Media

On February 11, news broke that Millennium Films was delaying Bryan Singer’s Red Sonja, which was to begin production this year. This was, on the face of it, a remarkable turn of events. Singer’s Queen biopic, Bohemian Rhapsody, had just been nominated for five Oscars. It performed exceedingly well at the box office, as is […]

What would New York Times CEO Mark Thompson do if he ran Gannett? How much does he attribute the Times’ accumulation of millions of digital subscribers to the journalism produced by its burgeoning newsroom? Does the Times have a role to play in helping local news recover? In this edited Q&A — assembled from my...

Mark Thompson’s nautical and military metaphors have generated some ribbing from others at The New York Times. He once said, early on in his now-six-year tenure as CEO, that the print paper was like the Titanic — “the movie,” he laughs, “which ran another two hours after the ship was hit.” His point — that...

The most famous journalist of all time is also the most famous superhero. For the past three-quarters of a century, with a few exceptions, his alter-ego, Clark Kent, has been working as a reporter for the Daily Planet. In a new DC Comics series, he and Lois Lane, his Pulitzer Prize-winning wife, meet a fiendish […]

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Remember the 2016 election? (Who could forget it.) For many, it felt like a breaking point between journalists and their audiences; neither party in that pairing seemed to be very good at listening at the other. But the fissure between writer and reader had been opening up for some time. “Journalists embarrassed themselves as they...

“Freedom of speech versus freedom of reach.” Pinterest got a positive spate of publicity Thursday as a couple different outlets reported on its policy (“which the company hasn’t previously publicly discussed but which went into effect late last year,” per The Wall Street Journal) of refusing to surface certain “polluted” terms like “vaccine” and “suicide”...

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On February 4, Virginia residents gathered outside the governor’s mansion in Richmond to call for Ralph Northam’s resignation. A racist image from his medical school yearbook page had surfaced on a right-wing news site. Soon, Northam and General Mark Herring, the attorney general, admitted to wearing blackface. National news outlets heralded a “political crisis” in […]

ON THIS WEEK’S EPISODE, CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope and Mathew Ingram, CJR’s chief digital writer discuss The Cairncross Review, a report published in the UK, and the role of tech companies like Google and Facebook on news. They are joined by Josh Young, creator of our trust-based engagement platform, Galley by CJR, who […]

In late 2017, on the shores of southern Bangladesh, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya people completed a grueling march to escape the campaign of rape and murder by Myanmar’s military. As they settled into huts dotting the muddy landscape, journalists from around the world descended on the camps to tell their story. “Can you speak to […]

This week, in a rehearsal room at Molloy College in downtown Manhattan, Xandra Clark sat in a folding chair, one leg tucked under the other, hand on her forehead, deep in thought. The room, fluorescent lit, was mostly empty. Clark, who is 28, had earbuds in; her cell phone was tucked into a pocket. “Most […]

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Maybe it’s because I spend a lot of time around audience engagement teams, but after publishing the first part of my analysis on platform growth, my favorite part was the feedback I got from readers. Before we dive into my next analysis, I wanted to clarify something about one common theme of the responses I...

Ten years in, ProPublica is basically synonymous with “sustainable nonprofit journalism” and “collaborations.” Many news nonprofits use collaborations in part to get their names out there, but ProPublica has gotten how to make the collaboration a two-way street — one that less-resourced (at this point) organizations want to jump on — down to a science....

The dismal factoids in a new report released Thursday by the Women’s Media Center go on and on. And on. While women outnumber men in journalism programs and in colleges, they represent just 41.7 percent of newsroom employees, according to the 2018 diversity survey by the American Society of News Editors. That survey also received...

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Google recently presented a white paper at a digital-security conference in Germany, in which the search giant detailed all the steps it is taking across its various divisions—YouTube, Google News and Google Search—to fight misinformation and disinformation. The company said it is working hard in a number of areas including using quality signals to help […]

On January 4, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press published the latest edition of its Open Government Guide—an indispensable resource for journalists navigating the tricky waters of government access, and a go-to compendium of state-level sunshine laws for 30 years. The guide, which is free and online, provides users with up-to-date statutory and […]

When I met Oliver Schröm at the Berlin offices of Correctiv.org, the investigative journalism non-profit he co-founded in 2014, I was his third interview of the day. It’s been like that, he told me, with a trace of outrage in his voice, since news broke last December that he’s being investigated by prosecutors in Hamburg […]

A squeezed industry, the constant threat of layoffs, a shrinking audience — local news is a tough place to be right now. But sometimes, when everything else feels like it’s falling, teaming up can stretch limited resources a little farther. Collaborations, many argue, will soon be core to the work of local newsrooms — partnering...

Reader revenue, reader revenue, reader revenue. It’s much easier said than done, but these two case studies from Tribune Publishing, the Guardian, and Slate prove that it’s possible. In a report from Digital Content Next and the Lenfest Institute, Matt Skibinski and Rande Price outline the for-profit and nonprofit approaches to increasing readers’ contributions, a...

Text messaging gets overlooked in most local news strategies. Maybe it seems too simplistic. Maybe it feels too personal or intimate. Or maybe it just doesn’t seem like journalism. (Spoiler: It is.) But the list of reasons for newsrooms to consider adding texts to their mix of products is growing. Here are just some of...

On January 25, Mukhtar M. Ibrahim, a reporter at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, announced that he would leave the paper to formally launch the Sahan Journal, a news organization dedicated to covering immigrant communities in his state. (Sahan means “pioneer” in Somali.) A Somali immigrant himself, Ibrahim plans to focus on his community as well as […]

This piece originally appeared in Local Edition, our newsletter following the digital transformation of local news. Want to be part of the conversation? You can subscribe here. 

It took some time, but Jesus Jimenez now has a pretty good …

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Last year, staff at the Dallas Morning News decided to experiment with three new beats: real estate, audience engagement and local weather.

Weather, in particular, looked like an opportunity. When DMN covered big weather events, audiences always showed up.

“But …

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Companies like Facebook are behaving like “digital gangsters,” British parliament said in a final report on disinformation and fake news released on Sunday after 18 months of work, and it’s time to rein them in. “We need a radical shift in the balance of power between the platforms and the people. The age of inadequate...

Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 196, published February 19, 2019. Sort-of reader mailbag: Spotify edition. It’s Spotify Day +13. My inbox has pretty much started to chill after all the news, which has given me some time to sift through and check out what’s been occupying the Hot Pod...

The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation will provide a whopping $300 million over five years to organizations including the American Journalism Project, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and and ProPublica, the foundation announced Tuesday. The funding announcement follows the Knight Commission’s release earlier this month of a report outlining its recommendations...

Would more young people watch local TV news if it looked more like a Vox video and less like, uh, local TV news? It’s worth a try, according to a report released by Shorenstein and Northeastern this week. The authors suggest that local TV stations “remix” their hard news offerings by borrowing tactics from digital-native...

How much should we freak out about anti-vaxxers? WHO named anti-vaxxers one of the top 10 global health threats for 2019. But is the threat from internet crazies overblown? Or are there certain things about the anti-vaccination movement that make it particularly dangerous? This debate is the health version of an argument we see often...

Go with your gut, not with the clicks: In a saturated media environment, news consumers most value news that is relevant to them — a factor that can’t be sussed out in a newsroom by measuring clicks, according to new research from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. (But you should still make...

Algorithms shape large parts of everyday life: our interactions with other people, what products we purchase, the information we see (or don’t see), our investment decisions and our career paths. And we trust their judgment: people are more likely to follow advice when they are being told that it came from an algorithm rather than...

Surprise: Subscribers to a nerdy bitcoin newsletter are just about as engaged as subscribers to a nerdy local newsletter. Inside.com, the startup that waited over a decade for the domain with its core product now in the inbox and not the browser, focuses on growing relationships using curated email newsletters to grab your attention. Last...

Covering suicides has, sadly, become more and more codified in the journalism industry — literally, here’s a site called Reporting on Suicide. Don’t include how they died, link to a support hotline or other resources in the piece, use words like “died by suicide” instead of “successful attempt.” But that’s been largely reactive as more...

2019 is a general election year in Canada (as it is in many countries around the world), and the Toronto Star wanted to be on top of the misinformation and disinformation efforts that will almost inevitably arise as voting day draws closer. Star editors didn’t have to start from scratch in getting a handle on...

It’s become something of a trend for national governments to convene a commission of some sort to review the status of their countries’ news industry — and to recommend what policies or regulatory changes might help sustain a vibrant free press. Australia had its Senate Select Committee last year and a new review that came...

Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 195, published February 12, 2019. That’s an (Anfield) wrap [by Caroline Crampton]. Hot Pod readers probably know that I’m based in the U.K., but I’m not sure it’s entirely clear that I don’t live in London. I moved away in the summer of 2017...

As the Swedish dust from last week’s Spotify acquisition-palooza settles, there’s little time to wait. Slate, the veteran digital media company and purveyor of fine podcasts, announced this morning that it’s rolling out something called Supporting Cast, a new technology service meant to help podcast publishers set up paid subscription layers or membership programs. For...

In journalism’s long and treacherous move away from ad dependency, the growing nonprofit news sector is trying to build a culture of philanthropy. At one level, that involves convincing foundations to send grants their way. But probably more important for the long term is building the habit of giving to news in a large number...

It almost seems impossible to ignore national politics today. The stream of stories about the president and Congress is endless; whether online, in print or on television, it’s never been easier to follow the action. National news outlets are adapting well to this environment: The New York Times and Wall Street Journal made big gains...

The bankers are now hired. Is the early 2019 newspaper chain M&A face-off now getting serious? It’s reminiscent of an earlier brand of warfare. Newspaper chains — all cutting desperately, each facing a shortening deadline to make a “digital transition” — line up their dealmaking armies, swords sharpened if not yet crossed. Gannett, having rejected...

A profile of hyperlocal news site Patch pops up once a year or so, and here’s the latest one, from Recode’s Peter Kafka. A few tidbits: — Patch is profitable (and has been for a few years — the company also said it was profitable in early 2016 and in mid-2017). — It now consists...

Data has a habit of giving us advance signals about particular trends. It shouts: “Hey, something big is happening.” Like when we saw Facebook decline for six months before they announced official changes to their News Feed. Some of those trends jump out more than others. Wouldn’t it be great to predict how reliable those...

People who’ve scanned Facebook for news gain a little knowledge. Why do some of them think they’ve gained a lot? Consider statements like “I feel that I need to experience strong emotions regularly” and “I feel like I need a good cry every now and then.” How much do these statements apply to you? If...

When you’re building a healthy web environment for journalism, there are a few key groups to keep in mind, says Scroll CEO (and Chartbeat founder) Tony Haile. Of course, you need to think about the publishers — the content creators — and the readers. Scroll, the $5/month, ad-free premium news site–reading experience that will roll out...