Monday, February 12, 2024 |
| “Frankly, the nation’s media may well be talking and thinking too much about the need for someone to ‘save journalism’ when all of us should be laser-focused on doing the work that may well save democracy.” By Joshua Benton. |
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| “Owning our own work, and being beholden to no one but our readers and colleagues — as opposed to say, investors, venture capitalists, or out-of-touch executives — feels like the future.” By Hanaa' Tameez. |
AI adoption in newsrooms presents “a familiar power imbalance” between publishers and platforms, new report finds What We’re ReadingNPR / Lynn Neary
R.I.P. Bob Edwards, host of NPR’s Morning Edition for nearly a quarter-century →“When listeners first heard that voice, they might have imagined a figure of great authority, an avuncular newsman dressed in a pinstripe suit. But that was not Bob Edwards.”Adweek / Mark Stenberg
Bustle Digital Group lays off Fatherly team →Seven editorial staffers lost their jobs. The title will “significantly decrease its editorial output” but “still produce some social media and newsletter content.” The company also laid off nine other employees from Romper, Bustle, and Elite Daily last month.The Washington Post / Erik Wemple
Jimmy Finkelstein, The Messenger, and the curse of the meddling media owner →“Conversations with former employees [suggest Finkelstein was] a fiddling, meddling presence in the daily production of Messenger journalism — a guy who distracted and flustered his staffers with every last directive…One former deputy section editor of the now-defunct site received 1,300 interventionist emails from Finkelstein between early July and the site’s demise.”The Guardian / Jonathan Heawood
Local news in the U.K. is in deep trouble, and the government should do more to help promising indie publishers →“You might think that the government would want to support these news entrepreneurs, who are leveling up information provision in communities across the U.K. But no. In fact, successive governments have channeled a range of subsidies to the corporate publishers who own the surviving legacy local papers, while the indies have received next to nothing.”Defector / Mike Tanier
Three newsrooms imploded around me in under a year →“I covered the NFL for three media outlets in the last calendar year: Football Outsiders, The Messenger, and The New York Times. Two of those outlets died. The third got rid of its entire sports section. I am forced to conclude that I am the grim reaper, harbinger of doom, the herald of the sports media apocalypse. Or maybe the industry’s just broadly and systemically broken, and I happen to have especially rotten luck. You can decide.”Semafor / Max Tani
Slate just had its most profitable year ever →“Slate’s chief executive officer Dan Check and chief revenue officer and president Charlie Kammerer said that they were a bit hesitant to celebrate their record-setting year due to the gloomy state of digital news media. But they also said the company’s leadership was proud of their strategy. By focusing on its podcasts and website, Slate was able to weather an otherwise dark media business climate and continue to grow.”The New York Times / Benjamin Mullin
Rolling Stone editor Noah Shachtman steps down after editorial differences with ownership →“The former top editor of The Daily Beast, Mr. Shachtman imported the news website’s hard-nosed, investigative sensibility to Rolling Stone. During his tenure, the magazine published investigations into prominent musicians and actors, including Jonathan Majors and Marilyn Manson.”Engadget / Pranav Dixit
Who makes money when AI reads the internet for us? →“For decades, websites have served ads and pushed people visiting them towards paying for subscriptions. Monetizing traffic is one of the primary ways most creators on the web continue to make a living. Reducing the need for people to visit actual websites deprives those creators of compensation for their work, and disincentivizes them from publishing anything at all.”Committee to Protect Journalists / Katy Migiro
Malaysia has given a two-year prison sentence (in absentia) to British journalist Clare Rewcastle Brown →“‘Malaysia should scrap the outrageous prison sentence given to Clare Rewcastle Brown and stop harassing the journalist over her crucial reporting on the country’s 1MDB scandal, recognized as one of the world’s biggest-ever corruption cases,” Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative, said on Friday.”The Wall Street Journal / Joe Flint, Jessica Toonkel, Isabella Simonetti, and David Marcelis
Why Disney, Fox, and Warner made a Hail Mary bet on sports streaming →“That the media behemoths were willing to risk the ire of the NFL shows the sense of urgency — even desperation — they feel about solving what is arguably the biggest riddle in their industry: finding a business model that can work in the streaming economy.”The Guardian / Alexandra Topping
Prince Harry has settled the rest of his phone-hacking claims against Mirror newspapers →“After a high-profile trial — in which Harry became the first senior royal in more than 130 years to be cross-examined in a courtroom — the landmark ruling found there was ‘widespread and habitual’ phone hacking by MGN from 2006 to 2011, ‘even to some extent’ during the Leveson inquiry into media standards.”The Guardian / David Smith
Jon Stewart returns to The Daily Show tonight →“One test will be whether Stewart’s satire will still cut through in a post-pandemic world of disinformation, polarization, and fragmented media — cable TV, which gave rise to Comedy Central and the news it lampooned, appears to be in terminal decline — or if he will resemble an aging rocker straining to recapture past glories.”The New York Times / John Koblin
Peak TV is officially over: Hollywood made 14% fewer shows in 2023 →Yes, the strikes make for an unfair comparison. “But orders for shows by the major studios started to drop precipitously in the middle of 2022, around the time that Wall Street soured on entertainment companies’ spend-at-any-cost strategy to make new series.”Wired / Lauren Goode
Google prepares for a future where search isn’t king →“Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai still loves the web. He wakes up every morning and reads Techmeme, a news aggregator resplendent with links, accessible only via the web. The web is dynamic and resilient, he says, and can still — with help from a search engine — provide whatever information a person is looking for. Yet the web and its critical search layer are changing.”The Washington Post / Dino Grandoni
Famed climate scientist wins million-dollar verdict against right-wing bloggers →“In a 2012 column titled ‘The Other Scandal in Unhappy Valley,’ published on a website of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, [blogger Rand] Simberg wrote that Mann had ‘molested and tortured data’ of global warming and compared Mann to [Jerry] Sandusky, who was a Pennsylvania State University football coach who had been arrested for molesting young boys. At the time, Mann was a professor at Penn State.”The New Yorker / Clare Malone
The future of news will require fundamentally rethinking the press’s relationship to its audience →“Many journalists working today have only ever been part of a culture of decline…it still feels like we’re all trying to outrun the cuts. A change of pace would be nice.”Air Mail / Brian Stelter
“We’re like the Fyre Festival of media”: How The Messenger went up in flames →“Some of [Jimmy Finkelstein’s] initial hires believed him. Others just needed a job. Of the 32 Ex-Messengers I interviewed for this article (most of whom requested anonymity because they need new jobs now), about half said a version of ‘None of us thought this was going to work.'”Axios / Sara Fischer
Meta says it won’t recommend political content on Threads →“Users will have an option that allows them to opt into political recommendations — first on Threads, then on Facebook, at an unspecified date.”
Nieman Lab / Fuego
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