Morning Update: Vice nightly news on HBO; NBC ‘broadcast TV is thriving’; Microsoft keeps dossiers on journalists
Ad Week: Vice Is Launching a Nightly Newscast on HBO to Coincide With the First Presidential Debate
Vice’s first daily newscast, called Vice News Tonight, will debut Sept. 26 on HBO. The half-hour broadcast is “for viewers who have grown increasingly skeptical of daily broadcast news,” the media company said this morning.
“The nightly news hasn’t changed its format in 60 years, whereas the way most viewers—particularly younger viewers—consume information has changed dramatically,” said Josh Tyrangiel, who joined Vice in October 2015 to head up the effort.
Ad Week: NBC Says Broadcast TV Is Thriving, Even as It Works on a Streaming Strategy
NBC execs say their momentum proves that broadcast networks are still thriving. But that isn’t stopping them from putting together an enhanced streaming offering to attract non-linear audiences.
“Broadcast network television, at least at NBC, is still a powerful way to bring a mass audience together,” NBC Entertainment chairman Robert Greenblatt said at the Television Critics Association’s summer press tour in L.A. “NBC has defied a lot of the doom-and-gloom, downward trends we’ve been hearing about network television.”
Gizmodo: Microsoft Keeps Dossiers on Journalists and Sent Us One By Accident
Email can be a slippery beast, and one thread of messages Gizmodo recently received—seemingly by mistake—has given us a window into how Microsoft prepares its employees for the apparently terrifying prospect of talking to the press.
The emails, which were sent to Gizmodo Tuesday afternoon, appear to show several high-level Microsoft executives discussing how they plan to roll out a new Skype bot announcement today—and more specifically, how they intend to incorporate a reporter into these plans.
Digiday: Newsletter editors are the new important person in newsrooms
Publishers are rediscovering that email newsletters are a reliable way to reach readers — and serve a critically important direct connection to audiences that serves as a counterweight to the mercurial algorithms of Facebook. The popularity of email digests is giving rise to a new specialty at publishers: the newsletter editor.
The title and its role varies somewhat by publisher. Quartz has a small “push team” that oversees its main Daily Brief newsletter and a few others. Organizing the newsletters in this way recognizes they’re a skill set unto themselves, said Zach Seward, Quartz’s vp of product and executive editor. The Daily Brief now has more than 200,000 subscribers and a unique open rate of 40 percent, he said.
Newsweek: Instagram’s next chapter is part of a Snapchat story
With the launch of Instagram Stories on Tuesday, Instagram created a new section exclusively for the private sharing of temporary, full-screen photo messages, an odd choice for a service known for encouraging the pursuit of the public, personal, permanent #brand. Instagram is not Snapchat, and as rude as it might be for me to suggest so, it’s a smart move to copy Snapchat, anyway. 
CNN President Jeff Zucker is not impressed with some of the biggest names in digital media. In a profile Variety published on Zucker Tuesday, the CNN chief said that competitors like Vice and BuzzFeed were not even worthy of being called journalistic outlets.
