These are the top maybe-not headlines from the past 84-hours presented by The Conversation Project from raw engagement data from our social media to the headlines posted over the past weekend.
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The 8 topics that our followers ranked as the most conversational are:
BEST BUY CEO CORIE BARRY BEING INVESTIGATING FOR ALLEGED MISCONDUCT
The board had received an anonymous letter that said Barry years-long relationship with former Best Buy senior vice president Karl Sanft before she became CEO in June 2019. Sanft did not immediately respond to CNBC for comment. The electronics retailer’s board retained outside counsel to investigate the allegations. In a written statement, Barry said, “The Board has my full cooperation and support as it undertakes this review, and I look forward to its resolution in the near term.” The allegations were first reported by the Wall Street Journal. It is not the first time Best Buy has dealt with such an matter. In 2012, its former CEO Brian Dunn resigned as the company investigated allegations of a relationship he had with an employee.
[SOURCE: cnbc.com]
JUVENILE ARRESTED AFTER 4 PEOPLE KILLED IN GRANTSVILLE, UTAH, SHOOTING
Police were still trying to piece together who’s who and what happened leading up to Friday night’s shooting in Grantsville. Investigators believe the victims are all related to one another, and officials declined to release information about the shooter other than he is a juvenile male. It appears to be the largest mass shooting in Utah since 2007, when a shotgun-wielding gunman killed five people and himself at Trolley Square mall in Salt Lake City. It’s also the first homicide in nearly 20 years in Grantsville, a town of 11,000 about 35 miles west of Salt Lake City.
[SOURCE: usatoday.com]
PRINCE HARRY, MEGHAN TO GIVE UP ‘ROYAL HIGHNESS’ TITLES
The palace said Harry and Meghan will cease to be working members of the royal family when the new arrangements take effect within months, in the “spring of 2020.” They will be known as Harry, Duke of Sussex and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex. The couple will no longer use the titles His Royal Highness and Her Royal Highness, but they are not being stripped of them. Harry will remain a prince and sixth in line to the British throne. The agreement also calls for Meghan and Harry to repay 2.4 million pounds ($3.1 million) in taxpayers’ money that was spent renovating their home near Windsor Castle, Frogmore Cottage. The couple’s departure is a wrench for the royal family, but Queen Elizabeth II had warm words for them in a statement Saturday.
[SOURCE: yahoo.com]
KACEY MUSGRAVES, KELSEA BALLERINI DECRY COUNTRY RADIO’S ‘UNFAIR’ ATTITUDE
The two musicians used their platforms Thursday to slam discriminative practices that some radio stations employ when it comes to playing female artists. The conversation started on Tuesday when Chris Willman, a features editor at Variety, tweeted: “I turned on the 105.1 country station in L.A. just now, and they were playing the new song by Gabby Barrett, and then, without any pause or interruption at all, they went into a Kelsea Ballerini song. Can’t they get fined for that?” In response, Michigan radio station 98 KCQ wrote, “We cannot play two females back to back. Not even Lady Antebellum or Little Big Town against another female. I applaud their courage.” (The station has since deleted its tweet.)
[SOURCE: usatoday.com]
DRUGMAKERS SLASH PRICES TO BE ELIGIBLE FOR CHINA’S BULK-BUY PROGRAM
Beijing has been pushing forward the program where drugmakers have to go through a bidding process and cut prices low enough to be considered over generic copies and be allowed to sell their products at public hospitals via large-volume government procurement. Some global firms such as AstraZeneca and Merck have already cautioned about intensifying price pressures on their mature brands in the world’s second largest drug market, as China expands the usage of the program. In the latest bidding on Friday that involved 33 drugs and 122 companies, Bayer slashed the price of its popular diabetes treatment Acarbose to 0.18 yuan ($0.0262) per pill, 78.5% lower than the price ceiling set by the government in December last year, elbowing some Chinese generic providers out of the tender, according to a Reuters calculation based on the preliminary results released by the authority overseeing the program.
[SOURCE: reuters.com]
CONOR MCGREGOR COSTS DAN BILZERIAN BIG AFTER INSANE BET ON UFC 246
Ahead of Saturday’s UFC 246 showdown between Conor McGregor and Donald “Cowboy” Cerrone, Bilzerian — who boasts nearly 30 million Instagram followers — revealed he would be putting money on Cerrone, sharing a photo of himself standing next to a massive pile of cash. Bilzerian took in the fight hours later, in which McGregor knocked out Cerrone 40 seconds into the first round — the Irishman’s first rumble in 15 months. Though it’s unclear how much money Bilzerian wagered, it’s been speculated the gambler put $1 million on the line.
[SOURCE: nypost.com]
EMINEM’S NEW VIDEO FOR ‘DARKNESS’ RECREATES THE 2017 LAS VEGAS SHOOTING IN A STARK CALL FOR GUN CONTROL
The rapper dropped the music video for “Darkness,” a single off his latest album, “Music to Be Murdered By,” on Friday. It’s a bleak recreation of the 2017 Las Vegas shooting from the gunman’s point of view. The first half of the nearly six-minute song follows Eminem’s familiar beats like anxiety and substance abuse, albeit with several analogies to firearms throughout. But the second part sees Eminem — and an actor in the video — assume the role of the Las Vegas gunman, who killed 58 concert-goers at the Route 91 Harvest music festival.
[SOURCE: cnn.com]
DISNEY DROPS FOX NAME, WILL REBRAND AS 20TH CENTURY STUDIOS, SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES
Disney has already started the process to phase out the Fox name: Email addresses have changed for Searchlight staffers, with the fox.com address replaced with a searchlightpictures.com address. On the poster for Searchlight’s next film “Downhill,” with Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Will Ferrell, the credits begin with “Searchlight Pictures Presents.” The film will be the first Searchlight release to debut with the new logo. “Call of the Wild,” an upcoming family film, will be released under the 20th Century banner, sans Fox. Those logos won’t be dramatically altered, just updated. The most notable change is that the word “Fox” has been removed from the logo marks. Otherwise, the signature elements — swirling klieg lights, monolith, triumphal fanfare — will remain the same.
[SOURCE: variety.com]
Eight Things To Talk About uses the raw engagement data from the social media engagement from The Conversation Project to generate the top-ranking headlines over the course of a weekend.
A full weeks’ data (from Friday to Friday) is compiled, weighed, and sorted to produce the content for the Wrap-Up Show with J Cleveland Payne, published every Saturday as a podcast available at ThisIsTheConversation.com or wherever your favorite podcasts are found.
To ‘participate’ in the rankings of the headlines for this newsletter or the podcast, follow the Conversation Project on social media and engage with the posts to give them more ‘votes.’ The Conversation Project can be found on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
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