Nonprofit newsrooms are competing for limited funding and attention spans, grappling with diminishing returns on social, and trying to address low trust in media. It’s forcing outlets large and small to adapt to survive.
“We talk to a lot of towns where there is no newspaper anymore; there’s no community center anymore; the town store shut down. And this is kind of it.”
The cable news network plans to launch a new subscription product — details TBD — by the end of 2024. Will Mark Thompson repeat his New York Times success, or is CNN too different a brand to get people spending?
“As more people online recognize breaking news as an opportunity to amass followers and attention, more non-traditional accounts and content creators will move into covering breaking news. We’re already seeing this phenomenon through the proliferation of what Caitlin Dewey recently described as ‘news hustlers.'”
“A state judge in Florida has given former President Donald J. Trump a legal victory, refusing to toss a libel lawsuit filed by Mr. Trump over a statement made by the board of the Pulitzer Prizes on coverage of the 2016 Trump campaign’s connections to Russia … The case hinges on a statement made in 2022 by the panel reaffirming its decision to award the national reporting prize in 2018 to The New York Times and The Washington Post for their coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and Russian ties to the Trump campaign.”
“All news is local,” said John Paul Vranesevich, the owner and only full-time reporter for the Beaver Countian. “Everything that happens that the national [media] cares about is happening in some community, somewhere.”
Los Angeles Times / Keri Blakinger and Alene Tchekmedyian
“Over the past year, many of the most important web sources used for training A.I. models have restricted the use of their data, according to a study published this week by the Data Provenance Initiative, an M.I.T.-led research group. The study, which looked at 14,000 web domains that are included in three commonly used A.I. training data sets, discovered an ’emerging crisis in consent,’ as publishers and online platforms have taken steps to prevent their data from being harvested.”
“A Russian court has sentenced Alsu Kurmasheva, a Russian-American journalist for U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), to 6-1/2 years in prison for spreading false information about the Russian army, the court revealed on Monday.”
“Even at news publications, there were vastly fewer revelatory stories on sensitive political issues and investigations on abuses of public power. Journalists shifted uncomfortably in their seats when they heard story ideas they felt could touch a nerve in the government. I saw editors press for extra-solid sourcing in anticipation of government condemnation.”
“Biden’s staff posted the news on X because they must have understood that, for better or worse, it is the quickest, least mediated way to inject information into the bloodstream of political and cultural discourse. (As Musk remarked about the mainstream media this afternoon: ‘They’re so slow.’)”
His employer, The Wall Street Journal, has been advocating for his release and called the verdict a “disgraceful, sham conviction.” The BBC reports that “Russian observers say a quick conviction could mean that an exchange is imminent. According to Russian judicial practice, an exchange generally requires a verdict to already be in place.”
The New York Times / Sapna Maheshwari and Ken Bensinger
“Despite having more TikTok followers than Beyoncé or Reese Witherspoon, he has received little attention in the national press, perhaps because his videos are mainly in Spanish. But he drew attention last month with videos that he filmed with President Biden as he announced two new immigration measures.”
Nieman Lab is a project to try to help figure out where the news is headed in the Internet age. Sign up for The Digest, our daily email with all the freshest future-of-journalism news.
