Sarah Scire – Nieman Lab https://www.niemanlab.org Wed, 10 May 2023 16:38:08 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.2 The Athletic’s live audio rooms bring sports talk radio into this century https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/05/the-athletics-live-audio-rooms-bring-sports-talk-radio-into-this-century/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/05/the-athletics-live-audio-rooms-bring-sports-talk-radio-into-this-century/#respond Wed, 10 May 2023 13:56:01 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=214763 A curious media hole forms in the wake of a big sports game. After the final whistle, people are craving content about what they just watched, but many reporters are busy interviewing coaches and players and writing their stories. That’s a void just when fans are most desperate to process what happened and what it all means for the team.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Basketball radio image generated by Midjourney

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/05/the-athletics-live-audio-rooms-bring-sports-talk-radio-into-this-century/feed/ 0 “The news industry takes advantage of the hate-as-commodity ecosystem” https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/05/the-news-industry-takes-advantage-of-the-hate-as-commodity-ecosystem/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/05/the-news-industry-takes-advantage-of-the-hate-as-commodity-ecosystem/#respond Thu, 04 May 2023 17:21:03 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=214596 A new study borrows from fandom literature to ask: What if some of our haters make us stronger?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah Scire: Can you tell me what piqued your interest in doing this research in the first place?

Jane Yeahin Pyo: I started this research because I was researching about the widespread culture of harassing journalists in South Korea: Calling journalists names (“giraegi” is the word that journalists are often called, a combination of gija, journalist, and tsuraegi, trash), writing hateful comments, sending emails, etc.

I first set out to interview journalists to ask how they responded to and coped with these attacks. Many were defensive, saying they don’t mind the trolls so much, which is a common reaction according to the existing literature. But soon, I realized that they were speaking in terms of potentially getting something in return from the trolls, like how celebrities become more famous as they are hated. This is how I came to think about the celebrity/influencer studies aspect.

Scire: You mention the professional rewards that can be gained from engagement from anti-fans. Does this “hater” dynamic change if the news organization has a business model dependent on subscriptions or reader-generated revenue (rather than advertising dependent on metrics like pageviews and clicks)?

Pyo: This is a really interesting question. I don’t think the dynamic would change radically, thinking about the broader attention economy and the trend in celebrity culture. For instance, haters may follow a celebrity’s Instagram account just to express their hate. Likewise, readers may subscribe to a newspaper to access the information they completely disagree with and spread it to their own community. To say that a subscription-based business model would only attract readers with favorable attitudes toward the news organizations would be assuming a strict echo chamber in news exposure, which studies have shown is not always the case.

More importantly, as the logic of the attention economy has permeated so deeply in the online sphere, I can’t possibly imagine a news organization’s business model that is completely separate from the advertising revenue driven by metrics.

Scire: How country-specific do you think these findings are? For example, would you say that the U.S. has something similar to these sites in South Korea that rank journalists as “trash”?

Pyo: The online harassment of journalists is a worldwide phenomenon, for sure. Some forms of harassment are similarly happening in the U.S., such as writing uncivil comments and emails, doxing journalists’ personal information, and calling them names. In the U.S., the online harassment of journalists also takes a collective form, as it is used as a right-wing strategy. Still, the culture of creating anti-journalist websites, sharing information, and ranking journalists is unique to South Korea because of the historical distrust in journalism [Ed. note: More on that below.]

The findings that hate works like capital due to the logic of the attention economy are also applicable beyond South Korea, as U.S. journalists are also pressured to make themselves more visible and accessible to the public.

Scire: In the paper, you mention a “decline in trust in journalism after a series of nation-level misreporting from major news outlets” in South Korea. Can you tell me more about those events? Were those responsible for those lapses featured on the sites “Reportrash” and “Nolooknews”?

Pyo: The misreporting event that I’m referring to is the Sewol Ferry Tragedy that occurred on April 16, 2014. On this day, a ferry with 476 people sank and caused 304 casualties, due to the mixture of problems of overloading, the captain’s incapacity, and the failure of the officials’ timely action.

As the whole Korea saw the ferry full of young high school students fall before their eyes, many were shocked. What left them in more chaos was the news media’s continuous misreporting. Right after the incident, two major national broadcasting television channels reported that everyone on deck was rescued. Minutes later, another breaking news broke out that there were still people trapped in the ferry, and the number kept changing, causing trauma and fury among citizens who were anxiously awaiting the rescue. Even during the rescue process, criticisms soared as journalists unsympathetically tried to interview the survivors and the victims’ families. Scholars attributed the press failure to the new organizations’ pressure for breaking news, competition for audience attention, and a lack of professionalism and ethics.

The use of the derogatory name “giraegi” increased exponentially after this. But [Reportrash and Nolooknews] were created around 2018, so these journalists’ names are not featured on these websites. However, the feeling of distrust and disappointment is the fundamental root of the websites.

Scire: It was fascinating to read the participants reflect on some of the upsides to receiving hate online. Ultimately, would it be fair to say that your work suggests the news industry benefits from haters and anti-fans, but individual journalists don’t benefit? You wrote, “While anti-journalist hate is detrimental to individual journalists, the news media industry is overlooking the threats and putting individual journalists at risk because it regards it as an opportunity to gain traction. In this way, this research is also a critique of how the news media industry is increasingly capitalizing on the heightened visibility and digital publicity of journalists, pushing individuals to expose themselves online.”

Pyo: Yes — the news industry takes advantage of the hate-as-commodity ecosystem! It’s not mentioned in this research, but in my dissertation, I demonstrate how journalists are pushed by news organizations to write news articles that will induce more hate. One memorable quote that I got from one participant — he was ranked first on Reportrash’s List — was that news organizations use journalists as “human bullet shields,” a Korean phrase often used to describe scapegoats. He explained that as “human bullet shields,” journalists were placed at the forefront, alluring trolls’ attention and receiving the attack and harassment, while the company stood back and made more revenues from increasing pageviews.

Scire: There have been calls for newsrooms in the U.S. to act and help stanch harassment of their journalists online. Are there similar calls for the news industry and/or individual newsrooms to take an active role in stopping harassment of their employees in South Korea?

Pyo: In South Korea, the protection of individual journalists is greatly lacking. My participants shared that at the senior and managerial level, there is a lack of proper acknowledgment that journalist trolling is a serious matter. Even for mainstream legacy news organizations, there are no systematic or legal protections. Because of the elitist, macho, and exclusive nature of the Korean journalism field, there is also [an expectation] that a journalist should be able to ignore harassment and criticism. I think news organizations’ awareness of the well-being of journalists is the most important thing.

Scire: Can you tell me more about what you learned about how “the consequences of journalist harassment have been harder for already marginalized journalists”?

Pyo: Numerous studies have already documented that female journalists are more likely to be digitally abused and more likely to suffer severely from the attacks. Female journalists across the globe face sexist and misogynistic comments that attack them based on their gender or sexuality. Female journalists are also more vulnerable to stress and trauma because gender/sexuality-based harassment is so daunting, sometimes even resulting in actual sexual and physical violence.

In my research [in South Korea], as in the U.S. and elsewhere, the attacks on female journalists were more severe and left more damage. Male journalists more often told me that they could cope with trolling, demonstrating a “just live with it” attitude. However, for female journalists, digital harassment viscerally impacted them because the attacks often led to sexual threats or comments that made fun of their appearances. Because of the fear, female journalists also shed away from taking a more active role in their reporting. They feared having their profile photos up on the websites. The fear of harassment also limited Korean female journalists’ work-related opportunities and experiences. For example, the attacks affected the topics and issues that female journalists could [cover], such as sensitive social issues (with feminism or progressive perspectives).

Graffiti photo by Steve Rotman used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/05/the-news-industry-takes-advantage-of-the-hate-as-commodity-ecosystem/feed/ 0 Disney is shrinking FiveThirtyEight, and Nate Silver (and his models) are leaving https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/04/disney-is-shrinking-fivethirtyeight-and-nate-silver-and-his-models-are-leaving/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/04/disney-is-shrinking-fivethirtyeight-and-nate-silver-and-his-models-are-leaving/#respond Tue, 25 Apr 2023 18:58:43 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=214537 FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver and at least some of the data-driven site’s 35-person staff are leaving ABC News as part of broader layoffs at The Walt Disney Company. (Or, in the words of ABC News, FiveThirtyEight is being “streamlined.”)

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.

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.

“A 1950s-style cartoon illustration of a very sad fox,” Midjourney

  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.”
]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/04/disney-is-shrinking-fivethirtyeight-and-nate-silver-and-his-models-are-leaving/feed/ 0 The first Substack dedicated to war correspondence launches https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/04/npr-layoffs-beget-the-first-substack-dedicated-to-war-correspondence/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/04/npr-layoffs-beget-the-first-substack-dedicated-to-war-correspondence/#respond Tue, 25 Apr 2023 17:30:37 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=214499 “I’ve decided to go back into Ukraine to keep reporting,” war correspondent Tim Mak writes in his first Substack newsletter. “This time, alone.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can read the first post from The Counteroffensive here.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/04/npr-layoffs-beget-the-first-substack-dedicated-to-war-correspondence/feed/ 0 “Tell a more complete story” and other lessons from a new report on mistrust of news media https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/04/tell-a-more-complete-story-and-other-lessons-from-a-new-report-on-mistrust-of-news-media/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/04/tell-a-more-complete-story-and-other-lessons-from-a-new-report-on-mistrust-of-news-media/#respond Mon, 24 Apr 2023 14:08:04 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=214295 There’s a new report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism that focuses on distrust of news media — and what news organizations might be able to do about it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tweaks are not enough

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/04/tell-a-more-complete-story-and-other-lessons-from-a-new-report-on-mistrust-of-news-media/feed/ 0 Why news outlets are putting their podcasts on YouTube https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/04/why-news-outlets-are-putting-their-podcasts-on-youtube/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/04/why-news-outlets-are-putting-their-podcasts-on-youtube/#respond Tue, 11 Apr 2023 18:51:24 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=213414 It has recently come to my attention that some people prefer to watch podcasts. In my house, podcasts are for multitasking, like walking the dogs or doing the dishes — but it turns out I’m in the minority, according to Morning Consult data.

The research firm found that more podcast listeners in the U.S. prefer to watch podcasts on YouTube than listen to audio-only versions.

A different study found watchable podcasts attract more podcasting newbies — those discovering podcasts for the first time — and that people listening to podcasts on YouTube are more likely to be younger (18 to 34 years old) than regular listeners elsewhere. (Cumulus Media, which conducted the survey, took care to ensure that none of the survey’s 604 respondents worked in fields that would presumably be disproportionately full of podcast listeners, like media, advertising, marketing, podcasting, or public relations.) Some podcast viewers report actively watching the videos to catch facial expressions while others minimize the video to listen in the background while doing something else.

YouTube starts to generate ad revenue for creators sooner than many other social platforms. And these video podcasts don’t necessarily have to be pretty or a heavy lift in the production department. Plenty of podcasts are uploaded with less-than-crisp videos showing hosts and guests in Zoom-like boxes. Others feature a static image and maybe a sound wave animation, if you’re lucky.

YouTube has published resources on bringing journalism to the platform, but those guides tend to be written for individual journalists — er, “news creators” — rather than news publishers. The platform recently rolled out a dedicated “Podcasts” tab and upgraded featured podcasts to include shows from The New York Times and NPR. Several news organizations stressed to me that YouTube appears, to them, to still be refining its podcast strategy, and said they’re waiting to see what shakes out before jumping on with their own content.

“We’re committed to supporting the future of journalism, and that means continuing to create opportunities for the industry to harness the latest technology and techniques for growth on YouTube,” Elena Hernandez, a YouTube spokesperson, said in an email. “Whether it’s long form video, Shorts [more on those below], or podcasts, we’re always working to improve the experience and support multiple formats for news creators.”

Here’s more from three news publishers on choosing to bring podcasts to YouTube.

Just last month, Slate announced it would partner with YouTube to bring its shows — including extensive archives — to YouTube. (A program called Headliner will allow the company to automate much of the process, a spokesperson noted.)

YouTube has more than 2.6 billion active users per month. The video platform enjoys a remarkably global audience, with more than half of internet users worldwide visiting YouTube at least once a month. Those numbers, ultimately, convinced Slate.

“Discoverability has become one of the biggest challenges across the podcast industry, and we see this as a real opportunity to build scale and reach a new, untapped audience on YouTube, which has become the world’s most-used podcast platform,” Slate president and chief revenue officer Charlie Kammerer said. “We’re excited to make our diverse collection of podcasts available to YouTube’s global audience, and to experiment with new formats and content ideas on the platform.”

Some of those experiments will include testing which Slate shows lend themselves to a visual medium and trying to envision what the next generation of a “video podcast” looks like. Slate also plans to use the videos on their site and experiment with Shorts to create “behind the scenes” content to promote the channel.

Other lenses to help determine whether putting effort into YouTube is worth the lift for NPR included research and development (NPR wants to feel like it’s learning about best practices for things like thumbnails, metadata, and discoverability) and reaching new audiences.

“We want to make sure we are reaching new audiences, and not recycling existing audiences,” Sucherman said. “Do we have evidence, if we are reaching new audiences, that they are younger, more diverse? And that these are ultimately public radio listeners [and] viewers of the future for us? Our mission is to reach as many Americans as possible with high-quality, fact-based journalism and information, however they choose to tune in.”

NPR, which recently laid off 10% of staff and cancelled podcasts amid a budget shortfall, leans toward producing content that can become a YouTube Short and a TikTok and appear on Instagram. “We use every part of the buffalo,” Sucherman noted.

The NPR team was frank about YouTube’s place in its overall social hierarchy. Audience teams have been more focused on Instagram and TikTok, where news about Ukraine and short-form videos from NPR Music have been doing especially well lately.

“We’re just trying to get a sense of what the audience might like, and not necessarily trying to build an audience around this content right now,” Jenkins said. “Our audience-building efforts are really taking place on Instagram, where we have a very robust NPR presence with our news content, as well as NPR Music.”

“We don’t do this in isolation. We do this as part of our overall podcast strategy and part of our overall content strategy. We’ve got levers that we’re pulling and pushing and this is one of them,” Jenkins added. “We are open to seeing it build over time — and we’re also open to changing course, depending on what makes the most sense.”

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/04/why-news-outlets-are-putting-their-podcasts-on-youtube/feed/ 0 NPR says it won’t tweet from @NPR until Twitter removes false “state-affiliated” label https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/04/npr-says-it-wont-tweet-from-npr-until-twitter-removes-false-state-affiliated-label/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/04/npr-says-it-wont-tweet-from-npr-until-twitter-removes-false-state-affiliated-label/#respond Fri, 07 Apr 2023 13:39:37 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=213751 Looking for NPR stories on Twitter? Look elsewhere.

NPR has not tweeted since Twitter slapped a “US state-affiliated media” label on its main account on Wednesday, a designation that lumps the news org in with propaganda outlets like Russian broadcaster RT and China’s People’s Daily newspaper. And it doesn’t plan to until the label is removed.

The @NPR account — which has more than 8.8 million followers — has an updated bio: “You can find us every other place you read the news.” The header image now includes the words: “Always free and independent. Always at NPR.org.”

The changes were made on Thursday, NPR spokesperson Isabel Lara confirmed.

“We stopped tweeting from the main @NPR account after they attached that false label to it because each tweet we publish would carry it,” Lara said. “We have paused tweeting from that account until we hear back from Twitter on this. We’ve continued tweeting from other accounts that aren’t mislabeled.”

Abstaining from Twitter is less of a hardship than Twitter owner Elon Musk might like to think. Twitter doesn’t drive much traffic for most news publishers, even though it’s a platform many journalists can’t seem to quit. (And that’s before the “state-affiliated” label downranks your content.)

Also on Thursday, Musk told an NPR reporter that the designation may have been a mistake.

“Well, then we should fix it,” Musk wrote in an email to tech reporter Bobby Allyn, who had pointed out government aid accounts for roughly 1% of NPR’s finances.

Allyn said he “provided Musk publicly available documentation of the network’s finances showing that nearly 40% of its funding comes from corporate sponsorships and 31% from fees for programming paid by local public radio stations.”

Twitter defines “state-affiliated” publishers as ones where the government “exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.”

Until Wednesday, Twitter’s own policy on the “state-affiliated” label specifically noted that “state-financed media organizations with editorial independence, like the BBC in the UK or NPR in the United States, are not defined as state-affiliated media for the purposes of this policy.” Twitter removed the reference to NPR after giving its account the “state-affiliated” label.

Photo of a NPR member station mug by Elvin W. used under a Creative Commons license.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/04/npr-says-it-wont-tweet-from-npr-until-twitter-removes-false-state-affiliated-label/feed/ 0 Local NewsMatch funders outpaced national donors for the first time in 2022 https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/04/local-newsmatch-funders-outpaced-national-donors-for-the-first-time-in-2022/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/04/local-newsmatch-funders-outpaced-national-donors-for-the-first-time-in-2022/#respond Wed, 05 Apr 2023 18:42:57 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=213630 For many nonprofit newsrooms, NewsMatch is the most important fundraising campaign on the calendar. The results from the latest campaign — which ran from November 1, 2022 through the end of the year — are in, and they skew local.

NewsMatch is the annual end-of-year fundraising campaign that uses gift-matching to encourage donations to nonprofit newsrooms. In 2022, the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN)-backed program secured $4.6 million in matching funds from national, regional, and interest-based funders.

The 303 participating newsrooms — all members of INN — then turned around and leveraged those commitments into $5.5 million in matching funds from small businesses, local philanthropists, and community foundations in their area.

Courtney Lewis, chief of growth programs for INN, has managed NewsMatch since 2020. She called this year’s tilt toward local funders “a more sustainable funding solution” for journalism.

NewsMatch has used growth in individual giving as a central marker of success, but Lewis implemented “a strategic shift” in 2020 toward thinking about the end-of-year program as an opening for newsrooms to form relationships with more local and issue-based funders. The program now provides training and financial incentives to nudge newsrooms toward securing local matches.

Since 2016, NewsMatch campaigns have helped to raise more than $270 million for nonprofit newsrooms that belong to INN. The vast majority of INN members participate in NewsMatch — about 300 of roughly 400 total members. Those who opt out tend to be more established nonprofit newsrooms — those “beyond the startup phase” and blessed with larger budgets, Lewis said.

Smaller and newer outlets “rely on NewsMatch for more than just matching gifts they can leverage for support from their communities,” Lewis said, including training, advice, and other resources.

Across the 303 participating newsrooms, NewsMatch brought in $38 million in individual donations from more than 231,000 unique donors in 2022. The largest 50 newsrooms brought in $24 million of the $38 million total, Lewis said, and the median amount raised from individuals across all newsroom was roughly $36,000.

While philanthropic investment rose this year, the amount raised from individuals dipped in 2022. In 2020, NewsMatch recorded more than a million donations from nearly 434,000 unique donors. Two years later, those numbers have dropped to 344,000 donations from 231,000 donors. How concerned should nonprofit newsrooms be about some of these downward trends?

Lewis noted that the NewsMatch results line up with giving trends across the entire nonprofit sector. In 2022, the total number of charitable donors declined 7.1% from the year before even as total revenue increased, according to data from the Fundraising Effectiveness Project.

“The bulk of the decreases were among the 50 participating newsrooms with the largest budgets, but we continue to see growth among smaller newsrooms,” Lewis told me. “For newsrooms with operating budgets under $2 million, the total amount raised and average amount raised per newsroom were up over last year.”

I asked Lewis where she sees room for improvement in NewsMatch. What is looking like fertile ground to INN’s chief of growth programs? She pointed to funders and foundations that may not have previously funded journalism before.

“This year, the Joyce Foundation contributed to a regional NewsMatch partner fund because bringing quality news to these communities aligns with the foundation’s philanthropic priority: advancing racial equity and economic mobility in the Great Lakes region,” Lewis said. (The Joyce Foundation gave $50,000 in matching funds to 10 newsrooms in 2022, including the Detroit-based Outlier Media.) “I anticipate we’ll see more placed-based and issue funders recognizing that providing news as a public service complements their mission.”

Photos of journalists from Public Square Amplified, WABE, CT Mirror, and High Country News provided by INN.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/04/local-newsmatch-funders-outpaced-national-donors-for-the-first-time-in-2022/feed/ 0 The FTC proposes a formal “click to cancel” provision for subscriptions https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/03/the-ftc-proposes-a-formal-click-to-cancel-provision-for-subscriptions/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/03/the-ftc-proposes-a-formal-click-to-cancel-provision-for-subscriptions/#respond Thu, 23 Mar 2023 16:13:06 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=213305 The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has sought to end “click to subscribe, call to cancel” subscription policies for years, labeling the practice — common in the news industry — “dark” and “deceptive” and vowing to ramp up enforcement.

But the federal organization admitted this week that its current enforcement and rules “have only gotten part way” to fixing the problem. On Thursday, the FTC announced a formal “click to cancel” provision it says will bring the rules the rest of the way. The commission voted 3-1 to bring this proposal to the public and the next step is allowing consumers to submit comments on the proposed rule electronically.

In case you haven’t had the pleasure of encountering this particular retention tactic in the wild, the rule change would formally ban companies from offering a free or reduced trial without making it clear that customers will be automatically be billed for the full price soon after. It would also ban companies from making it much, much harder to cancel a payment than to sign up for one.

Specifically, “if you can sign up online, you must be able to cancel on the same website, in the same number of steps,” according to the FTC. Sellers must also “take ‘no’ for an answer” instead of continuing to pitch new offers when customers call to cancel a subscription.

“These companies are betting that customers will be too impatient, busy, or confused to jump through every hoop,” FTC chair Lina Khan wrote about the proposed rule.

The new rule would help the FTC with enforcement. Companies could face a fine of $50,000 per violation per day.

“When you’re talking about companies that have hundreds or thousands or millions of consumers,” Khan said, “that could add up quite quickly.”

The FTC said the click to cancel rule is just one of “several significant updates” it is proposing to its rules regarding subscriptions and recurring payments.

“The new click to cancel provision, along with other proposals, would go a long way to rescuing consumers from seemingly never-ending struggles to cancel unwanted subscription payment plans for everything from cosmetics to newspapers to gym memberships,” according to a news release.

You can read more here.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/03/the-ftc-proposes-a-formal-click-to-cancel-provision-for-subscriptions/feed/ 0 The Boston Globe steps back from The Emancipator after two years helping the racial justice outlet launch https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/03/the-boston-globe-steps-back-from-the-emancipator-after-two-years-helping-the-racial-justice-outlet-launch/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/03/the-boston-globe-steps-back-from-the-emancipator-after-two-years-helping-the-racial-justice-outlet-launch/#respond Wed, 22 Mar 2023 18:05:20 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=213221 The Emancipator launched in 2021 with lofty goals (to reframe a national conversation in order to “hasten racial justice”), an impressive list of supporters (its original advisory board included Joy Reid, Eddie Glaude, Sewell Chan, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Jelani Cobb, and Annette Gordon-Reed, among others), and two major Boston institutions behind it.

Now, after two years, one of those institutions is stepping back.

The Boston Globe is ending its official involvement with the digital publication. The Emancipator, which is named after a legendary abolitionist newspaper, will continue its work with the other founding partner, Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research. (There’s already an open Emancipator digital producer listing up at the university.)

“Over the last two years, the Globe provided essential media start-up resources to develop and launch a digital newsroom in a short span of time,” Boston Globe spokesperson Heidi Flood said in an email. “We’ve successfully built a foundation for The Emancipator to regularly publish its content, newsletter, and to continue growing its reader base and social media presence.”

As a nonprofit newsroom, The Emancipator will operate independently within BU. Globe columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr — who had served as The Emancipator’s lead writer while contributing to the Globe’s opinion section — will stay with the paper while Amber Payne, co-editor-in-chief, will transition into the role of publisher and general manager for The Emancipator. (The other co-editor-in-chief, Deborah Douglas, was named director of Medill’s Midwest Solutions Journalism Hub in January.) Payne will focus on “strategic operations and development,” according to an internal email, and lead the search for the outlet’s next editor-in-chief. Another full-time employee and an audience engagement intern will also transition from the Globe to BU.

Payne, who joined The Emancipator after a year here at Harvard as a Nieman Fellow, told me the publication always knew it had a two-year runway under the current arrangement. After that time, Boston University and the Globe could renew or one institution could take on the project by itself. Payne said the shift to BU will allow The Emancipator to “streamline” its fundraising efforts and operations.

The Emancipator launched with coverage on the racial wealth gap, anchored by reporting by from Stohr. Another flagship series has been #TheTalk, which covers “what we tell our children and ourselves about being safe and sound in the world.” (Here’s one video commentary — a white mother talking to her sons about white nationalist content in their social feeds — that stands out to Payne.)

So far this year, The Emancipator has published 18 pieces, including four videos. Recent articles include an opinion piece arguing “parents rights” are a red herring, a reported piece about the fate of the Nashville building where historic counter-protests took place, and an article by a professor and leader at Boston University Center for Antiracist Research outlining an eponymous test to help audiences determine if the movie they are watching is antiracist or not.

Until the transition is finalized and a new homepage is launched, you can read The Emancipator’s work over at the Globe.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/03/the-boston-globe-steps-back-from-the-emancipator-after-two-years-helping-the-racial-justice-outlet-launch/feed/ 0 Pew’s Stateline finds a new home with nonprofit States Newsroom https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/03/pews-stateline-finds-a-new-home-with-nonprofit-states-newsroom/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/03/pews-stateline-finds-a-new-home-with-nonprofit-states-newsroom/#respond Wed, 08 Mar 2023 18:13:53 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=212854 “State government is the level of government that impacts people’s lives the most and is covered the least.” That’s what Chris Fitzsimon, the director and publisher of States Newsroom, believes. His nonprofit news network, which operates more than 30 digital news organizations from Alaska to Florida, is getting a major boost to help address that gap.

Pew Charitable Trusts announced Wednesday that it will transfer its Stateline news service to States Newsroom, and will provide a $3 million grant to help ease the transition.

Stateline will get a redesigned website at Stateline.org this spring and a new home for its nonpartisan reporting on trends in state policy in News from the States. The new addition represents a significant expansion for States Newsroom, bringing its headcount to roughly 180 journalists dedicated to covering state politics and policy across the U.S.

States Newsroom was “incubated” at launch by the progressive nonprofit Hopewell Fund before becoming its own nonprofit in 2019. (The newsroom, which publicly lists every donation over $500, did not receive funding from Hopewell.) Its newsrooms are studded with experienced reporters — often snapped up from local newspapers — who are guided by five national editors. The network publishes a national roundup, a newsletter on abortion rights, and (often left-leaning) editorials and commentary in separate opinion sections.

States Newsroom currently has journalists on the ground in 32 states. The network also partners with nonprofit newsrooms in eight additional states, including The Texas Tribune, Vermont Digger, and Mountain State Spotlight in West Virginia.

As part of Pew Charitable Trusts, Stateline has covered trends in politics and policy that cut across state lines for the past two decades. Recent articles have looked at how Republican legislators are raising new barriers to ballot measures after voters in some conservative states turned out to support abortion rights, what states and cities are doing about a dangerous additive appearing in street drugs, and the states considering ending “turn right on red” after a rise in pedestrian deaths. Stateline also keeps closer tabs on rural communities in America — including a lack of lawyers and an experiment to help hospitals in rural areas — than your average national publication.

Stateline executive editor Scott Greenberger, who used to be a statehouse reporter in Texas and Massachusetts himself, stressed how difficult it is for a reporter busy with a single legislature to keep up with what was happening in the other 49 capitals. With gridlock in Washington, D.C., more action is taking place at the state level — and that includes national groups pushing policy agendas in multiple states at once, Greenberger said.

“If you’re a statehouse reporter focused on a single statehouse, you might not understand that some legislation is part of something bigger,” Greenberger said. “That broader perspective is a big part of the value of Stateline that provides.”

The newly merged newsrooms will use their reporting power to compare the ways different states are dealing with similar challenges — like water access issues, housing shortages, and rules around the 2024 election.

“The election will be decided nationally, but how people vote, when they can vote, and who can vote — all those decisions are not made in Washington. They’re made in state capitals across the country,” noted Fitzsimon, pointing to Stateline’s coverage of proposed changes to election rules. “Very rarely do things happen in a vacuum in one state capital, whether it’s the changes in higher education, the debate over critical race theory, or transgender rights. Those things are not only related but, in many cases, they’re being pushed by the same folks. We want to continue to work, with Stateline’s expertise, to figure out who those folks are, what their agendas are, how it’s translating across each capital, and what it means to people who live there.”

The news comes after years of newspapers reducing the number of journalists dedicated to statehouse coverage. A surge in nonprofit newsrooms has partially made up for the newspaper losses. Twenty percent of the reporters covering U.S. statehouses work for nonprofits, according to a Pew Research report we covered last year.

The decision to find a new home for Stateline reflects those changes in the news industry, as well as the news service’s odd fit within an organization more dedicated to policy than journalism.

“Pew made the decision that at this exciting time for nonprofit news outlets and this very important time for statehouse coverage, Stateline would be able to grow and flourish in an organization that was focused purely on news, as opposed to one that where journalism was just part of the mission,” Greenberger said. “It made sense for it to be part of a journalism-only organization.”

“I think this merger with States Newsroom gives us a footprint that no one else can even come close to matching,” he added. “We’re not just a handful of reporters in odd places.”

States Newsroom plans to expand, but only where it can fill a gap in news coverage, Fitzsimon said.

“You’ll see us in the states where there is not a strong, thriving daily nonprofit,” Fitzsimon said. “Many nonprofits that pop up are [focused on] long-term investigative reporting, which I totally support and think is wonderful. But we also need the daily hard-hitting coverage to complement that. At some point we’ll have some presence, whether it’s a partner or a newsroom, in 50 states and complement that with the great work that Scott and his team do at Stateline.”

“Both organizations were doing good work, but this takes it to a new level,” he added. “We need more coverage. We need more transparency on public officials. We need more reporting, because I think even more vital decisions will be made in state capitals in the coming years. This positions us, collectively, to really give people the information they need to make decisions and to find out what’s happening across America, not just in Washington.”

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/03/pews-stateline-finds-a-new-home-with-nonprofit-states-newsroom/feed/ 0 Wired tells readers what it will use generative AI for — and what’s off-limits https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/03/wired-tells-readers-what-it-will-use-generative-ai-for-and-whats-off-limits/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/03/wired-tells-readers-what-it-will-use-generative-ai-for-and-whats-off-limits/#respond Mon, 06 Mar 2023 17:21:50 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=212744 Despite some high-profile cautionary tales, publishers have been announcing experiments with generative AI — many using OpenAI’s ChatGPT or similar tech — left and right.

But Wired is the first news outlet I’ve seen publish an official AI policy that spells out how the publication plans to use the technology.

The ground rules, published by global editorial director Gideon Lichfield last week, lead off with a set of promises about what the newsroom won’t be doing.

“It may seem counterintuitive for a publication like Wired to have a policy of mostly not using AI,” Lichfield told me. “But I think people appreciate both the transparency and the attempt to define clear standards that emphasize what quality journalism is about.”

Lichfield said questions around how journalists may use generative AI had been in the air since ChatGPT was released in November 2022 and that the news of CNET’s AI-written stories — you know, the ones that contained serious factual errors and plagiarized text — was “the accelerant” for developing Wired’s stance.

The policy went through several revisions. The original draft by Lichfield was vetted by senior members of his team, discussed with the entire newsroom during an all-hands meeting, and run by leadership at Condé Nast. I asked Lichfield what those internal conversations looked like. Were there, for example, any points of disagreements or unanimity?

“We had a bit of debate about whether it would be OK to use AI to edit a story, or write headlines, or brainstorm ideas, but on the whole everyone was very supportive of a stance that placed clear limits on what we would use it for,” Lichfield told me. “I think we all recognized that it simply isn’t very good for most of our purposes. I’m sure it will improve in some areas, but I believe a lot of people are overestimating what it can do.”

NO: Publishing editorial text written or edited by AI “Wired does not publish stories with text generated by AI,” Lichfield wrote in the policy, adding, “This applies not just to whole stories but also to snippets — for example, ordering up a few sentences of boilerplate on how CRISPR works or what quantum computing is.”

The rule extends beyond articles to editorial-side email newsletters, but leaves the door open to using AI for marketing emails. (Lichfield says the marketing emails “are already automated” and that Wired will disclose if they start using AI-generated text.)

The reasons for this ban are “obvious,” according to Lichfield.

“The current AI tools are prone to both errors and bias, and often produce dull, unoriginal writing,” Lichfield writes in the policy. “We think someone who writes for a living needs to constantly be thinking about the best way to express complex ideas in their own words.”

The fact that an AI tool could produce plagiarized text was another factor. And the policy includes a warning to Wired staff and contributors: “If a writer uses it to create text for publication without a disclosure, we’ll treat that as tantamount to plagiarism.”

YES: Using AI to suggest headlines or social media posts. “We currently generate lots of suggestions manually, and an editor has to approve the final choices for accuracy,” Lichfield writes in the policy. “Using an AI tool to speed up idea generation won’t change this process substantively.”

YES: AI-generated story ideas. Wired has already done some “limited testing” to see if AI could help with the process of brainstorming story ideas. Some of the results were false leads or — maybe worse? — straight-up boring.

NO: AI-generated images or video. Art generated with tools like DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion is “already all over the internet,” Wired acknowledges in its policy. But it looks like a legal headache. Lawsuits from artists and image libraries like Getty Images make AI-generated art a no-go for Wired.

Wired stressed that it specifically avoids using AI-generated images instead of stock photography.

“Selling images to stock archives is how many working photographers make ends meet,” Lichfield explains in the policy. “At least until generative AI companies develop a way to compensate the creators their tools rely on, we won’t use their images this way.”

Add “… for now” to everything. The policy notes that AI is evolving and that Wired “may modify our perspective over time.”

“My initial worry was that I’d been too conservative,” Lichfield told me. “I don’t want to close off experimentation, and we know these tools will evolve.”

But a small experiment gave him confidence in the policy.

Lichfield asked ChatGPT to suggest U.S. cities that a reporter looking to report on the impact of predictive policing on local communities should visit. He said it gave him “a plausible-looking list.” When he asked ChatGPT to justify the suggestions, he received more “plausible-looking” — if somewhat repetitive — text on the history and tensions around policing for each city.

Finally, Lichfield asked the tool when each city started to use predictive policing and asked ChatGPT to provide sources.

“It gave me a list of plausible-looking URLs from various local media,” Lichfield said. “Every single one 404’d. They were all made up.”

I went to ChatGPT to try and replicate the question. I knew it could include glaring errors in otherwise convincing text, but, surely, it hadn’t made up URLs when asked for sources?

Reader, it had. The outlets were real — The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, NBC Chicago, The Baltimore Sun, Miami New Times, The Verge, The Washington Post, and the Commercial Appeal in Memphis. But the URLs were all broken for me, too.1

ChatGPT making up URLs isn’t a brand new phenomenon. In this case, our best guess is that ChatGPT can’t search for articles live, so it’s doing its best impression of what, say, a link in the Baltimore Sun would look like. Asking the Open AI-powered version of Bing the same set of questions on Monday generated real links that take you to real outlets.

  1. Here is the text from ChatGPT:

    “Yes, here are some sources for when each city began using predictive policing:

    These sources should provide more information about the specific dates when each city began using predictive policing technology.”

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/03/wired-tells-readers-what-it-will-use-generative-ai-for-and-whats-off-limits/feed/ 0 Meet the first-ever artificial intelligence editor at the Financial Times https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/02/meet-the-first-ever-artificial-intelligence-editor-at-the-financial-times/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/02/meet-the-first-ever-artificial-intelligence-editor-at-the-financial-times/#respond Mon, 27 Feb 2023 17:45:06 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=212532 In recent weeks, Murgia has written about a science fiction magazine that had to stop accepting submissions after being flooded by hundreds of stories generated with the help of AI, China racing to catch up to ChatGPT, and the Vatican hosting a summit to address “the moral conundrums of AI.” (“A rabbi, imam, and the Pope walked into a room …”)

When not covering AI for the FT, Murgia is finishing her first book, Code-Dependent, out in February 2024. We caught up via email. Our back-and-forth has been lightly edited for clarity and that British proclivity for the letter “zed.”

Sarah Scire: How “first” is this position? It’s the first time that someone has held the title of “artificial intelligence editor” in your newsroom, correct? Have you seen other newsrooms create similar positions?

Murgia: It’s a first first! We haven’t had this title, or even a job devoted to AI before at the FT. I had sort of carved it into my beat alongside data and privacy over the last four or five years and focused on areas that impacted society like facial recognition, AI ethics, and cutting-edge applications in healthcare or science. Our innovation editor John Thornhill and West Coast editor Richard Waters often wrote about AI as part of their wider remits, too. But it wasn’t anyone’s primary responsibility.

In recent months, other newsrooms have appointed AI reporters/correspondents to take on this quickly evolving beat, and of course, there are many great reporters who have been writing about AI for a while, such as Karen Hao when she was at MIT Tech Review, and others. What I think is unique about this role at the FT is that it operates within a global newsroom. Correspondents collaborate closely across disciplines and countries — so I hope we can take advantage of that as we build out our coverage.

Scire: What is your job as AI editor? Can you describe, in particular, how you’re thinking about the “global remit” you mentioned in the announcement?

Murgia: The job is to break news and dive deep into how AI technologies work, how they’ll be applied across industries, and the ripple effects on business and society. I’m particularly interested in the impact of AI technologies on our daily lives, for better and worse. It’s a unique role in that I get to report and write, but also work with colleagues to shape stories in their areas of interest. Over the past six years, I’ve collaborated with reporters from the U.S., Brussels, and Berlin, to Kenya, China, and India — it’s something I love about working at the FT.

As AI technologies are adopted more broadly, in the same way that digitization or cloud computing was, correspondents in our bureaus across the world will start to encounter it in their beats. I’ve already heard from several colleagues in beats like media or education about AI-focused stories they’re interested in. With this global remit, I’m hoping we can tie together different threads and trends, and leverage our international perspective to get a sense of how AI is evolving and being adopted at scale.

Scire: What did covering AI look like in your newsrooms before this role was created? (And how will that change, now that you’ve taken this title of AI editor?)

Murgia: We aren’t new to covering AI — there are a handful of journalists at the FT who have understood AI well and written about it for a few years now. We were (hopefully) rigorous in our coverage, but perhaps not singularly focused or strategic about it. For instance, I became interested in biometric technologies such as facial recognition in 2018, and spent a while digging into where and how it was being used and the backlash against its rollout — but this was purely driven by interest, and not a larger plan.

Now, we are in a moment where our readers are curious and hungry to learn more about how this set of technologies works and its impact on the workforce. We’ll approach it from this macro angle. I’ve also always taken an interest in the broader societal impacts of AI, including its ethical use and its role in advancing science and healthcare, which I hope we will focus on. We want our coverage to inform, and also to reveal the opportunities, challenges, and pitfalls of AI in the real world.

Scire: You will be covering artificial intelligence as many industries — including journalism! — are trying to learn how it’ll impact their work and business. This is a little meta, but do you foresee AI changing the way you report, write, or publish?

Murgia: It’s been interesting to me how many media organizations and insiders are concerned about this question right now. It’s exacerbated, I think, by the public examples of publishers experimenting with generative AI. So far I haven’t found that these new tools have changed the way I report or write. Good journalism, in my view, is original and reveals previously unknown or hidden truths. Language models work by predicting the most likely next word in a sequence, based on existing text they’ve been trained on. So they cannot ultimately produce or uncover anything truly new or unexpected in their current form.

I can see how it might be useful in future, as it becomes more accurate, in gathering basic information quickly, outlining themes, and experimenting with summaries [and] headlines. Perhaps chatbots will be a new way to interface with audiences, to provide tailored content and engage with a reader, based on an organization’s own content. I’ll certainly be looking for creative examples of how it’s being tested out today.

Scire: How are you thinking about disclosures, if any? If the Financial Times begins to use a particular AI-powered tool, for example, do you anticipate mentioning that within your coverage?

Murgia: I don’t know of any plans to use AI tools at the FT just now, but I assume the leadership is following developments in generative AI closely, like many other media organizations will be. If we did use these tools, though, I’d expect it would be disclosed transparently to our readers, just as all human authors are credited.

Scire: What kinds of previous experience — personal, professional, educational, etc. — led you to this job, specifically?

Murgia: My educational background was in biology — where I focused on neuroscience and disease — and later in clinical immunology. One of my final pieces of work as an undergraduate was an analysis of intelligence in non-human animals, where I focused on an African gray parrot called Alex and its ability to form concepts.

I was an accidental technology journalist, but what I loved about it was breaking down and communicating complexity to a wider audience. I was drawn, in particular, to subjects at the intersection of tech, science, and society. Early on in my career, I investigated how my own personal data was used (and abused) to build digital products, which turned into a years-long rabbit hole, and travelled to Seoul to witness a human being beaten by an AI at the game of Go. I think this job is the nexus of all these fascinations over the years.

Scire: What do you see as some of the challenges and opportunities for being the first AI editor — or the first anything — at a news organization? Are there certain groups, people, or resources that you’ll look to, outside of your own newsroom, as you do this work?

Murgia: The great thing about being a first is that you have some space to figure things out and shape your own path, without having anything to contrast with. A big opportunity here is for us to own a story that intersects with all the things FT readers care about — business, the economy, and the evolution of society. And it’s also a chance for us to help our audience visualize what the future could look like.

The challenge, I think, is communicating the complicated underlying technology in a way that is accessible, but also accurate and nuanced. We don’t want to hype things unnecessarily, or play down the impacts. I’ll certainly look to the scientists, engineers, and ethicists who work in this space to help elucidate the nuances. I want particularly to find women who are experts across these areas, who I find always give me a fresh perspective. I’m keen to also speak to people who are impacted by AI — business owners, governments, ordinary citizens — to explore new angles of the story.

Scire: And what about your hopes and dreams for this new role?

Murgia: My hopes and dreams! Thank you for asking. I want to make AI more understandable and accessible to our readers, so it doesn’t feel like magic but merely a tool that they can wield. I want to report from the frontiers of AI development on how it is changing the way we work and live, and to forecast risks and challenges early on. I want to tell great stories that people will remember.

Scire: I appreciate that — trying to demystify or help readers feel it’s not just “magic.” What do you think about this criticism from some quarters that some news coverage is anthropomorphizing AI? I feel like this is coming up, in particular, when people are writing about unsettling conversations with chatbots. Is that something that journalists covering AI should be wary of doing?

Murgia: I think it’s really difficult not to anthropomorphize — I struggle with this too — because it’s a very evocative way to explain it to audiences. But I do think we should strive to describe it as a tool, rather than as a “brain” or a companion of some kind. Otherwise, it opens up the risk that consumers interacting with these systems will have certain expectations of them, or infer things that aren’t possible for these systems to do, like understand or feel.

Separately, however, I don’t think we should dismiss the very real impact that these systems do have on our behaviors and psyche, including people projecting human emotions onto chatbots. We’ve seen this happen already. It matters that the technology can fool regular people into believing there is intelligence or sentience behind it, and we should be writing about the risks and guardrails being built in that context.

Scire: Any other advice you’d give journalists covering AI? Maybe particularly for those who might be covering it for the first time in 2023?

Murgia: I’d say take the time to speak to practitioners [and] researchers who can break down and explain concepts in artificial intelligence, as it’s essential to writing well about its applications. As I’ve said above, we should strive to treat it as a tool — an imperfect one at that — in our coverage, and question all claims that sound outlandish. Really, the same skills you’d use for all types of explanatory journalism!

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/02/meet-the-first-ever-artificial-intelligence-editor-at-the-financial-times/feed/ 0 The Trace puts a local lens on gun violence coverage with new bureaus in Chicago and Philadelphia https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/02/the-trace-puts-a-local-lens-on-gun-violence-coverage-with-new-bureaus-in-chicago-and-philadelphia/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/02/the-trace-puts-a-local-lens-on-gun-violence-coverage-with-new-bureaus-in-chicago-and-philadelphia/#respond Thu, 23 Feb 2023 19:53:55 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=212535 The nonprofit newsroom The Trace is experimenting with a new approach to its award-winning coverage of gun violence in the United States. After 18 months of planning, the single-issue site launched its first local bureaus — in Philadelphia and Chicago — this week with one community-focused engagement reporter per every staff writer.

Mensah M. Dean, a recent Pulitzer Prize finalist for work published by The Philadelphia Inquirer, will staff the Philly bureau alongside engagement reporter Afea Tucker. In Chicago, the coverage will be led by engagement reporter Justin Agrelo and reporter Rita Oceguera.

In its announcement on Wednesday, The Trace explained the two cities were chosen because they are places with “chronic” gun violence where city officials have faced “little accountability” for failing to effectively address the issue. The Trace plans to launch additional local outfits, and is already accepting suggestions.

In an interview, The Trace staffers stressed that news-gathering would look different in the local bureaus — “more democratic” and “community-driven.” The goal is to flip a pattern that’s all-too-familiar for people in neighborhoods affected by gun violence: a reporter shows up on your block on one of the worst days of your life, talks to the cops, lingers long enough to grab a few “telling” details, and then — poof! — you never see them again.

Joy Resmovits, The Trace’s senior editor for local impact, cited community listening — which she defined as asking people what information they need as a starting point for reporting — at places like The Seattle Times and Epicenter-NYC as engagement work similar to what she hopes The Trace can accomplish in Chicago and Philadelphia.

More and more outlets, Resmovits said, are “understanding that service work is useful and necessary in and of itself — and can also lead to scoops in more traditional stories.”

So — what does it look like in practice? Engagement reporter Justin Agrelo said his efforts in Chicago began with eight months of speaking with “everyone in the gun violence space” that he could find. That included people who had experienced gun violence themselves, community organizers in neighborhoods experiencing high levels of violence, health care workers, violence prevention workers, and more.

“A common theme that we heard was that the episodic crime story, which gun violence in Chicago often gets framed through, does very little for folks who have been affected,” Agrelo said. “In some instances, it makes them feel less safe, like when it reveals which hospital victims have been taken to.”

(That response is not unique to Chicago, either. The Trace recently covered a peer-reviewed study conducted by a trauma unit surgeon who wondered, after seeing her patients in the news, what effect media coverage might be having on them. The Philadelphia-based researcher Dr. Jessica Beard discovered a range of responses among survivors but, ultimately, came away believing that newsrooms should publish fewer one-off stories.)

Agrelo, a Chicago native who previously worked at City Bureau, said he’s been trained to think about how to “horizontalize” media as much as possible. That means he’s asking constantly asking himself, “How do we allow the folks who are closest to the issue lead the way? How do we — for lack of a better word — pass the mic and allow them to help set the news agenda?”

One of the first projects to come from the early months of his on-the-ground engagement work is a storytelling network for survivors of gun violence. Participants in the group (who will be paid a $700 stipend) will receive hands-on training in storytelling and the basics of journalism.

The nonprofit newsroom, which has long worked with partnering publications to distribute its reporting, has teamed up with local newsrooms in both cities. In 2021, for example, an explainer on benefits available to victims of violent crime was co-published by a newspaper (The Chicago Sun-Times), digital newsroom (Block Club Chicago), and Spanish-language publication (La Raza Chicago). The local bureaus hope to take these partnerships even farther. With the storytelling series, The Trace plans to publish the stories widely and, “because we know not everyone in Chicago has access to the internet,” through a print zine designed by local Chicago artists.

Like any nonprofit newsroom reliant on foundation funding, The Trace has impact goals. Like any newsroom, it’ll track audience metrics and, among its 24-person staff, has plenty of journalists hungry to break big stories. But, at least in their local newsrooms, staffers are reaching for other goals, as well.

“I am excited, as a reporter, to learn in this space that I’m entering,” Agrelo said, after I asked what the team would consider a successful first year. “Even just through my conversations over the past eight months, there’s so much that community members have taught me about reporting and framing and Chicago. [A year from now] I want to feel like I’m more comfortable or more equipped to tell these stories.”

“Impact works both ways, right?” he added. “I also hope that we can recognize and measure and track how this experience changes our reporting practices. I’d like us to think about impact internally, too.”

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/02/the-trace-puts-a-local-lens-on-gun-violence-coverage-with-new-bureaus-in-chicago-and-philadelphia/feed/ 0 Half of Americans think most national news orgs intend to mislead or misinform the public, new report finds https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/02/half-of-americans-think-most-national-news-orgs-intend-to-mislead-or-misinform-the-public/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/02/half-of-americans-think-most-national-news-orgs-intend-to-mislead-or-misinform-the-public/#respond Tue, 21 Feb 2023 18:52:27 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=212410 Nearly three-quarters of Americans think national news orgs can report fairly and accurately, but only 35% of Americans believe they reliably do, a new study has found.

In a survey of 5,593 adults, Gallup and the Knight Foundation — which have been publishing reports on trust in news media since 2017 — found only 26% of Americans view news media favorably overall. A full 50% of respondents disagreed with the statement that most national news orgs “do not intend to mislead, misinform, or persuade the public.”

The study sidesteps valid questions about referring to “the media” in survey questions without attempting to differentiate between news sources like, say, Newsmax and The Daily Wire or Reuters and The Wall Street Journal.

As other research has found, the Knight/Gallup study indicated Americans trust local newsrooms more than national ones. More than half of Americans said local news outlets can generally be relied on, compared to 35% who expressed the same confidence in national news orgs.

As in previous years, Gallup and Knight found Republicans and younger people were more likely to hold negative views of national news media than Democrats or older people.

This report also found negative views toward media are growing across political affiliations, with the greatest deterioration of trust occurring among political independents. (Before you assume that shift can be attributed to independents who actually lean toward one party or the other, know that Gallup/Knight found 64% of “true independents who do not lean Republican or Democrat” now view news media unfavorably, no different than the independents who did express a lean.)

Newsrooms have been trying to repair credibility and trust with readers for at least as long as Gallup/Knight have been recording the decline. In this report, Gallup/Knight acknowledged those efforts have largely been unsuccessful in stopping — never mind reversing — the downward trend.

“Many Americans say they care about transparency, objectivity and accuracy. But if many news outlets already have high journalistic standards in place, why does trust continue to diminish overall?” the report reads. “This study suggests that many Americans … feel distrust on an emotional level, believing news organizations intend to mislead them and are indifferent to the social and political impact of their reporting. Our analysis demonstrates that these indicators of emotional trust in news are, in fact, distinct from the opinion that news organizations are capable of delivering accurate and fair reporting.”

Americans who get most of their news from a printed newspaper or magazine (35%) were more likely to voice high emotional trust in national news organizations than those who primarily get news online (15%) or radio (20%). Those who get most of their news from television — and that’s the majority of Americans — were split, with those who named a cable news outlet like CNN, Fox News, or MSNBC as their top news source expressing low emotional trust in national news orgs (45%). In comparison, just 17% of network news consumers (ABC, CBS, or NBC) exhibited low emotional trust, according to Gallup/Knight.

The report found low emotional trust in national news was associated with low levels of trust in elected officials and the political process. Americans with low trust were also more likely to agree that an increase of information makes staying well-informed harder because people “have to sort through lots of information to determine what is true and important.”

Falling trust has financial implications for news organizations as well, especially as more turn toward reader revenue. Gallup/Knight found that Americans with more trust in news media are more likely to have paid for journalism.

“People with high emotional trust in national news are nine points more likely than the national average to have paid for it, at 35%,” the report notes. “Only 23% of those with low emotional trust in national news have paid for news in the past, compared with 28% of those with moderate levels of trust.”

Read the full report here.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/02/half-of-americans-think-most-national-news-orgs-intend-to-mislead-or-misinform-the-public/feed/ 0 Indiana lands new support for local news — and Capital B’s next newsroom https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/02/indiana-lands-new-support-for-local-news-and-capital-bs-next-newsroom/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/02/indiana-lands-new-support-for-local-news-and-capital-bs-next-newsroom/#respond Wed, 15 Feb 2023 19:26:49 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=212330 Capital B, the one-year-old nonprofit news startup for Black Americans, has announced plans to launch its second local newsroom in Gary, Indiana.

Gary is a small city on Lake Michigan where 78% of the 68,000 residents are Black. Local news coverage there, residents have told Capital B, is often dominated by journalism from and about the much-larger city of Chicago just 25 miles away.

At first glance, Gary is a far cry from Capital B’s first pick for a local newsroom (Atlanta, Georgia, with a population just under 500,000) but co-founders Akoto Ofori-Atta and Lauren Williams said the choice is not quite the swerve it looks like.

“When we were thinking about what would make a Capital B market, we wanted to be really sure that we weren’t just looking at the biggest media markets where there were also Black people,” said Williams, who left the editor-in-chief role at Vox to become co-founder and CEO of Capital B. “Which you might think we were doing when our first market is Atlanta, right? But we want to go into markets where we see a real opportunity and a real need for us to reach Black audiences with the Capital B mission of serving folks who are underserved with high-quality news and information.”

“We’ve always had the Atlantas of the world on our list, but also Buffalos and Garys and smaller cities that had sizable Black populations,” Williams added. “So when this Indiana News Initiative started, and they called us up about coming to Gary, it’s not like Gary was coming out of nowhere.”

Capital B’s announcement comes as part of a larger effort to expand local news in Indiana. The Indiana Local News Initiative, announced Wednesday, launches with more than $10 million in funding from the American Journalism Project, Nina Mason Pulliam Charitable Trust, Herbert Simon Family Foundation, and others.

As part of the partnership, a 25-person news organization will launch in Central Indiana. (The job listing for the editor-in-chief role is online.) Existing outlets TheStatehouseFile.com, The Indiana Citizen, The Indianapolis Recorder, and Indiana News Service are also receiving support.

Six people currently staff Capital B’s local newsroom in Atlanta, according to the Capital B website, including a state and local politics reporter, community engagement editor, health reporter, general assignment reporter, criminal justice reporter, and an editor. For the Gary newsroom, Capital B said they would hire an editor and community engagement editor before deciding on specific beats or committing to a number of new jobs created.

“Giving an editor space to map out the ways in which Capital B will serve their city is an important part of what we do,” Ofori-Atta said. “Community engagement and community listening and fostering a sense of doing this journalism alongside and with the residents that we are serving — that’s part of our DNA and it’s something that we are going to absolutely do in Gary.”

(The Capital B Gary editor job listing — $95,000 to $110,000 — reflects that approach.)

Around their launch this time last year, the co-founders told me that in addition to maintaining a national news operation, they planned to add another local newsroom before the end of 2022 and another two local newsrooms before the end of 2023.

“We’re growing our newsrooms much slower than we had anticipated,” Williams acknowledged. “That’s a factor of doing it in real life versus planning it out on a spreadsheet.”

“We are not trying to flip a house to sell it really quickly,” she added. “We’re trying to live in the house — long term.”

Being a nonprofit newsroom helps, the co-founders said. Capital B nearly doubled its number of small donors (to 1,000) in its first year and has raised a total of $12 million. The full staff now includes 24 people, including The Atlantic’s former managing editor, Gillian White, who was recently promoted to chief revenue officer of Capital B.

“Being a nonprofit puts us in a good position of not having to be our own worst enemy,” Williams said. “We’re not in a race against anything but the deadlines we set for ourselves.”

A Capital B piece on Kanye West not being able to sell “White Lives Matter” apparel because two Black men own the trademark reached a wide audience and this eye-opening interview with the founder of the Kansas City Defender was a can’t-miss for the Nieman Lab crowd. I asked the co-founders what other stories stood out to them from Capital B’s first year.

Ofori-Atta, who serves as chief audience officer, first pointed to the outlet’s Jackson, Miss. water crisis coverage. She was particularly proud to note that though it was a national story, a large share of the traffic came from Jackson itself.

“It was a signal that, yes, the story was good, but also that it was filling a specific need for the people that we were covering,” Ofori-Atta said.

Williams mentioned on-the-fly reporting on Hurricane Ian by national health reporter Margo Snipe that resulted in a FEMA response and the Atlanta newsroom’s coverage on monkeypox, which focused on the virus’s impact on the Black, gay male population in Atlanta.

“I think that was really important because — for whatever reason — the mainstream media did not want to cover who monkey pox was affecting,” Williams said. “So while there were stories about monkeypox last summer, they weren’t specific and the coverage didn’t get specific for quite some time. We were kind of on an island of covering that for a few weeks before other people caught up.”

Williams — who had mentioned that, as she once did as editor-in-chief of Vox,  Capital B is “constantly talking” about who they are as an organization — said those stories marked moments where she said to herself, “Okay. We’re really figuring out our mission and hitting it.”

The team is also taking some pride in seeing other news organizations run near-identical stories in their wake.

“I feel like this is us pushing the industry forward,” Williams said of the follow-up coverage in other outlets. “Here is us centering Black voices in the conversation. We’re not sure they would have been centered in the conversation if we hadn’t done it first.”

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/02/indiana-lands-new-support-for-local-news-and-capital-bs-next-newsroom/feed/ 0 Meet the first-ever accessibility engineer at The Washington Post https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/02/meet-the-first-ever-accessibility-engineer-at-the-washington-post/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/02/meet-the-first-ever-accessibility-engineer-at-the-washington-post/#respond Wed, 01 Feb 2023 19:20:37 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=211824 I have for years been at this crossroads of wanting a more community-oriented journalism job while also enjoying the day-to-day work of software engineering. Basically, I would rather write code than write articles, but I’m more passionate about interacting with people than with technology. Accessibility in technology is such an interdisciplinary area of focus; it’s about understanding the needs of individual people and how to build things inclusively. That feels like a perfect combination of my skills, passion, and interests.

Accessibility is a relatively small area of focus in journalism right now. There aren’t yet a lot of roles like the one I’m starting now. At its core, I think journalism is about wanting valuable information accessible to as many people as possible, and I believe I have potential to create real change if I invest fully into it. Thankfully, the Post agreed and created this new title.

At an organization like the Post, we have great opportunity to contribute to the broader discussions surrounding accessibility and technology. I’ve often found myself wishing conversations in this area were more inclusive of people with a diversity of backgrounds and identities. It’s essential to think about accessibility not just in the context of disability but also in the context of other inequities affecting news coverage and access to news. For instance, writing in plain language for users with cognitive disabilities can also benefit users with lower reading literacy. [The Post published a plain language version of Foreman’s introductory blog post.] Making pages less complex can make them more user-friendly and also possible to load in the first place for folks in areas with bad internet, etc.

It’s definitely stressful to be the first in this new role. I feel deep down like I need to justify its creation with every step that I take. My managers and colleagues have been fully supportive, and it is thanks to them that the role exists, so I would say that the pressure feels self-enforced. Thankfully, there is a lot of collaboration in the accessibility world, and I have already been in contact with some folks from outside of The Post regarding how we can support each other.

Scire: You said you’ve found yourself wishing conversations were “more inclusive of people with a diversity of backgrounds and identities.” Can you give me a better sense of how you plan to address that? I know you’re good at putting your contact info out there and encouraging people to reach out, but do you have a plan for outreach, too?

Foreman: Yes, I plan to reach out to people directly. I’m also looking into conferences and organizations that feature diverse perspectives and areas of focus. If you’re reading this and have any in mind, please let me know. I look forward to sharing updates on our findings and solutions via The Post’s engineering blog and social media.

There are many types of diversity that we’ll consider in our outreach. For journalists, it is essential to source with diversity in race, gender, sexuality, and more. It is also essential in accessibility work. People with the exact same disability can have different resources, needs, and preferences. And issues like low internet bandwidth can correlate with other user demographics like geographic location. There are nuances specific to the accessibility space. Not everyone with a disability has access to the same technology. Screen reader availability varies by operating system. JAWS, one of the popular screen readers, is not free to use. And there are many different types of disability. We cannot focus our work only on disabilities related to vision or hearing. We need separate initiatives to address separate accessibility issues.

I’m always looking to learn from others, especially those directly impacted by accessibility issues. Some have already reached out to ask questions and share resources, and that is always appreciated. I also realize that not everyone will be as forthcoming. It will take trust, commitment and regular engagement to ensure we are not only considering the most well-supported and outgoing voices in this space.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/02/meet-the-first-ever-accessibility-engineer-at-the-washington-post/feed/ 0 BuzzFeed will start using AI to write quizzes and other content https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/01/buzzfeed-will-start-using-ai-to-write-quizzes-and-other-content/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/01/buzzfeed-will-start-using-ai-to-write-quizzes-and-other-content/#respond Thu, 26 Jan 2023 19:26:57 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=211806 Nothing like a spokesperson issuing assurances that BuzzFeed “remains focused on human-generated journalism” to make you feel good about the future of the news industry, right?

The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday on a staff memo at BuzzFeed that laid out plans for the digital media company to use OpenAI — creator of ChatGPT — to help write quizzes and other content. In the memo, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti wrote AI will play a role in both editorial and business operations at BuzzFeed within the next year.

“For example, a quiz to create a personal romantic comedy movie pitch might ask questions like, ‘Pick a trope for your rom-com,’ and ‘Tell us an endearing flaw you have,'” the Journal’s Alexandra Bruell reported. “The quiz would produce a unique, shareable write-up based on the individual’s responses, BuzzFeed said.”

But, hey! Humans will still provide “cultural currency” and “inspired prompts,” according to Peretti’s memo.

“If the past 15 years of the internet have been defined by algorithmic feeds that curate and recommend content, the next 15 years will be defined by AI and data helping create, personalize, and animate the content itself,” Peretti wrote.

Maybe it’s because the announcement comes as several news organizations announced layoffs and other cuts, but many found the update grim.

The stock market on the other hand? $BZFD ultimately jumped 120% on the news that the company plans to use AI to generate content, its biggest gain since going public in December 2021.

The AI-powered chatbot that can generate humanlike text on most prompts was released in late November 2022 and had a million users within a week. But we’re still learning about how it works — and how it came to be. (Time magazine, as one example, recently revealed OpenAI paid workers in Kenya less than $2 an hour to wade through some of the darkest parts of the internet.)

In one recent case of AI-powered articles gone wrong, the outlet CNET had to issue “substantial” corrections, respond to accusations of plagiarism, and ultimately hit pause on their whole AI experiment earlier this month. BuzzFeed must be hoping that using similar technology for quizzes will be less fraught.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/01/buzzfeed-will-start-using-ai-to-write-quizzes-and-other-content/feed/ 0 The first newspaper strike of the digital age stretches into a new year https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/01/the-first-newspaper-strike-of-the-digital-age-stretches-into-a-new-year/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/01/the-first-newspaper-strike-of-the-digital-age-stretches-into-a-new-year/#respond Wed, 25 Jan 2023 16:00:53 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=210753 PITTSBURGH — Scabby was wearing a bridal veil.

The blow-up rat — a staple at union protests — was joined by dozens of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette employees outside the Duquesne Club, a “premiere private club,” where Post-Gazette publisher John Robinson Block was celebrating his wedding.

The mid-November rally was one of dozens of protests the Post-Gazette workers have held since walking off the job on October 18, 100 days ago — and becoming the first American newspaper to strike since journalism entered the digital age.

Even as newspaper profits have plummeted and job losses have piled up, newsroom employees in the U.S. have stopped short of open-ended strikes for more than 20 years. But the Post-Gazette is ending that streak. Strike actions have included picketing the newsroom, running radio ads in Pittsburgh, calling for C-SPAN to remove a Post-Gazette owner from its board of directors, encouraging sources to sign a solidarity pledge, and asking subscribers to cancel their Post-Gazette subscriptions until the strike ends.

This isn’t a case of a rapacious hedge fund draining local news’ profits from a distance: The Post-Gazette has been owned by the same family, the Blocks, since 1927. In a statement released in response to the strike, their family company, Block Communications, said the Post-Gazette last turned a profit in 2007. Over the past 17 years, the paper has lost nearly $264 million, according to the statement.

Despite those economic headwinds for newspapers, frustration over stagnant wages, disappearing benefits, and newsroom cuts is spilling over into action in Pittsburgh. Post-Gazette union members say the paper’s financial outlook has improved, especially as it has cut printing to two days a week, reduced its headcount, and surpassed 50,000 paid digital subscribers. (A spokesperson for the Post-Gazette declined to comment on the paper’s finances or confirm subscription figures.)

The strike may be inspiring others. In the weeks since the Post-Gazette union went on strike, hundreds of journalists from 14 Gannett-owned newspapers walked off the job to protest low wages, layoffs, and other cost-cutting measures in local news. Journalists at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram went on strike for 24 days. And The New York Times saw its first major labor protest since 1981.

“I feel like we’re the canary in the coal mine,” said Andrew Goldstein, who, when not on strike, writes about education for Post-Gazette. “What happens here could go a long way to predicting what’s going to happen in other disputes.”

Goldstein, who’s been at the Post-Gazette since an internship in 2014, serves on the executive board of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh.

“We’re here fighting because we love Pittsburgh and we love the Post-Gazette, but we also know that the eyes of the journalism community across the country are on us,” Goldstein said. “Yes, we’re fighting for ourselves, but we’re also out here fighting because we want journalists everywhere to be treated fairly.”

“A trigger for us”

There are a couple of ways to tell the story of how the Post-Gazette strike started.

The first is that Post-Gazette journalists narrowly voted (38-36) to follow about 60 colleagues in distribution, production, and advertising, a couple of weeks after those groups went on strike over a health plan that members say costs more for less coverage. (At the protest in November, one Post-Gazette employee wore a “will work for healthcare” sign. Another said the health care plan would “blow a $10,000 hole” in his family’s budget.)

“When you’re part of a union, you’re supposed to honor picket lines. When the advertising and other groups went out, that was a trigger for us,” said Jon Schleuss, president of the NewsGuild-CWA, the national organization for the Post-Gazette’s union.

(Nearly five months after that narrow initial vote, a number of Post-Gazette journalists, including some of the paper’s most high-profile sports reporters, still have not joined the strike. I reached out to a handful of union members still working for the Post-Gazette and all declined to comment.)

The other story of how this strike began starts farther back. Journalists at the Post-Gazette have been working without a contract since 2017. The newsroom hasn’t seen an across-the-board pay raise in more than 16 years.

“We were called into a solidarity strike with [the other unions], and then decided to go on strike for our own unfair labor practices with the company,” said Natalie Duleba, a news designer and digital news editor at the Post-Gazette.

Duleba said she didn’t believe a work stoppage — “something you’d prefer to keep in your back pocket” — could have been avoided, even if the newsroom union hadn’t followed the other Post-Gazette unions on strike in October.

“It was probably always going to happen sometime,” Duleba said.

That’s because in the years since the last contract expired, disputes between the newsroom and management have only grown more contentious. In 2019, a staff exodus took place even as the paper won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Tree of Life synagogue shooting. (That same year, Rob Rogers was a Pulitzer finalist in the Editorial Cartooning category. The Post-Gazette had fired him in 2018, allegedly for being too anti-Trump.) Toward the end of the year, the union voted “no confidence” in management and went on a byline strike.

In July 2020, the Post-Gazette declared an impasse with the union and unilaterally imposed changes to wages, vacation time, severance packages, and health benefits. The National Labor Relations Board eventually intervened, finding that the Post-Gazette management had “bargained with no intention of reaching an agreement” before “prematurely declaring impasse.”

Duleba, who started her job during the pandemic and worked some evening hours as a designer, met several of her coworkers in person for the first time when the strike began. Duleba said fair wages are probably the most important issue to her, but when she was picketing outside or sitting in drawn-out meetings, she found herself thinking about colleagues trying to raise kids or take care of ailing parents.

“I want them to be able to take care of their families,” she said. “The longer you’re with a company, you should be able to take more vacation and build wealth — but we’ve found the opposite, that we’re just losing all that.”

In 2022, a federal court ruled that the Post-Gazette had to reimburse workers more than $100,000 after refusing to cover union contract–required health care costs for nearly four years. That history does little to instill confidence in the new health benefits that newspaper management is trying to impose.

“Under the imposed conditions, our company has set it up [so] they can change anything they want to, at any time, with no notice and no recourse for us,” Duleba said. “They could raise the costs every week.”

“Continuity at the top since early 1989”

In 2019, a Washington Post column declared the storied Post-Gazette was becoming a “chaotic circus.”

“What makes Pittsburgh’s situation particularly regrettable,” columnist Margaret Sullivan wrote, “is that the Blocks are a family who seem to have the resources — if not the wisdom — to do much, much better.”

The Block family has been in the media business for nearly a century and has owned the Post-Gazette since 1927. Post-Gazette employees who worked under former publisher William Block, Sr., say the union was able to conduct fair negotiations during his tenure and that he treated journalists as worthy partners in his newspaper business.

Those values, they say, have not been passed down from generation to generation intact.

The Post-Gazette and its sister paper, the Toledo Blade, are now controlled by William Block Sr.’s twin nephews, Allan Block and John Robinson Block, now in their late 60s.

“I was in charge and that’s one of the things that some people these days can’t seem to grasp,” John Robinson Block wrote in his “life’s accounting” in the Pittsburgh Quarterly in 2018. (Block did not respond to requests for comment.) “Nothing has changed at the Post-Gazette through the years because there’s been continuity at the top since early 1989 — almost 30 years.”

Both of the papers have lurched to the right under this generation of leadership. (“I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t vote for Donald Trump,” Block wrote. “I did.”) In 2018, a racist editorial prompted a disavowal from employees and some Block family members. The next year, Block, apparently “both intoxicated and enraged” and accompanied by his preteen daughter, visited the newsroom at night to scream and repeatedly punch a union sign that read “Shame on the Blocks.” In 2021, newsroom employees complained that the papers edited stories to downplay coverage of the January 6 United States Capitol attack, as Susan Allan Block, Allan Block’s wife, openly voiced support for violent insurrection.

Allan Block has indicated that he’s ready to part ways with the newspaper business entirely, and his brother has said he’s the one preventing the Post-Gazette from falling into the hands of hedge funds that now control so many local newspapers.

“What people in Pittsburgh must understand is that, in my family, I am the one who stood in the way and said, ‘We will cut our costs, but we will cut them with a minimum impact on the product,'” John Robinson Block wrote in the Pittsburgh Quarterly. “I assure you, my brother and cousin would have been much more abrupt in their changes, and would have cut much deeper. But I am proud of our product, much of the time.”

The Post-Gazette union has acknowledged that the newspaper business is not exactly booming but points to profits at Block Communications — which also has internet, telephone, and cable television holdings — when making their demands. (Even with its diversified business, Block Communications still leads with Pulitzer Prizes won by the Blade and Post-Gazette on its website.) The union’s argument has, to put it mildly, irked the Block family.

“In the estimation of our unions, our company is successful, despite today’s intense challenges,” wrote Block. “They think that the resources we earn in other businesses should subsidize our newspapers. Well, guess what? That’s what’s been happening but, again, it can’t continue.”

The Post-Gazette union chose to protest the Block wedding reception — and bring Scabby and a “congRATS” cake along — to put pressure on the family with the power to sign a new contract. Outside the reception, Post-Gazette writer and editor Bob Batz Jr. was clear about one thing: he’d really rather be back in the newsroom.

“We want to save the paper and we want to go back to work,” Batz said. “If [Block] came out right now and said, ‘Come in and have a brandy and work it out,’ that’s what we’d do.”

And now?

It looks as if the newspaper industry’s first strike in decades won’t end anytime soon.

After four negotiating sessions — the most recent one was held on Dec. 20 — no agreement has been reached. Post-Gazette marketing director Allison Latcheran confirmed that there are currently no additional meetings scheduled.

Alex McCann, secretary of the Pittsburgh Newspaper Guild and a digital news editor at the Post-Gazette, said the company has continued to “bargain in bad faith” and has yet to bring “a meaningfully different proposal,” despite the union offering concessions on job security, layoffs, and health benefits.

A lawyer representing the Post-Gazette in negotiations seemed to confirm that assessment. In December, Richard Lowe told assembled union members that he hadn’t been coming to bargaining sessions with new material because leadership would prefer to keep the contract imposed on workers in 2020. (“When I say I like it, it’s because it’s worked for us,” Lowe said.)

The last time Pittsburgh had a newspaper strike, more than 30 years ago, the largest newspaper in the city at the time, The Pittsburgh Press, didn’t survive. The Block family bought the rival newspaper in 1992 and quickly announced the Press would no longer be published. The Blocks are adding to their media empire this time around, too. They announced earlier this month that a subsidiary company had purchased the Pittsburgh City Paper.

A pending labor unemployment claim, if won, would give striking workers a weekly check in addition to the few hundred dollars they receive each week from the NewsGuild’s $400 million strike fund. Some Post-Gazette employees already had second jobs, from refereeing soccer games to working in retail to freelance work.

Since the strike began, several Post-Gazette journalists have left for other outlets rather than cross a picket line. The departed include Gillian McGoldrick, a statehouse reporter who staged a one-woman protest from Harrisburg at the beginning of the strike, and veteran journalists Bill Schackner and Jonathan Silver, who both moved across town to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.

Other striking workers have started something new.

Meet the Pittsburgh Union-Progress

Here’s something you hear over and over again in Pittsburgh: “It’s a union town.”

Talk to Post-Gazette staffers and it’ll feel as if each one has a story of a parent or grandparent who was active in a union — whether they were a mill worker or baker, worked in insurance or steel or as a fellow journalist.

Many of the remaining newsroom employees have been channeling their journalistic skills into a digital strike publication called the Pittsburgh Union Progress. Hometown support for their union-backed news org has been strong, and more than 1,000 people have subscribed for free updates.

Local elected officials have shared Union Progress stories and promised not to speak to the Post-Gazette as long as the union’s labor disputes go unresolved. As a candidate, U.S. Senator John Fetterman declined to cross the picket line to meet with the Post-Gazette’s editorial board and U.S. Rep. Chris Deluzio refused an election day interview with non-union reporters.

At the Union Progress, journalists are publishing multiple stories a day online. One vertical is dedicated to strike news, but the bulk of work is the kind of coverage the journalists would normally be filing to the Post-Gazette. And, unlike some of their predecessors, strike publications in 2023 can start up without acquiring printing presses or delivery trucks.

“That’s what I keep telling people: we don’t need anybody else to do what we do,” said Batz, who serves as interim editor. “It’s a WordPress. Just fire it up and go.” (They have office space, too.)

Even as the Union-Progress enters its fourth month of publication, the striking workers say they’re committed to not crossing any picket lines. Many mentioned not wanting to let down a long line of guild members who have fought for fair conditions at the Post-Gazette.

“What I tell a lot of the young people is — some of you don’t want to strike because this is your dream job. You’ve never made more money. You’ve never had better benefits. You’ve never done such great work with such great editors. Why do you think that is?” Batz said. “We’re a good place to work because people before us helped set those standards.”

Photo of Post-Gazette workers protesting in downtown Pittsburgh by Sarah Scire.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/01/the-first-newspaper-strike-of-the-digital-age-stretches-into-a-new-year/feed/ 0 “Canada’s ProPublica” is sharing the databases behind its hard-hitting stories https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/01/canadas-propublica-is-sharing-the-databases-behind-its-hard-hitting-stories/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/01/canadas-propublica-is-sharing-the-databases-behind-its-hard-hitting-stories/#respond Thu, 12 Jan 2023 15:28:12 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=211482 “Think of us like ProPublica meets OpenSecrets.” That’s how editor-in-chief Zane Schwartz describes Canada’s newly launched Investigative Journalism Foundation.

The nonprofit, nonpartisan news startup aims to “expand the breadth, depth, and long-term financial sustainability of investigative journalism in Canada” by building public interest databases, collaborating with other newsrooms, and publishing its own investigations. A week after launching, IJF has shown some political leaders have been breaking their party’s pledge to stop allowing lobbyists to attend cash-for-access fundraisers, taken a sobering look at the country’s public-housing system in partnership with The Walrus, and cataloged, alongside the National Observer, a lobbying blitz by Canada’s largest oil and gas group.

The IJF mission is fairly simple. They hope to follow the money — and leave the door wide open for other journalists. But that doesn’t mean compiling this amount of data into useful, searchable databases has been easy.

In the United States, public records can be frustrating to access and analyze, with information siloed across federal, state, county, and local websites. Schwartz said journalists face a similar situation in Canada.

“Before [launch], all of this data was required by law to be public, but you might literally need to go to a government archive to access it,” Schwarz said. “You almost certainly would have had to go to a government website where the data will be stored, let’s say, alphabetically by politician name. Really simple things like, ‘Who’s the biggest donor?’ or ‘How many people donated to x party in y year?’ were all but impossible to answer.”

The IJF staff (and more than 80 volunteers) spent two years collecting, cleaning, and analyzing nearly 9 million rows of data from government websites so they could launch with eight public interest databases:

  • Lobbying Registrations: We have data on the laws lobbyists want changed and government funding they’re asking for at the federal and provincial levels. Users will be able to search by lobbyist name and keyword (e.g. electric school bus, pipelines, solar panels, wealth inequality, etc.)
  • Revolving Door: Every lobbyist who used to work for the government at the federal level and in Saskatchewan, Ontario and British Columbia. Users can search by company (e.g. Suncor or TD Bank), by department (e.g. Environment, Finance), or by individual lobbyist name.
  • Lobbyist Meetings: Which lobbyists are meeting with which politicians.
  • Government Funding: All money received by lobbyists from provincial, territorial, municipal, federal and international governments. Users can search by company, dollar amount, and government program.
  • Political Donations: All donations to politicians at the federal level and in every province and territory from 1993 to the present. Users can search by donor name and recipient name. They can also refine the search by location, amount, political party and donor type (e.g. Union, Corporation, Individual).
  • Charity Tax Returns: The tax returns for all Canadian charities from 1990 to the present, searchable by revenue, expenses and programs of interest. Users can compare charities on revenue increases or expense-to-revenue ratios.
  • Grant Recipients: How much money foundations give to each charity they support. Users can search by donor, recipient, amount, region, and topic area (e.g. the largest funders of environmental charities, the largest funders of poverty-alleviation charities, etc.)
  • Charity Employee Salaries: The salary ranges for senior charity staff throughout time. This will show how much top-paid employees make.

The IJF currently has a staff of 12, including eight who are full-time employees. The reporters, developers, and editors are scattered across the country — though IJF recently began to rent co-working space a couple of days a week in Toronto, where roughly half of the team lives.

Before launch, Schwartz worked at the National Post, Maclean’s, The Logic, and the Calgary Herald. He currently serves as the national chair of the Canadian Association of Journalists (a volunteer position) and launched that organization’s annual diversity survey.

In an introductory post, Schwartz wrote that Canada has lost hundreds of media outlets and thousands of full-time journalism jobs in the past 15 years. The total number of newspaper articles published annually has been cut in half, with the number of articles on civic affairs down by a third.

To help resource-strapped outlets, IJF wants to provide reporting power — alongside the data — to partnering publications. “We don’t just say, ‘Here’s the database.’ We assign a reporter, they assign a reporter, and they work together to dig in,” Schwartz said.

Since 2021, the nonprofit has raised nearly 800,000 Canadian dollars ($596,024) from 10 donors.

“I’m incredibly grateful to the funders we have because they funded an idea, right? We came to them and we said, ‘Wouldn’t it be amazing if any Canadian could see who the largest donor to their politicians are?’” Schwartz said. “And they said, ‘Yes, that would be amazing. Let me give you money to go out and make it happen.’”

Still, Schwartz hopes to grow additional revenue streams, starting with reader support. “I would be a lot more comfortable if we had more funders,” he said. “You never want to be in a position where there’s the potential for conflict of interest.”

Though the databases will be free for “simple searches,” the IJF also plans to sell data access. Organizations “seeking to make money off the databases” and those interested in complex searches or real-time alerts will be charged a subscription fee. The four subscription plans cost between CA$10 and CA$60 per month.

Looking ahead, the IJF has its eyes on building more databases that would be of interest to journalists and the public, including compiling financial disclosure forms (including stock ownership) filed by politicians. And as more journalists discover their free resources, Schwartz also hopes to unlock more stories hidden in the data by teaming up with local reporters.

“We know that we don’t know everything about Canada,” Schwartz said. “There are reporters all across this country who would see a name and say, ‘Oh, that’s a huge real estate developer in my town. The fact that they donated is really significant.’ Then they can use the data to ask pointed questions.”

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/01/canadas-propublica-is-sharing-the-databases-behind-its-hard-hitting-stories/feed/ 0 GPT-3, make this story better https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/01/gpt-3-help-me-make-this-piece-better/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/01/gpt-3-help-me-make-this-piece-better/#respond Wed, 04 Jan 2023 15:57:37 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=211318 More than a few submissions to our annual Predictions for Journalism series touched on generative AI this year.

Some predicted the tech could be “a game-changer” for journalism, particularly resource-strapped local newsrooms. Others cautioned that producing convincing disinformation just got a lot cheaper and faster, raised ethical questions the news industry is only beginning to grapple with, and predicted that AI-written content will soon flood the internet.

A prediction by Gannett’s Eric Ulken read, in part, “I don’t imagine we’ll see GPT-3–produced copy in the pages of The New York Times in 2023, but it’s likely we’ll turn to machines for some previously unthinkable creative tasks.”

I didn’t realize how close we were to that first possibility until I listened to a recent episode of The New York Times podcast Hard Fork, hosted by Times tech columnist Kevin Roose and Casey Newton of Platformer.

“I will make a confession here on this podcast that I have tried to write parts of my column using AI,” Roose said. “I’ve said, ‘I’m sort of stuck on this paragraph. I wonder if it could help me figure out a way to complete this thought.’”

Roose hasn’t been entirely impressed with the results. (He used an app called Lex that he described as a “Google Doc with GPT-3 built in.”)

“Sometimes what it comes up with is passable, but it’s not good,” Roose said. “It’s not something that I would be happy to pass off as my own, even if it were ethical to do so — which I don’t think it would be.”

Our own Joshua Benton came to a similar conclusion after experimenting with GPT-2 back in 2019. Since then, the Microsoft-backed tech company OpenAI has trained its language processing AI on a much larger dataset and introduced a chatbot interface that will bring the technology to many more users than earlier iterations. OpenAI is also developing a watermark that’ll help detect text generated in ChatGPT.

Even with the improvements, Roose said he hasn’t been tempted to include AI-generated writing in his Times column just yet.

“I wouldn’t actually be copying and pasting any of the text verbatim, because it just, frankly, isn’t that unique or interesting or stylish,” Roose said in the episode.

“Maybe it’ll get to a point with GPT-4 where it’s better than I am, and then I’ll have to have some hard thoughts about what I can ethically and spiritually stand outsourcing to the AI,” he added.

Roose envisions using AI help to outline and research his columns. In an earlier Hard Fork episode, the hosts discussed using the tech to generate story ideas, submit broken code for corrections, and create multiple explanations for complicated concepts at different levels of difficulty.

Roose also mentioned another way that AI may help him write his columns.

“One thing that I do when I’m writing is I try to anticipate what people might object to, what good points people might make in response to some argument that I’m making,” Roose said. “I feel like I’m O.K. at that, but a GPT-3 or GPT-4 might be better at it. I might be able to paste in my column and say, ‘What are three counterarguments to this?’”

“Right,” Newton quipped. “Until now, if you wanted to find out why your argument was stupid, you had to tweet out a link to your story.”

Their most recent episode also included Hard Fork’s own predictions. (Newton said “the media’s divorce from Twitter will begin in earnest” in 2023 and Roose claimed to be “medium-confident” that TikTok would be banned in the United States before the year was through.) You can listen or read a transcript here.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/01/gpt-3-help-me-make-this-piece-better/feed/ 0 Younger Americans are listening to more non-music (like podcasts and news) than ever https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/11/younger-americans-are-listening-to-more-non-music-like-podcasts-and-news-than-ever/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/11/younger-americans-are-listening-to-more-non-music-like-podcasts-and-news-than-ever/#respond Wed, 16 Nov 2022 20:36:11 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=209548 A new study shows more young Americans are listening to news, podcasts, and audiobooks than ever. Nearly all of that growth comes from listening on digital devices like phones, computers, smart speakers, and internet-connected TVs — and not AM/FM radio.

The authors of the 2022 Spoken Word Audio Report conducted interviews in English and Spanish with 4,118 U.S. residents aged 13 and older. The report, released annually since 2014, is part of a partnership between NPR and Edison Research. For their purposes, “spoken word audio” means pretty much everything but music — news and talk shows on AM/FM radio plus podcasts and audiobooks of every stripe.

While the share of Americans listening to spoken word audio increased across all age groups, it increased the most for those ages 13 to 34, the report found. That age group now dedicates 26% of its listening hours to spoken word audio (instead of music) — up from just 12% in 2014.

Here’s a few other findings that stood out:

The number of Gen Zers who have ever listened to a podcast shot up. Nearly 80% say they’ve listened to one, up from 37% in 2014.

Gen Z is also the most likely to listen on their mobile device. Other groups listened to more spoken word audio on radio, smart speaker, or computer.

Americans are listening to less news on AM/FM radio, but the increase in podcast listening isn’t making up the gap.

Listening peaks in the morning. A second spike occurs around the evening rush hour — but that second peak has rounded out somewhat, possibly due to fewer people commuting and listening in their cars.

When it comes to weekly podcast listeners, comedy is king.

You can download the full report here.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/11/younger-americans-are-listening-to-more-non-music-like-podcasts-and-news-than-ever/feed/ 0 Meta’s layoffs make it official: Facebook is ready to part ways with the news https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/11/metas-layoffs-make-it-official-facebook-is-ready-to-part-ways-with-the-news/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/11/metas-layoffs-make-it-official-facebook-is-ready-to-part-ways-with-the-news/#respond Mon, 14 Nov 2022 18:07:05 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=209397 Among the mass layoffs at the company formerly known as Facebook last week are several roles that have served as a bridge between the news industry and the sprawling tech company.

The Meta Journalism Project Accelerator’s David Grant, a program manager, and Dorrine Mendoza, who led local news partnerships for the platform, were both laid off. Other journalism-adjacent positions eliminated include the head of news partnerships for South East Asia, a program manager for news, two program managers for news integrity, and multiple news communications jobs.

Meta declined to comment on the layoffs or confirm how many of the 11,000 positions eliminated were jobs relating to the news business. It’s unclear what impact the job losses will have on all of Facebook’s various news-related efforts, including the Meta Journalism Project itself. (Meta spokespeople and Campbell Brown, Meta’s vice president of global media partnerships, did not respond to requests for comment on the future of the Meta Journalism Project.)

The layoffs are another step in Meta’s journey to get the heck away from news. Meta, which promised $300 million in support of local journalism back in 2019 when it was still Facebook, has shifted resources away from its News tab, shuttered the Bulletin newsletter program, ended support for Instant Articles, eliminated human-curation in favor of algorithms, and stopped paying U.S. publishers to use their news content.

Instead, the company is focused on competing with rising platforms like TikTok and trying to build a metaverse that people actually want to spend time in. Meta has spent $15 billion so far in its quest to become “a metaverse company” and plans to spend billions more — plummeting stock price and leg-less avatars notwithstanding.

To be sure, the blockbuster investments of the past rarely arrived as checks paid directly to newsrooms. Facebook’s announced $100 million investment in local news at the start of the pandemic, for example, consisted of $25 million in grant funding and $75 million in “marketing spend.” In the early days of the Facebook Journalism Project, the training often focused on training newsrooms to use Facebook products to reach readers or teaching “best practices” for distributing on their own platform. But now, all sorts of funding is drying up — and anyone clicking on the “Grants” page on the Meta Journalism Project’s website will get a 404 error.

Multiple sources said Meta Journalism Project’s Global Accelerator Program — which consists of workshops and hands-on training designed to boost financial sustainability at news organizations — has been presumed dead for awhile now. A press release published two days before the layoffs became official said the accelerator helped 162 American and Canadian news publishers generate more than 166,000 new paying supporters and more than 2 million new registered readers since 2019. Its counterpart in Europe reported 166,000 new paying supporters, too, and nearly 1.5 million new registered users across 90 publishers from 17 countries.


The tech company’s divestment in news will hit some organizations harder than others. Many programs launched with funding from Facebook and/or Meta are funded only through 2024.

At Indiegraf — a network of local news organizations that received several infusions of Meta funds in 2020 and 2021 — the company’s change in direction does not change their work “in any way,” said CEO and co-founder Erin Millar.

“We have always been focused on building a sustainable business model that allows Indiegraf independence from platforms, similar to the news businesses we support,” Millar said. “Meta’s funding support enabled us to accelerate our plans to support independent media, but was never a crucial part of our sustainability.”

Millar said Indiegraf has been aware of the coming changes for months. Indiegraf doesn’t expect current funding arrangements to be revoked — but they’re not counting on any new partnership with Meta once those run their course.

The Meta staffers working on journalism projects “worked hard to use Meta’s resources to make an impact on the news ecosystem while they could,” Millar said. She added, “They also understood that the company’s investments in news were likely finite and temporary, and they were as transparent as they could be with partners like Indiegraf.”

A harder-hit organization will be the Local Media Association, which worked closely with the Meta Journalism Project and was chosen to execute a number of the U.S.-based programs.

Overall, since 2019, LMA has distributed more than $16.8 million to “a few hundred” local media organizations through Meta funding, said Nancy Lane, CEO of LMA.

She outlined the major programs that Facebook-turned-Meta funded through the association:

  • The News Accelerator program, including three sessions focused on reader revenue and one on video. Local media organizations received $4.27 million in grants through the sessions.
  • A Covid-19 local news relief fund that distributed $12 million to local news organizations in 2020. (“Some would have shut down without this funding,” Lane said.)
  • The LMA Local News Resource Center, dedicated to helping local media companies with their social media strategies. Meta’s total investment was more than $800,000 and allowed for a full-time staffer.
  • The Crosstown Data Journalism Pilot, which funded a collaboration between a data team at the University of Southern California and news partners WRAL-TV, NOLA.com/The Advocate and WBEZ. The grant, which totaled about $400,000, also funded data journalists in each newsroom.
  • The Meta Branded Content Project, operated in partnership with the Local Media Consortium, that helps local media companies create branded content revenue streams. Meta’s investment of more than $3 million funds two full-time positions.

LMA will seek new backers for their Branded Content Project and the LMA Local News Resource Center — both of which Meta will stop funding in 2024.

Lane praised Facebook for being one of the first organizations to invest in business sustainability efforts for local newsrooms and said many grant-giving institutions followed suit. She also had some harsh words on Thursday for people who have criticized the tech company that, frankly, has provided plenty of material for criticism.

Lane told me she thought publishers of color, in particular, would be hurt by the changes at Meta. (“Meta made sure that 50% of their programs were allocated to BIPOC publishers,” she said. I wasn’t able to confirm this number, though at least some Meta programs list half of their participants as Black-owned news organizations.)

“As far as LMA is concerned, more funders than ever before have stepped up recently and they will fill the funding void left by Meta, but nothing will replace the innovative spirit that defined this partnership,” Lane said. “And that is a huge loss for all of us.”

Chris Krewson, executive director of Local Independent Online News (LION) Publishers and the founding editor of Billy Penn, said Facebook left “an enormous mark on the emerging ecosystem of digital-only publishers.”

“There was one call where David Grant asked, ‘If money was not an issue, what would you do?’ And we’d never really thought about it that way, you know?” Krewson said. “Meta had the resources at its peak to do incredible things. Not just the dollars, but the encouragement to think of the best outcome possible, to make the biggest impact we could.”

LION received funding through Facebook’s Covid support programs and the LION-Meta Revenue Growth Fellowship. LION members also participated in the accelerator, which Krewson called “an unquestionable good” for dedicating millions to training for news orgs globally. (The team behind Meta’s Accelerator program has indicated that they hope to continue the work if they can find another funding source.)

Meta’s withdrawal won’t affect LION programs or staffing, but Krewson mentioned something else I’d overlooked. It was extremely helpful to have reliable Meta contacts when a small news organization needed verification or something went wrong with an organization’s page. Something weird happening with a member’s page is “not uncommon,” Krewson noted, but now, all of their contacts are gone.

Has your newsroom received Facebook-turned-Meta funding? Have you worked in a bridge role between the news industry and a tech platform? Will these changes affect you? I’d love to hear from you.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/11/metas-layoffs-make-it-official-facebook-is-ready-to-part-ways-with-the-news/feed/ 0 NPR launches a paid podcast bundle, hoping to convert a national audience into local donors https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/11/npr-launches-a-paid-podcast-bundle-hoping-to-convert-a-national-audience-into-local-donors/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/11/npr-launches-a-paid-podcast-bundle-hoping-to-convert-a-national-audience-into-local-donors/#respond Wed, 02 Nov 2022 15:01:47 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=208739 NPR launched a paid podcast bundle on Tuesday, giving subscribers access to bonus content, ad-free episodes, and other perks from nearly a dozen NPR podcasts including Planet Money, Fresh Air, and Code Switch. To join NPR+, listeners must make a new recurring contribution to their local member station starting at $8/month or $96/year.

Unlike the pilot program that offered single podcast subscriptions, the paid bundle is getting a very soft launch. To start, NPR+ will only be available in the 34 locations where a member station1 is participating in the program. That means listeners with IP addresses that put them in, say, New York City or Boston will only see single show subscriptions available for now, while those living in Orlando or Baltimore or Normal, Illinois can choose the bundled NPR+ option.

A team at NPR developed the NPR+ program and will manage marketing as well as customer service for the bundle. (It’s still not exactly easy to add a paid feed to the most popular podcast app in the U.S.) Member stations, meanwhile, get to keep 100% of the donations.

“We’re reserving our bundle for the benefit of supporting your local member station — that’s really the offer that we’re hoping becomes a resounding success,” said Joel Sucherman, NPR’s vice president for audio platform strategy. “Because, you know, ‘listeners like you’ supporting local member stations, which support NPR — that’s what makes the world go ’round in public radio.”

The podcast bundle has two origin stories. The first starts with die-hard podcast fans asking for bonus content, merch, and other ways to support their favorite show. (“We are a tribe of tote bag people,” Sucherman said at one point.) The other emerged from NPR reading the tea leaves and seeing increased competition and consolidation in the audio space.

“For many of our 50-plus years, our high standard of audio and fact-based journalism was a lane that we had to ourselves in many ways. But over the course of the last five to 10 years, it’s been amazing the number of folks who have jumped into the field and are doing great work — including folks that we never really truly competed against, like The New York Times,” Sucherman said. “What we do differently than The New York Times, or another commercial media company, is realize that we’re in it together.”

An NPR spokesperson said that “tens of thousands” of people subscribed to individual shows as part of the pilot program for NPR+. (Fresh Air and Planet Money were the most popular “singles” offerings.) The pilot phase also confirmed to NPR the importance of bonus content — not just ad-free episodes — in converting listeners into paid subscribers, said Leda Marritz, program manager for the NPR+ podcast subscription service.

“We knew from our technology platform partners that offering bonus content or early access to content is going to move the needle way more than ad-free,” she said. “Having said that, it was very gratifying to see that once we did start doing that, the number of subscribers just immediately started going up.”

NPR+ bonus content has included extended interviews, listener Q&As, and show-specific tidbits like a Planet Money Movie Club and early access to a chatty episode between Peter Sagal and Emma Choi from Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me! and their executive producer Mike Danforth.

“We wanted to differentiate bonus content from the core offering, both for philosophical reasons and editorial reasons,” Marritz, who joined NPR earlier this year from Apple Podcasts, said. “Planet Money is a highly polished, highly produced work of art, right? They can’t do that and a piece of bonus content, too. It would just not be achievable on an ongoing basis.”

Marritz emphasized the technical hurdles involved in linking a subscription to a recurring local donation when different stations use different systems to accept payments, share content, and manage donors. For now, Marritz said, NPR is focused on some of the unsexy stuff that’s nevertheless critical to scaling this project to their coast-to-coast vision.

“This is not ‘get rich quick.’ We’re not expecting stratospheric success right out of the gate,” Marritz said. “This group of 34 stations is basically going to be an informal advisory body for this product. We’re obviously going to be staying very close to them, hearing what’s working, hearing what’s not working, triaging those, and addressing them as much as possible.”

The fact that NPR+ subscriptions will only be available to new recurring donors at first was a sticking point for some stations presumably worried about antagonizing current members while recruiting their next generation of donors. NPR heard “loud and clear” from “many, many stations” that they only wanted to offer NPR+ when the technological infrastructure was in place to offer the bundle to their existing members, too.

In addition to the technical hurdles, there are cultural challenges for NPR+ contend with. Radio, NPR’s legacy platform, has long been on the decline. The pandemic accelerated that trend by disrupting many car commutes, where half of AM/FM listening in the U.S. takes place.

“For some stations, moving into a digital-focused strategy is a shift. Many of them still live in the broadcast world, uh, very firmly,” Marritz said. “There’s just a real variety — you get some for whom this feels like a really comfortable program to opt into, and you get some for whom this feels like a much bigger shift from how they’re operating in the day-to-day.”

Asking a national podcast audience to become donors to their local radio stations might seem like a convoluted way to generate subscription revenue. But NPR — for reasons institutional, journalistic, and financial — wants to prioritize local support.

Dues and fees paid by the more than 1,000 NPR member stations are one of NPR’s largest portions of revenue. Currently, member stations are drawing on a donor base that is older and less diverse than America at large. NPR’s own CEO has described the public radio system as “stagnant on new membership” and overly reliant on twice-yearly pledge drives.

Meanwhile, NPR estimates that less than 1% of its 20 million weekly digital users give to their local stations.

“Podcast listeners may or may not be listening to the traditional appeals on the radio,” Sucherman said. “They may not have a favorite radio station — or understand that a public radio station is connected to NPR and connected to the podcasts that NPR creates.”

The NPR+ podcast bundle is just one part of a broader strategy called NPR Network that was approved by the company’s board over the summer. The NPR Network initiative also includes creating a cross-promotional podcast network, launching a digital audio ad exchange, and changing the organization’s bylaws to allow NPR Network to seek individual contributions directly.

With NPR Network, NPR aims to double the number of people who support their local member stations directly and double the total annual revenue in the public radio system by 2030.

“As strong as Marfa, Texas is, that’s how strong NPR is, ultimately,” Sucherman said. “We want to make sure that we have more boots on the ground, more journalists in the field, more regional hubs. How can we think about supporting those in new ways? This is one of those ways.”

Illustration by Irene Rinaldi.

  1. As of Nov. 1st, participating local member stations are CapRadio – Sacramento, CA; Cincinnati Public Radio / WVXU – Cincinnati, OH; Colorado Public Radio – Denver, CO; Georgia Public Broadcasting – Atlanta, GA; Houston Public Media – Houston, TX; Iowa Public Radio – Des Moines, IA; KALW – San Francisco, CA; KENW – Portales, NM; KNKX – Tacoma, WA; KPBS Public Media – San Diego, CA; KUOW – Seattle, WA; KVCR – San Bernardino, CA; Louisville Public Media – Louisville, KY; North Carolina Public Radio – Chapel Hill, NC; North State Public Radio – Chico, CA; KOSU – Stillwater, OK; Prairie Public Broadcasting – Fargo, ND; South Dakota Public Radio – Vermillion, SD; Texas Public Radio – San Antonio, TX; WABE – Atlanta, GA; WCBU – Peoria, IL; WEKU – Richmond, KY; WFYI – Indianapolis, IN; WGLT – Normal, IL; WJCT Public Media – Jacksonville, FL; WKAR Radio – East Lansing, MI; WLVR – Bethlehem, PA; WMFE – Orlando, FL; WNIN Tri-States Public Media – Evansville, IN; WRKF – Baton Rouge, LA; WSKG Public Radio – Vestal, NY; WUSF Public Media – Tampa, FL; WYPR – Baltimore, MD; and WYSO – Yellow Springs, OH
]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/11/npr-launches-a-paid-podcast-bundle-hoping-to-convert-a-national-audience-into-local-donors/feed/ 0 You are a rat. You are an umpire. You are an engaged news consumer. https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/11/you-are-a-rat-you-are-an-umpire-you-are-an-engaged-news-consumer/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/11/you-are-a-rat-you-are-an-umpire-you-are-an-engaged-news-consumer/#respond Wed, 02 Nov 2022 14:50:58 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=208982 The New York Times and The Washington Post each published a fun game-with-a-news-angle last week — one that placed the reader behind home plate calling balls and strikes as a Major League Baseball umpire and another that, uh, made the reader a rat scavenging for food, water, and a place to nest in Washington, D.C.

Folks couldn’t help but compare the offerings:

Games, I probably don’t have to tell you, can be pleasantly diverting, especially when the rest of the news is about election deniers, political violence, and tragic mass-death events.

In the quest to create the daily habits that many publishers see as critical to retaining subscribers, news organizations have invested in digital games and puzzles, from the classic crosswords to shelling out seven figures for a game called Wordle.

The rat and umpire games we’re talking about here are a little different than those examples in that they’re not ones you’d play again and again. (Though some wouldn’t mind changing that!) Instead, the creators  described them, alternatively, as “gamifying the news,” “interactive, fan-centered service journalism,” and “evergreen news-you-can-use.”

With news fatigue and news avoidance on the rise, the thinking goes, being able to deliver your core product — journalism — in a ~~~fun~~~ format can’t hurt.

Jonathan Ellis, deputy sports editor at The New York Times, said on Friday that the interactive umpire game has been one of the most-read pieces across the site since it published last week. The Times has turned sports news into interactive games in the past, too, challenging readers to beat sprinter Usain Bolt off the blocks or predicting whether an N.F.L. pass is complete or incomplete.

For the umpire challenge, the Times created a social-friendly shareable score reminiscent of Wordle:

Ellis edited the piece, while graphics and multimedia editor Sean Catangui, The Upshot’s Kevin Quealy, and other editors on the sports and digital news design teams made contributions. Ultimately, though, Ellis credited graphics and multimedia editor Mike Beswetherick for coming up with the idea and pursuing it as a “passion project.”

“[Beswetherick] was intrigued that Major League Baseball was talking about the idea of using an automated strike zone to call balls and strikes, replacing the umpires’ traditional role, and wanted to explore just how accurate or inaccurate human umpires are,” Ellis explained. “There are already various websites that track umpire accuracy, but we quickly came up with the idea of letting readers see for themselves how hard (or easy?) it is for umpires to make the right calls — and so that in turn became the idea for a gamified format.”

“We felt that a simple game could really show, not tell, readers what it was like to try to make accurate calls as pitches sped toward them,” Ellis added.

The Times converted data provided by the MLB — including the starting position, velocity, and acceleration of each pitch — to create the three-dimensional game.

I did, embarrassingly, manage to slip in that I got a perfect score under the pretense of asking Ellis what percentage of readers “also” called all seven pitches correctly. He told me that the Times didn’t track how well users played in the game — but that I shouldn’t wait at home for a call from the MLB.

“I’m sorry to say you’re not alone atop the standings,” he said, noting that many of the scores shared to social media were also 7-for-7. “The game wasn’t intended to make umpires’ jobs look too easy — and we note in the piece that the professionals are highly accurate. Even if you miss just one of the seven pitches, you only got 85.7% correct, which is lower than the M.L.B. umpires’ 2022 rate of 93.8% correct.”

(The last pitch, a fastball on the outside corner, did trip up many players, Ellis added.)

Staff at The Washington Post described their game as a “passion project” as well. Inspired by “the nearly endless stream” of videos of rats around the city on social media, designer Tara McCarty conceived of the initial idea for a rat-based video game. The Metro desk’s Dana Hedgpeth and Alisa Tang, designer/developer Joe Fox, illustrator Shelly Tan, and several others contributed to the game, part of a bigger package about rats in D.C. that also includes a rat quiz and a feature with rat catchers sharing tips as well as videos of their epic “showdowns” with the large rodents.

If that last line made you shiver, you’re not alone. The Post took pains not to make the game too realistic by giving the main character — a long-toothed fellow named “Cheddar” —  a pixelated, retro feel.

“We leaned into a retro theme for the game to make it feel softer and more engaging. People have strong reactions to rats — if it’s too realistic of a rendering, it might scare off potential users,” deputy design director Matthew Callahan said in an email. “Everything from the color palette to the rendering was meant to evoke a retro and soothing game — sort of a Super Mario meets Animal Crossing — rather than something grotesque.”

Still, there are plenty of disgusting/amazing moments in the feature. The pet poop left in backyards is described as a nutrient-dense “energy bar” for rats and, as players maneuver into a restaurant’s kitchen as Cheddar, they learn the rodents can squeeze into spaces the size of a marble due to their collapsible rib cage.

“Parsing through fact and fiction when it comes to rats was fascinating,” designer Tara McCarty said when asked what stuck out. “The idea that rats gnaw things to prevent their teeth from growing super long is a myth. Learning about sebum — the dirt and oils that rub off of rat fur onto the sidewalks and cement they frequent — was an eye opener.”

“We can’t unsee or unlearn the things we’ve come across in this reporting process,” McCarty added.

The Post has experimented with newsy games dating back, at least, to the 8-bit-style Floppy Candidate game in 2016, in which presidential candidates navigate news-centric obstacles. They’ve produced various “SantaSearches” every year since 2017 (including one where Christmas elves battle supply chain issues) and, in May 2022, Fox and graphics reporter/illustrator Dylan Moriarty built a game that uses a round of mini golf to illustrate how politicians can use gerrymandering to tilt elections. (“Think of us as your caddie,” the game instructions read. “We’ll show you how the district shapes are the result of careful calculation and offer help to spot gerrymandering in the wild. Can you beat par — and other Washington Post readers — in our first-ever Gerrymander Invitational?”)

“Rather than just reporting the news or trying to explain it, it encouraged readers to engage with it,” Callahan said about these types of games. “It can make it easier for a reader to spend time and create a connection with the story.”

The Post’s rat game is available on desktop and mobile, but the teams said they designed Cheddar’s adventures through a community garden, neighborhood dumpster, and restaurant with mobile in mind.

“A few things were trickier than expected — for example, making sure the user could hold down the on-screen buttons without triggering their phone’s text selection. That was fundamentally a completely new interaction we haven’t really used before,” designer/developer Joe Fox said.

“From a format perspective, The Post is deeply interested in pushing our storytelling — we aim to learn from a technological and editorial perspective on each project like this that we publish,” Callahan added. “By taking these learnings back, it gives us a head start on the next story, enabling us to build faster and smarter, and put tools in more people’s hands. This helps us think more about the story and less about the code roadblocks.”

The Washington Post said they’d seen the topic of rats resonate with their readers on social media, and that even internally, every time they talked about their game idea, “more and more people in and out of the newsroom wanted to share their own rat stories and things that they had learned.” The interest helped get the package off the ground.

For smaller newsrooms with fewer resources than the Times or Post — and that’s most of us — publishing as many interactive games at the same level might be out of reach. But games also don’t have to be high-tech marvels. If your small and/or local newsroom is experimenting with games or puzzles, let me know.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/11/you-are-a-rat-you-are-an-umpire-you-are-an-engaged-news-consumer/feed/ 0 Defector’s most successful promo email was too “creepy” to repeat https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/10/defectors-most-successful-promo-email-was-too-creepy-to-repeat/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/10/defectors-most-successful-promo-email-was-too-creepy-to-repeat/#respond Thu, 27 Oct 2022 17:00:05 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=208891 Defector, the employee-owned sports and culture website founded by former Deadspin staffers, had another good year.

Their second annual report shows the news site brought in $3.8 million and nearly every dollar came from readers. Just as in its first year, 95% of revenue came from subscriptions and the rest from site sponsorships, podcast advertising, live event ticketing, monetization of their Twitch, Amp, and YouTube channels, and merch like their “Quit Your Job” hoodie and “Defecator” one-piece for infants. With operating expenses totaling $3.7 million, Defector was profitable in its second year.

During year two, Defector experimented with promotional pricing for the first time — $0.99 for the first month — and said more than 60% of the 2,000 people who subscribed to the promo rate converted to full-price subscriptions.

Defector promoted the deal with pop-ups on their website, tweets, and emails to a list of about 150,000 non-paying readers. Their most successful email “generated ~1.5x the normal open rate and ~2x the normal clickthrough rate of our subscription appeal emails,” according to the report.

But the email from editor-in-chief Tom Ley also generated “several complaints” that the subject line (“I see what you’re up to”) was somewhere between “creepy” and “alarming.”

Here’s the lightly menacing email in question:

 

“Despite that email’s effectiveness, we have since tried to stay away from creepy subject lines,” the report reads.

Total subscription revenue rose from about $3 million in year one to $3.6 million in year two and Defector ended its second year with roughly 2,000 more active subscribers than it had the year before. (That’s 36,000 active subscribers at the end of year one to 38,000 at the end of year two.) At one point, in September 2022, Defector reached “a high-water mark” of 41,000 active subscribers.

Defector is trying to address the churn and reached out to former subscribers with a short survey over the summer. More than 60% of ex-subscribers said they felt they weren’t reading enough to justify the subscription cost and 40% cited financial hardship as a reason they canceled. (Respondents could pick multiple reasons.) Other explanations included seasonality in the sports calendar (e.g. readers who only wanted to read about the NFL), article quantity, article quality, and user experience issues.

A major bright spot in Defector’s annual report is their hit podcast Normal Gossip. When I wrote about the show in June, a little more than 500 people had signed up as paid subscribers. That number has jumped to more than 2,500 — accounting for roughly 5% of all Defector subscribers.

In its outlook for year three, Defector said it expects the podcast to be “the major driver of growth in non-subscription revenue” as well. (The podcast’s first live events have sold out quickly, and more are planned.)

Here’s Normal Gossip host Kelsey McKinney, sounding proud as all heck:

Other tidbits from Defector’s annual report:

— Currently, the cheapest subscription tier costs $8/month or $79/year. Approximately 62% subscribe at that level, another 32% at $12/month or $119/year, and 5% via Normal Gossip podcast subscriptions (starting at $5/month). And 70 people subscribe at the $1,000/year “Accomplice” level.

— Defector considered raising subscription prices before 20,000 annual subscriptions were set to renew last month, but ultimately decided against it. (They get pretty technical about the why in footnote no. 7.)

— For small teams, some things just aren’t worth the effort. For Defector, those things include actively seeking out site sponsorships (“As currently constituted, our operations team is inexperienced and/or bad at sales. We will very much still consider inbound requests from brands”), a holiday subscription gifting campaign (Defector sold about 300 in 2021, half of what a similar campaign yielded the year before), and paid digital advertising (“We realized we did not have the expertise nor the bandwidth each week to really learn from and optimize our campaigns”).

— Their goals for year three? To run it back, with a larger “top of the funnel.”

You can read the full, admirably candid report here.

Some of the wares available in Defector’s merch shop. The Quit Like a Champion shirts “sold briskly after Brian Kelly quit as head coach at Notre Dame,” according to Defector.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/10/defectors-most-successful-promo-email-was-too-creepy-to-repeat/feed/ 0 The media startup Semafor launches with a “more honest” article format and lots of global ambition https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/10/the-media-startup-semafor-launches-with-a-more-honest-article-format-and-lots-of-global-ambition/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/10/the-media-startup-semafor-launches-with-a-more-honest-article-format-and-lots-of-global-ambition/#respond Tue, 18 Oct 2022 18:51:50 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=208603 Semafor has been buzzy from the beginning. Co-founders Ben Smith and Justin Smith left high-profile gigs as media columnist at The New York Times and Bloomberg Media CEO, respectively, to announce a joint effort designed to revive trust in journalism and revolutionize the news article format, with college-educated English speakers around the globe — all 200 million of ’em — as the audience.

Nine months, $25 million in private capital, and many Twitter ads later, Semafor is here. The news site launched on Tuesday with stories on a gruesome accident at SpaceX, House Republicans’ plan to investigate the Biden White House, and a third-party candidate on the rise in Nigeria, delivered in a new article format designed to be more transparent and trustworthy for readers than the traditional style. A roster of eight newsletters and a left-hand column of quick hits on stories like the artist formerly known as Kanye West’s planned acquisition of Parler and the Sri Lankan novelist Shehan Karunatilaka’s award of the Booker Prize round out the homepage.

Semafor debuts with a spiffy design that is vaguely European and distinctively yellow. (I’d hoped Semafor had a quirky name for the shade internally — “facts in flax”? “old lemon”? — but head of design Al Lucca said, “We call it Semafor Yellow.”) With clocks set to Washington, D.C., Brussels, Lagos, Dubai, Beijing, and Singapore time in the site’s header (sorry, London), Semafor shares more than a little design DNA with outlets like Quartz and Monocle that cater to a global business class crowd. You could faithfully describe the look as the Financial Times but yellow.

Two of the news startup’s biggest bets are that a new article format can improve trust in media and that it can be “a global news company at birth.” I spoke to co-founder and editor-in-chief Ben Smith and executive editor Gina Chua about both on the eve of their launch.

The Semaform structure — c’mon, it’s not a bad name — includes sections for straight facts, the reporter’s analysis, and various counter-narratives. There will also be some aggregation, or what Semafor refers to as “distilled news, analysis, and opinion from a global range of sources,” summarized so “readers don’t have to search the internet trying to triangulate the truth.” (“We read the beltway newsletters so you don’t have to.”) For fast-moving news, the “facts” section will be published first and the other sections will be filled out afterward.

The Semaform is preceded by other efforts to improve the news article to boost readability and trustworthiness. Some of those formats (Axios’s bullet point-heavy Smart Brevity style) have stuck around longer than others (Vox’s card stacks). And it should be noted that Semafor’s intended audience — namely, readers with college educations — already have higher levels of trust in media than those without degrees.

Smith and Chua were genuinely enthusiastic about the Semaform and said they’d found the structure complemented the newsroom’s natural workflow.

“My biggest worry was that reporters would be like, ‘This is incredibly clunky and I hate it,'” Smith said. “But we’ve found it’s a format that follows how you talk to your editor about a story.”

“I think this is exactly what editors do all the time,” Chua agreed. “Good editors take your story and hold you to account and say, ‘Well, have you thought about this? Have you thought about that?’ And what we’re doing here is taking that and putting it down in writing.”

From Politico to BuzzFeed News to The New York Times, Smith has been known, loved, and occasionally feared for his scoop-heavy style. How does he feel about delivering on that reputation given Semafor’s emphasis on this new, more structured format? (His inaugural media column on Tuesday follows it dutifully.)

“I definitely am obsessed with scoops and spent a lot of my career totally focused on getting scoops,” Smith said. But he’s more focused on addressing readers who feel overwhelmed by and distrustful of media than he has been in the past. “It took me awhile to realize that the reason people hate the news isn’t [that] we’re not giving them enough scoops.”

According to Chua and Smith, there hasn’t been much agonizing from the newsroom — about 60 people, more than half in editorial roles — over the Semaform structure categorizing some of the journalist’s own reporting as analysis or opinion.

“At some point, you get sick of pretending that this expert you’re quoting knows more than you do,” Smith said bluntly. “Or that you have no opinion or you have no analysis of your own.”

“Let’s face it, this is just more honest,” Chua said. “It’s just a much more honest way of looking at information and what reporters bring to a story.”

Along with the Semaform, the media startup’s other defining claim is that it’ll operate as a global newsroom.

Semafor’s About page describes the startup as a “global news company at birth,” but the international mix felt somewhat uneven on launch day. The outlet has made major hires to cover Africa, but on a staff list provided by Semafor, there were seven people listed as covering Washington, D.C. and just six grouped under “Global.” There are two separate newsletters that focus on American politics and one to cover the continent of Africa. Another newsletter, “Flagship,” will aim for a global outlook and be written from London.

The opportunity to hire editors Alexis Akwagyiram (formerly of the Financial Times) and Yinka Adegoke (previously an editor at Rest of World) helped convince Semafor to build out its Africa coverage first. Semafor also has open job listings for reporters based in Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa.

“We have a real size team that, frankly, rivals most of the major news organizations outside of the wires and the BBC” in Africa, Chua said. “We’re not foolish enough to say we’re going to cover the entire world as reporters from day one. We’re going to build that out over time, but this is a model for how we do it.”

“It’s a place we feel we can be competitive with other global organizations on day one,” Smith added.

Semafor Africa launches with “a real advertising business attached to it,” as Smith put it. (The U.S.-based chipmaker Qualcomm is listed as a launch partner for the vertical.)

“As we think about launching globally, we are trying to think about not just where’s the industry going to be, but where’s the world going to be?” Smith said. “The center of gravity is moving south and east. Obviously, if we were launching 40 years ago, we might have set up a headquarters in Paris.”

The Smiths have said news organizations can’t afford to be “ideological” about their business models. At launch, Semafor reported a revenue mix of 75% advertising and 25% event sponsorships with companies like Mastercard, Verizon, and Hyundai. There is an equity program to share profits with staffers. And co-founder Justin Smith, who will run Semafor’s business side as CEO, told CNBC that the news startup will introduce a paywall and subscriptions within the next 18 months.

“I think you have to do work that people really appreciate and then you do the math on what the best way is to support it,” Smith said recently. “The notion that you come in with a really strong view about which kinds of dollars are nicer than which other kinds of dollars just adds a huge, unnecessary obstacle to your survival.”

I asked Smith, who has done his fair share of media reporting, what questions he’d ask to try and gauge whether a newly-launched project was going to live up to its hype.

“Well, we’re all sort of scarred by our own past experiences,” Smith said. “I think the question probably is: is the journalism you’re doing really aligned with the business that will support it? That’s the real thing.”

Illustration by Emma Roshan, a designer at Semafor.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/10/the-media-startup-semafor-launches-with-a-more-honest-article-format-and-lots-of-global-ambition/feed/ 0 Layoffs at large U.S. newspapers and digital news sites “fell considerably” in 2021, report finds https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/10/layoffs-at-large-u-s-newspapers-and-digital-news-sites-fell-considerably-in-2021-report-finds/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/10/layoffs-at-large-u-s-newspapers-and-digital-news-sites-fell-considerably-in-2021-report-finds/#respond Tue, 18 Oct 2022 14:40:48 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=208562 In 2020, layoffs seemed to reach every corner of the news industry.

Legacy outlets like The Atlantic and The New York Times cut jobs. Newspaper chains implemented furloughs and gutted newsrooms. Neither alt-weeklies nor brand-new tech sites nor public radio stations nor award-winning magazines were immune. News industry folks used phrases like “extinction event.” It was pretty bleak, even for an industry familiar with terms like “restructuring” and “finding efficiencies” and “pivoting to video.”

Things turned around in 2021, however, and not just compared to the disastrous 2020. In a new report, Pew Research Center finds that 2021 had the lowest percentage of layoffs at large U.S. newspapers and digital news sites since the center began tracking the trend in 2017.

In 2021, 11% of large newspapers faced layoffs and, among that group, none experienced more than one round of layoffs. In 2020 — you know, the year something we were calling the novel coronavirus sent shockwaves through the economy — 33% of newspapers cut jobs and 11% had multiple rounds of layoffs.

Pew researchers found a similar trend at high-traffic news sites, which they defined as digital-native outlets with at least 10 million unique visitors per month. (News orgs like Vice that made the traffic cutoff but launched with a print product were excluded from the survey.) Just 3% of digital news sites had layoffs in 2021, compared to 18% the year before.

The overall decline in circulation at U.S. newspapers may play a role in the decrease of publicly reported layoffs in 2021, Pew cautions. Only 73 newspapers met the threshold for inclusion — an average Sunday circulation of 50,000 or more — in 2021, compared to 110 in 2017. (Roughly the same number of digital-native news outlets have met Pew’s criteria year after year; the survey included 34 in 2021 compared to 35 in 2017.)

You can read Pew’s analysis here.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/10/layoffs-at-large-u-s-newspapers-and-digital-news-sites-fell-considerably-in-2021-report-finds/feed/ 0 Facebook will shut down Bulletin, its newsletter service, by early 2023 https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/10/facebook-will-shut-down-bulletin-its-newsletter-service-by-early-2023/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/10/facebook-will-shut-down-bulletin-its-newsletter-service-by-early-2023/#respond Tue, 04 Oct 2022 18:25:04 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=208340 Facebook is pulling the plug on its newsletter subscription service Bulletin and no one is even pretending to be surprised.

New York Times media reporter Katie Robertson broke the news:

Bulletin was launched as Facebook’s answer to Substack in 2021, not long after Twitter jumped into the paid newsletter game by acquiring Revue. The first featured authors were folks like Malcolm Gladwell and Malala Yousafzai.

“What’s weird about Bulletin…and perhaps shines a bit of a light on how much faith Facebook actually has in this product long-term, none of the creators they’ve launched with are people who I would think actually need Facebook’s monetization features,” noted Garbage Day’s Ryan Broderick at the time. “I have an extremely hard time believing that Tan France needs a monetized newsletter hosted on Facebook.”

I imagine the celebrities recruited by Facebook to write for Bulletin will be okay! But Bulletin had started to extend support to a subset of writers who could really use the Facebook cash: local news reporters.

We know the local news writers had been promised “licensing fees” as part of a “multi-year commitment” that would provide them “time to build a relationship” with their audience but when we wrote about the program last year, Facebook declined to put a dollar value on the support or specify exactly how long writers could expect the payments to last.

A Meta spokesperson said this week that 23 out of the original 25 local news writers are still using the platform and confirmed they will receive licensing payments for at least another year, as the original contracts suggested. The company said they would also provide resources to the writers to help them map out their next steps.

“We are committed to supporting the writers through this transition,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. “As mentioned, we are paying out their contracts in full. Additionally, they can keep their subscription revenue and subscriber email lists. In terms of content, they can archive all content and move it to a new platform of their choice.”

Roughly half of the 25 local news writers selected to join Bulletin are journalists of color. They’ve been publishing from communities in Iowa, North Carolina, Illinois, New Jersey, Ohio, Virginia, Florida, Connecticut, Texas, Michigan, California, Hawaii, Wisconsin, Georgia, Washington, Arizona, and Washington, D.C.

The financial support from Facebook was likely not life-changing for the local news writers. (Some boldface names reportedly inked deals with Bulletin in the six figures, but several of the local news reporters were planning to keep other jobs to make ends meet.) Facebook also provided legal resources, design help, newsletter strategy, and coaching to the group.

Soon after the local news partnership was announced, Kerr County Lead writer Louis Amestoy told Nieman Lab he saw a chance for Facebook to shape its information ecosystem of many local communities into something better.

“I think it’s important for Facebook to recognize this opportunity and say, ‘Okay, what do we really want to be?’” Amestoy said. “You see in certain communities that Facebook has come to fill a hole left by news deserts. Who becomes your local authority? The messaging group that’s there? Is there really someone there to curate that — someone who is objective and can differentiate the good stuff from the bad stuff? I certainly hope that they take some of the lessons that they’re going to learn from this, and make some more investments, because I think that there are a lot of opportunities. There’s so many talented journalists out there who really want an opportunity to do kind of thing that I want to do.”

With Tuesday’s abrupt announcement, it seems a little less likely those questions will get answered.

This article has been updated.

]]> https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/10/facebook-will-shut-down-bulletin-its-newsletter-service-by-early-2023/feed/ 0 The Russian language news startup Helpdesk offers service journalism for times of war https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/10/the-russian-language-news-startup-helpdesk-offers-service-journalism-for-times-of-war/ https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/10/the-russian-language-news-startup-helpdesk-offers-service-journalism-for-times-of-war/#respond Mon, 03 Oct 2022 17:47:27 +0000 https://www.niemanlab.org/?p=208272 “My son might be mobilized. I am panicking. What can I do?” “Can I cross the border in a car that isn’t registered in my name?” “Is it true I can’t be called into the army if I have a lot of tattoos?”

Those are some of the frantic questions that Helpdesk.media has fielded through its hotline. Over the past nine days, the Russian language news startup has received more than 20,000 queries, according to its founder. A team of about 50 people — who work remotely and from offices in Riga, Kyiv, and Tbilisi — answers them for an audience that is roughly 60% Russian, 40% Ukrainian.

“We are joint team of Russian and Ukrainian journalists — a unique situation in current circumstances,” points out founder Ilia Krasilshchik.

Ben Smith, co-founder of Semafor and former media columnist for The New York Times, described Helpdesk as “service journalism for people in a conflict zone” and dubbed the news startup “one of the most interesting media projects to grow out of the Ukraine conflict.”

In addition to operating the hotline, Helpdesk publishes stories about the war in Ukraine on Telegram and Instagram. The number of people turning to the independent news org for information is staggering. Krasilshchik said the Helpdesk Instagram account is reaching 2.5 million users per month, while its Telegram reaches 3 million per day. (Telegram is one of the few platforms where Russians can access independent news sources and has been the most downloaded app in Russia in recent months.)

Last week, for example, the Helpdesk Telegram recommended avoiding the Ozinki checkpoint in Kazakhstan because travelers were waiting up to three days in the queue. The wait in Komsomolsky was shorter — only “about a day” — but readers were advised the road after the checkpoint is “very bad” and the wait is “very cold.”

For answer-seekers in psychological distress, the Helpdesk operators follow a playbook to provide support. If the operator is worried the person may be suicidal, they can offer professional psychological support through a partnering organization.

In addition to the social accounts it’s currently operating, Krasilshchik plans to launch an app within the next month that will support Helpdesk chats.

“There is no sense to launch a website: Russia will block it in days,” Krasilshchik said. “Internet in Russia is enough fast to chat, so there is no problem. The main goal is to make these conversations secure.”

He added, “That’s why we built our own password protected chat system. We don’t have any authentication, it is fully anonymous, you can delete your conversation anytime you want. And we automatically delete the whole conversation in seven days after we solve a case.”

For reasons that are not hard to guess, Helpdesk does not collect any identifying information about the people who submit questions. Krasilshchik doesn’t know the average age or gender or location of the people seeking help through Helpdesk — he just knows many are terrified.

The Helpdesk team sees its journalism — which has included first-person stories about being unwillingly drafted and graphic evidence of torture in Russian-occupied cities — as a funnel that allows more people to discover the Helpdesk hotline.

“Support gives us the ability to understand what is really happening with Russians and Ukrainians, which is really important because almost no Russian journalists are still in the country,” Krasilshchik said.

Fundraising has been difficult because Visa and Mastercard have suspended operations in Russia. The organization can receive money from the West, however, and has raised some funds through the Maryland-based VC firm North Base Media. It’s raised $1.6 million so far, and Krasilshchik expects its annual budget will run about $3 million.

“Right now we have enough funding for a couple months,” Krasilshchik said. “But after the mobilization started we needed to hire a lot of new people, so we urgently need to raise more money.”

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