Newcomer Pod

Hosts Tom Dotan and Eric Newcomer speak with longtime Hollywood reporter Richard Rushfield, who launched his newsletter The Ankler in 2017. Rushfield told readers he would be “giving Hollywood the business,” describing his unsparing newsletter as “the newsletter Hollywood loves to hate and hates to love.”

Now, Rushfield has broader ambitions. A splashy New York Times piece announced that he’d teamed up with Janice Min, the media executive responsible for reinventing both The Hollywood Reporter and Us Weekly. Substack is helping to fund their growth as The Ankler joins Y Combinator.

Almost immediately drama ensued. Variety, the Hollywood trade publication and Ankler rival, ran a headline on Dec. 16: Janice Min Loses First Hire at Ankler Newsletter to Rolling Stone (EXCLUSIVE).

It just so happened that Jay Penske, who was desperately trying to keep star reporter Tatiana Siegel in his media ecosystem, is the owner of Variety, Rolling Stone and Siegel’s employer The Hollywood Reporter. Meanwhile, Min insisted on Twitter that Siegel intended to join The Ankler.

The blowup only seemed to firm up The Ankler’s insurgent posture and the threat it posed to Penske’s Hollywood media empire. We spoke to Rushfield about the contentious launch. We also talked about some of the biggest stories in Hollywood right now, including Netflix employees protesting Dave Chappelle and the backlash to the Golden Globes.

New York Times reporter Erin Griffith returns to the show to catch us up on what’s been going on with the Elizabeth Holmes trial. To the surprise of many, Holmes took the stand to defend herself. Griffith updates us on her lunch, the politics of queuing outside of the courthouse, and Holmes’ legal strategy.

At the 33:40 mark Katie Benner joins hosts Tom Dotan and Eric Newcomer. We talk about Andreessen Horowitz crypto partner Chris Dixon’s anti-media tweets and Bloomberg Businessweek’s story on Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz purportedly slowly stepping back from their eponymous firm. We touch on leadership drama at Instacart and talk about fancy restaurants, including the viral review of Bros., Lecce.

Tom Dotan grills me on my trip to Miami during Art Basel. We talk about 500 Global in the shadow of 2017 exposé Dave McClure. We cover a potpourri of topics. I play my best Steven Pinker while Tom harkens back to his days as a digital media reporter. We talk about Max Read’s piece “Is web3 b******t?” and discuss the BuzzFeed public listing. (Ben Smith can finally sell his shares!) There’s even a brief discussion of the latest episode of Succession **spoilers** toward the end of the episode.

We talked to former Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos about what the media got right and wrong about its coverage of Facebook’s influence on the 2016 election. Stamos — who played a key role in bringing information to Robert Mueller about Russian election interference — is someone who is willing to criticize his former employer without letting the media off the hook.

Stamos argues that Facebook inadequately addressed misinformation posted onto Facebook’s platform and downplayed its discovery of Russian election interference on its platform. BUT, Stamos argues that the media played a far larger role in helping Russian election interference by gleefully publishing stolen Democratic National Committee emails.

We decided to check in with Stamos as the credibility of the Steele dossier has continued to unravel.

We talk about the media’s failure to soul search over its own role in the hacked election. We also discuss the Facebook Files and Stamos’ objections to some of the latest reporting on Facebook.

Background reading:

Opinion: Indictment of Steele dossier source is more bad news for multiple media outlets

How Did So Much of the Media Get the Steele Dossier So Wrong?

Collusion? Who needs it when Facebook was allowing Russians to help Trump?

A quick announcement:

I’m integrating the Dead Cat podcast a little more closely with this newsletter. We’ve brought on an audio editor with Substack’s support to professionalize the podcast. Now, you’ll be able to get Dead Cat right in your email. (But you can still listen to the latest episodes on Apple and Spotify.) If you don’t want to receive Dead Cat podcast episodes, you can go to Newcomer.co/account and deselect “Dead Cat.”

I hope you’ll listen along.

What’s the pitch?

It’s a show that gets behind the tech industry headlines. It’s hosted by me and Insider reporter Tom Dotan.

Our good friend Katie Benner, a reporter at the New York Times, is a regular special guest. So far guests have included Rippling CEO Parker Conrad, Doordash VP and Obama administration alum Liz Jarvis-Shean, and Dispo CEO Daniel Liss.

The podcast is meant to be a fun way to listen in on what reporters really think about the big tech stories of the day. Tom, Katie, and I have had a gossipy Signal thread for years. Dead Cat is that thread in podcast form.

What’s with the name?

Listen, Newcomer wasn’t the most creative name and I needed to make up lost ground. I also wanted a cute cat avatar.

But we do have a rationalization for the name “Dead Cat.”

Here’s the story:

Thanks to a shareholder lawsuit several years ago, the public got a peek inside Marc Andreessen and Mark Zuckerberg’s text messages. Andreessen was coaching Zuckerberg on how to convince the Facebook board to support Zuckerberg’s efforts to solidify his control over Facebook even if he sold shares.

Andreessen texted Zuckerberg: “The cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river.”

Zuckerberg didn’t seem to understand the language of spy craft.

Zuckerberg replied: “Does that mean the cat’s dead?”

Thus, the name for our podcast was born. To over intellectualize it, to me, it’s a statement about how the tech industry is already ascendant. The deed is done. The cat’s dead. We’re stuck with a culturally dominant Silicon Valley — the good and the bad. Now we’re just left making sense of it.

What’s on the docket this week?

Tom, Katie, and I talk about employee union organizing at tech companies and beyond. Tom argues that tech unions haven’t caught on like you might have expected from the cheerleading media coverage. We reflect on our conversation last week with Dispo CEO Daniel Liss and talk about reporter skepticism around cryptocurrencies. Finally, we touch on The Verge’s decision to resist background sourcing from corporate public relations.

We break the seal on crypto in this podcast in a long chat with Dispo CEO Daniel Liss about how the technology could transform social media products. He attended the big NFT conference in New York this past week and explained why the optimism in tech has been directed here. The conversation goes into what the crowd was like at the conference, how the consumer companies could embrace crypto as an alternative business model to advertising and whether it makes sense for services to jump aboard the trend even when its users don't care much about it yet.

Yes, we talk about Facebook's metaverse announcement. And yes, Eric takes the techno-optimist point of view while Katie and Tom are completely befuddled why anyone would want to spend their time there. But also, we discuss whether the announcement actually buried all the Facebook paper scandals, why Frances Haugen's turn to release her documents to multiple outlets was a jolting move for any reporter, and how whistleblowers are now just another version of influencer culture.

We dive into the wacky, wild and wildly inconsistent world of Peter Thiel with Bloomberg Businessweek editor Max Chafkin. He recently published a book, "The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power" that goes through Thiel's origins in the industry, how he influenced other founders and how his right wing political project is shaping up. Max also makes the case for why Thiel is one of the most influential characters in the formation of the current culture in tech. And Eric, Tom and Max mull over why Thiel's worldview is at odds with itself and whether maybe that's the point.

Max's book: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/609711/the-contrarian-by-max-chafkin/

We're joined by New York Times tech reporter Erin Griffith. She's been on the scene in San Jose covering the fraud trial against Elizabeth Holmes—tech's trial of the century, or at least the decade, or maybe of a generation. We talk about the surprisingly plodding pace of such a high profile trial, what kind of a case the prosecution appears to be building and what will be the broader reckoning for the tech industry. If there will be one at all.

We discuss Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong's tweets about how the tech press' harsh coverage of CEOs is driving away talent and whether the increasingly critical stories about tech companies is the natural maturity of the industry. We also dive into last year's controversies when national politics spilled into company Slack rooms and whether banning it actually helped improve morale (as Armstrong also claimed). Finally, as top Facebook officials make the media rounds after the whistleblower's testimony in Congress, we disagree on whether getting an interview with a high ranking exec is all that valuable to a beat reporter.