Nebula Expands Originals to Include Nebula News Division, ‘The Getaway’ From ‘Jet Lag’ Team and More
Nebula Expands Originals to Include Nebula News Division, ‘The Getaway’ From ‘Jet Lag’ Team and More
Indie streaming service Nebula is breaking into the news business.
I'm a huge fan of Jet Lag, so another show in a similar vein is great to hear about!
TLDR make great news content, so seeing Nebula start up an entire news division with their head at its head is really great. Kinda ironic that Nebula would start a news division so soon after kicking off one of its creators who did explicit news content, though (First Thought). I mean, a lot of their creators touch on news and current affairs, but it was really only TLDR and First Thought that were explicitly news reporting shows. And now it's only TLDR.
Does that mean TLDR is just their news team now?
It's not entirely clear what it means. The TLDR team is the Nebula team, but is this going to be entirely supplemental to their regular TLDR shows? Is it gonna be like a few Nebula-exclusive TLDR episodes? Is it just the same people who will also be working under an additional brand name? No idea.
Who is/was First Thought and why were they removed?
First Thought was the news channel from the guy behind Second Thought, a socialist educational channel. They even had a Nebula Exclusive series that was airing at the time they got kicked out.* They got kicked off in mid-October last year for taking a very strong anti-Israel stance and refusing to "both sides" the issue. I haven't actually tracked down exactly what they said—it's been difficult because discussion of it is being shut down on the Nebula subreddit (since it's run by the company). From memory, I do think what he said was a little over the line—something along the lines of "all Israelis are colonialists" with the implication (but not explicit statement) that they deserve what happens—not the political leaders or the army, but the regular people.
But it's disappointing that he was kicked off over this considering the overall context surrounding the comments, and considering that Nebula is supposed to be a platform where creators can get away from the censorship of YouTube, and where the creators, we are told, own the platform.
* I say kicked out, because that's basically what happened. But officially it was a mutual decision after they asked him to put out a statement distancing himself from his earlier statements, and he refused.