Weekly Digest: TV Rain’s Relaunch, Facebook Deprioritising News

TV Rain (Dozhd TV), the largest Russian independent TV channel, is relaunching from abroad.

Founded in 2010, the channel gained renown during the 2011-2012 democratic protests in Russia. It was forced to suspend operations in 2022 in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent media crackdown by the Russian government, soon after Russian authorities blocked the channel. The team had left Russia at the time.

Now, the channel is renewing work from Europe. TV Rain received a European Union broadcasting licence and will be operating from Georgia, Latvia, France, and the Netherlands. The main studio is based in Riga, Latvia. 

TV Rain also streams on YouTube, the only major way to reach the audience inside Russia. The channel has launched a fundraising appeal targeted at people both inside and outside Russia.

---

Swedish podcast company Acast announced the purchase of Podchaser, an American platform that serves as a podcast database tracking over 4.5 million podcasts.

The deal’s value is $34 million. “Together, Acast and Podchaser will deliver the industry’s richest metadata set for podcasters and advertisers,” the company’s statement promises.

“As the podcast landscape matures, more startups across the industry are being consolidated by bigger players,” Axios reminds. Over the past several years, Acast purchased two other podcast companies, and other podcasting players like Spotify and Amazon have been making big acquisitions as well.

---

Facebook is shifting resources from news, deprioritising the News tab and the Bulletin newsletter platform, so the company can concentrate on the creator economy, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Three years ago, the company struck deals with publishers to pay for their content used for a dedicated news section. In 2021, Facebook launched its own newsletter platform to profit from the newsletter boom.

Recently, however, Meta’s leadership grew less interested in growing news as part of Facebook’s roster of products. As The Wall Street Journal notes, “reallocating resources from News and Bulletin is part of a broader shift within the company toward the metaverse and short-form video content creators that can compete with… TikTok”.

Bonus — Seven more stories you might want to check out:

• The Guardian: English courts get new powers to dismiss Slapp cases against reporters  
• The Guardian: Council tax levy could replace TV licence fee in future funding model 
• The New York Times: Eugenio Scalfari, Leading Italian Journalist, Dies at 98
• Axios: Bloomberg Media plots global expansion 
• PressGazette: Guardian Media Group reports cash surplus for first time in a generation 
• Institute of Mass Information: [Ukraine’s] Ministry of Digital Transformation announces the creation of an English-language media about Ukraine
• The Guardian: XR protesters smash windows of News UK over coverage of Britain’s heatwave

---