Is “resistance journalism” about practices or power?
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Monday, January 3, 2022
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Is “resistance journalism” about practices or power?A new paper notes that discussions among reporters tend to focus on its “lack of verification” and “truth-bending.” But you can’t evaluate resistance without also looking at what it’s resisting. By Joshua Benton. |
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Are partisan news sites to blame for polarization? A massive study suggests they’re notPlus: Sadness-based news sharing, why journalists see audiences as more conservative than they are, and journalists’ community-building on Instagram. By Mark Coddington and Seth Lewis. |
What We’re Reading
Forbes / Veronica Villafañe
Fusion, which you didn’t remember still existed, no longer exists →
“Univision has pulled the plug on Fusion TV, the cable network it initially conceptualized as an English-language news and lifestyle channel targeting millennial Latinos. But it ended up being a mishmash with no true identity that evolved into a convoluted money-losing mess.” Its news site ended in either 2017 or 2019, depending on how you look at it.
Twitter / Paul Farhi
The New York Times’ talent vacuum remains fully powered, pulling in David Fahrenthold →
“Dave joined the Post in 2000 as a summer intern on the city desk and delivered stand-out work on every beat he did, including covering the nightside cops beat, the D.C. police department and as a roving New England reporter.” (We wrote what I think was the first piece on his unusual pad-and-pen approach to social reporting back in 2016.)
The New York Times / Ben Smith
A former Facebook exec pushes to open social media’s “black boxes” →
“…a few private companies are disseminating a massive amount of the world's news and it's largely happening inside black boxes…I think figuring out ways to both help and, in some cases, force, large platforms to be more transparent with news and civic content as it's in the process of being disseminated can ultimately help make social platforms better homes for public discourse.”
Yahoo News / Jana Winter
The U.S. Customs and Border Protection is reviewing its secretive division that investigates journalists (among others) →
“CBP's internal probe was prompted by Yahoo News' reporting earlier this month on Operation Whistle Pig, a leak investigation targeting reporter Ali Watkins and her then-boyfriend, James Wolfe, a Senate staffer…As many as 20 national security reporters were also investigated during this time.”
Press Gazette / Dominic Ponsford
What to expect in news media M&A in 2022 →
“Mercedes Benz is employing more journalists in Germany than the leading consumer car magazine. They have an agency in Berlin with 100 people; a third of them are journalists, a third of them are data scientists and the other third are online marketers. As a publisher, if you can position yourself within that content marketing trend that will be a strong thing.”
The Wrap / Lindsey Ellefson
Fox News was cable’s overall No. 1 network in 2021 for the sixth straight year →
“Fox News secured 2.348 million total average viewers between the hours of 8 p.m. ET and 11 p.m. ET. Of those, 370,000 were in the demo [ages 18-49]. MSNBC was in second place in total average viewers, pulling in 1.533 million, but its 216,000 demo viewers had the network placing third among the big three cable news channels. CNN saw an average of 1.078 million primetime viewers for the year with 268,000 of those in the demo.”
Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain / Jennifer Jenkins
Belated happy Public Domain Day! →
Newly out of copyright as of Jan. 1 are tens of thousands of books published in 1926, including A. A. Milne’s “Winnie-the-Pooh,” Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” Langston Hughes’ “The Weary Blues,” and H. L. Mencken’s “Notes on Democracy.”
The Washington Post / Margaret Sullivan
If American democracy is going to survive, the media must make this crucial shift →
“For the most part, news organizations are not making democracy-under-siege a central focus of the work they present to the public…pro-democracy coverage is not being ‘centered’ by the media writ large. It's occasional, not regular; it doesn't appear to be part of an overall editorial plan that fully recognizes just how much trouble we're in.”
The New York Times / Brooks Barnes
Oops: People’s latest cover wishes Betty White (R.I.P.) a happy 100th birthday →
“Some fans blamed the magazine for jinxing Ms. White…Others were pleased that Ms. White, known for her devilish sense of humor and impeccable comedic timing, had seemed to have pulled off one last laugh.”
The Washington Post / Jeremy Barr
Omicron has sent TV news anchors back to remote studios →
“Amid the massive spread of the coronavirus across the United States, television news programs have been nudging back toward the way things were in the spring of 2020, when hosts and anchors either worked from home or — more commonly, this time around — isolated in individual studios.”
Press Gazette / Aisha Majid
The pandemic boosted U.K. news orgs’ app downloads in 2020, but 2021 put an end to that →
“Overall, the top news apps were downloaded slightly more times in 2021 compared to 2020…Legacy players, however, lost out in 2021. In 2020 apps from five major legacy brands (BBC News, Guardian, Sky News, The Mail and The Sun) were collectively downloaded 4.2 million times. This year, the same group of five apps was downloaded 1.6 million times.”
Sky News
A police raid and arrests have shut down Hong Kong’s last prominent pro-democracy news outlet →
“Stand News said in a statement that its website and social media were no longer being updated and would be taken down. It said all employees have been dismissed…police raided Stand News’ office after arresting six people on charges of conspiracy to publish a seditious publication…More than 200 officers were involved in the search.”
The Washington Post / Courtland Milloy
This Black weekly newspaper is defying the odds — it’s growing →
“Readership for the D.C.-based [Washington Informer] has nearly doubled to roughly 50,000. Unlike some local newspapers, which have shrunk to the size of a supermarket supplement, the Informer has grown from an average 36 pages per issue to 56 pages.”
St. Louis Post-Dispatch / Jack Suntrup
Missouri’s governor still wants to make reporting on the state’s data screwups a crime →
“A Post-Dispatch reporter in October alerted the state to a data issue contained on a Department of Elementary and Secondary Education website that left Social Security numbers of educators vulnerable to public disclosure…[Gov. Mike] Parson, who has often tangled with news outlets over reports he doesn't like, announced a criminal investigation into the reporter and the Post-Dispatch.”
BBC News
The BBC acknowledged it probably shouldn’t have had Jeffrey Epstein’s former lawyer on as an impartial analyst on Ghislaine Maxwell →
Alan Dershowitz “was introduced as a ‘constitutional lawyer’ to provide analysis on the verdict — and his connection with Epstein and Ms Giuffre was not made clear in the interview.”
AP
45 reporters and media workers were killed doing their jobs in 2021 →
“The figure represents one of the lowest death tolls in 30 years, since the International Federation of Journalists first began publishing annual reports in 1991…the 45 journalists and media workers were killed in 20 countries. Of those, 33 died in targeted attacks. Nine were killed in Afghanistan, eight in Mexico, four in India and three in neighboring Pakistan.”
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