But the dense meetings, which can stretch as long as seven hours, often left Shah with questions. She posed many of them to her colleague Ross Wilson because, prior to becoming the foundation’s executive director, he had spent 17 years working in the school district. “I asked him questions all the time — about how school systems work, and how the district worked and what that meant, what was the backstory — and that conversation, particularly his answers, seemed so compelling to me,” Shah told me recently. “It felt like something that lots of people would want access to.”

In January 2020, the idea became reality in the form of Last Night @ School Committee, a podcast that’s been going strong for more than three years now. Its success has led to a partnership with WBUR that began in late 2021 and attracted attention from The Boston Globe. Co-hosted by Shah and Wilson and funded by the foundation, the podcast consists of roughly half-hour, fact-checked recaps of Boston School Committee meetings, often interspersed with commentary and context from previous meetings. Episodes are recorded and posted the day after each of the late-night, lengthy meetings. (Meetings take place approximately every two weeks, though their frequency varies.) Episodes end with an invitation for listeners to share their questions, thoughts, and concerns about the school system, and a statement embodying the podcast’s ethos: “We all have a stake in the future success of Boston’s students.”

Just this week, the American Journalism Project released a report based on input from 5,000 people laying out a clear desire for more local coverage — including for journalists “to show up to meetings, to scrutinize public statements…to force transparency through their work,” and to inform community members of decisions before they are made, while there is still an opportunity for public participation. As a nonprofit-funded effort to disseminate civic information in an accessible format, the Last Night at School Committee podcast is a model worth understanding at a time when, in many places, coverage of public meetings by traditional news outlets is disappearing.

The intersection of advocacy and reporting

Shah and Wilson settled on audio as the format for their school committee recaps in part because they felt a conversational approach would make the dense topics discussed at meetings more accessible. “The conversation is more fun for this topic than the written word,” Shah said.

What’s more, “there’s a lot of irony” in School Committee meetings, she added, that audio could better capture. In an episode recapping the March 22 School Committee meeting, for instance, co-hosts Wilson and Josh Block (the foundation’s communications director, who was sitting in for Shah that week) describe a surreal exchange prior to a vote on the superintendent’s proposed fiscal year budget where committee members questioned what would happen if they were to reject the budget by voting against it.

During the meeting and in a clip played on the podcast, School Committee Chair Jeri Robinson seemed to suggest that if the budget were not approved by the School Committee, it would still advance to a vote by the Boston City Council, a key next step in the typical budget approval process.

“If you vote yes on the budget, this budget goes to City Council for a vote, and if you vote no, the same budget goes to City Council for a vote,” Wilson summarized, underscoring the absurdity of that explanation.

One School Committee member, Brandon Cardet-Hernandez, immediately questioned that explanation in another quote played on the podcast: “If you vote tonight and it doesn’t go through, it still goes through? Then why are we voting — what is our governing power as a body around the budget?”

Block compared the implication that the School Committee’s vote doesn’t actually matter in the budget process to a theory that Indiana Jones’ role in Raiders of the Lost Ark “served no purpose” because all of the key plot points of the movie would have occurred without his actions. Under Robinson’s explanation, the School Committee seemed to serve the same inconsequential role, Block said.

Robinson then suggested she get clarity from the Committee’s legal counsel after the vote. But another School Committee member, Quoc Tran, who planned to vote in support of the budget, spoke up as a lawyer to ask for clarity on the meaning of the vote before members voted.

In a clip played on the episode, attorney Lisa Maki said she had “not had an opportunity to fully dive into what would happen if the School Committee were to take definitive action in the sense of a rejection of the budget this evening.”

“Josh, how do we not know?” Wilson exclaimed in exasperation during the podcast episode. “We vote on the budget every year!”

He and Block clarified that there is, in fact, a process if the committee votes down a budget — members can continue amending a budget to something they are willing to approve over several weeks before the City Council reviews the budget.

This combination of explanation, summary, commentary, and emphasis on why dense procedural discussions matter to school community members is characteristic of the podcast’s effort to boil down long meetings into a digestible format that they hope can galvanize listeners to react and engage with public process.

Podcast episodes almost always include audio excerpts of a mix of School Committee member, administrator, and community member comments from the meetings. “We really try hard to use the voices of those on the committee and in the school department to tell the story,” Wilson said. “We do so with great respect and regard for what they say, and make sure we don’t misrepresent…but we figure out how to weave all of their comments…and all their presentations together into something that makes sense of what is happening.”

City Bureau’s Documenters program, which trains citizens to cover public meetings, is among the most prominent and successful examples of contemporary citizen journalism. The Shah Foundation’s podcast takes a different approach that folds more advocacy and opinion into its careful summaries of meetings. Although neither Shah nor Wilson are trained as reporters, they both consider their work a kind of citizen journalism. “To some extent we view [our work] as reporting, to some degree we view it as advocacy,” Shah said. “I think at certain times, some of us wish it were sparking a revolution.”

In Shah’s view, the podcast also provides unique value to its listeners because it takes a slower approach to unpacking meeting highlights, waiting to publish until the day after the meeting. Mainstream news outlets’ rush to break news, by contrast, can sometimes mean that organizations publish a story before an issue has even been fully discussed, she said. “The nuance — the good questions that school committee members ask, the public comment that is made about a particular issue — never gets into that first story,” Shah said.

A notable example: In the summer of 2021, the Boston School Committee unanimously approved consequential changes to the city’s high-profile exam school admissions process in an effort to make that policy more equitable. Those changes were covered the same night of that meeting in two separate articles in The Boston Globe.

One story, focused on explaining the new process, characterized the changes as “the biggest permanent changes to the exam school admission process in more than two decades,” stating, “The new process was developed by a task force over the last five months.” The article also noted that the process approved by the committee “reflects the final recommendations released by Boston Superintendent Brenda Cassellius Wednesday afternoon.”

The other story focused on the School Committee meeting and vote to approve the admissions process changes. This article contextualized the changes with political and historical tensions stemming from and shaping newly approved process, and focused on one amendment Cassellius made to the task force recommendations to reject “a politically influenced measure reluctantly advanced by a task force.” This story mentioned that Cassellius’ recommendations “largely mirrored the original task force proposal” and, at the very bottom, described two other differences between her final recommendations and those made by the task force.

As usual, Last Night at School Committee recapped the meeting in an episode the following day, July 15. In that summary, they included additional context about the recommendations ultimately approved at the meeting: Shah explained that “the superintendent had made a presentation [that] was different, in many ways, from what the task force had recommended in the meeting prior.” Wilson specified that Cassellius had made five significant changes to the proposal approved by the School Committee without releasing data about those changes prior to the School Committee’s vote.

“Jill, the result of these changes, or simulations based on the new criteria, were not made public,” Wilson said in the episode. “We have no real idea about the changes the superintendent made just in the last few days to this proposal, or the impacts on schools or students in our city.”

“It’s really curious, right, that the School Committee didn’t insist on seeing simulations before calling for a vote, given that that was just normal process for the five months that the task force was meeting,” Shah agreed.

“There was a tremendous process, a very public process, a process that enabled all of us to pay close attention to what was happening and to have public debate around what should happen,” Wilson acknowledged. “And then at the very end here, in the last few days, a number of things shifted and the data wasn’t made public. And I think that’s a real concern.”

Shah told me she and Wilson had listened to all of the subcommittee meetings leading up to the recommendation, which was why they caught the 11th-hour changes by the superintendent, and the lack of public data describing their effects, right away.

Shah and Wilson’s immediate concerns would later be echoed in mainstream news stories as the unclear effects of the superintendent’s late-hour admission process changes sparked lawsuits, becoming a major debacle and news story. When the school department finally released data detailing the potential effects of the policy on exam school diversity a couple of months later, the Globe noted that “such an analysis was absent when Cassellius presented the committee with last-minute revisions she made to the policy prior to the July vote, raising questions if it had been properly vetted.”

In general, “I hope that our podcast also helps those who are in the more mainstream media listen and figure out what are the future stories that should be dug into,” Wilson said.

Who is the podcast’s audience?

Shah and Wilson created the podcast with the goal of helping Boston Public Schools community members follow and engage with decision-making that directly affects them — including parents, teachers, students, and Boston residents interested in the school system.

But the podcast first caught the attention of “the people who were really involved in the execution of the system,” Shah said — the superintendent; her staff; the most active parents, teachers and students; and School Committee members themselves. This was a surprise, Shah added, because “we thought they would be utterly dismissive of the podcast.”

Jeri Robinson, the Boston School Committee’s current chair and a School Committee member since 2014, told me she is glad the podcast exists, though she doesn’t listen to it very often because she knows what happens at the meetings from chairing them. “I think the questions they pose are the right ones; they’re the same ones that we’re asking ourselves,” she said of Shah and Wilson.

Robinson said that in her view, disseminating key information to stakeholders — and other advocates — is an important service to the community. “Boston is running over with advocates, for everybody and his brother,” Robinson said. “My issue is that the advocates themselves need to be well informed, and so if the individual clients can’t access [the information] on their own, that’s the role of the advocate…If there’s information you feel your constituents need to know, you need to know how to find it.”

Partnering with WBUR

The Shah Family Foundation partnered with WBUR in late 2021 to make the podcast sponsored content — meaning the foundation entirely funds the podcast, but it has access to some editing, production, and advertising resources through CitySpace Productions at WBUR. CitySpace Productions, the news outlet’s studio for partner projects with corporations and nonprofits, also partners with the foundation on a second podcast.

Through the WBUR collaboration, an audio editor from the news organization works on the podcast (though the Shah Foundation has full editorial control, and as sponsored content, the podcast is firewalled from WBUR’s editorial content). The editor contributes to fact-checking as well as professional mixing and engineering that elevate the quality of the podcast.

“It would be very hard to get that person to come work full time at the foundation,” Shah said, “but that person as a part of an institution like NPR and BUR, it’s super high-caliber, and…his attention’s focused on us. So it’s a real win-win.”

According to the Shah Foundation’s 2022 year in review, Last Night at School Committee tripled its listenership last year.

“All of our most recent [Last Night at School Committee] episodes have more than 500 downloads,” Jay Feinstein, senior producer for podcasts and business partnerships at CitySpace Productions, told me in an email. He added that this translates to “thousands of listeners per month.”

“When you’re thinking about the very niche audience that we’re trying to reach,” Feinstein said, “this is a very devoted audience that keeps on coming back…[parents and administrators] might not have time for a five-hour School Committee meeting, but might have time to hear a summary [while they do whatever else] they’re doing anyway.”

Though the partnership with WBUR has helped the original podcast grow, one experimental offshoot did not achieve the same enduring success with listeners. Following the partnership, the foundation launched a shorter summary in Spanish of the podcast that was sunsetted after about six months because it didn’t gain traction. Feinstein called the Spanish summary a “wonderful experiment” but said it only developed a “fraction of the listenership” of the original podcast.

The podcast team does not have data breaking down audience demographics or listeners’ relationships to the school system, Feinstein said.

Try this at home

For anyone else interested in launching a similar project, Wilson thinks it requires a few key ingredients: People who care about what they’re reporting on, people who think analytically and ask good questions, and “people who are willing to pay very close attention to these things, even when it becomes, at times, very monotonous and tedious to do so.”

Shah said that specific to podcasts, keeping the length under 30 minutes is important to respect listeners’ time and keep them engaged. “The pacing is important,” she said. “The pithiness of the content is important — for folks to tune in and listen, it has to be to some degree entertaining and provocative.”

At a time when School Committees are under intense political pressure across the country, Wilson said more nonprofits should be looking at doing this kind of work to keep local government transparent. “We can’t leave it to local papers,” he added, “who are doing significant, amazing work, but are also really struggling for resources and reporters.”

Correction: A previous version of this story stated that the American Journalism Project’s report was based on input from 500 people. The correct number is 5,000 people.

INN’s Index Report Snapshot is based on self-reported data from 315 nonprofit news outlets — about 90% of INN’s members — for 2022. (INN says it will release a “deeper and more complete Index Report focusing on diversity, equity and inclusion” this summer.)

Overall, roughly half of nonprofit news outlets are focused on local issues (184 newsrooms), with the rest split between state and regional coverage (104 outlets) and those focused on national or global issues (106 outlets).

A few other tidbits from the report:

• Revenue across the nonprofit news sector kept up with the growth of new newsrooms, increasing by 19% between 2021 and 2022 to nearly $500 million. “This indicates that growth in the field is not stretching or competing for a static or shrinking pool of resources, but that news organizations are developing new resources as they grow and as new ones launch and build support in additional communities,” the report reads. “More than 80% of the outlets surveyed either grew total revenue or maintained revenue from 2021 to 2022.”
• Large and established state and regional outlets are driving the nonprofit news industry’s gain in median revenue. “Our data don’t explain why foundation support to state and regional newsrooms is growing,” the report notes, “but our reporting indicates a shift in philanthropic attention to statehouse coverage.”
• The majority of outlets surveyed distribute their journalism through a website (74%), with other subsets primarily delivering via email newsletter (11%) or print (9%).
• A little over a third of outlets grew their web audience in 2022, but a similar portion saw their average monthly unique visitors decline. Local outlets were more likely to see their web traffic increase, according to INN, while outlets focused on national and global coverage were the least likely.
• INN estimated its digital-first members employ nearly 4,000 people. Roughly two-thirds of those employees are reporters, editors, and other kinds of journalists.

You can read the full INN Index Report here. INN also published its own financial information in an impact statement.

Note: This article previously referred to incomplete data and included an incorrectly labeled chart. Both have been updated.

For this issue, I spoke with Seen‘s co-founder, Yusuf Omar. He was previously a CNN senior social media reporter on Snapchat and mobile editor at the Hindustan Times in India. [Ed. note: You can also watch Omar’s keynote from this year’s International Symposium on Online Journalism here.]

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This “surveillance mode” is thought to be an evolutionary hangover from a time where survival odds were increased when we attended to the threats in our environment.

Research consistently shows bad news can have a negative effect on us. During the pandemic, multiple studies linked news consumption to poorer mental health, documenting symptoms of depression, anxiety, hopelessness and worry. In our research, we found that spending as little as 2-4 minutes on Twitter or YouTube reading about the pandemic affected people’s moods adversely.

However, our latest study has found that looking at positive news stories — specifically, videos and articles featuring acts of kindness — can actually counteract the ill-effects of seeing negative news stories.

Less decline in mood

To conduct our study, we showed 1,800 participants news stories. Some only saw negative news stories — including footage of the Manchester bombing, animal cruelty, or brutal acts of violence.

Others were shown a negative news story, followed immediately by a positive news story. The positive story featured kind acts such as acts of heroism, people providing free veterinary care for stray animals, or philanthropy towards unemployed and homeless people.

We then asked participants to report how they felt before and after viewing the news content. We also asked them how inclined they were to believe in the goodness of others.

The group that was shown negative news stories followed by positive ones fared far better than people who were only shown a negative news story. They reported less decline in mood — instead feeling uplifted. They also held more positive views of humanity generally.

Curious to know whether there was something special about kindness specifically, we also tested how people exposed to a negative news story followed by an amusing one (such as swearing parrots, award-winning jokes or hapless American tourists) fared.

Amusing news stories certainly helped buffer the effects of bad news and reduce the mood disturbances they caused. But in comparison, participants who’d been shown acts of kindness reported a more positive mood on average, and a greater belief in the goodness of humanity.

This shows us there’s something unique about kindness which may buffer the effects of negative news on our mental health. However, further research is needed to establish whether these are long-term benefits, as we only measured how people felt immediately afterwards.

The power of kindness

There are many reasons why kindness may have this protective effect on our mood.

First off, it is valued universally. Seeing acts of kindness may remind us of our connection with others through shared values. It may also help us maintain the belief that the world and people in it are good, which is important for our wellbeing.

Third, seeing others being helped is the resolution to seeing them hurt. So-called “catastrophe compassion“, whereby positive behaviour prevails despite negative circumstances, provides relief to the pain we experience when we see others suffering. Or, as one of our participants explained: “Knowing that there are a lot of people that are genuinely willing to help those affected by this attack somehow gives me a relief.”

Similarly, other research has found that even when children had not caused or were not connected to the suffering of another person, they experienced a reduction in physiological stress simply by seeing the hurt person being helped.

Fourth, countless research has shown that witnessing others’ acts of moral beauty, such as kindness or heroism, triggers “elevation” — a positive and uplifting feeling which experts theorise acts as an emotional reset button, replacing feelings of cynicism with hope, love and optimism.

It will be important for future research to investigate which specific reasons explain why kindness has the protective effect that our research has demonstrated.

A powerful tool for boosting wellbeing

It’s clear that kindness is a powerful tool for boosting wellbeing. In my research, I found that doing an act of kindness a day can increase life satisfaction. And more recently, researchers found that selflessness trumps selfishness when it comes to improving your happiness.

Less is known about whether making a conscious effort to notice kindness has the same wellbeing benefits, although one study found that observing others’ kindness is as effective in boosting happiness as performing an act of kindness.

Our latest study shows that kindness-focused news stories can take the sting out of difficult, depressing coverage by replacing feelings of despair with hope. As another participant put it: “I still feel that we’re fundamentally decent…And that’s worth clinging to.”

Perhaps including more kindness-based content in news coverage could prevent “mean world syndrome” — where people believe the world is more dangerous than it actually is, leading to heightened fear, anxiety and pessimism.

Other research has also found that positive news — such as bumble bees making a comeback or peace talks going well — make people feel better and want to do good things, such as voting or donating. This suggests there may be both personal and social benefits to showing positive news.

While it will be up to the media to make the change, our research makes the case for adding more balance to news coverage. Including more stories of kindness may help people feel better able to engage with these stories without perpetuating feelings of doom and hopelessness.

But Davies used to follow sources from her personal Instagram account, which created a dilemma familiar to many reporters: Where to draw personal and professional boundaries? The sources she followed “requested to follow me back,” she told me in an interview, which left her conflicted. Davies felt some desire to maintain a separation between the personal account full of pictures of her friends and family, and people she knew professionally, but also wanted to open up part of herself to the people who shared so much with her for her work.

“I started thinking about how I could be more transparent and vulnerable with them in ways that I asked them to be with me,” she said, “without opening my entire personal life and making myself a part of their story.”

For Davies, who is 25 and has worked for the Post full-time since 2020, this social media quandary embodied a deeper tension she feels as a reporter. “We ask people every day to let us in at their worst moments,” she said. “To give nothing of ourselves in return sometimes feels like denying that we’re [also] people in this equation.”

So in late January, she created @emilydaviesreports, a public Instagram account that offers sources and readers a window into her day-to-day life and process as a reporter — from snapshots of her writing process, to safety gear she uses to cover protests, to strategies she uses to unwind and stave off emotional exhaustion in an often grueling reporting routine.

 

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Almost all reporters rely on social media platforms as reporting tools and key avenues for sharing work today, and many maintain separate professional and personal presences online. But Davies’ Instagram account stands out because it is a product of her desire to reciprocate some of the vulnerability she asks of her sources while maintaining a professional boundary. “It felt like the right way to do that would be to explain how I do the work, and how it makes me feel…and hope that generated some trust with them,” she said.

If you scroll through her posts, you’ll see a laptop and a half-eaten salad as she files from a car; a list of words and phrases that inspire her in her notes app; a handwritten note she left for a professor who survived a shooting; and posts that start with a print newspaper and then show followers some of the people and places that led to that printed story. The posts, while certainly curated, have an intimacy that Davies creates in part by addressing her followers directly in the post captions and inviting them to engage, as well as describing some of the challenges and imperfections of her work.

“Some of the posts try to explain how much goes into each story, even if the story is 200 words,” Davies said (here’s a good example). That’s because she wants her sources to know that “a lot more goes into each story than they can see [in the finished article] — we care about fact-checking, we care about trying every number for every victim of crime, even if they don’t answer. And the line of the story that says ‘efforts to reach XYZ family were unsuccessful’? Something real went into that.”

Davies thinks this is especially important at a time when institutional trust has profoundly eroded. “Part of this is an attempt to reestablish trust, from a perspective of a young reporter who’s come up at a time when people[’s] default…[is] often to be skeptical of the media,” she said.

 

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Davies’ editor, Matt Zapotosky, sees the potential for building trust as well. “I love the account,” he told me. “When she first conceived it, we were talking about how to establish The Washington Post as a more credible and authoritative source of public safety news” that community members rely on and think to contact with news tips. He thinks Davies’ work on social media “has paid dividends” already, with more people recognizing her when she reports at crime scenes.

“The world is kind of moving to people wanting to know the process — they don’t want their journalism to be from a faceless institution,” Zapotosky said. “They want to know who’s behind it; they want to know the kind of discussions that went into it. So we want the Instagram to [share] that.”

Though Davies initially created the account for her day-to-day sources, over the past few months it has grown to about 750 followers with a wider variety of interests. Davies said her followers include some of her sources and D.C. community members, fellow journalists, and “news junkies” from the Post’s national audience. Some journalism professors have asked to share some of the account’s material with students. Davies thinks this may be because some of her posts “show the messiness of reporting in a way that we sometimes deny by writing clearly in the end,” she said. (Disclosure: I came across this account because Davies and I are former colleagues — in college, we worked together on our student newspaper, The Brown Daily Herald, where Davies was editor-in-chief in the year above me.)

“I’m still trying to figure out a little bit who my followers are,” she said, “and it’s obviously still growing, it’s new, and I haven’t made that much of a publicity push to try to get people to follow it. I’ve just sort of been posting when I feel like it’s right, and seeing what happens.”

The account has attracted positive attention internally at the Post, too. At least one of Davies’ colleagues, education reporter Karina Elwood, created her own Instagram account and credited Davies’ account as the inspiration.

The Post’s recently hired, first-ever social media coach, Emma Grazado, has supported the account from the start, Davies said. “She helped me tailor some of the outreach — like what I should have in my bio, and the tone I should strike. If I’m nervous about something toeing a line, I can send it to her.”

Davies “had a really clear idea of her target audience, what she wanted the content and posting style to be, and how to navigate the platform,” Grazado told me in an email.

Davies already enjoyed taking pictures of moments from her work days — sometimes for friends, sometimes to remind her of key details. So creating an Instagram account that documented her reporting process “didn’t add anything to my workflow,” she said. “It felt like taking advantage of something that I already do.”

Interest in the account from other journalists could also be related to Twitter’s problems, Davies added. “People might be looking for a new way to share their information.”

Grazado also highlighted some of the work of the Post’s foreign correspondents on Instagram. Because it is “such a visual platform, it is a great place for them to bring the audiences along with them to different parts of the world,” she wrote, pointing to the accounts of Tokyo/Seoul bureau chief Michelle Ye Hee Lee, Ukraine bureau chief Isabelle Khurshudyan, Southeast Asia bureau chief Rebecca Tan and Cairo bureau chief Siobhán O’Grady as examples.

The Post’s Next Gen politics team, she added — Brianna Tucker, Dylan Wells, and Camila DeChalus — “also does great work across social platforms” including Instagram and TikTok.

Davies does not have a regular posting rhythm. “I’m still trying to get the cadence right,” she said. “If I’m having a really, really busy news week, and it’s taking all my energy to do what I’m doing, sometimes it will slide and then I’ll try to do more of a recap post.” But the posts don’t take her long — typically five or 10 minutes. She sometimes puts them together while waiting for edits on a story, for instance.

The account has also “generated some interesting conversations with [Zapotosky],” she added. “Sometimes if I’m nervous about a post, or nervous about sharing a moment that we’ve talked about, I’ll ask him, and then we get into conversations about the ethics of what we’re doing. It’s another gut check on process.”

One specific instance where the account sparked conversation between him and Davies, Zapotosky recalled, occurred in February when he assigned Davies a story about an unseasonably warm day in D.C., removed from her usual criminal justice beat. After discussing how to frame the story in a unique way, they decided Davies should personalize it and share a chronological account of her day. Though the story touched on climate change as the grim specter behind the beautiful weather, the article still received some criticism, Zapotosky said, for not centering global warming more.

“She was contemplating: Should I respond to this criticism? Should I talk about our conversation in advance and the framing?” Zapotosky said. After a discussion, they ultimately opted not to respond in this instance: “We thought we should save that for a really sensitive, high-public-interest public safety issue, which we often get criticism on.” Zapotosky thinks Instagram “could be a great vessel” for responding to criticism of a story in the future. “That’s a part of this, that people have the ability to ask her about our process,” he said.

Davies is still figuring out what makes a good post for the account. TV appearances, because they’re inherently visual, often feature in her posts. On the other hand, if Davies is working on enterprise stories she doesn’t necessarily want people to know are in the works, or doing longer-term work, those can translate to quieter weeks on Instagram.

The account especially attracted attention after footage of the killing of Tyre Nichols by police officers was released. In late January, shortly after starting the account, Davies traveled to Memphis and spent a week documenting the city’s anger, grief, and resolution. She posted raw photos of protests and Nichols’ funeral, but also included snapshots of eating trail mix for dinner and a coffee cup late at night giving texture to her own experience as a person and reporter keeping up with the physical demands of the week.

Davies thinks her series of posts attracted more attention at this time primarily because “it was a really high-profile national event.” Additionally, “the place of Memphis…was new to me,” which heightened her attention to detail in the photos she took and the details she highlighted in posts.

“It felt like a really, really high-stakes moment,” she said. “I think I felt that so deeply that in everything I wrote for the newspaper or posted, that came across.”

 

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Account followers seemed especially curious about “understanding how I went about asking questions,” she said. Davies used the account to ask for input on what questions she should ask Nichols’ parents, and received some responses. For instance, one follower had written, “Can you ask them about their thoughts and emotions knowing residents of the city are likely to react and come out in mass once the video is released”?

“I asked something similar, so replied with their answer,” Davies wrote in a follow-up email.

“It felt like a new and nice way, I think, at a really high-stress moment, of communicating with people about what we were doing,” she reflected. “That trip made me feel like this account could work, and actually add something to the dialogue.”

For others who are interested in creating their own behind-the-scenes reporting accounts on Instagram or elsewhere, Davies suggested “look in your notebook, and in your camera roll, and in your voice memos and your text messages and your Slack messages, and see what content you’re generating by nature, and then figure out how to put that together as a starting place.”

“Leaning into that uniqueness,” she said, “and whatever it is that makes you want to report, and that makes you good at reporting and interested in others and interested in the story, I would just try to harness that.”

Instagram works for her, but the platform depends on the reporter, she added. “Figure out what you’re doing yourself, and then figure out which platform can best elevate it.”

A Google search for “The Messenger” didn’t bring up the site as one of the first options — instead offering up an Iowa-based news service with the same name.

“Like with any new media platform, it takes a period of time to index on Google, which will happen shortly,” a company spokesperson told The Post on Tuesday.

The rep would not reveal how many people visited the site its first day, but claimed: “We’ve hit our traffic numbers earlier than expected and it has all been organic”…

Scott Nover, a technology and business reporter for Quartz, noted on Twitter: “I would dunk on The Messenger but I googled the site’s name and cannot find it.”

Others gave more technical criticism about that the site’s “SEO [search engine optimization] strategy,” saying it was “not quite ready to support $100 million in year one ad revenue.”

Aram Zucker-Scharff, a privacy engineer, tweeted that the Messenger failed to grasp “the modern basics of SEO set up pre-launch.”

“Between the lack of modern SEO and the ad configuration I’m getting 2015 vibes all around,” Zucker-Scharff tweeted.

An incomplete list of websites that rank above news startup The Messenger in a Google search for “The Messenger”

The Messenger, a 2-D sidescroller platform game from Sabotage Studio: “As a demon army besieges his village, a young ninja ventures through a cursed world, to deliver a scroll paramount to his clan’s survival. What begins as a classic action platformer soon unravels into an expansive time-traveling adventure full of thrills, surprises, and humor.”

The Messenger, the local newspaper in Fort Dodge, Iowa.

The Messenger, the 2009 film starring Woody Harrelson, Samantha Morton, and Steve Buscemi.

The Messenger, an Australian miniseries (“Ed’s life is one peaceful routine until playing cards inscribed with cryptic tasks start to arrive in the mail”) that debuted Sunday, May 14, 2023, the day before the news site The Messenger did.

The Messenger, the local newspaper in Madisonville, Kentucky.

The Messenger, a documentary film that “explores our deep-seated connection to birds and warns that the uncertain fate of songbirds might mirror our own.”

The Messenger, an online publication for “Boomers and beyond” in Clark County, Washington.

The Messenger Wiki, a wiki about the 2-D sidescroller platform game from Sabotage Studio.

The Messenger, the European Southern Observatory’s journal of astronomical science and technology.

The Messenger, a classical album by violinist Daniel Rowland and pianist Borys Fedorov.

The Messenger, a Spotify-original podcast on Ugandan pop star Bobi Wine’s attempt to oust President Yoweri Musevani.

The Messenger, a 1996 video art installation by Bill Viola (b. 1951, New York) featuring “a watery zone within which a naked man slowly materializes.”

The Messenger, “Northview High School’s Student News Source” in Fulton County, Georgia.

The Messenger, a free weekly newspaper in Hillsborough, New Hampshire.

The Messenger, an African American political and literary magazine (1917–1928), cofounded by A. Philip Randolph, important during the Harlem Renaissance.

The Messenger, the church newspaper of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Belleville, Illinois.

The Messenger Co., a manufacturer of custom stationery based in Auburn, Indiana.

The Messenger, a poem by Eleanor Wilner (“The messenger runs, not carrying the news / of victory, or defeat; the messenger, unresting, / has always been running”)

The Messenger, the Facebook page of The Messenger, a newspaper in Grapeland, Texas.

The Messenger, the sixth book in Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon series (“Gabriel Allon, art restorer and spy, has been widely acclaimed as one of the most fascinating characters in the genre and now he is about to face the greatest challenge of his life”).

The Messenger Birds, a Detroit-area rock band whose most recent album in 2022’s Tragic Comedy.

The Messenger, a play by Jeff Talbot based on Henrik Ibsen’s classic An Enemy of the People.

The Messenger (Original Soundtrack), the soundtrack to the 2-D sidescroller platform game from Sabotage Studio, by Denver musician Rainbowdragoneyes.

The Messenger, a quarterly publication of the Lynnwood Senior Center in Lynnwood, Washington.

The Messenger, an online comic in which “Kai and Kalla — a young boy and a fledgling dragonbird spirit — take on a quest in hopes the reward will solve all of their problems.”

The Messenger, a kinetic pulse rifle available to players in the online first-person shooter Destiny 2.

The Messenger, an audiobook of the 2019 novel by J. N. Chaney and Terry Maggert (“Dash never asked to be a mech pilot, but fate has other plans”).

The Hartsville Messenger, a newspaper in Hartsville, South Carolina.

Messenger, Facebook’s chat app.

Shoot the Messenger, a Chrome extension for removing messages from Facebook’s chat app.

Messenger International, a charity that “exists to develop uncompromising followers of Christ who transform their world.”

The Messenger, a 2019 World War II film from Poland starring Philippe Tłokiński, Patrycja Volny, Tomasz Schuchardt, Adam Woronowicz, and Zbigniew Zamachowski.

Kill the Messenger, a 2014 Jeremy Renner film based on the life of San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb.

Messenger Coffee Co., a Kansas City artisanal coffee roaster and cafe.

MESSENGER, a 2004–2015 orbital space mission around Mercury (“MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging”) led by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

The Messenger, a 2017 podcast about the Australian immigration detention center on Manus Island.

“Shooting the Messenger,” a 2019 article in the Journal of Experimental Psychology on humans’ tendency to deem “innocent bearers of bad news unlikeable.”

The Messenger, the newspaper in Troy, Alabama.

“The Messenger,” the 15th track on Linkin Park’s 2010 album A Thousand Suns (“When life leaves us blind / Love keeps us kind / Oh-woah-oh, oh-woah-oh / Oh-woah-oh, oh / Oh-woah-oh, oh-woah-oh / Oh, woah, oh, oh”)

The Messenger, a hair stylist in Overland Park, Kansas.

The Messenger-Inquirer, the newspaper in Owensboro, Kentucky.

The Messenger, the monthly newsletter of Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan.

A caveat: Google search results are shaped by many factors and can vary from user to user and over time. Your mileage may vary.

But for me, The Messenger’s website, themessenger.com, did not appear in the top 100 results produced by a Google search for “the messenger.” The Messenger’s Twitter account, @TheMessenger, did appear as result No. 24. Its LinkedIn page ranked at No. 30.

Meanwhile, stories about The Messenger came in at No. 11 (New York Post), 15 (CJR), 19 (Nieman Lab), 21 (The New York Times), 23 (Poynter), 29 (Mother Jones), 42 (Axios), 48 (Commercial Observer), and 99 (The Wrap).

The Times has made changes to its dateline conventions before, eliminating actual dates in 2007. The dateline will still appear in print, though the Times print hub is working on its own experiments to adapt the new format.

Per the email sent to the newsroom by managing editor Marc Lacey and assistant managing editor Matt Ericson:

Instead of “WASHINGTON —” in the lead on our next article from the White House or Capitol Hill, we will write “Reporting from Washington” in an enhanced byline, or include a reference to the location in a broader description of the reporting effort.

Why the change? This new format is plainspoken and leaves no doubt that we have reporters on the ground, a critical measure of the authority of our journalism. Audience research shows that readers are confused by traditional datelines. Many understand that they signify the location of the news but not that we were there.

The old dateline, which dates to the time of the telegraph, does not do justice to reporting from multiple locations. The new form allows us to more fully describe the scope of our news gathering, emphasizing our role as expert eyewitnesses and thus boosting our credibility.

The Times has been experimenting with enhanced bylines since January 2022, first on the business and international desks, and later expanding to others in the newsroom. Edmund Lee, who was previously a Times media reporter on the business desk and is now an assistant editor on the Times’ Trust team, said the idea for enhanced bylines to replace datelines has been talked about in the newsroom since at least 2017. The Trust team’s research found that readers trust journalism more when they know the process of how it was produced.

“One of the specific elements of our journalism conventions that have always befuddled readers is the dateline,” Lee said. “People don’t know what datelines mean. When they see Washington or London in all-caps in the lead of a story, they might get that the story took place in Washington or London, but they don’t necessarily know that the reporter was physically present in those locations. A big part of ensuring trust is letting people know we are where we say we are.”

Other U.S. news outlets have also been experimenting with variations of extended or enhanced bylines, typically at the top of a story before the first paragraph.

The Verge:

Vox:

Forbes:

The Cut:

Here’s what a Times enhanced byline looks like on a September 2022 story on how rarely Florida voter fraud cases are prosecuted:

For a story earlier this week on the war in Sudan that’s leading refugees into the neighboring country of Chad:

The Times shared that the reporter on this story on Rwandan refugees said some readers read it because of the information in the enhanced byline:

The enhanced byline field has been built into the Times’ CMS, so reporters and editors can choose from three options: A plain byline with just the journalists’ names; a simple dateline with the journalists’ name followed by “reporting from ______”; or an enhanced byline that includes both dateline information and a description of how the story was reported.

“This is a way to modernize how we do what we do,” Lee said. “It’s more colloquial, it’s more plain-spoken. And at the end of the day, it’s just good journalism to be more transparent and explain how you gather your news.”

Last December, Google updated its search ratings guidelines to prioritize search results that signal “experience” and “expertise.” Lee said the enhanced bylines will help surface Times stories in Google searches, but it wasn’t the reason for the change (“That was just a nice coincidence”).

“We weren’t aware of Google’s pending change till very recently, though we’d been working on enhanced bylines for over a year,” he said. “We’re looking at updating our author pages, which should help with authentication across the internet.”

A plain byline will still suffice for most Times stories. Simple datelines will be applied to any stories reported outside of New York, while enhanced bylines will be applied at the reporters’ and editors’ discretion. The Times’ audience research found that readers most want to know about reporters’ experience and relationship to the subjects they’re covering.

“A small group of these stories will have that [dateline] information, plus additional information about either the reporter’s background or the specific legwork they applied in the story: ‘reviewed hundreds of documents,’ ‘interviewed 30 different people,’ ‘visited refugee sites,’ that kind of thing,” Lee said. “When we feel that an unusual amount of effort went into a particular story — or there’s a particular connection that the reporter may have had to the story, or a particular part of their background or expertise relates to the story — we’ll highlight it in the enhanced byline.”

Lee said the ideal enhanced byline will reveal information about how the reporting was done that isn’t included in the actual story. While the Times Insider section is dedicated to reporting on the behind-the-scenes of the paper and The Daily podcast interviews Times reporters, Times stories themselves typically don’t delve into how reporters did their work “because we’re not the story,” Lee said. But enhanced bylines are another way to show readers that they can trust trust the work.

“We rarely talk about how we gathered what we gathered in the story itself,” Lee said. “Sometimes in a very big story, we will make that very clear and explain up front, but not always. This is a chance to to pull back the curtain.“

The app — for now, iOS only — is “currently an exclusive benefit for New York Times news subscribers.” Here’s some of what it includes:

• The Headlines, a new morning show hosted by Times reporter Annie Correal that promises to catch readers up on top stories in 10 minutes or less.
• Shorts, a series of (yup) short recommendations for books, streaming video, recipes, travel spots, and more.
• Access to This American Life episodes a day early. (Recall that the Times acquired Serial Productions and entered into “an ongoing creative and strategic alliance” with This American Life in 2020.)
• The Magazine Stand, a selection of professionally narrated longform journalism from a short list of other publishers. (The New York Times will “sunset” the Audm app, where this work was previously found; it had acquired Audm in 2020.)

Other audio offerings — including the Times’ flagship podcast The Daily and shows like Serial, The Ezra Klein Show, The Run-Up, and Hard Fork — remain free. They can be streamed from the new app, as well as everywhere else you already listen to podcasts.

Paula Szuchman, director of audio for The New York Times, described the new show, The Headlines, as “a sibling” to The Daily. While The Daily typically dives deep into one story for 20-ish minutes, The Headlines covers three news stories in roughly half the time.

“It’s designed to help catch a listener up on the biggest news of the day, reflecting the breadth and depth of Times reporting and signaling the areas of coverage our newsroom is digging into,” Szuchman said. “We heard from listeners that they want more — that The Daily scratches an itch but they also want to be informed of other stories they should know about.”

Like some of its most obvious competitors — including NPR’s Up First, which also promises the day’s top stories in under 10 minutes — The Headlines will publish early every weekday morning to be available for commuters.

During its inaugural week, the Times will include The Headlines in The Daily’s feed so those millions of listeners “can see what we’re up to, and how the two shows deliver a complete sense of the day’s biggest stories,” Szuchman said.

The big question: How many people — even if they are loyal subscribers — will really want to download a separate app to listen to audio content only from The New York Times?

I don’t understand the strategy for this, at all.

It’s built for people who love NYT podcasts (check) but who don’t want to listen to podcasts made by anyone else (what?). https://t.co/XUMqSNn3sG

— Peter Kafka (@pkafka) May 17, 2023

Why would you go through the trouble of producing audio content only to limit it to a new app accessible to existing subscribers??

Why not put in the main app or make the content app agnostic?

There’s a graveyard of apps that have tried this! Ask the big media conglomerates! https://t.co/5jzVRggx6r

— Sar Haribhakti (@sarthakgh) May 17, 2023

New York Times Audio might best be understood as a retention tool. The Times says their success with subscriber-only newsletters showed that subscribers who engage with exclusive content are more active — and more likely to stay paying subscribers — than those who do not. Adding subscriber-only content in the audio realm, they figure, allows the Times to be relevant even when subscribers aren’t sitting down to read. As the Times’ Stephanie Preiss put it to Vanity Fair: “How do we get every second of your day?”

I *think* the big selling point is “top articles read aloud, for people who commute by car” which is personally pretty appealing to me

— Katie Notopoulos (@katienotopoulos) May 17, 2023

It's possible that a segment of NYT subs are interested in consuming audio from NYT (audio articles + podcasts) and are not podcast listeners in the classic sense. Also if the curation and topical features are better than Spotify/Apple, users might also find it more convenient.

— Misha Zilman (@MishaZilman) May 17, 2023

When NPR aired bilingual coverage of the State of the Union for the first time in February, host A Martínez switched between English and Spanish depending on who was being interviewed and what they were talking about. Some topics — like culture wars in the United States — made more sense to talk about in English. Issues that were pertinent to Spanish-speaking communities in the U.S., like education and immigration, were discussed in Spanish.

“I just want to get a poll from all of us,” Martínez said with a laugh, in English. “There is no translation in Spanish for ‘woke’, right?”

The bilingual broadcast — which NPR made available on Facebook, Twitter Spaces, and via participating NPR affiliate stations — has been streamed more than the English version on Facebook. The State of the Union coverage is just one of the projects that Pablo Valdivia, NPR’s first-ever audience editor for Latino audiences, has worked on since taking the role in August 2022.

In January 2020, NPR CEO John Lansing said that expanding the diversity of NPR’s audience was its “number-one goal.”

At least 62.5 million Latinos live in the United States, making up about a fifth of the total population. Radio is an especially important way to reach them: Nielsen found last year that 97% of Latinos ages 18 and older listen to AM or FM radio at least monthly.

Bringing in younger, more diverse audiences “is the only way for public radio to remain relevant and continue to grow,” said Isabel Lara, NPR’s chief communications officer. “Through this role we want to connect with the Latino audience and let them know there are Latino journalists and creators in the public media system, share who they are and what their work is about.”

The idea for the Latino audience-editor role came out of the NPR Oye project, a deep dive into the best ways NPR could reach Latino audiences. “One of the key findings was that NPR and the public radio system were already producing a some great content by and for Latinos,” Lara said, “but that it wasn’t being gathered anywhere or presented to Latino audiences in a consistent and coherent way.”

Before coming to NPR, Pablo Valdivia spent eight years at BuzzFeed as a staff writer and as the senior Latinx culture editor, helping launch the company’s sub-brand, Pero Like, that creates creative video and social media content for bilingual Latinos in the U.S. Now, he’s focused on bringing NPR’s journalism to Latinos on all platforms, including radio, online, podcasting, and social media.

I emailed with Valdivia about his new role. Our conversation, below, has been edited for length and clarity.

 

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That was the first thing I typed when I saw that new news startup The Messenger had led its launch with an “EXCLUSIVE” interview with Donald Trump.

After all, it was only a few days ago that a jury in Trump’s hometown found him liable for sexual abuse and defamation in the lawsuit brought by E. Jean Carroll. Surely, if you had a 30-minute “EXCLUSIVE” interview with the former president, you’d ask him a question about it, right?

command-f, s, e, x, u, a, l.

Let’s say you weren’t going to ask about it. You wanted to make sure you had enough time for your question about the JFK assassination, your question about ChatGPT, and your question about the man who strangled Jordan Neely to death on a New York City subway. (“Well, I think he was in great danger and the other people in the car were in great danger. I haven’t seen the tape. [!] But I think he was in danger.”) You’d at least mention it in your 600-word introduction, right?

command-f, d, e, f, a, m, a, t, i, o, n.

No results. Instead, Trump gets to attack his GOP rival Ron DeSantis (“He’s got no personality. And I don’t think he’s got a lot of political skill”). And on the topic of the 2020 election — which Trump has lied repeatedly about winning — reporter Marc Caputo muses aloud: “I need to find a way to discuss the 2020 elections without sounding like I’m debating it.”

I don’t want to make too much out of one interview. But The Messenger has built its brand (to the degree that such a thing exists) on providing “balanced journalism in an era of bias, subjectivity and misinformation” and “objective, non-partisan and timely coverage.” Fair and balanced, you might say. Its marketing doesn’t just argue for its own objectivity — it derides everyone else for lacking it. All of media is broken, you see, except The Messenger. “People are exhausted with extreme politics and platforms that inflame the divisions in our country by slanting stories towards an audience’s bias,” its editor-in-chief claims.

The thing that’s confusing about The Messenger to everyone else in the media world is that its ideas don’t make any sense. It’s in an aggressive sort of denial about the world of digital news publishing in 2023. It’s LARPing an earlier time. The Messenger thinks it will reach 100 million monthly uniques on the back of bland aggregation. (That’s only slightly smaller than The New York Times’ audience.) It thinks it can support a 550-person newsroom on programmatic advertising. The Messenger thinks the right pitch for a site funded by Republican megadonors and run by the guy who brought the world John Solomon is: “We’re the unbiased ones!”

The confusing part is that — at a time when money has tightened in both media and tech — this jumble of seemingly bad ideas has raised $50 million. Someone seems to think this is a good idea. Fox News at least makes a lot of money — will The Messenger?

Perhaps the most striking thing about The Messenger’s first day was the sheer volume of content. By my count, it published 203 different stories Monday — some as short as a single sentence. The New York Times — with its newsroom of more than 1,800 people — published 141.

But most of those Times stories were, you know, stories, with reporting and interviews and such. Most of The Messenger’s are of the quick-aggregation variety, with individual staffers publishing 10 or more in an eight-hour shift. Now, there is nothing wrong with smart aggregation. But you don’t need $50 million to do it, and you’d better do it in some way that stands out.1

During a one-hour stretch Monday morning, The Messenger published 27 stories — a new one every 133 seconds. (Over the same span, the Times published nine.) It’s a mishmash.

Florida Man Has Been Living Underwater Since March, Breaks World Record

Scientists Puzzled Over Mysterious Rumbles in Denmark

Al Roker Shares Health Update While Recovering from ‘Complicated’ Knee Surgery

Woman Killed After Jumping from Moving Car During Fight with Boyfriend

Home Depot, Target and Walmart’s Earnings This Week Will Say a Lot About the U.S. Economy

Train Intercom System Used to Play Hitler Speech For Unsuspecting Passengers

Scalise: House Republicans ‘Building a Case’ Against Mayorkas

The Do-Nothing Congress: Why Washington is More Dysfunctional Than Ever

Why nearly $40 billion worth of U.S. weapons may not be enough for Taiwan

10 Tantalizing Social Media Chefs You Really Should be Following

3 Family Members Including Kids Killed in California Crash, 7 Others Injured

Manchin: ‘I’m more concerned about my country than I’ve ever been’

What Happened to TLC: From Schoolhouse Staple to ‘MILF Manor’

Viggo Mortensen, Shia LaBeouf, Courtney Love Cast in David Mamet’s JFK Film ‘Assassination’

Court rejects Elon Musk’s request to nix tweet agreement with SEC

US Diners Divided Over Increasing Dog-Friendly Restaurant Policies

TV Startup Giving Away Free Flatscreens That Show Constant Ads

Woman Accused of Burying Husband in Backyard Claims Teen Girl Confessed to Killing

Supreme Court to Take Trump Hotel Documents Case

Biden nominates cancer surgeon to lead National Institutes of Health

Father Allegedly Killed by Ex-Wife’s Boyfriend Shortly After Winning Custody of Children

McCarthy Casts Doubt on Debt Deal, Says WH Not ‘Serious’

99-Year-Old Faces Blades of Circus Knife Thrower, Fulfilling Life-Long Dream

‘Succession’ Boss Breaks Down Tom’s Puzzling Reaction to Shiv’s Pregnancy Reveal

Thai Opposition Triumphs in Elections, as Voters Deliver Blow to Military Leaders

What Jamie Foxx’s New Show Means for the Future of ‘Beat Shazam’

Pence Will Go to Iowa’s ‘Roast and Ride’ Amid 2024 Speculation

The content mix (and sometimes just the content itself) is very British tabloid: “Mail Online with a much smaller photo budget.” The classic combo of celebs (more than 1/5 of all stories) and The Barbarians Are At Civilization’s Gates And You Should Be Afraid.

My colleague Laura Hazard Owen, armed with a spreadsheet, looked through more than 800 Messenger stories2 to calculate the most common words in its headlines. The top 20 give you a good idea of what The Messenger is about:

1. Trump
2. dead/deadly/dies/death
3. Biden
4 (tie). killed/killing/killer
4 (tie). migrant/migration/immigration
6. shooter/shooting/shot
7. Texas
8 (tie). arrest/arrested
8 (tie). Florida
10. border
11 (tie). attacked/attack/attacks/attacker
11 (tie). DeSantis
11 (tie). missing
14 (tie). murder/murdered/murderer
14 (tie). teen/preteen/teenager
16 (tie). ban/banned/banned/banning
16 (tie). police
18. Elon Musk
19 (tie). cop/cops
19 (tie). kidnapper/kidnapped/kidnaps/kidnapping

I’ll throw out one other comp: Knewz, the Murdochs’ ill-fated aggregation play from a few years back. It too promoted itself as a solution to Today’s Media Problems. (“We live in a world of vexatious verticals, of crass clickbait, of polarized perspectives and fallacious, fact-free feeds.” “A wide spectrum of news and views…without bent or bias.”) And it too ended up being a way to shove right-wing messaging through an “unbiased, unfiltered, untainted” grinder.

But the man behind The Messenger isn’t a Murdoch — it’s Jimmy Finkelstein, the 74-year-old heir to an East Coast media empire. His father Jerry owned the New York Law Journal and later started The Hill, which gave the family influence in New York and Washington. When Jimmy inherited The Hill from his father, he pushed it to the right; he’s one of Rudy Giuliani’s closest friends and has run in Donald Trump’s circles for decades, “boast[ing] that he’s a close friend” of the former president’s.

Perhaps his most noteworthy contribution to The Hill was hiring John Solomon — a man who had already left quite a trail across D.C. media — and having him report directly to Finkelstein. Solomon used his new perch to write less-than-well-supported pro-Trump articles about Ukraine that ended up being central to Trump’s first impeachment trial. As Oliver Darcy and Brian Stelter wrote in 2019:

Beyond his relationship with Solomon, Trump, and Giuliani, Finkelstein was Solomon’s direct supervisor at The Hill and created the conditions which permitted Solomon to publish his conspiratorial stories without the traditional oversight implemented at news outlets. And he has kept a watchful eye on the newspaper’s coverage to ensure it is not too critical of the President.

As one former veteran employee of The Hill told CNN Business, “Solomon is a symptom of the larger problem of Jimmy Finkelstein”…

None of it would have been possible without Finkelstein, who hired Solomon in July 2017 as an executive vice president at The Hill and initially charged him with leading the newspaper’s video division. “Jimmy is the one who hired John Solomon,” a former employee told CNN. “The editors didn’t want him there”…

Almost immediately after Solomon’s hiring, staffers at The Hill newspaper grew worried about his work. “I remember almost immediately thinking, ‘Why is he writing?’” the former veteran employee told CNN, noting that Solomon already had earned a reputation for conspiratorial work when he reported on things like the “deep state” for Circa, a now-defunct conservative news website.

Again: This is the guy who says he’s only interested in “balanced journalism in an era of bias, subjectivity and misinformation, with a mandate to deliver the news — not shape it.”

(The Messenger says it has “clear guidelines on how we maintain our day-to-day delivery of balance and objectivity, and guard against inaccuracies and misinformation.” I asked for a copy of those guidelines, along with a few other questions, Monday and haven’t heard back.)

One way to figure out what a news site is all about is looking at its opinion pieces. News, to a great extent, happens, and any editor can only do so much to control it. But opinion pieces are largely a reflection of whatever a publication wants them to be.

Yesterday afternoon, I looked at the 10 opinion pieces The Messenger was promoting on the homepage. The first thing I noticed: All 10 were by men.

(Indeed, Messenger bylines look to be overwhelmingly male. On the homepage yesterday afternoon were a total of 49 — 32 by men, 17 by women. But of those 17 women’s bylines, 14 of them were attached to entertainment stories. On everything but entertainment — which is to say, news, politics, business, and opinion — the byline score was a blowout: Men 32, Women 3. This is a company that felt totally comfortable making this photo their debut in the world.)

What sorts of opinions do those 10 men have? We have three academics, writing about extraterrestrial life, women’s sports, and Russia. Then we have a former FBI official known for giving an “exclusive interview” to Epoch Times (!) to call the Mar-a-Lago raid “an attempt by one political party that temporarily controls the DOJ to eliminate an adversary from the other party.” We have a former longtime aide to Sen. Chuck Grassley. We have 86-year-old Black conservative Robert L. Woodson on the evils of reparations. We have a former AEI and Heritage fellow and former assistant secretary of defense under Reagan, arguing the U.S. was foolish to end the Vietnam War. We have Fox News senior political analyst Juan Williams asking: “Michelle Obama for President?” And we have Fox News contributor Joe Concha, author of Come On, Man! The Truth About Joe Biden’s Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Presidency.

(I checked again this morning, assuming The Messenger would’ve found at least one female opinion it considered worthy. But no: 10 new stories, 11 new bylines — every single one belonging to a man. New faces include Trump impeachment defense witness Jonathan Turley and failed Trump Fed appointee Stephen Moore, on “How Biden Lost the Debt-ceiling Fight and Republicans Finally Became the ‘Smart Party.'”)

So who wants a site like this? Who gave The Messenger the $50 million it has raised so far? Here’s a list of all the investors who’ve been publicly reported (aside from Finkelstein himself and Messenger president Richard Beckman):

• former Hearst CEO Victor Ganzi
• Loews Corporation CEO James Tisch
• Apollo Global Management co-founder Josh Harris
• Thomas Peterffy of Interactive Brokers
• holding company The Stagwell Group

Are these people just fans of journalism who want “to champion balanced journalism in an era of bias, subjectivity and misinformation”? Or is politics a factor?

Victor Ganzi: Ganzi was Hearst’s CEO from 2002 to 2008. But since then he’s been a prolific Republican donor. Federal filings show he’s given at least $1,293,836 to federal political candidates over the years — $1,286,936 to Republicans, $6,900 to Democrats. He gave $100,000 to the Trump Victory fundraising committee. Most of his donations have been to the less MAGA, more business-friendly wing of the party — think Chris Christie, Paul Ryan, or Jeb Bush. In the most recent cycle, he gave $55,800 to Dr. Oz and a PAC supporting him.

James Tisch: Tisch, CEO of his family’s Loews Corporation, is a major Republican donor (although, like many in deep blue New York City, he also gives to some Democrats, like Kathy Hochul and Joe Manchin). He has described himself as a Democrat in the past, but his sweet spot seems to be relatively moderate, business-friendly Republicans; he supported the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush, John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, and Mitt Romney. In 2012, he said that “the United States economy would be better off with President Obama being a one-term president” and that Obama had “made businesses feel ‘unloved’ and reluctant to put money to work.” (Not an Obama fan.) In the 2016 cycle, he gave to Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush, but neither Trump nor Hillary Clinton. Tisch sits on the National Council of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. The Tisch family is worth an estimated $6 billion.

Josh Harris: Harris had a big week! On Thursday, his New Jersey Devils were eliminated from the NHL playoffs. Boo! On Friday, the owners of the NFL’s Washington Commanders agreed to sell the team to a Harris-led group for just over $6 billion. Yay! On Saturday, his Crystal Palace FC beat Bournemouth 2–0 in the English Premier League. Yay! Then on Sunday, his Philadelphia 76ers lost a disappointing Game 7 to the Boston Celtics. Boo!

I guess what I’m saying is “That news site I invested millions in launched” might not make his top 10 events of his week.

Harris is also a political animal who has “seriously considered running for political office as a Republican” in the past. Between 2015 and 2020, he gave $839,000 to federal candidates, 77% of that to Republicans. He was an advisor to the Trump administration and was reportedly its pick to run the Office of Management & Budget until he dropped out “because it would have been too difficult to unravel his personal finances in the short amount of time required to accept the government position.” Jared Kushner was reportedly his major supporter in the White House; a few months later, Harris’ company, Apollo Global Management, gave a $184 million loan to a Kushner company; a few weeks after that, an SEC probe into Apollo was dropped. (Apollo has said emphatically these events are unrelated.)

Thomas Peterffy: Josh Harris is reportedly worth a cool $7.6 billion. Small change to Thomas Peterffy, who’s worth a cooler $23.7 billion. Peterffy is a true GOP megadonor, giving $7.7 million to Republican campaigns and conservative political action committees in 2022 alone. He also lives three doors down from Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach.

Trump wasn’t Peterffy’s top pick for president — but he still gave $150,000 to his inauguration and $250,000 to his reelection efforts. He really hates socialism; in 2012, he spent more than $8 million on TV ads warning of collectivism on the march in America. He’s mused about a Tucker Carlson presidency (“That would be interesting, no?”).

The Stagwell Group: Stagwell’s chairman and CEO is Mark Penn. You may remember Penn as a Democratic pollster, pushing business-friendly ideas with both Bill and Hillary Clinton. (“Penn’s idée fixe is that the Democratic Party’s fate hinges upon currying favor with the rich.”) But in recent years, he’s moved right and become a Trump enthusiast. You may remember seeing Penn on Fox News defending Trump against impeachment and blaming the “deep state” conspiracy against him.

(Side note: Who was it who ushered Penn into the Trump White House? Former NYC city council president Andrew Stein, head of an organization called Democrats for Trump — and Jimmy Finkelstein’s brother. Andrew shortened his last name as a young man.)

Among the companies the Stagwell Group owns is HarrisX, the pollster. So who better for The Messenger to hire for its first poll? That survey appears to support The Messenger’s stated raison d’être:

American voters want a new media source that’s free from journalists’ personal biases, according to the inaugural Messenger/Harris poll.

— Two in three voters in the poll, conducted by HarrisX, agreed that journalists mostly practice advocacy rather than unbiased journalism, including 77 percent of Republicans and 61 percent of Democrats.

— Three in four voters agreed that the media “gives a biased picture of political events,” including 68 percent of Democrats, 80 percent of Republicans, and 76 percent of Independents.

— More than 80 percent of voters agreed that “we need a new news medium dedicated to even-handed treatment of issues without political bias.”

“Americans see many media sources today as advocates for political views and see great danger in first amendment freedoms,” said Harris Poll chairman Mark Penn. “They are hungry for new sources of information.”

So this is the group that’s backing The Messenger: wealthy, politically active men who collectively have put many millions of dollars into advancing conservative and Republican causes — but who apparently also have a hankering for “objective, non-partisan and timely coverage.”

Back to that Trump interview. Marc Caputo makes a lot of the idea that Trump is now venturing outside the conservative media bubble. Here’s Caputo:

I understand you’ve expressed concerns about Fox, and that one of the reasons you went on CNN is you didn’t want to kind of limit yourself to Fox. And obviously you’re talking to us at The Messenger for our maiden launch, you’re courting social media influencers, you were on the Full Send podcast and you’re talking to others — lots of different media from social media to non-traditional media to mainstream media to new media…

Can you tell me more about your media strategy. You’re talking to everybody. Why?…

Let me circle back to that in a minute. I was curious to see if your full-spectrum media blitz is drawing a distinction with DeSantis. He’s largely confined to friendly conservative media, whereas you’re out there with everybody.

Forgive me for not noticing that Trump was now “talking to everybody” or on a “full-spectrum media blitz.”

The evidence for this new openness seems to be (a) a CNN town hall packed with his cheering fans, and (b) that he submitted to a grilling by the investigative reporters of…a bro podcast sponsored by “Happy Dad Hard Seltzer”? A show whose episode immediately preceding Trump’s was with pornstar “Abella Danger on Hooking Up with Fans and the Secrets of the Adult Industry”? (Other guests on Full Send so far in 2023: Don Jr., Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, and O. J. Simpson.)

Oh, and then there’s (c): “Obviously you’re talking to us at The Messenger.”

This is the question we’ll see play out in the coming months. Does The Messenger really see itself as part of that “mainstream media”? Or is it happy being part of the conservative bubble, using its claims of “balanced journalism” as a cudgel, just as “fair and balanced” Fox News did before it? I have my guess, but we’ll wait and see.

1. And is technically sound. Aram Zucker-Scharff chronicled a long list of issues with The Messenger’s SEO and ad stack here.
2. As is common with new news sites, The Messenger started publishing stories before launch, back on May 8; they just weren’t accessible to the public until Monday.

A wild 2015 Twitter thread by Aziah Wells King, better known as Zola, about a trip to Florida wouldn’t have gone viral without the work of Black Twitter. Without that, it wouldn’t have gotten the attention of Rolling Stone, and it wouldn’t have been turned into a critically acclaimed film.

#TheStory, as it became known, is an example of both the creative capacity of Black storytellers on the platform and the way in which the network of collectives known as Black Twitter create culture on- and offline. But when Meredith D. Clark, associate professor at Northeastern University in the school of journalism and department of communication studies, began researching Black Twitter as a doctoral student over a decade ago, only two other people in academia were studying what she called the “dynamic phenomenon.” She hopes her Archiving Black Twitter project, launched in March, ensures future scholars can carry on that work.

Clark is part of Archiving The Black Web, a group of digital archivists seeking to preserve the stories of Black people and extend existing archival practices to the digital sphere. This group and others hope to document not just the content created on the platform but how Black people use it for communication and community. They see an urgency to preserving Black Twitter in a world in which Black history and Black women’s cultural labor are undervalued or unacknowledged — and where the future of Twitter seems unknown. They also want to document the racist and sexist abuse that Black women on the platform received, in part to help people dream up and create a more inclusive way of connecting that prioritizes the needs of the most marginalized.

For Clark, archiving Black Twitter allows for a richer understanding of peoples’ lives both on and off the Internet.

“I want for a student, or someone who is just plainly curious, who wants to dig into these histories and this knowledge 50, 75, 100, hell, even five years from now, to be able to access this and say, there is data, there is proof, there’s already a web of knowledge that’s out there about this,” Clark said.

Clark’s archival project has been in the making since long before Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase of the platform in October, but his subsequent changes to organizational structure, user experience and algorithmic curation have led many users to worry about the platform’s future — and some to delete their accounts. This potential loss of information has brought issues of archiving to the forefront.

“Black Twitter” isn’t one thing — it’s a term for a collection of networks of Black people on the platform, spreading across the globe. The ease of reaching others helped marginalized people build community and organize — even as it also opened users up to abuse based on race and gender.

This was particularly true for Black women. Many movements stewarded by Black women on Twitter moved into the real world, like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter. Black women’s cultural labor — movement building, care work, organizing, leadership — has been regularly overlooked, said Zakiya Collier, an archivist and memory worker.

“Names are not included or their perspectives are not prioritized. And so when we look at the cultural record, there are times where it may seem like there were no women involved,” Collier explained. “And we know that to not be the case.”

Preserving Black Twitter is an investment in the future; it allows for a more accurate and rich and complex version of Internet history, Clark said. The ephemeral nature of the Internet means a chunk of Black Internet history has already been lost, Clark said, citing how much of the Black blogosphere is now permanently offline.

Preservation is key across platforms. For example, telling the story of the movement for Black lives would be incomplete without Alicia Garza’s original Facebook post with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. “How could you tell the story about what that moment in history was like, without having that evidence? It would be really difficult to do, it would also be really easy to distort it,” Clark said. “And that’s something that we’re seeing in practice now with other forms of Black creation and Black culture.”

Twitter allows people to come together in a semblance of democracy, said André Brock, associate professor in the department of literature, media and communication at Georgia Tech. It’s not exactly true that anything is public on Twitter — your feed isn’t a real-time firehose of everyone’s posts — but anyone can read tweets from any account as long as it’s not locked. Hashtags make it easy to find and participate in conversations and plumb already existing communities.

“Twitter has somehow managed to get us to believe that we should have a space where we can all talk to one another,” Brock said.

Brock described Black Twitter as “the world’s largest Black group chat.” Prior to the space going mainstream, those community updates were siloed across different pockets of the web, he said. “Twitter, in a very strange way, has served as an aggregator of Black online identity, one that’s easier for people outside of the Black community to see but one that’s also easy for Black folk to find and congregate.”

But the features that make Twitter a place for queer or disabled or Black people to connect could also make marginalized peoples’ lives hell. No history of any part of Twitter is complete without discussing the abuse overwhelmingly targeting women and LGBTQ+ people — particularly when they are also people of color.

Capturing those experiences is one of the goals of A People’s History of Twitter (APHOT), a participatory archiving project that grew out of ultimately unsuccessful efforts to buy Twitter and make it a public utility, whose recent kick-off was co-hosted by Wagatwe Wanjuki and Jacky Alciné.

Part of the motivation for APHOT comes from the fact that many archival efforts decenter the users who make the platform valuable. Material from the project’s kickoff event referenced previous efforts such as “Hatching Twitter,” a book on the White men who founded the company, and the fact that many archival efforts are tied up in academia or government institutions.

It’s important to preserve stories of how the platform failed its Black users, because the media has failed to cover Black Twitter well, said Sydette Harry, a technologist and communications professional who is currently a senior fellow at University of Southern California. Harry also spoke at the APHOT kick-off event about social movements, change and institutions on Twitter.

“A lot of those stories start from the assumption that something is wrong with Black people when they noticed discrimination,” Harry said. “They start from the supposition that we have no idea what we’re talking about.”

Discussion of archiving Black Twitter has picked up renewed urgency and media attention following a mass exodus of users in November 2022 after Musk’s acquisition.

Challenges to the archiving process stem from ideas of what is worth archiving, as well as issues around consent, especially considering how Black people have been exploited or mistreated in historical collections. It’s important to remember that Twitter isn’t a monolith, Harry said. It’s made up of real people, many of whom might not want their often intimate tweets preserved for strangers to peruse.

Harry noted that when people talk about harassment on Twitter, the voices uplifted usually aren’t Black.

Collier grapples with the ethics of social media documentation at her work with Documenting The Now. Preventing the perpetuation of harm marginalized communities experience day to day has to be at the forefront of any sort of archive, she said, including how people are described and documented in the collections.

“One of my key concerns is how do we inspire people to own their own archives,” Clark said. People often have to be convinced that their tweets, these “small histories,” are worthy of attention. “I have to persuade people that there is something important there and walk with them as they re-experience their own lived experience, and figure out what’s important to them, what they want to mark as important to a larger community, and then figure out how to put that in a narrative form.”

Much of the way knowledge production works in America, Clark said, is grounded in what has already been incorporated into archives and valorized as worthy of attention. Archiving Black Twitter now reinforces there is something worthwhile for future generations to engage with. It’s important in the context of Black history being seen as unworthy of documentation in a world dominated by white supremacy.

The conversations around archiving Black Twitter are interesting right now, Harry said, because “it is a tacit admission that Black Twitter did something very specific and special on Twitter that we were never given or fully resourced to do.”

“It shouldn’t just be about, ‘How do we archive Black Twitter?’ it should be, ‘How do we respect Black Twitter?’ And most importantly, how do we honor and respect the Black people who made Black Twitter what it was?” Harry said. “That’s not the question that I ever hear come up.”

Even though it is painful, it’s important to document the harms experienced by Black women on Twitter, Collier said. Whenever women champion the stories of other women and femmes, they are put in a vulnerable position, she said.

“I would want [the archive] to also be a safe space for women, femmes, queer and transgender people, Black people broadly and people with disabilities,” Collier said. “I want it to feel like a safe space and not another place for us to be targeted.”

Collier wants anyone perusing the Twitter archives to have the same feelings she has when she goes to more traditional spaces where knowledge is gathered — not like it’s “super technical.”

“I often cry when I go to physical archives, I may laugh and smile,” Collier said. “I still want it to have that texture and that intimacy, despite it being in a digital format.”

The people at APHOT want to change the future of what news and social media can look like. Alciné said the team is hoping the learnings from the project can be used to build a new media platform centered on what people want, instead of corporate interests. Some examples he threw out were optimizing and prioritizing moderation instead of it being an additional feature, or making it clear to users how revenue works instead of privatizing advertising.

Both APHOT and Archiving Black Twitter are still in their early stages, with their respective organizers still determining what the final archive will look like.

Part of the joy of archiving is preserving something for the future with little idea of how it will be used. Clark said she is excited about people using the archive for creative projects, like the Twitter thread that spawned the “Zola” movie.

“Even in the way sometimes if the language has been co-opted, and the trends have been co-opted, and they show up in popular culture, I still think that having the source material for that is a very worthwhile endeavor,” Clark said.

A central theme that emerged in discussions of archiving Black Twitter is preserving not just the activism or traditionally newsworthy items, but also moments of joy and humor like an iconic Yahoo News typo or legendary parody tweets or #DemThrones watch parties.

“To say that there’s going to be one Black Twitter archive is almost antithetical to the spirit of Black Twitter,” Clark said.

It’s early days. But if these changes are rolled out widely, they’ll be the most significant overhaul of some of the important space on the internet in quite awhile. The shift could significantly decrease the traffic that Google sends to publishers’ sites, as more people get what they need right from the Google search page instead. They could also do some damage to the affiliate revenue that publishers derive from product recommendations.

On the bright side, a new search filter aimed at highlighting humans could help highlight individual journalists, columnists, and newsletters — maybe.

“Search Generative Experience”

Google will place AI-generated answers right at the top of some search pages. Here’s how the company describes it:

Let’s take a question like “what’s better for a family with kids under 3 and a dog, bryce canyon or arches.” Normally, you might break this one question down into smaller ones, sort through the vast information available, and start to piece things together yourself. With generative AI, Search can do some of that heavy lifting for you.

You’ll see an AI-powered snapshot of key information to consider, with links to dig deeper.

The Washington Post’s Geoffrey Fowler tested the feature and describes the way that SGE cites its sources:

When Google’s SGE answers a question, it includes corroboration: prominent links to several of its sources along the left side. Tap on an icon in the upper right corner, and the view expands to offer source sites sentence by sentence in the AI’s response.

There are two ways to view this: It could save me a click and having to slog through a site filled with extraneous information. But it could also mean I never go to that other site to discover something new or an important bit of context.

You see the top three sources by default, but can toggle for more.

AI-generated content will also be incorporated heavily into shopping results. Search something like “bluetooth speaker for a pool party under $100,” or “good bike for a 5 mile commute with hills,” and up pops an AI-powered list of recommended products to buy. I haven’t tested this feature, but in addition to keeping users off publishers’ pages altogether, it also seems as though it’s not great news for any publishers that make money from affiliate links.

Google cautions that SGE is still an experiment, and it’s not widely available yet. (If you want to try it and are in the U.S., you can add yourself to the waitlist here from the Chrome browser or Google app.) In addition to that limited access, The Verge’s David Pierce notes that there are supposed to be limits to what Google will use AI to answer

Not all searches will spark an AI answer — the AI only appears when Google’s algorithms think it’s more useful than standard results, and sensitive subjects like health and finances are currently set to avoid AI interference altogether. But in my brief demos and testing, it showed up whether I searched for chocolate chip cookies, Adele, nearby coffee shops, or the best movies of 2022.

For instance, when Wired’s Will Knight asked “if Joe Biden is a good president or for information about different US states’ abortion laws, for example, Google’s generative AI product declined to answer.” But even though Google’s AI is not supposed to have opinions, it seems as if they slip in sometimes. The Verge again:

At one point in our demo, I asked [Liz Reid, Google’s VP of search] to search only the word “Adele.” The AI snapshot contained more or less what you’d expect — some information about her past, her accolades as a singer, a note about her recent weight loss — and then threw in that “her live performances are even better than her recorded albums.” Google’s AI has opinions! Reid quickly clicked the bear claw and sourced that sentence to a music blog but also acknowledged that this was something of a system failure.

so in a world where search goes fully GenAI (which is still a big if), pages of links go away and you get a handful of citations

i would imagine/guess this theoretically destroys small publisher traffic while rewarding the big outlets which may be weighted w/more authority https://t.co/7CyPj2JthQ

— rat king (@MikeIsaac) May 10, 2023

I, for one, look forward to generating IP that helps Google generate more advertising revenue in exchange for less referral traffic. #cjpa https://t.co/6muq3S6KRT

— Matt Pearce (@mattdpearce) May 11, 2023

One thing this definitely kills is the easy-click stories like "what time is the Super Bowl" — which you may hate, but because they do viral traffic every time, pay the bills in many newsrooms. https://t.co/GdNvzUVWAW

— Heidi N. Moore (@moorehn) May 10, 2023

This is what Google's answer box with new AI looks like by @geoffreyfowler

Very curious to see how people use this irl and how every website will pivot to get into the new answer box. https://t.co/FxtKANg6Fv

— Shira Ovide (@ShiraOvide) May 10, 2023

2004: Let’s build our websites to make Yahoo happy!
2008: Let’s build our websites to make Google happy!
2014: Actually let’s focus on Facebook.
2019: Uh, actually let’s go back to Google. Good ol’ Google.
2023: Would you believe me if I said homepages are the new search? No? https://t.co/RPuu3Hre8a

— Peter Kafka (@pkafka) May 10, 2023

It’s wild how this only doesn’t constitute plagiarism or copyright violation by mere technicality. Like they can copyright strike you like the day is long on YouTube, but if you write on the internet for a living, your shit is just theirs now https://t.co/FrPNssjagG

— Alex Arrelia (@AlexArrelia) May 11, 2023

“Hidden gems”

Google is also expanding the use of a search filter called “Perspectives” that brings user-created content — think Reddit posts, YouTube videos, and blog posts — into search results. This change is coming at a time when Americans are increasingly seeking out news and information from individuals, not institutions — and TikTok and Instagram are eating into Google’s share of the search market. Here’s Google:

“In the coming weeks, when you search for something that might benefit from the experiences of others, you may see a Perspectives filter appear at the top of search results. Tap the filter, and you’ll exclusively see long- and short-form videos, images and written posts that people have shared on discussion boards, Q&A sites and social media platforms. We’ll also show more details about the creators of this content, such as their name, profile photo or information about the popularity of their content.

Helpful information can often live in unexpected or hard-to-find places: a comment in a forum thread, a post on a little-known blog, or an article with unique expertise on a topic. Our helpful content ranking system will soon show more of these “hidden gems” on Search, particularly when we think they’ll improve the results.”

“We’re finding that often our users, particularly some of our younger users, want to hear from other people,” Liz Reid, Google’s VP of search, told The Verge. “They don’t just want to hear from institutions or big brands. So how do we make that easy for people to access?”

As Perspectives rolls out, it’ll be interesting to see how Google defines “other people”: Do journalists or opinion columnists who work for newspapers count? Will Substacks be surfaced? The feature could potentially benefit larger news publishers as well as journalists going it alone, but we’ll see.

Postgame is one of the times when The Athletic’s live rooms shine. The writer-hosted live rooms — which sometimes get called “live podcasting” because the finished results are often posted to podcast feeds — are a two-way audio platform for Athletic beat reporters to have conversations with subscribers. If you’re a longtime sports fan who has turned an AM/FM dial or two in your day, the format might feel familiar.

“Technology is cyclical in a lot of ways,” Will Bartlett, The Athletic’s senior audio development specialist, acknowledged. “It feels like we’ve just reinvented sports talk radio, just making it a little bit more accessible to people in the 21st century.”

“We try to encourage writers to do it around Moments with a capital ‘m,’” Bartlett added. “So when, you know, the Celtics lose on a last-second shot from James Harden and the Sixers, let’s try and get on there as quickly as possible. People are going to be on edge and wanting to vent to [The Athletic’s Celtics reporter] Jay King the way they would want to vent to [Boston-area sports radio] WEEI or something like that.” (Boston sports fans on edge? Can’t imagine it!)

The live rooms I’ve joined do replicate the fun ephemerality of sports radio and — more recently — certain struggling social audio apps. The Athletic’s live rooms are recycled into specific team podcasts and league-level feeds, but most are not exactly evergreen content. Anyone can listen in, but only subscribers can ask questions using the chat-like text box or being invited to speak by one of the hosts. Non-subscribers run into The Athletic’s paywall after clicking on one article, so live rooms are one of the only ways readers can sample the outlet’s content before getting their wallet out.

The Athletic’s first live room took place in September 2021. By January 2022, they’d done 100. Today, they’re closing in on 1,000 live rooms. Most have between 50 and 250 listeners. They tend to follow a similar format: the beat writer(s) give a “State of the Union”-like update about the team before opening the floor to questions, comments, and provocations from listeners.

“It’s sort of an in-app version of Twitter Spaces for us,” Bartlett said.

But, unlike Twitter Spaces, the live rooms exist on The Athletic’s app. With prominent cautionary tales about what relying on social media platforms can do to a newsroom ringing in our ears, The Athletic’s choice to build on its own turf makes plenty of sense.

The Athletic prompts all subscribers to follow a team or league and uses these preferences to build a user’s homepage — and to send push notifications when a live room begins. A user who has followed tags for football’s Cincinnati Bengals and the NFL at large, for example, might get pinged for a live room about Cincinnati’s draft picks as well as league-wide news like quarterback Aaron Rodgers being traded to the New York Jets — even if the breaking story discussed in the live room isn’t about their local team.

The majority of listeners make their way to the live rooms through those push notifications from the newsroom’s app, Bartlett said. Others find them through organic discovery (i.e. clicking around in the app) and social media.

If looking to kill time and fill your brain with even more #Bengals draft theories and rumors, @JayMorrisonATH & I are doing a live room on @TheAthletic app at noon today.

Anyone can listen, subscribers can ask questions. Come on over. https://t.co/rNhRwlWtxI

— Paul Dehner Jr. (@pauldehnerjr) April 27, 2023

No podcast today because @thrace and I are gonna hang out in a live room on @TheAthletic tomorrow to discuss #NWSLChallengeCup and anything else y’all want to talk about!

2 ET. Bring snacks and questions. (And if you miss it live, it will be a podcast episode right after!) pic.twitter.com/LbxqdBxA6d

— Meg Linehan (@itsmeglinehan) March 17, 2022

Scheduled off day for the #STLCards today, but still plenty of things to talk about!

Let’s do a one-hour trade deadline live room at 12 pm CT. You don’t need to be a subscriber to @TheAthletic to join, but you do need to subscribe to ask questions.

Link posted here at 12.

— Katie Woo (@katiejwoo) August 1, 2022

When going live postgame, journalists and fans rehash missed opportunities, on-the-field celebrations, and more. During the offseason or in pregame coverage, the group can prognosticate and predict to their hearts’ content. The whole time, both writers and those invited to speak can assume they’re among fellow diehard fans. In my corner of the sports world, that means Jay King might feel free to mention the Kornet contest — a goofy vertical leap a certain Boston bench player attempts even when half a court away from the shooting player — one moment and, the next, dive into bigger-picture narratives like how two of the team’s brightest stars work together or how All-NBA selections could shape the team’s future.

There aren’t strict requirements or quotas for Athletic reporters around the live rooms. (“Our writers are writers first and foremost,” Bartlett said. “We want these to be something that writers want to do. There’s never going to be a mandate around these.”) But for new hosts looking for guidance, Bartlett encourages them to slot something in between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. or between 4 and 6 p.m. local time. Noon has also proven to be a popular option, presumably because listeners are tuning in during lunch breaks.

“We’ve definitely seen our highest rates of engagement around times that you would see in traditional sports radio, including those commuting times,” Bartlett said. “One advantage that we do have over traditional sports talk radio is the ability to send push notifications to all of our followers at different times.”

The largest audiences haven’t always been for rooms about teams in the largest cities. The beat writers who cover the Cincinnati Bengals host a popular live room every Monday at noon. Live rooms from a writer who covers NHL’s Minnesota Wild team were popular enough to break the app a couple of times. The beat writer for the St. Louis Cardinals also tends to draw a crowd.

“Not a lot of those [locations] are super-saturated markets in terms of news coverage,” Bartlett said. “This is a way for us to serve some of the markets [that] don’t have national writers living there or ESPN there every day — but we happen to have a very well-plugged-in writer in that spot.”

Katie Woo, the staff writer for The Athletic who covers the St. Louis Cardinals, said she likes being able to drop information and ideas she might not use in a story in live rooms.

“It’s a great way to make fans and subscribers feel connected to their teams,” Woo said. “Being able to have people call in and actually ask their questions in real time to a real voice, instead of debating online, has led, in my opinion, to productive conversations.”

A lot of listener questions are hypotheticals, “usually pertaining to roster moves, trades, or free-agent signings,” Woo said. She occasionally gets story ideas from the conversations, she added, “but the main reason I use the rooms is [that] it helps me feel more connected to the subscribers. Hopefully they feel the same.”

Saad Yousuf, who covers the Dallas Stars for The Athletic, recently held his first live room. (He has a side gig hosting a weekly radio show in Dallas, so he’s not exactly new to audio.) He described the live two-way audio form as a “great supplemental tool” for his written coverage.

“The fans who joined the live room are subscribers who read my work routinely, which differentiates it from something like Twitter Spaces, where anybody can join, even if they aren’t subscribers,” he said. The rooms help him “get a pulse” on which topics readers feel most strongly about, and which questions he should make sure to answer in his next article.

Bartlett said the live rooms can be a type of training ground — an opportunity to get some audio reps in — for writers who may eventually launch a podcast or earn a hosting gig on an existing show with The Athletic. “It’s one way for us to identify talent down the road,” he said.

With more than 800 live rooms completed, The Athletic has had roughly 2,000 people get “on stage” to ask questions live. Hosts have moderation tools, similar to the ones Twitter Spaces offers, but Bartlett says said they’ve had “zero trolls” thus far. From what I’ve heard, plenty of subscribers “call in” with a question-that’s-more-of-a-colorful-rant that brings legendary sports radio meltdowns to mind but, overall, there’s less casual racism and sexism.

“It’s one of the more positive places on the internet, for the most part,” Bartlett said. “People are just there to talk sports.”

After months of extracting and analyzing information from parliamentary websites, documents, and other public records, Demócrata — a recently launched news outlet focused on Spanish government and public policy — published a series finding that in general Parliamentary sessions, the ones that get the most attention, men gave nearly two-thirds of the speeches. Women were underrepresented on congressional committees related to “state matters” like defense, economic affairs, and budgeting, but make up the majority of members on committees focused on equality, gender violence, and children’s rights.

Stories like these are what Demócrata aims to provide news consumers in Spain: Data-based journalism that helps to holds politicians accountable. That series, for example, included a methodology of how the journalists obtained the data, organized it, and decided what to include. (For instance: “Participations of less than one minute duration have also been left out. They mostly deal with oaths to take possession of seats, questions of order, requests to speak…They accounted for less than 1% of the total interventions collected.”)

“It brings a lot of transparency to the legislative process,” said Pilar Velasco, a veteran investigative journalist and Demócrata’s editorial director. “When the noise of politics occupies the entire news cycle, it generates a space for opacity that isn’t reported on.”

The site fills a gap in Spain, which will hold its general election in December. “It’s a good year to launch a news outlet with a focus on politics and policies,” said Eduardo Suárez, the head of editorial for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. “[Demócrata’s] value proposition is to report on public policies and Parliamentary debates in much more detail than mainstream publications. Newspapers in Spain are much more focused on politics than on public policies, and this might provide an opening for a publication like Demócrata, whose goal is to cover those policy debates in a more nuanced and granular way.”

Demócrata is the country’s only news outlet that specifically covers Parliament and public policy from an accountability lens daily, according to the Iberian Digital Media Map by Iberifier, a European Commission–funded initiative. (Another initiative in Spain, Civio, was founded in 2012 and focuses on data-powered watchdog reporting on the environment, healthcare, and the justice system.)

Demócrata has a team of seven. It’s funded by an initial investment from its board of directors and from advertising, though Velasco wants to expand into sponsorships, paid events, and subscriptions. The site has multiple sections: Agenda (an archive of the weekly newsletter that summarizes what’s happening in Parliament in the coming week), Actualidad (updates and play-by-play of laws and amendments), Políticas (news on proposed and ongoing policies), Quieren Influir (economy stories), and an analysis and opinion section. The site’s initial target audience is political insiders and politics junkies, but Velasco said the stories are written so that general audiences will be able to understand them as well. The Agenda newsletter has around 2,000 subscribers.

Demócrata’s goal is to use its data expertise to tell stories that other outlets can’t. Leading up to the outlet’s launch, the data team spent months building the software it uses to scrape and analyze data that, while technically public, is disorganized and difficult to parse. When the country’s far-right party, Vox, called for a vote of no confidence against the current ruling socialist party this past March, Demócrata published an analysis of Vox’s legislative footprint in the current parliamentary session, finding that the party has so far failed to pass any laws.

Velasco, who was an investigative reporter for Spain’s largest radio network Cadena SER, where she investigated political corruption cases, experienced first-hand the challenges of telling data stories for radio, where it can be difficult to delve into numbers. As a 2018 Yale World Fellow and one of the co-founders of Spain’s Investigative Journalists Association, she also saw American sites like Politico cultivated audiences for in-depth political reporting. When Demócrata founder David Córdova (who is also the director of a public affairs consulting firm, Vinces) approached her for the project, she saw it as a chance to experiment and try something new. (Demócrata is editorially independent from Vinces.)

“The mission is permanent scrutiny of institutions,” Velasco said. “Through continuous supervision of the work of politicians and legislators, information transparency, we believe, can strengthen institutional credibility. [The news] that comes to us from Parliament is often the political discussion, statements, politicians fighting with each other, and press conferences. But the legislative branch is a pillar of the State where many things happen that regulate life in society. It is what orders us and regulates us. And all of that wasn’t being covered in Spain with the specialization it deserves.”

One of Velasco’s goals in the next few months is to continue the work on a platform, already in progress, that will monitor updates to every piece of legislation in Parliament in real time. Down the line, she hopes to launch a chatbot that can answer reader questions. Demócrata has also partnered with Political Watch (a group of academics who monitor Parliament), design studio Flat26, and the think tank Ethosfera, which is helping Demócrata with its own ethics and transparency policies.

“We sort of feel like a hub for people who already had innovative ideas about parliamentary information,” Velasco said. “We get a lot of pitches for [collaborations]. When that you’re a small outlet, to grow you have to put springboards in places to get to the next level, and you can’t get there on your own.”

Okay, let me sell that a little better: If you want to understand the relationships between tech companies and news publishers over the past decade — how they have sprouted and shrunk, been tainted and curdled — read this piece on the birth, life, and death of Google AMP. AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) isn’t dead, technically, since it can always be forked into eternal life. But for web publishers, it’s dropped off their developers’ to-do lists.

The story of AMP involves a tech giant worried about being outflanked by its tech giant peers and a news industry anxious for any Silicon Valley sunshine it could get. Google said publishers should start making their web pages in a new way that would make them load more quickly on phones — while centralizing Google’s control of the web. It was part carrot (C’mon, your mobile site sucks, we’ll make it better!) and part stick (It would be a real shame if something terrible happened to your search traffic, wouldn’t it?). The tradeoffs were baked in from the start, and as I wrote at the time, it was “another stop on the path to powerlessness for publishers — another case of tech companies setting the rules.”

In telling the AMP story, Pierce lays out all the forces at play and why many of us were nervous about creating what amounted to a web-within-a-web, where the fundamental architecture of a website is determined by Google. (Not to mention the obvious problem with abusing its market power in search to force those changes on publishers.) You should read the whole thing, but here are a few tasty bits to whet your appetite.

“If Google said, ‘you must have your homepage colored bright pink on Tuesdays to be the result in Google,’ everybody would do it, because that’s what they need to do to survive,” says Terence Eden, a web standards expert and a former member of the Google AMP Advisory Committee.

This “we care about publishers!” dance is a staple of Silicon Valley. Apple briefly promised to save the news business with the iPad, convincing publishers around the world to build bespoke tablet magazines before mostly abandoning that project. Facebook remains in a perpetually whipsawing relationship with the media, too: it will promote stories in the News Feed only to later demote them in favor of “Meaningful Social Interactions,” then promise publishers endless video eyeballs before mostly giving up on Facebook Watch.

The platforms need content to keep users entertained and engaged; publishers need distribution for their content to be seen. At best, it’s a perfectly symbiotic relationship. At worst, and all too often, the platforms simply cajole publishers into doing whatever the platforms need to increase engagement that quarter.

But while publishers had long been wary of the tendency of Big Tech companies to suck up ad dollars and user data, they had seen Google as something closer to a partner. “You meet with a Facebook person and you see in their eyes they’re psychotic,” says one media executive who’s dealt with all the major platforms. “The Apple person kind of listens but then does what it wants to do. The Google person honestly thinks what they’re doing is the best thing.”

“[Google] came to us and said, the internet is broken, ads aren’t loading, blah blah, blah. We want to provide a better user experience to users by coming up with this clean standard,” says one magazine product executive. “My reaction was that the main problem is ads, so why don’t you fix the ads? They said they can’t fix the ads. It’s too hard.”

“The audience people hated it because it was against audience strategy,” says one former media executive who worked with AMP. “The data people hated it because it was against advertising and privacy strategy. The engineers hated it because it’s a horrendous format to work with… The analysts hated it because we got really bad behavioral data out of it. Everyone’s like, ‘Okay, so there’s no upside to this — apart from the traffic.’”

Though it could expand his outlet’s reach — especially, in his words, as email becomes increasingly important “as a distribution channel with social media declining as a traffic source” — Brodbeck didn’t think creating an additional newsletter was an optimal use of reporter time in the zero-sum, resource-strapped reality of running a hyperlocal news outlet.

“As much as I would love to have a 25-person newsroom covering Northern Virginia, the reality is that we can only sustainably afford an editorial team of eight across our three sites: two reporters/editors per site, a staff [photographer], and an editor,” he said. In short, tapping a reporter to write a morning newsletter would limit ARLnow’s reporting bandwidth.

But with the exponential improvement of AI tools like GPT-4, Brodbeck saw an opportunity to have it both ways: He could generate a whole new newsletter without cutting into journalists’ reporting time. So last month, he began experimenting with a completely automated weekday morning newsletter comprising an AI-written introduction and AI summaries of human-written stories. Using tools like Zapier, Airtable, and RSS, ARLnow can create and send the newsletter without any human intervention.

Since releasing the handbook, Amditis has heard that many publishers and reporters “seem to really appreciate the possibility and potential of using automation for routine tasks,” he told me in an email. Like Brodbeck and others, he believes “AI can save time, help small newsrooms scale up their operations, and even create personalized content for their readers and listeners,” though he raised the widely held concern about “the potential loss of that unique human touch,” not to mention the questions of accuracy, reliability and a hornets’ nest of ethical concerns.

Even when instructing AI to summarize content, Amditis described similar challenges to those Brodbeck has encountered. There’s “a tendency for the summaries and bullet points to sound repetitive if you don’t create variables in your prompts that allow you to adjust the tone/style of the responses based on the type of content you’re feeding to the bot,” he said.

But “the most frustrating part of the work I’ve been doing with publishers of all sizes over the last few months is the nearly ubiquitous assumption about using AI for journalism (newsletters or otherwise) is that we’re out here just asking the bots to write original content from scratch — which is by far one of the least useful applications, in my opinion,” Amditis added.

Brodbeck agrees. “AI is “not a replacement for original local reporting,” he said. “It’s a way to take what has already been reported and repackage it so as to reach more readers.”

Fans and anti-fans — the haters, in common parlance — have a lot in common, argues Dr. Jane Yeahin Pyo of the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Both groups amass immense knowledge, react with strong emotions, and have a strong passion for their object of love/hate,” she writes.

Her cross-disciplinary study, published in the most recent issue of Digital Journalism, was based on 40 in-depth interviews with South Korean journalists who have been featured on two (in)famous anti-journalist sites in South Korea — “Reportrash” and “Nolooknews” — that rank journalists weekly. The conversations were anonymized for publication.

South Korea has freedom of information laws that are “in line with international standards,” though legislation on national security and defamation causes media outlets to leave out key details in some stories, according to the 2023 World Press Freedom Index. (The country ranked #47 out of 180 countries; the United States, for context, ranked 45th this year.)

We’ve got to start with the obvious: there’s a wiiiiide spectrum of anti-journalist sentiment, and this study is firmly planted at the “not so bad” end. When Pyo quotes South Korean journalists recounting praise they received from news industry peers after being targeted, it brings to mind reporters who proudly make “blocked by [famous politician’s handle]” their header image on Twitter or share less-than-kind feedback they’ve received.

Some harassment, though, is part of coordinated campaigns designed to undercut public trust in journalism — or silence reporters entirely. (At least 67 media workers were killed in 2022, a sharp increase from the previous year that was driven by deaths in Ukraine, Mexico, and Haiti.) Comments can function as digital media criticism that provides reporters with “a lens to read how the field of journalism is being contested and challenged” by the public, as Pyo puts it — or they can be outright harassment of journalists from underrepresented backgrounds. Press observers — including The Washington Post editorial board — have pointed out online environments are producing “dark alleys of hate, misogyny, and violence aimed at female journalists” in particular. Journalists of color are also particularly vulnerable to online harassment.

In this study, Pyo focused on two types of hate that reporters receive: “aggressive” comments left under news articles and being ranked on the sites “Reportrash” and “Nolooknews.”

The journalists Pyo interviewed outlined some of the social and professional upsides to appearing on the ranked lists — from spikes in pageviews to stronger connections with their peers, audiences, and sources — even as they told her the negative attention after a particularly prominent story could be stressful at best. (Pyo is careful to note that “existing literature on media harassment suggests that journalists maintain an avoidance or ‘don’t care’ mindset to mitigate their stress,” and that harassment tends to be worse for female journalists.)

Some reporters told Pyo that appearing on the online lists had helped them establish a reputation that could be recognized by “loyal” audiences of fans and anti-fans alike. Others said the name-calling was “a verification of their journalistic hunch of understanding what is ‘newsworthy.'” From the study:

“When I received a lot of comments calling me names, I knew that what I published was an exclusive piece, getting good traction,” said Eunjin, a young political journalist who broke a controversial story about the former Korean president. To her, negative and hostile news comments directed at her meant she delivered a scoop that successfully brought audience engagement. Similarly, Minjung explained the culture of her company that equates being hated with being impactful: “For political news, an article that did not receive any negative comments is a failure — no one writes harassing comments [to journalists] if no one cares about what they wrote.”

Another reporter, named Jinyoung, echoed the point: “No one pays attention to people whose jobs can’t make any difference in the world.”

I traded emails with Pyo about her research, the media context in South Korea, and mismatched incentives between news companies and individual journalists. Our conversation, edited slightly for length and clarity, is below.

Juana Summers is struck by “an incredible sense of responsibility.”

She took over one of the host chairs at “All Things Considered” in June 2022 after many years as a political correspondent for NPR. Now almost a year into her new role, she sees herself as a guide to making the news program — and NPR in general — a place where people can feel represented.

Part of that, Summers believes, starts with the audience knowing her.

“I am never setting at the door that I am a Black woman, I am a stepparent, I am a woman who grew up in the Midwest and lived in a low- and middle-income home growing up, and who went to private religious schools,” said Summers, 34. “All of those dynamics are things that inform how I do my journalism, and the degree in which I lean into any part of that varies from story to story.”

Summers is one of the four women of color — three of them Black — who have taken over hosting duties at flagship NPR programs over the past year. Leila Fadel moved to “Morning Edition” in January 2022, joined just over a year later by veteran NPR host Michel Martin. Ayesha Rascoe became the host of “Weekend Edition Sunday” in March 2022. Their roles extend beyond the voices delivering the headlines. Each are editorial leaders with immense influence over what and who is covered.

“It would seem that after NPR top executives and news managers saw its three most popular women of color hosts departed within the last year, they would have pondered seriously about why these stellar female journalists left, with serious determination to make progressive changes at the public network to recruit and retain women of color hosts,” said Sharon Bramlett-Solomon, an associate professor at Arizona State University and an expert on race and gender in broadcast journalism.

Bramlett-Solomon added that leadership at NPR now faces a unique challenge in showing their commitment “to move forward with dramatic and meaningful transformation in programming inclusion and not simply window dressing on the set.”

Whitney Maddox, who was hired for the newly created diversity, equity and inclusion manager role in January 2021, said that in her role, she has especially focused on women of color at NPR: “What’s happening with them? How are they doing? What do they need?”

She has created a monthly space for women of color at the organization to meet and share about their day-to-day experiences and voice what resources they need. Her work also includes consulting to the flagship programs and checking in on their workplace cultures and how people are supported, including how stories are pitched and edited.

Maddox also started Start Talking About Race, or STAR, which is a twice-monthly event open to everyone in the organization. From these conversations, Maddox said she’s already seen an impact.

“This is moving beyond this space into how people are pitching their stories,” Maddox said. “Editors have come back to me and said, ‘A point that somebody made in STAR — I used that when I brought up a point of how we should think differently about how to source this story.’ There is a process, there is time, there is changing people’s hearts and raising their consciousness to understand why this work is important.”

The leadership of Fadel, Martin, Rascoe, and Summers are key parts in acting on conversations surrounding equity. Their roles in the host chairs are a signal of NPR’s commitment to reflecting their audience, Marrapodi said. “Our job is to be public media for the entire public,” he said. “We’re here for everybody. Our job is to hold a mirror up to society. And this is what society looks like.”

Fadel, 41, is acutely aware that her in the host chair is a representation of what society looks — and sounds — like.

“I just never thought it could happen. Clearly women have held host seats at NPR long before me, and people of color have moved up through the organization, but I just never imagined it,” she said. “How could I have imagined this for myself? There was no one who looked like me, who was an Arab woman, who was Muslim, doing this job.”

“I think about that responsibility and I take it very seriously,” Rascoe said. She said she thinks about her late grandmother, a sharecropper from North Carolina, constantly as she works. “I think about her and I think about my whole family, and I never want to make them not proud of me. I never want them to look at what I’m doing and say, ‘What is she out here doing? How is she representing us? We didn’t raise her that way.’”

Even the sound of her voice has been true to Rascoe’s roots: As her executive producer Sarah Lucy Oliver said, “Ayesha sounds like herself. She says she sounds like a Black woman from Durham, North Carolina.”

Oliver described what she calls “NPR voice” — a low register, stripped of any regional dialects, that registers as white and male — as the prevailing sound of NPR. Rascoe, she said, is a disruption to that.

“For decades, listeners have been accustomed to a particular kind of NPR voice. You can run through the dial and figure out when you’ve landed on an NPR member station,” Oliver said.

Hearing a voice like Rascoe’s “is a definite change in direction, and is exactly the kind of voice NPR wants to bring to the air,” Oliver said. “This is part of the real world. People speak differently. People have different regional accents. People use different kinds of colloquialisms. NPR is trying to sound more like the real world now.”

But Rascoe has had to reckon with the way audiences — used to that staid, white, and masculine NPR voice — perceive her. She has received racist listener feedback: coded messaging urging her to “sound professional,” telling Rascoe about how they don’t like her voice.

Rascoe says this is “all just a way of saying, ‘You are Black, and you are a Black woman from the South, and therefore you are stupid.’” When she first arrived at NPR in 2018 from Reuters, where she was a White House correspondent, it was a shock. “I will not try to pretend that it didn’t hurt and that it wasn’t frustrating,” she said.

Though Rascoe said she has received nothing but support from her colleagues and managers, her experience speaks to the dynamic at play in newsrooms nationwide aspiring to evolve, change and grow in being representative in their journalism.

The work of “disrupting the whiteness that journalists of color so often feel in white newsrooms” is hard and real, Bramlett-Solomon said — but doable, especially when there is real, on-the-ground support from management, with actual dollars behind it to show it.

Rascoe is aware of the fact that by simply being on air in such a high-profile way, she is doing that work of not only changing NPR, but changing American audiences’ expectations more broadly on credibility within the news.

“I have a voice that is not a voice that people necessarily expect — but it’s mine…Hopefully, it helps expand their idea of what authority, what professionalism and what intelligence can sound like,” Rascoe said.

Martin, 63, first joined NPR in 2006 to launch “Tell Me More,” an interview-focused show that aired on NPR member stations nationwide from 2007 to 2014. She then became host of “Weekend All Things Considered,” a position she held until joining “Morning Edition” as one of the hosts in March.

After decades in journalism, and many years at NPR specifically, Martin is deliberate and thoughtful in her imagining of the organization’s future and her role in it. As someone with a long history with the organization — one that includes using her voice to help push NPR forward on how it thinks about and covers race — she brings to her new role the ability to hold the past in the present while continuing to look forward. She said she’s constantly thinking not only about her time at NPR, but the ways journalists of color have worked to serve communities throughout history in how she approaches her role today.

“I just want us to keep getting better,” Martin said. “I want us to keep getting better because if you aren’t, then you are not growing. If you are not growing, then you’re dying.”

Martin steps into leadership at the flagship program at a time when the political climate often makes it tough for journalists to report. Martin says she thinks journalists play an especially important role “to help us understand each other’s experiences.” Without helping audiences dig into the nuances of why people believe what they do — and why the political is so personal for so many — journalists aren’t doing the job they are charged with executing.

“Yes, the words are changing and we’re all having to learn to use different language and to recognize different identities that were perhaps not part of our own experiences before. But that’s life. That’s learning. That’s education. That’s the news,” she said.

Martin said she takes inspiration from the way that Spanish-language and Black newspapers have crafted their coverage strategies.

“The origin of these news outlets was not just to talk about the politics that particularly affected these communities, but also to help people understand how to live in the new world that they were in: telling people things like how to register to vote, how to register your kids for school,” Martin said.

It is exactly this kind of work — often dismissed by editors and audiences alike as “unserious” for being service-oriented or because its target audience is those from historically underrepresented backgrounds — that Martin has always prioritized, and sees as essential now more than ever.

“What I want the most is for us to keep moving forward and not lose sight of our mission, which is to serve the public…I want us to keep doing our jobs because I think the country really needs us,” Martin said. “I want us to get more honest and stronger and more clear in how we serve people by helping them understand the world that does not lead them to carry the baggage of waking up and saying, ‘Whose side am I on today?’ That’s not who we are and I think not being that is so important.”

To think about equitable journalism means to consider the weight and totality of experience that exists behind each voice that feels unheard. That’s something that Martin’s “Morning Edition” co-host Fadel thinks a lot about, too. Fadel said she sees a major part of her job as being someone who can actively make and support a “safe space” for a range of voices, opinions, and perspectives in the editorial process.

Being fully present as herself in the host chair is a critical element of that, Fadel said — while also acknowledging that simply sitting in the seat doesn’t mean her newsroom, or any other, is done with the work of thinking holistically about what representation means in journalism.

“Change doesn’t happen because one person sits in a chair,” Fadel said. “It requires action at every level. This is happening at NPR, but of course there is more work to be done. Diversity isn’t just who is in a newsroom, but whose voices are in a story, and there is still a lot of work to be done there. We have a very diverse newsroom, but we need to always make sure it is more than white men whose voices get to talk about what happened.”

Fadel said she thinks all the time about how her own journalism can help change other people’s — and predominantly white listeners’ — perceptions.

“I didn’t see myself and my family in the stories I saw on the news. My father is from Lebanon and I grew up in Saudi Arabia. Talking about people like my family in the news meant only talking about people who were ensconced in conflict. It was all conflict. But there are real people who exist in these places where there is conflict. And they are nuanced and may all experience pain differently and joy differently and have lives outside of the conflict going on around them.”

Sitting in the host chair at “Morning Edition” is a way that she feels she can change this kind of sentiment across journalism, writ large.

“Representation matters,” she said.

Founded and funded by Politico founder Robert Allbritton, the Allbritton Journalism Institute (AJI) will launch a nonprofit news outlet that covers government and politics, with veteran journalists overseeing an inaugural fellowship class.

Breaking into journalism can be difficult; journalism school is expensive, and entry-level salaries tend to be low. AJI’s stated purpose is to be a training ground for “aspiring journalists from underrepresented backgrounds” to cut their teeth, according to Semafor, which first reported on the initiative.

“It takes time and repetition to get good at journalism — to build sources, to identify stories, to report them out and write them and present them in a way that actually serves the intended audience,” said Tim Grieve, the former Politico Pro and Protocol editor-in-chief who will lead the institute’s (as-yet unnamed) publication. “We want to give aspiring reporters that time, without asking them to take on student loans or find some other job to support themselves.”

The fellows will be paid $60,000 per year for two years, with benefits. AJI plans to hire 10 fellows to begin this September and add another 10 each year; by September 2004, 10 first-year fellows and 10 second-years will be working on a mix of assigned and self-created beats, Grieve said. The fellowship application (due May 31) asks questions like “Where and how do you get your news?” and “If you were going to change one thing about Washington journalism, what would it be, and why?”

“Fellows will have health insurance, paid time off, and an annual salary of $60,000 to report for the institute’s publication and learn from over 20 professional journalists, who will serve as mentors.”

Welcome, Allbritton Institute, new kind of J-school. https://t.co/Vy1UJXWOe7 — Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) May 2, 2023

This September, the selected fellows will take a four-week “immersion course in the practical application of journalism skills, from ethics and newsgathering to writing and distribution,” before they start reporting and writing. Throughout the two years, they’ll continue to attend seminars and workshops while also reporting. The teaching faculty so far includes Atlantic staff writer Tim Alberta, Washington Post local enterprise reporter DeNeen L. Brown, and The Independent’s Washington correspondent Eric M. Garcia. The newsroom will be led by Grieve, former BuzzFeed News politics editor Matt Berman, former Washington Post Magazine editor Richard Just, and former Axios senior editor Kate Nocera.

Why a journalism institute with a stacked newsroom attached instead of a new newsroom with a robust fellowship program? Allbritton may have his hands tied after selling Politico off to Axel Springer for more than $1 billion in 2021. As Semafor’s Tani reported, “the Politico founder said that while he agreed to some restrictions about his own next business moves as part of the deal (primarily not turning around and starting a Politico competitor), the two sides also agreed to carve out space for Allbritton to pursue nonprofit opportunities.”

This is find and admirable and he’s welcome to do with his money as he pleases, but “not enough journalists in D.C.” doesn’t really feel like the main existential threat to this industry at this moment https://t.co/KtTBwwzODt

— Nick Manes (@nickrmanes) May 2, 2023

With trust in the news media at an all-time low, Grieve said he hopes the fellows will help readers understand “why people in power (or people who want power) think what they think and do what they do — which all helps to explain what Washington does (or doesn’t) do.”

In addition to Politico, Allbritton has launched other news outlets. In 2010, he launched the Washington, D.C. local news site TBD, which ran for six months before being shut down. The tech-focused Protocol had layoffs soon after launch in 2020, then was shut down in 2022 after Politico’s sale.

But the stated purpose of AJI’s associated publication is to develop journalists who will go on to work at other news organizations. According to the site’s FAQ, “By the end of the program, graduates will have the background necessary to cover the inner workings of Washington — and will be ready to take on reporting jobs at the country’s best outlets.”

“A handful of newsrooms have great training programs, and we’d love to learn from their successes. But many don’t, either because they have no one to train or not enough people to train them,” Grieve said. “On an individual level, all the editors I know wish they had more time to mentor their reporters, but they’re under so much pressure to produce that they just can’t do it. We’re turning that on its head: Our editors’ first job is teaching and training their reporters; the journalism they produce will be the result.”

Well, this looks like competition for journalism schools from Allbritton. In my experience students are uncomfortable writing in public until they feel they’ve learned enough. So I’ll bet his salaried “students” will be much farther along. https://t.co/Nier36WuPn

— Jeff (Gutenberg Parenthesis) Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) May 2, 2023

With so many of the digital publications closing or struggling, this hopefully (on a small scale) will address one key thing the digital publications did in politics, which is really provide solid, entry level reporting jobs https://t.co/2cOECqPcX5

— Katherine Miller (@katherinemiller) May 2, 2023

This could be cool. Politico’s internship program has been a bfd for a lot of young journos. In recent years, it’s helped jumpstart some exceptional latino news talent, too. https://t.co/Tu47Sb48EB

— Pablo Manríquez (@PabloReports) May 2, 2023

Correction: A previous version of this story suggested that Robert Allbritton shut down Protocol. It was actually shut down after Allbritton sold it with Politico to Axel Springer.

“I think anybody who has in the past enjoyed reading the internet purely for fun can see that there’s a real dearth of URLs to type into one’s address bar these days,” Livingstone told me in a chat with Lavery this week. We conducted the interview in a live Google Doc — my way of allowing both of their internet voices to operate at a maximum, and eliciting comparisons of The Stopgap to “a stately pleasure barge of a site” (Lavery) or “a burnish’d throne??” (Livingstone). The Stopgap launched Wednesday morning, and you can read it here.

Don't worry, no one's going to try to make money from this one. That lesson's been learnt! This one's just for fun, and per its tagline: "Better than nothing"

That's @The_Stopgap, remember. Accept no substitutes, and watch this space.

— Daniel M. Lavery (@daniel_m_lavery) April 27, 2023

The Stopgap’s motto: “It’s better than nothing.”

This will be an old fashioned, general interest blog, mostly written by us. We’ll make no money, produce no podcasty newslettery bullshit, and pay nothing—although readers can donate direct to guest authors thru financial socials.

— jo livingstone (@Jo_Livingstone) April 27, 2023

The Baffler

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Discourse Blog

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The Intercept

Media Matters

Nieman Lab

The Onion

Sahan Journal

Semafor

People have been running social platforms and media companies for literal decades, after all, all while Musk was busy with cars and spaceships and whatnot. A fair number of lessons have been learned! But Musk — so resolutely convinced of his own genius — has dedicated himself to making old mistakes new again, compressing a lifetime of bad ideas into six short months.1 It’s his most reliable pattern: announce a crazy new policy, preferably on a weekend; face huge blowback from users; reverse the policy, claim you were misinterpreted all along or just pretend it never happened.

So when I saw this tweet on Saturday afternoon, I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.

Rolling out next month, this platform will allow media publishers to charge users on a per article basis with one click.

This enables users who would not sign up for a monthly subscription to pay a higher per article price for when they want to read an occasional article.…

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 29, 2023

Since embeds of his new longer-than-280-characters tweets don’t show the full text, here’s what it says:

Rolling out next month, this platform will allow media publishers to charge users on a per article basis with one click.

This enables users who would not sign up for a monthly subscription to pay a higher per article price for when they want to read an occasional article.

Should be a major win-win for both media orgs & the public.

Fiiiiiiiiiinally, Elon turns his attention to micropayments. (Pretty sure this is in the Book of Revelation somewhere.)

The idea of news publishers charging readers by the article is not a new one. At least once an hour, someone tweets about “why hasn’t anyone figured out how to let me buy one article????” Literally dozens of micropayments-for-news startups have come and gone; dozens of publishers have run tests of various models; none have gained much traction.

Even today, well into the 2020s, you can find people saying the dream is an “iTunes for news” that — as the iTunes Store did 20 years ago — allows you to buy a single song (an article) rather than the full album (a subscription). (They say this despite the fact that approximately zero people still buy MP3s that way; instead, they pay a monthly subscription fee to Spotify or Apple.)

I’ve long been a micropayments skeptic. Not because I have any philosophical issue with the idea; I’m all for publishers making money and readers consuming news. My skepticism is driven by it being a strategy that sounds appealing but works poorly in practice. Others have written about the problems with micropayments at great length, but here are, to my mind, the most significant:

Friction at the story level.

What do people do when they hit a news site’s paywall? We have some data on that question, from a Gallup/Knight Foundation survey last fall. They asked American adults: “Suppose you were trying to access a news story online and had to pay to keep reading or watching it. Which ONE of the following would you be most likely to do?”

48% said they would “try to access the information elsewhere for free from a different news outlet.” 28% would “move on to something else or to a different news story.” 7% would “try to find information about the news story on social media.” 4% would “sign up for a free trial if available.” 3% would try to “get the story through friends or family who already have access.”

A measly 1% would “pay for access to the story or outlet.”

In the overwhelming majority of cases, a person faced with the need to pay a news site money will say “no, thank you.” You can view that as an artifact of subscription models, or you can view it as evidence of how transient most news stories are in people’s information lives. It’s hard to evaluate how much an individual article is “worth” before you’ve actually consumed it — and there is always free competition available, either on the same topic or in the broader universe of “things to click on in my feed.”

Friction at the payment level.

If an individual publisher sets up their own micropayments system, getting money will require readers setting up an account, attaching a credit card, and all the usual stuff that moving money online requires. Not many people will do that to read a single news story.

So maybe they sign on to one of the many micropayment startups that want to create an industry-wide network of news sites using a common payment platform — either as part of a pan-publisher subscription or on a pay-per-article basis. Unfortunately, none of them have the scale to be appealing or the appeal to build scale. (“Just sign up with your NewzBux account!” isn’t much of a pitch to your readers if they’ve never heard of NewzBux, or InfoCents, or FactCoins, or whatever.) And the companies that might be able to start with scale (Google, Facebook) are not ones that publishers trust with their money. And whoever owns the pipes, they’ll want their 30% cut.

Most paywalls aren’t that hard.

In a digital universe where every news story is behind a hard paywall — one impenetrable to the non-paying reader — then a micropayments model might make sense. But that’s not the digital universe we live in. The number of completely paywalled sites is low and typically either hyperlocal (a county-seat weekly with no competition) or high-end (think The Information or Politico Pro). Nearly all news sites will let a random web user read a story (or two, or five) for free. It’s only after a given number of clicks that the wall goes up.

If you want to think of that as “news sites already offer micropayments for those first five articles — they’ve just set the price at $0,” be my guest. And for those times when someone really wants to read just one article, that free allotment allows all the paywall workarounds that the savvy digital news consumer knows about. (We’re all adults here; we can talk about incognito windows.) If most paywalls aren’t that hard, there’s little pressure for a paid product to get around them on a single story.

No one agrees on what micropayments are.

Is a micropayment 10 cents for one article? That was the number Elon Musk was thinking about in this video from November, when he complained that he should be able to pay 10 cents to read an especially good Philadelphia Inquirer story despite not living in Philadelphia.

.@elonmusk describes the issue of reading articles with paywalls. In clips never shown before in our interview he alludes to the value of what Twitter can bring. He also talks about how the media wants to own their subscribers. @kgee @EliBurton_ @klwtts pic.twitter.com/WsA2lUHo0S

— Tesla Owners Silicon Valley (@teslaownersSV) November 1, 2022

If there is a sustainable price for journalism, it isn’t 10 cents an article. A large scale data analysis from Medill found that digital news subscribers don’t even visit those news sites on most days. For small local news sites, the typical subscriber visits once every three days. At larger sites, it’s once every five days. Those visits can include consuming multiple articles, of course, but the point is 10 cents an article would be a radical price reduction for most subscribers — and thus a radical revenue reduction for most publishers. Price points will have to be higher — and thus less appealing to fly-by readers.

Publishers don’t want to cannibalize subscribers.

It’s not at all unusual for a business to insist on their product being purchased in a particular quantity. Try to go to the grocery store and buy one peanut M&M, or one tablespoon of ice cream, or a single Corn Flake. They’ll look at you funny, because the businesses that manufacture those consumer goods have been structured around selling bags, pints, and boxes of them, respectively. Go ask the people at Tesla if you can buy a Roadster that’s only for the weekends — at 2/7ths of the price. The economics of information goods (like news) aren’t identical to those of physical goods, but they both require sustainable business models, and for most quality news sites, that requires paid subscriptions.

And that’s the root problem, from publishers’ point of view: If you sell subscriptions for $15 a month, but you sell individual articles at 15 cents each, you’re telling any subscriber who reads less than 100 articles a month they’re an idiot and should give you less money. There aren’t enough payment-willing fly-by customers to make up the difference for even a few lost subscribers. You’re encouraging your best customers to think of you as an occasional treat rather than a service you pay for — and to pause before every headline they click to estimate its worth in cash. It shouldn’t be surprising than “we’ll charge you $10 a month until you tell us to stop” is more appealing than “we’ll charge you 10 cents now and maybe you’ll come back again someday.”

As Tony Haile once smartly put it, news subscriptions are like gym memberships. Imagine a gym that charges $50 a month for a membership — but also lets anyone pop in for a single workout for two bucks. Why would anyone pay for a membership again? “If you would take the micropayments version of a gym membership, it would be like, ‘I can turn up and I can pay a couple of quid, and I can go into the gym whenever I want to use it.’ No gym works like that.”

All that said — these problems are not insurmountable. Smart people might come up with solutions, even if they haven’t so far. Indeed, I’ve long believed that if anyone could create a micropayment system for news that worked, there were only two real possibilities: Apple and Twitter.

With iPhones, iPads, and Macs, Apple controls the devices that most paying digital news consumers use. They have hundreds of millions of users’ credit cards already on file and attached to your identity. And with Apple Pay, they have a nearly frictionless payment platform that has already been integrated into countless apps and websites. If they decided to offer a “Read With Apple Pay” button for news sites, the technical problems of micropayments would mostly go away. (Along with 30% of publishers’ revenue, no doubt.) And Apple News+ is the closest thing to an all=news subscription that currently exists.2

Twitter, meanwhile, is the center of the digital news universe. There is no place online with more news-curious users clicking links to new-to-them news sites. And it showed interest in the subject, buying Tony Haile’s Scroll and integrating its network of ad-free news sites into Twitter Blue and teasing some sort of paywall integration on the way.

But that was the old Twitter. One of Musk’s first decisions after taking charge was killing off the remnants of Scroll — the closest thing to a foundation for a pan-publisher revenue model anyone had.

Unless you are one of the few Twitter Blue subscribers, Twitter doesn’t have your credit card number. It has no ready payment platform for publishers to integrate into their sites. Twitter would likely only be interested in a payment system that goes through Twitter, not via links that go to a publisher site from Facebook, Google, or elsewhere.

But let’s be honest: The biggest problem is Elon. What mainstream publisher would trust Elon Musk with their money right now? The guy who refuses to pay the rent on his corporate HQ? The guy who has spent the past six months dumping on the media, banning reporters, declaring their work a “relentless hatestream” from “media puppet-masters” that you “cannot rely on…for truth“? This is the guy who says he has a “major win-win” for publishers? The same guy that complains “media is a click-machine, not a truth-machine” thinks the answer is tempting people to pay with a single headline?

(Not to mention that Musk has no deadline cred remaining, and saying that micropayments will “roll out” later this month could mean this summer, late 2024, or never.)

Maybe someone will figure out micropayments for news someday. I think it’s unlikely at scale — but I could be wrong! But I am quite confident the man who has spent the past half-year destroying the news media’s favorite online space won’t be the one to do it.

1. I believe it was Techdirt’s Mike Masnick I first saw using this metaphor for Musk, specifically around content moderation.
2. Pro tip: Apple News+ now includes, along with roughly all the magazines, The Wall Street Journal, the L.A. Times, The Times of London, The Globe and Mail, and the metro dailies in Charlotte, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Kansas City, Miami, Raleigh, Sacramento, San Antonio, San Diego, San Francisco, plus a few more. If you run into a random local-news paywall, there’s a pretty decent chance that searching for the headline in Apple News might find it. It’s now a much better product for newspapers than it was at launch.

For curious journalists like me, spending time reading academic research about journalism and democracy reveals a mixed picture.

There’s plenty of research to show that journalism is still a critical part of an engaged society. Decades of evidence–based studies show a correlation between news consumption and political engagement. People who read more news tend to vote more regularly and engage more in their own community.

Newer academic studies tend to look at very specific practices around types of journalism and find insights particular to certain beats or coverage areas — and there’s quite a lot of it. Just a few examples include how journalists use empathy in covering homelessness, whether fact-checking changes false beliefs, and how audiences react to watching coverage of terrorism.

But keeping track of all that academic research across subject areas is no easy task. Here’s where professors Mark Coddington and Seth Lewis have stepped up an email newsletter (hosted on Substack) that aims to showcase the most compelling research published each month. The newsletter is called RQ1, and Nieman Lab republishes it each month.

Coddington and Lewis are both former journalists who became academics. (For several years, Coddington wrote the “Week in Review” column for Nieman Lab.) They now study their former colleagues amid a changing digital news environment, tackling issues of data journalism, social media, news engagement and news aggregation. (Coddington is at Washington and Lee University, while Lewis is at University of Oregon.)

“We’ve had trouble ourselves keeping up with the constant flow of new research on news and journalism, and we want to help you keep up with it as we try to wade through it as well,” they write in the newsletter.

As editor-in-chief of PolitiFact, I have a high interest in keeping up with academic research on fact-checking, and as a Nieman Fellow I’ve been studying research about the connection between journalism and democracy, so I reached out to Coddington and Lewis with a few questions. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Those invisible signals provided our kitchens, living rooms, and bedrooms with access to jazz clubs, baseball stadiums, and symphony halls. For a century, they have been transporting us instantly to London, Cairo, or Tokyo, or back in time to the Old West or deep into the imagined future of interplanetary travel.

The reception of those radio, then television, signals didn’t just inform us, they shaped us. Everyone experienced broadcasting individually and collectively, both intimately and as members of dispersed crowds.

Radio and television fostered an ephemeral and invisible public arena that expanded our understanding of the world — and ourselves. Whether it was the final episodes of radio serials like “Gangbusters”, or television’s “M*A*S*H” or “Seinfeld,” Americans often marked the passage of time by shared broadcast experiences.

Even today, more Americans use standard AM/FM radio broadcasting than TikTok. At a time when most Americans get their news from local TV stations and broadcast television networks, and radio remains pervasive, it might seem frivolous to express concern about preserving technologies so deeply embedded in daily life.

Yet a media evolution is occurring, as paid subscription video streaming and audio services climb in popularity, and fewer Americans are consistently tuning in to broadcast media.

Demise of shared moments

The broadcasting era is becoming eclipsed by new media technologies. In the era of TV and radio dominance, “mass media” was defined by shared experiences.

But now, new media technologies — cable TV, the web, and social media — are changing that definition, segmenting what was once a huge, undifferentiated mass audience. All those new media fragmented what were once huge collectives. Bottom line: We’re not all watching or hearing the same thing anymore.

With fewer Americans simultaneously sharing media experiences, the ramifications of this evolution stretch beyond the media industries and into our culture, politics, and society.

The shared moments that electrified and unified the nation — from President Franklin Roosevelt’s fireside chats to TV news coverage of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination and up through the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — have become more rare. Even national events, such as a presidential election, are different today in that our collective experiences now seem more individualized and less communal. People get their news about presidential elections from sources with radically different perspectives on what used to be shared facts.

The very idea of collectively tuning in to history as it happens has been altered, as the profusion of channels and platforms now funnels audience members into self-segregated affinity groups where messages are shaped more for confirmation than enlightenment.

How to remember

As we move into this new media world, broadcasting risks being relegated to the rustic past like other old media such as the rotary telephone, the nickelodeon, the 78-rpm phonograph, and the DVD.

That’s why, from April 27–30, 2023, the Library of Congress is hosting a conference, titled “A Century of Broadcasting,” that invites scholars, preservationists, archivists, museum educators and curators, fans and the public to discuss the most effective ways to preserve broadcasting’s history.

The goal of the conference, convened by the Library of Congress’ Radio Preservation Task Force, is to begin envisioning the future of this technology’s past. As a radio historian and member of the Radio Preservation Task Force, I was invited to serve on the conference organizing team. Panels, papers, and presentations will look at how broadcasting is currently being archived, and how we, as a society, can think more systematically and formally about how we’ll remember broadcasting. While the task force is primarily concerned with broadcasting’s inception as radio, aspects of television’s past will be included as well.

Preserving radio — and TV — is not as simple as storing machines or tapes. To understand broadcasting history, preservationists must try to describe an experience. It isn’t enough to show somebody the printed script from a 1934 Jack Benny radio program, or the theatrical stage set used when “All in the Family” was taped before a live studio audience in 1973. To comprehend what Jack Benny, Gracie Allen or Jackie Gleason meant to the people of the United States involves trying to imagine, and almost feel, an experience.

“Essential” first step

The Radio Preservation Task Force seeks to go beyond the big corporate commercial collections that already exist. NBC’s radio and TV archives, as well as the Radio Corporation of America’s and others, are already well-preserved and housed at repositories like the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution.

The Radio Preservation Task Force is concerned with the diverse universe of broadcasting, including the many types of stations and networks that defined American broadcasting.

“Millions of Americans listened to college, community, and educational radio stations that were less famous than CBS and NBC but still played an important role in daily life,” notes University of Colorado scholar Josh Shepperd, chair of the Radio Preservation Task Force. “Preservation projects associated with the Radio Preservation Task Force have revealed to us that African American radio stations played an important role in helping catalyze the Civil Rights Movement by fostering and inspiring community.”

Shepperd added that “those are just two examples of often-overlooked but essential components of our nation’s broadcast history.”

At the Century of Broadcasting conference, scholars will examine such varied topics as how gender roles were performed on the air and how Spanish-language radio maintained listener identity with the community while broadening outreach. The conference also includes discussion of international and global radio communities, with scholars presenting on broadcasting history from France, Germany, and Latin America.

“There’s even a panel on preserving the history of unlicensed and illegal ‘pirate’ radio,” says Shepperd.

Our media remains so atmospheric — it’s everywhere, all the time — that we too rarely pause to concentrate on how it evolves and how those transformations ultimately influence us.

Radio and TV might not technically be “endangered” right now; after all, we all still use telephones even if they look completely different and serve functions largely unimaginable 40 years ago.

Yet moving beyond the broadcast era holds important ramifications for all of us, even if we cannot precisely discern them in this moment. Recognizing the need to preserve radio and TV’s past marks an essential first step, so that the future will be properly informed about how we lived and communicated for over a century of American history.

Loyalty is a concept that’s invoked quite often when news executives and researchers talk about audiences. We talk about loyal audiences who trust our journalism and are “engaged” with our products, who spend a lot of time on our sites and keep coming back, who are willing to subscribe or donate to our organizations. But it’s not always clear what exactly we mean by loyalty in itself, apart from those actions that it has been tied to.

Is loyalty even a distinct phenomenon apart from the behaviors — like giving continued attention, sharing, and subscribing — that are often thought to characterize it? Researchers Constanza Gajardo and Irene Costera Meijer of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam believe it is. In a new study in Journalism Studies, they argued that, at its core, loyalty to journalism is less about actions than about feelings within a relationship, one that is often obscured as we focus on only its most economically beneficial outcomes.

To determine what loyalty means to news audiences, Gajardo and Meijer used a lengthy, multi-part interview process with 35 regular news users in Chile. They wanted to give people open-ended questions to describe loyalty on their own terms, prompting them to compare their feelings about journalists and news organizations to interpersonal relationships.

One of their most striking findings was that loyalty to a news source was not always tied to regular use. Some interviewees described deep, abiding loyalty for news sources they didn’t regularly use. Said one participant of a Chilean TV journalist: “I don’t listen to him religiously, but when I do, I listen to him. I’m 40 years old and I don’t have to talk to my father every day.” Others described sources they regularly use but feel no loyalty for: “I know…I should say that the news site I visit the most is close to me and that I like it, but this is not the case. This has a purely functional purpose: to know what happened here, there and that’s it.”

In the latter cases, loyalty was inhibited by a lack of political like-mindedness or credibility. But even trust didn’t guarantee loyalty, as some participants described a lack of relationship with trusted investigative or longform news sources they used, characterizing them as too serious or distant or heady.

So what kind of behaviors did mark loyalty for audiences? It wasn’t always the clicks, shares, donations, and subscriptions we might expect. Instead, people discussed their loyalty in terms of adapting to changes those news sources made, tolerating aspects they didn’t enjoy, or forgiving mistakes they made. Perhaps encouragingly for journalists, these were all quite relational actions. But they were more about tolerating and adapting to perceived shortcomings than responding to news with pure enthusiasm.

Other, more direct actions that we often think about as tied to loyalty — liking, subscribing, donating, and so on — weren’t as evident to users as expressions of loyalty. Just as journalists tend to think about loyalty as something audiences possess, audiences in this study saw it as primarily built around what journalists provide. “Users seem to be clear about what to expect from journalism,” Gajardo and Meijer wrote, “but they are somehow unaware of what journalism expects from them.”

This could be a bleak takeaway for journalists — even our most loyal users don’t know how to support us in useful ways! But it could also indicate opportunity for growth, as news organizations try to tap into the deep (and complex) feelings of their loyal audiences to develop mutually beneficial relationships.

Research roundup

“‘They’re making it more democratic’: The normative construction of participatory journalism.” By Tim P. Vos and Ryan J. Thomas, in Digital Journalism. The idea that journalists are obligated to engage with their audiences and allow them to participate in the co-creation of news — well, it has become “something of an article of faith in journalism studies scholarship in the first decades of the twenty-first century,” Vos and Thomas argue in this piece. Such ideas about participatory journalism, which became normalized over recent decades, “synced with broader intellectual currents around ‘participatory culture’ and optimism about the democratizing potential of the internet.”

Optimism about participatory journalism is in retreat these days, as the dark sides of a participatory internet has come fully into view. But it’s worth reflecting, as these authors do, on an enduring question: How did participatory journalism become such a firmly established journalism norm?

Vos and Thomas examine the “metajournalistic discourse” about participatory journalism from 2002 through 2021, focusing on nearly 500 articles representing 20 sites representing journalism discourse that were identified via network analysis. In attempting to trace how participatory journalism came to be a journalistic norm against the backdrop of social, economic, and technological change, the authors find several things.

First, they demonstrate how, over time, key commentators “sought to legitimize audience participation in the news production process by imbuing it with tried-and-tested notions of journalistic mission. Thus, we are confronted with a discourse that addressed something new but is garbed in the normativity of something more traditional.”

Significantly then, they go on to note that “the transformations to the culture unleashed by participatory technologies were treated as both an empirical given and as unquestionably positive. It is, the discourse suggests, simply commonsensical for journalists to embrace these new realities — this has happened, and it is good” (emphasis added).

Notably, however, they find that the discourse about participatory journalism appears to have peaked in 2015 and declined in recent years.

“News can help! The impact of news media and digital platforms on awareness of and belief in misinformation.” By Sacha Altay, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, and Richard Fletcher, in The International Journal of Press/Politics. What should news media do about misinformation? Some researchers have suggested that reporters can inadvertently amplify false claims in their reporting on them — that merely attempting to debunk misinformation can serve to magnify its spread. And it’s true that news media can be manipulated by bad-faith actors masquerading as legitimate sources. But is it true, as some have argued, that “mainstream media are responsible for much of the public attention fake news stories receive”?

No, probably not. That’s the conclusion of this large-scale survey analysis, which involved a two-wave panel study (where the same groups of people are surveyed at Time 1 and Time 2, to check for differences) that was conducted in multiple countries (Brazil, India, and the UK) to avoid problems associated with focusing on one location in isolation. The surveys investigated the impact of media use on awareness of and belief in misinformation about COVID-19.

“We find little support for the idea that the news exacerbates misinformation problems,” the authors write. “News use broadened people’s awareness of false claims but did not increase belief in false claims — in some cases, news use actually weakened false belief acquisition, depending on access mode (online or offline) and outlet type.”

They note that results were not even across countries — “underlining the importance of comparative research to guard against unwarranted generalizations” — nor for all types of news use, but the results were straightforward in the main: “Overall, we find that news can help.”

This research underscores the vital role that news media perform — most of the time, though not always nor everywhere — in “keeping people informed and resilient to misinformation.” Of note as well: the findings suggest that news use via platforms was not associated with greater belief in misinformation, countering somewhat sweeping claims that are often made about platforms and their effects.

“The limits of live fact-checking: Epistemological consequences of introducing a breaking news logic to political fact-checking.” By Steen Steensen, Bente Kalsnes, and Oscar Westlund, in New Media & Society. Political fact-checking has become a global phenomenon during the past decade. Because it often involves going to great lengths to establish evidence-based evaluations of political statements, this form of journalism is assumed to require a lot of “epistemic effort,” or a high degree of time and energy to verify knowledge claims. On the other end of the spectrum of epistemic effort might be another genre of journalism: breaking news. When journalists cover breaking news, especially when they do it from their desk in the newsroom, it’s assumed to involve a lower degree of epistemic effort, because, as noted in this article, “the immediacy of breaking news prevents the journalists from investing time and resources for extensive critical assessments of sources and information.”

So, what happens when fact-checkers attempt to bring a breaking news style to covering political debates with live fact-checks? How do they bridge the gap, as it were, between higher and lower forms of epistemic effort?

Steensen and colleagues, using a variety of research methods, sought to answer this question by investigating the Norwegian fact-checker Faktisk.no and its live fact-checking of political debates during the 2021 parliamentary election campaign in Norway. They found that live fact-checking, at least in the case of Faktisk, mainly involves strategies to reduce complexities in how claims are fact-checked, including a reliance on predefined understandings about the relative credibility of sources.

The upshot: live fact-checking of politics tends toward what the researchers call confirmative epistemology, in which fact-checks confirm rather than critique elite perspectives, reinforcing hegemonic views about what’s important, reliable, and true. This raises the “risk that live political fact-checking…might cater to the political elite more so than to the critical public. A potential consequence of this is that live political fact-checking, as performed by Faktisk, might add fuel to the growing criticism of mainstream media lacking diversity of perspectives and critical distance to elites.”

“‘Saving journalism from Facebook’s death grip’? The implications of content-recommendation platforms on publishers and their audiences.” By Yariv Ratner, Shira Dvir Gvirsman, and Anat Ben-David, in Digital Journalism. You’ve seen them at the bottom of many news sites: sections of “Around the Web” and “Recommended for You” articles that tempt readers with sensational photos and headlines (“37 Child Actors Who Grew Up To Be Ugly”) . These “chumboxes,” as they are derisively called, offer up attention-grabbing fare to lure in readers, and many news publishers allow them to live on their sites because they pay more than other forms of advertising. Research, however, suggests that such content leads people to take a dimmer view of news quality and credibility (no surprise!).

But is there a different way of looking at this phenomenon? For one thing, the clickbait aggregators — Taboola and Outbrain, chief among them — argue that they are sparing journalism from the “death grip” of Facebook’s ad dominance by allowing news organizations to work in revenue partnership with these content recommendation platforms.

So, what is the effect of these chumbox aggregators? Ratner and colleagues offer a large-scale analysis of that question, examining nearly 100,000 stories recommended by Taboola and Outbrain that were scraped from nine Israeli news sites. They find that “the spaces created by these partnerships blur the distinction between editorial and monetization logics” — in effect, muddying the waters between journalism and advertising as well as between news brands, and raising new questions about the role of sponsored content and algorithms in challenging journalism.

Additionally, the researchers discovered certain network effects that undermined some news sites: “While large media groups benefit from the circulation of sponsored content across their websites, smaller publishers pay Taboola and Outbrain as advertisers to drive traffic to their websites. Thus, even though these companies discursively position themselves as ‘gallants of the open web’ — freeing publishers from the grip of walled-garden platforms — they de facto expose the news industry to the influence of the platform economy.”

“Improvisation, economy, and MTV moves: Online news and video production style.” By Mary Angela Bock, Robert J. Richardson, Christopher T. Assaf, and Dariya Tsyrenzhapova, in Electronic News. If you’ve been around the journalism block since the early 2000s, you might remember those early hopes for “convergence” — for print and TV newsrooms to join forces in producing multimedia journalism. Those hopes never materialized, but the centrality of video in the digital news ecology has been profound (“pivot to video,” anyone?), and over the past decade digital-native news sites like Vox have worked to develop distinct styles of video storytelling.

Meanwhile, news consumption, to a large extent, has converged to a single screen (a smartphone). This leaves open an important question: Do newspapers, TV, and digital-native news organizations produce the same kind of video? Are they converging stylistically or, as Bock and colleagues wonder, “staying in their legacy lanes”?

Studying a randomized set of U.S. news outlets, the researchers found that “legacy print organizations continue to produce slower-paced videos without scripted narration; TV organizations use scripted narration with one correspondent; and digital natives produce stories with quick pacing and a mix of narrator types.” They argue that diffusion of innovations theory, which points to the role of culture, values, and other social factors in driving innovation adoption, “helps to explain why these organizations offer distinct production styles that are not converging in form.”

So, why isn’t there more similarity in video style? It appears to be at least partly a function of habit: longstanding, entrenched ways of doing things in legacy media routines. “Just because it is possible to create stories with quick edits, engaging graphics, or quality camera work does not mean all journalists are interested in or able to embrace these techniques,” the authors write. “As organizations turn, turn, and turn again to video, it will be important to consider which of these techniques are esthetic fads and which ones best serve the needs of the news audience.”

“Beyond the freebie mentality: A news user typology of reasonings about paying for online content.” By Arista Beseler, Mara Schwind, Hannah Schmid-Petri, and Christoph Klimmt, in Journalism Practice. With pay models popping up on site after site these days, what do news consumers think about being asked to pay for news that they previously accessed for free? While there have been studies on consumers’ willingness to pay, Beseler and colleagues wanted to go a step further in more holistically investigating people’s general attitudes, behaviors, and motivational reasonings around paid online news content.

Through interviews with 64 adults in Germany, the authors developed a typology of five main approaches: paying subscribers, free riders, promisers (“users who do not pay but announce to do so in the future”), occasional buyers, and convinced deniers. This typology, the authors suggest, is helpful for capturing the “extremely diverse” mindsets that may exist among consumers.

“On one hand, many respondents were skeptical or reluctant to pay for online news,” they write. “Even among the paying subscribers, some participants preferred printed news over online news, highlighting the reluctance to pay for something immaterial. On the other hand, some respondents were strong supporters of paid online news, whereby the majority of them have had experiences with or have been socialized with online or parental print subscriptions.”

El Salvador’s El Faro recently announced that it’s moved its business operations to Costa Rica after years of attacks from President Nayib Bukele. In Guatemala, journalist José Rubén Zamora is imprisoned for publishing an investigation into 144 corruption cases linked to President Alejandro Giammattei; the newspaper he founded, El Periódico, was raided and its bank accounts were frozen.

In Honduras — a country that according to Reporters Without Borders has been “slowly sinking into nightmarish disaster for more than a decade” — the government dismantled an agency designed to protect journalists.

In Nicaragua, press freedom has faced attacks from all sides and is only getting worse under president Daniel Ortega, now in his fourth consecutive term. The country now ranks 160 out of 180 on Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index. At least 185 journalists have fled the country since 2018, with at least seven going into exile in the first three months of 2023, free press advocacy group Voces del Sur found. As of February, at least 22 journalists had been stripped of citizenship due to their reporting on Ortega’s regime.

Journalists who work through these precarious conditions emphasize that international coverage from mainstream media outlets can help pressure their countries’ governments to reverse course. Such coverage can also influence how humanitarian aid budgets are spent.

At the International Symposium of Online Journalism earlier this month, a panel in the Spanish-language Colloquium on Digital Journalism convened four of Nicaragua’s most prominent journalists, all of whom are living in exile, to discuss the harrowing conditions they’ve lived through — offices being burned down, embargoes on supplies like newsprint and ink, imprisonment for sharing information on social media — and how they’ve innovated to keep publishing.

Below is an excerpt of the discussion of how these Nicaraguan journalists pivoted after being forced into exile, and the challenges they face today. Questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity, but if you can, you should watch the entire recording of the session here.

The panel was moderated by Dagmar Thiel, the U.S. director of Fundamedios, a free press advocacy group that supports Hispanic journalists in the Americas.

The panelists:

• Anibal Toruño, the owner and director of Radio Darío, one of the country’s oldest radio stations. His citizenship was revoked.
• Juan Lorenzo Holmann, the publisher of Nicaragua’s leading newspaper La Prensa. His citizenship was revoked and he was exiled to the United States after being imprisoned for 18 months. Today, all of La Prensa’s staff operates in exile.
• Martha Irene Sánchez, the director of República 18 and the president of the Independent Journalists and Communicators of Nicaragua. She has lived in Costa Rica since 2021.
• Miguel Mendoza, a veteran sports journalist who was imprisoned for 18 months and exiled to the United States in February.

Silver said on Tuesday that he expects to leave the politics and sports news site when his contract ends this summer. Several others at FiveThirtyEight — including deputy managing editor Chadwick Matlin, sports editor Neil Paine, senior audience editor Meena Ganesan, senior science reporter (and 2015 Nieman Fellow) Maggie Koerth, business operations manager Vanessa Diaz, and senior designer Emily Scherer — announced they were affected by layoffs, too.

Disney layoffs have substantially impacted FiveThirtyEight. I am sad and disappointed to a degree that’s kind of hard to express right now. We’ve been at Disney almost 10 years. My contract is up soon and I expect that I’ll be leaving at the end of it.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 25, 2023

I had been worried about an outcome like this and so have had some great initial conversations about opportunities elsewhere. Don’t hesitate to get in touch. I am so proud of the work of FiveThirtyEight staff. It has never been easy. I’m so sorry to the people impacted by this.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 25, 2023

FiveThirtyEight — named, of course, after the number of electors in the U.S. electoral college — has its roots in the “Community” section of the liberal news site Daily Kos, where, in 2007, a 29-year-old baseball statistician named Nate Silver began writing posts about the 2008 U.S. presidential election under the username “poblano.”1

Silver launched FiveThirtyEight as its own blog in March 2008, and in the general election that year, his model correctly predicted the results in 49 out of the 50 states, as well as all 35 winners of the U.S. Senate races. The early, wondering coverage of Silver’s work frequently invoked magic. “Silver’s box of tricks sounds baffling, laced as it is with talk of regressions, half-lives and Monte Carlo analysis,” The Guardian’s editorial board wrote in 2008.” The New York Times, announcing its FiveThirtyEight “partnership” in 2010, referred to Silver a “statistical wizard.” FiveThirtyEight quickly became a massive traffic driver for the Times, where his presence provided fodder for then-public editor Margaret Sullivan. (He is now the frequent subject of discussion by the Times’ current public editor, Twitter.)

In 2013, Silver left The New York Times (Sullivan wrote about that, too) and took FiveThirtyEight to ESPN. Under parent company Disney, it was transferred from ESPN to ABC News in 2018 as ESPN sought to distance itself from political commentary, and has operated from there since.

When Silver leaves ABC News, he’ll leave behind the FiveThirtyEight trade name, but his models will go with him. “The models are licensed to them and the license term is concurrent with my contract,” he confirmed to Nieman Lab in a message. “They have limited rights to some models post–license term, but not the core election forecast stuff.”

Van Scott, ABC News’ vice president of publicity, said in a statement that “ABC News remains dedicated to data journalism with a core focus on politics, the economy and enterprise reporting — this streamlined structure will allow us to be more closely aligned with our priorities for the 2024 election and beyond. We are grateful for the invaluable contributions of the team members who will be departing the organization and know they will continue to make an important impact on the future of journalism.”

Not mentioned in that statement: Sports or science, both of which are key verticals on the current FiveThirtyEight.

I think the big biz question with this is, what happens to the 538 models in late JUNE when the contract and licenses expire? Almost an election year… https://t.co/sYZeXN195p

— Clare Malone (@ClareMalone) April 25, 2023

Horserace always tends to suck up the oxygen, but the FiveThirtyEight crew has done a metric ton of smart, thoughtful work on data, politics and society. Sending good thoughts to everyone affected. https://t.co/qUoDpGURSS

— Ariel Edwards-Levy (@aedwardslevy) April 25, 2023

Buzzfeed News and FiveThirtyEight are huge organizational leaders in data transparency and reproducibility, ie. sharing your work. It’s a sad time for data journalism.

— Andrew Ba Tran (@abtran) April 25, 2023

1. Bill Kristol, writing in The New York Times opinion section in February 2008: “An interesting regression analysis at the Daily Kos Web site (poblano.dailykos.com) of the determinants of the Democratic vote so far, applied to the demographics of the Ohio electorate, suggests that Obama has a better chance than is generally realized in Ohio.”

Mak says he was laid off from his job as an investigative correspondent when NPR cut its staff by 10% last month. On Tuesday, Mak launched The Counteroffensive, the first Substack dedicated to war correspondence. (Others have featured war correspondence from time to time, a Substack spokesperson noted.)

“The idea first occurred to me just a few weeks ago,” Mak told me. “I think one of the benefits of Substack is that it works right out of the box. I just signed up and started writing.”

I’ll tell you my personal impressions, and let you in on the inside jokes, and give you the behind the scenes scoop on what’s happening in Ukraine…

… the sort of writing I couldn’t do with my straight news reports at NPR. pic.twitter.com/DwHyem1vjb

— Tim Mak (@timkmak) April 25, 2023

Reporting from conflict zones is complicated, resource-intensive, and, yes, incredibly dangerous. News organizations often provide equipment, hostile environment training, special insurance, and other resources to full-time reporters headed to the front lines.

In his appeal to subscribers, Mak outlined some of the costs — body armor, medical kits, rental cars, emergency supplies, a Ukrainian interpreter, etc. — that he’ll now pay for out of his own pocket. He told me he expects his operating costs to be, at a minimum, around $7,000 per month. (Substack has offered Mak “guidance and advice, but no financial resources,” he said.)

“I need 1,000 paid subscribers in order to stop losing money,” Mak wrote to me. “Then more to be a little bit more ambitious than ramen and buses. Then after that I can pay myself.”

Mak, a former U.S. Army combat medic, arrived in Kyiv on the night the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, according to his NPR bio. He has been covering the war since. I asked him what he sees as his biggest challenge, now that he’ll be reporting from the country independently.

“The hardest thing will be discipline, I think. As an independent journalist I’ll be on my own, without an institution to pull me out when I need it,” Mak said. “I’ll need to have the discipline to make wise decisions to keep me and my team safe.”

On Twitter, Mak often shares behind-the-scenes photos and stories from Ukraine. He said he was looking forward to taking a more informal, conversation manner with The Counteroffensive — less AP Style, more “like a letter to a friend.”

And there was the humor: the Ukrainians esp appreciated Angelina Jolie for visiting them during the war… pic.twitter.com/6lXPRAPMqY

— Tim Mak (@timkmak) February 24, 2023

In other dispatches, Mak has been posting various “dogs of war.” (He also reposts “dogs of peace” that folks back home in the U.S. send him.) He’ll continue the tradition in his newsletter with a mascot named Rex.

Today’s dog of war is Rex, our new mascot. “Soldiers call each other ‘Rex’ when they’re impressed with how good you are, or sarcastically when you’ve messed up,” said Ross, my interpreter and reporting partner.

Let’s hope for more Rexes of the former, and less of the latter. pic.twitter.com/vndnsdWoUW

— Tim Mak (@timkmak) April 25, 2023

You can read the first post from The Counteroffensive here.

Anyone expecting that Fox’s $787.5 million settlement with Dominion this week would make the network any humbler or gentler is likely to be disappointed. And there probably won’t be much of a shift in the way the network favorably covers Mr. Trump and the issues that resonate with his followers.

In Mr. Trump’s recent interview with the Fox host Tucker Carlson, he implied that there was good reason to doubt the legitimacy of President Biden’s victory, saying, “People could say he won an election.” Mr. Carlson, for his part, has also dipped back into election denialism recently. “Jan. 6, I think, is probably second only to the 2020 election as the biggest scam of my lifetime,” he said on the air on March 14. (His private text messages, revealed as part of Dominion’s suit, show him discussing with his producers how there was no proof the results of the 2020 election were materially affected by fraud.)

Only time will tell if Fox News writ large will change. But one hour of its weeknight prime-time programming sure will.

Tucker Carlson is out at Fox News. The network’s biggest star — creator of what the Times once called “what may be the most racist show in the history of cable news — and also, by some measures, the most successful” — was ousted via terse press release late Monday morning. “We thank him for his service to the network as a host and prior to that as a contributor,” the network wrote. The Los Angeles Times is reporting the decision was made by Rupert Murdoch himself.

The suddenness here is remarkable. Carlson’s final show aired Friday, with no indication of an impending end. His final interview was his second of the week with a Pennsylvania pizza delivery guy who had tripped a suspect fleeing police after a chase in a stolen car. (The two suspects arrested, 17 and 19, appears to be Hispanic; Carlson’s chyron called one a “bad hombre.”)

Here was the end of what turned out to be Tucker Carlson's final Fox News show last Friday. Certainly no indication that he didn't expect to be on the air tonight. In fact Tucker's final words are, "we'll be back on Monday." pic.twitter.com/F9R5MpWHDK

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 24, 2023

Fox News reportedly didn’t even announce the departure of its biggest star internally: “Everyone outside of top executives, including Tucker’s staff, found out about his exit on Twitter.” The network’s own announcement of the move had, as Aaron Rupar put it, the “vibes of Stalin’s death being announced on Soviet radio.” Only minutes before, Fox News had been promoting an interview set for Carlson’s show tonight.

Harris Faulkner announces on air that Tucker is out at Fox News pic.twitter.com/zuYmJRXbrM

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 24, 2023

(Carlson’s ouster seems to have inspired CNN to match moves, dropping Don Lemon only hours (minutes?) after his morning show ended. Carlson and Lemon will now apparently share a lawyer; odd bedfellows.)

The timing of Fox’s move certainly suggests a connection to the Dominion settlement — but Carlson was far from the worst offender on the network, and no host had better ratings. (Why would you fire Tucker over Dominion when Maria Bartiromo is still around?) After all, producer Abby Grossberg’s two lawsuits argue Fox News tried to make Bartiromo a scapegoat for the entire network in order to protect hosts like Carlson.

Then again, Grossberg’s suits (which also names Carlson as a defendant) also describe his show as “a work environment that subjugates women based on vile sexist stereotypes” and says Carlson himself is known for his “derogatory comments towards women, and his disdain for those who dare to object to such misogyny.” It’s worth remembering that it was their treatment of women that finally forced out past Fox News goliaths Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly.

(The L.A. Times suggests the Grossberg suits were a driving factor in Carlson’s departure. The New York Times also reports that Carlson senior executive producer Justin Wells is also out at Fox. Wells is also a named defendant in Grossberg’s suits; at one point, she accuses Wells of asking her: “Is Maria Bartiromo fucking Kevin McCarthy?”)

Perhaps it was all the Dominion discovery revelations that did Carlson in — the ones that made it clear he didn’t believe the lies Fox was putting on air, or that he “hates” Donald Trump. Maybe — but Trump seemed to be happy to sit with him for an interview a couple weeks ago, and there’s been no sign of Fox viewers abandoning the show out of a sudden burst of self-respect. Carlson’s texts also included his low opinions of Fox management, which likely didn’t help his cause.

Of note: Fox Corporation stock lost 5.2% of its value in the 22 minutes after Carlson’s ouster was announced. That’s about $870 million in lost value — more than the $787.5 million Fox is paying Dominion, to which the market had a more muted reaction.

There seem to be two big questions now — one about Fox, one about Carlson.

For Fox: Is this about Carlson specifically or a shift more broadly? If indeed this is mostly about dealing with another in a long series of workplace issues, Fox News may not think its fundamental DNA needs updating. Will tossing Tucker lead Fox to move further to the right in order to keep its audience from straying — the scenario that got the network in trouble with Dominion in the first place? Will all of the bile Carlson was known for just move to new hosts and new timeslots? Or is this a sign that the market for it is shrinking? (I wouldn’t hold my breath.) This is still the network of Bartiromo, Pirro, Hannity, Ingraham, and Watters; a rebrand this ain’t.

And for Carlson: Where next? Carlson now has the rare honor of having been fired by CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News. (RT is already sniffing around. Perhaps Viktor Orbán has an opening?) Would he settle for a right-wing also-ran like Newsmax? Set up shop on Rumble? Go back to his Daily Caller? Fly solo?

Like Bill O’Reilly before him, he seemed bigger than the network he was on. But when O’Reilly was bounced, Carlson was able to take his old timeslot and push ratings even higher. How much of his prominence was about him versus how much was about the grievance machine he worked for? Think about all the people who’ve left Fox News in recent years: O’Reilly, Megyn Kelly, Glenn Beck, Shepard Smith, Chris Wallace, Greta Van Susteren. None have been able to match their fame or reach on the outside. How diminished will he be? Will his audience follow him? And will we ever find out how much he believed and how much was an act?

Recently, Tucker's A-block was often more extreme than the front page of InfoWars, and I'm not exaggerating.

The path forward here is awfully grim. But at least his Great Replacement lies won't be aired in America's waiting rooms or included in basic cable packages anymore. https://t.co/d6MbUaY5zk

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) April 24, 2023

Newsmax looking to capitalize: "For a while Fox News has been moving to become establishment media and Tucker Carlson’s removal is a big milestone in that effort. Millions of viewers who liked the old Fox News have made the switch to Newsmax and this will only fuel that trend.”

— Jeremy Barr (@jeremymbarr) April 24, 2023

Re; Tucker – It is likely that this has more to do with pending litigation – Abby Grossberg's lawsuit alleging sexism and harassment at Carlson's show – than the defamation lawsuit that just settled for $778M.

Yet the suits are linked… / MORE

— David Folkenflik (@davidfolkenflik) April 24, 2023

Tucker Carlson's show was often described as part of the network's "opinion side." But one thing we learned from the Dominion filings was that he and other prime time hosts withheld their opinions about the case for a stolen election.

That's not opinion or news. It's surrender.

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) April 24, 2023

Tucker Carlson has a full television studio in Maine. Fox News might own it. He could go the InfoWars route and just start producing his own content – which will probably much worse than what he made on Fox News. There's a number of far right broadcasters he could align with.

— Decoding Fox News (@DecodingFoxNews) April 24, 2023

I agree with Tiffany Cross that while the loss of Fox as a platform is significant, there are many other avenues for Tucker Carlson to continue peddling his racism to tremendous effect. Nor am I sold that he's changing his gimmick. (a) It's lucrative. (b) He believes in it.

— Christoph Mergerson, Ph.D. (@colorofresearch) April 24, 2023

it rules that this is the last frame from his last fox broadcast pic.twitter.com/6dv9eVoUO0

— Charlie Warzel (@cwarzel) April 24, 2023

Remember, a thought of people thought something similar when O'Reilly got forced out…and we got Tucker, who was a lot worse than O'Reilly. https://t.co/XkSgh2x9NE

— Brian Rosenwald (@brianros1) April 24, 2023

Who is going to write the great essay in the “liberal-leaning” outlet lionizing Tucker Carlson and chiding people for celebrating him being off-air?

— Zito (@_Zeets) April 24, 2023

i'm sure whoever gets his timeslot will be a Great Replacement https://t.co/msd7yhIsUt

— Brendan Karet (@bad_takes) April 24, 2023

Let’s get the bad news out of the way: the news industry is unlikely to find a silver bullet. “There is no single trust problem, and therefore there is no single trust solution,” the first line of the report reads.

The report draws on a series of focus groups with 322 people from “disadvantaged or historically underserved communities” in four countries. (In Brazil, focus groups contained Black and mixed-race audiences. In India, Muslims and those from “marginalized castes or tribes” were interviewed. In the U.K., the authors focused on working-class audiences. And in the U.S., Black and rural audiences were in the spotlight.) Despite differences between and among the focus group participants, several familiar themes emerged. Participants thought the news could be unfair, inaccurate, sensationalized, and subject to “hidden agendas” they believed shaped coverage behind the scenes.

The report’s authors — Amy Ross Arguedas, Sayan Banerjee, Camila Mont’Alverne, Benjamin Toff, Richard Fletcher, and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen — wrote they were motivated to highlight these particular perspectives following feedback from newsroom leaders, “many of whom asked how they could better engage with audiences who have been historically underserved or marginalized in their country’s news coverage.”

Many of those interviewed saw news media as an institution “as an extension of systems aligned to serve those in power — systems many felt excluded from.” Those institutions are, not coincidently, also seeing falling trust.

Confirming previous studies, the Reuters focus group participants were more likely to blame news organizations and financial pressures for shortcomings than individual journalists.

“Despite often seeing journalists as out of touch and rarely having shared life experiences,” the report states, “many also emphasized what they believed were considerable constraints journalists faced when trying to cover news stories.”

One American who participated in a focus group said she felt “there are good journalists out there” but that their news organizations were the ones calling the shots: “Like, if you have a journalist for The New York Times…they’re going to write the way that The New York Times wants them to.” (The U.S. ranks last in media trust out of 46 countries, tied with Slovakia, a 2022 Reuters Institute report found.)

Some of the concerns of those interviewed echo critiques expressed by members of majority groups or those currently overrepresented in positions of power in their respective countries. But, the authors note, the stakes can feel very different.

“Privileged audiences may be concerned about, say, sensationalism, but they rarely pay a personal price,” they write. “Disadvantaged communities do.”

The “first and most voiced complaint” from participants was that news coverage of people like them skewed toward negative stories or reflected them in a negative light. Many told researchers that people like them only appeared in the news when something bad happened. For example, in India, several participants brought up widespread news coverage about a religious gathering reported to be the country’s first Covid super-spreader event.

“If you look at the national news, the only time you hear about rural issues is if a tornado went through a trailer park, or if this whole section flooded, or if, whatever,” one American participant said. “I mean, it’s only when you have a natural disaster component that I think you get rural people in.”

But the examples that came up most frequently — and which participants spoke about in the most detail — were about crime coverage. Many said news coverage overemphasizes violence in their communities. “It’s death, crime, murders, shootings,” an American participant named Gabrielle said.

Ultimately, the participants were concerned because they believed news coverage could shape “how others perceived them or even how they — and their children — perceived themselves,” the researchers found. Several people pointed to racial bias in story selection and framing:

• “‘The white person is never disrespected. They never say that your daughter was killed because you’re a criminal. Oh, and if it’s a Black person, they’re going to say, you know, your son or your daughter was killed because you were a criminal,’ commented Heitor [a participant from Brazil].”
• “For Alexandra [U.S.], this grievance was especially personal, following the coverage of her own father’s murder, which happened in a public park while he was playing a game of dice: ‘The way he was portrayed, they just were so focused on the dice game and gambling. Everybody gambles. Like, you go to Prairie Meadows right now, you’re gonna see 1,000 white men in there gambling, [but] because he was outside shooting dice in a park, “He’s a gangster, he’s a monster.”…They always make it seem like they deserved to die.'”
• “When a Black person goes to jail, they make fun of us. No one interviews those [people] or anything. When a white person goes to jail, ‘Oh, my God, poor person.’ They are interviewed and all that. They are treated respectfully,” noted Gabriel [Brazil].

Other examples that made participants distrust media involved a perception that journalists are “complicit with the political establishment” or “at the very least, populated by the same kinds of people.” For example, Timothy, an Iowan, described feeling as if news organizations only cared about people living in rural areas when they needed something…not unlike presidential candidates flying into his state for photo ops with corn dogs.

The report’s authors were clear that though trust is thorny and multifaceted, there are opportunities for newsrooms to improve their standing in underserved communities. Those opportunities include relentlessly rooting out bias and inaccuracies, telling a “more complete story” through news coverage that’s more positive and relevant, diversifying newsroom staffs, and being more engaged and present where people live and work.

“Taking these steps may require reallocating often scarce resources,” the report acknowledges. “This comes down to a question of priorities — just as not taking such steps is also a choice. In other words, there is no neutral path here.”

Tweaks are not enough

The researchers found little evidence that focus group participants would be swayed by “a few tweaks.”

“Just one or two participants specifically focused on the importance of news organizations highlighting their corrections policies or providing audiences with better labeling around separating facts from opinion content — approaches that have received some attention in prior studies on trust,” the report notes.

We’ve seen a number of news startups announce their brand-new newsrooms will tackle the lack of trust in media but it’s unclear if their approach will go beyond tweaks.

There’s more than a hint of frustration in the report’s conclusion:

It is also worth underscoring how similar issues have been raised by study after study after study for a very long time. More than half a century ago, in 1968, the Kerner Commission critiqued the U.S. news media’s distortions and inaccuracies in its coverage of Black people, its use of “scare headlines,” its dependency on inexperienced or prejudiced officials as authoritative sources in stories, its bias towards divisive racial framing of conflict, and a general neglect of the lived experiences and perspectives of Black people and the discrimination they regularly experienced.

While our report echoes many of these concerns in a wider variety of places and among a broader range of groups, the participants in our study are but the latest in a long line of people from marginalized and underserved communities voicing versions of the same frustrations about news media. Those who lead and manage news organizations may feel they are already making good progress towards addressing many of these concerns, but on what timetable and with what urgency? It is not at all obvious to the people who participated in our focus groups that there is any sincere reckoning in the news media, let alone commitment to substantial change.

You can read the full report here. It’s also been translated into Spanish and Portuguese.