Forbes / Veronica Villafañe
Fusion, which you didn’t remember still existed, no longer exists →“Univision has pulled the plug on Fusion TV, the cable network it initially conceptualized as an English-language news and lifestyle channel targeting millennial Latinos. But it ended up being a mishmash with no true identity that evolved into a convoluted money-losing mess.” Its news site ended in either
2017 or 2019, depending on how you look at it.
The New York Times / Ben Smith
A former Facebook exec pushes to open social media’s “black boxes” →“…a few private companies are disseminating a massive amount of the world’s news and it’s largely happening inside black boxes…I think figuring out ways to both help and, in some cases, force, large platforms to be more transparent with news and civic content as it’s in the process of being disseminated can ultimately help make social platforms better homes for public discourse.”
Press Gazette / Dominic Ponsford
What to expect in news media M&A in 2022 →“Mercedes Benz is employing more journalists in Germany than the leading consumer car magazine. They have an agency in Berlin with 100 people; a third of them are journalists, a third of them are data scientists and the other third are online marketers. As a publisher, if you can position yourself within that content marketing trend that will be a strong thing.”
The Wrap / Lindsey Ellefson
Fox News was cable’s overall No. 1 network in 2021 for the sixth straight year →“Fox News secured 2.348 million total average viewers between the hours of 8 p.m. ET and 11 p.m. ET. Of those, 370,000 were in the demo [ages 18-49]. MSNBC was in second place in total average viewers, pulling in 1.533 million, but its 216,000 demo viewers had the network placing third among the big three cable news channels. CNN saw an average of 1.078 million primetime viewers for the year with 268,000 of those in the demo.”
Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain / Jennifer Jenkins
Belated happy Public Domain Day! →Newly out of copyright as of Jan. 1 are tens of thousands of books published in 1926, including A. A. Milne’s “Winnie-the-Pooh,” Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” Langston Hughes’ “The Weary Blues,” and H. L. Mencken’s “Notes on Democracy.”
The Washington Post / Margaret Sullivan
If American democracy is going to survive, the media must make this crucial shift →“For the most part, news organizations are not making democracy-under-siege a central focus of the work they present to the public…pro-democracy coverage is not being ‘centered’ by the media writ large. It’s occasional, not regular; it doesn’t appear to be part of an overall editorial plan that fully recognizes just how much trouble we’re in.”
The New York Times / Brooks Barnes
The Washington Post / Jeremy Barr
Omicron has sent TV news anchors back to remote studios →“Amid the massive spread of the coronavirus across the United States, television news programs have been nudging back toward the way things were in the spring of 2020, when hosts and anchors either worked from home or — more commonly, this time around — isolated in individual studios.”
Press Gazette / Aisha Majid
The Washington Post / Courtland Milloy
St. Louis Post-Dispatch / Jack Suntrup
Missouri’s governor still wants to make reporting on the state’s data screwups a crime →“A Post-Dispatch reporter in October alerted the state to a data issue contained on a Department of Elementary and Secondary Education website that left Social Security numbers of educators vulnerable to public disclosure…[Gov. Mike] Parson, who has often tangled with news outlets over reports he doesn’t like, announced a criminal investigation into the reporter and the Post-Dispatch.”