國際傳媒新聞：2019/01/11~2019/01/17
Slate’s new union has a three-year contract
“Our contract is built on principles of equity and diversity. We’ve agreed on annual percentage increases, salary floor increases, severance pay, just cause, paid time off, non-discrimination rules, and a robust commitment to diversity.”
TWITTER / SLATE UNION / JAN 16
Look up to see the coming battle of privacy vs. access
“Terrestrial photojournalism has well-established laws and ethics and guidelines. Aerial journalism wants to have those — the National Press Photographers Association has developed some — but media photography with drones is a unique animal. “
RJI / JUDD SLIVKA / JAN 16
After cutting off post-GDPR ad exchanges in Europe, The New York Times’ ad revenue grew
“The New York Times has 2.9 million paying digital subscribers globally, and 15 percent of the publisher’s digital news subscribers are from Europe. Digital advertising in Europe also remains an important revenue stream for the publisher. The publisher’s reader-revenue business model means it fiercely guards its readers’ user experience. Rather than bombard readers with consent notices or risk a clunky consent user experience, it decided to drop behavioral advertising entirely.”
DIGIDAY / JESSICA DAVIES / JAN 16
No, tech companies shouldn’t fund journalism
“Tying the future of journalism to a tech or social media levy shackles the two even closer together, making a already dangerously codependent relationship even less healthy—and potentially compromising journalism in the eyes of readers. It would also let tech off the hook: one of the main justifications for corporate tax is making companies contribute towards the societies they live in, the infrastructure they rely on, and to offset the harms that they cause.”
COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW / JAMES BALL / JAN 16
Gannett is one of a few serious bidders remaining in an auction of Gizmodo Media Group
So how does this square with Digital First Media’s bid for Gannett? “In a sign of at least some shareholder support for Digital First’s bid or a similar deal, Gannett’s stock jumped 21% on the news Monday, which could make it harder for the company to justify turning its back on the offer and plowing ahead with a purchase of Gizmodo. Gannett shares closed Tuesday at $11.40, down 3.6%.”
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL / CARA LOMBARDO, BENJAMIN MULLIN, AND LUKAS I. ALPERT / JAN 16
What Jill Abramson’s book scandal tells us about publishing’s fact-checking problem
“Abramson’s highly anticipated new book, Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts, is scheduled to publish at the beginning of February, but advance copies have begun to circulate through the media. And more than one of the people featured in the book have disputed the facts and truth of Abramson’s writing about facts and truth.”
VOX / CONSTANCE GRADY / JAN 16
Why are local news organizations slow to invest in neighborhood economics reporting?
“Sometimes nothingness is news. Especially if it continues. News reflects change, and languishing storefronts may signal a problem — for the landlord and for the community. How does a neighborhood newspaper or website grasp it? Rents too high? All retailers are under pressure. Is it Amazon? At some point should a once-healthy but lagging commercial building be replaced by affordable housing or some other modern structure? How much would that cost? Would the nearby bank, likely just a branch of New York or Cincinnati or Charlotte or Toronto, be willing to take on the risk of a loan? Might local people be employed? In other words, what are the economics?”
NORTHWESTERN LOCAL NEWS INITIATIVE / JOE MATHEWSON / JAN 15
How the Financial Times is building brand loyalty among young readers
“The program, which began in the U.K. in 2017, has rolled out to 2,300 schools globally. While around 75 percent of those schools are in the U.K., there are around 100 involved in the U.S. and other schools are participating in countries where English is a second language, like China.”
DIGIDAY / JESSICA DAVIES / JAN 15
Amid the Bezos divorce, The Washington Post tries to sift between the tawdry gossip and the real news
“There has been some effort to figure out what’s the threshold for us to write about this. It’s the first test case, and in the most uncomfortable and salacious territory possible. It’s, like, can’t you just give us a good old-fashioned tax evasion?”
VANITY FAIR / JOE POMPEO / JAN 15
To diversify its audience, Nevada’s KUNR goes bilingual
“Like most other public radio stations, KUNR once offered news only in English. But the contrast between its largely white audience and Reno’s racially diverse population spurred KUNR to start experimenting with multilingual news in early 2017. Hispanics made up 24.6 percent of Reno’s population in July 2017, according to U.S. Census data, whereas only about 5 percent of KUNR’s weekly audience is Latino.”
CURRENT / MIKE JANSSEN / JAN 14
How content-management systems shape the future of media businesses
“The worst thing that a reader can do, we now know, is to consume whatever pops up at the top of a Facebook feed or Google search — the pond scum floating on the surface of the Internet. What we need is a digital-media version of organic food or a local farmers’ market: ethically sourced, sustainably funded, and integrity-certified, all the way from CMS up.”
THE NATION / KYLE CHAYKA / JAN 14
CNN.com’s editor-in-chief’s 2019 resolution for journalists: Earn the public’s trust by showing your work
“In 2019, we [should] go beyond the marketing campaigns of ‘Facts First’ and ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’ and all of that. That’s great. That’s really good stuff. We need to go further now. We need to actually do better about showing our work … Dial up the efforts to be transparent about when we get things wrong or when we change things, why have we done that. I think there’s so much of the journalistic process that audiences don’t understand and we need to lay that bare. I think that will increase the trust.”
RECODE / KARA SWISHER AND ERIC JOHNSON / JAN 14
Behind the scenes of one research team WhatsApp commissioned to fight misinformation
“WhatsApp has also commissioned us and several other research groups to investigate the problem of misinformation on the app and look for alternative ways to address it. Our prior research shows that a game-based inoculation approach can help people develop resistance to online deception.”
THE CONVERSATION / JON ROOZENBEEK, MELISA BASOL, AND SANDER VAN DER LINDEN / JAN 14
CBS News’s election team gets called out by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for its lack of black staff
Kerry Washington also @’d them: “Dear @CBSNews, I am encouraged by the diversity you DID include. But when it comes time to discuss the inevitable role that race and racism will play in the election, who will you turn to for a perspective with nuanced & personal understanding of the African American experience?”
INSIDER / ELLEN CRANLEY / JAN 14
Stephen King gets Maine’s largest daily newspaper to keep regional book reviews — with 100+ new subscribers
“‘Sales pitch? Blackmail?’ Mr. King wrote back. ‘Either way, 71 people have subscribed so far. Are there 29 more Twitterheads out there who want to ante up? Just asking.’”
THE NEW YORK TIMES / SARAH MERVOSH / JAN 14
Der Spiegel’s star reporter made up stories. How can it regain readers’ trust?
“We’re not this know-it-all, authoritative magazine that we sometimes pretend to be.”
THE ATLANTIC / EMILY SCHULTHEIS / JAN 14
A case study of community-funded journalism at The Seattle Times
“You have a lot of journalists who aren’t happy about the idea that government would sponsor journalism, so to have big billionaires’ philanthropic organizations fund us isn’t natural.”
REYNOLDS JOURNALISM INSTITUTE / HANNAH RODRIGUEZ / JAN 11
Vox Media ramps up hiring, but mostly for contractors and freelancers
“This comes after the company agreed to recognize a union of roughly 400 creative professionals employed by the company. It also comes a year after a period of slowing its hiring practices and layoffs.”
THINKNUM / JOSHUA FRUHLINGER / JAN 11
The Washington Post is launching an online opinion section in Arabic
“This online destination will host high-quality translations of Global Opinion columns, editorials and op-eds that are relevant to the Arabic-speaking audience…’The importance of this has become more evident since the murder of our own colleague Jamal Khashoggi, who saw very clearly the need for a forum such as this.’”
THE WASHINGTON POST / JAN 11
What a report from Germany teaches us about investigating algorithms
“Two nonprofits, the Open Knowledge Foundation and Algorithm Watch, initially partnered to collect data. They crowdsourced thousands of personal credit reports from consumers, which were then passed on to and analyzed en masse by investigative journalists.”
COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW / NICHOLAS DIAKOPOULOS / JAN 11
BBC journalists have been told to stop saying “BBC understands”
“A slightly pompous distancing phrase.”
BUZZFEED / MARK DI STEFANO / JAN 11
How the fossil fuel industry got the media to think climate change was debatable
“By demanding ‘balance,’ the industry transformed climate change into a partisan issue.”
WASHINGTON POST / AMY WESTERVELT / JAN 11
