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Monday, July 22, 2019
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By running unwitting PR for Jeffrey Epstein, Forbes shows the risks of a news outlet thinking like a tech platformIf journalists want to criticize the anything-goes ethos of Facebook, it’s only fair to note when news organizations’ hunger for scale leads them down the same problematic path. By Joshua Benton. |
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Can’t read just one: Slate’s daily advice columns are strange, funny, deep, and increasingly a major traffic driver for the site“We probably won’t do twincest again.” By Laura Hazard Owen. |
What We’re Reading
Bloomberg / Gerry Smith
BuzzFeed is finally recognizing its union, after a walkout and months of negotiations →
“Despite four months of negotiations, employees and management hadn't agreed on which workers should be eligible to be part of the new bargaining unit — a question that unions and companies frequently spar over.”
Wall Street Journal / Emily Glazer and Patience Haggin
Google’s campaign advertising transparency tool…has some problems →
“Nearly a year later, the search giant's archive of political ads is fraught with errors and delays, according to campaigns' digital staffers and political consultants. The database, the Google Transparency Report, doesn't always record political ads bought with Google's ad tools and in some instances hasn't updated for weeks at a time, they say…. Google's database has logged more than 115,000 ads.”
The Washington Post / Cat Zakrzewski
Knight Foundation is investing $50 million into university research centers for tech and democracy →
“What we don't have strangely enough is a really dispassionate collection of data — long-term data — about what happens in a democratic republic when you don't have consistently reliable information,” [Knight president Alberto] Ibargüen said in an interview.”
Rolling Stone / Tim Ingham
A timeline of how Spotify has changed its mind on content since 2011 →
Remember Spotify Running? Its short-form video content?
The Daily Beast / Lloyd Grove
How The New York Times is using an “obits diversity analysis tool” →
“It was designed last year by in-house software engineers along with the paper's audience-engagement team ‘to achieve a yearly 30% representation of women by March 2019,’ according to the internal tech site. The authors recommend: ‘Now how about Part II—a tool that measures people of color in our obits, so we can see how we're doing and make goals for improvements.'”
Columbia Journalism Review / Steve Waldman
Report for America’s cofounder responds to CJR’s deep analysis of the initiative →
“‘Balance concerns for scale with ability to demonstrate impact’: On the one hand, if we spent more money per corps member, we could have extra help to do things like community outreach. On the other hand, that would mean we'd support fewer reporters… Obviously we are trying to find the right balance. But, if we must choose, should we favor fielding more reporters or investing in community outreach?” (Here was the original analysis, from May.)
Chicago Tribune / Eric Zorn
10 years after Advance Publications stopped printing the Ann Arbor News, “No News is bad news” →
“In 2013, AnnArbor.com, with a print circulation of about 27,000, reclaimed the Ann Arbor News name and folded its stand-alone website into MLive.com, a statewide news service. The Alliance for Audited Media now estimates that the average circulation of the vestigial biweekly is 16,195. That 64% drop since 2009 is larger than the 37% overall drop in newspaper print circulation in roughly the same time frame reported earlier this month by the Pew Research Center.”
Press Gazette / Freddy Mayhew
The UK government launches a £2 million innovation fund for journalism →
“Dame Frances Cairncross called for the creation of an Institute for Public Interest News as one of her nine recommendations help save the news industry. She said she is ‘delighted’ her idea is being piloted.”
The Guardian / 17 co-signers
An open letter to UK secretaries about the abuse of defamation law against journalists →
“Fears have been expressed in the UK and abroad, and by the European parliament that this legal tactic was being deployed against the murdered Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who at the time of her death in October 2017 was subject to 42 civil libel suits against her, many of which were brought through UK-based law firms, acting for foreign banks and wealthy individuals. Twenty-seven of these vexatious lawsuits remain open more than 21 months after her assassination.”