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Rethinking Tim Cook

Big in the Bay: Ten days after Apple's big services rollout, Tim Cook's leadership is coming under scrutiny by reporters and industry analysts who fear that the company is losing its ability to innovate.

• The Big Picture: The mixed reviews of last week's rollout are starting to give way to larger questions about the company itself.

In the last 24 hours:

• NYT's Farhad Manjoo: Apple's new services "are all so trifling and derivative. ... Apple is turning into something like a digital athleisure brand ... a company that has lost sight of [putting a ding in] the universe and is content merely to put a ding in your pocketbook."

• Harvard's Youngme Moon: "I don't see the creative ingenuity that used to reside in that entire senior leadership team. ... [The event] was the first time I thought, 'Wow, is it blasphemous to wonder if it's time to start transitioning to a new CEO?'"

Any optimistic counter-argument (including mine the day after the event) has to concede that the rollout felt half-baked. Still, one could argue that Cook was simply laying the groundwork for something revolutionary, eventually. Harvard's Mihir Desai believes Apple's services offer "hasn't been fully imagined... but it will happen and it will come, and it will be profound."

• There's a strong case to be made that Apple's market penetration and its ability to compete across services (news, music, television, etc.) makes it unstoppable, whether it's innovating or simply matching its competitors.

• What's troublesome is that Apple doesn't usually go public with ideas that haven't been fully imagined, which is why the services rollout felt so weird and why people are asking questions.

What's Next: Maybe Apple needs to buy something? Bloomberg's Mark Gurman notes that the company has added M&A chief Adrian Perica to its executive leadership team, "a promotion that suggests the technology giant is more focused on deals."

Snap Programming Alert...

Evan Spiegel will lay out the case for Snapchat as the preeminent mobile storytelling platform during the company's Partner Summit this morning in Santa Monica. Watch for new content announcements and new stats on growth.

• Spiegel starts at 10:30 a.m. PT. Livestream here.

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Mark Zuckerberg's cloud case

Talk of the Valley: "More than 540 million Facebook records — including users’ comments, likes, account names and more — were left exposed by a third-party company on an Amazon cloud-computing server," WaPo's Tony Romm and Elizabeth Dwoskin report.

• Facebook says it prohibits "storing Facebook information in a public database" and worked with Amazon to take down the databases immediately once it was alerted to the issue.

The Big Picture: Earlier this week, Zuckerberg called for new tech regulations and specifically for "clear rules about who’s responsible for protecting information when it moves between services." This incident would seem to suggest that those regulations are needed.

• What's Next: In a new interview this morning, Zuckerberg tells ABC's George Stephanopoulos that he's proud of Facebook's progress in combating misinformation and major privacy breaches.

📰 Rally the Market 📰

Free Speech Dept: The Washington Post's editorial board has come out against Zuckerberg's call for new rules that would give government the authority to regulate speech. "Any international rules would be formed in part by repressive regimes," they write, "putting the Internet’s future in the hands of autocrats."

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Lachlan Murdoch's Fox

Moving the Market: In the inaugural edition of this newsletter, I wrote that the U.S. was beset by a politics of division, outrage and misinformation fueled not by Russian operatives or fringe political groups but by some of the most influential members of the U.S. political media establishment — including Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch.

• The next day, I wrote that Lachlan, then the newly named chief executive of "New Fox," was about to become the public face of one of the most divisive and controversial brands in American news media.

The New York Times Magazine investigation into the Murdoch media empire, which I wrote about at length yesterday, sheds new light on Lachlan's politics and suggests that Fox News will only become more committed to the populist right-wing agenda it has embraced in recent years.

From the Times' investigation:

• "Lachlan doesn’t speak publicly about his politics, but his employees in Australia found that he took a hard line on many issues. ... and that his views were usually to the right of his father’s."

• "Lachlan questions what he sees as the exorbitant cost of addressing climate change and believes that the debate over global warming is getting too much attention."

• "When Tucker Carlson came under fire for his increasingly pointed attacks on immigration .... he received personal text messages of support from Lachlan, according to two people familiar with the texts."

• "Lachlan’s first initiative [as CEO] was Fox Nation, a subscription-only, on-demand streaming service ... One of its most prominent personalities was Tomi Lahren ... who ... referred to Black Lives Matter as 'the new KKK' and to refugees as 'rape-ugees.'"

What's Next: The real question lingering over Fox News' future has to do with Lachlan's long-term commitment to "New Fox." The Times reveals that he shot down a plan to buy out his siblings' shares, which "raised questions about his commitment to the company."

• "People close to James said they believed Lachlan was not sure he wanted to stay at the company after the Disney deal was complete," the Times reports. "They said he might even want to go back to Australia."

Larry Busacca/Getty

The Suzanne Scott narrative

Big in Midtown: Fox News chief Suzanne Scott, already dubbed "the most powerful female executive in TV news" by Variety, is now the subject of a Los Angeles Times profile that similarly portrays her as a business-oriented leader who eschews the political activism of Roger Ailes:

• "In contrast, the even-keeled Scott, 53, is not driven by ideology. Her voter registration... is not affiliated with a political party. Many colleagues are unaware of her political leanings."

• "'Suzanne runs Fox News as more of a business than as a political machine,' said Washington attorney Robert Barnett. ... 'Roger ran it in a completely different way.'"

Real Talk: The portrayal of Scott as an apolitical business leader is beside the point if the network she runs is becoming more political — to the point of having unprecedented influence over the president of the United States, and vice versa.

• Scott may be "all business," but her business is advancing an aggressively partisan agenda.

Market Links

• Sundar Pichai's AI ethics board is falling apart (Vox)

• Jeff Bezos pitches advertisers on Fire TV (Cheddar)

• Marc Benioff launches a 'Time 100' event (PRNewswire)

• Bianna Golodryga parts ways with CBS News (Variety)

• Ben Smith talks about the launch of "The City" (CNN)

Shani Hilton

Shani Hilton to L.A. Times

Moving West: "Shani Hilton, who has worked hand-in-hand with editor-in-chief Ben Smith in running BuzzFeed News for the last few years in New York, is leaving to work for the newly restocked Los Angeles Times ... as deputy managing editor for news," THR's Jeremy Barr reports.

• Takeaway #1: It's a huge loss for Ben Smith and raises questions about who can fill the gap at BuzzFeed.

• Takeaway #2: Sources close to Hilton and the Times tell me she could eventually be in the running to replace the 76-year-old Norm Pearlstine as executive editor.

The Big Picture: Earlier this year, The New Yorker's Jill Lepore observed that BuzzFeed News has become "more like the Times," and the Times has become "more like BuzzFeed." The fact that Hilton is even in the discussion to take over one of the nation's biggest newspapers is a further sign of that trend.

Sign of the Times...

The End of the CDO: PricewaterhouseCoopers' strategy group has found that "the rate at which companies have been creating positions for a chief digital officer, or CDO, has slowed to a trickle."

• The Big Picture, via Quartz's Marc Bain: "The reason is not ... because companies overestimated the value of becoming digitally fluent. It’s because, these days, that job is the responsibility of the entire organization."

Drew Angerer/Getty

John Skipper talks sports

Coin of the Realm: John Skipper, DAZN executive chairman and former ESPN president, sat down with his former colleague Bill Simmons this week and, among other things, acknowledged that he was a "coward" during Simmons' suspension at ESPN.

But the best part of the pod comes late in the interview when Skipper weighs in on the importance of live sports rights:

• "It's like playing 'Risk.' He who has the armies wins. If you get to roll three dice and everybody else is rolling two dice, you will win."

• "The live rights are still more valuable than any other content ... the only thing that matters is 'live [sports]' and 'news.' But sports is scheduled and news is not."

• "Live sports is still the most valuable content on the planet. It's the only place you can aggregate a simultaneous concurrent audience that's valuable to marketers."

The Big Picture: "You don't need to watch anything else in a linear manner."

• Except, of course, "Game of Thrones." But as Simmons notes, "'Game of Thrones' is probably the last TV show that's going to have everybody watching it when it's actually on."

What's Next: The final season of Thrones starts in 10 days. Here are photos from last night's premiere in New York.

See you tomorrow.