Monday, January 6, 2025 |
| When reporting in solidarity, journalists use newsworthiness criteria, sourcing tactics, and framing styles that are distinct from those typically used by mainstream media. By Anita Varma. |
What We’re ReadingTechCrunch / Maxwell Zeff
Google unveiled an AI-powered TV that summarizes the news for you at CES 2025 →“By asking Gemini to play your ‘News Brief,’ the AI assistant will scrape news stories from across the internet and YouTube video headlines posted by trusted news channels, and produce a brief summary to catch you up on the day’s events … Google plans to release these new Gemini capabilities for new and existing Google TV devices toward the end of 2025.”Wired / Tim Carmody
HTML is actually a programming language. Fight me →“HTML is somehow simultaneously paper and the printing press for the electronic age. It’s both how we write and what we read. It’s the most democratic computer language and the most global. It’s the medium we use to connect with each other and publish to the world. It makes perfect sense that it was developed to serve as a library — an archive, a directory, a set of connections — for all digital knowledge.”The Washington Post / Ben Strauss
Journalists for The Athletic push to join The New York Times union →“The Athletic’s bargaining unit is around 200 people and would grow the Times Guild to around 1,700 members. Times reporters are represented by the NewsGuild of New York, which was part of The Athletic’s organizing effort.”The Atlantic / Charlie Warzel and Mike Caulfield
January 6 and the triumph of the justification machine →“Lately, our independent work has coalesced around a particular shared idea: that misinformation is powerful, not because it changes minds, but because it allows people to maintain their beliefs in light of growing evidence to the contrary. The internet may function not so much as a brainwashing engine but as a justification machine. A rationale is always just a scroll or a click away, and the incentives of the modern attention economy—people are rewarded with engagement and greater influence the more their audience responds to what they’re saying—means that there will always be a rush to provide one.”The Canadian Press / Tara Deschamps
Google sends funds to journalism collective in exchange for Online News Act exemption →“Google has sent the $100 million it agreed to pay Canadian news outlets in exchange for an exemption from the Online News Act to a journalism organization designed to distribute the funds….The collective expects the cash to start reaching media businesses whose work was shared or repurposed by Google by the end of January.”The New York Times / Nico Grant
Amazon Prime will release a Melania Trump documentary →“The company and its founder, Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, had a rocky relationship with Mr. Trump during Mr. Trump’s first presidential term. But in recent months, Amazon and Mr. Bezos have taken steps to repair it.”Press Gazette / Charlotte Tobitt
Around 4,000 journalism job cuts made in U.K. and U.S. in 2024 →“At least 3,875 redundancies and layoffs across newspaper, news broadcaster and digital media businesses were publicly announced or reported in 2024. This compares to
the at least 8,000 journalism job cuts made in the UK and North America in 2023.“Status / Oliver Darcy
Washington Post expected to lay off dozens of staffers →“The layoffs are slated to hit the Jeff Bezos-owned and Will Lewis-led newspaper’s business division, I’m told. One person familiar with the matter said that the cuts will be deep, impacting many dozens of employees.”The New Yorker / Jordan Salama
On TikTok, every migrant is living the American Dream →“Like many of the migrants I spoke with in New York, María and Mercedes said that their decision to leave Colta was at least partly influenced by TikToks they’d seen—videos very similar to the ones they were making now.”Columbia Journalism Review / Norman Pearlstine
Trump, the public, and the press →“Billionaires, once thought to be the saviors of journalism, are proving themselves poor stewards of media companies.”The Washington Post / Jeremy Barr
A Florida jury will decide if CNN defamed security contractor →“While most defamation lawsuits against media companies are either settled out of court or dismissed in their early stages, the Young case represents a rare example of a case actually going to trial, putting the network in the uncomfortable position of seeing its journalists, producers and executives being forced to take the stand.”The Guardian / Sam Levin
U.S. newspapers are deleting old crime stories, offering subjects a “clean slate” →Among the papers doing this:
Cleveland Plain Dealer,
The Boston Globe,
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the
Bangor Daily News in Maine,
The Oregonian, and NJ.com. Semafor / Max Tani
The Bulwark bulks up its newsletters →On Monday, The Bulwark announced “
Huddled Masses, a twice-weekly, immigration-focused newsletter authored by Adrian Carrasquillo. It will focus on the incoming Trump administration’s mass deportation policies, which the president-elect has said will be a Day 1 priority for the incoming team.”NPR / David Folkenflik
A Pulitzer winner quits The Washington Post after a cartoon on Bezos is killed →“I’m very used to being edited,” Telnaes tells NPR. “I’ve never ever, since I’ve worked for the Post in 2008, been not allowed to comment on certain topics by having cartoons being killed.”…Editorial page editor David Shipley said in a statement, “My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column — this one a satire — for publication. The only bias was against repetition.”
Nieman Lab / Fuego
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