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Monday, June 15, 2020
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UK readers find the government’s COVID-19 messages more misleading than actual fake newsIt’s not the 5G-type stuff that’s confusing people. By Stephen Cushion, Maria Kyriakidou, Marina Morani, and Nikki Soo. |
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How The New York Times is producing quarantine videos without being live and in-person“The intimacy that you can build with your character when you’re doing a FaceTime interview instead of having a big camera crew in their living room is great.” By Hanaa' Tameez. |
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Australia is trying to make Facebook and Google pay for news. Facebook Australia says it doesn’t need news, actually.Facebook and Google argue that the value they derive from news content is marginal and they don't believe they should be responsible for funding it. By Hal Crawford. |
What We’re Reading
Honolulu Civil Beat / Christina Jedra
The Honolulu Star-Advertiser is gutting its newsroom →
“In a devastating blow to Hawaii's largest daily newspaper, leadership at the Honolulu Star-Advertiser told employees it intends to lay off about half of its union news staff by the end of the month. Thirty-one workers across all departments are flagged for removal: 15 of the newspaper's 34 reporters, two photographers, three page designers, seven clerks, three graphic artists and a web designer.”
Columbia Journalism Review / Anya Schiffrin
The Conversation now has 10 national and regional editions and 150 full-time staffers →
“‘What's the difference between pandemic, epidemic and outbreak?’ was read more than 900,000 times, translated into Danish and Indonesian, and used by multiple sites, including Market Watch, EcoWatch, Premium Times – Nigeria, and the Good Men project. Since publishing ‘Could chloroquine treat coronavirus? 5 questions answered about a promising, problematic and unproven use for an antimalarial drug’ in The Conversation US, Dr. Katherine Seley-Radtke of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County has been interviewed by outlets all over the world, including NBC Euronews, Newsy, NPR, The Washington Post, and the South Asian Times. A piece on which household cleaning products can kill the virus was viewed more than a million times, and republished in ScienceAlert; The Sun, a British news tabloid; and the New Zealand Herald. That article, and many others, performed particularly strongly on Apple News.”
The Daily Beast / Lloyd Grove
More reporting on how New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger handled the Tom Cotton op-ed →
“It’s one thing to choose to stride into controversy with eyes open, but it's quite another to stumble into it. The Cotton column was an example of the latter. It was such an explosive moment, and the opinion team was so traumatized, Sulzberger believed, that it was difficult to fathom how Bennet would be able to project the necessary confidence to rally his staffers, lead them through the storm, get them safely back out again, and then preside over the changes necessary to fix what was broken in the op-ed process.”
Medium/The Objective / Gabe Schneider
How to erase Black journalists →
“Prominent white writers constantly obscure the racially coded nature of their criticisms. Writers like Weiss and Stephens don't want to directly admit that they disagree with a large number of their Black colleagues, nor do they want to deal with the idea that their colleagues always exist in Black skin; it's easier to relegate these opinions to some faceless overzealous writers, rather than admit that they've chosen to ignore Black writers in their own office. And it's not a new fad for white writers to obfuscate their point or create mental obstacles in order to avoid directly criticizing their Black contemporaries.”
The New York Times / Ben Smith
Big newsrooms are in revolt. The bosses are in their country houses. →
“The biggest story in the world came to your front door and you left — that to me is insane.”
Digiday / Steven Perlberg
Caught in the mushy middle: How Quartz fell to earth →
“As industry furloughs and layoffs continue, Quartz has joined a growing club of publications that seemingly got caught in the mushy middle of 2010s digital media, like Mic and Mashable. Not quite niche enough to be essential to a small group of readers, but not quite big enough to compete at scale. Coronavirus didn't help.”
Rappler / Lian Buan
A court in Manila finds Rappler CEO Maria Ressa and former Rappler researcher-writer Reynaldo Santos Jr. guilty of “cyber libel” →
“Judge Rainelda Estacio Montesa ruled that only Ressa and Santos are guilty of cyber libel charges. Rappler Inc was initially charged in the suit. The court sentenced Ressa and Santos to a minimum of 6 months and 1 day to a maximum of 6 years in jail over charges filed by businessman Wilfredo Keng in a case that tested the 8-year-old Philippine cybercrime law. Ressa and Santos won’t have to go to jail because the conviction is appealable all the way to the Supreme Court.”
Amsterdam News / Sarah Glover
The case for capitalizing Black. (USA Today, NBC News, Seattle Times, and more have made the change.) →
“Capitalizing the ‘B’ in Black should become standard use to describe people, culture, art and communities. We already capitalize Asian, Hispanic, African American and Native American.”
NPR / David Folkenflik
The Los Angeles Times faces an “internal uprising” over coverage of recent protests and hiring practices →
“There is just one black reporter on the metro desk of nearly 90 people covering greater Los Angeles, the largest desk at the paper.”
IJNET / Jennifer Dorroh
Three ways large media companies are innovating during the COVID-19 pandemic →
“I’ve been really heartened by just the sheer amount of reader call-outs and the sheer work reporters and editors have put into reaching out to readers in the past couple of months.”