These are the top maybe-not headlines from the past 36-hours presented by The Conversation Project from raw engagement data from our social media to the headlines posted over the past day.
SUBSCRIBE TO THE EMAIL NEWSLETTER | BECOME A SUPPORTER ON PATREON
The 8 topics that our followers ranked as the most conversational are:
FOTIS DULOS, CONNECTICUT MAN ACCUSED OF KILLING WIFE JENNIFER DULOS, IS FOUND UNRESPONSIVE TODAY AFTER APPARENT SUICIDE ATTEMPT
Drone footage captured the dramatic minutes Farmington Police tried to revive 52-year-old Fotis Dulos. Officers found him unresponsive while sitting in his running vehicle in the garage of his Farmington home. They performed CPR for more than 10 minutes, stopping only to check for a pulse. Paramedics even tried to shock him back to life using a defibrillator. Dulos’ attorney, Norm Pattis told CBS News that Dulos apparently tried to kill himself by carbon monoxide poisoning. Farmington Police found him while performing a welfare check after Dulos failed to show up for a bond hearing that could have sent him back to prison for the murder of his wife. McKenzie said Dulos was taken to UConn Health for treatment. He was later flown by helicopter down to a hospital in New York City, where he is in intensive care.
[SOURCE: cbsnews.com]
KFC TO SELL BEYOND MEAT’S PLANT-BASED ‘FRIED CHICKEN’ IN THE SOUTHERN U.S.
Fast-food chains including McDonald’s, Burger King, and Dunkin Brands have raced to add imitation meat products to their menus as Americans cut down on animal protein consumption. While those companies have rolled out imitation pork or beef patties, Yum Brands Inc’s KFC is the first to launch plant-based “chicken.” The product is 80 calories per piece and looks a bit like a fried chicken nugget, with a sinewy texture designed to feel like chicken. It will be available next month in dozens of stores in and around Nashville, Tennessee, and Charlotte, North Carolina, the companies said. KFC said it would take what it learns from those markets to better understand how offering the imitation chicken will play out nationally.
[SOURCE: reuters.com]
TRUMP SAYS U.S. WOULD BE IN ‘WORLD WAR SIX’ IF HE’D LISTENED TO BOLTON
President Donald Trump blasted John Bolton on Wednesday, saying the U.S. would be in “World War Six” if he’d listened to the former national security adviser. With Democrats calling for Bolton to appear under oath in Trump’s impeachment trial, the president attacked his ex-aide in a pair of tweets. Bolton alleges in a forthcoming book that Trump sought to tie aid to Ukraine to an investigation of the Bidens, which the president denies. Trump calls the book “nasty & untrue” in his tweets. The White House, in a letter to Bolton’s lawyer, said the book “appears to contain significant amounts of classified information,” and that it may not be published without that information being deleted.
[SOURCE: marketwatch.com]
‘ROUGHEST’ KFC INSTALLS FENCE BETWEEN COUNTER AND CUSTOMERS FOR EMPLOYEE SAFETY
This particular location is known as the city’s “roughest,” reported South West News Service (SWNS), a British news agency. According to the news outlet, many locals are afraid to visit the restaurant after dark due to a spate of violent incidents. Multiple incidents have been reported at the location involving intruders jumping over the counter to attack employees. A notable incident occurred last October that involved a 16-year-old boy getting assaulted after attempting to intervene in an argument. An employee of the restaurant told SWNS, “We’ve had a few problems with fights so it’s for our safety. One of our girls was attacked, people have jumped over the counter before. It’s fine most of the time but we’ve had a few issues, shall we say.”
[SOURCE: foxnews.com]
NINJA REPORTEDLY GOT PAID BETWEEN $20 MILLION AND $30 MILLION BY MICROSOFT TO LEAVE AMAZON’S TWITCH STREAMING SERVICE
Twitch is bleeding: a major talent exodus has more people than ever using competing services from Microsoft and Google. It all started with Tyler “Ninja” Blevins last August. In a publicity statement made to look like a press conference last August, Tyler “Ninja” Blevins announced his intention to switch from Amazon-owned Twitch to Microsoft-owned Mixer. The announcement itself was lighthearted and silly, but the news was anything but — the world’s most popular, well-known video game streamer was switching from Amazon to Microsoft. We’re talking about a guy who makes hundreds of thousands of dollars each month streaming himself playing “Fortnite” to tens of thousands of viewers, a guy who was reportedly paid $1 million for a single day of playing EA’s “Apex Legends.” Neither Blevins nor Microsoft revealed the contract terms that got one of the most popular streamers in the world to jump ship to a nascent platform with a fraction of the audience. But a talent management executive who’s worked with Blevins told CNN Business in an article published Monday that the streamer may netted between $20 million and $30 million from the deal.
[SOURCE: businessinsider.com]
DIOCESE OF KANSAS CITY-ST. JOSEPH: ST. JAMES PRIEST DIES BY SUICIDE
Director of Communications Jeremy Lillig said the diocese was notified this morning of the death of Fr. Evan Harkins after he did not show up for Mass. Lilling said Fr. Harkins had apparently taken his own life. Officers were at the church on King Hill Avenue Tuesday morning. Fr. Harkins was Pastor at St. James Parish and Parochial Administrator at St. Patricks’ Parish in St. Joseph. He had been at St. James since 2012.
[SOURCE: kq2.com]
ROOKIE TALKER ‘MEL ROBBINS’ WILL NOT RETURN FOR SEASON TWO
Sony Pictures Television will not bring back rookie talk show, The Mel Robbins Show, for a second season, the company confirmed Tuesday. The show will stay in original production through this year as planned and then go off the air once the season concludes in early September. The show has averaged a 0.4 live plus same day household rating season to date, according to Nielsen Media Research. It did recently get upgrades in a few Nexstar markets, including Nexstar’s KTLA Los Angeles from 3 a.m. to 4 p.m., but that seems to have been too little too late. Robbins made her name as a best-selling author of books such as “The Five-Second Rule,” and as an inspirational speaker. She has a content deal with audio content provider Audible and nearly one million followers on her popular and inspirational Instagram feed. Like all of that content, the talk show focused on Robbins offering help and advice to real people with the intention of improving their lives.
[SOURCE: broadcastingcable.com]
NETFLIX, APPLE IN TALKS WITH MGM TO ACQUIRE MOVIES LIKE ‘BOND,’ ‘ROCKY’
Picture the current “streaming content” landscape as a vast ocean. And picture all the various studios, distributors, and hybrid content creators/platforms as the various fish and — gulp — sharks swimming around, looking for stuff to eat. Lately, in this ocean, we’ve been seeing a lot of aquatic animals consuming each other, resulting in strange hybrid fish-creatures trying desperately to fight other strange hybrid fish-creatures (i.e. HBO and WarnerMedia teaming up for HBO Max; Disney buying Fox and getting rid of the ‘Fox,’ etc.). But one fish hasn’t found their shark to gobble them up: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), an entertainment studio since 1924. And as we’ve seen in this current ocean, when a fish can’t get eaten by a powerful shark, it tends to starve itself. There’s already currently a fair amount of corporate fish team-ups occurring within MGM — they tend to co-produce and distribute their projects with places like Sony Pictures and Hulu, and they own subsidiaries like United Artists, Orion Pictures, and Epix. But they don’t have a place in the ocean to stream their own content — a shark to team up with/get eaten by. However, that may all change very soon, per a report from CNBC.
[SOURCE: https://collider.com/netflix-apple-mgm-movies-sale-talks/]
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 the past day.
A full weeks’ data (from Friday to Friday) is compiled, weighed, and sorted to produce the content for the Weekly Wrap-Up 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.
Connect with us directly by emailing us at theconversationinbox@gmail.com or by simply visiting thisistheconversation.com.
