Journalists report working hundreds of hours of unpaid overtime at Gannett papers

In the tweet that started the debate, Arizona Republic consumer protection reporter Rebekah Sanders wrote that she had worked hundreds of hours of unpaid overtime at the paper early in her career because she had been told she needed to “pay (her) dues.”

The COVID Reporters Are Not Okay. Extremely Not Okay.

An underprepared industry is losing a generation of journalists to despair, trauma, and moral injury as they cover the story of a lifetime.

https://www.cjr.org/criticism/protest-journalism-black-lives-matter-floyd.php

Unraveling the protest paradigm requires radically repairing journalism’s foundations—work that includes re-evaluating our foundations and interrogating traditional ideas of who we grant legitimacy to, and why. Police reports are made readily available, but they don’t tend to humanize Black people. We don’t need more reckonings, or explainers of how racism works; we can’t continue to debate if racism is a real problem. Find Black advocates, activists, community members and leaders in your community, and give them a voice in your coverage.

The journalists ended up chronicling a siege that underscored the fragility of American democracy. Many did their jobs a few feet from drawn weapons. Others faced the wrath of pro-Trump agitators with a grudge against the news media.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/01/04/is-substack-the-media-future-we-want

The subscription-based news industry, the founders speculated, could someday “be much larger than the newspaper business ever was, much like the ride-hailing industry in San Francisco is bigger than the taxi industry was before Lyft and Uber.” These days, Substack’s founders, investors, and marketing materials all have different ways of describing the startup’s mission. Depending on which source you consult, Substack might be “reinventing publishing,” “pioneering a new ‘business model for culture,’ ” or “attempting to build an alternative media economy that gives journalists autonomy.” It is “writers firing their old business model” or “a better future for news.” Substack’s C.E.O., Chris Best, has said that the company’s intention is “to make it so that you could type into this box, and if the things you type are good, you’re going to get rich.” Hamish McKenzie, one of Substack’s co-founders, told me that he sees the company as an alternative to social-media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. “We started Substack because we were fed up about the effects of the social-media diet,” McKenzie said. Substack’s home page now reads, “Take back your mind.”

https://www.cjr.org/special_report/out-of-nowhere.php

Bowie, of the Baltimore Sun, began adjusting to working from home. It was feasible only because of the strong relationships she’d developed with editors over three decades in the newsroom. “You can sort of read them through Slack channels and email in a way that if I was a new reporter entering the newsroom it would be very, very difficult,” she told me. Early in the year, the Sun’s staff had shared a Pulitzer Prize for a series of investigations into allegations of corruption and fraud committed by Catherine Pugh, the former mayor. Bowie believes that work would have been impossible as a remote project. “There were so many moments during those months where the discussions in the newsroom resulted in better stories coming out, because we were all asking each other questions all the time,” she said. “I know for a fact that our reporting would not have been as good if we couldn’t have been together in that room.”

It’s time to hold editors accountable for harassed news workers

Jessie Opoien, opinion editor for The (Madison, Wisconsin) Capital Times, broke journalism convention by sharing the offensive message. That same convention asks news workers to ignore slurs and threats, promote their work on social media, and focus on their assignments instead of their detractors. That’s a prescription for PTSD, especially for women journalists.

https://www.cjr.org/analysis/as-election-looms-a-network-of-mysterious-pink-slime-local-news-outlets-nearly-triples-in-size.php

THE RUN-UP TO THE 2020 November elections in the US has produced new networks of shadowy, politically backed “local news websites” designed to promote partisan talking points and collect user data. In December 2019, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism reported on an intricately linked network of 450 sites purporting to be local or business news publications. New research from the Tow Center shows the size of that network has increased almost threefold over the course of 2020, to over 1,200 sites.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-future-of-democracy/how-can-the-press-best-serve-democracy

Lippman lamented the tendency of the press to act as “a searchlight that moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of darkness into vision.” He believed that the searchlight needed to pause long enough to illuminate issues of vital importance to the public. The Hutchins Commission had similar concerns: “Too much of the regular output of the press consists of a miscellaneous succession of stories and images which have no relation to the typical lives of real people anywhere. Too often the result is meaninglessness, flatness, distortion, and the perpetuation of misunderstanding among widely scattered groups whose only contact is through these media.” Today, in the age of digital journalism, the pressures of velocity and volume are even more powerful, particularly for media organizations which depend on advertising; even subscription-oriented businesses are not immune, since they must attract new readers and optimize their editorial content for search engines and social-media sharing. Democracy may well depend on finding a sustainable business model for a slower, more deliberative form of news. If “objectivity” has lost its usefulness as a shorthand for journalism’s aspirations, and if the meaning of “moral clarity” is unclear, then perhaps quality, rigor, and depth could be worthy ideals.

https://www.cjr.org/special_report/reporting-on-facebook.php

With the knowledge that a company that has built a globe-spanning surveillance apparatus might always be watching, reporters and sources take tremendous precautions. Any Facebook-issued device, or even a phone with the Facebook app installed, could be vulnerable to the company’s internal investigators. If a source has friended a reporter on a social network or merely looked up their profile on a company computer, Facebook can find out. It can potentially tap location data to see if a reporter and a source appear to be in the same place at the same time.

What’s different, in this moment, is that the editors of our country’s most esteemed outlets no longer hold a monopoly on publishing power.

News organizations have long hoped that tech platforms would pay them for news. Now regulators abroad are moving to make that happen.

The Australian government said on Monday that Google and Facebook would have to pay media outlets for news content in the country, part of an emerging global effort to rescue local publishers by moving to compel tech giants to share their advertising revenue.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-communications/the-fate-of-the-news-in-the-age-of-the-coronavirus

Can a fragile media ecosystem survive the pandemic?

The coronavirus is likely to hasten the end of advertising-driven media, our columnist writes. And government should not rescue it.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-2020-disinformation-war/605530/

How new technologies and techniques pioneered by dictators will shape the 2020 election

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-future-of-democracy/what-happens-when-the-news-is-gone

In Jones County, North Carolina, and many other places around the country, local journalism has just about dried up.

As hedge funds take a greater role in newspaper chains, journalists at the Chicago Tribune and elsewhere are sending out an S.O.S.