Since buying the struggling daily from its hedge-fund ownership group for an undisclosed sum in 2016, Mr. Huntsman has sometimes found himself at odds with family members and the local establishment his ancestors helped shape. He has also been challenged by the task of keeping the paper alive at a time when small newspapers are dying out and big dailies with national followings are growing more dominant.
But Twenty Lake Holdings is not just another commercial real estate investor. It is a subsidiary of Alden Global Capital, the New York City hedge fund that backed the purchase of and dramatic cost-cutting at more than 100 newspapers — causing more than 1,000 lost jobs.
The conventional wisdom used to be that digital natives were the only journalism businesses that would thrive. But big layoffs at BuzzFeed and HuffPost show that the Web’s dominant companies can’t be trusted to build a news business on.
The conventional wisdom used to be that digital natives were the only journalism businesses that would thrive. But big layoffs at BuzzFeed and HuffPost show that the Web’s dominant companies can’t be trusted to build a news business on.
This week, as a long-predicted collapse seemed to hit digital media, we saw a few of the tried-and-true ways managers use to explain to employees why they’re laying them off. BuzzFeed chose the language of corporation-as-family, with founder Jonah Per
THIS WEEK, AS A LONG-PREDICTED collapse seemed to hit digital media, we saw a few of the tried-and-true ways managers use to explain to employees why they’re laying them off.
Since then, freelancers have increasingly filled the void. These include both Western journalists working in conflict zones around the world, as well as local journalists working in their own non-Western countries.
Local newspapers like The Fresno Bee have long been an endangered institution in America, and that was before California Rep. Devin Nunes began waging a public campaign against his hometown paper. Zach Baron spent time with the reporters fighting to keep news alive in an age when the forces they cover are working equally hard to destroy them.
The White House Correspondents’ Dinner happened this weekend and mostly no one cared, rightly, until some journalists thought it was a good idea to criticize a comedian for telling the truth, which is what both comedians and journalists are supposed to do.
From person-to-person coaching and intensive hands-on seminars to interactive online courses and media reporting, Poynter helps journalists sharpen skills and elevate storytelling throughout their careers.
The 14 Pulitzer prizes for American journalism can be a form of tea leaves for the state of the industry. The winners and finalists offer a highly imperfect view of who’s doing notable work. It is often said that you have to be both good and lucky to win one of the prizes. Here are a few observations:
From person-to-person coaching and intensive hands-on seminars to interactive online courses and media reporting, Poynter helps journalists sharpen skills and elevate storytelling throughout their careers.
The 14 Pulitzer prizes for American journalism can be a form of tea leaves for the state of the industry. The winners and finalists offer a highly imperfect view of who’s doing notable work. It is often said that you have to be both good and lucky to win one of the prizes. Here are a few observations:
Here’s the problem: No matter how hard Google and Facebook try to help publishers, they will do more to hurt them, because that’s the way they’re supposed to work. They’re built to eviscerate publishers.
This has been my life for nearly two months. In January, after the breaking-newsiest year in recent memory, I decided to travel back in time. I turned off my digital news notifications, unplugged from Twitter and other social networks, and subscribed to home delivery of three print newspapers — The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and my local paper, The San Francisco Chronicle — plus a weekly newsmagazine, The Economist.
Facebook is essentially running a payola scam where you have to pay them if you want your own fans to see your content. If you run a large publishing company and you make a big piece of content that you feel proud of, you put it up on Facebook. From there, their algorithm takes over, with no transparency. So, not only is the website not getting ad revenue they used to get, they have to pay Facebook to push it out to their own subscribers. So, Facebook gets the ad revenue from the eyeballs on the thing they are seeing, and they get revenue from the publisher. It’s like if The New York Times had their own subscriber base, but you had to pay the paperboy for every article you wanted to see.
But the online ad machine is also a vast, opaque and dizzyingly complex contraption with underappreciated capacity for misuse — one that collects and constantly profiles data about our behavior, creates incentives to monetize our most private desires, and frequently unleashes loopholes that the shadiest of people are only too happy to exploit.
From person-to-person coaching and intensive hands-on seminars to interactive online courses and media reporting, Poynter helps journalists sharpen skills and elevate storytelling throughout their careers.
The site was an early example of amateur journalism online, but it will dissolve its self-publishing platform in an attempt to minimize unverified stories.
The decision was rooted as much in a move to declutter the site as in Ms. Polgreen’s desire to focus on quality reporting and minimize unvetted stories at a time when there is so much misinformation online.
For Facebook, journalism has been a pain in the neck from day one. Now, bogged down with the insoluble problems of fake news and bad PR, it’s clear that Facebook will gradually pull the plug on news. Publishers should stop whining and move on.
