“Joy” may not be the first word that comes to mind when you think about journalism. In some ways, that makes sense: Journalists report emotionally exhausting stories, manage the at-times hostile audience members, and navigate long working hours. Recent academic research has explored much of that. But we’re missing something essential in all of that...
In an era dominated by social media, misinformation has become an all too familiar foe, infiltrating our feeds and sowing seeds of doubt and confusion. With more than half of social media users across 40 countries encountering false or misleading information weekly, it’s clear that we’re facing a crisis of misinformation on a global scale....
It started when Andy Larsen, sports reporter and data columnist for The Salt Lake Tribune, got annoyed with an “obnoxious” ad on the Tribune’s own site. He brought his frustration about the digital clutter to someone else who happened to be working late in the newsroom — chief development officer Ciel Hunter. “I asked her:...
There have been few digital news outlets with a more complicated brand history than what used to be Recode. First came All Things Digital, a technology site born within The Wall Street Journal in 2007. Six years later, its two most prominent faces — Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg — left the Journal to start...
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...
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...
The lakeside location, historic churches, and pretty cobbled streets of Ohrid in North Macedonia draw hundreds of thousands of tourists each year. But the city’s status as a UNESCO-protected gem has not defended it from rampant overdevelopment and corruption. When notorious local politician and businessman Nefi Useini began to illegally build a pizzeria near an...
Atlanta — If you are a U.S. news publisher, you likely know that your traffic from social media has fallen — the question is just how much. Social analytics platform Chartbeat has some answers. Social’s share of traffic to the 700 U.S. news sites that are Chartbeat clients has dropped by a third since January 2023,...
It has long been difficult to be a journalist in Venezuela. Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index ranks it 156 out of 180 countries, and more than 400 Venezuelan news outlets have shut down over the last 20 years. The country’s recent presidential election made the job of doing journalism even more difficult. On July...
We’ve long been warned about the looming demise of traditional journalism in the face of digital disruption. But some tech giants, once the very disruptors themselves, have been positioning themselves as journalism’s saviors. Programs such as the Google News Initiative promise not only to keep journalism alive, but by enabling innovation, to also help it...
Atlanta — When newspaper veteran Ross McDuffie became the first-ever chief portfolio officer for the National Trust for Local News, the nonprofit organization owned two dozen newspapers in Colorado and generated around $5 million in earned revenue. A little more than a year and a half later, the Trust has grown rapidly by nearly every...
Last week, six of us attended the Online News Association’s 2024 conference in Atlanta. We wrote up two full panels — one on The National Trust for Local News, one on Google Discover and Chartbeat’s newest traffic stats — but lots of interesting stuff remained in our notes. Here it is (along with the most useful social...