Tuesday, February 13, 2024 |
| The key quality journalists looked for in leadership? Whether the newsroom leader could do the jobs they supervised. By Gregory P. Perreault. |
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| Plus: What local news audiences really value, defining ‘precarious’ journalistic work, and what journalists say good newsroom leadership is. By Mark Coddington and Seth Lewis. |
What We’re ReadingPress Forward
Dale R. Anglin, a Cleveland Foundation VP who led investments in area nonprofit news projects, is Press Forward’s first director →“Managing and sustaining funder collaboratives is challenging. Funders have different styles, time frames, values, risk tolerance and understanding of challenges. I’ve learned that attention to the process is as important as attention to the final outcomes, and gaining insights from the grantees, industry leaders and residents is important to creating a good strategy.”The Washington Post / Quinta Jurecic
How Elon Musk broke Twitter as he turned it into X →“’Extremely Hardcore,’ named after the working style Musk quickly said he would require of Twitter’s employees, builds on [Zoë Schiffer’s] earlier reporting to provide the closest look yet at Musk’s destruction of what was once a foundational component of the global public square.”Stop The Presses / Mark Jacob
Obsessing over gaffes on the campaign trail is lazy journalism →“This obsession with verbal missteps reflects a basic flaw in the media’s idea of what a campaign is for. It’s not the national spelling bee. It’s not an obstacle course. It’s supposed to be a forum for candidates to discuss the issues that matter to voters – to describe their vision for our country.”The Boston Globe / Aidan Ryan
Layoffs and closures have roiled the media industry. What will happen to the young people studying journalism? →“I definitely want to go into journalism after I graduate,” said Sophia Harris, 20, a junior at Framingham State University and the editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, The Gatepost. “The only thing holding me back is…the layoffs, high cost of living, now inflation, and that most people, when they start in journalism, they’re not making a ton of money.”ProPublica / Stephen Engelberg
Why ProPublica focuses on issues you may not see on cable news →“The worrying trends of 21st-century American life, from the division of the country into red and blue enclaves to the tendency of social media algorithms to create self-confirming bubbles of like-minded people, have not eliminated the power of great journalism to catalyze changes.”Hazlitt / Scaachi Koul
Where are all these journalists going to get a sense of self from now? →“There is mourning to be done publicly about the collapse of free media, and then a more private, humiliating one for journalists and writers everywhere who will simply never get another staff job again.”Columbia Journalism Review / James Ball
The most civilized place to look at news online might be Reddit →“[The rules] effectively ban emotive content, which, given the horrors of most world news at the moment, gives the board something of a sterile feel. But it also provides a genuinely useful way to catch up on the facts of what is happening — the ‘what,’ not the more controversial ‘why’ or the ‘what it means.’”TechCrunch / Sarah Perez
In a battle with X, Threads adds trending topics where politics will be allowed →“Today’s topics, as the section will be titled, are determined by Meta’s AI systems and are based on what people are engaging with on Threads, Meta told TechCrunch. These topics will be surfaced in the app in two places: on the Search page and in the For You feed.”Bloomberg / Lucas Shaw
The $20 billion sports media problem no one can answer →“The business of regional sports networks is collapsing, and profit at ESPN, the biggest sports media company in the world, is way down. Traditional media companies are paying more for fewer games while their audience — at least inside the cable bundle — is shrinking for everything but football.”TechCrunch / Amanda Silberling
Spotify’s layoffs put an end to a musical encyclopedia, and fans are pissed →“Spotify data alchemist Glenn McDonald, who created EveryNoise, was one of the 1,500 employees who was let go [in December], but his layoff had wider-reaching implications; now that McDonald doesn’t have access to internal Spotify data, he can no longer maintain EveryNoise, which became a pivotal resource for the most obsessive music fans to track new releases and learn more about the sounds they love.”Rest of World / Barkha Dutt
How Narendra Modi became India’s influencer-in-chief →“Political pundits offer different and very compelling reasons for why Modi keeps winning elections: the cult of personality, Hindutva, nationalism, an environment of polarization, and an inchoate opposition. But what many underestimate is how the political matrix has been remade by a society that now devours digital content.”Reuters / Panu Wongcha-um and Panarat Thepgumpanat
Two Thai journalists were arrested for their news coverage of anarchist graffiti on a temple →“Nattaphol Meksobhon, a reporter from an independent online news outlet Prachatai, and freelance photographer Nattaphon Phanphongsanon were arrested on Monday…The allegations stem from their news coverage last March of an activist spray painting an anarchist symbol and the number 112 with a strike through it on the wall of the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, located within the Grand Palace compound in Bangkok.”The News Minute / Balakrishna Ganeshan and Dhanya Rajendran
The Indian government has forced The Caravan to take down a story about the army torturing civilians →“The Ministry has demanded that the magazine remove the story titled ‘
Screams from the Army Post’ by Jatinder Kaur Tur which was published both in text and video format. Both these contents were to be removed within 24 hours as per the orders, according to The Caravan. The Ministry has said that if The Caravan does not remove the story, then the Government of India will block the URL of the story.”Votebeat / Natalia Contreras
A Votebeat reporter hit hurdles when she tried to register to vote in Texas →“Being able to participate in democracy should not be this hard.”
Nieman Lab / Fuego
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