Tuesday, July 27, 2021 |
| “Tell the story without the explanatory commas, as if you’re telling to the person you want to be telling the story to.” By Hanaa' Tameez. |
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| Among the 20 biggest dailies, nearly two-thirds of their newsrooms are run by a woman or a person of color (or both). But newsrooms still have a long way to go to be reflective of the communities they serve. By Joshua Benton. |
What We’re ReadingPoynter / Kristen Hare
Gannett has sold 26 publications back to local owners →The newsrooms now in local hands are located in Arkansas, California, Florida, Guam, Illinois, Kansas, Massachusetts, Missouri, Oklahoma, and South Carolina. Twitter / Paul Farhi
The Washington Post will require employees to show proof of covid vaccination “as a condition of employment” →The new memo from publisher Fred Ryan also indicated plans to return to the office by mid-September. The Markup / Julia Angwin
The Markup teams up with Süddeutsche Zeitung to bring its Citizen Browser project to Germany →“Through a custom browser installed on their desktops by a panel of citizens who opt to share real-time data directly from their Facebook accounts, this initiative reveals what information Facebook’s algorithms serve users and measures how disinformation travels across the platform over time.”The Daily Beast / Maxwell Tani and Lachlan Cartwright
The “popular but niche” tech site Futurism has been purchased by an acquisition-hungry firm backed by venture capital →The buyer, Recurrent Ventures, has purchased 18 media brands, including MEL, Popular Science, Outdoor Life, and Saveur.Digiday / Sara Guaglione
The Financial Times will open bureaus in Houston and Hollywood →The FT’s American readership has increased in the last few years: about a third of their 1.1 million subscribers are based in the U.S. AdWeek / Mark Stenberg
The New Yorker launches a daily trivia game →“After an initial trial period, Name Drop will fall behind The New Yorker paywall, and each game will count as one article read … When possible, the quiz will link to a New Yorker profile of the character whose identity was in question.” (We talked to the magazine’s first-ever Puzzles and Games Dept. about their subscription strategy
earlier this year.) Al Jazeera
In “a troubling escalation,” Tunisia police raid Al Jazeera’s bureau in Tunis →“Reporters said they were ordered by security officers to turn off their phones and were not allowed back into the building to retrieve their personal belongs. The officers confiscated the keys to the office.”New York Times / Edmund Lee and Lauren Hirsch
BuzzFeed is going public. What about Vice, Vox, and Group Nine? →“The media industry has turned into a barbell. On one end, there are The Post (3.2 million print and digital news subscribers), The Journal (3.4 million) and The Times (six million) — large news operations that rely on their prestige, breadth and experience to attract subscribers. At the other end are The Information, Insider, Axios and others that provide hyper-focused reporting on subjects of special interest to smaller but intensely loyal audiences. It gets murky between the two extremes. BuzzFeed, Vice, Vox and Group Nine find themselves in a difficult competition with the legacy publications for general readers and with Facebook and Google for ad dollars.”Current / Mike Janssen
Public media salary survey finds a gender gap in compensation, and higher salaries for unionized employees →“Among the lowest-paid categories are several journalism roles: data journalist, reporter and photo journalist.” (You can see the full salary information
here.)Philadelphia Magazine / Victor Fiorillo
How is The Philadelphia Inquirer’s reckoning over race going? →“Well, we now have lots of committees, that’s for sure. Many, many, many, many committees.”Splash
Quartz is hosting a free seminar on new ways to find stories in financial data and documents →“This seminar is part of a series of discussions hosted by Quartz on the fundamentals of business journalism, how the industry is changing, and the ways it could become more accessible to both journalists and readers.”NBC News / Kalhan Rosenblatt
Twitter is testing downvotes on the platform →“Thumbs-down is better than commenting, ‘Take a dirt nap,'” one academic said.”Columbia Journalism Review / Jon Allsop
Covering the pandemic when the news is a mishmash of good news, bad news, and uncertainty →“It’s a bit maddening, because it felt like we got to a point where we got to know this virus a little bit,” Apoorva Mandavilli, a science reporter at the New York Times, said yesterday on The Daily. “Delta has really changed that entire calculation. There are just so many more questions than I think we expected to have at this point.”Poynter / Mark Jacob
More chain-owned news organizations are returning to local ownership →“Gannett’s strategy appears to be focused on its bigger properties, with some smaller ones up for sale … The Reid family purchased three Gannett outlets in February, adding them to its group of small papers in Oklahoma. Larry and Sharon Hiatt acquired Gannett’s Cherokee County News-Advocate in Baxter Springs, Kansas, in March. Former Guam Lieutenant Governor Kaleo Moylan bought the Pacific Daily News from Gannett in February.”
Nieman Lab / Fuego / Encyclo
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