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Wednesday, July 17, 2019
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Attempting a meta-network for local news, Facebook announces community-building granteesRecipients include 100 Days in Appalachia, Block Club Chicago, Chalkbeat, and the Tyler Loop, among others. By Christine Schmidt. |
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Apple might be getting into the podcast-making business. Is its reign as the industry’s benevolent overlord coming to an end?“There remains a lot we don’t know, and I have strong feeling we’re witnessing a little shard of a much larger, complicated soul-searching process.” By Nicholas Quah. |
What We’re Reading
The New York Times / Jacey Fortin
When “good stories” happen for bad reasons →
“Stories like these typically pop up on social media, where they spread quickly and catch the attention of news organizations and spread even farther…Sweet stories like these, the critics say, hide an underlying rot. Individual acts of kindness don't solve systemic problems — in fact, they can do harm by glossing over deeper issues.”
The New York Times / John Markoff
But does your news organization have a brain-implant strategy →
“Neuralink described a ‘sewing machine-like’ robot that can implant ultrathin threads deep into the brain…The company claims the system will eventually be capable of reading and writing vast amounts of information.” I can see the 2024 Medium post now: “How Old Media is Blowing It On Neural Media.”
University of British Columbia
Canada is getting its own journalism innovation lab →
“The $2.5m Partnership Grant…will support the development of the Global Journalism Innovation Lab/Lab Mondial d'Innovation en Journalisme, with hubs across Canada and internationally…The six-year project is led by University of British Columbia School of Journalism associate professors Alfred Hermida and Mary Lynn Young.” Also including familiar-to-Nieman-Lab researchers like Candis Callison, Heidi Tworek, and Gord Pennycook.
Digiday / Kerry Flynn
Twitter has a new/old publisher tool for live video clipping →
“Like SnappyTV” — its predecessor product, which Twitter acquired back in 2014 — “LiveCut helps publishers increase the distribution of their videos and directly monetize them through Twitter Amplify. PBS NewsHour was one of the five publishers in the alpha test of LiveCut.”
BuzzFeed / Mark Di Stefano
The Athletic is still hiring every sports reporter alive →
Now including some top soccer (er, football) writers in the U.K.: “The incredible hiring spree has been described as ‘setting off a bomb’ in the industry.”
The Guardian / David Smith
Craig Newmark on Facebook, supporting journalism, and bird seed →
“I have no idea what [Mark Zuckerberg’s] done personally. I focus on how we all work on this together. It's all hands on deck. People need to enlist much like in the US after the attack [on Pearl Harbor] in December of 1941, much like people during the Battle of Britain. There are foreign adversaries who've come out, published their public statements and say that they're at war with us.”
NPR / Keith Woods
Call racism racism? Here’s a vote for “no” →
“Journalism may not have come honorably to the conclusion that dispassionate distance is a virtue. But that’s the fragile line that separates the profession from the rancid, institution-debasing cesspool that is today’s politics….Were we to use my moral standards, the line for calling people and words racist in this country would have been crossed decades ago. But that’s not what journalists do. We report and interview and attribute.”
WAN-IFRA / Brian Veseling
Table Stakes is moving to Europe →
“WAN-IFRA and the Google News Initiative (GNI) have launched Table Stakes Europe…applications are already being accepted (the deadline to apply is 1 September)…’No one has figured out the answer going forward. But what it does is put local enterprises on a hopeful path toward the future that’s grounded in the own experienced reality of making progress and transformation.'”
Jefferson Public Radio / April Ehrlich
After purchasing two local papers from Gatehouse, a media businessman partners with a Sinclair-owned TV station →
“All of this — the thinning newsrooms, the video emphasis, and the out-of-state consultants and contributors — is a big change for a newspaper that was the first in Oregon to win a Pulitzer Prize for its local investigative journalism in 1934.”
Columbia Journalism Review / Jon Allsop
In 889 pages’ worth of texts, Puerto Rico’s governor disparaged reporters and hurricane victims →
“According to El Nuevo Día's Dennis Costa, officials outlined efforts ‘to manipulate public narrative through mass media, influence public polls to favor the administration, and operate a “troll network” to discredit negative press coverage.'”