Wednesday, October 11, 2023 |
| People were often clear about distinguishing between the healthcare system, which they tended to describe with disdain, and their individual doctor. There was no equivalent distinction made in journalism. By Young Eun Moon, Kristy Roschke, Jacob L. Nelson and Seth C. Lewis. |
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| “We find a really strong connection that they’re able to maintain accountability in these communities.” By Clark Merrefield, The Journalist's Resource. |
What We’re Reading
Cuts at The Washington Post follow rapid expansion and unmet revenue projections →Bloomberg / Sarah Frier
The war in Israel shows how social media’s idealistic era has ended →X and Meta once aspired to be go-to platforms for reliable real-time information. Both have abandoned that goal. “We’ve moved from social media to algorithmic media.”Talking Biz News / Chris Roush
The Wall Street Journal’s Washington bureau chief reassigned to work full-time on securing release of Evan Gershkovich →“Let’s hope it is a short-term assignment,” Paul Beckett
wrote. Nieman Reports / Gabe Bullard
Six months ago NPR left Twitter. The effects on traffic have been “marginal.” →“A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter, now officially renamed X, though traffic from the platform was small already and accounted for just under two percent of traffic before the posting stopped. (NPR declined an interview request but shared the memo and other information).”the Guardian / Severin Carrell
Europe’s oldest student newspaper turns to emergency crowdfunding to avoid closure →“Joe Sullivan, editor-in-chief at [Edinburgh University’s The Student], told the BBC its greatest expense was the paper it was printed on but the team felt it was essential the newspaper remained in print rather than went online, where it would struggle to remain visible. ‘As a community publication having a presence in print, on counters, in newsstands, across all the student parts of Edinburgh — without that visibility we might not be able to survive as a digital publication.'”CNN / Oliver Darcy
How Haaretz, Israel’s oldest daily newspaper, is covering the unfolding war →Well-rehearsed processes allowed editors and reporters to gather in WhatsApp groups and publish hundreds of stories in the last 72 hours. the Guardian / Amy Mae Baxter
The U.K.’s literary magazine scene is “crumbling” →“The White Review, one of the mainstays of the past decade, announced last month that it would cease publishing ‘for an indefinite period’ as it failed to receive Arts Council England funding for three years in a row. The cultural phenomenon that was gal-dem, the magazine by women of colour, which provided a huge amount of literary coverage over the years, closed earlier this year, and the beautifully illustrated literary magazine Popshot Quarterly has announced its move to solely online editions due to ‘recent increases in production costs.'”New York Times / Sheera Frenkel and Steven Lee Myers
Hamas is seeding violent videos on X and Telegram thanks to little moderation →“Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at Free Press, a media advocacy group, said the state of discourse on X during the conflict was ‘the terrible but natural consequence of 11 months of misguided Musk decisions.’ She cited the rollback of policies against toxic content, cuts in staff and the priority given to subscription accounts, which ‘now allows, even begs for, controversial and incendiary content to thrive.'”The New Yorker / The New Yorker
Why the Internet isn’t fun anymore →“Remember having fun online? It meant stumbling onto a Web site you’d never imagined existed, receiving a meme you hadn’t already seen regurgitated a dozen times, and maybe even playing a little video game in your browser. These experiences don’t seem as readily available now as they were a decade ago. In large part, this is because a handful of giant social networks have taken over the open space of the Internet, centralizing and homogenizing our experiences through their own opaque and shifting content-sorting systems.”NBC News / Ben Goggin
Elon Musk’s fact-checking system delayed Israel corrections for days →“All weekend we were furiously vetting, writing, and approving Community Notes on hundreds of posts which were demonstrably fake news. It took 2+ days for the backroom to press whatever button to finally make all our warnings publicly viewable. By that time… You know the rest of that sentence.”Business Insider
How Texas Monthly is cashing in on Hollywood’s true crime obsession →“Texas Monthly has 50 film and TV projects sold or in development, half in the true crime genre, based on its journalism.”POLITICO / Gavin Bade
What happened to the TikTok ban? →“That [national security] review ran aground when defense officials, who wanted an outright ban of the app, clashed with economic officials who backed a compromise with TikTok.”Intelligencer / Reeves Wiedeman
Shams Charania tweeted his way to the top of the NBA reporting world →“Timesian hackles [have been raised] about Charania in particular, as Times journalists questioned how the instantaneous, anonymously sourced, transactional reporting that he specializes in fit in at the paper of record and whether his arrangement with a sports-gambling company opened him up to the kind of ethical conflict it tries to avoid. ‘He is now a vital part of a de facto sports section for a newspaper that would never hire him,’ a former Times reporter told me.”DCist / Margaret Barthel
These Virginia teens want more youth voices in local news. Now they’re adding their own →“They don’t understand how our generation is thinking, or what issues we’re dealing with, or what the best approach would be for us and the new legal system that we might create.”Semafor / Max Tani
The bots have come for podcasts →“iBoostReach is part of a cottage industry that has emerged as podcasting has grown in recent years…’The two places where it really gets used most are to satisfy a talent’s ego, or to satisfy an advertiser who isn’t really looking too closely at the numbers,’ one podcast exec told Semafor.”
Nieman Lab / Fuego
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