Nieman Lab: The Daily Digest

Why news outlets are putting their podcasts on YouTube

ESPN, NPR, and Slate are experimenting with watchable podcasts. By Sarah Scire.
What We’re Reading
Gizmodo / Mack DeGeurin
The news app Artifact has added “reputation scores” and Reddit-inspired upvotes →
Artifact, the personalized news sharing app founded by Instagram’s co-founders, also added comments and discussion on articles.
The New Yorker / Melissa del Bosque
The covert mission to solve a Mexican journalist’s murder →
“The murders of [Miroslava Breach] and [Javier Valdez Cárdenas] and the exile of [Patricia Mayorga] had a chilling effect on colleagues left behind. Marcela Turati, one of the country’s most renowned investigative journalists and editors, told me that it felt as though journalism itself was dying in Mexico.”
Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism / Gretel Kahn
Will AI-generated images create a new crisis for fact-checkers? Experts are not so sure →
“Visual disinformation is a particular concern since images are especially compelling and they can have a strong emotive impact on audiences’ perceptions … ‘You can talk to a person for an hour and give him 20 arguments for one thing, but if you show him an image that makes sense to him, it is going to be very difficult to convince him that’s not true.’”
Washington Post / Taylor Lorenz
Substack unveils Notes, the product that got it banned from Twitter →
“Notes has one advantage those others did not: Substack already is being used by many big names in media, entertainment and politics.”
Wall Street Journal / Vivian Salama
U.S. deems WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich “wrongfully detained” by Russia →
“His case now shifts to a State Department section known as the Office of the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs, which is focused on negotiating for the release of hostages and other Americans classified as wrongfully detained in foreign countries.”
Rest of World / Viola Zhou
Elon Musk is using Wikipedia to determine which media outlets to label “government funded” →
“Musk decided to change NPR’s ‘state-affiliated media’ label to a newly-created ‘Government Funded Media’ label and also stuck the label on the BBC, PBS, and VOA.” (NPR has said it will not tweet until the false label is removed.)
Axios / Sophia Cai
Biden administration wants to give influencers their own briefing room in the White House →
“We’re trying to reach young people, but also moms who use different platforms to get information and climate activists and people whose main way of getting information is digital.”
New York Times / Neil Genzlinger
Al Jaffee, cartoonist who gave a satirical double-take on the news for Mad Magazine, dies at 102 →
“When the page was folded in thirds, however, both illustration and text were transformed into something entirely different and unexpected, often with a liberal-leaning or authority-defying message … The fold-in from the Nov. 2001 issue asked, ‘What mind-altering experience is leaving more and more people out of touch with reality?’ The unfolded illustration showed a crowd of people popping and snorting various substances. But when folded, the image transformed into the Fox News anchor desk.”
Poynter / Angela Fu
What’s next for Salt Lake Tribune chair Paul Huntsman? A new local weekly in SoCal →
“Called The Coronado News, the weekly launched at the end of January and is delivered for free to 9,500 of the city’s residents and businesses. The News’ reporting is also free to read on its website.” (The resort town already has two other news outlets, including the 111-year-old weekly Coronado Eagle & Journal and digital outlet Coronado Times, both locally owned.)
NPR / David Folkenflik
A Fox News host repeatedly proposed an hour-long special debunking myths about the 2020 election. It never aired. →
“[Bret] Baier told colleagues he thought the hour-long treatment would be an important way to show Fox’s audience that it was taking their concerns seriously while presenting them with the facts about the election.”
The Verge / Adi Robertson
Hashtags are everything on Mastodon — why not give them a home? →
“Back on Twitter, I kept several columns of search terms open — some for serious topics I was covering, some for personal interests like my favorite games, all of them a potential gateway to an interesting new corner of the service. Mastodon deliberately disallows plaintext search, and despite some attempts to devise an opt-in system for it, the main alternative so far is hashtags.”