Category: Journalism

  • A photographer visited more than 100 newspapers in rural Kansas – Poynter

    A photographer visited more than 100 newspapers in rural Kansas - Poynter

    A photographer visited more than 100 newspapers in rural Kansas – Poynter

    Jeremiah Ariaz was looking for signs of democracy.

    via Poynter: https://www.poynter.org/business-work/2023/jeremiah-ariaz-photographer-newspapers-kansas/

    Leading up to the 2020 presidential election, photographer Jeremiah Ariaz wanted to make images that showed what democracy looked like in rural America. So he traveled across the country, from swing state to swing state. He visited campaign offices, main streets, protest sites and sometimes, newspapers.

  • Journalists report working hundreds of hours of unpaid overtime at Gannett papers – Poynter

    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. – Study Hall

    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.
  • Unraveling the Protest Paradigm – Columbia Journalism Review

    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.
  • 11 Journalists on Covering the Capitol Siege: ‘This Could Get Ugly’ – The New York Times

    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.
  • The Groundbreaking Honesty of Joe Sacco’s Comics Journalism | The Nation

    https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/joe-sacco-paying-land-review/
    That honesty is a crucial part of Sacco’s decades-long project. Whether covering the lives of Palestinians in the occupied territories, Bosniaks and Serbs in the former Yugoslavia, or the Dene, he seeks out difficult and painful stories and tells tales of war and oppression that many people may not want to hear. Sacco’s oeuvre is built on using words, images, and a potent combination of the two to make visceral the realities of historical trauma. As Hillary Chute wrote in her 2016 book, Disaster Drawn, his work “is about an ethics of attention, not about producing the news.” And as a white Western man, he’s keenly aware of the power his attention holds.
  • Is Substack the Media Future We Want? | The New Yorker

    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.”
  • Out of Nowhere – Columbia Journalism Review

    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 – Poynter

    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.
  • As election looms, a network of mysterious ‘pink slime’ local news outlets nearly triples in size – Columbia Journalism Review

    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.
  • How Can the Press Best Serve a Democratic Society? | The New Yorker

    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.
  • Spies, Lies, and Stonewalling: What It’s Like to Report on Facebook – Columbia Journalism Review

    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.
  • Opinion | A Reckoning Over Objectivity, Led by Black Journalists – The New York Times

    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.
  • Big Tech Has Crushed the News Business. That’s About to Change. – The New York Times

    News organizations have long hoped that tech platforms would pay them for news. Now regulators abroad are moving to make that happen.
  • Australia Moves to Force Google and Facebook to Compensate Media Outlets – The New York Times

    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.
  • The Fate of the News in the Age of the Coronavirus | The New Yorker

    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?
  • Bail Out Journalists. Let Newspaper Chains Die. – The New York Times

    The coronavirus is likely to hasten the end of advertising-driven media, our columnist writes. And government should not rescue it.
  • The 2020 Election Will Be a War of Disinformation – The Atlantic

    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
  • What Happens When the News Is Gone? | The New Yorker

    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.
  • Worried Reporters Make a Plea: Please Buy Our Paper – The New York Times

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