The Weekly Wrap: February 09, 2024
The week our local news reporter published your #1 weekend read
We are so lucky to have Sophie Culpepper as our full-time local news reporter. For several months, she’s been working on a heavily reported series, “‘Haves and have-nots’ in nonprofit news? The view from small news outlets.” This week, we ran it in two parts: You can read part I here and part II here. For this piece, Sophie spoke to dozens of folks from small nonprofit news outlets, associations, and foundations about what they’re seeing in terms of funding. They talked with her extensively and candidly (“bacon-wrapped conferences” is a new fave phrase around our office) and the resulting in-depth pieces should be read by anyone who’s interested in the funding of news in the United States. As our deputy editor Sarah Scire noted, this package has “got everything — resentment, crunched numbers, local stories, and legitimate debate.”
(To those of you who are seeing our weekly newsletter for the first time, welcome! After several months of testing sending a Friday wrap-up to our weekly-only subscribers, we’re now sending it to our daily subscribers as well. It includes an original intro, a list of the stories we published for the week, and a select list of weekend reading from other sources around the internet. If this was forwarded to you, sign up here.)
— Laura Hazard Owen
From the week
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| “All of these are choices that funders make, and they could choose differently if they wanted to.” By Sophie Culpepper. |
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| “There are haves and have-nots in the nonprofit journalism space. And this isn’t right.” By Sophie Culpepper. |
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| Plus: How researchers used OpenAI’s GPT model to take on a month’s worth of “boring” and “rote” work By Sarah Scire. |
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| “We want to meet the people where they’re at, whether that’s churches, neighborhood block clubs, salons, or barber shops.” By Will Fischer. |
Nonprofit news site Chalkbeat gets a shoutout on ABC’s hit show “Abbott Elementary”The New York Times made more than $1 billion from digital subscriptions in 2023“Ineptitude bordering on cruelty”: A roundup of recent news and takes on The MessengerMicrosoft, pushing generative AI in newsrooms, partners with Semafor, CUNY, the Online News Association, and others Highlights from elsewhere
WIRED / Lauren GoodeGoogle prepares for a future where search isn’t king →“Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai still loves the web. He wakes up every morning and reads Techmeme, a news aggregator resplendent with links, accessible only via the web. The web is dynamic and resilient, he says, and can still—with help from a search engine—provide whatever information a person is looking for. Yet the web and its critical search layer are changing.”
Washington Post / Ashley Fetters MaloyThe millennial women leading a new era of fashion journalism →“Reading [former Vanity Fair and The New Yorker editor] Tina Brown’s memoir was so fab because I was like, ‘Ohhh, you just got to give parties and also edit amazing, amazing content.’ There was no, ‘Oh, I have to be an influencer and I have to post from this show and run off somewhere else and then check in on the video and — oh, my Slack’s dinging.'”
What Works / Ellen CleggA funding dispute in Baltimore highlights a challenge over nonprofit news and racial equity →“MLK50, a nonprofit, is not what I’d call an advocacy site. It doesn’t endorse candidates for election. There are guest essays, but the focus is on investigative reporting and explanatory journalism. [Wendi] Thomas and her executive editor, Adrienne Johnson Martin, focus their reporting team on issues like public health, workplace safety, affordable housing and the racial wealth gap. In a city that is 66% Black, Thomas noted, that makes some observers view MLK50 as a niche publication.”
Substack / Richard J. TofelWhat just happened at the LA Times? →“[Patrick Soon-Shiong] couldn’t quite ever decide if he wanted to run the business itself, even while he continued work in other fields, or to have it run by others — and no one else was sufficiently empowered to do so.”
Defector / Tom LeyThere’s nothing innovative about Semafor’s AI partnership →“A good question to ask whenever a media company rolls out a shiny new product is: Which came first, the product or the money? In other words, did Semafor launch Signals—which will now demand time and energy from its staff necessary to pump out a dozen short aggregations every day — because of its inherent journalistic value or because Microsoft came to them and said, Here’s a bag of money. Find some way to make our AI tools look valuable?”
Columbia Journalism Review / Kevin LindDahlia Lithwick on the Colorado case, the election, and the press →“I have not figured out a way to make dark money in politics — the Koch network bringing Clarence Thomas to their events so that high donors get to spend time with him, and him changing his position on the Chevron doctrine — into a story. Or anything other than a one-off, sublimely well-reported story that ProPublica, Politico, The Guardian, and the New York Times are starting to do. Every time one of those publications does a story about democratic subversion and everybody shrugs — because Who cares? — we are failing.”
Semafor / Reed AlbergottiMedium expects to post its first profit this year. Here’s what its CEO has learned about tech and journalism. →“When you bring in a bunch of journalists, it goes against what makes blogging great — that you get to hear personal experiences rather than reported experiences. And the economics just didn’t work at all because it’s expensive to write about things that you don’t already know. That’s why journalists have to be paid a lot to get a high quality piece up. The reporting is really time intensive.” (Laura Hazard Owen wrote about
“the long, complicated, and extremely frustrating history of Medium” in 2019.)
Poynter / Jon GreenbergReporting on people with extreme views? Consider these questions before you decide to cover →Have you looked for national ties? “VoteBeat’s Arizona reporter Jen Fifield followed the money and learned that what looked like a grassroots effort targeting election boards was fueled by national dollars.”
Wired / Kate KnibbsConfessions of an AI clickbait kingpin →“He defends his choices, pointing out that his life has been tougher than that of the average American blogger.”
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