BuzzFeed is going public today in a major test for the digital media industry as well as the SPAC market. Both have seen better days.

The backstory: Instead of pursuing a traditional IPO, BuzzFeed merged with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), an increasingly popular way for companies to list on stock exchanges and avoid all the pomp and circumstance that the classic IPO route demands.

• SPACs are shell companies that raise money by going public, then acquire other companies and take them public in the process.

Investors in the SPAC acquiring BuzzFeed, 890 Fifth Avenue Partners, were the opposite of pumped to find out it chose BuzzFeed. A whopping 94% of the $287.5 million raised by the SPAC has been withdrawn, leaving only $16 million for BuzzFeed (the company raised another $150 million in convertible debt).

Investors pulling their $$$ from SPACs is not unique to the BuzzFeed situation, but 94% is an unusually high number: The average SPAC redemption rate in Q3 was 52%. And that's up from a 10% redemption rate in Q1, showing that investors are cooling on what had been a white-hot SPAC market.

As for BuzzFeed?

The company’s come a long way from its Disney princess listicle origins, expanding into areas like physical products and original journalism—for which it’s won a Pulitzer Prize.

But with tech giants like Alphabet and Meta dominating the online ad market, digital media is still a tough business, and BuzzFeed barely eked out a profit last year. Plus, management is on bad terms with many employees—members of the BuzzFeed News Union staged a walkout on Thursday over contract negotiations.

Zoom out: Not all digital media shops are finding it hard to raise capital. Former President Trump’s new social media venture said it raised $1 billion, though it won’t reveal the identity of the investors.

Unlike the Detroit Lions, Cathie Wood is still looking for her first win of the year.

After another bruising week for tech shares, all but two of the star fund manager’s stocks have entered a bear market, meaning they’re at least 20% off a recent high.

• Robinhood is down 74% from its 52-week peak
• DraftKings -62%
• Zoom -60%
• Roku -58%
• Twitter -48%

In all, Wood’s flagship Ark Innovation ETF has dropped 25% for the year, compared to the S&P’s 21% gain.

The backstory: Wood, the CEO of Ark Invest, became a hero to many individual investors last year for her bets on disruptive tech companies in areas like artificial intelligence, blockchain, and robotics. Her Innovation ETF surged 149% in 2020, when much of life moved online.

2021 has been a different story. Speculative tech stocks have been clobbered by the Fed’s plan to raise interest rates next year, and some longtime investors like Charlie Munger say the current tech bubble is “even crazier than the dot-com era.”

Still, Wood believes her investing thesis is sound, and insists that the market will prove her strategies right over the long term. She predicts her portfolio will quadruple over the next five years.

Spotify is not here for open mic night. The streaming company has pulled the clips of hundreds of comedians, including Kevin Hart and Jim Gaffigan, over a deadlock in negotiations with the global rights administration company Spoken Giants, the WSJ reported.

Spoken Giants is leading the charge to get comedians paid royalties for their jokes when streamed on services like Spotify and YouTube, or played over the radio.

Under the existing setup, comics are paid via their label or distributor, and not directly as the authors of their works, the WSJ notes. Spoken Giants is essentially aiming to get comedians paid in the same way songwriters are compensated for their music and lyrics.

• Spotify is standing its ground, saying it’s paid “significant amounts of money for the content in question, and would love to continue to do so.”

Big picture: A decade ago, comedy rights negotiations probably wouldn’t have made the Brew, but the growth of streaming + all of us desperately needing something to laugh about has transformed the category into a major player in audio. Comedy was the most popular podcast genre, according to a Statista survey from October 2020.

Stat: Following the Taliban takeover of the country four months ago, Afghanistan’s economy is in free-fall. Its GDP is likely to plunge by 20% this year, leading to a profound hunger crisis. 22.8 million people, which is more than half of the country’s population, are expected to face potentially life-threatening food insecurity this winter, according to the UN.

Quote: “This is not how I want my time at CNN to end.”

CNN host Chris Cuomo was fired by the network following an investigation into his role in helping his brother, former NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo, respond to allegations of sexual misconduct.

Read: What humanity should eat to stay healthy and save the planet. (Nature)

Inflation data: The consumer price index (CPI) has become the hottest data release on the economic calendar, so you can bet everyone from your cousin to the president will be paying attention when it drops on Friday. Last month, CPI showed prices increasing at the fastest rate in 31 years.

Grande union vote: Ballots are due on Wednesday for unionization votes at three Buffalo-area Starbucks locations. None of Starbucks’s corporate-owned locations in the US are unionized.

Earnings: GameStop’s earnings, which drop on Wednesday, are never boring. Costco, Oracle, Lululemon, and Rent the Runway also report this week.

Everything else:

• President Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin will chat Ukraine over videoconference on Tuesday. The call comes as Russia has reportedly sent nearly 100,000 troops to the Ukraine border.
• Tuesday, Dec. 7, is Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day.
• Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story opens Friday.

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Best reads of the year: Pocket is a service that lets users read and save news articles. Here they recap the top articles of the year.

Dive back into the week:

• Shallow dive: The London accent from the 14th to the 21st centuries
• Medium dive: The most-discussed books on Reddit
• Deep dive: How the Covid vaccines actually work
• Cannonball: How a NYT reporter collects royalties from hundreds of musicians

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Turntable: This Boggle-style word puzzle is quickly becoming one of the Brew’s most popular game formats. See what all the hype is about here.

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