The Daily Digest: April 14, 2025
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| Columbia University’s Eunji Kim: “The behavioral data tells us that most American life is not political — so why don’t we study what people are actually consuming every day, however lowbrow it may seem?” By Joshua Benton. |
What we’re reading
The New York Times / Amanda HessBlue Origin launched one giant stunt for womankind →“Blue Origin pitched the flight as a gambit to encourage girls to pursue STEM careers and to, as [Lauren Sánchez] put it in an Elle cover story on the trip, inspire ‘the next generation of explorers.’ But the flight was recreational, and its passengers [including the journalist Gayle King] are not space professionals but space tourists. Their central mission was to experience weightlessness, view the Earth from above, and livestream it. They are like payload specialists with a specialty in marketing private rockets. If the flight proves anything, it is that women are now free to enjoy capitalism’s most decadent spoils alongside the world’s wealthiest men.”
AP News / David BauderDespite a court order, White House bars AP from Oval Office event →“A reporter and photographer from The Associated Press were barred from an Oval Office news conference on Monday with President Donald Trump and his counterpart from El Salvador, Nayib Bukele…The extent of AP’s future access remains uncertain, even with the court decision. Until being blocked by Trump, AP has traditionally always had a reporter and photographer among the small group of journalists invited into the Oval Office. [U.S. District Judge Trevor N. McFadden] did not order that to be restored, only that no news organization should be shut out because the president objects to its news decisions.”
The New York Times / Lizzie DeardenUk laws are not “fit for social media age,” says report into summer riots →“In a report looking into the riots, a parliamentary committee said a lack of information from the authorities after the attack ‘created a vacuum where misinformation was able to grow.’ The report blamed decades-old British laws, aimed at preventing jury bias, that stopped the police from correcting false claims. By the time the police announced the suspect was British-born, those false claims had reached millions.”
Grist / Kate Yoder and Ayurella Horn-MullerMillions of Americans don’t speak English. Now they won’t be warned before weather disasters. →“The NWS has indefinitely suspended its automated language translations because its contract with [AI translation service] Lilt has lapsed, according to an April 1 administrative message issued by the agency. The sudden change has left experts concerned for the nearly 71 million people in the U.S. who speak a language other than English at home. As climate change supercharges calamities like hurricanes, heat waves, and floods, the stakes have never been higher — or deadlier.”
Feed Me / Emily SundbergJake Sherman on co-founding Punchbowl News, going niche, and why news still breaks on Twitter →“It’s difficult to become a stand alone entity in a large newsroom. We elevate our talent and want them to become huge. We have nine or so reporters, all of whom kick ass on their beats. We let them do their thing and try to stay out of their way. We are looking for new ways to give them bigger and better platforms and I think you’ll see some of that happen very soon with us. We also have a relatively flat decision-making process. So if someone has an idea, we try to let them execute on that pretty quickly. That doesn’t happen at large news companies.”
The New Yorker / Hanif AbdurraqibThe face of the devastated sports fan →“It isn’t funny, exactly, though I would be lying if I said that I didn’t take some delight in these low-stakes disappointments. There is beauty for me in the sports fan’s moments of grief, and there is also, to some degree, relief. It is but for the grace of God that I am not the fan in question, two hands on his head, elbows out, sinking into my own universe of pain. It is but for the grace of God that I am not the lone individual sitting in a sea of standing, cheering fans from an opposing team, a camera zoomed in on me, friends texting to tell me that they saw me on television, albeit not in my finest hour.”
The New York Times / Katie Robertson and Jessica TestaWho wants to run Vanity Fair? Everyone? Anyone? →“You could cosplay a 1990s or aughts E.I.C. for a hot minute in your mind,” [Janice Min of The Ankler] said. “But then for talented editors, reality sets in. The fun parts of being a top editor are harder now to achieve in legacy media without a mandate to shake things up.”
Semafor / Max TaniHow Bloomberg — and “Walter Bloomberg” — drove markets and headlines →“Though [editor Reto] Gregori was too polite to point it out, Bloomberg’s main rivals — the financial broadcaster CNBC and the global wire service Reuters, which picked up the CNBC report, in an ouroboros of aggregation — had fallen for a ‘Walter Bloomberg’ post. The post, shared around 10 a.m. on Monday, claimed, apparently out of thin air, that Trump would pause the tariffs that had just crushed global markets. The fracas sparked some $2.5 trillion worth of market moves, as investors reacted to what they (or some automatic models) assumed was a genuine Bloomberg scoop.”
Columbia Journalism Review / John Schwartz How I’m teaching my students to report when scientific sources are afraid to talk →“The fear about speaking openly is not limited to hard sciences. Here in Texas, the legislature has banned diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, in hiring and admissions at the college level, and vocal members of the legislature want to extend that ban into classroom discussion of these topics.”
The Hill / Sarah FortinskyTrump says CBS should lose license after “60 Minutes” segments on Ukraine, Greenland →“President Trump railed against CBS on Sunday night, saying the network should lose its broadcast license after ‘60 Minutes’ aired segments on Ukraine and Greenland that the president said cast him in a negative light…Trump sued CBS News in October over a ‘60 Minutes’ interview with his campaign opponent, former Vice President Kamala Harris, that aired shortly before the 2024 presidential election. In the lawsuit, Trump claimed the network deceptively edited the interview to portray Harris in a positive light. CBS News’ parent company, Paramount, has said the president’s lawsuit is an ‘affront to the First Amendment and is without basis in law or fact,’ claiming Trump is trying to ‘punish a news organization for constitutionally protected editorial judgments they do not like.’”
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