Ranges have to include a minimum and maximum — employers can’t say something like “$15/hour and up.” So some — cough, New York Post, cough — are finding wiggle room with useless ranges like “$15/hour to $125,000.” Some CNN positions included pay ranges of nearly $100,000.

We went searching through the job boards to find what media companies, both those based in New York City and those that have offices or some positions there, are paying — and whether they’re adhering to the, um, spirit of the law. (By the way, is it fair to expect companies to be complying already? Yes, they’ve had months to prepare and the rule was already delayed once.)

This list is up-to-date as of Friday, November 4 at 11:00 AM.

ABC

Examples:

• Producer (consumer investigative) – GMA, ABC News: $99,400–$136,730
• Digital editor, hard news – ABC News: $75,200–$103,400

AP

New York City–based jobs did not include salary information as of Friday, November 4 at 11:00 AM.

The Atlantic

The Atlantic appears to be providing salary ranges for all positions, including those with the option of working remote. Examples:

• Senior photo editor: “Salary Minimum: $100,000, Salary Maximum: $120,000.”
• Staff writer, The Daily: “Salary Minimum: $60,000, Salary Maximum: $70,000.”
• Product manager: “Salary Minimum: $60,000, Salary Maximum: $130,000.”

Axios

Axios is providing salary ranges for jobs listed under its “NYC Office,” even if they are remote. Salary information is not given for jobs based out of other offices. Examples:

• Associated director, integrated marketing: “On target earnings for this role is in the range of $90,000-$110,000 and is dependent on numerous factors, including but not limited to location, work experience, and skills.”
• Senior software engineer (backend): “Base salary ranges for this role are listed below and are dependent on numerous factors, including but not limited to location, work experience, and skills. This range does not include other compensation benefits.
  L6: $160k – $210k
  L5: $160k – $200k
  L4: $130k – $190k”

Bloomberg

Examples:

• Newsletter producer (contract): “35 – 45 USD Hourly”
• News automation content engineer: $105,000–160,000
• Senior video producer: $110,000–$115,000

Bustle Digital Group

Examples:

• Deputy features director: $85,000–$105,000
• Writer and director, branded video: $72,500–$78,000
• Entertainment editor, Nylon: $63,500–$70,000

BuzzFeed

• News editor, BuzzFeed News: “Salary band: $72,500-$87,000”
• Business analyst, BuzzFeed News: “Salary band: $73,000-$82,000”
• Features editor, Complex: $83,000–$100,000

CBS News

Examples:

• Editor: $110,000-$120,000
• Senior editor, CBSNews.com: $100,000–$109,000

CNN

Examples:

• Producer, Snapchat, CNN Digital Video: “In compliance with local law, we are disclosing the compensation, or a range thereof, for roles that will be performed in New York City. Actual salaries will vary and may be above or below the range based on various factors including but not limited to location, experience, and performance. The range listed is just one component of Warner Bros. Discovery’s total compensation package for employees. Pay Range: $85,540.00 – $158,860.00 salary per year.”
• Senior section editor, social: “In compliance with local law, we are disclosing the compensation, or a range thereof, for roles that will be performed in New York City. Actual salaries will vary and may be above or below the range based on various factors including but not limited to location, experience, and performance. The range listed is just one component of Warner Bros. Discovery’s total compensation package for employees. Pay Range: $113,890.00 – $211,510.00 salary per year.”

Chalkbeat

Example:

• People operations assistant: $50,000–$60,000

The City

Examples:

• Investigations editor: $140,000–$150,000
• Associate director of development, individual giving: $110,000–$120,000

Condé Nast

Examples:

• Executive director, brand marketing, Vanity Fair: $145,000–$180,000
• SEO writer and producer, Glamour: $60,000–$78,000
• Executive editor, news, Wired: $170,000–$225,000

The Daily Beast

Example:

• Entertainment critic: $90,000–$100,000

FT

Examples:

• Associate editor: $95,000–$110,000
• Reporter, FundFire: $65,000–$72,000

Dotdash Meredith

Examples:

• Methodology writer, beauty: “This is a contract role at 40 hours per week and would be hybrid. The rate for this position is $27/hour.”
• General manager, Verywell Health: $146,000–$219,000

First Look Media

Examples:

• Designer: “Compensation (NYC Only): Full Time salary range between 65K – 75K”
• Senior analyst, Topic streaming service: “Compensation (NYC Only): Full Time salary range between 90K – 100K”

Forbes

Forbes appears to be posting salary ranges for all jobs. Examples:

• Senior editor, newsletters: “The annual base salary range for this role is: $115,000 – $140,000.”
• Breaking news politics reporter: “This is a contract position with potential for full time employment…Hourly Rate Range: $28.85 – $28.85.”

Fortune

Example:

• VP, newsletters: $175,000–$200,000.

G/O Media

Examples:

• Staff writer, Quartz: “This is a position covered under the collective bargaining agreement with the WGA-East which establishes the minimum salary for this position at $62,000. This position is set at a range of $62,000 to $68,000.”
• Editorial director, New York, NY: “The salary for this position ranges from $300,000.00 to $350,000.00.”

The Guardian

Examples:

• Deputy editor, race and equity: $180,000–$190,000
• Reporter, fossil fuels and climate: $88,000–$100,000

The Information

New York City–based jobs did not include salary information as of Friday, November 4 at 11:00 AM.

Insider Inc.

Examples:

• Business features editor: $150,000–$220,000
• Politics correspondent: $100,000–$140,000

NBC

Examples:

• Reporter, Select: $75,000–$125,000
• Updates editor, Select: $75,000–$90,000

New York Post

• Decider digital project manager: “$50,000–$145,000”
• SEO manager: $50,000- $145,000
• Deputy photo editor, Sunday (Tues–Sat): “$50,000- $145,000”
• Sports digital reporter/producer: “$15/hour – $125,000”
• Tech reporter: “$50,000- $145,000”
• Politics reporter: “$15/hour – $125,000”

New York Times

The Times is providing base pay salary ranges, including for jobs that can be done remotely. Examples:

• Senior designer: $76,500–$105,000
• Reporting fellowship: $76,168.04
• Legal affairs correspondent in Washington, D.C.: $115,506.56–$170,000.00
• Director, story and audience analytics: $152,000–$185,000.00
• Senior art director, games: $140,000–$165,000
• Supervising editor, style, Wirecutter, in New York, NY or remote: $92,650–$109,000

Penske Media Corporation

Examples:

• Associate director, paid social: $100,000–$110,000
• Vibe music editor: $75,000–$85,000
• Rolling Stone photo coordinator: $52,000–$62,000

Puck

New York City–based jobs did not include salary information as of Friday, Nov. 4 at 11:00 AM ET.

Reuters

Examples:

• Product manager – video: $122,500–$227,500
• Reader revenue analytics: $60,200–$111,800

Slate

Examples:

• News editor: “The annual base pay range for this job is between $82,000 and $100,000.”
• Podcast host – ICYMI: “The annual base pay range for this job is between $100,000 and $115,000.”

Substack

New York City–based jobs did not include salary information as of Friday, Nov. 4 at 11:00 AM ET.

Time

Examples:

• Manager of product design: $85,000–$125,000
• Newsletter operations manager: $75,000–$105,000

Vice

Examples:

• Editor, shopping and reviews: “New York/California: 64,000 – 75,000 USD. Outside New York/California: 54,000 – 64,000 USD”
• Associate writer, affiliate: “New York/California: 55,000 – 60,000 USD”
• VP, audio: “New York/California: 190,000 – 230,000 USD”

Vox Media

Vox is providing salary ranges for all positions, including for jobs that can be done remotely. Examples:

• NowThis director of analytics: “The minimum and maximum salary for this position is $125,000.”
• Cities manager, Eater (temporary while manager is on maternity leave): “The annual base pay range for this job is $77,000 to $108,000.”

Wall Street Journal

Examples:

• Executive producer, news podcasts: $50,000 to $180,000
• Audio reporter, The Journal podcast: $40,000 to $160,000
• Reporter, careers and workplace: $50,000 to $180,000

Washington Post

Examples:

• Sales sector director: $200,500–$334,100
• Graphic designer: $59,167.16–$125,600

WNYC

Examples:

• Major gifts officer: $82,000-$100,000.
• Housing reporter, WNYC/Gothamist: $84,413-$86,000.

Licht acknowledged to CNN staffers that some of them might find Stelter’s firing “unsettling” and told them, “There will be more changes and you might not understand it or like it all.” On Friday, another change rolled out: CNN is revamping its morning show, in what Licht called a “mass appeal play.”

Can this work? Justin Peters in Slate last month:

For decades, CNN stood for objective, down-the-middle news reporting in the mind of the American media consumer. The network’s pioneering coverage of the Gulf War lent it a certain stature, and it quickly grew a reputation for neutral, credible reporting, becoming uniquely authoritative in the American media sphere. With Reliable Sources, the network aimed to leverage its reportorial credibility into honest, authoritative criticism and analysis of the rest of the media. If you trusted the network’s reporting on the nation and the world, then why wouldn’t you trust its reporting on the media?

The flaw here is that over the past several years, more and more people have come to distrust CNN’s reporting and analysis — a phenomenon that is at least partially attributable to the continuous attacks Donald Trump and his allies have launched at the network in order to blunt the impact of its reporting on and analysis of his incompetent, dishonest presidency.

A new report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism on how 18- to 30-year-olds engage with news refers to the paradox that CNN and other mainstream media outlets face now:

A suspicious, skeptical approach to information [means] news brands are judged by, but not inherently valued for, their impartiality — except in times of crisis, when their professionalism, reach, and resources come into their own…

Mainstream media therefore finds itself in a paradoxical position. It is judged more harshly than other types of news media, because it is held to a higher (impossible?) standard. It is expected to be impartial, objective, and cold-blooded by a group of people who seriously question whether that can ever be truly achieved and who don’t always value the tonal execution of impartial, objective, cold-blooded news.

The report builds on research published by Reuters earlier this year. Its authors spoke with 72 people ages 18-30 in the U.S., U.K., and Brazil. (In each country, a third of the people were ages 18 to 21, a third ages 22 to 24, and a third ages 25 to 30.) Some of their responses highlight the uphill battle that CNN may face as it shifts.

“A lot of the time, mainstream news can be very biased or politically-motivated. This makes it hard to decipher its credibility,” one 28-year-old in the U.S. said. “In turn, I oftentimes have to spend additional time seeking out information and facts.”

That attitude is common. “One of the great commonalities in this study is that almost all young people believe that all information is put in the public realm for a reason, and is not to be trusted or taken at face value,” the authors write, adding, “They are highly skeptical of most information, to greater or lesser degrees — they don’t necessarily judge a source’s value by its impartiality.” They identify three types of skepticism:

You can read the full report here.

CNN+ officially launched on Tuesday, and the cable company has billed it as “the most important launch for CNN since Ted Turner launched the network in June of 1980.” Much of the news coverage around the release has mentioned that CNN’s $120 million investment comes as the number of cable subscribers is on the wane, and that the median cable news viewer is in their mid- to late-sixties.

The new subscription-based streaming service — which will cost $6/month or $60/year, though there’s a 50% lifetime discount for early sign-ups — hopes to attract not just “CNN superfans” but a cord-cutting younger audience as well.

The original programming is anchored by eight live shows per day. Freed from commercial breaks and the rigid half-hour slots of television news, the first of these — “5 Things with Kate Bolduan,” taped live at 7 a.m. — recapped five stories in just under 11 minutes. On Tuesday, the “things” were the war in Ukraine, Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars, updates from the FDA and CDC on the coronavirus pandemic, a major crash in Pennsylvania caused by a snow squall, and Walmart’s decision to stop selling cigarettes in some of its stores. (There was also a “bonus” sixth thing, about firefighters rescuing a dog from a flooded river.)

Here’s some of the great content you can catch on #CNNPlus starting March 29 pic.twitter.com/ShgGgchHBA

— Daniel Wine (@danwine) March 28, 2022

In addition to the daily live shows, CNN+ will host an “Interview Club” (where anchors promise to answer audience questions in real time), original series (like a “real-life Succession” series about the Murdochs), food and travel content (including a show from cookbook author and former New York Times writer Alison Roman), and weekly offerings like an interview show with Audie Cornish (formerly of NPR) and a book club with CNN anchor Jake Tapper.

Rebecca Kutler, head of programming for CNN+, told Adweek she “100%” expected to see CNN+ evolve its streaming offerings as it learns what subscribers are (and aren’t) interested in. “If we are doing our jobs well, the content you see on CNN+ on Tuesday will look very different in a year — and will look different again two years and three years from now,” she said.

On mobile, CNN+ won’t live as a standalone app, but instead appear as a tab within a single CNN app that’ll also allow those with a TV service provider login to stream CNN U.S. and CNN International channels. (The current CNNgo app “will sunset for users.”)

Interestingly, CJR’s Jon Allsop noticed that CNN chief digital officer Andrew Morse has not been comparing the new streaming product to Fox Nation or ad-supported offerings from the likes of NBC and CBS. Instead:

Morse has repeatedly compared CNN+ not to other streaming services but to the Times, which has in recent years transitioned itself from being an old-school newspaper company to a multi-pronged digital behemoth that has successfully added online subscribers — not just for its core news business but also for cooking, games, and more — via various subscription combinations. Executives see CNN as being able to achieve something similar with video to that which the Times has done with text.

You can read more about the CNN+ launch from Allsop here.

That was the conclusion of the nonprofit Public Religion Research Institute in a report released just after the 2020 presidential election. It noted that 15% of Americans cited Fox News as the most trusted source — around the same as NBC, ABC and CBS combined, and four percentage points above rival network CNN. The survey of more than 2,500 American adults also suggested that Fox News viewers trend religious, especially among Republicans watching the show. Just 5% of Republican viewers of the channel identified as being “religiously unaffiliated,” compared to 15% of Republicans who do not watch Fox News and 25% of the wider American public.

To further explore the relationship between different faiths and the TV news they associate with as part of my research on religion data, I analyzed the result of another survey, the Cooperative Election Survey.

The annual survey, which was fielded just before the November 2020 election, with the results released in March, polled a total of 61,000 Americans over a number of topics. One question was on their news consumption habits. It asked what television news networks respondents had watched in the prior 24 hours.

Some very interesting patterns emerged across religious traditions, the nonreligious, and the type of media being consumed. For instance, of the big three legacy news operations — ABC, CBS, and NBC — there was no strong base of viewership in any tradition.

In most cases, about a third of people from each religious tradition said that they watched one of those legacy networks in the last 24 hours. PBS scored very low among every tradition. In most cases fewer than 15% of respondents reported watching PBS in the time frame.

However, the numbers for the three major cable news networks — CNN, Fox News and MSNBC — were much higher across the board. In eight of the 16 religious and nonreligious traditions categorized in the poll, CNN viewership was at least 50% of the sample. This was led by 71% of Hindus who watched CNN and 63% of Muslims.

The least likely group to watch CNN was clearly white evangelicals, at just 23%. In comparison, MSNBC scored lower nearly across the board. In fact, in none of the 16 classification groups was viewership of MSNBC greater than it was for CNN.

Fox News viewership was higher than that of MSNBC, but was not as widely dispersed as it is for CNN. It’s no surprise, given its reputation as a conservative news outlet, that 61% of white evangelicals say that they watch Fox News — in the last election, around 80% of white evangelicals voted for Republican candidate Donald Trump. The other three traditions where viewership was at least 50% are white Catholics, Mormons and members of the Eastern Orthodox Church. It should come as no surprise, as those are three groups that consistently vote for the Republican Party. Just 14% of atheists watched Fox, which is about in line with the share of white evangelicals who watch MSNBC.

Fox particularly uses the term when explaining opposition to Donald Trump. His opponents are said to “hate” Trump, his values, and his followers.

Our research, which ran from Jan. 1 to May 8, 2020, initially explored news of Trump’s impeachment. Then came the coronavirus. As we sifted through hundreds of cable news transcripts over five months, we noticed consistent differences between the vocabulary used on Fox News and that of MSNBC.

While their news agendas were largely similar, the words they used to describe these newsworthy events diverged greatly.

Fox and hate

For our study, we analyzed 1,088 program transcripts from the two ideologically branded channels — right-wing Fox and left-wing MSNBC — between 6 p.m. and 10:59 p.m.

Because polarized media diets contribute to partisan conflict, our quantitative analysis identified terms indicating antipathy or resentment, such as “dislike,” “despise,” “can’t stand” and “hate.”

We expected to find that both of the strongly ideological networks made use of such words, perhaps in different ways. Instead, we found that Fox used antipathy words five times more often than MSNBC. “Hate” really stood out: It appeared 647 times on Fox, compared to 118 on MSNBC.

Fox usually pairs certain words alongside “hate.” The most notable was “they” — as in, “they hate.” Fox used this phrase 101 times between January and May. MSNBC used it just five times.

To put these findings in historic context, we then used the GDELT Television database to search for occurrences of the phrase “they hate” on both networks going back to 2009. We included CNN for an additional comparison.

We found Fox’s usage of “they hate” has increased over time, with a clear spike around the polarizing 2016 Trump-Clinton election. But Fox’s use of “hate” really took off when Trump’s presidency began. Beginning in January 2017, the mean usage of “they hate” on the network doubled.

“Us” vs. “them”

So who is doing all this hating — and why — according to Fox News?

Mainly, it’s Democrats, liberals, political elites and the media. Though these groups do not actually have the same interests, ideology or job description, our analysis finds Fox lumps them together as the “they” in “they hate.”

As for the object of all this hatred, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and other Fox hosts most often name Trump. Anchors also identify their audience — “you,” “Christians,” and “us” — as the target of animosity. Only 13 instances of “they hate” also cited a reason. Examples included “they can’t accept the fact that he won” or “because we voted for [Trump].”

Citing liberal hate as a fact that needs no explanation serves to dismiss criticism of specific policies or events. It paints criticism or moral outrage directed at Trump as inherently irrational.

For loyal Fox viewers, these language patterns construct a coherent but potentially dangerous narrative about the world.

Our data show intensely partisan hosts like Hannity and Carlson are more likely than other Fox anchors to use “they hate” in this way. Nevertheless, the phrase permeates Fox’s evening programming, uttered by hosts, interviewees and Republican sources, all painting Trump critics not as legitimate opponents but hateful enemies working in bad faith.

By repeatedly telling its viewers they are bound together as objects of the contempt of a powerful and hateful left-leaning “elite,” Fox has constructed two imagined communities. On the one side: Trump along with good folks under siege. On the other: nefarious Democrats, liberals, the left and mainstream media.

Research confirms that repeated exposure to polarized media messages can lead news consumers to form firm opinions and can foster what’s called an “in-group” identity. The us-versus-them mentality, in turn, deepens feelings of antipathy toward the perceived “out-group.”

The Pew Research Center reports an increasing tendency, especially among Republicans, to view members of the other party as immoral and unpatriotic. Pew also finds Republicans trust Fox News more than any other media outlet.

Americans’ divergent media sources — and specifically Fox’s “hate”-filled rhetoric — aren’t solely to blame here. Cable news is part of a larger picture of heightened polarization, intense partisanship, and paralysis in Congress.

Good business

Leaning into intense partisanship has been good for Fox News, though. In summer 2020 it was the country’s most watched network. But using hate to explain the news is a dangerous business plan when shared crises demand Americans’ empathy, negotiation and compromise.

Fox’s talk of hate undermines democratic values like tolerance and reduces Americans’ trust of their fellow citizens.

This fraying of social ties helps explain America’s failures in managing the pandemic — and bodes badly for its handling of what seems likely to be a chaotic, divisive presidential election. In pitting its viewers against the rest of the country, Fox News works against potential solutions to the the very crises it covers.

So we need to make sense of TV.

Our tool allows anyone to quickly run analyses of how TV news stories develop over days, weeks, or years, and how coverage differs across 3 networks that each have a different target audience and ideological bent. https://t.co/zY7io9Dna5 pic.twitter.com/6VVtMVjGHQ

— Jacob Ritchie (@jwkritchie) August 20, 2020

The tool uses “deep-learning-based image and audio analysis processing techniques” to pull from more than 270,000 hours of programming and commercial segments from Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, dating back to January 1, 2010 and updating daily. “Computer vision is used to detect faces, identify public figures, and estimate characteristics such as gender to examine news coverage patterns. To facilitate topic analysis the transcripts are time-aligned with video content, and compared across dates, times of day and programs,” Geraldine Moriba, a journalist and filmmaker and 2019 JSK journalism fellow, explained on Medium. People can use the tool answer questions like “How much coverage does Trump receive compared to Biden? How did this change when coronavirus and the George Floyd protests came into the picture?” (There’s more on the methodology, and some findings, here.)

The tool helps “increase transparency around daily editorial choices,” Moriba noted. “How long are certain people on the screen? How often are certain words mentioned? What will you find when you compare these measurements across time, channel, and programs?”

.@GeraldineMoriba's new Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer is amazing.

Ever think "I wonder if cable news covers Trump more than Obama" when he was president?

Well. Now you can find out… and about a zillion other possibilities. Just.. WOWhttps://t.co/OcAUpbws8g pic.twitter.com/nlnNc49cRR

— Don Day (@DonLDay) August 20, 2020

The tool was created by the Computer Graphics Lab at Stanford University in collaboration with the John S. Knight Fellowship Program, with support from the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, Intel, Google, Amazon, and the National Science Foundation. The video dataset is from the Internet Archive’s TV News Archive.

Here are some of the queries people have run so far:

According to this new powerful tool from @BrownInstitute, references to “press freedom” skyrocketed in US cable TV news in late 2018 with Khashoggi’s murder

Other hikes since then: Apr 2019 (Assange arrest) & Jun 2020 (violations at George Floyd protests)https://t.co/flYWTEKY45 pic.twitter.com/zijOBcgPvO

— Ahmed Zidan @ (@zidanism) August 25, 2020

Trying out @BrownInstitute's new TV News Analyzer, which tracks cable news content in a variety of ways

Here's the cable news presence of Biden/Harris/Warren/Sanders/Buttigieg, by month and by day, from Jan 2019 to now:https://t.co/77wOSFnLz3 pic.twitter.com/M0yIu96SH5

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) August 27, 2020

Which cable TV news hosts hog the screen-time on their own shows the most?

Ans: (Chris Cuomo and Tucker Carlson)https://t.co/8SsY543YIE pic.twitter.com/39q1RiPmc4

— Maneesh Agrawala (@magrawala) September 1, 2020

Check out the Cable TV News Analyzer here.

Everyone knows that Google has changed the way they rank sites. Now that the algorithm’s changed and everyone is competing again can you take a page to #1? More importantly, can you keep it there? Together with SearchGuild.com, we’ve put together a competition titled “SEO Challenge” to sort the Players from the Stayers.

DarkBlue.com is giving away an Apple Mini iPod and a Sony Flat Screen Monitor to any Webmaster or SEO who can take their page to #1 for the search term “TBA”. Get there any way you can to win a prize.

(Nothing timestamps a contest quite like an iPod mini as top prize.)

The idea was that, at a set time, the organizers, a company called DarkBlue, would announce a phrase that didn’t appear anywhere on the web. From that point and over a few weeks, competitors would try their best to make one of their webpages be the top Google search result for that phrase. To the winner went glory and the aforementioned iPod.

When the phrase was announced — “nigritude ultramarine,” a play on “DarkBlue” — swarms of SEO types filled the web with it and tried their own techniques to get their version to the top. As Search Engine Journal wrote at the time, the contest:

…is likely to bring out the best and the worst in optimization tactics. The black magic optimization techniques that are suspected in having sites banned from Google are likely to be exercised, along with tried and true optimization practices. Immediately after the contest was announced experts snapped up hyphenated domain names and began tweaking their text. Many experts were surprised to see how quickly ‘nigritude ultramarine’ made its way into the Google’s listings, with new listings appearing daily it is clear that the contest is well underway.

The experts will be at the mercy of Google and any new algorithms implemented over the course of the next two months. Experts will have to anticipate and update on a regular basis, to ensure that they are able to obtain and retain a strong listings.

But the winner of the SEO Challenge wasn’t a black-hat consultant or a stack of Macedonian children in a trench coat. It was a blogger. Anil Dash, who at the time worked at the blog company Six Apart, wasn’t a particular fan of SEO types, many of whom he considered “barely above spammers.” So he decided to put up a single blogpost, headlined “Nigritude Ultramarine,” and asked his readers to link to it. Many did. And that combination — the Google cred Anil had already built up as an active blogger plus all the PageRank-boosting “votes” created by those links — was enough to beat the most dark-arts-savvy SEO consultants in the world.

A lot of bloggers saw it as a sweet victory. See, building up a reputation for doing good work online gets rewarded, as it should be! If Google is going to determine the single best result for a search, a bunch of spammy keyword-stuffed SEO tricks should lose out to an established writer, a known entity.

Meanwhile, a lot of SEO guys thought Anil’s win was unfair. The idea of the contest was to see whose SEO skills were the strongest, they argued, not who runs a popular-enough blog to game the results. Anil was taking advantage of his blogosphere fame, coasting on reputation without putting in the work. They saw it as high school: the popular crowd picking on the nerds.

That was the first time I ever encountered a phenomenon that, a year ago, was finally given a name: a data void. Microsoft’s Michael Golebiewski coined the term “to describe search engine queries that turn up little to no results, especially when the query is rather obscure, or not searched often.” Like, say, “nigritude ultramarine.”

Or, not that long ago, “sandy hook crisis actors.” Or “social justice warrior.” Or “notre dame fire muslims.”

Golebiewski (he works on Bing) and co-author danah boyd came out with a new report this week examining the topic of data voids and the dangers they pose for manipulation by those seeking to spread disinformation. (True fact: For a long time I assumed “data void” was a danah boyd phrase, almost certainly because they rhyme.) And in a certain sense, the issue isn’t that different from that contest back in 2004: When an algorithm has to suddenly determine what’s the best information about something, what signals should it favor? The ones coming from established authorities? Or technical tricks from those trying to manipulate results? And what changes when there are a lot of the latter and not many of the former?

The logic underpinning search engines is akin to a lesson from kindergarten: no question is a bad question. But what happens when innocuous questions produce very bad results for users?

Data voids are one such way that search users can be led into disinformation or manipulated content. These voids occur when obscure search queries have few results associated with them, making them ripe for exploitation by media manipulators with ideological, economic, or political agendas. Search engines aren’t simply grappling with media manipulators using search engine optimization techniques to get their website ranked highly or to get their videos recommended; they’re also struggling with conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, and a range of other extremist groups who see search algorithms as a tool for exposing people to problematic content.

In the report, released by Data & Society, Golebiewski and boyd identify five types of data voids ripe for abuse:

Breaking News: The production of problematic content optimized to terms that are suddenly spiking due to a breaking news situation; these voids will eventually be filled by legitimate news content, but are abused before such content exists.

Strategic New Terms: Manipulators create new terms and build a strategically optimized information ecosystem around them before amplifying those terms into the mainstream, often through news media, in order to introduce newcomers to problematic content and frames.

Outdated Terms: When terms go out of date, content creators stop producing content associated with these terms long before searchers stop seeking out content. This creates an opening for manipulators to produce content that exploits search engines’ dependence on freshness.

Fragmented Concepts: By breaking connections between related ideas and creating distinct clusters of information that refer to different political frames, manipulators can segment searchers into different information worlds.

Problematic Queries: Search results for disturbing or fraught terms that have historically returned problematic results continue to do so unless high quality content is introduced to contextualize or outrank such problematic content.

For journalists, these are each important to be aware of, but their role in breaking news situations is obviously most direct. Golebiewski and boyd highlight what happened after the 2017 mass shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas:

Shortly after the announcement of the shooting in Sutherland Springs, a distributed network of people began coordinating on various forums in an effort to shape media coverage and search engine results. They were driven by a political agenda to influence public perception about this shooting. They first targeted Twitter and Reddit, knowing that search engines like Google and Bing elevate content from these sites when no other material is available. To increase the likelihood of visibility of their content on search engines, they tweeted and posted content that includes words and phrases related to the incident in the early moments before higher-authority content (news media) appeared.

At the same time, these manipulators attempted to influence journalists by using a series of “sock puppet” (inauthentic) accounts on Twitter to ask journalists about the shooter or drop hints to send journalists in the wrong direction. In this case, they tried to encourage journalists to consider whether the shooter might be associated with left-leaning groups by asking questions or pointing to misleading social media posts. While their primary goal was to influence news coverage, this tactic also helps waste journalists’ time.

This coordinated activity was noticed by a Newsweek journalist who wrote a story about it (good!), which was then published with a headline that made things worse (bad!): “‘ANTIFA’ RESPONSIBLE FOR SUTHERLAND SPRINGS MURDERS, ACCORDING TO FAR-RIGHT MEDIA.”

Hopefully you can see the problems here. For one, it doesn’t correct the misinformation — it literally repeats it. Presumably, the headline writer thought the “according to far-right media” was enough to indicate that this information was not to be trusted. But not all readers got that — especially ones that might only glance at the headline while scrolling through social media. And, needless to say, if you’re conservative, hearing that “far-right media” is reporting something will likely increase its trustworthiness in your eyes.

For another, tech platforms often truncate long headlines, so even those weak words at the end were often chopped off. Here’s what that headline looks like in a Google search, to this day:

Yikes.

Interestingly, the story’s headline for social wasn’t as awkwardly structured — “Alex Jones claims the Texas church shooting was ‘part of the Antifa revolution against Christians'” — so things weren’t as bad on Twitter:

But other sites that syndicated the story, like Yahoo, didn’t get the metadata memo:

The language journalists use matters. And that’s true even if you’re better about framing your headline than Newsweek was. Golebiewski and boyd note that a significant moment in the rise of the “crisis actors” conspiracy theory after the Parkland school shooting was when CNN’s Anderson Cooper interviewed student David Hogg about the conspiracy theory.

This was intended to allow Hogg to deny the conspiracy theory, but it ended up breathing life into it. More news outlets — and news comedy shows — started using the term. And the more that the term was used in the media, the more people searched for it.

That’s how you end up with a Google Trends spike like this one:

yeah the google trends profile is pretty telling

little bump in Oct 2017 was the Las Vegas shooting, now it's grown up into the go-to catchphrase for whinging pic.twitter.com/fsLM7PhUzL

— Dr Sarah Taber (@SarahTaber_bww) February 24, 2018

But the Catch-22 is that the initial absence of legitimate news stories debunking the theory also gave it fuel:

When they searched, they found the conspiratorial content that had been staged over multiple years. Even though there was some content designed to debunk the conspiracy, conspiratorial content was highly ranked in web searches and in searches on platforms because it had been there for years and because the network of content surrounding it was highly optimized for search engines and recommender systems. With no major news coverage or other authentic sources using this term, the conspiratorial content came up first in nearly every search context until debunking videos started overtaking the results. But even debunking videos helped spread this particular conspiracy.

As of August 2019, searches for information about parents whose children were murdered in the Sandy Hook shooting returned conspiratorial content; the top hit for “Robbie Parker” on YouTube offers a video that claims he’s a crisis actor because he smiled at one point. The comments are filled with conspiratorial narratives. In response to all that has unfolded, some parents whose children were murdered have sued the most well-known conspiracy theorist; at least one parent died, in part because of the harassment experienced after their tragic loss.

That frustrating pattern sets you up pretty well for the authors’ conclusion: There’s no easy way to fix the problem of data voids.

While Bing and Google can — and must — work to identify and remedy data voids, many of the vulnerabilities lie at the heart of what these search engines do. Bing and Google do not produce new websites; they bring to the surface content that other people produce and publish elsewhere on third party platforms. Without new content being created, there are certain data voids that cannot be easily cleaned up. The type of data void also matters: Search engines are able to address issues with problematic queries and forgotten terms much more easily than strategic terms or breaking news. Fragmented concepts raise a myriad of more challenging questions for search companies…

Factually inaccurate information, hyper-partisan content, scams, conspiracy theories, hate speech, and other forms of problematic content are harmful to individuals and societies, but media manipulators have a higher incentive to create such content than those who seek to combat it. Search engine creators want to provide high quality, relevant, informative, and useful information to their users, but they face an arms race with media manipulators. While this report focuses on the dynamics occurring in English on these sites, these problems are likely to be of even greater concern in non-English settings where there is even less data…

How can search engines more effectively detect vulnerabilities in search? Who is going to provide viable content for search engine users seeking information where the current quality of content ranges from mediocre to atrocious? What role should search engines play when someone searches for a data void? And who is responsible for addressing the vulnerabilities at the intersection of different websites, services, and user practices? Even as technology companies increasingly seek solutions to this challenge, the practices of media manipulators reveal that this is not a problem to “solve.” Instead, data voids are a security vulnerability that must be systematically, intentionally, and thoughtfully managed.

There’s lots more interesting stuff in the paper, including a section on manipulating recommendation engines (*cough* YouTube) that I didn’t touch on here. It’s all worth a read. Not least because these behaviors can have impact for a looooong time. Fifteen years later, Anil Dash’s post is still the No. 1 result in Google for “nigritude ultramarine.”

With a new spinoff movie now out on Netflix, someone had the bright idea to change Los Pollos Hermanos from a plot detail into an actual chicken restaurant. Starting tomorrow, you’ll be able to open up the Uber Eats app on your phone and order real food from the once-fake restaurant: Pollos Tenders, Fring Fries, or the ABQ Hot Chicken Sandwich, which sounds delicious even before you get to the side of Slaw Goodman it comes with.

(Well, you’ll be able to do it in Los Angeles, with expansion coming to elsewhere in California, Nevada, and Illinois soon. No word on when it might be available in To’hajiilee, Abiquiu, or New Hampshire.)

The twist here, though, is that Los Pollos Hermanos won’t be a normal fast-food restaurant, the kind with locations at high-traffic intersections, a drive-thru, and plenty of parking. It’ll be a ghost kitchen — a delivery-only brand affectation that connects hungry people using an app to an anonymous kitchen frying chicken.

“Little did I realize this could be accomplished without building an actual brick-and-mortar restaurant,” show creator Vince Gilligan told The Hollywood Reporter or, more likely, whoever was typing the press release. “Yay, technology! Smart phones actually are good for something!”

I thought about Los Pollos Hermanos when I read this piece in The Information: “CNN to Launch Digital News Service to Compete With Facebook, Apple.”

First there was Knewz, now there is “NewsCo.” Media companies are ramping up their efforts to take on Facebook and Apple with digital news services.

Just a few months after Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. announced it was developing Knewz.com, a news aggregation service offering articles from a wide range of outlets, CNN is jumping in with its own offering. Not yet named, but referred to internally as “NewsCo,” CNN is discussing paying news organizations to feature their content on the platform, which will likely be a mix of subscription-based and advertising-based content, according to CNN digital chief Andrew Morse.

In other words, CNN desperately wants to avoid becoming Los Pollos Hermanos — a valuable brand that, instead of engaging directly with consumers, gets reduced to being just a tiny icon in someone else’s app, the place where all the money gets made.

In the food business, the aggregators are apps like DoorDash, Uber Eats, Postmates, and Grubhub. In the news business, they’re Apple News, Google News, Facebook News (set to be unveiled Friday), and all the other tech giants’ efforts to package publishers’ stories for users.

Despite all the variation between them, each of those apps offers some version of a new front door for news: a bunch of different stories from a bunch of different outlets, assembled through some combination of human editing and algorithmic personalization, and optimized in whatever way most aligns with the company doing the optimizing. For each, the brand equity of the publisher — “Did you read that story on The New York Times?” “Did you see that on CNN?” — is sublimated to the brand of the tech company. And publishers don’t like that — switching from news outlets to wire services, from restaurants on every corner to anonymous kitchens in the warehouse district.

So why is the Los Pollos Hermanos scenario so bad for a CNN or a News Corp? After all, the potential benefits for chicken-slingers are clear: Finding land for and building out dozens or hundreds of restaurants is super expensive, and renting space in an industrial kitchen isn’t. Just as buying a giant printing press, hiring a newsroom, dealing with advertisers, and distributing tons of newsprint every morning was super expensive — and just as starting a news site isn’t.

Today, a wave of ghost kitchens and virtual restaurants are betting that keeping production costs low and riding on delivery apps’ distribution can build a great business. A few years ago, a wave of content mills, aggregators, and other digital-native publishers made the same bet, lowering the cost of output and counting on Facebook shares and Google searches to provide the distribution.

For an awful lot of them, that bet didn’t work out. Google could change its algorithms; Facebook could turn the traffic dial up or down as it pleased. Emphasis shifted from cheap scale to something smaller, higher quality, and more direct, as seen primarily through the wave of paywalls we’ve seen go up.

Into this situation walks CNN, or News Corp, or any other news company that has a high-cost model of production and fears becoming that icon in someone else’s app. They don’t want to become mere suppliers to the tech titans. They want to own the customer relationship. And hence NewsCo and Knewz. Check out this podcast interview with CNN’s Morse from just a month ago:

CNN is also proceeding cautiously in its partnerships with social media giants like Facebook, which Morse regards as competitors as much as they are collaborators.

“It’s pretty hard to look at them and not see a media company, and the same with Apple,” he said of Facebook. “And the reality is I don’t think we should cede the ground in the news business to Facebook or Apple. I think the stakes are too high. I think they’ve let down audiences, I think they’ve let down advertisers, I think they’ve let down journalism. And no matter how many task forces and how many reporters they hire, it doesn’t change the fact that’s not their core business.”

To get my prediction on the record: I don’t think NewsCo and Knewz are going to work. Dumb names aside — at least NewsCo is clearly a working title, can’t say the same for Knewz — it is going to be very hard to get large numbers of people to create new app habits for news on their phones without the cachet of a prominent news brand. Even the most prominent and premium of publishers have found that their app users are their superusers, the most dedicated consumers of their work. The people who specifically seek out news on phones — not the ones who let news occasionally bump into them via alerts or a random Facebook post — tend to be people who have preexisting opinions about where they want to get it from. Knews and NewsCo are much more about satisfying the strategic needs of their corporate owners than about satisfying the information needs of actual users. For them, the value proposition — “a bunch of news stories, but in a different app than the one that comes preinstalled on your phone or the one where you choose all the sources to follow or the one all your friends are on” — is pretty muddled. Maybe they’ll surprise us all with a brilliant angle; probably not.

But you can see the frustration that leads to attempts like this. As Walter White himself could have told you, it’s not just about having the best product — it’s also about controlling distribution. Your meth could be the best in the West, but you still need someone to get it to market and to your best, er, users.

Some people stop using their news apps (or don’t even download them in the first place) out of sheer overwhelmingness. And some people turn to CNN for live updates.

On Wednesday, for example, you could find live updates on market factors, a shooting near a German synagogue, Turkey’s military moves in Syria, and oh yeah, the Trump impeachment inquiry on CNN’s site in what’s essentially a live blog format.

Politico, The New York Times, and plenty of others publish liveblogs for elections and other major events, so this isn’t breaking news in itself, but CNN’s live story is a new tool spun up by the product team in the past year with pretty decent results so far. The tool had its highest traffic in August covering the El Paso and Dayton shootings and Hurricane Dorian, with 35 million unique visitors from CNN Digital. (Dorian’s live story, updated for nine consecutive days, had 29 million unique users.)

The live story tool, known internally as the “dynamic live experience,” is basically a way to keep all the breaking news straight, more quickly. But the team had to build a brand-new CMS to make it happen.

“It’s acknowledgement that the story is ongoing, with built-in notifications,” chief technology officer Robyn Peterson said. He led the five to ten product folks working on the continual development of the tool, which can now support video and live results from election polling. “It was such a different form of content, such a different platform, that it really deserved to be built by itself.”

“We needed a product to push out news faster to a consumer, even if it’s just one to two sentence updates,” director of breaking news for CNN Digital Amanda Wills said. “When people think of CNN as a brand, they very much think of the pace and breathlessness they see on air. I wanted us to mirror that.”

Live stories are promoted at the top of the website, similar to the blinking “LIVE TV” that you might see. In addition to the auto-uploading updates, a sidebar on the left explain variations of “Where things stand now” or “What we covered here,” depending on if it’s still live or not. Bullet points give a primer before a reader jumps into the scrolling fray, and a video autoplays at the top. After a few scrolls down the page you’ll see some links if you chose to explore the topic in more depth. On mobile, the sidebar shows up first.

These blogs supplant the process of updating regular articles, where a reporter would write the sentence or two of new information and add a few extra paragraphs of context. The context is now built into the blog, where editors can virtually read over the shoulders of the writers to save time on publishing. “When my team is working on something that is super urgent I am reading them as they are typing. When they’ve moved on to the next sentence” she starts editing the previous one, Wills said.

Each live story needs at least two people to maintain it — a reporter and editor — but some have had as many as 10 adding to and refining them, like during the CNN debate. Unsurprisingly, Wills does not see an operational limit to how many can be maintained simultaneously.

“How many updates are we getting on this story? How many reporters are on this story? How much are we getting, information-wise, on this story?” she said as examples of how to decide which event gets a live story. “We really don’t have a shutdown date for [impeachment] because it’s so ongoing. We might move URLs as the story changes but we are consistently live on that story. When it’s something like a storm or a hurricane, we tend to launch in the lead-up to that hurricane. When it’s out in the Caribbean and we know it’s going to make landfall in the next few hours, that’s when we’re going to launch. We keep it running until the hurricane has dissipated or until it’s made landfall and the impacts are felt and the storm is over. Then we shut down the ‘storm is coming’ live story and then we move into the next phase, which is recovery.”

Most of the viewership comes when those stories are live, but CNN is exploring a time capsule-like afterlife. After the Oscars ceremony, Wills’ team reframed the collection as “relive the Oscars as it happened.”

In a follow-up study to a 2017 review, Columbia Journalism Review’s Pete Brown collected 1,510 mobile push alerts from 30 news apps over two weeks in June and July 2018, mirroring the previous procedure. 284 alerts alone came from President Trump’s family separation policy and border chaos in 2018, so Brown looked at those again in a case study.

“This case study further confirms the ongoing shift away from using push purely for breaking news, a movement we had already observed last year. Notifications categorized as ‘analysis,’ ‘general,’ and ‘first-hand accounts’ comprised over a quarter of all alerts during the family separation controversy,” Brown wrote in his analysis.

The weekly average for push alerts overall increased 16 percent from last year to 26 per app. Overall, the Wall Street Journal had the most apps in the test period due to new alert category options beyond breaking news, followed by CNN, The New York Times, and the Washington Post Classic app, with Mic, the Star-Tribune, and the BBC sending the fewest. Here’s the percent change between the years for each publisher:

In an unrelenting year of news, some news app users (a group that grew worldwide in 2017) saw seven alerts just about the family separation policy in one day with CNN, Brown recorded. That’s a lot! But publishers also shifted the experience so the alerts are filled with more text, more conversational, using more adjectives, and pushing more analysis pieces instead of breaking news showering down users’ phone screens during their commute or school pickup.

Maybe 2017’s findings or just the overall thrashing of the news cycle caused alert managers to take another look at what they’re flowing to people’s phones. Brown’s interviewees described a “growing consensus that push should not be viewed solely as a platform for breaking news, but also as a means for promoting the newsroom’s strongest journalism and building brand loyalty around exclusive stories, resulting in a broader range of content being surfaced via the platform.”

Layoffs also shuffled push alert strategies: “The most prolific alerter from last year’s study, CNN MoneyStream, sent zero alerts during this recent data collection period.” Digiday has reported that MoneyStream faced layoffs in CNNMoney’s transition to CNN Business and became essentially an automatic feed. But Mic, before its November firesale, went from 33 alerts sent on average per week to just two. The team had experimented with alerts presenting news in full — so users didn’t need to tap through for the whole story.

“We found that roughly 50 percent of users actually used the app in the traditional way, opening it from the home screen. Our explanation was that for many iOS users, Long Press or 3D Touch is still a novel and even undiscovered behavior,” said Marcus Moretti, Mic’s vice president of product.

Notifications make someone with a news app on their phone more likely to actually open the app, as a 2016 study found, where 58 percent of study participants said they opened a news app from the notification. A Pew study also from 2016 similarly notes “only about half of those who ever get them click through to the full story or search for more information.”

Those habits have led news outlets to present alerts with additional context 55 percent of the time, Brown found in 2017. The average length of alerts in the 2018 study grew by 11 percent, increasing from 101.9 characters to 113.4. But part of the challenge in CJR’s 2017 study was determining success for an alert besides mere open rate:

“This really surprised me, and it came up again. I’d ask people in every interview what they consider a successful push alert,” Brown told my colleague Laura Hazard Owen in 2017. “They’d say, ‘What I consider a successful push alert might not be what my boss considers a successful push alert.’ … The whole notion of creating content just for the lockscreen feels a little bit, to me, like creating content for Apple or Google or the mobile operating system.”

For more from app managers’ interviews with Brown and details from the case study, here’s the full report.

How do we respond to tragedy? That question is never far from the work of journalists, and Friday’s Annapolis Capital Gazette assault only made it more intimate, with journalists becoming one with the story they’ve covered time and again.

Numerous journalists responded to the murder of five of their own by restating the truths of local journalism. The humorist Dave Barry (“Sorry, I’m not feeling funny today — my heart aches for slain journalists“) captured it as well as anyone:

There are over 1,000 daily newspapers in the United States, most of them covering smaller markets, like Annapolis or West Chester. The people working for these newspapers aren’t seeking fame, and they aren’t pushing political agendas. They’re covering the communities they live in — the city councils, the police and fire departments, the courts, the school boards, the high-school sports teams, the snake that some homeowner found in a toilet. These newspaper people work hard, in relative obscurity, for (it bears repeating) lousy pay. Sometimes, because of the stories they write, they face hostility; sometimes — this happens to many reporters; it happened to me — they are threatened.

The Annapolis shootings would of course have been tragic in any year. But in 2018, it’s impossible to understand them without considering the cleaved national context of journalism itself. Certainly, the craft has never been under greater pressure, financially or in terms of public trust. We still don’t know how the madness of fake news fury will redefine the very nature of the journalist/reader relationship in the digital age.

Today we, like apparently many Americans, choose our realism. Millions of Americans have never valued journalists more, seeing us as providing an essential service. (From Edelman’s annual trust survey: “The biggest gain in credibility in the latest survey was for — ahem — journalists.“) At the same time, fake news purveyors, foreign and domestic, have cynically divided democratic populaces, content to make journalists collateral roadkill. The contradictions take real, daily form. As newsrooms, like airports and schools, must put in place physical security measures, engaging with the communities they serve grows more difficult.

As we have read this weekend in the sense-making out of Annapolis, such engagement — in reporting, in community events, in governmental meetings, and in just being seen around town — separates what the local press has always done differently, and by its nature better, than the national press. It’s what the American local press in the best of times has done in cities and towns across our 3,000-mile landscape, and it’s a task uniquely required at this time in American history.

Here are a few of the other big questions we’re watching in today’s news industry.

What does Norm Pearlstine have planned in L.A.?

There’s a lot of chatter around Patrick Soon-Shiong’s pick of news veteran Norm Pearlstine as his new editor-in-chief. “He pulled a Cheney,” several sources observed of the appointment. Like the man who famously headed up George W. Bush’s vice-presidential search, only to end up with the job himself, Pearlstine’s role, in part, was to help the L.A. Times’ new owner pick his first editor-in-chief. As I pointed out in May, though, his job always encompassed more than just that selection process.

Given unlimited financial capacity, sole ownership, and a clean slate, Soon-Shiong and Pearlstine have been able to take a cartographer’s tour the past couple of months.

Do they map out the next Los Angeles Times — the Times of the 2020s — as a global creature? Or as one focused on the fastest, closest, maybe most intriguing part of the globe — Asia? Should it (as Michael Ferro was only the latest to fantasize) turn its Hollywood (er, El Segundo) base into a worldwide entertainment franchise? Or does it try to launch itself into the national space, taking a page from Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post playbook, adding a couple of hundred journalists and entering our frayed political conversation more fully?

Of course, Bezos saw in his investment — $250 million, or half of what Soon-Shiong paid Tronc for the Times and San Diego Union-Tribune — the power of the Post’s home city. With Washington the country’s center of politics and policy, reclaiming that national position didn’t require a big leap of imagination — just resources, smart leadership, and the proper application of the technologies of the day.

The L.A. Times’ case is trickier. Once roughly on par with the Post (and even The New York Times) in stature and resources, its home turf is Southern California. Does that mean embracing, defining, and explaining a new California ethos, one that’s also emerging fitfully nationwide? How would the West Coast’s deep blueness color that sort of a role in our bizarre political landscape?

What does Patrick Soon-Shiong want his L.A. Times to be? And, importantly, what kind of business does he want it to be?

Hyper-successful businesspeople don’t like to lose money at anything they do, even if they can easily afford it. So how do Soon-Shiong and Pearlstine meld an audience and product vision with a new business model? Among the multitude of questions: How will they harness technology to forge that new strategy? While many have focused on the extra journalistic headcount Bezos has provided Post editor Marty Baron, his funding of a similar number of new technologists has made its business transformation — most notably, passing 1 million digital subscribers — possible. The L.A. Times became the first Tronc paper to implement the Post’s Arc platform earlier this year. So what will it now do with it? And how compatible with Arc will Soon-Shiong’s AI-aided notions for revolutionizing journalism be?

Pearlstine, a now fashionably youthful 75, quickly acknowledged that finding a successor became part of his role the day his position was announced. Certainly, if Soon-Shiong had been able to lure either the Times’ Dean Baquet or the Post’s Baron — each a former L.A. Times editor — the publishing world’s skepticism about his plans would have melted away. With Pearlstine in charge, though, many will wait and see.

It’s easy to look at the hiring of a New Yorker septuagenarian as less than au courant, and yes, the hiring of a younger, even female, editor-in-chief would have sent a far different message. But in hiring someone of Pearlstine’s long industry stature — The Wall Street Journal, Time Inc., and Bloomberg — the newbie publisher has hired someone who should be able to set up the new lines of church and state at the new Times properly. That’s no insignificant task. Soon-Shiong’s innovative medtech career has been all about crossing lines, and with Pearlstine, the Times’ staff and readers should be assured that the Times’ coverage won’t be bent to fit the owner’s own interests or beliefs.

Pearlstine’s big and immediate test will be in hiring. In the past couple years of Tronc chaos, the Times has lost lots of talent, most notably to the Post and New York Times. Can Pearlstine reverse the flow and lure top people with a golden promise of building the next Times? That’s not just a question of finding a successor-in-waiting; it’s about repopulating and adding new newsroom talent, both those with gumshoe journalistic skills and those with a deep digital sense of reader connection. Watch who gets hired — that will tell us a lot about the reality of the new Los Angeles Times.

Will AT&T follow through on its promises for an independent CNN?

As a federal judge okayed AT&T’s deal to buy Time Warner, few people focused on the questions of its ownership of CNN. Certainly, they’d come up during the lengthy merger battle, but only here and there. John Stankey, AT&T’s newly appointed head of Time Warner, immediately said all the right things about CNN, its independence, and its value to our struggling democracy. We have no reason to doubt him.

And yet as we look around the world, at the rampage of press-strangling authoritarianism from Russia, Turkey, Poland, and Hungary to China and the Philippines, let’s recall how concentrations of media power have often been coupled with the erosion of democratic freedoms. One usual course: Major telecommunications companies come to own major news operations and then bend them to the political needs of their owners, when push comes to expedient shove.

We would seem far away from that point today — but then again, so many of our democratic norms have been blown away in such a short time. I still recall AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson paying his courtesy call to Trump Tower — one that seemingly didn’t do much to soothe the presidential-elect beast, given his feral hatred of CNN itself. That photo still bothers me, though.

We will, and should, watch CNN for any signs of business and political interference, though I don’t expect any in the short term. But the politics and pressures of our time are as likely to get worse as better, and we shouldn’t lose sight of this concern, which is exacerbated by longer-term trends and the ongoing quest for bigness, which accelerates year by year.

Perhaps the marriage of pipes and content in the U.S. can proceed differently; Comcast’s stewardship of NBC/MSNBC hasn’t appeared to be problematic. But certainly, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News shows the clear and present peril of a politicized, regime-echoing “news” company. If CNN, one if its two main counterweights, were neutralized — or turned — imagine how our national debate would morph overnight. We now know, on so many fronts: It can happen here.

Consider — and savor, for the moment — the unaffiliated and feisty we’re-news-companies position of The Washington Post and The New York Times, today and back to Watergate times. What’s been the value of that independence over the past two years? Priceless.

What’s the sound of a towel being tossed in?

It would be something like the multiple thwacks we heard last week, as new milestones in the ongoing consolidation of news media continued just about daily.

Warren Buffett tossed in one of those towels Tuesday. He announced that he was doing the ultimate outsourcing — paying Lee Enterprises $5 million or so a year, plus partnership incentives that could double the Lee take — to run his newspapers in 30 markets.

Recall that just six years ago, the Oracle of Omaha — and a leading supporter of civil society and of the role of the press — seemed to be giving beleaguered newspapers a vote of confidence, buying 63 newspapers from Media General. It was a year before Jeff Bezos bought the Post. Both deals seemed to signal that smart, caring money saw a future in transforming print franchises into digital.

But while one of them has done that gloriously, one never got far from the starting gate. As Berkshire Hathaway Media CEO Terry Kroeger departs, perhaps for a political future, the disappointment here is in BH Media’s lack of transformation. While Buffett himself has run hot and cold publicly on the prospects of the newspaper industry, for some reason, he squandered the chance to use his reputation and capital to actually innovate. The BH Media playbook, such as it was, always seem to trail even its struggling chain peers, leading to the same results and same layoffs. Maybe more was going on inside the company — but whatever it was plainly didn’t work.

Perhaps the Media General deal was widely misunderstood from the beginning. I found Roy Greenslade’s Guardian piece on the 2012 sale, and the seemingly jaundiced view expressed by both the FT’s Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson and me may have been too close to the eventual truth:

[Media columnist Jack Shafer] cites media analyst Ken Doctor, who regards the Media General deal as “more a feat of financial engineering than a newspaper deal” because it includes a $400m loan and a $45m line of credit at 10.5% interest in exchange for warrants that would give Berkshire Hathaway almost 20% of Media General.

And Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson of the Financial Times points out that the warrants obtained by the “well-meaning billionaire” are worth $19.5m.

So, once Media General dumps the Tampa Tribune, the company will essentially be a profitable TV station owner, a business that Buffett knows and likes. Then there is the valuable newspaper real estate too.

And then Greenslade concludes with this observation from Shafer:

Buffett’s recent newspaper acquisitions don’t indicate the industry has returned to health. But if he starts selling, you’ll know that it’s dead.

Buffett hasn’t sold, but he has thrown in a towel.

Lee, which owns papers in 47 largely smaller markets, gets good marks from its peers for its operating prowess. That’s meant the management of decline, which all those peers have contended with, and a brick-by-brick building of a more digital business. But still, in 2017 only about 28 percent of Lee’s ad revenues were digital, and it saw an overall revenue decline of 7 percent — about the industry average.

For Lee, the deal buys one precious commodity: time. If it can earn out that $10 million a year, that’s a shot of much-needed revenue.

How much will the two companies combine? Not that much, apparently, which is a bit of a headscratcher in an era where cost efficiencies drive strategy.

“Regarding regional management, BH Media will remain a separate company with its own management, personnel, and systems. Lee’s role will be to guide BH Media management,” a Lee spokesman told me. “As [Lee CEO] Kevin Mowbray mentioned, we do expect that both Lee and BH will benefit from our combined larger operating scale, primarily in digital sales, shared services and vendor contracts.”

So BH Media’s national costs go away, replaced by Lee fees. Berkshire Hathaway had previously been a significant shareholder in Lee, but it isn’t any longer. Still, Buffett’s long familiarity with the company and its chair (and retired CEO) Mary Junck provides the logic for the dealmaking.

One day before the BH Media semi-exit, another big newspaper chain headed for the showers. Gray TV — now the country’s No. 4 local broadcast player; another rapidly consolidating industry, as the FCC has undone decades of restraint on bigness — bought Raycom’s 65 stations (some of which it will have to divest) for $3.65 billion.

That leaves Raycom’s more than 100 CNHI newspapers — some smaller dailies and many weeklies, largely across the Southeast — as refugees from the deal. They’re now up for sale, less than a year after CNHI formally combined with broadcaster Raycom. Who will buy them?

Newspaper brokers are busy this week.

Would traffic signals help people separate real from fake?

Yes, they might, says a new Knight Foundation-funded Gallup Poll. The survey found that both “signals” and neutrally written descriptions of websites did help survey respondents separate news wheat from abundant chaff.

For the survey, Gallup used NewsGuard’s system of tagging. The new Steve Brill/Gordon Crovitz startup applies green (“aims for accuracy”) and red (“doesn’t meet minimum standards” signals to websites (not stories) and provides “nutritional labels” for those descriptions. (Samples here.)

This is what Gallup found:

The news source rating tool worked as intended. Perceived accuracy increased for news headlines with a green source cue and decreased for headlines with a redsource cue. Participants also indicated they were less likely to read, like or share news headlines with a red source cue. The source rating tool was particularly effective for participants who correctly recalled that experienced journalists devised the ratings, compared with those who did not recall that information.

The source rating tool was effective across the political spectrum. The perceived accuracy of news articles with a red source cue decreased similarly among Republicans and Democrats, with the sharpest decline occurring when the headlines had a clear political orientation that matched the users’ political beliefs.

The source rating tool did not produce known, unintended consequences associated with previous efforts to combat online misinformation. Our experiment did not produce evidence of an “implied truth effect,” an increase in perceived accuracy for false stories without a source rating when other false stories have a source rating, or a “backfire effect,” a strengthening of one’s false beliefs following a factual correction.

Knight, one of NewsGuard’s funders, sees the survey (conducted independently of the principals) as support for the NewsGuard notion.

For its part, the startup is on track. In July, it will begin providing its browser plugin free to libraries to get its product to market. By fall, it plans to make its full product publicly available.

Meanwhile, its staff of “several dozen full-time and part-time” journalists continue their review of the news web, affixing signals and writing labels. The goal: have 98 percent of U.S. news consumption covered by site tagging by fall.

The big question looms: However good this attempt to defang fake news might be, how will the public see it? That will take some major platform — Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft — to take it public. And — so far — no movement on that front.

Earlier this year, Facebook announced that it would prioritize news from brands that its users perceive as trustworthy, as part of a response to allegations related to the spread of misinformation on the platform. “As part of our ongoing quality surveys, we will now ask people whether they’re familiar with a news source and, if so, whether they trust that source,” Mark Zuckerberg wrote. Facebook measures news brand trust by asking its users if they have heard of a news brand and then to rate it as trustworthy from 1 (entirely) to 5 (not at all).

Critics have speculated that allowing ordinary people to decide what news sources should be deemed trustworthy could result in niche or highly partisan sources being prioritized at the expense of legacy brands that sometimes offer more balanced coverage. Others have worried that sources that produce the most widely shared content could be seen as the most trustworthy. However, data from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s 2018 Digital News Report shows that on average people have fairly conventional views about what news brands to trust — views that probably differ little from expert consensus. [Ed. note: Research also suggests that Facebook’s plan could work well, but with some important caveats.]

In our survey, people were asked to rate a number of the most popular news brands from 0 (not at all trustworthy) to 10 (completely trustworthy). They could also respond that they had never heard of the news brand. The data presented here represents the views of the online population of each country (unlikely to differ significantly from the views of Facebook users).

In the U.S., we can see that people tend to place more trust in mainstream, legacy news brands. Digital-born and/or partisan sources are trusted less. The users of each brand tended to trust it more than the general population, but particularly so for more right-leaning brands like Fox News and Breitbart.

Across a number of countries, we see that TV brands and newspapers score higher levels on trust on average than digital-born news brands. In addition, we find that Public Service Broadcasters (such as the BBC in the UK) are more trusted in cases where they are perceived as being more independent from the government. There are some exceptions to this pattern. In Hungary, a country with low levels of trust in news, digital-born outlets are as trusted as legacy outlets. Digital born brands also do well for trust in Spain, where journalist led start ups have become a feature of the media landscape.

In many instances, we see large differences between people on the left and the right in terms of how trustworthy they think news brands are. Overall, most mainstream news brands in the U.S. are trusted more by those who self-identify on the left of the political spectrum, while those on the right tend to be much more skeptical of news organizations, with the exception of right-leaning outlets such as Fox News and Breitbart. The differences were very large for outlets like CNN (7.08 score for left-wing individuals and 2.4 for right-wing individuals), The New York Times (7.55 for those on the left, 3.04 for those on the right), and Fox News (2.44 for those on the left, 6.94 for those on the right). Broad trust is rare in the U.S.

These rather striking differences could be a reflection of President Trump’s narrative about the mainstream media. It’s noticeable that outlets with the largest gaps in trust between left- and right-wing partisans (The New York Times and CNN) are those frequently attacked by the president himself. Though people have conventional views about what news outlets are trustworthy in the aggregate, it’s also clear that views can diverge greatly when we consider specific groups.

But not every country is as polarized as the U.S. When looking at brand trust based on political leaning in the U.K., we can see that the gaps are much smaller. This is perhaps surprising given that in the U.K. most print outlets align themselves to the left or the right, unlike the U.S. where the “objectivity norm” has been dominant. We do see some large differences in the U.K. for the right-wing leaning tabloids, such as The Sun and Daily Mail, which tend to be more trusted by right-wing identifiers. But perceptions of quality also seem to matter. The Times and the Telegraph, which are both considered to be right-leaning, also enjoy a relatively high degree of trust from those on the left.

Brand trust scores will be particularly important this year when Facebook will use similar metrics (alongside other signals) to prioritize news from some outlets over others. These algorithm changes have already been made in the U.S., but have still to be rolled out elsewhere. We may never get to see Facebook’s scores, and it’s still possible that they will differ from those presented here, either because of the methodology used or because their sample is different. However, if scores similar to these were to be factored in to Facebook’s algorithms, traditional, non-partisan brands would be most likely to benefit from this change to the News Feed ranking algorithm.

The news brand trust scores for the most popular news brands of all 37 countries of our survey sample are available here.

As Facebook’s Campbell Brown put it in a post:

Earlier this year we made a commitment to show news that is trustworthy, informative, and local on Facebook. As a part of that commitment, we are creating a dedicated section within Watch for news shows produced exclusively for Facebook by news publishers. With this effort, we are testing a destination for high quality and timely news content on the platform. Today we are announcing the first slate of these funded news shows for Facebook Watch.

Here are the shows, which feature the usual mix of networks (ABC, CNN, Fox, Univision) and digital players (ATTN:, Mic) — plus the unusual addition of an Alabama-based show produced by Advance Local.

ABC News’ “On Location” is a daily news show with ABC News journalists from around the globe delivering on-the-ground reporting and the top headlines that are driving the day.

Advance Local’s “Chasing Corruption” In Alabama Media Group’s Chasing Corruption’s weekly series, host Ian Hoppe and the Reckon by AL.com team travel across the USA to meet some of America’s toughest watchdog journalists — and the stories of conspiracy, bribery, fraud and more they’ve uncovered.

ATTN:’s “Undivided ATTN:” is a weekly explainer show that breaks down the biggest issue of the week. In 3-5 minute episodes hosted by a rotating cast of social influencers, Undivided ATTN: will provide context on the stories everybody’s talking about.

CNN’s “Anderson Cooper Full Circle” is a daily global brief on the world, M-F evenings featuring Anderson Cooper and a roster of guests. The interactive program will air live from Anderson’s New York City newsroom in mobile-friendly vertical video.

FOX News’ “Fox News Update” will focus on up-to-the minute breaking news and the most compelling stories of the day. FNC’s chief news anchor Shepard Smith will report the latest news each weekday afternoon, with Carley Shimkus updating viewers every morning. Additionally, Abby Huntsman will provide the latest headlines once each morning throughout the weekend.

Mic’s “Mic Dispatch” reveals the world as we see it: complicated, diverse and full of potential. Mic correspondents on this new, twice-weekly show go beyond the headlines to profile the underrepresented, the problem-solvers and the provocateurs.”

Univision’s “Real America with Jorge Ramos” Award-winning journalist, anchor and author Jorge Ramos travels the country to talk to immigrants of diverse backgrounds and situations, delivering a rarely covered view of today’s America from their perspective. Univision will also cover the top stories in Spanish at noon every day on Watch with “Noticiero Univision Edición Digital.”

These shows will debut “later this summer,” and there are more coming in the next few weeks.

NowThis will start a breaking news channel on Snapchat Discover in June, updated in realtime, Axios reported earlier this week. The social video brand’s existing channel will continue showcasing general news and features (highlights of its channel this week include a man living in a sandcastle, immigrants smuggling a “LIVE TIGER” in a duffel bag, and those jeans that only have seams and no fabric between them).

“The way we’re thinking about it now is we will publish as news as it breaks. We’ll go up with breaking news stories five, 10, 15 minutes from the when the story breaks. We will add to those stories as they develop throughout the day. It could be updated five times per day, or it could be updated zero times per day. It all depends on the news cycle,” said Tina Exarhos, NowThis’s chief content officer.

NowThis has experimented with Snapchat before, like the group’s collaboration with Jim VandeHei in the final stretch of the 2016 presidential election on a Discover channel called “We the People.” Snapchat has already featured hard news from NBC News (NBCUniversal is an investor in Snap) through a twice-daily show and CNN’s daily show, though the latter folded after four months when the “issue at hand was the show’s potential path to profitability — or rather, the lack thereof.”

But the redesign shook up the Discover platform on Snapchat, switching from a magazine-rack vision of selected publisher partners to an algorithm-based portal that includes celebrity and influencer stories, in addition to Snapchat shows and stories and publisher channels. It also moved users’ Stories out of Discover, lowering the incentive for people who primarily use the messaging app to communicate with their friends to visit the Discover side of the app. And recently Snap started telling publishers it would end its licensing deals, moving from paying publishers upfront for producing their daily and weekly content to focusing solely on splitting advertising revenue from their content. That was a leading cause for CNN’s exit.

The numbers since the redesign haven’t been bright: Snap’s first quarter reports show users and advertisers losing confidence and Snap shares falling. This week the company announced they’ll be tweaking the redesign, with CEO Evan Spiegel pointing to “headwinds from the redesign” as “a change this big to existing behavior comes with some disruption.” Snapchat averaged 191 million daily active users worldwide in 2018’s first quarter, compared to an expected 194.15 million. Those users, though, spend an average of 30 minutes on the app each day, and for Star Wars Day (May the Fourth!) users can use a Snapchat filter to take a Chewbacca selfie.

So really excited to see NowThis breaking news on Snapchat but also remembering when CNN pitched themselves as that (and then left) https://t.co/V0yvLhbids https://t.co/XdGkOtZ4Ff

— Kerry Flynn (@kerrymflynn) May 3, 2018

$SNAP “The DAU growth trend appears to have hit a proverbial “wall” in January 2018 with a major product redesign/relaunch” https://t.co/EoSpyIkSlm pic.twitter.com/1SuIzIRDq6

— Rich Greenfield (@RichBTIG) May 2, 2018

They have a Chewbacca snapchat filter pic.twitter.com/ytRKyEe0Kb

— Christopher Okey (@christopherokey) May 4, 2018

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Monmouth contacted a national random sample of 803 adults in the U.S., half by landline and half by cell phone, all in English — in early March before the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook news broke. Some top-line findings:

— What is “fake news”? Academics of misinformation and journalists alike have been trying to put better labels on the situation, but only 25 percent said “fake news” applies only to stories where the facts are wrong. 65 percent said it “also applies to how news outlets make editorial decisions about what they choose to report.” Chalk one up to the president’s ongoing campaign to label news he doesn’t like “fake.” (If we can’t agree on a definition, can we poll conclusively about it? Keep that grain of salt close…)

— 69 percent of Americans said social media sites are not doing enough to quash the spread of fake news on their platforms, though 60 percent said, additionally, that while social media sites are partly responsible, other media sources are more responsible. The number of people who think online news sources report fake news on a regular basis has risen from 41 percent a year ago to 52 percent in the latest poll.

“Confidence in an independent fourth estate is a cornerstone of a healthy democracy. Ours appears to be headed for the intensive care unit,” said Patrick Murray, the director of the Monmouth arm behind the poll.

The poll, whose full data can be found here, has already served as a rallying cry — for many sides.

Interesting poll out of Monmouth: more people trust @CNN than @realDonaldTrump https://t.co/t8CQqQn4XX Those are the facts. #FactsFirst

— CNN Communications (@CNNPR) April 3, 2018

More than 3-in-4 Americans believe that traditional major TV and newspaper media outlets report “fake news,” including 31% who believe this happens regularly and 46% who say it happens occasionally.https://t.co/Iw5h1N45hp

— Mike Cernovich (@Cernovich) April 2, 2018

Bites.

• New York Media has acquired Splitsider from The Awl Network (RIP). Splitsider has a great “This Week in Comedy Podcasts” column that I frequently skim, and I’m excited to see the feature pop up on Vulture. (Wall Street Journal)
• Art19 now hosts podcasts from the following TV companies: NBC Sports, NBC News, MSNBC, CNBC, NBC Entertainment, Bravo, Oxygen and SYFY.
• Speaking of Bravo: Connie Britton has been cast in Bravo’s TV adaptation of the Los Angeles Times and Wondery’s Dirty John. (Vulture)
• And speaking of Wondery: the Los Angeles-based podcast company has another collaboration with a Tronc-owned newspaper in the pipeline: Felonious Florida, with Broward County-area paper Sun Sentinel.
• First Look Media has a new podcast out to pair with Intercepted: Deconstructed, with the British political journalist Mehdi Hasan.
• Spotify has rolled out a voice-control feature. I’m not quite ready to say “Play God’s Plan” out loud in public, so you can keep it.

• The choice to target the evening commute is a really, really smart one. I’ve argued this before, but I think it’s safe to assume that there might be considerable overlap between the audiences of The New York Times and Vox.com. As such, a move to complement The Daily is significantly more prudent than engaging it as a direct competitor. In any case, even if the overlap was small, the evening commute remains untapped by the daily news podcast to begin with — aside from Mike Pesca’s The Gist, of course, which isn’t really playing the same game anyway. It’s a safer, and therefore more reliable, base to build from, and besides, Today, Explained could always expand with an a.m. version at some point in the future. (Same goes with The Daily and a p.m. version, a prospect that it has previously explored with breaking news specials.)
• In case it fully doesn’t come across in the writeup: I think Today, Explained’s success will mostly hinge on Sean Rameswaram’s personality — more so, I’d argue, than how Michael Barbaro fits into The Daily as a presence. Which is, I suppose, kind of the point when you bring in someone with a specific sense of showmanship like Rameswaram to headline a project.

And two more things I’d like to add to the preview:

• Here’s Vox.com general manager Andrew Golis, responding to an inquiry about how the podcast fits into the company’s overall business goals: “It gives us an opportunity to have an audio daily presence in our audience’s life in the way our website does in text and our YouTube channel does in video. That persistent relationship and trust is a powerful platform for building our business…we believe ‘Today, Explained’ will give us a new way to introduce audiences to a growing network of Vox podcasts as we continue to expand our ambitions and programming.”
• I’d be remiss if I didn’t discuss Midroll Media’s involvement in the production. The Scripps-owned podcast company serves as the exclusive advertising partner for Today, Explained, but I’m also told that they provided upfront investment to help assemble the team and build out the production. Chris Bannon, Midroll’s chief content officer, was also involved in the development of the show. “Creatively speaking, I spent a day in D.C. with the Vox team, and together we started sourcing host and staff candidates,” explained Bannon over email. “Right now we’re in the fun part, listening to show drafts and sharing notes. They’re alarmingly well-organized, cheerful, and efficient.” Bannon, by the way, worked with Rameswaram back when he was still at WNYC. (He left for Midroll in early 2015.)

When asked about his perspective on the potential of Today, Explained, Bannon offered an analogy. “I think we want Today, Explained to be All Things Considered to the The Daily’s Morning Edition,” he said. “Except that we will be more like All Things Considered’s smart, funny, well-informed, and streetwise uncle.”

“Streetwise uncle” sounds about right.

On a related note: I heard there’s some big news coming later today on The Daily. Keep your eyes peeled.

What comes next for the Fusion Media Group. Last week, The Onion binge-dropped A Very Fatal Murder, the satirical news site’s first stab at a long-form audio project. The show was designed to parody the wildly popular — and eminently bankable! — true-crime podcast genre, which is an appealing premise right off the bat: indeed, there’s no team I’d love to see interpret the phenomenon more than the brains behind The Onion. A Very Fatal Murder turned out to be enjoyable enough, no more and no less, though I did end up thinking it didn’t come anywhere close to realizing its promise as podcast satire.

But there’s a thing, and then there’s everything around the thing. And despite the minor swing and miss of A Very Fatal Murder, I was nonetheless left quite excited about the prospect of future projects from The Onion, and curious about what’s going on with the audio team at The Onion’s parent company, Fusion Media Group (FMG).

So I checked in with Mandana Mofidi, FMG’s executive director of audio. In case you’re unfamiliar, FMG is the sprawling, multi-tentacled corporation best known in some circles — mine, namely — for absorbing the remains of the Gawker empire post-Terry Bollea lawsuit in the form of the Gizmodo Media Group that spans Gizmodo, io9, Jezebel, and others. A television arm factors in somewhere, as does the city of Miami.

Anyway, Mofidi tells me that since her team kicked off operations about a year ago, they’ve been playing around with a couple of ideas and formats to see what would stick. Weekly interview and chat shows made up the early experiments, which apparently ended up working well for Lifehacker (The Upgrade), Kotaku (Splitscreen), and Deadspin (Deadcast). But following the reception they received for A Very Fatal Murder as well as Containers, Alexis Madrigal’s audio documentary about the sexy, sexy world of international shipping from last year, more plans have to been put in place to build out further narrative projects.

Mofidi’s overarching goal this year, it seems, is to ensure that each of FMG’s properties gets a solid podcast of their own. To that end, they have several projects in various stages of development, including:

• A six-part narrative series from Gizmodo about “a controversial and charismatic spiritual guru who uses the internet to build her obsessive following.” That show is being developed with Pineapple Street Media, which appears to be really carving out a niche around themes of obsession, charismatic leaders, and the followings they spawn, following Missing Richard Simmons and Heaven’s Gate.
• A show for Jalopnik called Tempest, which will examine “the funny and at times tragic intersectionality of people and cars.”
• A series that “explores the connectivity of our DNA” — which evokes memories of Gimlet’s Twice Removed — featuring Grammy Award-winning artist René Pérez, a.k.a. Residente. Gretta Cohn’s Transmitter Media is assisting with this project.
• A collaboration with The California Endowment that’ll produce stories on young activists “who are using their platforms to promote solidarity between different communities and causes.”

Mofidi also talked about an intent to dig deeper into events. “We recently did a live taping of Deadspin’s Deadcast in St. Paul before the Super Bowl. We were expecting to sell about 200 tickets, but ended up with over 360 people,” she said. The smart speaker category is also of interest, along with figuring out ways to collaborate with FMG’s aforementioned television arm.

I asked Mofidi if she had any dream projects that she’d love to produce in her role. “A daily show,” she wrote back. “It would be ambitious, but with so many passionate voices across our sites it feels like something we could do in a way that was distinct.”

Related reading: Publishers with TV ambitions are pursuing Netflix.

We’re back with this nonsense: “Public media again in bull’s-eye in president’s FY19 plans.” Re-upping my column from the last time we were in this mess, on why it’s bad in ways you already know and in more ways you don’t.

And while I’m linking Current, the public media publication just announced the new host for its podcast, The Pub: Annie Russell, currently an editor at WBEZ.

Pod Save America heads to HBO. Surprise, surprise. Crooked Media’s flagship podcast is heading to the premium cable network with a series of hour-long specials that will follow the Obama bros — that’s former Obama aides Jon Favreau, Tommy Vietor, and Jon Lovett, in case you’re unfamiliar with the deep-blue podcast phenomenon — as they host live tapings on the campaign trail for what will most definitely be a spicy midterm election season this fall. This is the latest addition to the newly buzzy trend of podcasts being adapted for film and television, and the deal for this adaptation in particular was handled by WME.

Over at Vulture, I tried to turn a series of dots into a squiggly shape linking this development, the recent debut of 2 Dope Queens’ HBO specials, and HBO’s relationship with Bill Simmons to say something about the premium cable network’s potential strategic opportunities with podcasting. Put simply: Traditional standup comedy programming is getting more expensive due to the pressure of Netflix’s infinitely large war chest, and one could argue that certain types of conversational podcast programming offer HBO an alternative resource to adapt and develop content that can potentially hit the same kind of experience and pleasure beats you’d get from conventional standup TV specials.

But sometimes dots are just dots, and those aren’t really constellations in the sky — just random, meaningless arrangements of stars that are indifferent to your experience of them.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Meanwhile, in the nonprofit world. This one’s pretty interesting: Tiny Spark, the Amy Costello-led independent nonprofit news outfit that covers the world of philanthropy and nonprofits, has been acquired by Nonprofit Quarterly, which is…well, a much larger independent nonprofit news organization that covers the world of philanthropy and nonprofits. “Amy…has done an exceptional job building the audience for her podcast. We are excited not only to add this new media channel to our organization, but also to collaborate with Amy to expand our reach into public radio,” said Joel Toner, NPQ’s president and chief operating officer.

As part of this arrangement, NPQ owns Tiny Spark’s intellectual property and Amy Costello is brought on as a senior correspondent to lead the organization’s investigative journalism work, podcast development, and public radio outreach. “Tiny Spark’s work fits very well into the topics we cover at NPQ,” said Toner, when asked about the strategic thinking behind the acquisition. “Additionally, our 2017 annual audience survey confirmed that our readers had a significant interest in having us develop a podcast channel.”

I’d like to point out just how much this arrangement reminds me of the one that was struck between USA Today and Robin Amer, which I profiled last week. Speaking of which…

A quick update to last week’s item on The City. In the piece, I talked a little bit about the USA Today Network’s podcast plans for 2018, chiefly drawing information from a summer 2017 press release the organization circulated when they first announced the acquisition of The City. The plans mostly involve launching more podcasts across its properties.

The company reached out to let me know that their thinking has since evolved. “The network already produces dozens of podcasts across its 109-plus sites, but is now focusing on a handful of those shows to support with resources and marketing à la The City,” wrote Liz Nelson, the USA Today Network’s vice president of strategic content development. “At the time [the press release] was written, we did have 60-plus podcasts — most of which bubbled up organically at the local level. We’re closer to 40 now. That number will continue to ebb and flow and we encourage experimentation at the local level, which gives our journalists the space they need to experiment in the medium.”

Nelson added: “But from a network level, we are not putting the same amount of resources we’ve put into The City into every single show. We’re concentrating on a smaller set of shows we believe can have national impact.”

Hold this thought. We’re going to talk about other stuff for a bit, but we’ll get back to this notion of resource focus.

“It amuses me,” wrote Traug Keller, ESPN’s senior vice president of audio, in a corporate blog post touting the sport media giant’s podcasting business, “when I read about podcasting in the media with references to it being ‘new’ or ’emerging.'”

Keller continued:

As ESPN has done with other technologies — be it cable TV in 1979, the Internet in the ’90s, HD television or mobile initiatives more recently — we embraced podcasting as soon as we could and ran with it — even if we didn’t always know where we would end up! We launched our first podcast way back in 2005. A head start is often critical in a competitive business environment.

I also chuckle when people refer to podcasting as some mysterious new format to figure out. I’ve spent a career in audio, and I can tell you the key ingredients for compelling audio are constant…

Yeah, I don’t know, dude.

The borderline condescending tone of the post isn’t exactly something I’d want to hear from a company whose public narrative is one of crisis on multiple fronts — from the disruption of its cable-bundle–reliant business model to layoffs to its uneven handling of social media policies to the uncertain future of a gamble on OTT distribution — let alone a podcast publisher whose Podtrac ranking placement (as always, disclaimers of that service here and here) is powered by what is still largely a spray-and-pray strategy, in which 82 shows are deployed to bring in 35 million global unique monthly downloads. For reference, the infinitely smaller PRX team gets 4 million more with less than half that number of shows (34 podcasts), while NPR bags three times more downloads with just 42 podcasts that don’t at all traffic in naturally addictive sports content.

To be clear, I am, very generally speaking, more appreciative of a world with a strong (and better) ESPN in it than one without. And let me also just say that I really like some of its recent moves in on-demand audio, namely the creation of the 30 for 30 Podcast and having Katie Nolan launch her own show.

But I just don’t think very highly of this whole “oh we’ve been doing this for a long time/we were doing this first therefore we are super wise” mindset that either mistakes early sandbox dabblings for meaningful first-mover value creation or simply being first for being noteworthy. To be fair, this isn’t a knock that exclusively applies to Keller’s blog post; that thinking governs an alarming share of press releases and huffy emails that hit my inbox. But here’s the thing: I really don’t think it matters whether you did first. What mostly matters is if you did it right. Which is to say: If you invented Facebook, dammit, you’d have invented Facebook. Furthermore, as it stands, if there’s anything I’m acutely aware of writing this newsletter every week, it’s that, much like everywhere else, nobody really knows anything. It’s just a bunch of people working really hard, trying to figure this whole podcast thing out.

Anyway. I normally try not to be too worked up about anything, but this stuff really bugs me, and goodness, there’s nothing I would love more than to take this mindset, strap it onto the next Falcon Heavy rocket, and launch it straight into the dying sun.

Still, credit should be given where’s credit due: The post goes on to discuss what I think is a really positive development for ESPN’s podcast business:

To get there, we pared our lineup — once numbering in triple digits — to about 35, focusing on the most popular offerings (NFL, MLB, and NBA) and other niche topics where we can “own” the category. It’s a “less is more” strategy, where we can better produce and promote a smaller lineup.

Which reminds me of something…

After spray-and-pray. ESPN’s move to pare down and focus its overflowing podcast portfolio reminds me of another podcast publisher that’s been pretty active since the first podcast boom: NPR.

NPR’s podcast inventory, too, once numbered in the triple digits. In August 2005, its directory housed around 174 programs, 17 of which were NPR originals while others were shows from member stations that the public radio mothership were distributing on their behalf. (That practice has since been terminated.) The show number peaked around 2009, when the directory supported about 390 podcasts.

“Back in those days, podcasts were hard to access and only the really digitally savvy listeners could find and download them,” an NPR spokesperson told me. “We were experimenting and we were excited with the possibility of putting out NPR content on-demand, repackaging content that had aired about specific topics, seeing what the audience would like…It also allowed for additional creativity in programming, podcasts could be a sandbox for piloting new ideas.” Some of those ideas eventually grew into segments and radio shows of their own, but these podcasts mostly ended up being an unruly system of small, quiet, under-the-radar projects.

All that changed with this most recent podcasting boom, which started in the latter half of 2014. Around that time, a focused effort was made to identify and retain shows that fit a certain set of criteria that included having a native podcast experience (and not just recycled segments from existing shows), strong listener communities, an alignment with the organization’s business needs, and so on. The rest were culled. By the end, NPR was left with 25 shows. “Our thinking was that by having a smaller portfolio, we could draw more attention to them, serve them better, cross-promote, bring sponsorship support, create significant reach,” the spokesperson said.

The move felt like a gamble at the time, but it paid off. “While everyone expected our downloads to go down, within two months, downloads were somewhere near 50 million a month,” remembered Audible’s Eric Nuzum, then vice president of programming at NPR. “Within a year, it was over 80.”

That number is now 110 million. The point of this little parable is…well, I don’t think I have to spell it out. You get the picture.

Call Your 2018. There are few teams I admire more than the trio behind Call Your Girlfriend, the podcast for long-distance besties everywhere: journalist Ann Friedman, international woman of mystery Aminatou Sow, and radio producer Gina Delvac. The show has, over its nearly four years of existence, evolved from a fun side project to stay connected into something so much more than that. It is, in equal parts, a platform, a community, and an ever-growing resource. And if the enthusiasm of some friends of mine who consider themselves devout CYG fans are any indicator, Call Your Girlfriend is also damn close to being a full-fledged movement.

Last year was a difficult one for the team, given the political environment, but it was also a call to arms to which they responded with vigor. “Despite the trash-fire that was 2017 in America,” they wrote me, “Better yet, because of it, we wanted CYG to function as a place of refuge for our listeners, and for ourselves.” This translated into an interview schedule that was dense with guests that spoke directly to the moment — including but not limited to Hillary Rodham Clinton, Kirsten Gillibrand, Margaret Atwood, and Ellen Pao — as well as a multipart series on women running for office that featured sit-downs with first-time candidates and organizations that support women seeking political office. The team also worked to push the show creatively, producing a special episode on pelvic pain and trauma and occasionally handing the mic over to other podcasting teams, like Who? Weekly’s Lindsey Weber and Bobby Finger along with Good Muslim Bad Muslim’s Tanzila Ahmed and Zahra Noorkbakhsh.

The year was also fruitful for Call Your Girlfriend’s business. Though specific numbers were not disclosed, I’m told that the show’s revenues — which come from a combination of ad sales, live events, and a healthy merchandising arm — far exceeded their original targets. More ambitious goals were set for the new year.

We’re neck-deep into the second month of 2018, so I thought it was a good a time as any to check in with the team about their plans for the coming months, their thoughts on how the industry has changed, and their commitment to being independent. They were kind enough to oblige:

Conveniently, David Axelrod is familiar with both, as President Barack Obama’s former chief strategist for his 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns and as the voice of his podcast The Axe Files, a production from CNN and the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics. (Disclosure: As an alumna of the University of Chicago I was involved with the IOP, though I did not interact with Axelrod frequently.) He worked as a local reporter in Chicago before jumping to politics, developing campaign ads, and eventually leading messaging for Obama’s early years in the White House.

In 2015, Axelrod launched The Axe Files as a mechanism for finding common ground in sharing life stories between political, media, and other celebrity heavyweights. His guests have included John McCain, Katie Couric, Corey Lewandowski, Spike Lee, former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, Chelsea Handler, Tom Hanks, and even Obama himself (surprise). He now leads the Institute of Politics and is a political commentator on CNN.

I spoke with Axelrod as he traversed the trains of Philadelphia about the market for podcasts, the media coverage of the Alabama Senate race, the siloing of news and information, and more. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

That’s a sideshow. What’s quickly appearing on the main stage — if it’s still behind the curtain for now — is the beginning of a likely massive movement in news media ownership. You think you’ve seen a politicization of the press? The 2016 election may serve as just its preamble.

We’re on the brink — witness several actions this week alone — of a small number of right-leaning companies rapidly buying up, or buying into, the assets of journalism companies. In so doing, the alt-right “fake news” assault may move into a much more insidious phase, as long-trusted brands could take their marching orders from those who believe “fact” is fungible, in service of their political and business goals.

“Media madness,” former Federal Communications Commission member Michael Copps called it Wednesday, as 15 Democratic senators called for a new federal investigation of the FCC’s rush to deregulate broadcast media in America.

Their immediate target: Today’s FCC meeting, as current FCC chairman Ajit Pai speeds up his blitzkrieg assault on the decades-old regulatory rules aimed at maintaining a diverse, many-voiced, widely owned free press. Soon to be repealed: several regulations that have prohibited domination of broadcast news media by a few companies and one that has long forbid the joint ownership of a major newspaper and a major TV broadcaster in the same market. [Update: On Thursday afternoon, the FCC indeed voted to repeal the regulations preventing broadcasters from owning newspapers in the same market.]

While Pai and his confederates pose superficially plausible arguments about how digital media has changed everything, their goals are more prosaic. Sinclair Broadcasting figures to become the first big winner of the new era. Although it’s opposed by a good mix of critics — from the stalwart Free Press group to Newsmax’s Chris Ruddy to Glenn Beck to the Dish Network, Public Knowledge, and Common Cause — Sinclair stands a good chance of soon becoming the largest regional broadcaster. How big? If it is allowed to complete its acquisition of Tribune Media (which some will recall cashed out a good chunk of the newspaper industry–built digital classifieds business and then most of the real estate and buildings associated with the former Tribune, now Tronc, newspapers), Sinclair will own 233 TV stations across the country, including the 42 gained in the Tribune sale. That’s a reach into 72 percent of U.S. households. Before the in-progress de-regulation, companies were capped at 39 percent.

Look no further than the coverage of the Roy Moore story to get a glimpse of the future in detail. In “How Sinclair compromised the news on an Alabama station it owns to support Roy Moore,” Baltimore Sun media critic David Zurawik traced the chain of slanted reporting. It began with Sinclair-owned WBMA, which reported that all its sources (from three interviews) believed the good judge and not The Washington Post.

Then Breitbart picked up that report, giving its journalism even wider distribution and its own brand of certification. It’s hard to quickly assess how WBMA and other Sinclair owned stations have covered the Moore story. What we do know is that Sinclair, privately owned and led by chairman David D. Smith and CEO Christopher Ripley, makes no secret of its alt-right enthusiasms. It has mandated nationally produced must-carry editorials, some of them so fact-challenged as to provide ample satiric fodder for John Oliver. 6,356,541 people, as of this writing, had watched that 20-minute Oliver segment, but it’s unclear how much of a difference that makes. (On the other hand, let’s recognize the dogged work of Advance Publications’ Al.com tracking the real story of Roy Moore’s behavior in Gadsden in the 1970s and eighties.)

Sinclair’s approval appears to be in the final stages, though it’s unclear how the heightening opposition will affect that. It may be the first of ever-bigger deals done for political as well as business reasons. As former FCC commissioner Copps told Deadline.com Wednesday, “[It’s] the nadir of the FCC’s credibility as a protector of the public interest. We shouldn’t just be focused on one merger. There are going to be a lot more after that. It’s a flashing green light, greener than any before it.”

While broadcast takes center ring here, pay attention to the rest of the circus.

On Wednesday, the aspirational media mogul Koch Brothers blazed their way back into media ownership consciousness. As The New York Times reported, the brothers are backing a bid to buy Time Inc. With an injection of $500 million, magazine publisher Meredith looks as if it will finally be able to close its pursuit of Time Inc., perhaps putting that company out of its two-decades-old transition woes. The Kochs came close to beating Michael Ferro to the Tribune Publishing punch three years ago; only odd circumstance and pressure on one of Tribune’s then-major owners, Oaktree Capital Management, and on its co-chairman Bruce Karsh, prevented that deal.

In 2013, the Kochs came close to owning The Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Hartford Courant, Florida’s Sun Sentinel and Orlando Sentinel and Baltimore Sun. (Presumably, if they had made the acquisition, David Zurawik wouldn’t be writing his critical columns for the Sun, and then often taking his viewpoint to Brian Stelter’s Sunday morning Reliable Sources.)

As the Times’ Dealbook put it, “It is not clear how much influence — if any — the Kochs would have on a Meredith-owned Time Inc. if the deal were to go through.” The Kochs have never been shy about mixing business and politics, and they’ll be — with long-standing publisher Meredith a curious intermediary — close to such titles as Time Magazine, Fortune and Money.

How might they use that influence? How might Sinclair double down on its own advocacy after it wins the approvals it needs? Who else may come along — with enough money to freely mix business and politics? Inevitably, Rupert Murdoch’s name reappears. Just a week after it was reported that his 21st Century Fox was in talks to sell substantial film and TV cable assets to Disney, his name has popped up again as a would-be buyer.

Could it have been the never-say-die 86-year-old news magnate of our time who whispered AT&T sweet nothings in President Trump’s ear, moving him to both tweet concern about media consolidation and to see his recent pick for Department of Justice Antitrust chief reverse himself and object to AT&T’s buy of Time Warner, including, most significantly to our points, CNN? Yet it’s also been reported that Murdoch has been a would-be buyerof CNN? The regulatory apparatus, or the dismantling of one, only serves as another means to a business end for Murdoch. Yes, imagine it: Some kind of Fox/CNN tie-up of money, distribution and, of course, working the political angles of the day.

Who may be a first mover if Ajit Pai is successful in letting big broadcasters buy up as many of the country’s TV stations as they want and add big metro newspapers to their consolidated operations? Rupert Murdoch would have to be high on that list. And again, the L.A. Times, the center of so much intrigue throughout its ownership-challenged decade, plays a part. In 2012, Murdoch, too, wanted to buy the L.A. Times. But he was stymied by the cross-ownership rules that meant he’d had to sell highly profitable L.A. stations in order to buy the Times. Now, if the FCC changes stick, Murdoch may be a key player in the broadcast/press roll-up.

This brings up the inevitable question: where are the other names? Wasn’t George Soros supposed to be the master of progressive conspiracies? We’ve seen people like Jeff Bezos (Washington Post), John Henry (Boston), Glen Taylor (Minneapolis) and the Huntsmans (Salt Lake), among others, step forward and return degrees of reinvestment and stability to important metro dailies. Now, when it looks as if many more assets can be bought — and combined, with TV broadcast assets looking richer in a print-decimated world — who else will step forward?

It will take confidence, courage, and money, to confront the new reality. Free Press and others are likely to contest FCC changes in the courts, but that may only be a delaying action. It’s best, perhaps, to contest this war of free press in the marketplace as well. This week, I raised the question of who might buy CNN if the global TV news giant (and leader of the digital news audience pack) comes up for sale. Though, AT&TT CEO Randall Stephenson has proclaimed his willingness to litigate DOJ’s objection to the breadth of his Time Warner buy, time — and offers — may persuade him to sell off CNN.

The gravity of such a sale is clear. I’d argue that CNN has served as a fact-seeking bulwark against the alt-right, in the company of the Times and Post in aggressively covering and uncovering truths and lies. Imagine if it morphed into something else. (In fact, AT&T’s own standing has quickly morphed, given the crazy times: It has moved from being a perhaps poor steward of CNN to a politically aggrieved party in the mess. On Monday, L.A. Times columnist Michael Hiltzik laid out concerns about the AT&T/Time Warner deal.

On Tuesday, Axios’ Jim VandeHei linked the rise of Newt Gingrich’s weaponized politics to John McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin as VP to the “algorithm-ized rage” of Facebook. “Fox News, created in 1996, televised and monetized this hard-edged combat politics. This created the template for MSNBC to do the same on the left, giving both sides a place to fuel and fund rage 24/7. CNN soon went all politics, all day, making governance a show in need of drama,” he wrote. The Fox point is a good one, but underestimates Fox’s — and Murdoch’s influence — on our current politics.

Before Fox — the Americanized version of downmarket British tabloids that blur fact and fictions — such “journalism” was reserved for a place at the supermarket checkout. Most people knew that the category of Enquirers and Stars were not to be taken seriously. Fox News changed that by looking like TV news, its production values and Roger Ailes’ wiles revolutionizing reality. In 2017, we’re up to competing realities. What about 2027?

In the Trump administration’s ongoing teardown of regulation — from health to environment to education — incalculable damage grows. Its media deregulation could have a great deal of impact. I’ve written, here at the Lab, about the likely impacts of news deserts on the 2016 election. As we approach 2018, that desertification only grows. Print advertising losses of 15 percent or more will mean hundreds of fewer journalists working next year. The FCC’s cry for digital freedom is likely a smokescreen. The likely convergence in the TV/local newspaper property combos to come will likely be convergences of costs and less reporting. Cost savings are a top priority for companies eyeing such consolidations. But this deregulation could put more money into the pockets of those who already have a lot of it.

Last week, when I spoke with New York Times CEO Mark Thompson, he recalled his awakening to the value of journalism in a democratic society:

My story of becoming a journalist — I was born in 1957, so at the age of 14 or 15, I was completely engrossed by American politics and Watergate. In England, by the way, where I couldn’t see any American newspapers. But hearing at one or two removes about the work being done by The New York Times and The Washington Post in uncovering Pentagon Papers, Watergate, and so forth. It’s a matter of honest astonishment that 45 years, 46 years later, it’s the same brands.

It is an astonishment. About 2,000 journalists, in total, power those two institutions. Although their work this year will prove historic, it’s not enough. We need journalists working freely in the pursuit of fact all over the country, in whatever “print” and “TV” become.

Three months after making the transition from the Discover platform’s text-based newsmagazine format to a daily video show, CNN’s Snapchat style is clearly different from other publishers on the app known for captivating teenagers’ attention with instantaneous sharing, breakdancing hot dogs, and voice changing filters. You won’t see single-second shots or snappily colored graphics cartwheeling over a single anchor in The Update, CNN’s brand ambassador to the youth, but rather a “cast of characters” steadily sharing the news in a slower-paced manner that doesn’t break too far from CNN’s flagship cable news channel.

“Snapchat is a part of, for us, a larger social and digital strategy which is about creating the CNN news habit for every generation on every platform,” said Samantha Barry, CNN’s executive producer for social and emerging media. “We’re telling great stories on the platforms where they live. They’re getting to know those three red and white letters for what it stands for: great news and information.”

CNN was one of Snapchat’s earliest media partners, with ties from an investment from Time Warner (CNN’s parent company) and its hiring of former CNN reporter Peter Hamby as the platform’s head of news in May 2015. When the Discover section, prominently featuring news from legacy organizations, launched in January 2015, CNN was one of 10 media partners alongside ESPN and National Geographic. But the content was largely text-based, and Snap controlled (and still does) who could actually publish within Discover.

That administrative upper hand has helped the platform avoid the pitfalls of user-generated authoritative-seeming content, such as fake news. Bloomberg’s Max Chafkin points out that “whereas Facebook deliberately blurs the line between personal status updates, news articles, and ads — sticking all three in its constantly updating, algorithm-driven News Feed — Snapchat has taken a more old-fashioned approach. The app’s news section, Discover, is limited to professionally edited content, including dozens of channels maintained by old-media outlets.”

CNN’s Snapchat show fits more with the old-media style of sharing information. CNN joined NBC News as a hard news provider on the platform, the latter launching its twice-daily show a month before. (NBCUniversal invested $500 million into Snap in March.) Discover offers plenty of entertainment content in addition to Snapchat’s curated and user-focused Our Stories, but NBC News’s Stay Tuned, CNN’s The Update, and Hamby’s Good Luck America weekly docu-series are shows that delve into current events, breaking news, politics, and analysis. Even then, it’s typically Snapchat-style politics and analysis — NBC News’ Nick Ascheim emphasized the importance of being high-energy: “Each show has to engage from literally the first second. It’s so easy to tap through a segment of the show…You have to provide them a very clear reason from the get-go why they should be sitting through this.”

Barry said she’s fine with The Update moving more slowly than other Snapchat shows. “Snapchat is about taking fantastic journalism and serving it up in a way that is palatable for the platform,” she said. “In my opinion, it doesn’t need to be full of bells and whistles and flashes in order to engage somebody. Content engages. Great journalism engages users.”

The Update has featured dispatches from North Korea, special reports on gun ownership after the mass shooting in Las Vegas, and sexual harassment allegations after the Harvey Weinstein news broke. Unlike the NBC News show’s two alternating hosts and team devoted specifically just for the show’s production, The Update features that rotating cast of characters” as Barry put it, of its anchors and correspondents for different stories with the CNN logo prominent rather than a pair of hosts. But that’s also an edge for their show over the previous magazine Discover format: “We didn’t in Discover have the opportunity to highlight all the anchors and reporters,” Barry said. Its relationship to the CNN TV programming is more seamless: The Update is released every day at 6 p.m. and encompasses content covered on the network, though not necessarily recycling the same footage.

“As a video-led network, we distribute our content on so many platforms. One of the challenges is if you are talking about legacy TV and 16×9 in digital that is shot a certain way,” Barry said. “It’s not always repurposed square for Facebook or vertical for Snapchat. Where do we make those decisions to create original content?”

Barry said the show comes from a team of “six dedicated producers that work on an edition of The Update on any given day” in New York, Atlanta, and London.

This summer, as a Knight Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard, I’ve been looking at another technology I think could lead to a similar step change in how publishers relate to their audiences: AI-driven voice interfaces, such as Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Home and Assistant, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Apple’s upcoming HomePod. The more I’ve spoken to the editorial and technical leads building on these platforms in different news organizations, as well as the tech companies developing them, the more I’ve come to this view: This is potentially bigger than the impact of the iPhone. In fact, I’d describe these smart speakers and the associated AI and machine learning that they’ll interface with as the huge burning platform the news industry doesn’t even know it’s standing on.

This wasn’t how I planned to open this piece even a week before my Nieman fellowship ended. But as I tied together the research I’d done with the conversations I’d had with people across the industry, something became clear: As an industry, we’re far behind the thinking of the technology companies investing heavily in AI and machine learning. Over the past year, the CEOs of Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and other global tech giants have all said, in different ways, that they now run “AI-first” companies. I can’t remember a single senior news exec ever mentioning AI and machine learning at any industry keynote address over the same period.

Of course, that’s not necessarily surprising. “We’re not technology companies” is a refrain I’ve heard a lot. And there are plenty of other important issues to occupy industry minds: the rise of fake news, continued uncertainty in digital advertising, new tech such as VR and AR, and the ongoing conundrum of responding to the latest strategic moves of Facebook.

But as a result of all these issues, AI is largely being missed as an industry priority; to switch analogies, it feels like we’re the frog being slowly boiled alive, not perceiving the danger to itself until it’s too late to jump out.

“In all the speeches and presentations I’ve made, I’ve been shouting about voice AI until I’m blue in the face. I don’t know to what extent any of the leaders in the news industry are listening,” futurist and author Amy Webb told me. As she put it in a piece she wrote for Nieman Reports recently:

Talking to machines, rather than typing on them, isn’t some temporary gimmick. Humans talking to machines — and eventually, machines talking to each other — represents the next major shift in our news information ecosystem. Voice is the next big threat for journalism.

My original goal for this piece was to share what I’d learned — examples of what different newsrooms are trying with smart speakers and where the challenges and opportunities lie. There’s more on all that below. But I first want to emphasize the critical and urgent nature of what the news industry is about to be confronted with, and how — if it’s not careful — it’ll miss the boat just as it did when the Internet first spread from its academic cocoon to the rest of the world. Later, I’ll share how I think the news industry can respond.

Talking to objects isn’t weird any more

In the latest version of her annual digital trends report, Kleiner Perkins’ Mary Meeker revealed that 20 percent of all Google search was now happening through voice rather than typing. Sales of smart speakers like Amazon’s Echo were also increasing fast:

It’s becoming clear that users are finding it useful to interact with devices through voice. “We’re treating voice as the third wave of technology, following the point-and-click of PCs and touch interface of smartphones,” Francesco Marconi, a media strategist at Associated Press, told me. He recently coauthored AP’s report on how artificial intelligence will impact journalism. The report gives some excellent insights into the broader AI landscape, including automation of content creation, data journalism through machine learning, robotic cameras, and media monitoring systems. It highlighted smart speakers as a key gateway into the world of AI.

Since the release of the Echo, a number of outlets have tried to learn what content works (or doesn’t) on this class of devices. Radio broadcasters have been at an understandable advantage, being able to adapt their content relatively seamlessly.

In the U.S., NPR was among the first launch partners on these platforms. Ha-Hoa Hamano, a senior product manager at NPR working on voice AI, described its hourly newscast as “the gateway to NPR’s content.”

“We’re very bullish on the opportunity with voice,” Hamano said. She cited research showing 32 percent of people aged 18 to 34 don’t own a radio in their home — “which is a terrifying stat when you’re trying reach and grow audience. These technologies allow NPR to fit into their daily routine at home — or wherever they choose to listen.”

NPR was available at launch on the Echo and Google Home, and will be soon on Apple’s HomePod. “We think of the newscast as the gateway to the rest of NPR’s news and storytelling,” she said. “It’s a low lift for us to get the content we already produce onto these platforms. The challenge is finding the right content for this new way of listening.”

The API that drives NPR made it easy for Hamano’s team to integrate the network’s content into Amazon’s system. NPR’s skills — the voice-driven apps that Amazon’s voice assistant Alexa recognizes — can respond to requests like “Alexa, ask NPR One to recommend a podcast” or “Alexa, ask NPR One to play Hidden Brain.”

The Washington Post — owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos — is also an early adopter in running a number of experiments on Amazon’s and Google’s smart speaker platforms. Senior product manager Joseph Price has been leading this work. “I think we’re at the early stages of what I’d call ambient computing — technology that reduces the ‘friction’ between what we want and actually getting it in terms of our digital activity,” he said. “It will actually mean we’ll spend less time being distracted by technology, as it effectively recedes into the background as soon as we are finished with it. That’s the starting point for us when we think about what voice experiences will work for users in this space.”

Not being a radio broadcaster, the Post has had to experiment with different forms of audio — from using Amazon’s Alexa automated voices on stories from its website to a Post reporter sharing a particular story in their own voice. Other experiments have included launching an Olympics skill, where users could ask the Post who had won medals during last year’s Olympics. That was an example of something that didn’t work, though — Amazon built the same capability into the main Alexa platform soon afterwards itself.

“That was a really useful lesson for us,” Price said. “We realized that in big public events like these, where there’s an open data set about who has won what, it made much more sense for a user to just ask Alexa who had won the most medals, rather than specifically asking The Washington Post on Alexa the same question.” That’s a broader lesson: “We have to think about what unique or exclusive information, content, or voice experience can The Washington Post specifically offer that the main Alexa interface can’t.”

One area that Price’s team is currently working on is the upcoming release of notifications on both Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Home platforms. For instance, if there’s breaking news, the Post will be able to make a user’s Echo chime and flash green, at which point the user can ask “Alexa, what did I miss?” or “Alexa, what are my notifications?” Users will have to opt in before getting alerts to their device, and they’ll be able to disable alerts temporarily through a do-not-disturb mode.

Publishers like the Post that produce little or no native audio content have to work out the right way of presenting their text-based content on a voice-driven platform. One option is to allow Alexa to read stories that have been published; that’s easy to scale up. The other is getting journalists to voice articles or columns or create native audio for the platform. That’s much more difficult to scale, but several news organizations told me initial audience feedback suggests this is users’ preferred experience.

For TV broadcasters like CNN, early experiments have focused on trying to figure out when their users would most want to listen to a bulletin — as opposed to watching one — and how much time they might have specifically to do so via a smart speaker. Elizabeth Johnson, a senior editor at CNN Digital, has been leading the work on developing flash-briefing content for these platforms.

“We assumed some users would have their device in the kitchen,” she said. “This led us to ask, what are users probably doing in the kitchen in the morning? Making breakfast. How long does it take to make a bagel? Five minutes. So that’s probably the amount of time a user has to listen to us, so let’s make sure we can update them in less than five minutes. For other times of the day, we tried to understand what users might be doing: Are they doing the dishes? Are they watching a commercial break on TV or brushing their teeth? We know that we’re competing against a multitude of options, so what sets us apart?”

With Amazon’s recent release of the Echo Show — which has a built-in screen — CNN is taking the “bagel time” philosophy to developing a dedicated video news briefing at the same length as its audio equivalent.

CNN is also thinking hard about when notifications will and won’t work. “If you send a notification at noon, but the user doesn’t get home until 6 p.m., does it make sense for them to see that notification?” Johnson asked. “What do we want our users to hear when they come home? What content do we have that makes sense in that space, at that time? We already consider the CNN mobile app and Apple News alerts to be different, as are banners on CNN.com — they each serve different purposes. Now, we have to figure out how to best serve the audience alerts on these voice-activated platforms.”

What’s surprised many news organizations is how broad the age range of their audiences are on smart speakers. Early adopters in this space are very different from early adopters of other technologies. Many didn’t buy these smart speakers themselves, but were given them as gifts, particularly around Christmas. The fact there’s very little learning curve to use them means the technical bar is much lower. Speaking to the device is intuitive.

Edison Research was recently commissioned by NPR to find out more about what these users are doing with these devices. Music was unsurprisingly at the top of the reasons why they use these devices, but coming in second was to “ask questions without needing to type.” Also high up was an interest to listen to news and information — encouraging for news organizations.

While screens aren’t going away — people will always want to see and touch things — there’s no doubt that voice as an interface for devices is already becoming ingrained as a natural behavior among our audiences. If you’re not convinced, watch children interact with smart speakers: Just as we’ve seen the first Internet-connected generation grow up, we’re about to see the “voice generation” arrive feeling completely at ease with this way of engaging with technology.

The NPR–Edison research has also highlighted this trend. Households with kids that have smart speakers say engagement is high with these devices. Unlike phones or tablet, smart speakers are communal experiences — which also raises the likelihood of families spending time together, whether for education or entertainment purposes.

(It’s worth noting here that there have been some concerns raised about whether children asking for — or demanding — content from a device without saying “please” or “thank you” could have downsides. As San Francisco VC and dad Hunter Walk put it last year: “Amazon Echo is magical. It’s also turning my kid into an asshole.” To curb this, skills or apps for children could be designed in the future with voice responses requiring politeness.)

For the BBC, where I work, developing a voice-led digital product for children is an exciting possibility. It already has considerable experience of content for children on TV, radio, online and digital.

“Offering the ability to seamlessly navigate our rich content estate represents a great opportunity for us to forge a closer relationship with our audience and to serve them better,” Ben Rosenberg, senior distribution manager at the BBC, said. “The current use cases for voice suggest there is demand that sits squarely in the content areas where we consistently deliver on our ambitions — radio, news, and children’s genres.”

BBC News recently formed a working group to rapidly develop prototypes for new forms of digital audio using voice as the primary interface. Expect to hear more about this in the near future.

Rosenberg also highlights studies that have found voice AI interfaces appeared to significantly increase consumption of audio content. This is something that came out strongly in the NPR-Edison research too:

Owning a smart speaker can lead to a sizeable increase in consumption of music, news and talk content, podcasts, and audiobooks. Media organizations that have such content have a real opportunity if they can figure out how to make it as easily accessible through these devices as possible. That’s where we get to the tricky part.