Media industry veteran John Ellis has been a political analyst for NBC News, a columnist for The Boston Globe, a political editor for Business Insider, a News Corp advisor and SVP at the Fox Business Network.

In 2016, he launched News Items, which became The Wall Street Journal CEO Council’s morning newsletter. Ellis restarted News Items as an independent newsletter in August 2019. His articles have been published in Fast Company, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Real Clear Politics, and Business Insider.

News Items is “a collection of news stories, commentaries, analyses, essays and research reports that are interesting or important (or both).”  Each “item” posted is usually two or three sentences long and resides in one of four “baskets:”

 

·      World in Disarray,

·      Financialization of Everything,

·      Advances in Science and Technology,

·      Electoral politics, foreign and domestic.

 

Those who subscribe claim that Ellis and the team have proved their value by being “the first newsletter to devote extensive coverage to Covid-19, accurately calling the invasion of Ukraine by Russia almost to the day and being one of the first news sources to forecast the enormous importance of AI and the leadership roles taken by Google, Meta, and Weibu.”

In this episode of E&P Reports, we go one-on-one with news media industry veteran John Ellis about his 40+ year journey from NBC News in the 70s and 80s, columnist for the Boston Globe and LA Times in the 90s, leadership roles in the 21st century at CNBC, and FOX News and eventual founder and editor today of the daily newsletter, News Items. We also chat with Ellis on how he sees journalism and news publishing in general have changed over the decades, where the industry is today and how he feels it will evolve in the years to come.