Media Beat: April 29, 2021
Lina Kim named TPX President as Jean-Marie Heimrath semi-retires
By David Farrell
Lina Kim named TPX President as Jean-Marie Heimrath semi-retires
The Podcast Exchange (TPX) has announced Lina Kim as the new president of The Podcast Exchange (TPX), replacing retiring co-founder and CEO Jean-Marie Heimrath.
Kim was formerly Managing Director at Havas Media Group, the French multinational advertising and public relations company, headquartered in Paris with operations in more than 100 countries and one of the largest global advertising and communications groups in the world.
Retiring CEO Jean-Marie Heimrath announced the decision, citing her “excellent track record in the industry,” and described Kim as “the perfect candidate to lead TPX” as she has served in senior leadership capacities in both the advertising and digital space.
The targeted advertising sales agency for podcasting media represents more than 1,000 different shows across multiple podcast networks, covering a wide variety of popular and niche genres.
TPX has a number of exclusive agreements to represent podcasting portfolios for marketing and sales in Canada, including US-based AdLarge Media’s cabana’s catalogue of titles and Terry O’Reilly’s Apostrophe Podcast Company. Montreal-based media and tech company Stingray acquired a 30% equity position in TPX in the fall of 2020.
Heimrath will remain on the TPX board, providing counsel and guidance as the company continues to build its core business while pursuing new avenues of strategic value.
Spotify expands podcast reach via Facebook link
Spotify is extending its global reach in podcast distribution in a collaboration with Facebook, which serves 1.8-billion daily users. In this link-up, Spotify listeners can share a podcast episode on their Facebook news feed. Facebook does not have a native audio player, so listening to a Spotify podcast episode shared on Facebook takes the listener into Spotify. – Brad Hill, RAIN News
Public service journalism under threat of extinction
…The pandemic has hit journalism hard, drying up revenue and putting its very existence into question – something that many fear may prove to be a so-called “media extinction event”.
UN News’ Vibhu Mishra spoke to Ms. Vyas, whose fund has a bold, billion-dollar rescue plan to help save journalism for the public good, and he began by asking why public service journalism matters. – UN News
Fixing the social media problem
When political scientist Francis Fukuyama and his team of researchers last year began studying the dominance of platforms Facebook, Google/YouTube and Twitter, they first thought this was a problem for antitrust laws and regulations to solve. But in the end, they concluded that being big was not what made these platforms bad. Instead, it’s the algorithms powering these platforms that cause “social harms, including loss of privacy and monopolization and manipulation of attention, and political harms, including threats to democratic discourse and deliberation and, ultimately, to democratic choice in the electoral process.”
The root of the issue is how the platform algorithms maximize usage. The more engagement and more time spent by users, regardless of the truth or harm of the content being consumed and shared, the more advertising revenue. Their algorithms learned that misinformation grabs people’s attention best, which is why their recommendation engines send people down rabbit holes of Covid-19 hoaxes, QAnon conspiracies and divisive Russian disinformation operations. – L. Gordon Crovitz, Politico
World military spending rises to almost $2 trillion in 2020
Total global military expenditure rose to $1981 billion last year, an increase of 2.6 per cent in real terms from 2019, according to new data published today by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). The five biggest spenders in 2020, which together accounted for 62 per cent of global military expenditure, were the United States, China, India, Russia and the United Kingdom. Military spending by China grew for the 26th consecutive year.
The 2.6 per cent increase in world military spending came in a year when global gross domestic product (GDP) shrank by 4.4 per cent (October 2020 projection by the International Monetary Fund), largely due to the economic impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic. As a result, military spending as a share of GDP—the military burden—reached a global average of 2.4 per cent in 2020, up from 2.2 per cent in 2019. This was the biggest year-on-year rise in the military burden since the global financial and economic crisis in 2009. – SIPRI
35 years since its nuclear disaster, Chernobyl prepares for tourist influx
In the 35 years since the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, the nearby main thoroughfare in Pripyat, Ukraine, has been taken over by plants, trees and wildlife.
Abandoned hours after the meltdown of the Soviet nuclear reactor in 1986, the town that once housed workers of the nuclear plant and their families has existed ever since as an eerie ghost town.
But now its central boulevard has been cleared of trees and shrubs, and even reconnected to the electricity grid. In 2020, the former residents of this once-thriving town visited it for the first time to mark five decades since it was first established in the then-Soviet Union.
While only a trickle of hardy tourists has made their way to Chernobyl and its environs over the last decade, the Ukrainian authorities believe this could soon turn into a stream - if not a flood. – Euro news & AP
