The Honolulu Star-Advertiser is gutting its newsroom →

“I’ve been really heartened by just the sheer amount of reader call-outs and the sheer work reporters and editors have put into reaching out to readers in the past couple of months.” —LO

“There is just one black reporter on the metro desk of nearly 90 people covering greater Los Angeles, the largest desk at the paper.”

“Capitalizing the ‘B’ in Black should become standard use to describe people, culture, art and communities. We already capitalize Asian, Hispanic, African American and Native American.”

“Judge Rainelda Estacio Montesa ruled that only Ressa and Santos are guilty of cyber libel charges. Rappler Inc was initially charged in the suit. The court sentenced Ressa and Santos to a minimum of 6 months and 1 day to a maximum of 6 years in jail over charges filed by businessman Wilfredo Keng in a case that tested the 8-year-old Philippine cybercrime law. Ressa and Santos won’t have to go to jail because the conviction is appealable all the way to the Supreme Court.”

“As industry furloughs and layoffs continue, Quartz has joined a growing club of publications that seemingly got caught in the mushy middle of 2010s digital media, like Mic and Mashable. Not quite niche enough to be essential to a small group of readers, but not quite big enough to compete at scale. Coronavirus didn’t help.”

“The biggest story in the world came to your front door and you left — that to me is insane.” —LO

“Prominent white writers constantly obscure the racially coded nature of their criticisms. Writers like Weiss and Stephens don’t want to directly admit that they disagree with a large number of their Black colleagues, nor do they want to deal with the idea that their colleagues always exist in Black skin; it’s easier to relegate these opinions to some faceless overzealous writers, rather than admit that they’ve chosen to ignore Black writers in their own office. And it’s not a new fad for white writers to obfuscate their point or create mental obstacles in order to avoid directly criticizing their Black contemporaries.”

“It’s one thing to choose to stride into controversy with eyes open, but it’s quite another to stumble into it. The Cotton column was an example of the latter. It was such an explosive moment, and the opinion team was so traumatized, Sulzberger believed, that it was difficult to fathom how Bennet would be able to project the necessary confidence to rally his staffers, lead them through the storm, get them safely back out again, and then preside over the changes necessary to fix what was broken in the op-ed process.”

“‘What’s the difference between pandemic, epidemic and outbreak?’ was read more than 900,000 times, translated into Danish and Indonesian, and used by multiple sites, including Market Watch, EcoWatch, Premium Times – Nigeria, and the Good Men project. Since publishing ‘Could chloroquine treat coronavirus? 5 questions answered about a promising, problematic and unproven use for an antimalarial drug’ in The Conversation US, Dr. Katherine Seley-Radtke of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County has been interviewed by outlets all over the world, including NBC Euronews, Newsy, NPR, The Washington Post, and the South Asian Times. A piece on which household cleaning products can kill the virus was viewed more than a million times, and republished in ScienceAlert; The Sun, a British news tabloid; and the New Zealand Herald. That article, and many others, performed particularly strongly on Apple News.”

“The owners of the Post-Gazette will still be very wealthy regardless of what happens to the paper. But the PG’s Pulitzer Prize-winning newsroom staff — with buyouts already being offered — has more at stake.”

“It wasn’t immediately clear why VOA Director Amanda Bennett and Deputy Director Sandy Sugawara submitted their resignations. In a memo to staff on Monday, they jointly wrote, ‘It is time for us to leave,’ but cited no specific reason other than the arrival of Michael Pack, a Trump appointee who will head the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees VOA. Pack is an ally of Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist.”

“That’s not all they were losing. Absolute circulation rose until 1990, and has been falling since (‘gradually, then suddenly’), but circulation per capita has been falling since 1950, in common with most other developed markets.” —HT

“Our crisis subs, our coronavirus subs, are retaining at a better rate, 5% better than the group that came to us in January. We’re holding onto them at a better rate. Most of them came on with a six-month offer. So that will be the telling point.”