The New York Times and the Washington Post compete with meme accounts for the chance to be first with a big headline.
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Nieman Lab Wire
The last 20 posts from the Nieman Journalism Lab, for those who enjoy reverse chronological order.
July 22, 2024
July 22, 2024
Radio Broadcast received close to a thousand entries to its contest — but ultimately rejected them all.
July 18, 2024
“The strength of weak ties” applies to misinformation, too.
July 18, 2024
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.
How can local online newsrooms best reach, and keep, their audiences?
At this inflection point, Local Independent Online News Publishers found more of its members are investing in products that connect them to audiences without a tech intermediary.1
While the number of products per newsroom hasn’t changed significantly from 2022 to 2024, “the types of products LIONs create are changing,” as Rockway and research and evaluation associate Dylan Sanchez write in the brief report. “We’ve seen pronounced increases among LIONs producing newsletters (up to 95% in 2024 from 81% in 2022) and events (up to 60% in 2024 from 34% in 2021).”
Rockway and Sanchez also highlight self-reported data from these newsrooms on the most effective ways audiences find them. “We’ve seen particular growth in newsletters, in-person conversations, and events,” they note, “though the latter two may be reflective of a broader shift back to in-person engagement post-COVID.” (LION does not collect traffic data by source from publishers.)
These results also make clear that search and social media remain top sources of audience discovery for the overwhelming majority of newsrooms. Specifically, “73% of organizations noted direct search as effective in 2024, up from 56% in 2022,” the report notes. Organic social media discovery has also “remained consistently high,” with more than 75% of outlets citing it among the “most effective” sources of audience discovery for the past three years.
You can read the full report here.
- There’s a philanthropic parallel to this traffic dependency, at LION and across the local news and news support sector: In the past, Meta Journalism Project has been a major source of funding for LION, though it no longer is. The Google News Initiative remains one of LION’s three biggest funders, per its five-year strategic plan. [↩]
Vaping and doomscrolling are both addictive and both bad for you, so why not combine the two? Because look, here’s a touchscreen vape that gets news alerts.
You’re still looking at Twitter to get your news? That’s cool I guess. Me? I get it on my vape pic.twitter.com/PHZi022tXf
— Katie Notopoulos (@katienotopoulos) July 17, 2024
No way we got twitter on my vape pic.twitter.com/Nnaz5fp0Lt
— Jimmer Fredette (@jimfredette32) July 5, 2024
The Swype 30K has a 2.01″ touchscreen and Bluetooth connection to sync with and deliver notifications from your smartphone. (It also has a Find My Phone function.) “There’s a lot to keep you busy when you own this vape,” a reviewer at online vape store EightVape notes. It retails for $19 and is designed to be thrown away.
Carlos Watson’s luck may have run out.
Watson was remanded into custody after the government said he repeatedly perjured himself on the stand. U.S. District Judge Eric Komitee agreed and revoked Watson’s bail. https://t.co/2Riz7E8npS
— Nika Schoonover (@NikaSchoonover) July 16, 2024
But yesterday’s verdict secured one important distinction between Ozy and its digital rivals. Watson’s outfit was, at its highest levels, a criminal enterprise, not just one that made strategic errors and bad management decisions. (Watson now joins his co-founder Samir Rao and former chief of staff Suzee Han as frauds in the eyes of the law. They pleaded guilty to the charges and testified against Watson, who pledges to appeal.)
Indeed, the defense’s main strategy throughout Watson’s trial seemed to be: Maybe we fluffed up a few numbers, but who doesn’t in this business? We just did the same “puffing and bluffing” that those other guys did. His lawyers tried, unsuccessfully, to have the case dismissed for what they called selective prosecution, saying Watson was being prosecuted because of his race. (Roland Martin had thoughts on that.) But in the end, the event at the case’s center — Rao, at Watson’s direction1, using a voice-changing app to impersonate a Google exec on a call with a potential investor — was enough to illustrate the ethical gap between Ozy and even its most sketchy peers. (Not to mention dragging Google CEO Sundar Pichai into court to testify that, no, he had not offered to buy Ozy for $600 million, at Watson told a different investor.)
Throughout the trial, Watson’s team kept up an active online presence arguing for his innocence (or at least his unfair prosecution). They’ve appeared to fall silent since the verdict; Ozy.com — until this week recast a curated apologia for Watson — has been blanked. The same’s true for TooBlackForBusiness.com, the site which argued at length that Watson was being unfairly persecuted because of his race. But before the Ozy story slips into obscurity, I’ll just note this Instagram post, which lays out an alleged “Timeline of Carlos Watson.” The first item: “1850: Carlos Watson’s grandfather, a runaway slave, escapes,” paired with an image of shackles being broken. It’s certainly possible that story exists in Watson’s family history, but it’s unlikely to involve either of his two grandfathers, who were born in 1892 and 1889.
It cannot be emphasized enough that Watson named Ozy after the Percy Shelley poem “Ozymandias” — an unusual choice, given its content! It appears we’ve finally reached the poem’s end:
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Photo of a Carlos Watson Show poster by Elvert Barnes used under a Creative Commons license.
- Watson denies it was at his direction, saying he walked into the room mid-call. Rao testified that not only was it Watson’s idea, but that he texted Rao throughout the call suggesting talking points. The texts were entered into evidence; you be the judge. [↩]
July 16, 2024
“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.”
July 16, 2024
Ziff Davis can’t lay off workers or decrease their salary due to generative AI, according to the tentative contract.
July 15, 2024
“I’ve joked about Businessweek(ish); I don’t think that one was really considered.”
NPR’s Collaborative Journalism Network to expand with an Appalachia newsroom, short-form video pilot, and more∞
In 2019, the four largest public radio stations in Texas teamed up with NPR to establish a collaborative statewide newsroom. When that collaboration was first announced, NPR specified reporting goals including “increas[ing] coverage of statewide issues and boost[ing] reporting from underserved regions.” But the vision for this experiment was always much bigger than Texas: By investing in one statewide newsroom, NPR and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting were betting on a collaborative reporting model as “a prototype for the way stations throughout the country can share resources and produce more of the journalism their communities need.”
Five years later, the one-newsroom prototype has grown to five collaborative newsrooms across the country, with newsrooms added in California, the Gulf States, the Midwest, and, most recently, New England.1 Now, a $5.5 million investment over three years from philanthropists Eric Schmidt (a former tech executive) and Wendy Schmidt (a former journalist who also worked in marketing communications in Silicon Valley), announced on Wednesday, will fund a significant expansion of the network.
By year’s end, NPR will establish a new regional newsroom in Appalachia and strengthen the existing Mountain West News Bureau public media collaboration, bringing its total number of collaborative regional newsrooms up to seven (consistent with a plan first shared in a February board meeting). The hefty investment will also fund expansions of both the California and Midwest newsrooms (which were seeded with a $4.7 million grant from the Schmidts in 2020), and create a short-form video pilot among the New England News Collaborative.
NPR declined to specify how much of the $5.5 million will flow to each of these regions and initiatives (NPR senior vice president and editor-in-chief Edith Chapin told me, “We are still working on specifics, so we consider it best not to comment publicly until that is firmed up.”)
In the network’s five years of growth, “this type of regional collaboration has allowed us to pool resources to create editorial positions that each of the partner stations couldn’t support alone,” Chapin told me in an email. In the Gulf States newsroom, for instance, the regional newsroom structure created the possibility to hire six regional beat reporters (focused on beats including economic mobility; justice, incarceration and gun violence; and sports and culture) and a community engagement reporter “whose work is shared by all the partner stations,” creating “coverage that wouldn’t exist otherwise,” Chapin said.
The collaborative structure results in more local and regional reporting reaching national audiences, and helps NPR take the pulse of national stories by picking up on “patterns and trends — similar stories that pop up in different regions,” Chapin said, which member station and national NPR reporters work on together.
The collaborative newsrooms have already generated work with impact. Chapin pointed to a story about inadequate oversight for mental illness in California nursing homes by the California regional newsroom, LAist, and APM Research Lab resulting in lawmakers questioning state and county agencies. Similarly, in the Gulf States newsroom, she cited the Utility Bill of the Month series as especially impactful, resulting in bills reduced by thousands for some sources. In terms of successes with readers, meanwhile, she said the open and click-through rates of the Texas newsroom’s bicultural newsletter, Oye Texas, indicates that it “is resonating with readers.”
The collaborative structure can have economic benefits as well, according to Chapin. In Texas, the regional newsroom produces six live statewide newscasts per weekday broadcast across 27 public radio stations, which brings in “underwriting dollars that wouldn’t come in otherwise.” Regional newsrooms have also benefited from “grants from a variety of philanthropic organizations.” (That’s significant at a time when NPR is grappling with falling revenue and a shrinking audience.)
The new Appalachia newsroom will begin as a collaboration among six public media stations in Kentucky and Tennessee “with the possibility of adding more,” per the press release. The Mountain West News Bureau, meanwhile, is a 14-station collaboration spanning six states — Colorado, Iaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming — that will become a regional newsroom with the support of this new funding.
From previous regional launches, NPR has “developed a template for the formal agreement among the station partners and NPR” outlining “the new ways we’ll work together and the commitments we’re making to each other” that it plans to use for the new regional newsrooms, Chapin told me. At the same time, the regional newsrooms are not one size fits all; Chapin pointed to an evolution in the Texas newsroom from a focus on statewide newscasts to the later addition of a capital reporter, investigative editor, audience editor, and digital breaking news reporter according to the unique needs of that region’s audience.
NPR has emphasized underserved communities, statewide coverage, and an increased ability to conduct investigative reporting as objectives and advantages of the regional newsroom model. Reporting for underserved communities and bolstering investigative reporting are explicit focuses of the two newest newsrooms, too. Specifically, NPR intends to “strengthen reporting on issues impacting Indigenous and Native communities” with this grant. “In the Mountain West News Bureau, new grant funds will support an Indigenous Affairs reporter-producer, adding to existing coverage of Native communities there,” Chapin specified.
“We’ve learned that putting an investigative reporting team at the regional newsroom not only results in great stories from that team but enables more investigative reporting at the newsroom’s member stations,” Chapin told me. “The central team consults, coaches, advises and pitches in to help stations carry out investigative projects they couldn’t do on their own.”
Beyond that, the new grant will support development of a “talent pipeline,” including by funding professional development and training opportunities, and will “create a shared services model that will provide support for small stations.”
The shared services model is partly based on a structure currently in place in the California regional newsroom, Chapin said. “While the newsroom continues to work with stations on investigations – part of its original mission – it also offers general editing and training to help small-station reporters expand their skills and hone their craft,” she explained. The Schmidt funding “will allow us to add two new editors to focus on audio and digital training for smaller stations in the state where early-career journalists often serve news deserts in need of strong local reporting.”
“Our objective is to methodically build this structure throughout the whole country,” Chapin said, “and we have seen progress in more and more stations and groups wanting to join.”
The short-form video pilot among the 10-station New England News Collaborative, also announced Wednesday, represents a new front of experimentation within the Collaborative Journalism Network. Short-form video certainly isn’t new to NPR writ large (see Planet Money, etc.), and the pilot will build on the network and stations’ “infrastructure and expertise.” It will include “training and mentorship to build visual storytelling capacity and knowledge of best practices for digital platforms.”
Cori Princell, managing editor of the NENC, pointed to the collaborative’s shared Instagram channel Our New England (launched last fall) as the kind of resource-sharing around short-form video the pilot will build on. “That work includes a series of video shorts made by students in New England Public Media’s Media Lab; video portraits highlighting accessibility and inclusivity in the outdoors; ‘Meditation Monday’ ambient videos; and short videos featuring our bilingual video series Conexión: Rooted in New England’s Outdoors,” she said. But the exact shape of the pilot is still in flux: “The grant primarily supports NPR and NENC staff who will work together to develop the structure and specific goals of the project in the coming days and weeks,” she added.
The pilot is “an opportunity that builds up our station journalists’ skills in short-form video, and allows us to share best practices on how newsrooms can sustainably integrate video and visuals in the ways we tell stories,” Princell said. While they will further refine specific goals in the next few weeks, “reaching younger and more diverse audiences is a significant part of our strategy in public media,” she said.
“Across the board we’ve witnessed the adoption of short form video as a primary entertainment and information source,” Chapin said. NPR’s Instagram channel, for instance, “has seen triple digit growth in audience and engagement over the last couple of years with a daily audience rivaling our website’s.”
- NPR leaders shared plans to establish a regional newsroom in New England based on the existing New England News Collaborative in February. The NENC announced its regional newsroom launch plan today, Thursday. “The NENC is a longstanding collaboration supported by CPB, annual station dues, foundations and donors, and now NPR will make an annual contribution as one of our partners,” Connecticut Public chief content officer and NENC director Vanessa de la Torre clarified. [↩]
July 11, 2024
The Athletic intends to use its live coverage as a “shop window,” giving new readers a taste of what they might get if they subscribed.
July 11, 2024
Can AI models save reporters time in figuring out an unfamiliar field’s jargon?
The New York Times is “constantly thinking about the hierarchy of the stories that we’re promoting,” Joe Kahn says∞
In the two years that The New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn has been on the job, there’s been a firehose flow of challenges to tackle.
In a New Yorker interview with Clare Malone published on Wednesday, Kahn gets into just about all of them: the biggest controversies of his tenure so far like transgender issues and Gaza coverage, managing internal conflict, experimenting with new story formats and artificial intelligence, and more.
Come for Kahn’s answers and stay for Malone’s sharp questions. Below are a few of the most Lab-adjacent bits of the interview, but you should read the full Q&A here.
On curation and vertical video
Malone: When a person is scrolling the New York Times app, there’s tons of stories. Some are about yoga, some are about Gaza, some are about Trump or Biden. How do you communicate the editorial judgment that came from people opening up the newspaper and seeing what was on the front page?
Kahn: I think the difference between coming to the Times at any given moment and going to many other places where you can find news on the Internet is we’re constantly thinking about the hierarchy of the stories that we’re promoting, which is a big part of my day and a big part of my leadership’s team day — the play and the prominence of the different story lines that we have.
Malone: What does that look like?
Kahn: Oh, multiple times a day, we’re debating essentially what the top of the home screen, what the top of the digital feed should look like. The big stories that we’re covering, how many should be in the package that goes along with those stories, making sure that that package has something that has an explanatory element to it, that if it’s a controversial story where there’s been a strong reaction, you want to have a piece of journalism there that gives people a glimpse into the range of reactions to it. The depth of the New York Times’ coverage is a big part of what I do, what the leadership team does, what our news desk does. We hope to provide a much richer, fuller experience of the news than you can find anywhere else. Now, of course, you will also find, as you scroll down the feed, any number of things that might be diversions from that, particularly as you go deeper into the feed, and you find cultural lifestyle coverage, or health-and-wellness coverage, or some of our other journalistic offerings like sports in The Athletic, or Wirecutter, or other things. The ranking of those, the packaging of those, is very much a human curation task and an editing task. And we try to put them together really with a lot of intent every day and multiple times a day.
Malone: The Washington Post’s new publisher, Will Lewis, just announced that the Post will have three newsrooms — a classic news one, an opinion newsroom, and then a third, for service journalism and social media. What do you make of that? And would the Times ever consider a division that’s more wholly devoted to creating content for people who get their news mostly from social media?
Kahn: The Washington Post is among our most traditional and competitive rivals out there on just about every story that we cover. And it would be a loss to us and to the news media in general if the Post didn’t continue to thrive. As much as we’re competitors and as much as I want to beat them on any given story on any given day, I also want them to succeed. I hope Will Lewis has something figured out that will help the Post grow its audience, and we’ll be watching to see what he does. Our approach has been different. We do divide news and opinion into separate operations and we feel strongly about that, as the Post does. We don’t divide some sort of social or viral news —
Malone: I’m noticing more and more, let’s say Jonathan Swan, a vertical video of him summarizing his reporting.
Kahn: The difference is that it’s Jonathan Swan, or it’s Maggie Haberman, or it’s Jonah Bromwich. We’re using reporter-on-camera vertical video to offer a kind of explanatory layer to the journalism that we’re doing and to give people a more direct relationship with the beat reporters doing that work. But I consider that kind of the opposite — I want all those innovations to be within our own newsroom as a way of giving people other angles of entry into the good reporting that we’re doing.
On managing criticism and disagreement as the boss
Malone: You seem to have come in at a time when the paper is really trying to push people in line as far as independence. “Let’s go back to old-school reporting.” Do you think, temperamentally, you are the kind of person who’s suited for that kind of “get in line” period? Does some outspoken portion of the newsroom voicing their dislike get to you?
Kahn: I don’t mind people who are outspoken or have critiques about the journalism that we’re doing. In fact, I encourage a newsroom where we’re constantly debating how we’re doing on various stories. I think what you’re implying is that there’s an old-school kind of hierarchical decision-making that we want to impose, and that’s not really the case at all. One thing that I do feel strongly on, seeing the way it is increasingly difficult for reporters to take on difficult reporting topics that are sensitive, and seeing the kind of vitriol that’s unleashed on social media about those things, I think it’s really important that the rest of the staff understand that they need to stand behind their colleagues in those moments. So I do have less tolerance for internal criticism of each other as journalists. And I do think it’s important to build a culture where people feel they’re supported by their colleagues when they’re doing difficult stories, yes.
Read The New Yorker’s interview here.
July 10, 2024
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?
July 10, 2024
“Our task is to get back to the real world, to the extent that it is recoverable.”
July 9, 2024
“Thank goodness that the mandate will never be to look what’s getting the most Twitter likes.”
July 8, 2024
Institute for Poetjournalism founder Aaron Dworkin hopes a cash prize and a wire service for “newspoems” will help the form take off.
July 8, 2024
In countries that have demanded Facebook pay local news publishers, the tech giant has responded with threats — and sometimes action. Will a Canada-style ban become the international norm?
June 27, 2024
Nieman Lab’s tests show ChatGPT is directing users to broken URLs for at least 10 publications with OpenAI licensing deals.
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