Category: Journalism

All that has come to pass, more or less. Everyone is online all the time, and just about everyone seems interested in, if not obsessed by, national and world happenings. But the traditional media that Mr. Fidler was championing do not receive much benefit. After decades of decline, their collapse seems to be accelerating.

The layoffs and cutbacks. The pandemic was brutal, but job cuts eased up a bit in the last two years. They’re back up again now, and hundreds of workers in local news have lost their jobs this year. Gannett, for example, has shut down several printing plants, and Lee Enterprises has furloughed its staff, held layoffs and reduced print days at many of its papers. A reporter at The Buffalo News recently noted that Lee shed more than 1,000 jobs in the past year

Even in the long-fractious relationship between publishers and tech platforms, the latest rift stands out — and the consequences for the news industry are stark.

As a newsroom lawyer, I hope journalists resist the urge to pay for a blue check and leave the platform for good. It doesn’t benefit their careers, doesn’t drive traffic to their employers’ websites and opens them up not only to defamation litigation and charges of bias, but also to threats and risk of bodily harm.

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.”

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

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 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.”

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.

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.

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.