Here’s a nugget from the Institute for Nonprofit News that might come up as we creep ever closer to the 2024 elections. Only 48% of nonprofit newsrooms that applied for INN membership in 2023 were accepted.

Others failed to meet INN membership standards, which focus on editorial independence and transparency and include prohibitions on “dark money” to fund journalism.

INN wants membership in their organization — currently about 450 newsrooms strong — to be “a sign of quality, credible journalism” in an information ecosystem that includes some bad actors, said Sharene Azimi, communications director for INN. She noted, in particular, the phenomenon of “‘pink slime’ sites masquerading as news.”

To become a member of the INN Network, nonprofit news organizations must meet the membership standards and be approved by INN’s board of directors.

“The reasons for denial are various but tend to be that the organization receives too much anonymous funding, that it is not operationally independent from a larger organization, that it does not have full editorial independence (e.g., if it’s part of an advocacy-oriented nonprofit), or that the quality of the reporting is not high enough,” Azimi said.

Each application receives hours of individual review from INN staffers. The staff go on to make recommendations but the board of directors has the final say. INN staff will work with newsrooms who’ve been rejected, Azimi noted, to help them try and meet the organization’s standards on a second or third application.

INN’s CEO Karen Rundlet has noted the rejection rate and stressed that the organization is dedicated to elevating (emphasis mine) independent journalism.

“INN members produce fact-based, data-driven original reporting — and you know exactly who their funders are. Let’s continue to make sure the public knows that what our members produce is very different from pink slime journalism, press releases, or funder-prescribed content,” she said in remarks given at the INN Days conference this June. “Not everyone gets to be an INN member.”

When’s the last time you consumed local news about crime, and how did it make you feel?

For me, it was last Thursday, after a colleague shared a Boston Globe story about a horrifying development in a horrifying case. The lede alone, not to mention the damning details meticulously reported by Laura Crimaldi and her Globe colleagues, left me feeling many things, none of them good — most immediately, angry and nauseous.

The latest report about local news from the Pew-Knight Initiative, released last week, details how, and how often, Americans consume and respond to local news about crime. Unsurprisingly, most Americans (77%) report getting news about crime at least sometimes, including a third of Americans who said they consume crime news often.

“In fact,” the Pew-Knight report notes, “more Americans get news and information about crime than any other local topic except the weather.”

Here are some takeaways from the report:

Among consumers of local news, those who prefer local TV news stand out

Though the popularity of digital news sources has risen over the last few years, TV news is still a top source of local news nationally. So it’s significant that Americans who said they prefer to consume local news on TV report getting crime news more often than others — and are more likely than any other group to report seeing news about local violent crime daily.

They’re less likely to say they think the amount of crime in their community is exaggerated, and more likely to report satisfaction with the quality of the local crime news they consume.

People who consume the most news about crime are more concerned about personal safety

Americans who consume crime news most often, from any source, are the most likely to say they are concerned about local crime affecting them or their family. Specifically, one-third of Americans who get news about crime often report being extremely or very concerned about this, compared to one-fifth of those who get this news sometimes, and one in 10 of those who never consume local crime news.

Importantly, the report notes, “the survey cannot confirm which is more likely: that news about local crime leads people to become more concerned, or that people who are already concerned about local crime consume more news about it.”

Concern and anger are among the most common emotional responses to local crime news

The Pew-Knight survey explored how crime coverage makes Americans feel. About eight in 10 respondents reported that the coverage makes them feel concerned at least sometimes, while seven in 10 reported feeling angry at least sometimes. About half reported feeling motivated to change things by news coverage, and confident that things will improve. And four in 10 said this coverage at least sometimes made them afraid for their safety.

Americans who consume local crime news more often are more likely to have any of these emotional responses.

Just because most Americans consume local crime news doesn’t mean they find it easy to stay informed

One-third of Americans report being extremely or very satisfied with the quality of the local crime news they consume. (That’s similar to reported levels of satisfaction with local arts and culture news coverage and a higher level of satisfaction than Americans report with political news.) About half say they’re somewhat satisfied and 18% say they are not satisfied.

Though large majorities of Americans express interest in various types of crime news — such as the broader patterns in local crime or what local officials are doing to address crime — relatively few say it’s easy to stay informed about those topics.

The survey asked Americans where they get their news and information about local crime. Those who consume local crime news through social media like Facebook and Instagram are more likely to think news sources exaggerate local crime while those who get news from local politicians are the most likely to say it’s underplayed.

News consumers see a disproportionate amount of violent crime coverage

A similar proportion of Americans report seeing news about three types of crime at least weekly: property crime (37%), drug-related crime (33%), and violent crime (32%) — even though violent crime is much less common than property crime.

Meanwhile, just one in 10 Americans report seeing news about white-collar crime with the same frequency.

Where do people turn to get information about a crime? It’s fragmented

Many Americans reported getting information about crime from either people they know or local news sources: 71% and 70%, respectively.

But, when asked which sources they’d turn to first for more information about a crime in their community, the Pew-Knight survey found much more fragmentation. About a quarter say they’d check out local news outlets first, with fairly equal shares saying they’d turn to social media (19%), search engines (19%), or friends, family, and neighbors (17%). Less than one in 10 said they’d look to apps like Nextdoor or to local law enforcement.

The politics of local crime news

Nationally, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say they view violent crime as a big problem across the country, but Pew-Knight did not find much difference along party lines in how the two groups consume local news about crime or in their levels of concern about crime.

The survey did find, however, that Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents are more likely to see all news sources as exaggerating the amount of crime in their community, and as covering unfairly by race or ethnicity.

Black Americans see news about violent crime more often

Pew has previously found the Black Americans follow local news more closely than other Americans. This is also true of local crime news: “Black Americans see or hear more local crime news — and specifically news about violent crime — than other racial and ethnic groups.” A quarter report seeing news about violent crime daily, while about half see this news at least weekly.

That greater consumption of local news correlates with a greater likelihood to say crime reduction should be a political priority nationally, and to share concerns about violent crime. Black Americans are also more likely to perceive information about crime from local law enforcement, and from local news sources, “as unfair to some depending on their race and ethnicity.”

You can read the full report here.

When is a news alert not a news alert?

No, that’s not a question from a blunted hippie who just read the I Ching and now speaks only in kōans. It’s a question about TikTok and other social apps that have leaned into sending push notifications that look like news alerts but actually derive from the user-generated muck.

The Financial Times has an interesting story out this morning that notes the vertical-video app’s tendency to send pushes that frame non-news as news:

TikTok has been sending inaccurate and misleading news-style alerts to users’ phones, including a false claim about Taylor Swift and a weeks-old disaster warning, intensifying fears about the spread of misinformation on the popular video-sharing platform. 

Among alerts seen by the Financial Times was a warning about a tsunami in Japan, labelled “BREAKING,” that was posted in late January, three weeks after an earthquake had struck.

Other notifications falsely stated that “Taylor Swift Cancelled All Tour Dates in What She Called ‘Racist Florida’” and highlighted a five-year “ban” for a US baseball player [Shohei Ohtani] that originated as an April Fool’s day prank.

The notifications, which sometimes contain summaries from user-generated posts, pop up on screen in the style of a news alert. Researchers say that format, adopted widely to boost engagement through personalized video recommendations, may make users less critical of the veracity of the content and open them up to misinformation.

These alerts are newsy in format but not in content; they are either culture-war agitprop or old stories unstuck in time. Many of these are perfectly accurate, of course, but they are nonetheless produced by someone other than journalists, leaving the door wide open for abuses. And given that their broadcast is governed by algorithms, measures of engagement are more likely to win out over measures of accuracy.

A reminder: News alerts are not nearly as common among the general population as phone-addicted journalists might imagine. As of 2021, only 24% of Americans surveyed said they had received even a single mobile news alert in the past week. (I’ve gotten more than that in the past five minutes.) While that was higher than in most other countries (e.g., U.K. 17%, Japan 13%, Finland 9%), it still means three-quarters of Americans carry an essentially news-alert-free phone in their pockets. So these platform-derived alerts may, for many, be the only ones they see. And, of course, many users will see the alert but not tap through, leaving the false info as the entirety of the message communicated.

TikTok removed the specific alerts the FT brought to their attention, but declined to get into how they managed to rise to the top of the algorithm in the first place.

The New York Times now has 10.2 million digital-only subscribers, and 4.8 million of them are paying for some kind of Times bundle — the news product plus at least one of The Athletic, cooking, games, or Wirecutter — the company said in its second quarter earnings report Wednesday.

A few other bits from the earnings report, which saw The New York Times’ profit up 13.6% compared to this time last year:

• The Times added 300,000 digital subscribers in the quarter.
• Digital revenues are up 12.9% over this time last year, to $304.5 million, “due to an increase in bundle and multiproduct revenues and an increase in other single-product subscription revenues, partially offset by a decrease in news-only subscription revenues.”
• The Times has spent a little less than $3 million this year on its ongoing lawsuit against OpenAI.
• The Athletic, the sports site the Times acquired for $550 million in 2022, is still losing money, but it’s losing less than it was this time last year.

On Tuesday, Axios CEO Jim VandeHei told staff (in an email that used Axios’ “smart brevity” format) the company is laying off 50 people, or about 10% of its employees. These are the first layoffs in the 7-year history of the company, which until now seemed to have dodged the icebergs that had torn holes into many of its competitors; it was so successful, in fact, that Cox Enterprises bought Axios for $525 million in 2022. Its founders — VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz — stayed on to continue running the company.

In his memo, VandeHei mentioned that reader attention is “scattering across social, podcasts, individual creators and influencers, partisan websites and more,” and that this coupled with AI models’ ability to summarize news makes now “the most difficult moment for media in our lifetime.” In April, VandeHei had told The New York Times he was concerned the rise of AI would “eviscerate the weak, the ordinary, the unprepared in media,” and that Axios’ strategy would shift toward live events, membership programs, and premium newsletters.

Axios’ Detroit and Tampa Bay reporters both posted about being laid off, as did a national news editor. The visuals team was hit particularly hard, according to Axios’ managing editor of data visuals.

NEW: Axios is laying off 50 people across the company. CEO @JimVandeHei just sent out this note — which says the layoffs are because of “changes in the media business” pic.twitter.com/lLVemNFh0N

— Katie Robertson (@katie_robertson) August 6, 2024

There’s just something so unsettling that they used the Axios “smart brevity” bulletpoint format to fire their staffers.

WHY IT MATTERS: You will no longer have a job. https://t.co/oVWTUhUFVE

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) August 6, 2024

Axios laying off people in smart brevity style and doing it as a news dump right before the vice presidential announcement is heartless stuff.

— Scott Nover (@ScottNover) August 6, 2024

Everything else aside here—notable that VandeHei essentially cites AI as a threat to Axios’ business model https://t.co/zJbmTYLzVI

— Damon Beres (@dlberes) August 6, 2024

it’s a sad day for those of us at Axios that are losing beloved colleagues — i promise our internal email format is not the most gutting thing about this news and saying so is not very nice to those laid off!

— Ashley Gold (@ashleyrgold) August 6, 2024