Why did Linda Yaccarino step down as CEO of X?

At 1:51 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday, X owner Elon Musk tweeted, “Never a dull moment on this platform.”

You can say that again.

Musk tweeted that hours before his hand-picked CEO for X, Linda Yaccarino, announced she was leaving the company after two years, capping off yet another topsy-turvy 24 hours for the controversial social media platform.

Yaccarino made her announcement in a post on X, writing in part, “When @elonmusk and I first spoke of his vision for X, I knew it would be the opportunity of a lifetime to carry out the extraordinary mission of this company. I’m immensely grateful to him for entrusting me with the responsibility of protecting free speech, turning the company around, and transforming X into the Everything App.”

But she never gave an actual reason why she is stepping away.

Some speculated that it was partly due to some of the wild things that happened less than 24 hours earlier when Grok, X’s artificial intelligence chatbot built by Musk’s xAI, was responsible for highly inappropriate comments.

As the Indianapolis Star’s John Tufts, Jessica Guynn and C. A. Bridges explained, “Grok let loose a barrage of antisemitic phrases, attacked users with traditionally Jewish surnames, and began referring to itself as ‘MechaHitler.’ At one point, Grok praised the former Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in a post concerning the recent Texas floods that have killed more than 100 people.”

Many of the posts have since been deleted.

But podcaster and journalist Kara Swisher, who is plugged into the tech industry, didn’t believe Yaccarino's leaving had anything to do with Tuesday’s controversial posts. Swisher wrote on Bluesky, “The MechaHitler controversy was not it btw — I’d guess she sided with Trump over Musk. Also without the Trump card, it was likely going to be hard to shake down advertisers with the threat of lawsuits. And finally, Threads is close to being as big as X, along with competitors like Bluesky.”

The New York Times’ Mike Isaac and Kate Conger reported, “Ms. Yaccarino had discussed her plans to leave with X employees earlier this week, before the incident with Grok, two people familiar with the matter said.”

So, it’s unclear as to why she is leaving. It should be noted that Musk responded to Yaccarino’s resignation post with a succinct (you might even say terse) response: “Thank you for your contributions.”

The Times pointed out that “In March, Mr. Musk said he had sold X, which is a privately held company, to xAI, his artificial intelligence start-up, in an unusual arrangement that showed the financial maneuvering inside his business empire. The all-stock deal valued xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion, Mr. Musk said. Since then, xAI has been in talks to raise new financing that could value it at as much as $120 billion.”

Lou Paskalis, the chief executive of AJL Advisory, an advertising consultancy, and friend of Yaccarino, told the Times, “I think this was an inevitability when X got layered under xAI. While she got a lot of advertisers back on the platform through her tenacity, they did not return to their previous levels of spending, and that was very unlikely with Elon behaving the way he did.”

Paskalis told NPR, “She thought she could shape Elon. But ultimately, the man's gonna do what the man's gonna do regardless of good advice, and so, she probably wasn't as successful as she had hoped she would be.”

As CNBC’s Ashley Capoot wrote, “Yaccarino previously worked at NBCUniversal and rose to the top of the company’s global advertising business. She was primarily tasked with overseeing ‘business operations’ at X, which included trying to placate advertisers as the social platform underwent substantial changes to its safety and content moderation policies.”

Throughout her tenure, Yaccarino was a staunch supporter of Musk, at least publicly. According to web traffic data from Similarweb, traffic is down on X — from 915.9 million combined active app users and unique website visitors when she took over in June 2023 to 684.2 million last month. But that’s likely more of a reflection on Musk than Yaccarino.

The Times wrote, “Upon joining X, Ms. Yaccarino had her work cut out for her. Mr. Musk quickly made changes that tore up much of the good will Twitter had with users, employees and advertisers, including changing speech policies that allowed noxious content to circulate on the platform. Many advertisers left. Part of Ms. Yaccarino’s mandate, aside from running day-to-day operations at the company, was to repair those broken relationships. The other part of her job has been to manage Mr. Musk. Famously impulsive, the billionaire has frequently made her job more difficult, including using expletives to tell advertisers that he would not change his ways. He has clashed with foreign governments who have requested takedowns of certain social media accounts. Mr. Musk also erased Twitter’s iconic internet brand by renaming the company X.”

Yaccarino did her best to placate advertisers, while also trumpeting what she called the free speech aspects of X — something she touted again in her resignation post.

But Nora Benavidez — senior counsel and director of digital justice and civil rights for Free Press — said in a statement, “It’s as ludicrous as it is offensive for Yaccarino to frame her time at X as a win for free speech. Musk hired her to lure back advertisers fleeing the platform after he turned it into a cesspool of hate and disinformation. Yaccarino’s legacy is her failure to manipulate companies to advertise at previous levels, and now she’s trying to mask that failure in First Amendment rhetoric. No one is buying that X is a free-speech platform — it’s a megaphone for bigotry, conspiracy theories and bullying people into silence. Musk has no interest in upholding free expression or protecting platform users. It’s essential to name the harm clearly and reclaim free speech as a force for truth and democracy — not a shield for those who profit from undermining it.”

Musk has not named a new CEO, nor commented beyond thanking Yaccarino for her contributions.

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More on Grok

Just to follow up on the controversy of Grok and the inappropriate posts from Tuesday. The official account for Grok on Wednesday said, “We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts. Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X. xAI is training only truth-seeking and thanks to the millions of users on X, we are able to quickly identify and update the model where training could be improved.”

The Anti-Defamation League said in a statement, “What we are seeing from Grok LLM right now is irresponsible, dangerous and antisemitic, plain and simple. This supercharging of extremist rhetoric will only amplify and encourage the antisemitism that is already surging on X and many other platforms.”

It was only last Friday that Musk said Grok has been improved, adding users “should notice a difference.”

Oh, users noticed a difference, all right. But I’m guessing that’s not what Musk had in mind.

If you don’t like it …

Looks like more drama at The Washington Post. Publisher Will Lewis sent a memo to staff Wednesday saying those who “do not feel aligned” with the company’s future plans should consider taking the voluntary buyout that was recently offered. New York Times’ media reporter Ben Mullin had the scoop and posted Lewis’ memo on X.

Lewis said in his memo, “We are reimagining our Opinion offering to champion timeless American values; tackling subscription fatigue head-on through flexible access; launching new, engaging product improvements such as From the Source; and embracing AI rapidly across all our workflows.”

“But,” Lewis continued, “we are far from done. The moment demands we continue to rethink all aspects of our organization and business to maximize our impact. If we want to reconnect with our audience and continue to defend democracy, more changes at The Post will be necessary. And to succeed, we need to be united as a team with a strong belief and passion in where we are heading.”

Lewis then wrote, “I understand and respect, however, that chosen path is not for everyone. That’s why we introduced the voluntary separation program. As we continue in this new direction, I want to ask those who do not feel aligned with the company’s plan to reflect on that.”

You might recall that back in February, Post owner Jeff Bezos announced plans for a “significant shift” to the Opinion page. Bezos said the Post would focus on two “pillars”: personal liberties and free markets. Bezos added that “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”

That led to the paper’s editorial page editor David Shipley, among others, to leave the paper. Last month, the Post hired The Economist’s Adam O’Neal as the new Opinion editor. In his introductory video, O’Neal said, “We’re also going to be stalwart advocates of free markets and personal liberties. We’ll be unapologetically patriotic, too. Our philosophy will be rooted in fundamental optimism about the future of this country.”

Meanwhile, Post columnist Joe Davidson, who was a Federal Diary/Federal Insider columnist, recently wrote his final column on June 27. He wrote, “I’m leaving because of a policy restricting the level of opinion and commentary in news section articles. While the policy can be justified journalistically, its rigorous enforcement represents a significant reduction in the latitude I’ve enjoyed since I began writing the Federal Diary, now the Federal Insider, in 2008, three years after I joined The Post.”

In a lengthy Facebook post on Wednesday, Davidson wrote, “Quitting The Washington Post -- or did it quit me?”

He added, “For me, the cost became too great when a Federal Insider column I wrote was killed because it was deemed too opinionated under an unwritten and inconsistently enforced policy, which I had not heard of previously.”

He would go on to write, “Some readers who commented on my final column skewered Post owner Jeff Bezos. I have no reason to believe he was directly involved in my situation, but it would be naïve to ignore the context. Starting before the November presidential election, Bezos’s policies and activities have projected the image of a Donald Trump supplicant. The result – fleeing journalists, plummeting morale and disappearing subscriptions. Since October, when Bezos blocked publication of a planned Post endorsement of Kamala Harris for president, the departure of Post talent has been shocking and included five former editors directly above me in the newsroom’s hierarchy. Nonetheless, Post coverage of Trump remains strong. Yet the policy against opinion in News section columns means less critical scrutiny of Trump -- a result coinciding with Bezos’s unseemly and well-documented coziness with the president.”

Overreaction to Rubio AI voice clone

For this item, I turn it over to my colleague Alex Mahadevan, director of MediaWise and Poynter faculty member who teaches and studies AI.

On Tuesday, headlines in The Washington Post, the Associated Press, Reuters, NBC, CBS, The Guardian and many others highlighted the use of generative artificial intelligence in an attempted security breach at the U.S. State Department.

Someone used a deepfake of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s voice to leave messages for government officials and send texts with a bogus Signal account. The story is unsettling, but not for the reasons most headlines suggest.

Yes, generative AI played a role — and it’s disturbing that you can create a voice clone with a few seconds of someone talking. But, the personalization and scale — like being able to generate thousands of individualized voice memos —  that make AI so dangerous were not a factor here. It was five voice mails that anyone with a good Rubio impression could have left.

And news organizations sounding the alarm about AI and deepfakes are contributing to an overblown panic about a technology that is embedded deeper into our lives every day.

“Impersonation attempts themselves are not new, and their success does not rest just on technological wizardry, but on things like the plausibility of the message, the status of the sender and the channel used,” said Felix M. Simon, Research Fellow in AI and News at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, who just co-authored a comprehensive report on AI and elections. “What this episode demonstrates is less the risk of sophisticated AI to fake appearances but the risks of key government actors using private messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Signal instead of dedicated and government-approved systems to conduct state matters,” Simon told me via email.

That’s the part of the story that deserves more scrutiny. Instead, the coverage mostly zeroed in on the AI angle. In more than a dozen stories I reviewed, the technology got top billing even though the attack wasn’t scalable, wasn’t especially persuasive and didn’t appear to succeed.

“Newer generative AI systems can certainly enable such malicious uses and instances such as the Rubio case raise questions, for example about the security of a number of verification systems that we have come to rely on, e.g. in personal banking, that use things like voice recognition,” Simon said. And I’m certainly not downplaying the plethora of celebrity deepfake scams we see on social media every day.

But, I’d encourage more focus on the AI problems that are more urgent: Like the fact that thousands of people an hour are asking Grok to fact-check posts X.

Loss of local journalists may be even worse than you think

For this item, I turn it over to Rick Edmonds, Poynter’s media business analyst.

A new report drawing on a fresh database, released this morning, estimates there has been a 75% decline in the number of local journalists per 100,000 of population in the U.S. since 2002.

The study is the work of Muck Rack, a data firm and software company for public relations professionals whose products include a directory of local journalists, and Rebuild Local News, an advocacy group for government help to the sector.

It’s not billed as such, but the report supplements the The State of Local News annual report of the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University’s Medill journalism school, which has been the oft-cited standard source for a count of newspapers that have closed (3,200 since 2005).

Muck Rack’s study, instead of estimating numbers of newspaper organizations, focuses on counting full and part time journalists. And with some geographic exactness, it pinpoints which counties stack up better or worse in the number of journalists compared to population.

Some of the findings:

• In 2002, the U.S. had about 40 journalists per 100,000 residents. Today, the national average is below nine.
• More than a third of U.S. counties have fewer than the equivalent of one full time journalist. However, those counties account for only about a sixth of the population. The clear implication is that most are lightly populated.
• However, huge metro areas, typically home to a rich array of old and new publications, do not fare especially well on the measure of journalists compared to population. For instance, the home counties of Los Angeles, Houston, Phoenix and Dallas only had about half the norm for the nation.
• Some localities not necessarily known widely for their journalism were at the top by this measure. Vermont was the best among the states; top counties included Lee (home to Tupelo) in Mississippi and Jerauld in South Dakota.

The study is one more chunk of evidence in shortfalls of the benefits of good journalism. What to do about it is less obvious.

Steve Waldman, president of Rebuild Local News, said in a press release, 

“This new data confirms that the local journalist shortage is more severe and far-reaching than we feared. Thousands of rural, urban and suburban communities are being left without the basic reporting they need to stay informed, connected and civically engaged. We hope this report will help philanthropists target their funding; entrepreneurs spot opportunities; and local stakeholders better argue for public policy changes to help sustain local news.”

Legislation to subsidize local outlets has advanced in some states – notably New Jersey and California – but has yet to gain traction in Congress.

Political summit from The Hill and NewsNation 

The digital political news site The Hill and cable news network NewsNation, will host a daylong bipartisan event featuring House Speaker Mike Johnson and others for one-on-one interviews and panel discussions examining President Donald Trump’s second term in office. The inaugural “Hill Nation Summit” will take place next Wednesday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern Washington, D.C.

In addition to Johnson (R-LA), other guests scheduled include White House Senior Counselor Peter Navarro; Senator Mark Warner (D-VA); former Vice-Co-Chair of the Democratic National Committee David Hogg; Small Business Administrator Kelly Loeffler; former Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy; Executive Director of White House Council on Digital Assets Bo Hines; Rep. Lisa McLain (R-MI); Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL); Rep. Ro Khana (D-CA); Rep. Kevin Hern (R-OK); Rep. John James (R-MI); Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH); Rep. Ted Lieu (D-CA); and more.

The forum will also have news anchors and correspondents from both The Hill and NewsNation. The entire summit will be livestreamed on TheHill.com and NewsNation will offer special coverage throughout their programming day.

Media tidbits

• Mediaite’s Sarah Rumpf with “Move Over, Epstein Files – Here’s the Next Thing That Will Spark MAGA Rage.”
• Longtime Poynter faculty member Al Tompkins with “Wishing for a world where corporate motives didn’t clash with the sacred trust of journalism.”
• In a column for The Guardian, Margaret Sullivan with “Is the New York Times trying to wreck Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral bid?”
• Nieman Lab’s Sarah Scire with “Bluesky chooses sports news to launch push notifications.”
• For the Columbia Journalism Review, Wendell Jamieson with “Thirty Years After New York Newsday, There’s Never Been Another Paper Like It.”
• Front Office Sports’ Michael McCarthy and Ryan Glasspiegel with “Fox Extends Erin Andrews, Charissa Thompson Contracts Ahead of NFL Season.”
• In other sports media news, ESPN has re-signed NFL analyst Dan Orlovsky to a multi-year extension. He will continue to be featured on shows such as “NFL Live” and “Get Up,” “First Take,” “The Pat McAfee Show” and “SportsCenter.” He also will continue his role as game analyst on the occasion “Monday Night Football” during the five weeks ESPN has a second “MNF” game. This is a smart move by ESPN. Orlovsky is solid.
• This is both hilarious and a little pathetic. Mediaite’s Ahmad Austin Jr. writes about the former NFL sideline reporter who is now trying to make it as a conservative commentator: “Michele Tafoya Shows Off a Note of Praise She Claims She Got from a Flight Attendant — Only She Posted the Exact Same Note Two Years Ago.”

Hot type

• For Los Angeles Times’ subscribers, Harriet Ryan with “A new Scott Peterson mystery: Why is the Innocence Project trying to set him free?”
• Finally today, another powerful piece about the Texas floods from The New York Times. It’s Meredith Honig and John Branch with “Mayhem at the River Inn Crossing: A Dark-of-Night Flood Escape.” The Times notes that Honig, a video journalist, was staying in her family’s house on Marymeade Drive, next to the River Inn Resort, on July 4 and witnessed the frantic evacuations.

More resources for journalists

• Journalism leaders of color: Poynter’s prestigious Diversity Leadership Academy has helped over 200 journalists of color advance their careers. Apply today.
• Learn how to uncover public records and hard-to-find facts in The 5 Ws of Research, an on-demand course taught by veteran journalist Caryn Baird — free for a limited time.
• New TV producers: Apply by July 18 to get the tools to create standout content, handle journalism's challenges, and lead your newsroom effectively. Apply today.
• Join a five-day, in-person workshop that gives new managers the skills they need to help forge successful paths to leadership in journalism, media and technology. Apply today.