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Monday, July 8, 2019
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Not just one foundation, not just one newsroom: How the Colorado Media Project is trying to rebuild a local news ecosystem“This didn't take a ton of capital. It just took a lot of willingness on the part of a lot of different folks to collectively figure out what we should do, where are the gaps, and how we can fill them.” By Christine Schmidt. |
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Can a squat wooden disk lead to better civic conversations and smarter journalism? Cortico has $10 million to try it out“The source of power is the people in the community volunteering to foster these sorts of conversations and have them be accessed by trusted local media partners.” By Christine Schmidt. |
What We’re Reading
KTVU / Duncan Sinfield
Klay Thompson released some newspaper-themed sneakers yesterday →
“The one-of-a-kind KT4’s are filled with newspaper-style print, including clippings of Thompson’s amazing feats on the court in both English and Chinese…Priced at $179.99, the [150 U.S. pairs of] shoes come with a one-year subscription to any Bay Area News Group paper. The remaining 10,000 pairs will be sold exclusively in China at a retail price of $390.”
WGBH
The New England Center for Investigative Reporting is merging with WGBH Boston →
“The joining together of the two organizations follows more than four years of close collaboration, producing stories that changed public policy and earned numerous awards, including a recent National Edward R. Murrow Award for best Investigative Series in the large market radio category.”
ProPublica
ProPublica is opening one spot for a Youngstown, Ohio reporter in its Local Reporting Network →
“Applications are due by July 22. The news organization we select will receive funding for the salary and benefits of a full-time reporter through June 2020.”
The Information / Jessica Toonkel
At Sun Valley, plenty of sellers but few buyers in media →
“Then there are the upstart media companies, where a long-awaited consolidation has barely begun. While Mic got swallowed up, most of the new-media firms to raise venture backing in recent years are still independent. These include BuzzFeed, which had another round of layoffs earlier this year, and Vice, which also had layoffs and raised a new round of financing.”
Vox / Rani Molla
Why you have to keep logging in to read news on your phone →
“In the current system, for example, in order for a New York Times subscriber to be able click on Facebook to access a New York Times article, Facebook would need to be able to see that the reader is logged in to the paper on their regular browser. But since Facebook opts not to use a regular browser and therefore doesn't share the same store of local user data as the browser, that information is unavailable to it.”
The New York Times / Marc Tracy
As the world heats up, the climate for climate change news is changing too →
“We have good research that in amping up the threat without actually providing people with things they can do, you end up with fatalism, despair, depression, a sense of paralysis, or a sense of dismissiveness and denial.” Or: “You're still not talking about it like it's an emergency, and that's what we have to do now: Be honest to the public about the full-scale changes we have to make.”
Jonathan Stray / Digital Journalism
Why hasn't AI made a bigger impact on investigative journalism yet? →
“Journalism problems are often unique to a particular story, which means that training data is not readily available…Much of the data relevant to a story is not publicly accessible but in the hands of governments and private entities…Journalistic inference requires very high accuracy, or extensive manual checking, to avoid the risk of libel. The factors that make some set of facts ‘newsworthy’ are deeply sociopolitical and therefore difficult to encode computationally.”
The Washington Post / Margaret Sullivan
"Democracy…is about to die in Youngstown" with the closing of the local newspaper →
“One Vindicator journalist told me it would be telling to have a show of hands at the mournful community meeting: How many of the bereft were actual subscribers?”
The Cut / Rebecca Traister
Politics is changing. Why aren't the pundits who cover it? →
“This is the suffocatingly grim reality: Even after the peeling off of a layer of the political media's most prominent interlocutors during #MeToo — including Charlie Rose, Mark Halperin, Bill O'Reilly and Matt Lauer —television coverage of the 2020 election is still being led by men who have sketchy histories around gender and power.”
The Verge / Jacob Kastrenakes
Mozilla teases $5-per-month ad-free news subscription →
“Mozilla appears to be working with Scroll, a news subscription startup, to offer this service.”
Nieman Lab / Joshua Benton
In Youngstown, an American city loses its only daily newspaper — and it won’t be the last →
"GateHouse exists in its current form for one reason: to buy up newspapers. It's spent more than $1 billion doing so in the past five years; it's the sort of company that gets called 'omnivorous' in headlines. And yet it apparently wasn't interested in adding The Vindicator to its stable."
Digiday / Lucinda Southern
“Newsletters as puzzle pieces”: How The Economist uses email to reduce subscriber churn →
“Revamping the daily and weekly newsletters has meant that the proportion of web traffic via newsletters has more than doubled in the past year, according to the publisher. For the first time in May, referral traffic from its newsletters overtook referral traffic from Twitter.”
Chicago Sun-Times / Mitchell Armentrout
"An essential force in American history," the Chicago Defender is stopping print publication →
"Wednesday marks the final physical edition from the Defender's Bronzeville newsroom, its executives announced…'Under the print version, we could not reach people where they live and work,' said Hiram E. Jackson, CEO of Real Times Media, the Detroit-based black newspaper chain that bought the Defender in 2003."
New York Times / Motoko Rich
This reporter asks a lot of questions. In Japan, that makes her unusual. →
“Ms. Mochizuki is unusual in that she is a reporter covering the Tokyo metropolitan region who attends news conferences held by the central government. But she also stands apart as a vocal woman in the male-dominated world of Japanese politics. ‘She is attacking these male bonds,’ said Kaori Hayashi, a professor of sociology and media studies at the University of Tokyo. Ms. Mochizuki violates ‘what they have understood of what journalists should do at a press conference,’ she said.”