Monday, April 24, 2023 |
| Is this Fox News cleaning up its act after that $787.5 million Dominion settlement? Dealing with the latest in a long line of workplace lawsuits? Or betting they can get make someone else a star in the same time slot? By Joshua Benton. |
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| “The ‘first and most voiced complaint’ from participants was that news coverage of people like them skewed toward negative stories or reflected them in a negative light.” By Sarah Scire. |
What We’re ReadingSemafor / Max Tani
It’s back to the future for a diminished digital news business →“Homepage traffic, blogging, niche email newsletters. They were some of the foundational concepts of digital media in the early 2000s. And as the digital news media business turns again, they’re increasingly the ones media organizations are turning to.”The Washington Post / Annabelle Timsit and Marisa Iati
These celebrities “subscribed to Twitter Blue.” Except they’re dead. →“Chadwick Boseman, Kobe Bryant, and Anthony Bourdain are the latest celebrities to be verified under Twitter Blue, the social media platform’s paid-subscription service that allows anyone to get a blue check mark by their display name if they pay $8 a month and confirm their phone number. Except the actor, athlete, and celebrity chef died years ago, before Twitter Blue even existed.”The Verge / David Pierce
Can ActivityPub save the internet? →“The tech industry is abuzz about a new standard for social networking that is more open, more user-centric, and potentially more powerful than Twitter and Facebook. But we’ve been here before.”Vanity Fair / Ben Smith
The inside story of how Disney’s attempt to buy BuzzFeed fell apart →“[Jonah] Peretti says he doesn’t regret turning down the Disney deal, and I don’t either, though I’m sure our investors do. At the time, the upward trajectory seemed clear: Social media would swallow the old internet, and we’d rise with it. And for a couple more years, we seemed to be rising…But our big prediction was wrong. Social media turned dark and began to contract.”The Guardian / Dani Anguiano
A California journalist documents the far-right takeover of her town: “We’re a test case” →“[Doni] Chamberlain and her team at A News Cafe, the news site she runs, have covered it all. Her writing has made her a public enemy of the conservative crowd intent on remaking the county. Far-right leaders have confronted her at rallies and public meetings, mocking and berating her. At a militia-organized protest in 2021, the crowd screamed insults.”Slate / Alex Kirshner
How Elon Musk turned the blue checkmark into a scarlet letter →“It’s an astonishing business story. Famous people from every walk of life you could think of have, in the span of a few days, grabbed their megaphones to tell the world they did not pay for a specific product. Imagine if they felt the need to tell you the same thing every time they passed a restaurant they didn’t want to eat at. Most people seem to agree with the celebrities.”The New York Times / Michael D. Shear
Biden has held the fewest news conferences since Reagan. Any questions? →“Traveling in Ireland last week, President Biden abandoned the decades-old tradition of holding a news conference while abroad. On Thursday, President Gustavo Petro of Colombia met with Mr. Biden, but the two did not hold a news conference together, another practice of his predecessors that Mr. Biden has frequently chosen to skip. After the meeting, Mr. Petro took questions from reporters — alone — at microphones in front of the West Wing.”Financial Times / Laura Pitel, Olaf Storbeck, and Arash Massoudi
Mathias Döpfner becomes the story: The return of scandal at Axel Springer →“He faced calls to resign, including from a government minister, and was forced to apologise after the German weekly Die Zeit published private text messages between him and [former Bild editor Julian] Reichelt in which he said that east Germans were ‘either communists or fascists,’ railed against ‘intolerant Muslims’ and described himself as ‘very much in favour of climate change.'”The Washington Post / David J. Lynch
Dominion settlement tab may be just the start of Fox’s financial woes →“The $787.5 million settlement effectively erases more than half of the profits the company earned last year. And for Fox, this is just the start of its reckoning with the cost of election lies. Additional lawsuits that could vaporize another chunk of earnings are pending from Smartmatic, a maker of electronic voting systems, as well as several Fox shareholders.”CJR / Maddy Crowell
Runa Sandvik on her mission to protect journalists against cyberattacks →“When I asked Sandvik what would be required to make yourself entirely safe from cyber threats, she replied: you wouldn’t be online at all, and you would have to live in the forest.”The New York Times / Brian X. Chen
The future of social media is a lot less social →“Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter seem to be increasingly connecting users with brands and influencers. To restore a sense of community, some users are trying smaller social networks.”The New York Times / Alex Williams
Gail Christian, trailblazing news correspondent, dies at 83 →“An on-air career seemed unlikely for a Black woman in the 1970s. It didn’t help that she had been imprisoned for armed robbery. But she broke barriers.”STAT / Leah Russin
How journalists can cover RFK Jr.’s antivax presidential run responsibly →“Nothing good would come of elevating his dangerous disinformation to the level of scientific discourse where each individual is positioned as ‘equal’ in terms of the data they bring to the table. But ignoring him entirely is equally fraught. In today’s environment of social media and fragmented news, he will find a platform, or create one.”The Guardian / Amanda Meade
The mouse that roared: How a little Australian website stared down Lachlan Murdoch →“It was quite the backflip by the 50-year-old media mogul whose legal case has played out in lurid media headlines for eight months. He launched the proceedings after Crikey named the Murdoch family as an ‘unindicted co-conspirator’ in the U.S. Capitol riot.”The Guardian / John Naughton
Rupert Murdoch was ever a master strategist, but he’s beginning to lose his grip →“Given how highly Murdoch values his image as a swaggering media giant, it was probably money well spent. Otherwise he would have had to testify under oath and the world would see not the robust titan of popular legend but an elderly mogul who is physically frail and, more importantly, who could not stop his TV station pandering to Donald Trump for fear of alienating the audience that had turned Fox News into such a profitable cash cow.”TechCrunch / Paul Sawers
Twitter seemingly now requires all advertisers to have a verified checkmark →“Moving forward, it seems that anyone wanting to post an ad or promote a tweet will have to cough up $8/month for Twitter Blue, or $1,000 per month to be recognized as a verified organization.”The Washington Post / Ben Strauss
How cable changed sports and what happens when fans cut the cord →“With one regional sports network in bankruptcy and others losing subscribers, the local sports TV model is in upheaval, threatening the financial foundations of MLB, the NHL and the NBA. The effects could be wide-ranging, from how fans watch their favorite teams to how much players get paid.”Press Gazette / Dominic Ponsford
Google is done sending traffic to your “what time is the super bowl” content →“Written for Google, these stories take a trending search term and manage to confect a news story out of answering it. They tend to reverse the conventional architecture of a news story by burying the relevant information near the bottom of a story so readers spend more time on the page before arriving at a simply-told answer.”The Verge / Justine Calma
Disaster alert accounts are preparing for a world after Twitter →“For years, Twitter has been a go-to for agencies that need to warn people during a rapidly changing crisis. The National Weather Service uses it to share hurricane and tornado alerts. Firefighting agencies tweet updates about where a blaze is headed. It’s supposed to give people a heads-up so that they can take precautions to keep themselves safe.”Reuters
A German magazine editor has been fired after running an AI-generated “interview” with Michael Schumacher →“The seven-times F1 world champion, 54, has not been seen in public since December 2013 when he suffered a serious brain injury in a skiing accident in the French Alps.”The Washington Post / Jaswinder Bolina
How to defend against the rise of ChatGPT? Think like a poet. →“As AI proliferates, this lack of originality in our daily language is what will render so many of our jobs irrelevant. But this is where I become optimistic. Because to me, it’s clear that one of our best defenses against the rise of the writing machines might be to learn how to think like a poet.”
Nieman Lab / Fuego
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