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Tuesday, July 21, 2020
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The New York Times’ special section on disability is available in Braille and audio and has its own style guide“We are really trying to make strides as an organization toward accessibility but it was clear that if ever there were a reason to make a concerted effort to push the operation forward, it would be for this package.” By Sarah Scire. |
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With masks and sanitized mics, podcast pros tiptoe back into in-person interviewsPlus: “The H&M of audio drama,” Apple News Today, and Gimlet’s accessibility lawsuit. By Caroline Crampton. |
What We’re Reading
Notes from Poland / Barbara Erling
As Polish public radio becomes politicized, presenters are creating independent crowdfunded alternatives →
“Globally, the success of such initiatives as De Correspondent in the Netherlands, Krautreporter in Germany, and El Español in Spain, who redefined their business models in 2013, has demonstrated the potential of crowdfunding. However, Czykier argues that this is not a stable source of income. Of course, a launch of a project might be financed by a crowdfunding campaign, but in the long term, to maintain the financial stability, the business model needs to be changed. ‘It's hard to convince a new audience to support an already existing project,’ he says.
Axios / Sara Fischer
Hate speech has soared online since George Floyd’s death →
“States with heavy protests experienced the highest levels of hate speech online. Minnesota, Washington D.C., Delaware, New York, Connecticut, Vermont, Washington, Oregon, Colorado, and Virginia saw the highest spikes, per DoubleVerify. Each state has experienced at least a 2.2 times increase in its own average rate for hate speech online.
The Wall Street Journal / Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg
WSJ journalists ask publisher for clearer distinction between news and opinion content →
“The letter, signed by more than 280 reporters, editors and other employees says, ‘Opinion's lack of fact-checking and transparency, and its apparent disregard for evidence, undermine our readers' trust and our ability to gain credibility with sources.'”
Axios / Sara Fischer
Drudge vs. the algorithms →
“The influence of Drudge on the media publishing industry cannot be overstated, despite the fact that it has changed in recent years. To this day, many mainstream publishers still personally pitch Drudge with articles and headlines each day, hoping that he will feature them prominently on his homepage.”
Columbia Journalism Review / E. Tammy Kim
A look at the new “transnationally Asian” online media →
“New Naratif, New Bloom, and Lausan focus on Southeast Asia, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, respectively, but in ways that avoid the biases of foreign correspondents and policy wonks or the narrow concerns of in-country English-language newspapers. Their orientation is not so much postcolonial as anti-nationalist and internationalist, meaning that they're keener to explore what's shared between working people in say, Taipei and Los Angeles, or Bangkok and Davao City, than to ask whether Canada or Vietnam has the more capable government — a temptation of traditional journalism.”
Al Jazeera / Asad Hashim
Prominent Pakistani journalist Matiullah Jan “goes missing” in Islamabad →
“I assure you that, while I do not have all of the details, this much is clear that [Matiullah Jan] was kidnapped,” said [Pakistani Information Minister Shibli Faraz]. “We will try our best that today we find out where he is and what steps be taken to recover him. It is obvious that this is the duty of the government, and the government will fulfill its duties.”
TechCrunch / Manish Singh
Pakistan issues “final warning” to TikTok and blocks Bigo app over “immoral, obscene, and vulgar content” →
“Some activists have decried Pakistan's warning to TikTok and blocking of Bigo Live, calling the move nation's attempt to ‘test the ground to what extent they can go in censoring.’ Pakistan also placed a temporarily ban on popular mobile game PUBG earlier this week over concerns that youth in the nation were "wasting their time" on the "addictive" app.”
Stat / Usha Lee McFarling
Dermatology faces a reckoning: Lack of darker skin in textbooks and journals harms care for patients of color →
“An analysis of textbooks by Jules Lipoff, an assistant professor of clinical dermatology at the University of Pennsylvania, showed the percentage of images of dark skin ranged from 4% to 18%. ‘We are not teaching (and possibly not learning) skin of color,’ Lester wrote in a separate analysis she conducted. Many worry the field's shift toward using artificial intelligence to aid diagnosis of disease will further deepen the divide, because the machine learning algorithms are trained with datasets consisting primarily of fair-skinned images.”
TechCrunch / Sarah Perez
Spotify launches video podcasts worldwide, starting with select creators →
“The video podcasts are supported on both the desktop and mobile app — and video will serve as an additional component, not a replacement for the audio. That means you'll still be able to stream the audio or download the podcast for offline listening, if need be.”
Nieman Storyboard / Audra Jenkins
Fashion reporting as cultural criticism →
“I didn't have an aha moment as much as it was a slow awakening to the ways in which politics permeated our lives much the same way that fashion does. The two are intertwined. I saw that in powerful ways when Hillary Clinton was first lady. One time when she testified on Capitol Hill, she was wearing a coat with a curious design on the back. TV commentators kept referring to the pattern as a ‘dragon.’ I called her spokesperson, who sent me a close-up image of the back of her coat. The pattern was abstract. People saw what they wanted to see. The coat pattern was like a Rorschach test.”
The Fence / Clyde Bruckman
David Gallipoli-Jones, the New York Times correspondent for The New York Times, is the busiest man in journalism →
“Some days I'm writing about editorial policy, sometimes it's hanging a journalist's dirty laundry out to dry – some days it's just because a columnist has written something incredibly stupid and everyone needs to know that. So in that sense it's a pretty varied beat.”
L.A. Times Guild
The Latino staffers at the L.A. Times have formed a Latino Caucus →
The new Latino Caucus sent a letter to Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong and editors Norman Pearlstine, Kimi Yoshino, and Scott Kraft with 14 demands, which includes correcting pay disparities, hiring more Latino staffers on specific desks, and “[providing] L.A. Times en Español the resources it needs to succeed as a key L.A. Times brand representing Southern California's vast Spanish-speaking market.”
TechCrunch / Ingrid Lunden
Ebay sells its Classifieds business to Schibsted’s Adevinta in $9.2 billion deal →
“With the acquisition of eBay Classifieds Group, Adevinta becomes the largest online classifieds company globally.”
The Washington Post / Allyson Chiu
Tucker Carlson claimed The New York Times planned to expose his address. Then his fans doxed the reporter. →
“Instead of addressing the [sexual misconduct] lawsuit or the recent resignation of his chief writer, who was linked to anonymous blog posts containing racist, homophobic and misogynistic language, Carlson used the final minutes of his first broadcast back from a ‘long-planned’ vacation to take aim at the Times. The newspaper, Carlson alleged, has been ‘working on a story about where my family and I live’ in an effort to intimidate him.” A Times spokesperson said: “While we do not confirm what may or may not publish in future editions, the Times has not and does not plan to expose any residence of Tucker Carlson's, which Carlson was aware of before tonight's broadcast.”
Law and Crime / Colin Kalmbacher
Lawsuit accuses ex-Fox News co-anchor Ed Henry of “violent” rape, alleges Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, Howard Kurtz harassed guest →
“Filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the 39-page complaint contains a trigger warning at the top (in red type, nonetheless) and documents a sweeping set of allegations against several of the conservative-leaning network's top talent and against the network itself.”
New York Times / Adriana Balsamo
How The New York Times Book Review, with limited access to physical books, is adjusting →
"In the first week that we left the office, 167 packages of books arrived on the desk that no one was there to open or look at," said Pamela Paul, the editor of the Book Review. "There's a constant worry, 'Are things falling through the cracks in a way they wouldn't if we had physical record of them?'”
chicagotribune.com / Steve Johnson
Report for America is a finalist in the MacArthur Foundation competition to give away $100 million →
“RFA would deploy 1,800 new reporters to U.S. communities that have been hit hard by the decline of the American newspaper industry, a situation it calls ‘a crisis for democracy.'”