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

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

“Search Generative Experience”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— rat king (@MikeIsaac) May 10, 2023

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

— Matt Pearce (@mattdpearce) May 11, 2023

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

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

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

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

— Shira Ovide (@ShiraOvide) May 10, 2023

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

— Peter Kafka (@pkafka) May 10, 2023

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

— Alex Arrelia (@AlexArrelia) May 11, 2023

“Hidden gems”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— jo livingstone (@Jo_Livingstone) April 27, 2023

The Baffler

Bellingcat

Bloomberg

Dame Magazine

Detroit Metro Times

Discourse Blog

Hell Gate

The Intercept

Media Matters

Nieman Lab

The Onion

Sahan Journal

Semafor

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

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

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 25, 2023

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

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 25, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Clare Malone (@ClareMalone) April 25, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

BuzzFeed News’s first few years were a time of global expansion and excitement. This is the era when Stratechery’s Ben Thompson called BuzzFeed “the most important news organization in the world.”

But there were warning signs. In 2017, BuzzFeed was receiving more than 50% of its traffic from platforms — setting it up for trouble when the algorithms changed and social traffic to news sites plummeted. And the public always seemed to have a hard time distinguishing the Pulitzer-winning BuzzFeed *News* from cat-video BuzzFeed.

BuzzFeed, like many other digital publishers, went through multiple rounds of layoffs. When the company went public, its stock price began falling almost immediately, and investors pushed for BuzzFeed News to be eliminated entirely.

“Investors can’t force me to cut news, and the union can’t force me to subsidize news,” CEO Jonah Peretti wrote in an internal memo in spring 2022. But, he added, “We can’t keep losing money.”

Just about a year later, he announced that BuzzFeed News would be shut down.

[Part I: 2011 to 2017]

In a memo to staff on Thursday, Peretti announced that BuzzFeed News would be shut down entirely, amid broader layoffs at the company. From now on, “we will have a single news brand in HuffPost, which is profitable,” Peretti wrote. As of Thursday afternoon, BuzzFeed stock was trading below $1 a share.

We’ve chronicled the ups and downs of BuzzFeed News since 2011, when the company hired a blogger named Ben Smith. Here’s part I of its history, from 2011 to 2017. (And here’s Part II.)

This doesn’t exactly mean that NPR’s 50 official Twitter accounts — @NPR, @allsongs, @altlatino, @jazznight, @LouderThanARiot, @microface, @morningedition, @nprhelp, @npr_ed, @npralltech, @npraskmeanother, @npratc, @nprbooks, @nprbusiness, @nprchives, @nprclassical, @nprcodeswitch, @nprdesign, @nprembedded, @nprextra, @nprfood, @nprgoatsandsoda, @nprhealth, @nprinterns, @nprinvisibilia, @NPRItsBeenAMin, @nprjobs, @nprlifekit, @nprmusic, @nprone, @nproye, @nprpolitics, @nprscience, @nprshortwave, @nprstations, @nprtechteam, @nprtraining, @nprviz, @nprweekend, @nprwest, @nprworld, @pchh, @planetmoney, @podcastsNPR, @roughly, @sourceoftheweek, @tedradiohour, @throughlinenpr, @UpFirst, @waitwait — are leaving-leaving Twitter, and the company has been careful not to use those words. The accounts — by my count have a combined 17,665,607 followers; NPR’s flagship account alone has 8.8 million — haven’t been deleted. We can keep arguing about whether Twitter actually drives traffic1, but a multi-million-person following is definitely doing something positive for your brand, and it’s taken years to build. NPR CEO John Lansing was careful not to rule out a return:

In a BBC interview posted online Wednesday, Musk suggested he may further change the label to “publicly funded.” His words did not sway NPR’s decision makers. Even if Twitter were to drop the designation altogether, Lansing says the network will not immediately return to the platform.

“At this point I have lost my faith in the decision-making at Twitter,” he says. “I would need some time to understand whether Twitter can be trusted again.”

In the meantime, NPR’s accounts have a “two-week grace period” to “revise their social media strategies.” On Thursday, some of the accounts tweeted infographics about non-Twitter places to find them. Others just aren’t tweeting.

pic.twitter.com/OLgOHvTlma

— NPR (@NPR) April 12, 2023

We are turning away from Twitter but not from our audiences and communities. There are plenty of ways to stay connected and keep up with NPR's news, music, and cultural content.
See full statement below: pic.twitter.com/VPDXy7lWw7

— Isabel Lara (@isalara) April 12, 2023

pic.twitter.com/OLgOHvTlma

— NPR (@NPR) April 12, 2023

Some of NPR’s Twitter accounts already hadn’t tweeted in weeks (@AltLatino) or months (@PodcastsNPR, @nprhelp) or years (@MicroFace, @nprchives).

While there’s been plenty of public cheering for NPR’s move, it’s unclear how many other media organizations will follow suit, especially without a fairly direct push. PBS, for instance, hasn’t tweeted since April 8, but its sub-accounts, like @NewsHour, remain active.

1. For Nieman Lab, it definitely does.

The changes coincide with Twitter officially shutting down its free API, and also with Twitter inaccurately labeling NPR as “state-affiliated media” (a label also given to propaganda outlets like Russian broadcaster RT and China’s People’s Daily newspaper).

On Thursday, Twitter made it impossible to embed tweets in Substack posts. Paste a Twitter link in a Substack post and it simply doesn’t work, giving you this pop-up message:

Team is working on it. We're not the only ones experiencing problems with the Twitter API today.

— Chris Best (@cjgbest) April 6, 2023

Twitter is also not allowing users to take actions on tweets that contain substack.com links — as of Friday morning you can’t like, reply to, or retweet them. (Quote-tweeting still seems to work.)

oh wonderful — I see Elon has made it impossible to RT, reply, or like tweets containing a link to a Substack article. What's next, a SpaceX launch site right outside my condo?

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 7, 2023

The block on RTs/likes/replies also doesn’t appear to apply to tweets that include Substack sites with custom domains:

Okay, seems like the custom domains are still exempt from this goofy change in Twitter's end. (For now.)

— Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) April 7, 2023

A current workaround is using a link shortener so “substack.com” doesn’t appear in the link you’re sharing.

Looks like you can get around twitter’s apparent ban on substack links by just using a URL shortener lol https://t.co/Bt7HveFV1I

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) April 7, 2023

Substack’s statement:

Statement from the founders of Substack on Twitter’s decision to restrict engagement with Substack content pic.twitter.com/HbQJk5v0jn

— Max Tani (@maxwelltani) April 7, 2023

Twitter’s move against Substack isn’t totally unprecedented; Instagram and Twitter squabbled in pre-Musk times, though more recently the relationship appears to have mended.

1. Substack, at least until recently, was also burning money. The Information, referring to recent SEC filings, reported Friday that the company “Substack’s expenses skyrocketed as a result of its expansion in 2021, causing enormous losses,” and that year “Substack reported negative revenue, which is unusual.” You can look at the SEC filings here.

New data from Hearst Newspapers bears this out. Writing for INMA, Hearst Newspapers’ Ryan Nakashima notes:

In the past couple of years, several newspaper publications with paywalls have given subscribers a new benefit: They allowed them to share articles with friends and family for free. At Hearst Newspapers, we added a second wrinkle: requiring anonymous gift recipients to register an e-mail address to redeem the article view.

The New York Times and Washington Post both also allow article-gifting, but they don’t require recipients to share their email addresses. (Other publications I found that have the feature: Bloomberg.com, the Financial Times, The Economist, and the Portland Press-Herald.) For Hearst, though, prompting for an email worked well enough that it’s expanding the experiment from HoustonChronicle.com to its other largest papers — SFChronicle.com in San Francisco; ExpressNews.com in San Antonio, and TimesUnion.com in Albany — with more papers planned.

It’s something readers really wanted, Nakashima writes:

In a survey of our subscribers last March, the ability to share articles with friends or family was the most requested feature benefit. And when we sent an e-mail to subscribers touting its availability, more than 50% read the e-mail, an astonishingly high read rate for any e-mail campaign.

The second element of our feature was just as exciting. When gift recipients went to view the article sent by their friend or significant other, about 20% provided an e-mail address when asked.

That is more than triple the e-mail provision rate when we tested imposing a registration step on visitors who have exceeded their monthly allotment of free article views.

More here.

— Male journalists were still much more likely to cover sports. Women were more likely to cover health, and family and education.

— Travel and entertainment are “the only topic area in which a majority of those who cover it (57%) are freelance or self-employed journalists.” Perhaps not coincidentally, travel is also where BuzzFeed is experimenting with AI-generated content.

— Pew found that journalists’ beats vary “modestly” by race and ethnicity. White journalists — who accounted for about three-quarters of the journalists Pew surveyed in total — represented large majorities of every beat except for “social issues and policy.”

More here.

Protocol, the technology news site that Politico founder Robert Allbritton launched in 2020 and then sold to Axel Springer along with Politico in 2021, shut down abruptly last November, laying off its 60-person staff. Its enterprise editor, Tom Krazit — who, all the disclosures, was my editor at Gigaom until 2015 when that site abruptly shut down, and who has been covering the tech industry for 20 years — launched a Substack while considering what to do next. He launched and ran Protocol’s enterprise and cloud computing newsletter, and eventually managed five writers before the shutdown.

Krazit bought the email list for that newsletter, including more than 20,000 subscribers, from Politico Media Group in February. Today, he’s relaunching it as Runtime. (“The folks at Politico Media Group wanted me to make clear that Runtime is in no way associated with Politico or Protocol, and, for the record, I am extremely happy to make that distinction,” Krazit noted in his launch post.)

The Runtime newsletter will come out three times a week, and an accompanying website will include a mix of long-form reporting, interviews, and explorations of emerging technologies. “You can’t drop a 1500-word report in a newsletter unless you’re Ben Thompson,” Krazit said, explaining the need for the website. “I’m not going to try to get away with that right off the bat.”

Runtime will be free to read and ad-supported; Krazit is its only full-time employee for now, and he’s hired some help with ad sales. Eventually, Krazit plans to hire more reporters, but he didn’t want to raise VC money. “I don’t want to promise anybody a job in these crazy times without being sure I can support that person beyond a short period,” he said.

The newsletter is launching on the publishing platform Ghost, which has emerged as a Substack competitor and hosts properties including The Atlantic’s subscriber-only newsletters, Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World, and David Sirota’s The Lever. “Substack is really nice. I’ve been doing a blog slash newsletter for the last few months, and I really like a lot of the things they offer, but they as a business seem very clearly geared around paid subscription,” Krazit said. “There are people on there who have sponsorship business models, but those don’t really seem aligned with [Substack’s] long term view.” Ghost, in his view, made more sense for an ad-supported newsletter.

Krazit added that enterprise reporting — which he defined simply for me as “writing about the business of businesses selling technology to other businesses” — is a unique space, advertising-wise, compared to consumer-focused tech reporting. “People who read this kind of content are reading it for business reasons, not so much for their own personal interests,” he said. “Runtime kind of has the luxury of being in a market where people want and need the kind of quality, in-depth journalism I’ve always wanted to provide. And there is a ton of sponsor interest in this market.”

I’ll note right up front that this paper is funded by Meta and written in response to proposed legislation in Canada and the U.K. that would make platforms pay publishers for linking to their content (similar to legislation that has already passed in Australia). The platforms’ position is that they send traffic to the publishers by linking to their content and shouldn’t have to pay them. The paper’s author, economist and consultant Jeffrey Eisenach, says up front that “The evidence presented here indicates that publishers reap considerable economic benefits from their use of Facebook.” But whether you support or oppose the legislation, there are a few interesting facts here about news on the platform, using data provided by Meta that as far as I know hasn’t been published elsewhere.

— News accounts for “less than 3% of what users see in their Facebook Feeds,” Eisenach writes, noting, “News publisher content plays an economically small and diminishing role on the Facebook platform.” The 3% figure is worldwide and “based on Meta internal data for the last 90 days ending August 2022.” Facebook had said in 2018 that news made up about 4% of the feed.

— In the fourth quarter of 2022, just 7.5% of posts shared on Facebook in the U.S. contained any links, to news or otherwise. That figure is decreasing over time; in the fourth quarter of 2021, 14.6% of posts shared on Facebook in the U.S. contained a link.

— “The vast majority of news content shared on Facebook comes from the publishers’ own Facebook pages,” Eisenach writes: For the 90-day period ending August 2022, “Meta reports that more than 90% of organic views on article links from news publishers globally were on links posted by the publishers, not by Facebook users. In other words, Facebook users who view news publisher content on Facebook are primarily viewing content selected and posted by the publishers themselves.”

The full paper is here.

Specifically, it looks a lot like the SEO-driven, human-written, meh content that you’ll find all over the rest of the internet. As Noor Al-Sibai and Jon Christian reported for Futurism on Thursday:

The 40 or so articles, all of which appear to be SEO-driven travel guides, are comically bland and similar to one another. Check out these almost-copied lines:

• “Now, I know what you’re thinking – ‘Cape May? What is that, some kind of mayonnaise brand?'” in an article about Cape May, in New Jersey.
• “Now I know what you’re thinking – ‘but Caribbean destinations are all just crowded resorts, right?'” in an article about St Maarten, in the Caribbean.
• “Now, I know what you’re thinking. Puerto Rico? Isn’t that where all the cruise ships go?” in an article about San Juan, in Puerto Rico.
• “Now, I know what you’re thinking- bigger isn’t always better,” in an article about Providence, in Rhode Island.
• “Now, I know what you’re probably thinking. Nepal? The Himalayas? Haven’t we all heard of that already?” in an article about Khumbu, in Nepal.
• “Now, I know what you’re probably thinking. “Brewster? Never heard of it,” in an article about Brewster, in Massachusetts.
• “I know what you’re thinking: isn’t Stockholm that freezing, gloomy city up in the north that nobody cares about?” in an article about Stockholm, in Sweden.

That’s not the bot’s only lazy trope. On review, almost everything the bot has published contains at least one line about a “hidden gem.”

You can see all the articles (THAT WE KNOW OF) here; they’re bylined “As Told to Buzzy,” a winking bow-tied robot with the bio “Articles written with the help of Buzzy the Robot (aka our Creative AI Assistant) but powered by human ideas.” Forty-four of them were published this month.

The articles are pretty bad.

this stuff is GOLD, what is everyone worried about!!! pic.twitter.com/3JkqkoEFQB

— Kathryn VanArendonk (@kvanaren) March 30, 2023

BuzzFeed is publishing AI-generated travel articles.

On the one hand, they're terrible. On the other, they're just reflecting back the fact that most travel writing online is truly awful.https://t.co/oUA0qX5uXu pic.twitter.com/fvCIDvDAN8

— Max Tani (@maxwelltani) March 30, 2023

credit where credit's due, this is an astonishing lede pic.twitter.com/JfTfumLSQy

— Kathryn VanArendonk (@kvanaren) March 30, 2023

Now, I know what you’re thinking: The concern isn’t that these specific articles are going to win any awards, it’s that AI’s future potential is so great that this is simply the tip of the iceberg and human writers will soon be replaced by a sentient, independent Buzzy.

Maybe. But another way to look at it is that a lot of the human-written content that Buzzy’s articles are competing with are also pretty bad — “essentially human-made AI”:

it was bc there was the need for more and constant content stream. so writers would scour the internet for what's been written before and essentially just rewrite it, maybe give it a new placement. but it was all the same, very random pool. same terminology, etc.

— cale g weissman (@caleweissman) March 30, 2023

anyway, now AI is actually doing this and it's worse in a different but funnier way: https://t.co/3M22BYhsnA

— cale g weissman (@caleweissman) March 30, 2023

A BuzzFeed spokesperson told Futurism that the company is using Buzzy + a human editor “to unlock the creative potential of UGC so we can broaden the range of ideas and perspectives that we publish,” with people picking the topics (in this case, specific cities) and Buzzy doing the, um, generating.

It’s not that different from a freelance assignment I did in my twenties: A human editor assigned me to write some articles about the promise of 5G — a topic about which I knew nothing — and I googled 5G, read other content mill-ish articles about it, and compiled them into my “own” article. The content I created wasn’t really meant to be read by humans who actually needed to know anything about 5G, in the same way that anybody who is planning a trip to Morocco probably shouldn’t get their recommendations from Buzzy. (Its recommendations are: Go to Marrakesh, the mountains, and the desert. It’s far away. Bye!)

In the 5G case, I was basically Buzzy, except I was getting paid. Buzzy works for free. You know, for now.

"They're taking the jobs of severely underpaid offshore 'content writers' for chum-bucket sites that no one reads except for ad-fraud bots!" If they can fake the money, it's a perfect closed circle.

— Steven Scott (@scottstev) March 30, 2023

Very formulaic picture-driven travel listicles. But this experiment shows that the writing is on the wall for anyone currently making a living from generating that type of content. https://t.co/uWAxfxJCyi

— Peter Aldhous (@paldhous) March 30, 2023

A little over a year after its launch, the news site Grid is being absorbed into The Messenger, a forthcoming news site that plans to employ 550 journalists within a year while changing “the face of the media landscape.”

What is Grid?

The Washington, D.C.–based Grid launched in January 2022 with a mission to provide a “fuller picture” around big news stories. “Grid is meant for people like you and me who follow the news but want something more,” cofounder and executive editor Laura McGann, the former politics editor of Vox.com and Politico, wrote at launch. The site touted its “creative formats,” like the “360,” which would examine news stories via “multiple lenses, including science, economics, misinformation, the law, politics, technology, identity and global.”

Grid’s “About us” page currently lists 50 staffers, including 13 reporters, and publishes around 5 stories a day. McGann also hosts a weekly podcast, “Bad Takes,” with editor-at-large Matthew Yglesias, and the site has one daily and three weekly newsletters.

Grid CEO and cofounder Mark Bauman stepped down last November amid what Axios’s Sara Fischer described as “slow revenue growth” and struggles to build an audience.

Second part of the release: As part of the deal, the UAE-based fund IMI has invested in the parent company of the Messenger pic.twitter.com/dHryUf3lBn

— Max Tani (@maxwelltani) March 22, 2023

What is The Messenger?

The Messenger is a forthcoming digital news site founded by Jimmy Finkelstein, the wealthy 74-year-old media entrepreneur and former owner of The Hill. Finkelstein has raised $50 million to launch the site this May.

The Messenger’s LinkedIn page describes it as

a new digital news media company, launching May 2023, whose mission is to deliver accurate, balanced, non-partisan news and information. Powered by one of the largest digital newsrooms in the country, The Messenger’s coverage will span news, politics and all our readers’ most important passion points, from sports and entertainment to technology, health and business.

Finkelstein recently told The New York Times that he hopes The Messenger (aka TheMessenger.) will recreate the media of the past:

“I remember an era where you’d sit by the TV, when I was a kid with my family, and we’d all watch ‘60 Minutes’ together. Or we all couldn’t wait to get the next issue of Vanity Fair or whatever other magazine you were interested in. Those days are over, and the fact is, I want to help bring those days back.”

From The Messenger’s website:

The Messenger is founded on the belief that it is not our role to shape or alter the news, it is our role to deliver the news with an unflinching dedication to accuracy, balance and objectivity. In doing so, we aim to earn your trust and rekindle your passion for media.

What do Grid employees think about the acquisition?

A Grid spokesperson directed me to The Messenger’s spokesperson. No Grid employees are quoted in The Messenger’s Wednesday press release, which was tweeted by Semafor media reporter Max Tani. I could not find any Grid employees tweeting about the news.

“Grid has built a successful and impressive news site that reaches an influential audience and we are thrilled to be associated with their brand and talented team,” Finkelstein said in a statement.

The Grid had a lot of employees. Will The Messenger be really big?

If The Messenger keeps all 50 Grid staffers on*, they will make up less than 10 percent of the staffers that Finkelstein claims his site will have within a year. From a recent New York Times piece by Ben Mullin:

Financed with $50 million in investor money, the site will start with at least 175 journalists stationed in New York, Washington and Los Angeles, executives say. But in a year, Mr. Finkelstein said, he plans to have around 550 journalists, about as many as The Los Angeles Times.

I'm sorry, but I just keep coming back to the idea that The Messenger (@Messenger_Now) is going to have a 550-journalist newsroom in a year, and how absolutely, hilariously insane that ishttps://t.co/mdLLLdsWAZ

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) March 16, 2023

*The Messenger has not committed to keeping all 50 Grid staffers on. Messenger spokeswoman Kimberly Bernhardt told me, “We look forward to taking on the majority of Grid employees over the coming weeks.”

How much money does The Messenger plan to make?

Here’s the Times again:

Richard Beckman, a former president of The Hill and Condé Nast who will be The Messenger’s president, said in an interview that the company planned to generate more than $100 million in revenue next year, primarily through advertising and events, with profitability expected that year.

To build its digital audience, the company has hired Neetzan Zimmerman, who has been a digital traffic maven at The Hill and Gawker Media, and is expecting more than 100 million monthly readers — an ambitious goal that would make it one of the most-read digital publications in the United States.

Zimmerman was also formerly editor-in-chief of the secret-sharing app Whisper. Beckman “is perhaps best known for a horrific ‘joke’ gone wrong,” per The New York Post.

Wow, 100 million monthly readers?

A “longtime media exec who is close to Finkelstein and Beckman” told The New York Post that the traffic goal is “delusional”: “It’s wishful thinking. They are a few ghosts from the past. If they were a public company, I wouldn’t invest in them.”

As someone who worked at The Daily, which had $60 million (in 2010 dollars) and the infrastructural support of both the Steve Jobs and Rupert Murdoch empires, I think $50 million and 175 employees to generate $100 million and 100 million readers **NEXT YEAR** sounds… lol. https://t.co/4i54AG5Q87

— claire howorth (@clairehoworth) March 22, 2023

So who is investing in them?

The United Arab Emirates, for one. (As Brian Morrissey wrote in his Substack last week: “These days, it’s hard to imagine any venture investor touching the media business. There’s a reason more media companies are rationalizing their decisions to turn to Middle East autocracies.”) Grid was tied to APCO Worldwide, “which is headquartered in D.C. but is a registered lobbyist for various clients in the UAE,” Politico reported last year. John Defeterios, an APCO senior advisor and former CNN anchor, was a member of Grid’s board. The Messenger’s Wednesday press release refers to the Abu Dhabi–based International Media Investments, which is reportedly tied to the UAE royal family, as Grid’s “primary investor,” and says a paragraph later that “Grid is owned by IMI.”

At any rate, IMI is now also investing in The Messenger. “We are proud of what we built at Grid and are now excited to be joining with The Messenger,” Nart Bouron, CEO of IMI, said in the release. “The move is part of IMI’s investment plan to invest in digital first products and content.”

As part of The Messenger's news re: acquiring @gridnews, it says Grid is "owned" by Abu Dhabi-based IMI & w deal, IMI will make minority investment in Messenger's parent
—Grid had 2 investors: IMI & Brian Edelman: It never said how much either invested, just that it was over $10M pic.twitter.com/i71oPIA8Cs

— Sara Fischer (@sarafischer) March 22, 2023

1/3 How do folks feel about UAE ownership of news outlets?
Genuine question – we turned down a (small) investment from a certain North Asian country because we felt long term it wasn't compatible with credible media, even though the chances they meddled would be minimal. https://t.co/FZXW2hDoPm

— John Fowler (@johnsnonsense) March 22, 2023

Paterson, one of New Jersey’s largest cities, is majority-Hispanic and also has a sizable proportion of Arab residents. (Paterson residents were surveyed in Spanish, Arabic, and Bengali as well as English.) It has a below-average median income for the state. Trenton, another large city and the New Jersey state capital, is roughly half Black. And Blairstown is a small, rural town that is more than 90% white.

But all three communities had lost most of their existing local news outlets over the years. All wanted more service journalism, in the form of information about municipal government meetings or contact information for local leaders. And all relied heavily on local Facebook groups for news, even though they also understood Facebook’s flaws.

Stonbely compiled her findings in this new report and shared them with hyperlocal news outlets that had recently launched in the communities: The Paterson Information Hub in Paterson, which is a news product of the nonprofit hub Paterson Alliance; the Trenton Journal in Trenton; and the Ridge View Echo in Blairstown. All three outlets are grantees of the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, which we’ve covered here.

I asked Stonbely a few questions about her research.

The research was supported by funding from the Google News Initiative, and one condition of the grant was that “after the initial information needs assessments were complete, each outlet was to make improvements to their product based on the findings.” Here are the recommendations that Stonbely gave to The Paterson Hub, Trenton Journal, and Ridge View Echo.

Recommendations given to Paterson Hub

• The top two topics of interest for the community members we heard from were safety/crime and food (in)security, which do not readily lend themselves to events, which suggests that a different platform — perhaps an email newsletter or dedicated website — may be of more interest to those community members who want to hear about these topics.
• However, nearly half of people showed interest in events about exercise/recreation, housing affordability/homelessness, early childhood education, mental health, and music. This list of topics lends itself well to a shared calendar. In addition, the greatest share of survey respondents (more than half) said that they attend events that ‘help me solve everyday problems in my life’ and that ‘connect me to friends and neighbors.’ You can emphasize these types of events in your calendar — focusing on utility and connection.
• There is a long list of trusted organizations in Paterson; consider collaborating with these organizations on a calendar or news outlet (beyond just asking them to contribute content), so that trust is built in from the beginning. You may also tap people/offices on the list of most trusted sources.
• Engage to a greater extent on Facebook, and be present on Facebook groups that are relevant in Paterson; this is where most of the traffic is and where you’ll have the greatest visibility.
• Paterson is extremely diverse; take advantage of this diversity by offering your content in as many relevant languages as possible, but especially Spanish and Arabic.

Recommendations given to the Trenton Journal

• Create a dedicated section for posting the dates and times of upcoming municipal meetings, similar to your events page; publicize it via your newsletter and social media.
• Go one step further and cover municipal meetings regularly, even if it’s simply by providing a transcript.
• Consider adding a section on your website that lists all city and state departments, the services they provide, and their contact information.
• Consider offering different sub-pages for each ward, that can be tailored to the differing concerns and interest in each.
• Engage to a greater extent on Facebook, and be present on Facebook groups that are relevant in Trenton, especially Trenton Orbit and Peterson’s Breaking News of Trenton.

Recommendations given to Ridge View Echo

• Create a dedicated section for posting the dates and times of upcoming municipal meetings, similar to your events page; publicize it via your newsletter and social media.
• Go one step further and cover municipal meetings regularly, even if it’s simply by providing a transcript.
• Get more involved on Facebook, both on the feed and in groups.
• Continue to cover feel-good lifestyle issues in addition to hard issues.
• Consider adding a section that allows people to recommend service providers; maybe service providers could recommend themselves for a fee (similar to advertising but in a dedicated section)? Could list it as a Directory similar to the others that you have under Resources.

Publishers were alerted to the coming change in December, and subscribers were notified last week. (If you have any of these subscriptions, you can see the timing for how they’ll be phased out; you won’t lose money.)

The Kindle was once seen as a possible savior for digital journalism (though Nieman Lab was always skeptical). In 2009, then–New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger appeared on stage with Jeff Bezos to introduce the larger-screened Kindle DX, saying, “We’ve known for more than a decade that one day an e-reader product would offer the same satisfying experience as the reading of a printed newspaper.” From 2011 until 2020, people who subscribed to the Times on the Kindle got free access to NYTimes.com, too.

Amazon hasn’t shared its exact reason for the change (the company’s statement to publishers is here), but one obvious explanation is that relatively few people are buying these subscriptions and it doesn’t make financial sense to continue to support them. Instead, Amazon wants publishers to add their content to its $9.99/month digital subscription program, Kindle Unlimited, which includes a bunch of magazines and access to one newspaper that I saw — USA TODAY.

Anyway, while this all feels very 2011, news publishers in particular should check out some of the comments on last week’s Reddit thread, where customers talk about why they liked reading newspapers on Kindle, and why they’re sorry to lose the subscriptions — and it still has to do with the “satisfying reading experience” Sulzberger talked about more than a decade ago.

Very disappointing. I had only recently discovered that I actually enjoy reading my local newspaper when it’s on the Kindle as opposed to the paper’s poorly designed website and frequently broken app.

In addition to the sheer legibility/readability of the Kindle screen display, I liked the Kindle editions for the Table of Contents feature and other navigational aids. These made it easy to skim, particularly in large issues of a pub like the daily New York Times…

I currently subscribe via Kindle Newsstand to the publications below. It will be a hassle to manage the subscriptions separately now, for each publisher, via their websites. This mirrors the mess that streaming television has become, fragmented into many different providers with their own payment schedules, subscriptions costs, log-in credentials, Terms of Service, etc. etc.

I have:

The New York Times – Daily Edition for Kindle
The New Yorker
Foreign Affairs
New Republic
The New York Review of Books
New York Magazine

Woke up to the email and I’m pretty pissed. Loved having a few magazines and newspapers on my Kindle. Much easier on the eyes than a phone/tablet, better battery life, and things just worked (some of the apps reload and you lose your place between sessions).

Very disappointing. I’ve subscribed to many newspapers and magazines via my kindle for many years and prefer its layout to most crappy apps. At this point, i have been only using my kindle to read newspapers and magazines (usually use the app for books).

This is hugely disappointing. I have been a NYT subscriber on the Kindle for so many years…more than 10. One of my fondest memories is on a trip to Greece, staying in a hotel on the side of a cliff, and barely getting enough 3G signal to download the Sunday Edition. During the summer, I wake up every day and sit on my deck and read the NYT while I drink a cup of coffee. I subscribe to the paper edition on the weekends but I actually prefer the Kindle edition in a lot of ways because it’s ad-free and easy to navigate.

I was mad enough about dropping support for 3G but this might be the end of my relationship with Kindle. I’ll switch brands to whatever I can get NYT on, or I’ll just skip the Kindle entirely. And I was hoping to upgrade soon… Kindle probably just lost a customer.

If you like reading news sites on Kindle, here’s a hack to keep you going.

From The Canadian Press on Tuesday evening:

The company said Wednesday that it is temporarily limiting access to news content for under four per cent of its Canadian users as it assesses possible responses to the bill. The change applies to its ubiquitous search engine as well as the Discover feature on Android devices, which carries news and sports stories.

All types of news content are being affected by the test, which will run for about five weeks, the company said. That includes content created by Canadian broadcasters and newspapers.

The tests “limit the visibility of Canadian and international news to varying degrees,” Google told Reuters.

Bill C-18, the Online News Act, is modeled on legislation that passed in Australia in 2021. The bill, which has already passed Canada’s House of Commons and moved on to the Senate, would, among other things, require platforms that “facilitate” access to news — by linking to it in search results, for instance — to compensate the publishers of said news.

For more background on both sides, we ran a piece last year discussing how the bill could be modified. Our Josh Benton called the law that passed in Australia “a warped system that rewards the wrong things and lies about where the real value in news lies.” The Canadian academic Michael Geist has written extensively criticizing the bill, as has Canadian journalist and former Wikimedia Foundation director Sue Gardner, while David Skok, CEO of Canadian news site The Logic, calls it “a necessary evil in order to maintain balance in Canada’s media ecosystem.”

A spokesperson from the Department of Canadian Heritage, whose minister Pablo Rodriguez is the sponsor of Bill C-18, criticized Google’s action, telling the Globe and Mail, “At the end of the day, all we’re asking the tech giants to do is compensate journalists when they use their work.”

This is not the first time that platforms have tested blocking news in countries where they are under legal threat: The company conducted a similar “experiment” in Australia in January 2021. In February 2021, Facebook temporarily blocked Australian users from sharing or viewing Australian and international news, sending publishers’ traffic tumbling. Facebook parent company Meta has said it’s ready to do the same in Canada.

CP reporter @MickeyDjuric was having some trouble finding some news stories online. She covers the Canadian Heritage beat so she asked Google whether something was up. She was right.https://t.co/QTJQiWRiS5

— Joanna Smith (@smithjoanna) February 22, 2023

This explains everything about my failed Google searches this week.

According to Google the only companies writing news lately are Politico, Farmers Forum and MSNhttps://t.co/Sj01NOVXWQ

— Marieke Walsh (@MariekeWalsh) February 23, 2023

If you’re having problems accessing @TheTyee stories, try using something other than Google, like Firefox or Bing

(Also please drop me a note if this is happening) https://t.co/aHiwuOjGOS

— Jen St. Denis https://journa.host/@jenstden (@JenStDen) February 23, 2023

In the past year, page A1 of The New York Times has frequently featured stories with one similar theme: “whether care and support for young trans people might be going too far or too fast,” in the words of Tom Scocca writing recently in Popula. By his estimate, these front page stories have totaled more than 15,000 words combined, not counting coverage of similar topics in the Opinion section and New York Times Magazine. He added:

Page A1 is where questions go. Is the number of young trans people suddenly unusually large? Is it good for young trans people to be getting medical treatment as drastic as breast-removal surgery? If they’re deferring more drastic medical treatment by taking puberty blockers, is it harmful for them to take those puberty blockers? If they’re not getting medical treatment at all, are their schools letting them socially transition too easily?

On Wednesday, in two separate open letters to Times leadership, two different groups argued that the Times’ coverage of transgender, non⁠-⁠binary, and gender nonconforming people is biased. (The timing was coordinated, the organizations said.)

“The Times has in recent years treated gender diversity with an eerily familiar mix of pseudoscience and euphemistic, charged language, while publishing reporting on trans children that omits relevant information about its sources,” reads the open letter organized by the Freelance Solidarity Project, the digital media division of the National Writers Union.

The letter is addressed to Philip B. Corbett, the Times’ associate managing editor for standards. Initially signed by more than 200 Times contributors, including Alison Roman, John Herrman, Jia Tolentino, and Virginia Sole-Smith, the letter has gained thousands more signatures since Wednesday morning.

The letter notes that Times coverage has been used to support anti-trans bills across the country:

Last year, Arkansas’ attorney general filed an amicus brief in defense of Alabama’s Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act, which would make it a felony, punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment, for any medical provider to administer certain gender⁠-⁠affirming medical care to a minor (including puberty blockers) that diverges from their sex assigned at birth. The brief cited three different New York Times articles to justify its support of the law: [Emily] Bazelon’s “The Battle Over Gender Therapy,” Azeen Ghorayshi’s “Doctors Debate Whether Trans Teens Need Therapy Before Hormones,” and Ross Douthat’s “How to Make Sense of the New L.G.B.T.Q. Culture War.” As recently as February 8th, 2023, attorney David Begley’s invited testimony to the Nebraska state legislature in support of a similar bill approvingly cited the Times’ reporting and relied on its reputation as the “paper of record” to justify criminalizing gender⁠-⁠affirming care.

The letter draws parallels between the Times’ coverage of trans people and, in earlier decades, its coverage of gay people and HIV/AIDS and its treatment of gay employees. “New York Times managing editor and executive editor A. M. Rosenthal neglected to put AIDS on the front page until 1983, by which time the virus had already killed 500 New Yorkers,” they write. “He withheld planned promotions from colleagues he learned on the grapevine were gay. Many of his employees feared being outed.”

That last link is to a 2018 piece in the Times’ T Magazine, “Six Times journalists on the paper’s history of covering AIDS and gay issues.” Reading the Times’ early HIV/AIDS coverage, T Magazine editor-at-large Kurt Soller wrote then, is “to be reminded how news coverage shapes perceptions and policies, particularly when it comes to oppressed communities.”

In an interview with Hellgate NY, Jo Livingstone, a critic and writer who helped organize the Freelance Solidarity Project’s letter, argued that the Times’ reporting on trans people is intended in part to drive views and outrage:

There are really not that many trans people in America. There aren’t that many trans children in America. This is an issue which affects a lot of people, in theory. In practice, maybe not so much.

But because it’s a question that seems to relate to institutions that people feel a lot of ownership over, for example, schools, especially primary schools, you know, “what are people doing with my child when I’m not around?” I think that there’s a paranoia at the heart of what makes people want to read about this stuff, which is only getting more and more intense, the more the coverage.

Newspapers have a passive explanation — what people want to read is the news that we report. And just to go back to what I was saying before, that is a willful misreading of what journalism does in society.

GLAAD also published an open letter on Wednesday and protested outside Times headquarters, calling out the Times’ “irresponsible, biased coverage of transgender people.” That letter was signed by more than 100 equality and media organizations and individuals including celebrities like Judd Apatow and Margaret Cho.

GLAAD’s letter includes specific demands for the Times, including a meeting with trans community members and more hiring of trans employees. The Freelance Solidarity Project’s letter simply asks for a response.

Charlie Stadtlander, The New York Times’ director of external communications, provided a statement on Wednesday afternoon:

“We received the open letter delivered by GLAAD and welcome their feedback. We understand how GLAAD and the co-signers of the letter see our coverage. But at the same time, we recognize that GLAAD’s advocacy mission and The Times’s journalistic mission are different.

As a news organization, we pursue independent reporting on transgender issues that include profiling groundbreakers in the movement, challenges and prejudice faced by the community, and how society is grappling with debates about care.

The very news stories criticized in their letter reported deeply and empathetically on issues of care and well-being for trans teens and adults. Our journalism strives to explore, interrogate and reflect the experiences, ideas and debates in society — to help readers understand them. Our reporting did exactly that and we’re proud of it.”

I asked Stadtlander to clarify which letter this statement is referring to — just the one from GLAAD, or also the one from the Times contributors? He responded:

The letter you linked to with the numerous signatories was delivered in person by GLAAD reps to the NYT this morning. GLAAD issued press releases and letters of their own simultaneously, but the open letter you’re talking about came to us through GLAAD. The statement applies to both.

On Thursday, the group of Times writers behind the letter told me, “GLAAD confirmed to us that they did not deliver a copy of our letter to the New York Times. We look forward to clarification from the Times.”

You can read the Times contributors’ letter here or sign it here. You can read GLAAD’s letter here or sign it here.

180 (and counting) past and present New York Times contributors have signed an open letter to the paper’s standards editor condemning the ongoing unethical anti-trans bias in its coverage of trans, non-binary and gender nonconforming people. Read it here https://t.co/0A9Ryp4R5K

— stasis baby (@HarronWawker) February 15, 2023

Permit me a thread on something I have first-hand knowledge of. My child transitioned when he was 20. This is a good letter Chris links to. What is most disturbing to me about the treatment of trans issues even by the mainstream media is how facile it can be, lacking nuance.
1/5 https://t.co/Ck6Ji1Fyj8

— Jon Ralston (@RalstonReports) February 15, 2023

Last week, NYT published a (very rare) column defending trans people from right-wing attacks. Then an editor went in and removed mention of trans people from the headline. https://t.co/FLGVWFPd0F pic.twitter.com/z2MDWAxqYn

— Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) February 15, 2023

…from 1963 to 1987 was deeply problematic. At the time, the first instinct of all those involved would doubtless have been to claim they were just telling all sides of the story. But bias can often disguise itself as neutrality/objectivity. This merits real self-examination. >

— Mark Harris (@MarkHarrisNYC) February 15, 2023

…but those pieces no longer look expert or objective. Many other stories assigned by crime or city-desk editors treated homosexuality only as an urban scourge, a blight on the streets. They don’t look great either. It’s always worth asking: How will this be read in 10 years? x

— Mark Harris (@MarkHarrisNYC) February 15, 2023

“To suggest that there is no relationship between the way that we are using language at the newspaper to discuss people’s lives, people who are also being debated in court, is to really be willfully ignorant of what it is that we do as journalists.”https://t.co/7xXOgedB1A

— Hell Gate *subscribe today!* (@HellGateNY) February 15, 2023

This counts as a pretty strong audience engagement effort by a local news organization, if you ask me! The Valentines work because they’re about Boston — Dunks, T fires, Ben Affleck — and not about how great the Boston Globe itself is.

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The Valentines were an audience team effort, said Heather Ciras, the Globe’s senior assistant managing editor for audience — from the Globe’s Ryan Huddle, Cecilia Mazanec, and Steve Annear. Readers have been suggesting plenty more (“Are you the orange line? — because I’ve been waiting for you for forever ), which the Globe’s audience team will turn into additional Valentines and post later today.

The Boston Globe isn’t the only news organization making Valentines today. Here are some more.

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Projects like these, which focus on giving people information they need to make the places they live better, are the focus of a new report, out Thursday, that calls on local journalism’s would-be saviors to focus their energy and funding on collaborative efforts, startups, and community groups — not on legacy news organizations.

“Too much time and energy has been spent propping up and mourning the declining legacy systems,” the report’s lead authors — Chalkbeat’s Elizabeth Green, City Bureau’s Darryl Holliday, and Free Press’s Mike Rispoli — write. All three, of course, run or are part of media organizations that operate squarely outside of legacy media. (Disclosure: Green is my close friend.)

The opportunity now is to shepherd and accelerate a transition to this emergent civic media system. This new ecosystem looks different from what it will replace: while the commercial market rewarded information monopolies, what is emerging now are pluralistic networks in which information is fluid, services are shared, and media is made in cooperation with the people it seeks to serve.

“The Roadmap for Local News” was built on conversations with more than 50 local news folks, leaders of nonprofit news organizations, and funders. It focuses on “civic information” and “civic media,” which it defines like this:

Civic information: High-quality, verifiable information that enables people to respond to collective needs by enhancing local coordination, problem-solving, systems of public accountability, and connectedness.
Civic media: Any practice that produces civic information as its primary focus.

The authors write:

Civic media practitioners are united by a vision of a world in which people everywhere are equipped to improve their communities through abundant access to high-quality information, on urgent health and safety emergencies, the environment, the people and processes of local government, and daily social services like healthcare, education, and transportation. In this vision, the community librarian facilitating conversations around authoritative, trusted digital news is as celebrated as the dogged reporter pursuing a scoop.

They call for “a new level of investment to the civic media field,” with “leaders in philanthropy, journalism, and democracy” “[coordinating] work around the goal of expanding ‘civic information,’ not saving the news business.”

The goal should not be to save legacy businesses that remain in decline, but instead to meet the civic information needs of all individuals and communities.

The report also stresses the need for more open-ended funding (“including conversion of project-based funds to general operating support”), shared services and infrastructure, and major public policy initiatives.

It will require investing significantly more into our current public media system, creating new forms of public funding, and passing a suite of other policy solutions at all levels of government to create the conditions for local civic information to thrive.

Coauthor Holliday also delved into some of the report’s themes in a thread.

We won’t emerge from this by “saving” the old system. We need to accelerate the transition to a new system centered on community info needs & news products that help people act & solve local issues

A participatory public good that's worth investing in. Yes, I made a chart pic.twitter.com/gO97IlfyI1

— Darryl Holliday (@d_holli) February 2, 2023

The development of the report was funded by the Knight Foundation, Ford Foundation, Democracy Fund, MacArthur Foundation, Walton Family, and American Journalism Project. Funders came together with many of the report’s sources last week to meet at a local news summit at the former Annenberg Estate in California. Lenfest’s Jim Friedlich wrote up the event for our sister publication, Nieman Reports, describing it as “extraordinarily positive.”

Former ProPublica president Dick Tofel offered some criticism of the initiative here. “If the upshot of all this is more money for great journalism, that’s all to the good,” Tofel told me in an email. “What I hope can be avoided are especially two things: a new bureaucracy doling out a pool of funds, and a centralized support mechanism. Both, in my view, would tend to inhibit experimentation and innovation, of which we need more, not less.”

But “most funders seemed aligned in the view that coordinated effort toward common goals and funding of key priorities could best be accomplished through close communication and coordination,” Friedlich wrote, “rather than consolidation into a kind of fund of funds.”

You can read the full thing here.

NEW: I helped a bit with this, and am very happy to see the focus of this effort on the information needs of communities. It's not about "saving" organizations. It's about solving problems. #localnewsroadmap https://t.co/7DAYqGYZAu

— Chris Krewson (@ckrewson) February 2, 2023

I’m not saying this bc I am one of them. But I have colleagues at McClatchy, Gannett and others who work on many of these premises within difficult systems. They deserve to be cheered on.

Go ahead and hate these companies, they still hold power and house good souls.

— P. Kim Bui (@kimbui) February 2, 2023

Proud to be among 60+ news leaders & practitioners who engaged in the development of the #LocalNewsRoadmap.

Released today, the new report is a vision statement for the field, with strategies, evidence, & examples to scale civic media.

Read and share: https://t.co/Dx63QzRCwJ https://t.co/7WIlmQtGjZ

— Mukhtar M. Ibrahim (@mukhtaryare) February 2, 2023

“We are proud of the site that Leah [Finnegan] and her team built,” Goldberg wrote in an email to employees that was tweeted by Semafor’s Max Tani. “Gawker published a lot of brilliant pieces in these nearly two years. But in this new reality, we have to prioritize our better monetized sites.”

In an email to employees, Bustle Digital Group CEO Bryan Goldberg announces the company is laying off 8% of staff and “suspending operations” at Gawker pic.twitter.com/ushUzsISUa

— Max Tani (@maxwelltani) February 1, 2023

Goldberg, who in addition to BDG owns Napoleon’s hat, told Axios’s Sara Fischer on Wednesday that Gawker was “essentially an early-stage startup within our company” and “now just isn’t the moment to push millions of dollars into a pre-monetization product.” But the brand is really old in internet years. The original Gawker Media was founded in 2002 and filed for bankruptcy in 2016 following the sex tape lawsuit that awarded Terry Gene Bollea (a.k.a Hulk Hogan) $140 million in damages. (The lawsuit was bankrolled at least in part by billionaire Peter Thiel; Bollea and Gawker Media ultimately settled for $31 million.) That year, Univision acquired all the Gawker Media brands except for Gawker (Deadspin, Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Kotaku, Jalopnik, and Jezebel); they were later sold to equity firm Great Hill Partners.

Goldberg’s BDG acquired Gawker’s archives and social media accounts for $1.35 million in 2018. (He spent $1.4 million on the hat.) The site relaunched, after a couple false starts, in 2021 under Leah Finnegan, who had been a features editor at the original Gawker.

BDG’s remaining brands include Bustle, Mic, Nylon, Romper, and Elite Daily, among others. In the past couple years, it has shut down The Outline and Input. I asked the company where the other layoffs this week are taking place, and will update this post if I hear back.

Well, after an incredible 1.5 years, BDG has decided it is done with Gawker 2.0. Can't say enough about how proud I am of the site and all the brilliant people who worked to create it, and what a staggering shame this is. I had an absolute blast, and I love you.

— Leah Finnegan (@leahfinnegan) February 1, 2023

people asked me about gawker to get whatever “real” gossip on what it was like they would be disappointed when i’d say “it’s the best job i’ve ever had and i get to work with people i love very deeply” but that was the truth…only job where i truly felt like myself https://t.co/4rxN4ZjKXp

— sarah hagi (@KindaHagi) February 1, 2023

RIP to working the dumbest most fun job with some of the funniest girls and one guy in the game, all for less money than bryan goldberg spent on napoleons hat https://t.co/raeLCLaLGY

— tarpley (@tarpleyhitt) February 1, 2023

RIP to the last place i could’ve pitched “I ate an entire weed lollipop in a day, here’s what happened” if i were white

— ashley ray (@theashleyray) February 1, 2023

Is the Defector model really the only way to do a site like this? It's clear that a voicey, attitudey, non-bootlicky site can't survive under One Of Today's Leading Global Media Companies With A Portfolio Of Distinct Digital And Experiential Brands That Are Shaping Culture https://t.co/K9rCNdFizg

— Eric Harvey (@ericdharvey) February 1, 2023

It was never anyone's must-read. Old Gawker not only would've had a field day with George Santos, Anna Delvey, Hilaria Baldwin, etc. but, for better or for worse, it would've been breaking the news on them. Now that stuff primarily happens in Twitter threads from randos. https://t.co/h8eQyX3m9g

— caroline mccarthy (@caro) February 1, 2023

If you feel like you’re just tweeting into the void and getting minimal replies of any kind, the corpse of @gawker has >500k followers. Here are some interaction numbers from the past couple days pic.twitter.com/1N2LRXQnPF

— The Ball Is Orange (@theballisorange) February 1, 2023

if you want to make something valuable and lasting in this world then prepare to do it yourself entirely because the people who hire you are dumber than you and less talented which is why they are in the business of allocating dollars instead of doing stuff

— noah kulwin (@nkulw) February 1, 2023

“It was very important to me when I was writing that tweet that even though the metaphorical Gray Lady would try to use slang, it was still very proper grammar,” Jacob Harris, the Times developer behind the Twitter account, told Nieman Lab in 2017. “‘It is I’ versus ‘It’s me.’ It’s like the Queen trying to use slang. It had to be that combination of fusty and fashionable.”

Fast-forward to January 2023. The queen is no longer with us, and corporate social media has undergone a vibe shift. When The New York Times launched its flagship TikTok this week, on January 24, it started with hard news, featuring Brandon Tsay, the 26-year-old who disarmed a gunman at a dance hall in Alhambra, California.

@nytimes

A mass shooting at a popular ballroom shocked a small community east of Los Angeles. The police praised a man as a hero after he disarmed the gunman at a second dance hall. The attack was the deadliest mass shooting in the U.S. since the massacre at Uvalde, Texas, in May 2022.

♬ original sound – The New York Times

I am not on TikTok, but the NYT is, and now a story I've been working on for the NYT this week has become the NYT's first story on TikTok. https://t.co/JKhyrYwNGC

— Scott Dodd (@scottdodd) January 24, 2023

The Times is a few years behind other publishers in creating a flagship TikTok account but already had some subbrands on the platform, including NYT Cooking and the Hard Fork podcast. It’s looking to hire social media video journalists. And it’s published three more TikToks. Topics: “A Times reporter and photographer rode along with a team gathering data on the colossal atmospheric rivers that have drenched California,” “A barrage of gun violence left the nation’s most populous state groping for answers on Tuesday as the death toll from back-to-back mass shootings in California rose to at least 19 people in less than three days,” and “The deadly trek to the U.S. through the Darién gap.”

“nytimes on the tok?! ” Brut, a mobile-first video publisher, wrote.

The Times’ official TikTok account had 747 followers as of Thursday morning.

With just a three-year delay compared to its major competitors, The NY Times has finally joined TikTok.

It sounds like the right time to remind journalists looking into TikTok that there are +700 examples of publishers worldwide on the platform here: https://t.co/23DTjrymmC pic.twitter.com/pMpAUR2GyR

— Francesco Zaffarano (@FraZaffarano) January 25, 2023

The New York Times reports:

As [Bezos] left, a Post employee wearing a red shirt emblazoned with the insignia of The Post’s guild stopped him and asked why the company was laying people off without offering buyouts first, according to the three people with knowledge of the meeting. Mr. Bezos responded that he was at The Post to listen, not answer questions, and underscored his commitment to The Post’s journalism.

The Post was on track to end 2022 in the red after years of profitability, The New York Times reported in August. The Post has struggled to grow its subscription business, with fewer paying subscribers last year than the three million it had in 2020, a presidential election year.

Post employees could be forgiven for thinking the timing feels ~a little weird~. Bezos — not Amazon — is the owner of the Post, but his visit took place a day after Amazon commenced “what’s poised to be the largest round of layoffs in the company’s history.” The company’s HR and stores departments appear to be most affected, but there were also a significant cuts at ComiXology, the digital comics platform Amazon bought in 2014. One ComiXology employee who was laid off said he believes that “at least 50% of the staff have been let go,” though Amazon has not confirmed that number. (According to LinkedIn, ComiXology had around 100 employees.) Artist, writer, and illustrator Jonathan H. Gray tweeted:

Still thinking about Comixology & how Amazon bought a thing that worked, gutted it, shat in its bed, and then threw it away because they didn’t want to play with it any more.

Jobs lost, livelihoods upended, & a fresh digital horizon that was opened up is now gone on a whim.

Amazon is also shuttering AmazonSmile, the charity program that allowed me to donate countless cents to my children’s school. And to throw a little more bad news on the pile, Microsoft said Wednesday that it will lay off around 10,000 employees — about 5% of its global work force.

It is very depressing, but surely some bright spots can be found over in the creator economy? Well…maybe not. From a new Financial Times piece:

Patreon, which secured a $4 billion valuation in 2021, told the Financial Times it was abandoning plans to introduce cryptocurrency payments and had delayed previous ambitions of an initial public offering.

Substack, the much-hyped newsletter service valued at $650 million in March 2021, told the FT it had given up on near-term plans to raise further capital to support the business.

Twitch, the Amazon-owned video gaming streaming service, has announced plans to take a larger cut from subscription payments for some of its biggest streamers next year.

A third of people who use a paid-for media subscription, including for payments to creators, plan to cut back in the next six months, according to market research company Mintel.

The FT, citing data from data provider Dealroom, says investment in the creator economy sector rose from $1.4 billion in 2020 to $3.3 billion in 2021 — before crashing back to $801 million last year “as investors became increasingly nervous about frothy valuations in private tech companies.”

That’s the question that one publisher asked in a Digiday piece today about how Twitter is declining as a traffic source for publishers.

The question was recently echoed — and answered — by Semafor editor-in-chief Ben Smith. “When you get beyond the drama of Twitter and the flickers of life on your Facebook feed, what we’re seeing is the end of the whole social media age in news,” he wrote on Christmas Eve 2022.

Twitter never drove much traffic to news publishers. Back in 2016, social analytics firm Parse.ly (which was acquired by Automattic in 2021) found that “Twitter generates 1.5 percent of traffic for typical news organizations.”

So for most publishers, we’re talking about going from a base of “tiny” to “tinier” — as many rushed to point out after Twitter CEO Elon Musk falsely claimed, in a now-deleted tweet response to Bloomberg’s Ashlee Vance, that “Twitter drives a massive number of clicks to other websites/apps. Biggest click driver on the Internet by far.” (Vance had commented, “It is really weird how Twitter drives so few clicks.”) While plenty of people, at least as of last fall, say they come to Twitter to get news, they don’t necessarily click past headlines.

But what was already small seems to have gotten smaller. A few stats from the piece:

Web publishing tech provider Automattic analyzed a random set of 21 large and small publishers and found that the sites’ traffic from Twitter in the fourth quarter fell, on average by, 13%. Of that data set, 71% of publishers saw their traffic decline.

For the whole of 2022, referral traffic from Twitter dipped by 20% year over year, according to data from publisher analytics firm Chartbeat which includes 1,200 sites that are Chartbeat customers in the News and Media category.

Twitter referral traffic to a dozen major publishers’ websites declined, on average, by 12% in December 2022 compared to November 2022, according to an analysis by Similarweb, a data analytics company that monitors web traffic. Some publishers — such as The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, The New York Times, USA Today, the BBC and Yahoo — each saw referral traffic from Twitter fall between 10% and 18% month over month.

Some publishers are hurting from the loss of Twitter Moments, the curated tweet collections that Twitter got rid of in December. And only current Twitter Blue subscribers have access to Twitter Top Articles (née Nuzzel), which might have been providing publishers with a little more traffic around the edges.

More here.

But what if refusing to allow subscribers to cancel online is not only annoying, but also actually counterproductive?1

The Minneapolis Star Tribune is working to hold on to subscribers with a position focused solely on subscriber retention, WAN-IFRA noted Thursday. One counterintuitive way to do that, the Star Tribune found, is to give subscribers the option to cancel online.

Toby Collodora joined the Star Tribune in 2019 as its first senior manager of retention and engagement. The paper now has 100,000 digital subscribers. “Our goal is discuss retention as often as we discuss acquisition,” she said at WAN-IFRA’s World News Media Congress last fall.

Perhaps surprisingly, the Star Tribune found that allowing online cancellation, as it started doing in December 2021, hasn’t resulted in more cancellations. Instead, it may actually be helping the paper keep more of its subscribers who are on the fence. The Star Tribune’s “total online save rate” is 18.5%, while the “call center save rate” — where you have to talk to a person who tries to persuade you to stay — is only 8.8%.

While allowing online cancellation initially raised some concerns that more people might cancel, Collodora said they’ve implemented a low-tech solution where users enter in some simple information, such as their name, email address and answer a short series of questions to help identify what kind of subscription they have.

“That information is then used to present an offer, sometimes it’s a price-based offer, sometimes it’s a different offer such as somebody is experiencing a problem with their digital account, we offer that somebody will give them a call back or send them an email to try to resolve that technical problem, and then of course that entices that person to retain their subscription with us,” she said.

The best indicator that a subscriber will stick around, the Star Tribune has found, is when they renew for the first time:

While Collodora is the person in charge of Star Tribune’s retention efforts, she said they also spend time talking about how retention is part of the job of everyone who works for the company.

For example, she said, “we talk about what each person in the organization can do to get a subscriber to make that first renewal payment. That’s really something we focus on because once a person makes their first renewal payment, they are far more likely to retain. It’s our single best indicator.”

You can read the full post about the panel here.

1. In fact, our 2021 survey on cancellations suggested that this might be the case. “Oppressive cancellation policy that requires calling customer support to cancel,” one respondent wrote to explain why they canceled their subscription to the Chicago Tribune.

The Times journalists join employees at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, many of whom have been on strike since October, and journalists at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, who have been on strike since November 28.

The New York Times Guild argues that while the paper is flourishing economically, profits haven’t been shared fairly with workers. Times employees on strike plan to protest outside the company’s headquarters in Manhattan at 1 p.m. ET on Thursday.

From CNN:

The act of protest, which has not been staged by employees at the newspaper of record in decades, will leave many of its major desks depleted of their staffs, creating a challenge for the news organization that millions of readers rely on.

An executive at the Times, who requested anonymity to speak candidly, acknowledged to CNN on Wednesday that the work stoppage would certainly create difficulties. But, the executive said, management has readied for the moment and could rely on the newspaper’s other resources, such as its international staff which largely are not part of the union, to fill the voids.

Joe Kahn, executive editor of the Times, said in a note to staff, “We will produce a robust report on Thursday. But it will be harder than usual.”

Times journalists encouraged readers not to engage with any Times products during the strike, and yes, that means reading about Brittney Griner’s release elsewhere and breaking your Wordle streak. Critic-at-large and VP of the Guild Amanda Hess:

We’re asking readers to not engage in any @nytimes platforms tomorrow and stand with us on the digital picket line! Read local news. Listen to public radio. Make something from a cookbook. Break your Wordle streak.

— Amanda Hess (@amandahess) December 7, 2022

I try not to cross picket lines, but for Nieman Lab purposes was curious to see specific ways that the strike was affecting Times output Thursday, so I fired up an RSS reader that I hadn’t used in several years. A few things I noticed:

• Breaking news alerts are still being sent out.
• A new episode of The Daily was released Thursday, as was a new edition of The Morning. Those products were presumably produced on Wednesday before the strike began, though, and I’ll be curious to see if they come out tomorrow.
• A liveblog on Brittney Griner’s release primarily consisted of posts bylined by international correspondents, who are not part of the Guild. Most other stories in the Times’ “Top Stories” RSS feed for Thursday were also by international correspondents. A very brief Celine Dion story was written by an editor. Some pre-written stories by journalists who are on strike today were published as well.
• Two top Times reporters are not participating in the walkout, and their bylines appeared in the Brittney Griner liveblog Thursday.
• The Washington Post’s Elahe Izadi notes that comments may go unmoderated.

NPR’s David Folkenflik:

“From my point of view, this is an absolutely necessary shot across the bow,” says guild member Michael Powell, a veteran reporter who covers free speech matters for the New York Times national desk. “We’re approaching two years without a contract, which means we’re approaching two years without a raise….Each month that goes by, they’re taking more money out of our pocket.”

Several managers at the Times, speaking to NPR on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment, acknowledge concern about the tensions and the burden of putting out the paper without hundreds of their colleagues.

Editors are scrambling to make sure long-held stories are ready for publication. Some are preparing to flex dormant reporting muscles. Others are unlikely to miss a step. But the sheer volume of copy produced by the paper’s newsroom each day is unlikely to be matched with more than half of the chairs metaphorically empty.

NYT management is trying to ride out the walkout using a mix of pre-written stories from guild staff (it has a lot of those) and a skeleton crew + editors to handle breaking news. Here’s the un-bylined story for Griner’s release: pic.twitter.com/sZW5MWfojY

— Peter Kafka (@pkafka) December 8, 2022

If you see someone's name on a story on Thursday or Friday, it does not necessarily mean they crossed the picket line to write it. Newspapers often have reporters write portions of stories ahead of time when possible.

— NYTimesGuild (@NYTimesGuild) December 8, 2022

A rare unbylined @nytimes story: https://t.co/sYUJwcO7kQ

— David Gura (@davidgura) December 8, 2022

A news alert with my name on it just went out. It was a pre- written story ahead of an expected vote.

I stand with the guild!

— Annie Karni (@anniekarni) December 8, 2022

But Post has bigger ambitions. The “social platform for real people, real news, and civil conversations,” was founded by former Waze CEO Noam Bardin. It counts Kara Swisher as an advisor and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz as one of its two investors. The other investor is Scott Galloway, an NYU professor and cohost of the Pivot podcast with Swisher. “I’ve never seen anyone, except maybe at a few strip bars, throw more money at someone than they’re throwing at Noam Bardin right now,” Galloway said on an episode of the Pivot podcast last week, in which he and Swisher interviewed Bardin. (Bardin wrote that, beyond funds from Andreessen Horowitz and from Galloway, “the only other money invested is mine.”)

Bardin wrote on Monday that Post has approved around 65,000 users out of a wait list of 335,000.

I used Twitter, posts on Post, and Swisher and Galloway’s podcast interview with Bardin to get some insight into how the company is thinking about news.

Post wants to build a business around micropayments for news

“We want to allow you to read premium news from multiple publishers,” Bardin wrote in a post on Sunday.

So far, the only publisher I’ve seen with content for “sale” on the platform is Reuters, which invites users to read its articles using “points.” (Each Post News user is given 50 points at sign-up.) Reuters is posting all its articles to Post News. But all these same articles are free on Reuters’ website, so I’m not sure why anyone would pay for them, even with imaginary free points.

This is quite a thing for Post News to claim when right now the only premium news provider I've found is Reuters, who is republishing wire stories you can read for free on their website for money while WSJ has uhhh this. https://t.co/hgPHWDXMg1 pic.twitter.com/swjkLVvpgm

— Aram Zucker-Scharff | @Chronotope@indieweb.social (@Chronotope) November 25, 2022

Ultimately, the vision seems to be that Post will allow users to pay micropayments for individual articles on Post. It’s a setup that Bardin says is good for both publishers and for itself, so I imagine he’s envisioning a revenue share, though he doesn’t say that explicitly. Here’s Bardin talking about the business model on the Pivot podcast (emphases mine):

I’ve been obsessing, the last, like six years, about this triangle between publishing and news journalism, social media networks, and the changing consumer behavior. And these three things have been working together, I believe, to bring us to the worst possible place.

News has moved to subscription, which basically converts maybe 2% of the users and so blocks 98% of the users from getting real editorialized content. Consumers have changed their behavior. They want to consume their news in their feed. And so, obviously, consumption from a feed does not work with subscription. And social media networks, with their advertising-based model, promote the worst in us because it works. I mean, the algorithms are don’t really care. They just, you know, try to achieve the engagement at any cost, right?

I spent a lot of time since I left Google about two years ago, building different products in this space, trying different things, and finally realized there’s no choice but to build something new, and what I’ve realized is that there’s a moment of opportunity now, and it’s wider than just what’s going on on Twitter, right? Facebook basically decided to drop news, move it out of the News Feed, and then stop paying news organizations. On the legal side, regulators are trying to force platforms to pay publishers. There’s this whole ecosystem of — where does news fit in? — that is kind of broken today…

What I believe consumers want is to be able to get multiple sources of news in their feed — some from creators or from people, some from professional journalists. They are willing to pay something for it. It doesn’t have to be free if you want good-quality news, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to subscribe to every publication. The fact that every publication thinks you’re gonna subscribe to it just mathematically can’t work, right? Obviously, that’s not going to work. So we need other models and we can’t have a world of just advertising or subscription. […]

We want to be able to bring the right content to the right user at the right price. And that means that if you come on the platform, spend 15 minutes, walk away feeling smarter, that’s success. But it also means that our incentives are aligned with content creators’, whether it’s publishers or individual content creators. We both make money or we don’t make money, unlike today where the platforms make a lot of money, but the publishers and the creators make nothing. […]

Let’s start, always, from the consumer. By the way, that’s one of the problem with publishers: They don’t talk about the consumer at all. It’s not part of their DNA. They’re saving the world. But when it comes from the consumer perspective, right, the modern consumer wants to get multiple sources in their feed. Why can’t you do that today? Because every time you click on it, you hit a paywall, and you’re not gonna subscribe to everything, right?

And so this means that publishers are losing 98% of the traffic. Now, the 2% that subscribe are obviously very, very valuable for them. So this means from a newsroom perspective, they end up writing for that 2%, which are the most extreme and politically aligned group, and they’re not writing for the average. And if they could hear — hear, in terms of monetization — the requests of the average, I believe it would also impact dramatically what they cover and how they cover it.

So in my view, you’re going through your [Post] feed, you see an article from The Washington Post on inflation, you click on it, and you read it. No friction. Friction is our biggest enemy, right? One click, you pay for it, you read it. The next article coming in might be The Wall Street Journal on inflation, because your feed has been changing based on what you’re reading. And you’re gonna read that suddenly. So suddenly, you’ve read two different takes on inflation in your feed, but you’re not subscribed to either of them. But the publisher can set the price. They can set the terms.

There are a few questionable statements here: It isn’t true that consumers can’t get multiple sources of news in a feed. They can! On Twitter, for instance, or on Apple News+.

It also isn’t true that you hit a paywall as soon as you click on a link to an article from a news outlet you don’t subscribe to. Most news outlets give you a bunch of free articles; local news sites are worse about this, but the two news sources that Bardin mentions, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, definitely let you read plenty of stuff for free.

And it isn’t true that publishers don’t talk about the consumer “at all” — as publishers become more reliant on subscriptions, most are talking about audiences constantly. (Maybe Bardin is referring here to “the consumer” as someone somehow separate from “the subscriber,” i.e., a person who will absolutely never pay to subscribe?)

I’m also generally skeptical of the notion that the average news consumer wants to read — and pay for — takes from multiple political perspectives on an issue like inflation, though It’s unclear here if Bardin is referring to politics, specifically.

But who does Bardin think the average news consumer is? Later in the podcast, he speaks about that:

I want to care about the 75% of users that today on Twitter don’t tweet. They really are who I’m thinking about, more than anything — not the small percentage that make all the noise and have all the followers and all the excitement. [But] regular people who want to use social media to get their news. They want to communicate with others, ask questions, and they don’t want to be called a Nazi or communist for just having a question out there.

Post hopes you’ll tip

Every post on Post has a little dollar sign to tip. It’s unclear how the tipping part will work with the micropayments part, or if they’d be separate. On the podcast, though, Galloway intertwines the two: “Yeah, I think the micropayments part — whether it’s Simon Holland with his dad jokes, or the wolf conservation group that has these wonderful videos of wolves, just the idea, and what I love about Post.news so far, is I can just say this, ‘This made me feel good. Here’s a buck.'” Simon Holland tweets PG family jokes and the Wolf Conservation Center is this.

I guess — think about which tweets you’d pay for, and then imagine that they were Posts instead and that you were paying a little bit. Would you do that? Maybe! (There have definitely been a few Twitter threads by one expert or another that I’d maybe pay $1 for, but Post doesn’t allow threads yet.)

Anyway, everyone starts off with 50 free points and if you click the “tip” button on a post, you’ll see this:

If you want to buy more points, you can, with a credit card. (Payments are processed via Stripe.) Post’s FAQ says that each point is equivalent to $0.01, and “the Points you [purchase] will be used towards supporting creators and content of your choice, and enabling the Post platform to operate.”

For “batches” of points up to 1,000, Post is taking a 29% cut. 300 points cost $4.20 (so $1.20 goes to Post), 500 cost $7 ($2 goes to Post), and 1,000 cost $14 ($4 goes to Post). If you buy larger numbers of points, there are slight discounts (10,000 points cost $126, meaning Post takes about a 20% cut.)

Most news publishers aren’t on Post, but Post is making it look as if they are

I found a lot of news publishers that appeared to have Post News accounts. But these accounts are actually placeholders created by Post News in an effort to get publishers to move there — the idea being, I suppose, that if they come on over they’ll already have a bunch of followers.

https://t.co/tUChf5Yfkt is creating fake/placeholder accounts for publishers to try to entice them to move there? pic.twitter.com/qlOQr5TFy8

— Laura Hazard Owen (@laurahazardowen) November 28, 2022

Rather… media companies see Post needing..

1) Their brands to establish Post as legitimate
2) Their content to give Post actual value

Creating dummy placeholder accounts with astroturfed petitions to "bring the NYT on Post" only furthers this observation

— Noah Chestnut (@noahchestnut) November 28, 2022

Reaction to this practice has been all over the place, from “genius” to “gross.” Personally, I think it’s a little sketchy, especially since Post says it wants to work with publishers as partners and considers their content a key part of its business model.

Yep. It sails *awfully* close to this. https://t.co/FWcC9HdAUB. I get that the line "convince them to join" makes it clear it's not an official account but I'd be furious if someone did this t me personally cc @fergb @Chronotope

— Corinne Podger (@corinne_podger) November 29, 2022

Did I sign up for post news? yes.

Have I actively been using it? no.

Do I think news orgs should jump in feet first as a Twitter replacement? no.

Does it seem like they legitimately want to work with publishers to distribute news? Um…. no. https://t.co/I4GFDLezBw

— Emma Carew Grovum (@emmacarew) November 28, 2022

Here’s Andrew Zalk, Post’s head of publisher development (he previously spent more than a decade at Flipboard):

“You can attack anyone’s ideology, but you can’t attack the person.”

Bardin wrote on Sunday that he wants to “keep Post civil”:

We are focused on moderation and operational tools, hiring and training people, flagging posts, blocking, muting, tuning the comment moderation keywords. This is the biggest constraint on letting more people in faster.

He also spoke about content moderation on the Pivot podcast:

I think that’s one thing that I want to make very firm on this platform. You can attack anyone’s ideology, but you can’t attack the person…Having debates about content, about ideas, is super important. But as soon as we start throwing in, you know, what we think about that person’s lifestyle, that obviously degrades us, to where we are today.

So then can you not, say, call Nick Fuentes a white supremacist? Like many other things about Post News at the moment, it’s unclear how this will work in practice.

Until Sunday, the company’s mission statement noted that nobody should be discriminated against based on, among other things, “net worth.” Maybe they just meant “income” and meant poor people, but anyway, the “net worth” part has since been removed, though you can see it archived here.

honestly too funny that post explicitly says no making fun of billionaires. no surprise it’s funded by a16z!https://t.co/Z8HAg4raje pic.twitter.com/oWhJDIqhYz

— Paris Marx (@parismarx) November 27, 2022

As for diversity, Bardin wrote on Sunday that this is how he’s thinking about who he approves from Post’s wait list:

I am working hard to keep the audience as diverse as I can (from what I can gather reading 200 characters) but this means that some people may be invited before others. I understand the fairness argument but I feel strongly that having broad diversity at the early stage is crucial for the long term success of Post.

“You mean like you’ll actually have to do work?” he said.

NO, I mean that if Twitter goes away, Journalism Today loses a bunch of really concrete things! And here they are: A list of things that journalism will lose, and ways that it will change, if Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter leads to its shutdown.

The version of the story below includes embedded tweets. I’ve saved a second version that includes tweet screenshots so that we can preserve this post if tweet embeds stop working.

Please keep the ideas coming and I’ll update this list. You can find me on Twitter as long as it stays up, or email me here.

Real-time feedback, criticism, and perspectives on stories

The tweet that originally inspired me to do this piece was by Jenée Desmond-Harris, who writes Slate’s Dear Prudence column.

I know a lot of people hate it (who doesn't hate to be criticized or feel misunderstood?) but I think being forced to hear how readers who aren't your buddies react — and to then always have that other POV in the back of your mind — is a very good thing

— Jenée (@jdesmondharris) November 11, 2022

Brent Staples, an author and member of The New York Times’ editorial board, and Stewart Coles, an assistant professor in the department of communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, weighed in.

I am sure you know this. But you have indeed hit on something: How the advent of social media (combined with online publications) blackened a very, very white public "discourse." A significant portion of anti-Twitterism originates in this fact.

— Brent Staples (@BrentNYT) November 11, 2022

Yes, and research bears this out! Twitter’s influence well beyond its walls, esp. into journalism, plus #BlackTwitter’s power over the platform, has been a game changer for Black people’s sociopolitical power over the last decade or so.

And that seems to be why some hate it. https://t.co/KVwYaXOHCW

— Chokely Carmichael(StewartColes@mastodon.social) (@StewartColes) November 12, 2022

Quote tweets have been a crucial part of this, noted Johnathan Flowers, a lecturer at American University.

This right here: call and response is a crucial part of what makes Black Twitter work on Twitter, especially as the affordances of the site allow the elevation and transformation of call and response into something unique by means of the platform. https://t.co/2XK4lVCHmd

— Dr. Johnathan Flowers, Citational Rebel (@shengokai) November 7, 2022

A regular reminder of the problems with “objectivity”

Twitter has been an excellent place to publicly call out news organizations for doing dumb or lazy things. This ties in with Desmond-Harris’s point above, but the potential for being publicly called out has likely contributed to many media companies’ decisions to move away from outdated notions of “objectivity.”

It’s not that pile-ons and public shamings are always a force for good. But Twitter has served something like the role of a public editor, and that is beneficial. If editors and reporters know there is a high likelihood of being publicly called out on something, they’re likely to spend more time making an argument airtight, tracking down a few extra sources, or checking their data.

A recent NPR tweet is a good example of how Twitter has nudged news outlets toward being more direct. Of course, NPR would not be tweeting if we didn’t have Twitter. But what I mean is that we would be less likely to see this framing of news if Twitter hadn’t helped push toward it.

BREAKING: Donald Trump, who tried to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election and inspired a deadly riot at the Capitol in a desperate attempt to keep himself in power, has filed to run for president again in 2024. https://t.co/iqIcaN3SZA

— NPR (@NPR) November 16, 2022

The place for breaking news

Sports journalism is going to be a bit lost without major personalities dropping big news on Twitter before anywhere else

— Mike Denison (@ThatMikeDenison) November 16, 2022

Screenshotted best bits

Goodbye, screenshots of the juiciest part of a story. Goodbye, reporter threads that break the best parts down so you don’t have to read the whole thing — in the most well-done cases, these are “like a tldr or instant annotation by an expert,” my colleague Sarah Scire noted.

They'll hit a pay wall for a lot of (really good) reporting. Maybe they'll subscribe, maybe they'll find free coverage (which could also be really good, but often is from non-local / imo less-grounded TV outlets in emergencies). + also get news slower of course

— Jake Sheridan (@JakeSheridan_) November 16, 2022

An amazing way to find sources, experts, and brand-new research

When a family member was diagnosed with a rare medical condition, I only had to spend about an hour on Twitter to find a handful of experts on that condition nationwide. All responded to my DMs within a few hours and one doctor gave me her personal phone number.

Twitter gives journalists easy access to the academic and scientific communities. We can learn about new scientific research straight from the source (and academics’ threads about their own research are often invaluable; see also that “TLDR” that Sarah mentioned above.)

It’ll be harder to identify scientific sources that aren’t already well known, and much harder to find new scientific stories that aren’t broadcast as press releases to everyone on a mailing list.

— Dr Robin George Andrews (@SquigglyVolcano) November 16, 2022

And sourcing will simply become more difficult.

Finding sources will be back to the hard way — listening, asking others, reading local news coverage (whoops! There is no local news coverage any more!).

— SIVA VAIDHYANATHAN (@sivavaid) November 16, 2022

DMs as a reporting tool

DMs, falling somewhere between a text and an email, are an amazing way to get in touch with sources, even if the conversation later moves off Twitter. I don’t think someone’s ever declined my request to “follow for DM,” whereas another email in the inbox is easy to ignore. DMs in most cases just don’t seem as burdensome as emails.

The part of Twitter that would be most annoying to lose is as professional networking service. Have been interviewing a ton of people for a book project and probably 60% of interviews originate w/Twitter DM. Higher success rate than email; easier than tracking down a phone #.

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) November 18, 2022

An internet directory

Because no thank you, LinkedIn.

lack of an internet directory. can look up a person or org's profile and get a semi up to date view of where they work/what's going on. it's also one place to look rather than finding the about us page on every website

are people going to update their sites instead? hope so!

— erika owens (@erika_owens) November 16, 2022

“That tweet should be a story”

“This tweet should be a story” is a real driver imo

— jaimegreen.net/book (@jaimealyse) November 16, 2022

Real-time conference coverage

If you couldn’t attend a conference, you could learn the highlights from Twitter, pointed out Eder Campuzano, a reporter for the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

* Less public criticism and feedback, leaving a gap in correspondence between reporters and their audience.
* Another effect: Power centers in newsrooms going unchallenged when they stumble.
* Live coverage of conferences and workshops. I learned so much for free over the years.

— Señor Eder Campuzano (@edercampuzano) November 16, 2022

That listing right up there ^ is where to apply, but let me tell you a little more about the job.

We’re looking for somebody who is genuinely interested in the future of news and journalism online, and who also sees this beat as a wide-ranging opportunity. Writing about digital media = writing about life on the internet = writing about real life, and many of the challenges confronting journalism reflect broader societal rifts. We’re looking for someone who approaches this beat with deep curiosity and openness, who is skeptical or even scathing when warranted but who is also fundamentally optimistic about innovation in digital journalism and wants to play a part in making this industry better and more sustainable.

Bringing that back down to earth a bit: We’re also looking for someone who has at least two years of journalism experience. (That can include college journalism experience.) And it is essential that this person be an excellent writer.

Here are some other qualities of a successful Nieman Lab staff writer:

— You dig, dig, dig. You call/text/email/DM (um, if Twitter still exists by the time you are hired) to get the full story and make sure you understand what is going on. You’re good at finding the kernel of a post and identifying what’s interesting and what isn’t.
— You’re motivated, organized, and self-directed, and you’re excellent at written communication with colleagues — Slack is our hub. (This position can be remote; more on that below.)
— You get obsessed and passionate; you recognize that being an expert on small things helps you see the patterns behind big things.
— You have a finely calibrated bullshit detector and recognize when something is PR speak or dumb or just a lot of words.
— You are empathetic. You may be able to write brutal takedowns when necessary, but you also understand that most of the time, we are writing about kind humans who want to make journalism better. There are many terrible ideas in the world and making fun of some of them is definitely a delightful little aspect of this job, but for the most part, we want to focus on good ideas, and on what is working.
— You read a lot — both news stuff and other stuff. (One of the responsibilities of the job is helping with our “What We’re Reading” section of curated links.)
— You have ideas for how to make Nieman Lab better.

Our team has a wide range of outside interests and family commitments. We are looking for someone who’s excellent at managing their time and meeting the deadlines of a daily publishing schedule (our newsletter goes out Monday through Thursday at 3 PM ET), and who’ll be a vibrant and involved colleague on Slack. In return, we trust you to have your own life and, for the most part, get things done at the times that work for you.

We’re able to consider remote candidates in the states where Harvard is registered to do business — currently California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont. The rest of our team lives in the Boston area, but we work remotely most days.

As a Nieman Lab staff writer, you will be a full-time Harvard employee, with the truly excellent benefits that entails. These benefits include, but are not limited to, top-notch health/dental/vision/life insurance, paid parental leave, a Harvard-funded retirement plan in addition to an employee-funded one, tuition assistance (take Harvard Extension School classes for $40 or other classes for 10% of the normal cost), discounted public transportation passes or a bike commuting allowance, 20 days of paid vacation per year plus the week off between Christmas and New Year’s, generous sick time, and personal days — and the list goes on.

This is a union job. The salary range for this position is $68,000 to $72,000.

Apply here. To be considered, you must apply at that Harvard HR site link, where you should include a brief cover letter telling me why you think you’d be right for the job. Please don’t email me application materials directly; I’m not allowed to consider anyone who doesn’t go through the official HR process.

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.