"One particular piece of the journalism model that is broken? How news organizations measure their readership." Pageviews are not a million miles away from hits - which is how we measured success in 2003. This is much-needed innovation from The 19th. Alexandra Smith, who wrote th … | Continue reading
A new leader for Press Forward, at a pivotal moment for journalism. | Continue reading
They gave local news away for free. Virtually nobody wanted it. | Continue reading
Be skeptical of PR hype Question the training data Evaluate the model Consider downstream harms adactio.com/links/20304 | Continue reading
an attempt to do digital media differently as a worker-owned co-op without outside investors, supported by readers, and writers own their IP # | Continue reading
Last week, the political press turned to a familiar yearly ritual: covering the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC. This year’s edition took place under multiple clouds—Matt Schlapp, the event’s top organizer, is facing an allegation of groping (which he denies); m … | Continue reading
“People want more local news, and local newsrooms are looking for more support,” Campbell Brown wrote in 2019 when Meta (then Facebook) announced its three-year, $300 million commitment to global “news programs, partnerships, and content.” In a press release titled, “Campbell Bro … | Continue reading
For more than a billion users around the world, TikTok is just a mobile video-sharing app that they scroll through to watch people dancing and cats falling off of furniture (or cats dancing and people falling off of furniture). For the US Congress, however, TikTok is a political … | Continue reading
“As it turned out, not enough people were migrating off Twitter and onto the same platforms as Grimes for it to be a sufficient replacement. On Mastodon, she has a much smaller and less diverse community that didn’t let her obtain the same level of reporting. Likewise, the 40,000 … | Continue reading
It’s understandable that the idea that government should help save local media makes many journalists’ skin crawl. How can reporters get support from one of the institutions we’re supposed to be holding accountable? In this case, journalists should rethink their concerns. Here’s … | Continue reading
What links the Republican Reps. Scott Perry, Paul Gosar, Lauren Boebert, and Marjorie Taylor Greene (beyond, in the case of the latter two, a buzzy recent Daily Beast story about a bathroom shouting match)? All voted to overturn President Biden’s win in the 2020 election, and wor … | Continue reading
On Wednesday—Day Three of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland—the digital newsroom Semafor came out with the third installment of its “Davos Daily” newsletter, a one-stop template for how the media covers the WEF and the global rich. There’s the cocktail-party scene-se … | Continue reading
Ivory-tower journalism has failed. It’s time we focus on building public infrastructure where everyone can find, factcheck, and produce civic information
| Continue readingTHE NEWS Yesterday, Semafor—a much-discussed yet hitherto-nonexistent news site—finally launched. The brainchild of Justin Smith, formerly the CEO of Bloomberg, and his namesake-but-not-relative Ben Smith, the muckraking former editor of BuzzFeed News and media columnist at the N … | Continue reading
A week ago, New York magazine dropped a cover with a simple yet striking image: a close-up shot of John Fetterman, the hulking, goateed Democratic nominee for US Senate in Pennsylvania, staring straight forward, his brow slightly furrowed, alongside the headline “The Vulnerabilit … | Continue reading
In July, Twitter sued Elon Musk for his failure to complete his $44 billion acquisition of the company, a process he formally initiated in April. Musk subsequently filed a countersuit in which he alleged that Twitter was not telling the truth about some aspects of its business, i … | Continue reading
For a news organization, being owned by an oligarch can be complicated. In 2013, when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post from the Graham family, those complications were not top of mind. The Post was in a downward spiral, sloughing off staff and flirting with irrelevance. Bez … | Continue reading
For a news organization, being owned by an oligarch can be complicated. In 2013, when Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post from the Graham family, those complications were not top of mind. The Post was in a downward spiral, sloughing off staff and flirting with irrelevance. Bez … | Continue reading
In August, Twitter, Google, TikTok, and Meta, the parent company of Facebook, released statements abouthow they intended to handle election-related misinformation on their platforms in advance. For the most part, it seemed they weren't planning to change much. Now, with the Novem … | Continue reading
“It’s mid-August of an election year in America, which can only mean one thing,” wrote Sarah Roach, Nat Rubio-Licht, and Issie Lapowsky in Protocol’s “Source Code” newsletter yesterday. “It’s time for every social media company to announce how it plans to combat whatever fresh he … | Continue reading
“IT’S THE SUN WOT WON IT.” Thirty years ago, The Sun, a Rupert Murdoch–owned tabloid in the UK, plastered those words on its front page—a humblebrag it was not—after John Major, then Britain’s Conservative prime minister, was reelected; the day before, the paper had mocked up a f … | Continue reading
Last Friday, the US Supreme Court handed down a decision overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 court case that had enshrined legal access to abortions in the United States. The decision was widely expected, thanks to a story that Politico published in May, based on a draft opinion th … | Continue reading
A Friday morning last fall, in the subterranean labyrinth of the Capitol building, on either side of thick double doors: a throng of reporters and the House Democratic Caucus. No sound from the room could be heard in the hallway.(cjr.org) | Continue reading
Over the weekend, with the House committee investigating January 6 having arrived at the midway point in its schedule of televised hearings, ABC News and Ipsos jointly published a poll, conducted since the latest hearing, with an eye-catching finding: nearly 60 percent of those s … | Continue reading
On June 9, Keach Hagey and Alexandra Bruell reported for the Wall Street Journal that Facebook, a subsidiary of Meta Platforms, was “re-examining its commitment to paying for news,” according to several unnamed sources who were described as familiar with Facebook’s plans. The pot … | Continue reading
A new book on Anna Wintour reinforces her powerful persona
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How an HIV specialist in Germany is using media law to erase reporting of sexual abuse allegations against him
| Continue readingOn Monday, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, said that it plans to share more data about political ad targeting on its platform with social scientists and other researchers, as part of what the company calls its Open Research and Transparency project. According to CNN, Meta w … | Continue reading
Last week, Meta, the parent company of Facebook, reported its quarterly financial results, noting that while the number of Facebook users increased during the first months of this year, the company's revenues grew at the slowest rate since Facebook went public a decade ago. This … | Continue reading
On the early morning of March 14, 2018, photojournalist Vladjimir Legagneur left home for an assignment in Martissant, a sprawling neighborhood in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince that has been referred to as “ground zero” for warring gangs. He was documenting the aftermath … | Continue reading
On a Monday in early January, in the Floresta area of Veracruz, a port city on Mexico’s east coast, the body of a man dressed in blue jeans and a brown shirt was found on the street. He had been stabbed at least seven times. At first it looked like an armed robbery gone wrong. [… … | Continue reading
Elon Musk’s plan to acquire Twitter for $44 billion has raised concerns among numerous Twitter users, who have expressed fears that his remarks promoting unrestrained freedom of speech may enable right-wing trolls to engage in harassment with impunity, and that his promise to “au … | Continue reading
Unionized staff at three newspapers in Florida—the Miami Herald, its Spanish-language sibling El Nuevo Herald, and the smaller Bradenton Herald—are refusing to work for one day Friday amid ongoing contract negotiations with their owner, McClatchy. The union has been engaged in mo … | Continue reading
WNYC removed forty-five stories from its websites, wnyc.org and Gothamist.com, according to an announcement on the site today, because they contained “unattributed passages from other sources,” in forty-two of the cases, and had been “published on other websites by the author” in … | Continue reading
On March 10, a Reuters headline announced that Facebook would temporarily change its content rules to allow users to post calls for the death of Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, as well as “calls for violence against Russians.” (Reuters later modified its headline to specify”i … | Continue reading
By Priyanjana Bengani (@acookiecrumbles) and Jon Keegan (@jonkeegan) IRE NICAR Conference – March 4, 2022 Slides: English | Russian The Tow Center would like to thank Dr. Svetlana Borodina and the Harriman Institute for translating this presentation into Russian. What is this? … | Continue reading
On Tuesday, Mark Schoofs, the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, told staff that he and two other senior editors—Tom Namako, deputy editor-in-chief, and Ariel Kaminer, the executive editor of the investigations unit—are leaving the company, and the news division is being downsized … | Continue reading
Since the invasion of Ukraine began two weeks ago, Russia has become more and more cut off from the rest of the world in a number of important ways, including access to international media and the global internet. In some cases, Russia itself has been severing those ties, as it d … | Continue reading
It's been just over two weeks since Russia invaded Ukraine, which has led to Russia being the most sanctioned country in the world. Companies are pulling their products and services from Russia, platforms are restricting access to Russian state-controlled media (partly driven by … | Continue reading
As soldiers and civilians in Ukraine continue to resist an invasion by Russian troops, a very different kind of war is being fought on a separate front: the internet. Within hours of Russian troops attacking cities and government facilities in Ukraine, hackers—including some who … | Continue reading
For years, I kept a copy of the September 11, 2001, print edition of the New York Times in a box at home. Splashed atop the front page, across four columns, was a color photograph of people waiting for the start of New York Fashion Week. Beneath that, there was a feature on the r … | Continue reading
Whenever the subject of disinformation, hate speech, or harassment on social media platforms comes up, someone inevitably suggests these problems could be solved if Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram outlawed anonymity and forced users to sign up using their real names. The past we … | Continue reading
In 2020, members of Congress introduced the EARN IT Act—an abbreviation for the full name, which was the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies Act. The act proposed a national commission for developing best practices for the elimination of child sex- … | Continue reading
In June, a video of mob violence in northern India surfaced online. Filmed in a village near Ghaziabad, the video showed people slap and violently harass Abdul Samad Saifi, a 72-year-old man wearing traditionally Muslim clothing. The mob then cuts off his beard while he sobs. Sho … | Continue reading
On Tuesday, Twitter said it is expanding its privacy policy to include what the company calls “private media.” Its current privacy policy prevents users of the service from sharing other people’s private information, such as phone numbers, addresses, and other personal details th … | Continue reading
Two weeks ago, Alex Heath of The Verge reported that the company then known as Facebook was planning to rename itself. An anonymous source told Heath that the new name was intended to direct attention away from the company’s existing services (including WhatsApp, Instagram, and t … | Continue reading
CJR · What does the Facebook data dump mean? As journalists struggle to cover the latest revelations in the Facebook story, they also endeavor to write stories that land with the general public. How much context is sacrificed for the sensation of something new? On this week’s Kic … | Continue reading
June 22 was a great day for Alfi, Inc, a tech company in Miami Beach, Florida, which sells facial recognition advertising software. After going public in early May at $3.75 per share and dipping to a low of $2.41, the stock had risen above $16. On June 21, an article published on … | Continue reading