 |
Friday, May 8, 2020
 |
In Canada, a government program to support local news tries to determine who’s most deservingThe country’s $50 million Local Journalism Initiative is funding more than 160 reporting positions across the country. But critics say that it’s subsidizing old media at the expense of new models. By Sarah Scire. |
 |
Maybe the CDC and WHO should take a few cues from “The Plandemic”“Populist Twitter decries any misstep by authority as confirmation of wholesale ineptitude or corruption — as if a mistake anywhere casts doubt on expertise everywhere.” Plus: Facebook announces its oversight board, and tracking traffic back to WhatsApp. By Laura Hazard Owen. |
What We’re Reading
Columbia Journalism Review / Savannah Jacobson
Reporter Natasha Daly is National Geographic’s animal fact checker →
Just so we’re all on the same page, Vladimir Putin did not set lions free to roam the streets of Russia.
Deez Links / Delia Cai
How The City is adjusting to covering New York City during the pandemic →
“Right now, it almost seems like all journalism is service journalism,” said deputy editor Hasani Gittens. “Even if that service is giving some hope among the dread.”
Local Media Association
The Local Media Association raised $1 million in donations for local pandemic coverage →
“More than 230 independent and family-owned local news outlets participated in the program, proactively engaging their communities to appeal for support of their COVID-19 coverage. More than 11,500 individual donors from 48 states have contributed. On Giving Tuesday alone, the program generated $90,417 in grassroots giving from 936 donors, its highest single-day totals.”
MediaPost / Wendy Davis
Maryland’s governor has vetoed a proposed tax on tech giants’ digital ad revenue →
“The measure would have imposed new taxes on companies that have more than $100 million in digital ad revenue. Rates would have varied from 2.5% to 10% of revenue attributable to Maryland, with the percentage tied to global revenue.”
Vanity Fair / Joe Pompeo
There have been days recently “when not a single ad appeared” in the print New York Post →
“…the problem for the [New York Daily] News and the Post in particular is that despite all of their digital derring-do in recent years, they are still, at their core, creatures of the newsstand…At the present moment, and likely for the immediate future, newsstands are essentially irrelevant.”
TechCrunch / Jordan Crook
IRL, the calendar app for virtual events, launches a web product →
“Through API partnerships with YouTube, Twitch and Spotify, as well as user-generated content, IRL (which now stands for In Remote Life) wants to aggregate all the virtual events across the globe into a curated, categorized home page. That may include an esports tournament, a virtual concert, a Zoom cocktail party or a webinar.”
The City / Terry Parris Jr., Ann Choi, Derek Kravitz, Anjali Tsui, and Keith Cousins
Fewer than 5% of NYC’s COVID-19 deaths have been the subject of an obituary →
“The publicized deaths — defined as accompanied by a victim's name and other identifying information, such as age, home borough and next of kin — skew male and younger. They also disproportionately come from wealthier enclaves of the city than the general population felled by the virus.” The City is trying to fill that void.
The Daily Beast / Robert Silverman
Barstool Sports is “hemorrhaging money” →
The editor-in-chief, after telling a reporter he wasn’t allowed to write about a big advertiser on the site: “We need the dollars to stay in business and meet payroll.” (Also, a number of more colorful phrases you’d expect from Barstool.)
The Nation / Victor Pickard
Instead of killing the U.S. Postal System, expand it to help support local news →
“Along with libraries, universities, and public broadcasting stations, we could leverage such public infrastructure to provide institutional support for local journalism. These spaces could become centers for different kinds of community media, from weekly newspapers to municipal broadband networks.”
The Hollywood Reporter / Ashley Cullins and Tatiana Siegel
Experts say many media CEOs taking showy pandemic paycuts will get that money back →
“Eventually…attention will be diverted elsewhere, at which time experts say some of them will be repaid, making their current cuts merely a loan to the company disguised as a financial sacrifice…’When the massive executive bonuses and stockholder dividends are still in place while there's 100,000 of us on furlough, it's pretty hard to trust the “we're all in this together” and “our cast are our greatest asset” messages.'”
The New York Times / Tiffany Hsu and Marc Tracy
Not impossible, not a whopper: Burger King has been a model online advertiser through the pandemic →
“Instead of shunning articles that included terms like ‘Covid-19’ or ‘pandemic,’ the company behind the Whopper focused its message on contactless food delivery and pickup. That way, its marketing would not seem out of place in a grim news cycle…’It isn't damaging for the brand to appear within the context of the crisis, because the brand is playing a role.'”
MIT Technology Review / Abby Ohlheiser
How COVID-19 conspiracy theorists are exploiting YouTube culture →
“…many prominent peddlers of conspiracy theories are successfully using the system exactly as intended — applying the same techniques that many YouTubers have used to become famous.”
Snopes
Snopes got a $289K stimulus loan →
“Like many news organizations that accepted this funding, we believe we are the exact type of business the program was intended to help. The reasons that forced us to accept this small business loan are important to share in the spirit of transparency to our community.”
The Hollywood Reporter / Georg Szalai
Cable, satellite, and other pay TV services lost a record 1.8 million subscribers in the U.S. in Q1 →
“‘There are now as many non-subscribing households (46 million) as there were pay TV subscribers in 1988,’ noted MoffettNathanson analysts…They warned: ‘With sports off the air, and with the pain of the tsunami of unemployment just beginning to hit as the quarter ended, all these numbers will get worse in the second quarter.'”
News Corp
The Wall Street Journal has reached a record 3 million paying subscribers →
“Dow Jones saw 20% growth in digital-only subscribers to over 2.5 million, including 15% growth in digital-only subscribers at The Wall Street Journal, while experiencing record traffic across its digital networks.”
WAN-IFRA / Simone Flueckiger
In Connecticut, Hearst published a single issue dedicated to exploring life after coronavirus across eight dailies →
The supersized Sunday edition was the largest since 2004. “Forty percent of our top 10 stories driving non-subscribers to the paywall on those days were from this project, including pieces about the future of vaccines, grocery shopping habits and the possible decline of jury trials.”