Techmeme: Reuters 2025 Digital News Report: in a first, Americans' top news source is social media, at 54%, overtaking TV, at 50%, and news websites and apps, at 48% (Nieman Lab)

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June 17, 2025, 11:50 AM

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Nieman Lab:

Reuters 2025 Digital News Report: in a first, Americans' top news source is social media, at 54%, overtaking TV, at 50%, and news websites and apps, at 48% — Plus: The pivot to video is really happening, digital subscriptions may have peaked, and other findings from RISJ's 2025 Digital News Report.

John Koblin / New York Times:

Nielsen: in May, Americans watched more TV on streaming than on cable and broadcast networks combined, the first time streaming was king of TV over a full month — In May, more Americans watched television on streaming than on cable and network television combined, Nielsen said.

More: Nielsen, CNBC, Sports Business Journal, Awful Announcing, Media Play News, nScreenMedia, Advanced Television, What's On Disney Plus, TVLine, The Desk, Radio & Television …, Los Angeles Times, Variety, Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter, and MediaPost. Forums: r/technology

See also Mediagazer

The Information:

Sources: OpenAI wants Microsoft to take a ~33% stake in exchange for foregoing future profit rights, and seeks to modify its exclusive cloud deal with Microsoft — Negotiations between Microsoft and OpenAI over the startup's plan to restructure its for-profit unit, which requires Microsoft's approval …

More: ITPro, Spyglass Spiral, and The Hans India

Bluesky: @edzitron.com. X: @mgsiegler and @jukanlosreve. LinkedIn: Scott Griffiths

Berber Jin / Wall Street Journal:

Sources: OpenAI and Microsoft talks have become so fraught that OpenAI executives discussed accusing Microsoft of anticompetitive behavior before US regulators — The startup, growing frustrated with its partner, has discussed making antitrust complaints to regulators

More: Gizmodo, The Information, The Hans India, Thurrott, TechCrunch, Quartz, The Crypto Times, Tech Monitor, New York Times, The Decoder, Barron's Online, Spyglass, Axios, crypto.news, The Rundown AI, WinBuzzer, Benzinga, Proactive, Computerworld, Silicon UK, TVNewsCheck, PYMNTS.com, Windows Central, The Hill, Reuters, and nextbigwhat

Bluesky: @edzitron.com, @edzitron.com, and @navneetalang.com

X: @brianrumao, @benfritz, @morqon, @alexeheath, @rustybrick, @bdsams, and @berber_jin1

Forums: Hacker News, r/BetterOffline, and Slashdot

Cameron Faulkner / The Verge:

Amazon plans to hold Prime Day 2025 from July 8 at 12:01am PT through July 11, lasting four days instead of the usual two and exclusive to Prime subscribers — Prime members will have even longer than usual to score some of the year's best tech deals.

Bloomberg:

Sources: xAI is in talks to raise $4.3B via an equity investment on top of the $5B in debt it's trying to borrow; of its previously raised $14B, it has $4B left — Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI is in talks to raise $4.3 billion through an equity investment on top …

More: Reuters, Financial Times, TechCrunch, Blockchain.News, and Proactive

Bluesky: @chadstanton and @niedermeyer.online

X: @andrewcurran_ and @silvermanjacob

Mike Rogoway / Oregonian:

Memo: Intel's manufacturing VP says Intel plans to cut 15%-20% of factory staff from July “to meet our affordability challenges and current financial position” — Intel plans to lay off up to a fifth of its factory workers, an enormous cutback that will have a profound effect on one of the chipmaker's core businesses.

More: CRN, Tom's Hardware, DatacenterDynamics, Oregonian, HPCwire, TechRadar, CTech, Tom's Hardware, Portland Business Journal, Phoenix Business Journal, Tech.co, Moneycontrol, CTech, Financial Express, and CTech

Bluesky: @oregonian.com. Forums: r/oregon, r/PortlandOR, r/hardware, r/Portland, and Slashdot

Mark Mwachiro / Adweek:

At Cannes, Meta adds AI tools to its Advantage+ suite for advertisers and agencies, including turning images into videos, video highlights, and Virtual Try-On — The new features include the ability to transform still images into video. — With the advertising world congregating this week …

More: Bloomberg, Sherwood News, WinBuzzer, and The Drum

Jordan Novet / CNBC:

The US Defense Department awards OpenAI a one-year $200M contract to develop prototype AI tools that address challenges in “warfighting and enterprise domains” — OpenAI has been awarded a $200 million contract to provide the U.S. Defense Department with artificial intelligence tools.

More: OpenAI, Breitbart, New York Post, Quartz, The Verge, U.S. Department of Defense, Engadget, Mercury News, Dexerto, Patently Apple, PhoneArena, Android Headlines, The Register, The Decoder, Silicon UK, Maginative, Cryptopolitan, Benzinga, Business Insider, Hürriyet Daily News, Fortune India, The Information, SiliconANGLE, USA Today, Reuters, and nextbigwhat

Bluesky: @deanobeidallah. X: @emostaque, @cryps1s, and @andrewcurran_

Forums: Hacker News, r/aiwars, r/artificial, r/LocalLLaMA, r/OpenAI, r/PLTR, r/technology, r/singularity, and r/politics

Katie Notopoulos / Business Insider:

The Meta AI app now shows a pop-up warning before users share to the public Discover feed, after reports showed accidentally shared chats with personal info — - Business Insider found that the Meta AI app's public feed was full of personal information that looked to be accidentally published.

More: 404 Media, Engadget, Mashable, and Thurrott

Threads: @jacaranda7. X: @alexpalcuie, @katienotopoulos, and @katienotopoulos

Financial Times:

German defense tech startup Helsing raised €600M led by Daniel Ek's Prima Materia, sources say at a ~€12B valuation, bringing its total funding to €1.37B — Defence start-up valued at €12bn to become one of Europe's most valuable tech groups

More: PitchBook, Tech.eu, CNBC, Helsing, TechCrunch, Reuters, and Silicon Canals. LinkedIn: Khaled Helioui

Marina Temkin / TechCrunch:

AI-powered virtual physical therapy startup Sword Health raised $40M led by General Catalyst at a $4B valuation, up from its $3B valuation from June 2024 — Sword Health, an AI-powered digital health startup, has raised $40 million at a $4 billion valuation, a 33% jump from the $3 billion price tag it earned just a year ago.

More: FinSMEs, Tech.eu, Axios, and CNBC

Jess Weatherbed / The Verge:

Adobe debuts Firefly for iOS and Android, letting mobile users generate images and videos using text prompts and experiment with popular AI photo editing tools — The iPhone and Android Firefly app can sync AI image and video projects to desktops via Creative Cloud.

More: Bloomberg, ZDNET, Thurrott, Forbes, MacRumors, CNET, 9to5Mac, Reuters, AppleInsider, TechCrunch, WeRSM, The Shortcut, NERDS.xyz, WinBuzzer, and MacDailyNews. Threads: @chriswelch

Bloomberg:

Shanghai-based MiniMax open sources MiniMax-M1, a model for complicated productivity tasks that supports 1M input tokens and it says beats DeepSeek's R1-0528 — Chinese AI upstart MiniMax released a new large language model, joining a slew of domestic peers inspired to surpass DeepSeek in the field of reasoning AI.

More: South China Morning Post, GitHub, The Decoder, VentureBeat, implicator.ai, and Sherwood News

X: @minimax__ai, @reach_vb, @koltregaskes, @teksedge, @dorialexander, @minimax__ai, @minchoi, @teksedge, and @sarthakgh

Rohan Paul / @rohanpaul_ai:

[Thread] A US paper shows the best frontier LLM models solve 0% of hard coding problems from Codeforces, ICPC, and IOI, domains where expert humans still excel — This is really BAD news of LLM's coding skill. ☹️ The best Frontier LLM models achieve 0% on hard real-life Programming Contest problems, domains where expert humans still excel. LiveCodeBench Pro, a benchmark composed of problems from Codeforces, ICPC, and IOI ("International [image]

More: arXiv.org and Hugging Face

X: @rohanpaul_ai, @rohanpaul_ai, @rohanpaul_ai, @rohanpaul_ai, and @rohanpaul_ai

Ryan Pendell / Gallup:

Survey: US employees using AI at work at least a few times/year grows from 21% in 2023 to 40% in 2025, and those using AI a few times/week is up from 11% to 19% — The use of AI at work is accelerating. In the past two years, the percentage of U.S. employees who say they have used AI …

More: NewsMax.com and The Hill

X: @noamscheiber. Forums: Slashdot

Erik Hayden / The Hollywood Reporter:

Disney and Amazon partner to let media buyers using Amazon's DSP have better tools to target consumers on ad-tier programming across Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ — The pact unlocks more opportunities for brands using Amazon's Demand Side Platform to reach consumers watching Hulu, Disney+ and ESPN content.

More: The Wrap, Marketing Dive, MediaPost, and What's On Disney Plus

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The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

From Mediagazer

Todd Spangler / Variety:

Filing: WBD president and CEO David Zaslav sold $195M+ worth of WBD stock since the company agreed to be acquired by Paramount; his latest sale totaled $21.7M

Richard J. Tofel / Second Rough Draft:

The history of the Dow Jones Special Committee, created to ensure WSJ editorial independence, suggests the model would not protect CNN from the Ellisons

Rick Porter / The Hollywood Reporter:

Early Nielsen data: Ted Lasso's Season 4 launch set a record for Apple TV debuts with 296.6M minutes viewed August 4-5, passing 215.1M minutes for Season 3

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More News

Brody Ford / Bloomberg:

Salesforce says it will increase prices on many products in August, including Slack; major product lines will see a 6% increase on average

More: Salesforce

Liam Wright / Forbes:

Eigen Labs raised $70M via a token purchase by a16z and launched EigenCloud, which helps developers cryptographically prove what happens in off-chain apps

More: Decrypt, CoinDesk, The Block, crypto.news, CryptoSlate, and Coinpedia Fintech News

Jagmeet Singh / TechCrunch:

Israeli observability startup Coralogix raised a $115M Series E led by NewView Capital at a $1B+ valuation, and plans to invest ~$100M in India over five years

More: Globes, Entrackr, SiliconANGLE, Press Trust of India, and Tech Funding News

Kieran Press-Reynolds / New York Times:

Grow a Garden, a simplistic farming simulator game within Roblox, hit 16.4M active players on June 14, beating Fortnite and other games' peak concurrent users

More: Los Angeles Times and Dexerto

Mark Sweney / The Guardian:

Sky, ITV, and Channel 4 plan to offer their streaming ad spaces in one marketplace, letting advertisers run campaigns across services, to combat Google and Meta

More: Telegraph, The Desk, Broadband TV News, TVBEurope, and Proactiveinvestors UK

Earlier Picks

Brayden Lindrea / Cointelegraph:

TheMinerMag: the median cost of mining bitcoin is set to rise 9.4% QoQ in Q2 2025 to $70K, up from $52K in Q4 2024, shrinking margins for less efficient miners

More: TheMinerMag, Cryptopolitan, The Crypto Times, BeInCrypto, CoinDesk, CryptoSlate, and CoinDesk

Bloomberg:

The US Senate's draft tax bill would raise the CHIPS Act's tax credit for semiconductor factories from 25% to 30% until the tax break expires at the end of 2026

More: pv magazine International, Cryptopolitan, New York Times, and Bloomberg Law

Cory Weinberg / The Information:

Sources: Meta's Scale AI talks started in mid-April, with Mark Zuckerberg floating a $5B investment in early May, which Alexandr Wang later countered with $20B

More: Inc.com, Entrepreneur, and Time

Bluesky: @davelee.me. X: @ericnewcomer

Alex Weprin / The Hollywood Reporter:

Threads plans to let users hide text or images that spoil something, blurring the text or image that has been marked as a spoiler until a user selects the post

Katie Roof / Bloomberg:

Juniper Square, which offers software and fund administration services for VC, PE, and real estate investors, raised $130M led by Ribbit at a $1.1B valuation

More: FinTech Global and Juniper Square

X: @arobinsontweets, @juniper_square, @juniper_square, and @felicis. LinkedIn: G.M. Nicholas Vik

Sergiu Gatlan / BleepingComputer:

Germany, Europol, and Eurojust take down Archetyp Market, a darknet drug marketplace active since May 2020 with 612K+ users and €250M+ in Monero transactions

More: Europol, The Record, Cyber Daily, SecurityWeek, Eurojust, Security Affairs, and PCMag

X: @totalcrime, @eileenormsby, @vxdb, @beniduboss, @eurojust, and @europol

Forums: r/technology and r/technology

New York Times:

WhatsApp rolls out ads in its Updates tab, a first for the app, and Meta will collect some data to target the ads, but says it has no plans to put ads in chats

More: WhatsApp Blog, Meta Newsroom, The Hill, The Verge, 9to5Mac, The Sun, Tech Advisor, TechRadar, MacRumors, Metro.co.uk, Barron's Online, TheCable, TechSpot, Raleigh News & Observer, noyb, TechCrunch, Daily Mail, The Hans India, The South African, Trusted Reviews, Cult of Mac, Mirror, NDTV Profit, Cyber Security News, Digit, BBC, Times of Oman, Ars Technica, Newser, Mumbrella, Tom's Guide, Capital Brief, Marketing Brew, MediaPost, Android Authority, Windows Central, WeRSM, CNBC, MobileSyrup, Marketing Dive, Daring Fireball, Cryptopolitan, The Stack, Lifewire, WABetaInfo, Financial Times, and Business Insider

Bluesky: @fortydeucetwits, @goldstein, @jonwood, @meredithmeredith, @noyb.eu, and @emilprotalinski

Threads: @thatchriscarley and @documentingmeta

X: @supbagholder, @lukolejnik, @luketryl, @signulll, @moreperfectus, @rihardjarc, @sarthakgh, @borrowed_ideas, @mikeisaac, @wabetainfo, @loudmouthjulia, @matthewstoller, and @metanewsroom. LinkedIn: Itxaso Domínguez …

Todd Spangler / Variety:

The Trump Organization teases the $499 “T1 Phone”, a gold phone “designed and built” in the US, and Trump Mobile, an MVNO that uses AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile

More: The Verge, Platformer, 404 Media, Wired, Trump Organization, CNBC, eWeek, Gizmodo, Moneycontrol, CNET, PCMag, Ars Technica, Engadget, TalkAndroid.com, GreenBot, CNET, Know Your Meme, Sandra Rose, Reuters, Business Today, BBC, Techdirt, The Hans India, thesource.com, Business Standard, The Indian Express, Sam Lover, Windows Report, Information Age, Tech Times, Engadget, Lawyers, Guns & Money, The Desk, iDrop News, 9News, New York Times, New York Magazine, Mashable, nextpit, Daring Fireball, The Register, The Guardian, NERDS.xyz, The Verge, Washingtonian, Pocket-lint, Bloomberg, Techstrong IT, Tom's Guide, Rolling Stone, and CNN

Bluesky: @caseynewton, @sethabramson, @drewharwell.com, @juli, @juli, @seanokane, @davidcarroll.org, @josephcox, @the-jaguarr, @karolinschwarz.de, @mickeykuhns, @karlbode.com, @stevekovach, @thedextriarchy, @brendannyhan, @lauren.rotatingsandwiches.com, and @goldengateblond

Mastodon: @dangillmor@mastodon.social and @Techaltar@mas.to

Threads: @cult_papa and @snazzyq

X: @erictrump, @gavinnewsom, @jaredlholt, @luke_metro, @snazzylabs, @trumpmobile, @maxwinebach, @getpeid, @steverattner, @mikeisaac, @davemcclure, @atrupar, @sino_market, and @mattyglesias