#media-competition

#media-competition

The PAC was deeply troubled to learn that the BBC still does not know how much the government would fund the World Service for the coming year. The government provides about 30% of the budget for the World Service, which reaches more than 300 million people a week and is 'a jewel in the crown of the UK's soft power', according to the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee.

When Will Lewis arrived at the Washington Post in January 2024, he was received as a potential redeemer. The Post had lost $77 million the previous year under Lewis's predecessor as publisher and CEO, Fred Ryan, an affable man about town who was once Ronald Reagan's post-presidential chief of staff. "The state of the paper when Fred left was really bad," says a senior staffer on the business side. "It was basically like two generational news cycles of Trump and COVID made the execs feel like they had a strategy and then the music stopped and subscribers fell away." From its high of 3 million subscribers at the end of the first Trump administration, the Post was now down to 2.5 million, and half of its online audience had withered away from a peak in 2020. Owner Jeff Bezos, who bought the Post in 2013, was looking for a leader to jolt the paper to life.

The Filter, like the rest of The Guardian, will be paywall-free and will rely on affiliate revenue. This has worked well for The Filter's U.K. offering - The Guardian told Digiday that The Filter received 62 million views and 8 million clicks through to retailers in its first year, leading to a "significant volume in sales," though they didn't provide details on those numbers.