EXEC SUMMARY: Hello from DC! Katie Pellico helped prepare this early edition of the newsletter. Check out our recommended weekend reads...
| | $300 million weekend?
Frank Pallotta emails: When I heard a few weeks ago that "Avengers: Endgame" could have a $300 million opening, I laughed. Why? Because I thought it would be, you know, mathematically impossible. Yet, here we are. Disney is "cautiously projecting" that "Endgame" could make $300 million this weekend in the U.S. That includes a potential opening day of $140 million or more. Both records are unheard of -- no film has ever opened domestically beyond the $300 million mark.
Thursday's results
Pallotta adds: "Endgame" has already had the biggest opening night ever banking $60 million on Thursday. I went to the AMC in Times Square to see the scene for myself -- and it made "Force Awakens" look like a small get-together!
>> Overseas, the film has made $305 million in just two days. Stay tuned to CNN Business and my Twitter feed to get all the updates...
Lowry with the bottom line
Brian Lowry emails: I suspect there will be some hand-wringing about the latest records to fall in connection with "Avengers: Endgame," and what that level of gigantism means for the movie business -- and specifically, smaller films. The bottom line, though, is that it's an endorsement of Disney's strategy, with at least four more potential huge openings from the studio this year: "The Lion King," "Toy Story 4," "Frozen 2" and "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker." And that doesn't even include the newly acquired Fox titles...
WEEKEND PLANNER
Saturday evening: WHCD pre-parties start at 5pm... The dinner starts at 7:30... CNN will have special coverage anchored by Alisyn Camerota and Don Lemon from 7 til 11...
Sunday: Kellyanne Conway and Seth Moulton on "SOTU" with Jake Tapper...
Monday: A week full of Digital Content NewFronts gets underway in NYC...
It's not "nerd prom" anymore
The White House Correspondents Association's annual dinner was informally dubbed "nerd prom" years ago, but now it's just "the dinner." On Saturday the president will skip the dinner for the third straight year -- and hold a media-bashing rally instead. At the dinner, historian Ron Chernow will take the place of a comedian. WHCA president Olivier Knox, speaking with The Hill, called this a reset: "When I ran for the job in early 2016, I told folks that I felt the dinner needed a reset, to be more serious, to put the focus back on journalism, on the job of chronicling a presidency and holding it to account. I've kept that campaign promise."
>> Andrew Ferguson's must-read raises the WHCD curtain: "A Republic Too Fractured to Be Funny"
At David Bradley's dinner...
There was a round of applause for the aforementioned Olivier Knox at Atlantic Media's annual dinner at David Bradley's home Friday evening. Bradley acknowledged how difficult the WHCA chief's position is, given Trump's hostility toward the press. Later in the evening, Emily Lenzner and Patrick Garrigan produced a "cabaret" -- in part, Bradley said, to make up for the lack of a comedian at Saturday's dinner...
Spotted: Bob Cohn, Peter Lattman, Kellyanne Conway, Bill Weld, John Delaney, Sally Quinn, Tom Udall, Mark Warner, Judy Woodruff, Margaret Brennan, Ruth Marcus, Megan Murphy, Hilary Rosen, Mary Louise Kelly, Josh Rogin, Elaina Plott, Peter Nicholas, and many more...
On Sunday's show...
Joining me on "Reliable Sources" after the rally and the dinner: Elaina Plott, Amanda Carpenter, Karen Finney, David Zurawik, Glenn Kessler, and Randall Lane...
Biden bobs and weaves on "The View"
| | Katie Pellico writes: "The View" was Joe Biden's first TV stop post-2020 announcement. The ABC hosts asked him to address and redress both recent allegations of unwanted touching, and the claims he mistreated Anita Hill while chairing the 1991 confirmation hearings of Justice Clarence Thomas. As CNN's Gregory Krieg writes, "the former vice president deflected them at almost every turn, offering qualified regrets."
>> Sydney Ember, Matt Flegenheimer and Alex Burns did something unique for the NYT, writing a "recap and analysis" that was seamlessly conversational. One observation from Flegenheimer as an example: "He came out to 'We Take Care of Our Own' by Bruce Springsteen — a song used often by Barack Obama back in the day. Subtle!"
>> An attempt to shape the news media narrative: The campaign came out Friday afternoon and announced a one-day fund-raising haul of $6.3 million...
>> Stelter adds: As I was watching Biden on "The View," I was thinking, Can you imagine Trump in this talk show format?
FOR THE RECORD, PART ONE
-- New poll #'s that will steer many cable news segments this weekend: "A majority of Americans oppose impeachment. Most also say Trump lied to the public..." (WaPo)
-- "Trump now says parents must vaccinate children in face of measles outbreak." Brendan Nyhan tweeted: "Credit where credit is due. This is great (and could have been so much worse). Shout this from the rooftops!" (CNN)
-- James Hamblin's latest is about "Measles and the Limits of Facts:" At its core, "the resurgence of the once-defeated disease in the U.S. is a failure of communication..." (The Atlantic)
-- Deepest condolences to Jeanine Pirro and her family... Pirro's mother Esther Ferris died Thursday at the age of 90... (Journal News)
Recommended reads for your weekend 👓
-- Politico Mag's annual media issue is always a treat, and this year is no exception... Read it here!
-- Charlie Warzel's latest: "If a $5 billion fine is chump change, how do you punish Facebook?"
-- Airbrush apps and ring lights may be props of the past, according to the influencers "going out of their way to make their photos look worse" or more off the cuff. Taylor Lorenz declares "The Instagram Aesthetic Is Over..."
-- Poynter's Daniel Funke writes about a new study showing journalists are, in some cases, just as susceptible to misinformation as the rest of us, and "need help covering" it...
-- Read about why Meagan Fekos resigned from her post as managing editor at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for a job in communications... It has to do with parenthood...
-- This profile got a fair amount of flack, and is all the more worthy of a read for it: VF's Evgenia Peretz profiles Bari Weiss, the NYT reporter "the left loves to hate..."
-- A friendly, always-refreshing reminder that "Twitter is not America." A new Pew study and accompanying Atlantic article from Alexis C. Madrigal show the breadth of the divide "between the general population and Twitter users..."
"Inside the team at Facebook that dealt with the Christchurch shooting"
Katie Pellico writes: Kate Klonick takes us there for The New Yorker, profiling three content moderators at Facebook and offering a sympathetic look into their lives. Klonick shows the three eye-opening "phases" of Facebook's "crisis-management protocol," as applied to the viral spread of the Christchurch video.
First... is the "understand" phase. Content moderation teams stationed around the world "spend as much as an hour gathering information before making any decisions." Second... Those teams work to "isolate," containing the spread of the content, which is much thornier than it sounds. Finally... "Enforcement" occurs, or, monitoring to ensure the content doesn't resurface.
>> Klonick illuminates the instances in which live-streaming violence has in its own way served a "noble purpose," complicating the first phase. The shooting of Philando Castile in 2016 was "exempted... from claims that it had been edited by activists or the police department before it was released" because it was streamed live on Facebook. Klonick writes, "Such scenarios, for better or worse, force tech companies to do the delicate work of determining whether a video of violence ultimately serves a harmful or noble purpose." Read on... | |
FOR THE RECORD, PART TWO
-- Via CNN's Elizabeth Joseph: "Judge James Burke has set a new trial date of September 9 for the criminal case against disgraced movie mogul Harvey Weinstein..."
-- The judge "banned reporters and the general public from portions of Friday's pretrial hearing..." (CNN)
-- Finally, we hear from inside The Correspondent's nascent newsroom. Zainab Shah, the first U.S. hire, "speaks out..." (NiemanLab)
-- MNG Enterprises, still betting on its Gannett bid, withdrew three of its six nominees for the board which, Gannett-owned USA Today reports, means MNG "could not control the Gannett board even if its candidates are elected." Mark your calendars for the May 16 shareholder vote... (USA Today)
-- A promotion for Ryan Lizza: He is now a senior political analyst at CNN, Playbook notes... (Politico)
Fox News reporter chides colleagues for sounding "like a White Supremacist chat room"
Pavni Mittal emails: Fox News Radio's White House correspondent Job Decker chided two of his colleagues, according to leaked emails. He said "both of you should send an apology to your Fox News colleagues."
Decker was replying to general assignment reporter Doug McKelway and digital senior editor Cody Derespina, who reportedly sent an email to "dozens of network employees" Thursday in defense of the president, prompted by Joe Biden's campaign announcement video that zeroed in on the Charlottesville "both sides" remark. The internal thread was initially obtained by FTVLive, then confirmed by the Daily Beast's Max Tani and Andrew Kirell. "Your posts read like something you'd read on a White Supremacist chat room," Decker emailed. Read on...
Warren Buffett's warning
Warren Buffett's words from earlier this week are still ringing in my head... In an interview with Yahoo Finance EIC Andy Serwer, Buffett agreed with him that as ads declined, newspapers "went from monopoly" to "toast." He added, "They're disappearing. They're going to disappear." Buffett, of course, owns some local papers, including the Omaha World-Herald and the Buffalo News...
Standout quote: For Buffett, the glory days of yore were defined by "survival of the fattest. Whichever paper was the fattest won, because it had the most ads in it and ads are news to people. They want to know what supermarket is having the bargain on Coke or Pepsi this weekend and so on. It upsets the people in the newsroom to talk that way but the ads were the most important editorial content from the standpoint of the reader."
Des Moines Register takes on 2020 with a "shrinking newsroom"
Katie Pellico writes: The paper many see as pivotal to the presidential primary elections is "shrinking," and Politico's Tim Alberta gives us a look at its winnowing workflows in the aforementioned media issue. In short, the Des Moines Register is strapped: "Fourteen reporters at the Register are currently assigned to Democratic candidates, responsible for tracking their every move and covering their every stop in the state, but only three of them are practiced political journalists." Yes, that's 14 reporters for all 20 declared candidates. Keep reading... | |
FOR THE RECORD, PART THREE
-- Amazon wants in on music streaming. "MBW has caught wind of the company's next big plan to challenge the likes of Spotify..." (MBW)
-- "I know what you're thinking: Another story on Luminary?" NiemanLab's Joshua Benton rounds up Luminary's rough launch week, and its Friday response to the kerfuffles... (NiemanLab)
-- Amanda Mull for the Atlantic, arguing "wireless headphones are the new cubicles" in a world of open-plan offices... (The Atlantic)
Remaining Markup leaders go on PR offensive
This is getting dicey... Peter Sterne tweeted about a new "PR blitz," reporting The Markup team "is now working with a professional comms shop." Sterne provided screenshots of a beat-by-beat "overview of the false, inaccurate or misleading statements made by" co-founder and former EIC Julia Angwin.
Additionally, the remaining co-founders Sue Gardner and Jeff Larson contacted Recode Friday with a reply to Thursday's Recode Decode interview with Angwin. Gardner said, "The idea that she is going out and just making up an entirely whole-cloth kind of theme around this advocacy thing, I'm kind of baffled by it. I'm not loving stories that frame this as 'she said, she said' or whatever." The article is appropriately titled, "What the hell happened at The Markup?"
>> Recode's Eric Johnson has the "super-quick recap" for background...
"Jeopardy!" update
>> WaPo's Emily Yahr wanted to find out "What it's like to lose to unstoppable 'Jeopardy!' champion James Holzhauer." She polled "some of these unlucky — yet extremely good-humored — souls and... learned that there are five stages of losing to Holzhauer..."
| | Tribeca Film Fest is in full swing
The festival began Wednesday night... It is a "restlessly polyglot affair," Deadline's Dade Hayes wrote...
One of the early highlights: Erin Lee Carr's documentary about about the USA Gymnastics sex abuse scandal, "At the Heart of Gold," premiered Thursday night, and now awaits a Friday premiere on HBO. THR's Keith Uhlich reviewed the doc, lauding the film for giving "resounding voice" to the hundreds of affected athletes, their stories uniting into a "ringing, uniformly righteous howl."
>> Here's a link to the TFF's full schedule...
FOR THE RECORD, PART FOUR
-- Earlier this week filmmaker Kate Tsang was awarded $1 million through AT&T's "Untold Stories" pitch program... (Variety)
-- Lifetime's "Surviving R. Kelly: The Impact," a two-hour special about the docuseries that sparked a national conversation, airs next Saturday... (THR)
-- Sinemia, a theater subscription service, "couldn't outlast MoviePass," or the patent lawsuit MoviePass filed against them. Citing "unexpected legal proceedings," the service announced it will shut down in the U.S... (Engadget)
--The Washington Examiner has passed TheBlaze as the second-most trafficked conservative news website... (MediaPost)
Bill Nye, The Science "Rules" Guy
Katie Pellico emails: Bill Nye is launching a podcast called "Science Rules" on May 16. The Verge's Andrew Liptak spoke with Nye about it... "Unlike his TV programs, Nye's new podcast is a bit more interactive. In it, he'll be taking audience calls to answer various questions about science, and he'll be accompanied by veteran science journalist Corey S. Powell," plus "a number of guests." More here...
FOR THE RECORD, PART FIVE
By Lisa Respers France:
-- Here's the full list of Billboard Latin Music Awards 2019 winners...
-- Corey Feldman once caught flack for seeming to defend Michael Jackson and now the actor says he wonders if the pop star was "grooming" him...
-- The man who was shot alongside rapper Nipsey Hussle says he turned to leave the parking lot and "it was all bad..."
| | | Thank you for reading. Email me anytime. See you tomorrow... | | | |
