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Monday, November 20, 2017
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Village Media, relying on local advertisers, seems to have found a scalable (and profitable) local news model“We have to find new and creative ways to not replace a client’s Google and Facebook spend but find our own portion of it.” By Christine Schmidt. |
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Three years in, Discourse Media looks to membership to power its national expansionThe Canadian news industry “has been in a long, slow, painful decline, and people are ready for solutions and to see something new.” By Christine Schmidt. |
What We’re Reading
HuffPost / Ryan J. Reilly and Christopher Mathias
A freelance journalist swept up in mass arrests at protests at Trump’s inauguration faces his criminal trial today →
“A photojournalist facing a criminal trial on several felony charges sounds like something that would happen in another country. So this article is written in the style that would be used if it did.”
Crain's Chicago Business
Crain’s Chicago Business is shutting down its comments section, citing a lack of resources to curtail comments from trolls and hate speech →
“Simply put, we do not have the personnel to manage this commentary, to keep it civil and fair and to halt the back and forth before it devolves into invective, name-calling and, in too many cases, outright hate speech. We’d rather not play host to these often anonymous commenters. They drive out more civil readers and potential commenters. They sully our content, our brand and our sponsors. So, to borrow a phrase, we’re draining the swamp.”
Twitter / Rafat Ali
A recognition of the good news in media companies →
“The jig is up on platforms and despite their death grip, that may be the best news of all in media.”
Vox / Laura McGann
New York Times White House correspondent Glenn Thrush’s history of bad judgment around young women journalists →
“He kept saying he's an advocate for women and women journalists. That's how he presented himself to me. He tried to make himself seem like an ally and a mentor.”
The New Yorker / Emily Gould
An unabashed appreciation of Smitten Kitchen, the ur-food blog →
“Today, almost all of the personal blogs that began in the early aughts are gone, but Smitten Kitchen remains. Not only does it remain: it thrives; it grows.”
Democracy Fund / Josh Stearns
News Match, “largest grassroots fundraising campaign for nonprofit journalism ever,” announces more funding partners →
“In ten other states, individual donors and local foundations have stepped up with challenge grants to encourage people to give to nonprofit news, adding at least another $500,000 to support quality journalism this year. In total, more than 20 foundations, corporations, and individual donors are offering matching challenges, most of which were developed independently by local leadership at nonprofit news organizations.”
MediaShift / Heather Bryant
How the 'Paradise Papers' set the bar even higher for global collaboration →
“ICIJ's custom tool, Global I-Hub, again played a central role in connecting journalists. Described as a ‘Facebook for journalists,’ the proprietary software served as a secure space for reporters to share things they had found in the data, note quotes and plan coverage. Hamilton says GoTo Meeting was another common tool to connect editors via video chat to talk things out when meeting in person wasn't feasible. On the data side, the work benefitted from ICIJ's expanded data team. Linkurious was used to track and display connections between entities in the data. Hamilton says the hardest part early in the project was just getting the data into a workable shape to share with partners.”
Columbia Journalism Review / Shaya Tayefe Mohajer
The LA Times flirts with unionization, defying its history and challenging its current parent company →
“From 1960 to 1980, the Times was a totem of West Coast journalism that had been built up into a journalistic force by the aspirations of Otis Chandler, the golden boy heir to the one of the most powerful and most aggressively anti-union families in Southern California. The Times became a marquis newspaper during his time as publisher, and by-and-large his employees felt richly compensated not only in pay but prestige.”
Poynter / Melody Kramer
How accessible is your website for the disabled? →
“In August, two New York federal judges said that the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was applicable to websites, following a Florida federal judge's verdict this past June that ruled that the grocery store Winn-Dixie ‘violated Title III of the ADA by having a website that was not useable by plaintiff … to download coupons, order prescriptions, and find store locations.'”