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Wednesday, December 13, 2023
 | The cable news kayfabe is dead“It’s time to get real with people. They don’t want to hear the debate between two rival sects of increasingly unaccountable rich people, especially when neither of them is living a life that has anything to do with their daily lived experiences.” By Ben Collins. |
 | College media remains the news industry’s younger, cooler aunt“If college media is supposed to be the training ground for hard-hitting journalism, students need support and resources from older generations to continue their work.” By Alex Perry. |
 | The homepage is back“There’s something cleansing about avoiding the algorithm and doing a little self-discovery when it comes to news sources.” By Andrew Kaczynski. |
 | Scale is a trap“If we want to solve this problem of informing audiences, we need to do the hard work of finding them and engaging them at their level. And that means going niche.” By Ernie Smith. |
 | Journalists abandon social media, and news audiences follow (eventually)“The downside: Without news brands investing the time and effort to add their content to social media platforms, these platforms — already flooded with misinformation — will become even less hospitable venues for the millions of people who spend hours on them daily.” By Jacob L. Nelson. |
 | To build trust, news outlets prioritize transparency“Reputation is trust. And transparency creates an exchange where trust can grow.” By Sue Cross. |
 | Press Forward must prove itself to the Black press“How are the neediest of newsrooms supposed to trust Press Forward when public and private funders involved have already tried to lock us out? We all have stories.” By Amethyst J. Davis. |
 | After the breakup, Canadian news orgs learn to live without Facebook“Here’s to clearing our shared cache.” By Linda Solomon Wood. |
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For more engagement and trust, try this one weird trick“News organizations can be very good at output — publishing a story, sending a newsletter, broadcasting a show or audio, and pushing out posts. But how good are we at the intake?” By Meredith Artley. |
 | Peer support will be a critical part of newsroom resilience“Increasing our skills around talking about the compassion, rigor, and experience needed to cover the toughest stories will make a difference in improving newsroom resilience, wellbeing, and journalism craft.” By Phoebe Connelly. |
 | The web floods“Newsrooms that commit to AI-driven storytelling as a way to cut costs while increasing output will be lost in a sea of similarly bland content and spammy marketing.” By Ben Werdmuller. |
 | Journalism outside urban areas thrives“We have a tremendous opportunity with the Press Forward initiative’s pledge to invest more than $500 million to ‘catalyze a local news renaissance.’ I hope the people making decisions on where and how to invest the money remember that there’s a lot of America between the coasts.” By Fernanda Santos. |
What We’re Reading
the Guardian / Ruth Michaelson
Gaza’s citizen journalists are chronicling life in war →
“Her personal touch found a niche that television news failed to capture, giving an intimate view of day-to-day life inside the enclave where more 1.8 million people have been displaced and entire neighbourhoods destroyed. The death toll in Gaza has surpassed 18,200 people, and almost no family has been untouched by loss.”
TechCrunch / Sarah Perez
Amazon is launching a competitor to Goodreads, the book site it also owns →
The new site “Your Books” will organize “all the books you’ve bought, borrowed, or saved, including print books, as well as Amazon’s Kindle and Audible titles.”
Engadget / Malak Saleh
Meta will extend fact-checking to Threads in early 2024 →
“Our goal is for fact-checking partners to have the ability to review and rate misinformation on the app.”
The New Yorker / Michael Luo
The New Yorker publishes list of top stories “during a year when many avoided the news” →
“The list of the most popular New Yorker stories of 2023, as measured by ‘engaged minutes’—the total amount of time readers spent on them—is striking to me for what is missing. No war in Gaza. No Trump. No politics.”
Poynter / David Schechter
“I’m a reporter and I know why talking about climate change makes local TV news nervous” →
“They avoid it out of a fear of getting harassed, getting the facts wrong and losing the ratings war. For the health, safety and well-being of our local communities, it’s critical for all of us to understand the problem and how to fix it.”
Axios / Sara Fischer
Axel Springer and OpenAI strike a deal for “real-time news” for ChatGPT →
“ChatGPT users will receive summaries of select global news content from Axel Springer’s media brands in response to certain user prompts, including content that is paywalled. ChatGPT’s answers will include attribution and links to the full articles that the content is pulled from.”
