Forward

Exec summary: According to Chartbeat I wrote the single most "engaging" news story of 2018, across the entire web. But I would take it back in a heartbeat if I could. Scroll down for the explanation... Plus some excellent year-end lists and rhymes...

Senate passes criminal justice reform bill

Van Jones and the Koch brothers. Jared Kushner and Kim Kardashian. Fox and the ACLU. An unlikely band of supporters have been working behind the scenes to overhaul outdated criminal justice laws. On Tuesday night, the Senate passed the First Step Act by a vote of 87 to 12. President Trump is expected to sign it this week.

"The effort cements what is so far the biggest bipartisan victory of his presidency and turns the page on decades of policies that critics say were brutal, racist, ineffective and costly," Jeremy Diamond and Alex Rogers wrote in this incredible CNN.com tick-tock about the bill's life and near-death. Check it out!

For more, here are the NYT and WSJ's Wednesday stories about what the bill will do.

Van Jones' reaction to the vote

Jones, a CNN commentator and host, was one of the bill's top champions, working hand in hand with Jared Kushner. Shortly after the vote, he said on Don Lemon's show, "A Christmas miracle just happened tonight." For decades, both political parties have "rushed to build prisons and be tough on crime, and we've been trapped," he said, but "that nightmare began to come to an end tonight."

Key word: Began. "People go, 'Van, it doesn't do this. It doesn't do that.' It's not called the last step. It's called the First Step! We will get to all these other issues," Jones told Lemon...

>> More: WaPo's Wesley Lowery tweeted that these 3 things are all true: "1. Possibly most significant criminal justice reform Congress has enacted in a generation. 2. Bill barely touches most areas of needed reform. 3. Amount of effort this small step took to get a vote on/passed not exactly encouraging for those who believe sweeping reforms needed..."

Winning over the right

Assuming Trump now signs the bill, "Kushner's efforts to court conservative media figures" will be a big reason why, Politico's Eliana Johnson and Burgess Everett wrote last week. Kushner worked the phones with Fox News hosts... showed up in person on Sean Hannity's show... and spoke with execs like Rupert Murdoch.

"Tending to the conservative press has also allowed Kushner to shape the news consumed by the president's political supporters, and to make the case directly to the president — who has publicly embraced the measure — that the bill would not roil his political base," Johnson and Everett wrote.

Fox's parent company took the rare step of publicly endorsing the bill earlier this month. Fox spokeswoman Hope Hicks said the company has no new comment about the Senate vote...

The ad boycott against Tucker Carlson's show is growing

Oliver Darcy emails: Tucker Carlson is facing a growing advertiser backlash over anti-immigration comments he made last week. As of Tuesday evening, more than a dozen companies had abandoned Carlson's program, either suspending or outright pulling their advertising. Those companies are Land Rover, IHOP, Ancestry.com, Just For Men, Minted, Smile Direct, Pacific Life, ScotteVest, Nerd Wallet, TD Ameritrade, Bowflex, CareerBuilder, Zenni and the Chase United MileagePlus Explorer card. A few other companies have publicly said that they'll continue sponsoring his show. Here's my full story...

Fox slams "agenda-driven intimidation efforts"

Darcy continues: Fox News released a pointed statement on Tuesday afternoon that invoked the recent Antifa protest outside Carlson's DC home and said this is another "threat" from the left. "We cannot and will not allow voices like Tucker Carlson to be censored by agenda-driven intimidation efforts from the likes of MoveOn.org, Media Matters and Sleeping Giants," Fox said...

>> Another bullet point from Fox: All of the advertisers that left Carlson's show moved their commercials to other shows on the network, a network spokesperson said. As a result, the Fox spokesperson said no revenue has been lost...

>> Tucker's show had at least 17 advertisers on Tuesday night, but the overall ad load was lower than usual...

Lowry's take

Brian Lowry emails: It's frankly embarrassing that Fox — and specifically whoever drafted its PR response — would refer to Tucker being "censored" by advertisers withdrawing from the program. Censorship has a very specific meaning, one that involves the government or an institution imposing limitations on speech. A company bowing to pressure from interest groups and pulling ads might be a lot of things — including, in the past, a preferred tactic of conservatives who have a beef with primetime series — but censorship isn't one of them. It is, rather, an example of "free-market logic," as WaPo's Erik Wemple put it, which an enterprise with Fox's editorial stance would clearly support in other circumstances. And in practical terms, trashing your own advertisers isn't a great look...

FOR THE RECORD, PART ONE

-- If I ran a print newspaper, I'd put this on Wednesday's front page: "Trump Foundation agrees to dissolve under court supervision..." (CNN)

-- Jeffrey Toobin tweeted: "State of play: @realDonaldTrump is unfit to run a charity in New York State but fit to control nuclear weapons that could destroy the world several times over." (Twitter)

-- Trump is once again claiming that he's the victim of pro-Dem bias at Twitter. Aaron Rupar debunked his "conspiracy theory" here... (Vox)

BREAKING

New NYT story about Facebook and your data

"While it is true that Facebook hasn't sold users' data, for years it has struck deals to share the information with dozens of Silicon Valley companies. These partners were given more intrusive access to user data than Facebook has ever disclosed," the NYT reported Tuesday night in a new investigation by Gabriel J.X. Dance, Michael LaForgia and Nicholas Confessore.

The partners include Microsoft, Amazon and Spotify. They "got far more access than Cambridge Analytica did," and FB "never directly told users that it was sharing this data," according to the NYT's "5 takeaways" recap of its own story. Here's the main one, titled "Facebook Offered Users Privacy Wall, Then Let Tech Giants Around It."

A dichotomy...

CNN Digital SVP S. Mitra Kalita emails: Walt Mossberg announced he is leaving Facebook, and I bet many journalists are considering the same. Then I saw this heartbreaking account of a Massachusetts professor being stopped by police. And therein lie the two narratives of social media in 2018: One is of a platform so porous that users have been manipulated and mind melded, all while Russians meddled in U.S. elections. The other is the agency that Facebook and Twitter represents to Americans dealing with cops, or drinking coffee at a Philadelphia Starbucks, or barbecuing in Oakland, or selling bottled water in San Francisco. At their best, platforms democratize content and force us not to look away. Surely, they could figure out a way not to kill democracy in their business model...

--> Related: NYT's Kevin Roose tweeted on Tuesday, "So many tech executives think the public/media is at the cars-in-1910 stage of social media acceptance ('we want our horses back'), but most people I know are at the cars-in-1955 stage ('yes we know driving can be both useful and dangerous, now please give us seatbelts')"

"Silicon Valley won't save us. We're on our own."

That's the subhed on Kara Swisher's latest column, titled "How You Can Help Fight the Information Wars." She says social networks are exploited so effectively "precisely because they represent our values" -- free speech, privacy and other democratic principles. So "for now, it's not clear what we can do, except take control of our own individual news consumption."

To that last point, I wrote in last night's newsletter about the need for media and tech literacy and wondered aloud about how it can possibly scale to meet the size of the problem? Alan Miller, the head of the News Literacy Project, emailed with an answer: "Our Checkology virtual classroom is now being used by more than 5,000 teachers in every state in the U.S. We've reached more than 117,000 students with the prospect of exponentially expanding that number..."

Moonves: "It's far from over"

One day after CBS said Les Moonves would not receive his $120 million severance, Moonves told Agenda, the FT's corporate governance news service, that "it's far from over."

"In the interview, Mr. Moonves said he hadn't yet decided whether to pursue arbitration," Jim Stewart writes in Wednesday's NYT. "But why wouldn't he? Under his termination agreement, reached when he left the company in September, CBS itself will be picking up the tab." Yes, the company has been paying Moonves's legal fees...

An update on the CBS CEO search...

The WSJ's Joe Flint and Emily Glazer report that former Disney COO Tom Staggs "has emerged as a top candidate" to take over at CBS.

They say the list includes about 10 people. The search firm Korn Ferry is helping the board with the list. Other potential candidates, according to the WSJ, include the company's interim CEO Joe Ianniello (who deserves a lot of credit for steadying the ship), Hasbro CEO/CBS director Brian Goldner, and Starz COO Jeffrey Hirsch. "Former senior Time Warner executives John Martin and Olaf Olafsson are also among those who have had informal contact about the job, people familiar with the matter said. HBO Chief Executive Richard Plepler also was sounded out but indicated he wasn't interested, the people said..."

Politico's record year

This Joe Pompeo piece for VF reveals that Politico "made $113 million globally in 2018, the highest revenue number in its history, and roughly double what the company made five years earlier." Owner Robert Allbritton says the company "will turn a profit of around $2 million this year." The site has been plowing its annual profits back into expansion for years... Pompeo's story has a preview of further expansions...

>> Allbritton's comment about the state of VC-backed digital media: "Look, there are a lot of guys who took money at frothy valuations, and it's really hard to keep those numbers going and to keep them sustained. And there are a lot that are still playing in the consumer-advertising world. I don't know what the future holds for them. I think it's gonna be a tough business. There's this idea that you're either sliding toward a position of having greater market presence, or you're sliding off that curve, and if you're dealing with consumer advertising, you're fighting Facebook, Twitter, Google, now Amazon. Those are really, really big vacuum cleaners that are gonna suck up the vast majority of bucks. And even big media companies—the critical mass of those organizations is gonna be weighed against what Google's got. I don't know how that works long term, which saddens me to a large degree. I think everybody's gonna have to find a different way."

FOR THE RECORD, PART TWO

-- Via CNN PR: "Tonight on 'Cuomo Prime Time,' Chris Cuomo discussed a newly obtained document that shows President Trump signed a letter of intent to move forward with negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Russia, despite his attorney Rudy Giuliani claiming the document was never signed." Just a few days ago, Rudy said "no one signed it..." (CNN)

-- Multiple Fox News stars defended Michael Flynn by asserting that Flynn was entrapped by the FBI. Cue Shep Smith after the sentencing hearing: "You heard the theory floated by the White House and its defenders here and elsewhere. That all blew up today..." (Mediaite)

-- Steve Mnuchin, in an interview with Bloomberg, when asked about Trump's campaign pledge about a middle-class tax cut: "I'm not going to comment on whether it is a real thing or not a real thing..." (Bloomberg)

-- Tweet of the day from the WaPo's Dan Zak: "How long has 2018 felt? Most of us didn't know who Stormy Daniels was before this year (the Wall Street Journal reported the hush money 11 months ago)." (Twitter)

Media companies are in end-of-year mode... Here's a peek...

Steve Burke as Dr. Seuss

NBCU CEO Steve Burke sent out a year-end note to staff inspired by Universal's film "Dr. Seuss' The Grinch." A+ rhymes:

During 2018 our businesses mostly rocked,
But it did not feel at all good when Disney got Fox.
We welcomed Sky – but please let no one reveal
That we won it from picking suitcases on Deal or No Deal.

If you must know – how did our businesses really do?
Then, pay close attention and we will review …

We started the year with the Olympics, and a metric called "TAD."
Either a genius invention, or a sign that we have gone mad!

Hats off to MSNBC on the best primetime 25-54 ratings ever,
The way you slice and dice ratings by daypart is oh so clever!

From TODAY to Nightly, NBC News has talent by the gallon
And in late night, it doesn't get better than SNL, Meyers and Fallon!

It goes on... Read the whole thing here... But let me skip ahead to the news...

Burke hints about an NBC streaming service in 2019

He added this near the end: "And while you all go off to relax, swim or ski … Maybe, just maybe, next year we will announce our plan for OTT!"

Speaking of...

THR's interview with Kevin Mayer

Here's what the chairman of Disney's direct-to-consumer and international divisions told Natalie Jarvey:

-- "We are going to offer really compelling services to consumers. We are going to let them choose what they want to buy and what they don't want to buy. That's starting to have a ripple effect on the industry..."

-- With the Disney+ streaming service: "We have to take our content and make it as exclusive as we can to our service. We have to make the app and the technology pretty seamless.."

-- "An international rollout of Hulu would be something that we'd be very interested in, and we're talking to Hulu about that now..."

-- On Vice: They have "great creative instincts, a good business model. I think they are going to do great..."

FOR THE RECORD, PART THREE

-- Alexios Mantzarlis has Poynter's annual list of the year's best/worst/funniest media corrections... (Poynter)

-- Longform is out with its picks "for the top ten articles of 2018..." (Longform)

NYT published 50,000,000+ words this year

That stat, and many more, can be found in this "year in numbers" feature on NYTimes.com. The Times published stories in 11 languages... counted subscribers "in 200+ countries and territories..." and received 34 Twitter mentions "from one loyal White House reader..."

The most "engaging" story of 2018...

Every year Chartbeat revisits the stories across all of its client websites, from the BBC to the NYT, CNN to ESPN, and ranks them by "total engaged time for the year." Out of "over 60 million pieces of content published in 2018," the company says the year's top story was my obituary for Anthony Bourdain.

This isn't exactly bittersweet -- it's more bitter than sweet. It's a strange feeling, knowing the most-read thing I've written in my life was also heartbreaking for readers. The story broke the news about the death of a colleague... A man who was beloved around the world.

Of course, many of the biggest stories each year are tragic. The day Bourdain died was one of the worst days at CNN, yet there was also a feeling of pride -- that we paid tribute to him despite the shock and pain. Jeff Zucker woke me up around 5 that morning and told me to come into work. We had about two hours to prepare the web story and the TV coverage. We knew we had to wait until Bourdain's family was notified. But we also knew that we should break the news ourselves. Throughout the day, a team of CNN journalists updated the story with remembrances and reflections. I went with this as the lead at the end of the day: "In death, as in life, Anthony Bourdain brought us closer together."

>> On Tuesday, Poynter's Rick Edmonds wrote about the obit and the other stories that topped Chartbeat this year... Here's his look back...

No. 2 on Chartbeat's list is...

"The op-ed in The New York Times by Anonymous, a high-ranking administration official on the 'resistance' to President Trump's excesses."

Penny Marshall, 1943-2018

Chloe Melas writes: "Penny Marshall's legacy will live on forever in Hollywood. Tributes from her celebrity friends began pouring in on social media after the news of her death on Tuesday. Marshall, who rose to fame on TV's 'Laverne & Shirley,' went on to direct films like 'Big' and 'A League of Their Own.'" Rosie O'Donnell said she was "simply heartbroken." Ron Howard said "I was lucky to have known & worked with her." Read on...

Lisa interviews Steve Carell

Happy birthday to Lisa Respers France!

The other day she sat down with Steve Carell and director Robert Zemeckis and talked about their remarkable new film "Welcome to Marwen." The feature came out on Tuesday... Read it here...

Mary Poppins "Returns" on Wednesday

Brian Lowry emails: When "Mary Poppins Returns" opens in theaters on Wednesday, it will revive a beloved character who has basically been left dormant on screen for 54 years. In today's environment, where studios have placed much of their emphasis on exploiting existing intellectual property, that's the kind of hiatus that's unlikely to happen again, even if that means braving the thickets of nostalgia.

Here's Lowry's full column...

Let's get these movies made!

I missed this on Monday: This year's "annual rundown of unproduced screenplays," The Black List, is out.

Per Deadline's Anthony D'Alessandro: "Topping this year's list is a Social Network-like story, Elissa Karasik's Frat Boy Genius, which follows a disgruntled employee of Snapchat who tells the story about the rise of her former Stanford classmate, 'preeminent douchebag and current boss' Evan Spiegel. Also of note on this year's list is Cody Brotter's Drudge, a screenplay about reporter Matt Drudge as he broke the Monica Lewinsky scandal, nearly taking down a presidency, all from a desktop computer in his one-bedroom apartment in Hollywood." I'd like to watch both of those films right now...

That's a wrap. Thanks for reading. Send me your feedback via email anytime! Back tomorrow...