Justin Wise

If you don't subscribe, then you are missing out on great content! Eleanor Hawkins delivers every time! My BIG takeaway from the current installment has to do with this stat: "An MIT study found false news online reaches people about six times faster than the truth, yet 28% of businesses don't have a formal mis-disinformation response plan in place and 23% have no plan." At the very least, businesses need a single source of publicly-facing truth space online. I see so many businesses that do not have this space (and no, it is not your consumer-facing blog), so the stat is not shocking at all. This is a communication malpractice. Reach out and let's fix it.

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New from me: The House Judiciary Committee has been intensifying an antitrust probe into the Global Alliance of Responsible Media and its members, which includes major advertisers, agencies, and platforms. The Committee alleges GARM's members have been colluding to defund conservative media. While the ad industry insiders I spoke to felt the allegations were without merit, they are concerned about the chilling effect the probe -- and its numerous document and interview requests -- could have on GARM's work around brand safety and online misinformation. Read more over at Business Insider #garm #brandsafety #advertising #gop https://lnkd.in/ePpYBcRa

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Beat the clock. Weeks to go before in sleeps. Maybe days. Only Universe Knows Biden's sell-by date. Joe hasn't much time to score a legacy with your billions. POLITICO: "Biden’s $1.6 trillion visions hit reality. President Joe Biden is trying to secure an FDR-style legacy with $1.6 trillion in spending and tax breaks embodied in his climate, infrastructure, chips and pandemic-relief laws. But a POLITICO analysis finds he’s running short on time — with huge chunks of the money still in waiting as he faces a rematch with former President Donald Trump." https://lnkd.in/gZSmA8gN "4 takeaways on Biden’s massive spending plans POLITICO’s examination of the administration’s $1.6T energy and infrastructure programs shows a massive set of initiatives struggling to make headway before the clock may run out on Joe Biden’s presidency." https://lnkd.in/gAgCU48n "Poll: Biden touts his four major infrastructure and clean energy laws. Voters doubt they’re working." Even when they do see positive benefits, many voters aren’t giving the credit to Biden, a new POLITICO poll shows. https://lnkd.in/g_99-vf5

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The blush boom is real. Not only is the category a viral mainstay and a steady driver of makeup growth since 2023, per Circana, but it also raked in $58.9 million in revenue on Amazon during the last 12 months, growing at a rate of 39 percent year-over-year. This outpaces not just makeup’s growth of 25 percent during the same period, but also beauty and personal care’s overall sales growth of 30 percent on the platform. Here, a dive into Amazon's burgeoning blush business for WWD: https://lnkd.in/epuuW9y9

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On your data and political campaigns: your political profile is scattered all around the internet - data brokers pull all the crumbs together: https://lnkd.in/gMcC3Rqw

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I wrote a piece for Politico on major trends buffeting the media including artificial intelligence, deepfakes, and fighting disinformation in an age of dwindling resources. The conclusion is that founders, CEOs, politicians and others in the public eye now face an exponentially increasing threat of reputational damage. In today’s media landscape, a single negative review can quickly go viral, a poorly phrased statement can trigger a global backlash and an ill-judged joke can wreck careers. While the media world’s pace of change is dizzying, the words written by businessman Warren Buffett almost a decade ago have never been more relevant: “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” Article here: https://lnkd.in/dtTNY4PU

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SPOILER ALERT 🚨🚨🚨 I don't think TikTok is going anywhere. But, the debate happening among policymakers makes for pretty good conversation. In my latest thought piece for H/Advisors Abernathy, I examined the newscycle to see how a potential #TikToK ban could play a big role in the 2024 election cycle, rankle #BigTech data collection and lay the groundwork for more #dataprivacy advocacy. https://bit.ly/T1kT0kban

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The end of the Walmart - Capital One partnership is not a good look for Capital One... From reading the court documents, it seems like Capital One was able to deliver on very little of what it promised... For example, on posting and processing, Capital One committed to the following: • Conforming payments: 97% posted within 1 business day of receipt • Non-conforming payments: 99% processed and posted within 5 business days of receipt In July 2022, Capital One posted only 55% of conforming payments within one business day of receipt and 76% of non-conforming payments within five business days of receipt Five of the these "critical" service failures took place in a single 12-month period, giving Walmart the right to exercise a termination clause However, Capital One quibbled about the wording of the termination clause, forcing Walmart to take the credit card issuer to court The court ruled in Walmart's favour, describing the termination clause as "plain" and "unambiguous" https://lnkd.in/eFY5RjpS https://lnkd.in/e_NVr6rB

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So I went to vote today in our primary election, and something happened. I tell you at the start that this is kind of an involved, in-the-weeds story, but I hope you’ll read it anyway. Because I think it illustrates how 99.9% of the time when something goes wrong with voting, it’s because good people with good intentions make a mistake. It’s NOT because of vote fraud. New Jersey had its primary today for Senate, House and other offices. No great controversies, but I wanted to do my civic duty, particularly because my wife was on the ballot: She’s running for a seat on our county’s Democratic committee (two candidates for two seats, so she was effectively unopposed).. So we walked into our polling place, and the poll workers there said they’d had some trouble with the voting machine, but we still checked in and started to fill out our ballots. It’s the kind of machine where you take a paper ballot, mark who you’re voting for and feed it into the machine. That’s when I saw it. “Hey, Christa,” I said to my wife, “why is your name not on here?” Because it wasn’t, and it should have been. Her name had been on the sample ballot we received in the mail ahead of the election - but the actual ballot I was about to cast had two different names listed as candidates for Democratic committee members, not her name. We pointed that out to the poll workers, and it quickly became clear what had happened: These were the wrong ballots. They were for a DIFFERENT polling place and district nearby, with different people running for that district’s slots on the county committee. A poll worker had picked up, and had been using, a stack of ballots for the wrong district. That was why the machine was on the fritz - it was being asked to accept ballots that didn’t fit the proper specifications for that polling place. My wife hopped on the phone to the Board of Elections and county committee members to alert them to the situation - some votes might have to be invalidated - while the poll workers tried to sort through what was going on and what they should do. Within maybe 15 minutes, the problem was resolved. The correct ballots were located, I cast my vote (including for my wife), the machine accepted my ballot. and I went home satisfied. I saw all of this happen with my own eyes - the discovery of the problem, the attempts to alert people to it, the resolution. No one tried to hide anything. No one got angry. Everyone did their best to figure out what was going on and how to remedy it. No fraud or other underhandedness. It was a relatively low-stakes primary election, true, so there was less reason for fraud to begin with - but if you dig below the surface of virtually any voting problem, what you’ll find is human error and Murphy’s law, not fraud. So if and when certain people start yammering about how the 2020 election was “stolen,” or how the 2024 election is going to be “rigged” - try to remember this, and use your common sense. Feel free to share.

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"I've pulled together a series of fun prompts to try with ChatGPT that work with free & paid versions & covered a range of topics with these prompts, as well as different prompting styles including one where you need to enter a multi-prompt conversation."

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What will the Q2 call reports show when it comes to NSF/OD income at the largest CUs? Here's a preview (and, right or wrong, it indicates many CUs may find themselves on the defensive). Story here: https://lnkd.in/ePPn8P7f

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If you look at the circulation numbers for the papers Media24 says it is planning on closing it's hard to imagine how things could be any different. While by no means any better off than the newspapers of other publishers, the declines in circulation in these papers are stark. Soccer Laduma from 317,013 total circulation at the start of 2014 to 41k in 2024. Daily Sun down from 283,216 to 11,889 over the past 10 years. City Press at less than tenth of its circulation size 10 years ago. Even the relatively stable Rapport is a third of its former self. https://lnkd.in/dnBKHsY2

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As I approach my third month at The Baltimore Banner, I have been thinking a lot about defining success. A mentor offered the following thoughts: For reporters, it is much easier to define success. Editors often need help seeing that their goals should be quite different than their reporters'. They need to see each of their reporters as individuals with different strengths and weaknesses. So editors need to meet each reporter at a different place and help them improve, and hopefully, thrive. Sometimes that means focusing on reporting or writing skills, sometimes it is helping a reporter figure out how to cover a beat, or how to distinguish their work from the competition. Editors of course are key to guiding coverage, whether it's breaking news or a more conceptual beat, when the goal has to be finding the front edge of the topic (for an education reporter, that might be new trends in teaching and for the city hall reporter it might be who are the emerging power brokers.) When it comes to editing copy, editors have to avoid rewriting stories, which can completely demoralize reporters, but they also can't send along stories that are confusing or take too long to get to the point. It takes awhile for editors to figure out that sweet spot between improving copy but not just rewriting it the way they would have written it. The hardest part of editing is probably dealing with difficult reporters and there is no easy answer for that. The only part of running a newsroom that I could advise on is running the coverage and for me, that was always driven by focusing on the big news of the day. You have to make sure that editors have put enough staffers on the big stories and are looking across the news cycle, e.g. what will we have to publish first thing tomorrow, and make sure some people are trained on the bigger, deeper questions that take a few days to report. If you are clear on your top priorities each day and the newsroom aligns behind those, then the smaller stories will take care of themselves. You will be judged by how the Banner did on the big things, not the small things.

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It's a simple fact that close followers of the secondary watch market know well but it is still surprising that a slight difference in the color of a watch bezel can mean the difference of thousands of dollars in value. #rolex #pepsi #batman #bloombergsubdialwatchindex Subdial Watches

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Something you might have missed over the July 4th holiday... A federal judge partially blocked the FTC's noncompete ban. And based on how the judge is looking at the rule now, the prospects for the rule's survival are not great. #behavioralhealth #mentalhealth #addictiontreatment #regulations #policy #politics #healthcare #hr https://lnkd.in/ePFd_r5Y

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You might see some promotional publicity in the media for a new book purportedly about public relations from what its publisher claims is a 'top operative.' Consistent with the historic tension between hacks vs. flacks, some journos will jump at the chance to platform someone especially if it provides an opportunity to position lying and manipulation as the essence of PR. Bad boys and 'high stakes' take-the-money firms might steal a few sensational headlines, but they are actually at the fringes and on the bottom of an industry where most practitioners around the world counsel candor and transparency in the public domain for clients with worthy points of view. #publicrelations #PR #ethics #propaganda https://a.co/d/0dP8eAG8 https://lnkd.in/eucAfEDU https://lnkd.in/ek2wk3Pg

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Misinformation and disinformation, the threat of deepfakes, the rise of AI, dwindling workforces and resources - are converging trends undermining the quality of and trust in the media? Have a read of this excellent piece by Tom Harper, APCO European head of media and former Sunday Times journalist, in POLITICO today.

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