, right? Captain Marvel had the seventh-highest opening for a Marvel movie and by far the highest debut for a film fronted by a woman. (Also, Marvel, perhaps because of its internal and external experience, was ready for the trolls.) – Quartz

It’s TikTok (you might know that already) – but what is TikTok? Whew: “A free-for-all. It’s easy to make a video on TikTok, not just because of the tools it gives users, but because of extensive reasons and prompts it provides for you. You can select from an enormous range of sounds, from popular song clips to short moments from TV shows, YouTube videos or other TikToks. You can join a dare-like challenge, or participate in a dance meme, or make a joke. Or you can make fun of all of these things.”  The New York Times

No, not with director’s cuts, but with literal remakes of their own earlier movies. “For the studio heads tasked with squeezing as much money out of the project as possible, it’s a can’t-fail proposition even safer than sanding off all of a foreign hit’s edges to prep it for Stateside viewers.” – The Guardian (UK)