Joshua Benton » Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism

Articles by Joshua Benton

Joshua Benton is director of the Nieman Journalism Lab. Before spending a year at Harvard as a 2008 Nieman Fellow, he spent a decade in newspapers, most recently at The Dallas Morning News. His reports on cheating on standardized tests in the Texas public schools led to the permanent shutdown of a school district and won the Philip Meyer Journalism Award from Investigative Reporters and Editors. He has reported from 10 foreign countries, been a Pew Fellow in International Journalism, and three times been a finalist for the Livingston Award for International Reporting. Before Dallas, he was a reporter and occasional rock critic for The Toledo Blade. He wrote his first HTML in January 1994.

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November 30, 2020

Just how broken is our political information ecosystem, anyway?

Nearly half of Trump supporters surveyed still believe he’ll be sworn in for a second term in January. Not that he should be — that he will be.

November 23, 2020

Another bit of good news from Apple: Publishers can now offer targeted discounts in the App Store

Want to offer a special introductory rate for students and educators? Superfans of your local football team? People who’ve hit your paywall five months running? You now can through the App Store on iPad and iPhones.

November 18, 2020

Apple is reducing the cut it takes from most news publishers’ subscriptions

Instead of taking 30% of new subscribers’ payments, it’ll take 15%. The money’s welcome, but it’s also a reminder of how little control publishers have over the terms they get from tech giants.

November 16, 2020

So what did the 2020 election really mean, anyway? Here’s a first draft of media history, from 100-plus scholars

Including how research into sports fandom explains Trump supporters’ claims of voter fraud: “One’s degree of team identification is a major predictor for attributing a loss to external forces such as referees and opponents’ cheating, resulting in denial of the outcome.”

November 9, 2020

Can Spotify be the one to convince people to pay for podcasts?

The Swedish music giant is apparently testing out podcast-only subscription offers. But the market for paid premium podcasts is pointedly unproven.

What is The Epoch Times? A vehicle for pro-Trump conspiracy theories, and the culmination of all that Facebook has encouraged

October 23, 2020

As they shrink, are local newspapers protecting their “iron core” of local government coverage? This paper says no

Newspapers have all had to make cuts. But it doesn’t look like they’ve favored the beats that are most important to democracy — watchdog coverage of local governments — over other kinds of news.

October 19, 2020

Is Facebook too big to know? The Markup has a plan (and a browser) to wrap its arms around it

The Citizen Browser Project will pay 1,200 Americans to let The Markup monitor the choices that tech company algorithms are making for them. “What are they choosing to amplify? And what are they choosing not to amplify?”

October 13, 2020

The new iPhone has 5G data, which will accelerate its impact on the media business

Faster speeds will enable new levels of video, AR, VR, and other _Rs that haven’t even been invented yet. But news products are unlikely to benefit as much as all the other apps competing for audiences’ attention.

October 13, 2020

The fired New Yorker writer who helped birth Media Twitter has died (and I’m sure he’d apologize if he could)

When Dan Baum started spooling out the story of his ouster on Twitter in 2009, the media world was entranced — and a new kind of digital serial storytelling seemed possible.

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