We keep an eye out for the most interesting stories about Labby subjects: digital media, startups, the web, journalism, strategy, and more. Here’s some of what we’ve seen lately.
July 23, 2024
“The stark extent of the BBC’s challenges are set out in the corporation’s annual report, which shows the total number of British households paying the £169.50 license fee fell to 23.9 million, suggesting a growing number of people feel able to go without BBC services. The fall has hit the BBC’s income at a time when its finances were already struggling owing to a decade of funding cuts and high inflation.” —
The Guardian / Jim Waterson
/ Jul 23“…giving more to our high-value supporters — we’ve gifted Feast to our subscribers on the classic subscription packages. And we have also made it available with an extended free trial to other supporters as well…We know that the more people read, the more they engage, the happier they are, and the better their retention is.” —
Press Gazette / Bron Maher
/ Jul 23July 22, 2024
“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.'”
—Substack / Taylor Lorenz
/ Jul 22“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.” —
New York Times / Rebecca Robbins
/ Jul 22“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.” —
Washington Post / Elahe Izadi
/ Jul 22“The Sheriff’s Department confirmed its investigation into [journalist Maya] Lau is closed and said it is no longer surveilling reporters.” —
Los Angeles Times / Keri Blakinger and Alene Tchekmedyian
/ Jul 22“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.” —
New York Times / Kevin Roose
/ Jul 22“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.” —
Columbia Journalism Review / Selina Cheng
/ Jul 22“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.’)” —
The Atlantic / Charlie Warzel
/ Jul 22
