Tuesday, March 26, 2024 |
| “People experience war on a personal level, and our ability to communicate extraordinary stress on an individual human level is the goal of good war reporting.” By Hanaa' Tameez. |
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| Reporter Patrick Lohmann has lived in New Mexico for most of his life, but covering the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire required building trust in a divided community. Here’s how he did it. By Patrick Lohmann, Source New Mexico and ProPublica. |
What We’re ReadingNew York Post / Alexandra Steigrad
Former Deadspin owner G/O Media puts The Onion up for sale →“The A.V. Club was scooped up by Paste Magazine, which recently bought shuttered Jezebel, and The Takeout has been bought by Static Media, [Jim Spanfeller, G/O Media’s CEO] said.”The Chronicle of Higher Education / Francie Diep
The colleges that pay for positive coverage →“If you land a profile in a magazine or newspaper that follows the norms of journalism, you’re subject to the reporter’s scrutiny, and possibly to a story that might include faculty members’ criticisms, or unflattering anecdotes. Why bother when you can pay for something that looks like an independent profile, and promote it afterward as if it is?”The Boston Globe / Aidan Ryan
WBUR offers employee buyouts to help cut 10 percent of budget →“The buyout plan comes weeks after Low told donors that the station had seen ‘a dramatic loss of sponsorship support’ and that the station wouldn’t rule out a hiring freeze or layoffs to help cut costs. Low previously said in an interview with the Globe that on-air sponsorship revenue had fallen 40 percent over the past five years.”The Guardian / Lisa O'Carroll
EU tells tech firms to hire fact-checkers ahead of elections this year →“Social media firms including TikTok, X, Facebook and Instagram will be required to put an army of fact-checkers and moderators in place with a collective knowledge of 24 EU languages amid fears that the European parliamentary elections will be a prime target for disinformation campaigns run by Russia and others including the far right.”The Atlantic / Louise Matsakis
The end of foreign-language education →“Learning a different way to speak, read, and write helps people discover new ways to see the world—experts I spoke with likened it to discovering a new way to think. No machine can replace such a profoundly human experience. Yet tech companies are weaving automatic translation into more and more products. As the technology becomes normalized, we may find that we’ve allowed deep human connections to be replaced by communication that’s technically proficient but ultimately hollow.”Washington Post / David Kenner, Sarah Ellison, and Jonathan O'Connell
Qatari royal invested about $50 million in pro-Trump network Newsmax →“Before and after the investment, senior newsroom leaders urged Newsmax staff to soften coverage of Qatar, current and former employees said. A representative for Newsmax strongly disputed that the network ‘slanted coverage to be favorable to Qatar,’ and that [founder and CEO Christopher] Ruddy had told staff not to criticize the country.”Reuters / Guy Faulconbridge
Russia has extended the detention of WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich by another three months →“This verdict to further prolong Evan’s detention feels particularly painful, as this week marks one year since Evan was arrested and wrongfully detained in Yekaterinburg simply for doing his job as a journalist,” US ambassador to Russia Lynne Tracy said.Washington Post / Alyssa Fowers, Leslie Shapiro, Cate Brown and Hajar Harb
What would have happened to friends and family if Gaza was home? →News reports from Gaza are often filled with numbers that can be hard to comprehend. The team at the Washington Post broke them down to the scale of a single person’s social circle. 404 Media
404 Media figured out how to make a full-text RSS feed for paid subscribers →“We feel strongly that offering full text RSS is the right thing to do, and that offering RSS in this way can help small, journalist-owned publications like ours better connect with our subscribers and can offer another path forward as we attempt to reach our reader directly, without having to rely exclusively on Google’s declining search engine or fractured social media algorithms that consistently devalue outbound links…With the hard development work now done, FeedPress and Outpost can now offer the feeds as a service to more Ghost sites.”Associated Press
Trump’s social media company starts trading on Nasdaq with a market value of almost $6.8 billion →“Many of Trump Media’s investors are small-timers either trying to support Trump or aiming to cash in on the mania, instead of big institutional and professional investors…These investors could experience a bumpy ride. For one, they’re betting on a company with vague prospects of turning a profit. Trump Media lost $49 million in the first nine months of last year, when it brought in just $3.4 million in revenue and had to pay $37.7 million in interest expenses.”Bloomberg / Aisha S Gani
U.K. regulators are clamping down on influencers selling financial products →“The Financial Conduct Authority outlined the fresh guidance for so-called ‘finfluencers,’ users who advertise financial products on social media platforms like Instagram or TikTok, in a 47-page report on Tuesday…The agency said the new rules even apply to communications that originate outside the U.K. if it is capable of having affect in the country. Breaching the rules is considered a criminal offense, with violators facing as much as 2 years in prison, an unlimited fine or both.”The Verge / David Pierce
Why AI search engines really can’t kill Google →“For all the people using Google to find important and hard-to-access scientific information, orders of magnitude more are using it to find their email inbox, get to Walmart’s website, or remember who was president before Hoover. And then there’s my favorite fact of all: that a vast number of people every year go to Google and type ‘google’ into the search box. We mostly talk about Google as a research tool, but in reality, it’s asked to do anything and everything you can think of, billions of times a day. The real question in front of all these would-be Google killers, then, is not how well they can find information. It’s how well they can do everything Google does.”This American Life / Dana Ballout
At least 95 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza. This American Life profiled 5 of them. →“I saw this over and over again, journalists posting tributes, who were then killed themselves soon after. And a tribute goes up for them. And then the pattern continues.”
Nieman Lab / Fuego
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