Monday, September 30, 2024 |
| The Kansas City Beacon seemed to be a nonprofit news success story. So what’s going wrong in Wichita? By Sophie Culpepper. |
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| In the age of “meeting the reader where they are,” mission-driven news orgs say they’re looking beyond the pageview — plus other lessons from ONA 2024. By Nieman Lab Staff. |
What We’re ReadingNew York Magazine / Noah Shachtman
The secretive alliance between the New York Post and Eric Adams →“The coverage was so slanted that the City Hall bureau chief left in part over disagreements with management over the fawning coverage of Adams — one of a stream of key journalists who eventually departed when top editors seemed to make an exception to its take-no-prisoners policy for him. ‘If you had a good story about the city or about a city politician doing crazy shit, you’d get it in the paper … that changed massively after the paper endorsed Eric Adams.'”Washington Post / Will Sommer
The Onion is pivoting to video … seriously →Former MSNBC anchor Joshua Johnson will anchor the revived Onion News Network. Johnson told the Post: “If ONN is anything, it’s a news organization that is so unaware of its own ridiculousness that it has the confidence of a serial killer.” The New York Times / Michael M. Grynbaum and John Koblin
CBS is experimenting with QR codes to fact check the VP debate →“‘The idea is to give people that second-screen experience,’ said Claudia Milne, the senior vice president for standards and practices at CBS News, adding, ‘The audience can get the takeaway they need in a responsible and smart way.’ … Norah O’Donnell, the anchor of ‘CBS Evening News,’ and Margaret Brennan, who hosts ‘Face the Nation’ will primarily focus on encouraging exchanges between the candidates and enforcing the ground rules, rather than fact-checking.”The Asheville Citizen Times / Asheville Citizen Times Staff
The Asheville Citizen Times launches text message updates in Hurricane Helene’s aftermath →“We know many folks from Florida to North Carolina to Georgia are currently without essential services, like water and power and cell phone service has been an issue for many in the storm’s wake.Current / Tyler Falk
NPR updates newsmag strategy to address audience declines →“Among the changes it’s making on its flagship programs Morning Edition and All Things Considered are including more stories in the 2- to 3-minute range, featuring a broader range of topics and shifting to a livelier and more conversational presentation style … ‘While both Morning Edition and ATC have been the drivers of the public radio audience for more than 40+ years, their style and format have not changed as much as listener behavior has evolved.'”The New York Times / Lulu Garcia-Navarro
John Oliver is still working through the rage →“In terms of the responsibility of journalism, we do have intense fact-checking because we want it to be right. Our stories are aggregations of incredible journalism. So it cannot function without journalism. We recheck it to make sure it’s accurate or that it hasn’t changed. But we’re building this to make jokes. It’s just we want the foundations to be solid, or those jokes fall apart.”The Verge / Emma Roth
California governor vetoes major AI safety bill →“Senator Scott Wiener, the bill’s main author, called the veto ‘a setback for everyone who believes in oversight of massive corporations that are making critical decisions’ affecting public safety and welfare and ‘the future of the planet.’ ‘This veto leaves us with the troubling reality that companies aiming to create an extremely powerful technology face no binding restrictions from U.S. policymakers, particularly given Congress’s continuing paralysis around regulating the tech industry in any meaningful way.'”The New York Times / Nico Grant and David McCabe
How Google defended itself in the ad tech antitrust trial →“Government lawyers have contended that Google is the central player in online display ads, the type of promotion that would be featured alongside an article on a news website. Google’s lawyers have described this as an inaccurate framing of the ad market, saying that display ads come in a variety of formats and can be placed virtually anywhere.”The Desk / Matthew Keys
California governor vetoes bill expanding media access to prisons →“The measure, Senate Bill 254, would have imposed a requirement on all prisons that fall within the purview of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) to permit accredited members of the news media to tour their facilities and to arrange for interviews with inmates upon their request. The bill would also have prevented prisons from recording interviews with representatives of the news media, affording them many of the same protections as attorney-client conversations. And it prevented prisons from retaliating against inmates who agreed to participate in interviews with journalists.”The New York Times / Nicole Sperling
CNN wades back into the documentary business →“When the filmmaker Daniel Roher won an Oscar last year for his feature documentary ‘Navalny,’ about the Russian dissident Aleksei Navalny, it signified a high note for CNN Films … Yet that moment of triumph was met with a harsh reality: Months earlier, CNN announced that it would cut way back on the production of original documentary series and films as part of a companywide cost-reducing measure.”Semafor / Max Tani
Politico will launch a “bespoke AI tool” for Politico Pro subscribers →“Politico and Capitol AI said they’ve formed a partnership to develop a tool for subscribers to Politico Pro … The new AI tool, which will roll out later this year, will aim to help users quickly pull together information from Politico and Politico Pro content to create comprehensive reports on topics instantly.”
Nieman Lab / Fuego
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