Jeff Roe

Who pays for posts? A new post on X from “Billboard Chris” provides some insight into how the online influencer racket actually works. Earlier this week, pro-Trump poster Ryan Fournier shared a suspect report that claimed former president Donald Trump was considering picking North Dakota governor Doug Burgum to be his VP — and then listed all of the reasons why that would be a bad idea. The problem? Billboard Chris points out that an “influencer marketing firm” tried to pay him to post the exact same thing.  “I’ve been told there’s a story dropping today that I think would fit well in your feed re a GOP gov who vetoed a bill that would’ve banned biological males playing in female sports. Wanted to see what your rate was to share/write a post?

Journalists are OUT, influencers are IN. That’s the chief finding from a new report by the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford, which discovered that 55 percent of TikTok and Snapchat users, and 52 percent of Instagram users, get their news from “personalities,” compared to 33-42 percent who get it from mainstream media outlets or journalists on the same platforms. “This Reuters study once again validates what I have been saying for over a decade,” Taylor Lorenz told Cockburn, “content creators are the new media and it’s been that way for a while.” The Washington Post columnist has long banged the drum about the importance of emerging social media platforms and the importance of members of the media cultivating brands on them.

Mad Joe Manchin yells at journos Senator Joe Manchin is furious — and he’s letting reporters know. Sources close to the West Virginia senator tell Cockburn that Manchin is fuming over a recent article in Fox News giving credit to House Republicans, and not Manchin, for the approval of the Mountain Valley Pipeline. The new major pipeline could help Manchin politically as he faces a perilous path to reelection next year. “Manchin is furiously calling reporters himself to push back on it,” according to a West Virginia source, despite that “the truth is that he played a relatively minor role in finally getting MVP done.