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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Baffler

Bellingcat

Bloomberg

Dame Magazine

Detroit Metro Times

Discourse Blog

Hell Gate

The Intercept

Media Matters

Nieman Lab

The Onion

Sahan Journal

Semafor

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

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

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

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

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

Demise of shared moments

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

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

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

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

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

How to remember

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

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

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

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

“Essential” first step

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Research roundup

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

On April 7, the Crimson sent out the first edition of its Metro Briefing newsletter, a new weekly roundup of coverage of the Cambridge-Boston area. The Metro Briefing includes summaries of the top local news and arts stories from the past week and a list of local events.

In recent years, student journalists have filled local news gaps around the country, covering statehouses and reporting on higher education to partnering local professional publications. Beyond the Crimson, Cambridge’s primary local news outlet is Marc Levy‘s nonprofit news site Cambridge Day. (Cambridge Day’s newly formed advisory board launched a crowdfunding campaign on Tuesday to raise $75,000; by comparison, the Crimson’s 2020 tax filings show the paper made more than $756,000 that year, 80% of it from donations.) The Gannett-owned Cambridge Chronicle serves the city in name only; on Thursday, there was not a single story on the site’s homepage about Cambridge.

The Crimson’s managing editor Brandon Kingdollar and newsletters editor Elias Schisgall answered my questions via email about the Crimson’s decision to expand its local news offerings. The interview is slightly edited for length and clarity.

If you’re a student journalist filling in local news gaps in your community in an innovative way, get in touch: hanaa@niemanlab.org.

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

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

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

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

pic.twitter.com/OLgOHvTlma

— NPR (@NPR) April 12, 2023

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

— Isabel Lara (@isalara) April 12, 2023

pic.twitter.com/OLgOHvTlma

— NPR (@NPR) April 12, 2023

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

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

1. For Nieman Lab, it definitely does.

Bu Iroh is determined to see her grandchild and to get her husband to stop believing every WhatsApp forward over factual information. Dressed in a red trench coat and cap with a giant magnifying glass in hand, she takes her husband around town listening to people’s false ideas about the vaccine and debunking them.

This story — from a 22-minute sitcom-style video on YouTube — is one of the tools Mafindo (an acronym for the Indonesian Anti-Slander Society) is using to combat misinformation and elevate media literacy in Indonesia, the world’s third-largest democracy.

Mafindo has a core team of nine people, with thousands of volunteers across Indonesia helping conduct trainings, fact-check, and get more members of the public connected with the organization’s work.

Mafindo offers lots of resources beyond video that aim to be conversational, relatable, and meet people where they are. Its Facebook group — more on that below — has 98,000 members; on TurnBackHoax.id, Mafindo keeps an archive of all of the debunked misinformation from that group. The organization runs trainings on the real-world dangers of election disinformation and incitement. It’s also created a WhatsApp chatbot to check dubious information and a hoax-busting app. It’s a Facebook third-party fact-checking partner and received Google News Initiative funding to run a media literacy program.

Indonesia’s media environment is complicated. Though independent news outlets are technically free to operate, the country’s laws on libel and defamation are vague, putting both journalists and uninformed citizens at risk. Last year, Indonesia’s parliament passed legislation that bans “insulting” state institutions, “regulates the criminal act of broadcasting or disseminating false news or notifications,” and “regulates criminal acts against anyone who broadcasts news that is uncertain, exaggerated, or incomplete.” The United Nations has warned that the law could suppress free speech and silence dissent, and Human Rights Watch called it “an unmitigated disaster for human rights in Indonesia.”

In 2022, 68% of Indonesians said they primarily got their news from social media, and only 39% said they trust the news media overall. In the country’s 2019 presidential election, nearly half of the false information shared about candidates originated on Facebook, the BBC found.

These laws make the stakes for sharing misinformation, even accidentally, incredibly high. (In 2019, Mafindo ran several fact-checking workshops for Indonesian housewives after a few women were arrested for sharing fake news.) They also don’t address the root problems, like platform algorithms that boost false content because it’s engaging, said Harry Sufehmi, Mafindo’s founder. Instead, they punish people who aren’t digitally savvy.

Most “hoax spreaders are not criminals,” Sufehmi said in an email. “They are actually victims. Don’t put them in jail, instead rehabilitate them, and make a better effort to educate the public. Target the hoax actors instead, especially their sponsors. Follow the money.”

That’s why Mafindo’s focus is on citizens. One of the group’s key tenets is that the spread of false information is a societal problem, not something that can be fixed top-down by government. At a World Health Organization event in 2021, Mafindo board member Santi Indra Astuti outlined the organization’s overarching belief that solutions to misinformation should “avoid government intervention as much as possible.” (Mafindo has partnered with the Indonesian government’s Covid-19 task force on fact-checking initiatives, but it doesn’t accept government funding.)

Mafindo was borne out of a misinformation-debunking Facebook group that Sufehmi created in 2014. After seeing family members and friends argue over the false information they were sharing about that year’s presidential election, he wanted to do something to help. The group, whose title translates to the Anti Defamation, Incitement, and Hoax Forum, grew by tens of thousands of members in its first two years, which led Sufehmi to found Mafindo as grassroots organization in 2016.

Eight years into this work, Mafindo is going into the next presidential election in 2024, along with its current programs, focused on pre-bunking, meaning encouraging users to think critically about the information they’re receiving and consuming, especially before they share it.

“With debunking, it’s like the house is already on fire and we are doing the firefighting,” Sufehmi said. “But with pre-bunking, we are hoping to be able to actually prevent the fires.”

Mafindo’s goal is to be fair, neutral, and empathetic in its work and with its community, according to its code of ethics. That principle was reinforced in 2020, at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. During that time, Astuti said, Mafindo was equipped with frameworks and tools to debunk misinformation — but facts were not enough.

“People didn’t want to listen to us when we [just] warned them about misinformation,” Astuti told me in an email.

Instead, Mafindo representatives worked with communities to help meet their most immediate needs.

“We joined forces with [people] to collect donations, food, meals, medicine, and anything that could make them help them and suffer less,” Astuti recalled. “During these activities, windows of opportunity to talk about misinformation suddenly appeared. It was during a casual conversation in an informal setting, people would listen to us again.”

Working with communities in crisis on their most immediate needs also builds trust in Mafindo’s other work, the organization has found. People need basic supplies before they need fact-checks. But, Astuti said, “Without immersing in everyday life, I think we’ll lose opportunities to listen and to feel people’s emotions, perceptions, and why such perceptions did exist.”

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.”

It’s not hard to see the Bannon strategy at work at Elon Musk’s Twitter. Each day brings a new fistful of outrages. Just from the past few: Twitter starts promoting Vladimir Putin’s tweets. Twitter blocks tweets critical of the Indian government — not just in India, but worldwide. Twitter stops putting labels on Chinese propaganda — but starts adding labels to the BBC. Twitter starts a dumb feud with Substack, throttling tweets to Substack articles, telling users they’re “unsafe,” and redirecting searches for “substack” to “newsletter.” And oh yeah, Elon’s inner child is rebranding “Twitter” as “Titter.”

But I wanted to get one more Musk-driven obituary on the record. Twitter’s API restrictions have killed off Fuego, a little side project we’ve been running here at Nieman Lab since 2011. Here’s how I described it at the time:

Fuego is all about right now — what people in our field are talking about at this very instant. Every hour, Fuego searches through thousands of Twitter accounts related to the future of news, sees what links people are sharing and talking about, does a little math to favor fresh stories, and spits out the 10 links that are getting the most attention, with sample tweets for each. It’s like spending your day reading Twitter — but without having to actually spend your day reading Twitter.

In other words, it was a lot like Nuzzel, which launched the following year and which, after being acquired by Twitter in 2021, lives on as Twitter Blue’s Top Articles. (Fuego in turn took its inspiration from an earlier experiment called Hourly Press by Lyn Headley and Steve Farrell.) Credit for its construction goes 98% to our old friend Andrew Phelps and 2% to me fiddling with fonts. We open-sourced it in 2013 so you could build your own Fuegos, focused on any topic you chose.

Fuego was an early example of the sort of thing the Twitter API enabled: an alternate interface for your network. If you read every single tweet posted by a group of digital-media-savvy people — for an hour, a day, or a week — what are the links you’d see most often? And what are people saying about them? The old rules let us do it for free; now, Musk wants to charge us $42,000 a month. We will, unsurprisingly, not be paying. And with that, Fuego joins the tens of thousands (likely hundreds of thousands!) of projects killed by Musk.

Civilization will somehow survive the loss of Fuego, I imagine. But its death is yet another sticky-note-on-the-bathroom-mirror reminder that you can no longer depend on Twitter for anything. Building something there is like building on sand — and you never know when the next wave will come rolling in.

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

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

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

— Chris Best (@cjgbest) April 6, 2023

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

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

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 7, 2023

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

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

— Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) April 7, 2023

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

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

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) April 7, 2023

Substack’s statement:

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

— Max Tani (@maxwelltani) April 7, 2023

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

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

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.

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

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

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

It’s something readers really wanted, Nakashima writes:

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

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

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

More here.

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

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

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

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

The full paper is here.

El País closed out 2022 with more then 266,000 paying subscribers — 227,000 of whom opted for digital-only subscriptions, according to the paper’s parent company Prisa.

More and more news outlets continue to turn to their readers for support, and that often means diversifying offerings beyond just the news. With the intention of building community for its subscribers outside of journalism, last November El País launched its first reading club. In five months, the club has grown to more than 1,100 members scattered mostly throughout Spain and Latin America.

Any paying subscriber can join the reading club. They get added to the subscribers-only Facebook group where they can talk to El País journalists, the authors they’re reading, and each other.

According to Andrea Nogueira Calvar, the editor leading the Facebook group, staffers at the paper’s culture section and its weekly arts and literature supplement Babelia had been kicking around the idea of a reading club for several years. But the demands of the daily news cycle and the day-to-day needs of the newsroom always pushed the idea to the back burner.

Reading or book clubs are hardly a new concept, though who did it first is debatable depending on the parameters you use. Some of the first records of American reading groups date back to a ship heading to the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1634. Today, reading groups exist in a variety of formats (hello, BookTok and Bookstagram) and can be organized by genre, location, or other shared values, identities, and interests. In the United States, having your book chosen by Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon’s book club is a near-guaranteed way to become a bestseller. National news outlets like the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and others all have their own book clubs and reading communities.

In Spain, reading clubs gained prominence in the 1980s amid a new investment in public libraries. Blanca Calvo, who was the director of the Library of Guadalajara in Spain at the time, launched a reading club as a way to attract new public library patrons and encourage reading.

When the pandemic first forced people to stay home in 2020, Nogueira said an overall trend emerged of people reading more in their newfound free time. El País had hosted events and gatherings for subscribers before, but launching the reading club in 2022 was an experiment that proved that not only had the reading habit stuck, but that people were also looking for a forum to slow down and to connect with others over literature.

“Two things came together,” Nogueira said. “We have a very active community that highly values the culture section and Babelia. And after the pandemic, the need to stop and dedicate time to oneself was reclaimed. It’s also about dedicating time to reading and to the analysis of reading, because in the end what the club gives you, as a reader, is support from other readers.”

About once a month, a team of El País editors, led by Babelia editor-in-chief Guillermo Altares, announces what the next book will be in the Facebook group. They take into account the members’ interests in certain genres, the themes of the book (so as not to repeat the same themes in different books), the availability of the author to participate in the Facebook group and the in-person events, and accessibility of the books in both Spain and Latin America.

For book club members in Spain, they can enter a raffle to attend an in-person, interactive event with the book’s author. Then, twenty raffle winners have three weeks to read the book before the event (finishing the book is heavily encouraged). Readers outside of Spain or anyone who didn’t win a raffle ticket can watch a livestream of the event in the Facebook group. Each event is held in a different Spanish city at a local FNAC, a European bookstore chain. El País also publishes its own story covering the event the following day.

Throughout the month, members of the group can post discussion points, questions, and their own thoughts about the readings, and talk to each other. The team announces the book and shares some supplemental articles, but Nogueira has noticed that the members do their own research and share it with the group. In five months, the club, despite its growth, has managed to foster a tight-knit community that encourages critical reading.

“We were reading a book that was a bit complex in terms of structure and plot,” Nogueira said. “Sometimes there were readers who got lost and then would share it in the group, and some readers would help others to follow. One would say to the other, for example, ‘Hold on a little longer, you’ll soon understand everything.’”

With the hunch that the reading club might take off, the team’s first pick to kick it off was a risk: poetry.

It’s not the most popular genre, Nogueira said, but the star power of the author may have helped reel people in and kept them reading. The first book the club read was Un año y tres meses (One Year and Three Months), a book of poems by Luis García Montero, a renowned Spanish writer and the president of the Cervantes Institutes, which promotes the study of Spanish language and literature. The book is based on the last few months of the life of his wife, writer Almudena Grandes, who passed away in 2021.

“Poetry gives us answers that we need beyond technology or science,” García Montero told the reading club in November. “That’s what I’ve been looking for in this book.”

The reading club is now on its fifth book, Roma soy yo (I Am Rome), a narrative biography of Julius Caesar by Santiago Posteguillo. The event with Posteguillo is slated for March 30 at an FNAC in Valencia.

Nogueira said one of the project’s challenges is keeping as many members happy as possible. With every book, she said, there have been readers who weren’t interested in the subject, found the reading too difficult, or gave up.

“I believe in not disappointing the readers and offering them what they expect from us,” Nogueira said. “When we [as people] decide to join a book club or a group or a community like the one at El País, we all go in with illusions. The difficult thing is to maintain that illusion over time so that we are not disappointed. That is the biggest challenge — to keep surprising them with the books and living up to what they expect to be offered.”

And like any other attentive, engaged readers, El País book club members are quick to point out grammatical errors, whether they’re in the readings, El País stories, or in the Facebook posts. But, it comes from a good place, Nogueira said.

“They are very demanding, which is fine, because I think that happens when you really feel that you are part of something, you feel you are in a position to make demands,” Nogueira said. “I think it’s great because we’ve managed to create a community that feels part of El País, which I think is the goal of any newspaper.”

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

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

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

I asked Stonbely a few questions about her research.

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

Recommendations given to Paterson Hub

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

Recommendations given to the Trenton Journal

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

Recommendations given to Ridge View Echo

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

The former soccer player’s tweet on March 7 described the wording of the new government policy on immigration as language “not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s.” It triggered attacks by Conservative Members of Parliament, intense national debate, and a crisis at the corporation.

The BBC’s flagship TV soccer review program, Match of the Day, was aired without presenters or contributors over the weekend amid calls for the resignation of its director general, Tim Davie. The BBC gave up on finding substitute presenters after other pundits stood down in solidarity.

Lineker refused to retract his tweet. After weekend talks, BBC management reached a deal, obliging him to observe the corporation’s editorial guidelines while it conducts a social media usage review.

There is no huge influx. We take far fewer refugees than other major European countries. This is just an immeasurably cruel policy directed at the most vulnerable people in language that is not dissimilar to that used by Germany in the 30s, and I’m out of order?

— Gary Lineker (@GaryLineker) March 7, 2023

Described by some as a “humiliating climbdown,” the deal aimed to help the crisis blow over quickly. But it did not.

Conservative party deputy chairman Lee Anderson claimed that Gary Lineker had proved he was bigger than the BBC itself, creating a precedent for a social media “free for all” for those working for the BBC on non-journalistic contracts.

The crisis has highlighted many unresolved questions about the place of legacy media organizations — largely broadcasters and newspapers — in the fast-changing digital information space. It also raises questions about the role of journalism in the age of social media.

Obsolete definitions

During discussions around Lineker’s social media conduct, media professionals have frequently referred to the distinction between news and current affairs and other BBC output — and the difference between journalists and other contributors. This distinction, once quite rigid, is increasingly blurred.

Some high-achieving BBC staff journalists were offered more lucrative freelance contracts in the 1980s and 1990s by BBC management who did not want to lose them to commercial rivals. This prompted a government inquiry into the nature of the practice.

Meanwhile, growing celebrity culture forced the BBC to offer generous freelance deals to attract top talent. This triggered resentment among staff on more modest salaries and resulted in a wave of public criticism.

Freelance journalists still had to abide by the BBC’s strict guidelines on impartiality, fairness, and accuracy. But other non-staff contributors had more room for maneuvering, depending on their contracts — the wording of which has always been shrouded in secrecy.

This discretionary nature of contractual arrangements has led to confusion and controversy. Many members of the public do not differentiate between a BBC journalist and a commentator, interviewee, pundit, or studio guest. They are all a BBC voice. But, as pointed out by former head of BBC News, James Harding, impartiality is key in maintaining the quality of public discourse and fighting growing polarization.

The former director of BBC policy, Dame Patricia Hodgson, described the threat of such departures from impartiality as “culture wars.” But can this level of adherence to editorial standards be required from all actors, musicians, scientists, or sport pundits appearing on the BBC without thwarting the principle of free speech?

The BBC’s guidelines on social media were updated only two years ago. Now, post-Lineker, they already seem obsolete, and the BBC is reviewing them again. The BBC’s requirement of impartiality from all contributors who are “primarily associated with the BBC” can be challenged — and successfully so — as shown by Lineker.

When criticized by BBC news journalists in September 2022 over earlier controversial political tweets, Lineker was backed by BBC management. One of the journalists was even censured for challenging the presenter and had to apologize.

Journalism in the age of hybrid news

The Lineker crisis, however short-lived, reflects how hard it is for organizations like the BBC to keep up with the world of social media, which has not been kind to journalism, either.

In a media landscape where anyone with an internet connection has access to large audiences and mainstream publishers and broadcasters and their journalists are no longer the gatekeepers of information, the definition of who or what is “doing” journalism has become blurred.

Competition is intense, revenues have fallen heavily, and many news organizations have found it hard to survive. The idea of journalism appears to have been subsumed under the more general efforts of “content creation.” This has put a great deal of pressure on the sharp distinction once created by the BBC between news and current affairs and other content. Anyone can today call themselves a journalist — whether a “citizen journalist” or otherwise.

Meanwhile, people with large social media followings and significant reach, like Lineker, can enjoy the benefits of contract escape clause that do not oblige them to behave like journalists. It seems that journalism has transcended its vocational and institutional identity and is badly in need of a new definition.

Attacking journalism — even accurate and verified reporting — provides a quick lift for politicians.

It’s not just Donald Trump. Trump’s rival for the 2024 Republican nomination, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, recently criticized “the Lefty media” for telling “lies” and broadcasting “a hoax” about his policies.

Criticizing the media emerged as an effective bipartisan political tactic in the 1960s. GOP Sen. Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign got the ball rolling by needling the so-called “Eastern liberal press.”

Democratic President Lyndon Johnson’s lies about the Vietnam War clashed with accurate reporting, and a “credibility gap” arose — the growing public skepticism about the administration’s truthfulness — to the obvious irritation of the president. Johnson complained CBS News and NBC News were so biased he thought their reporting seemed “controlled by the Vietcong.”

Democrats like Chicago’s Mayor Richard J. Daley, who complained bitterly about news coverage of the 1968 Democratic convention (labeling it “propaganda“) and Federal Communications Commissioner Nicholas Johnson, who published “How to Talk Back to Your Television Set” in 1970, argued that “Eastern,” “commercial” and “corporate” media interests warped or “censored” the news.

In 1969, Republican President Richard Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, launched a public campaign against news corporations that instantly made him a conservative celebrity.

Agnew warned that increased concentration in news media ownership ensured control over public opinion by a “tiny and closed fraternity of privileged men, elected by no one.” Similar criticism emerged from leftists, including MIT linguist Noam Chomsky.

The bipartisan popularity of news media criticism continued to grow as politicians found attacking the messengers the fastest way to avoid engaging in discussion of unpleasant realities. Turning the spotlight back on the media also helped political figures portray themselves as victims, while focusing partisan anger at specific villains.

Today, only 26% of Americans have a favorable opinion of the news media, according to a poll published in February by Gallup and the Knight Foundation. Americans across the political spectrum share a growing disdain for journalism — no matter how accurate, verified, professional or ethical.

Yet open debate over journalism ethics signals healthy governance. Such argumentation might amplify polarization, but it also facilitates the exchange of diverse opinions and encourages critical analyses of reality.

Journalistic failures damaged trust

Americans grew to distrust even the best news reporting because their political leadership encouraged it. But multiple failures exposed over the past several decades also further eroded journalistic credibility.

Long before bloggers ended Dan Rather’s CBS News career in 2005, congressional investigations, civil lawsuits, and scandals revealing unethical and unprofessional behavior within even the most respected journalism outlets doomed the profession’s public reputation.

In 1971, CBS News aired “The Selling of the Pentagon,” an investigation that revealed the government spent tax dollars to produce pro-military domestic propaganda during the Vietnam War.

The program infuriated U.S. Rep. Harley Staggers, who accused CBS of using “the nation’s airwaves…to deliberately deceive the public.”

Staggers launched an investigation and subpoenaed CBS News’ unpublished, confidential materials. CBS News President Frank Stanton defied the subpoena and was eventually vindicated by a vote of Congress. But Staggers, a West Virginia Democrat, publicly portrayed CBS News as biased by insinuating the network had much to hide. Many Americans agreed with him.

“The Selling of the Pentagon” was the first of many investigations and lawsuits that damaged the credibility of journalism by exposing — or threatening to expose — the messy process of assembling news. As with the recent embarrassing revelations about Fox News exposed by the Dominion lawsuit, whenever the public gets access to the backstage behavior, private opinions and hypocritical actions of professional journalists, reputations will suffer.

But even the remarkable Fox News revelations shouldn’t be considered unique.

Repeated lying

Numerous respected news organizations have been caught lying to their audiences. Though such episodes are rare, they can be enormously damaging.

In 1993, General Motors sued NBC News, accusing the network of deceiving the public by secretly attaching explosives to General Motors trucks, and then blowing them up to exaggerate a danger.

NBC News admitted it, settled the lawsuit and news division president Michael Gartner resigned. The case, concluded The Washington Post’s media critic, “will surely be remembered as one of the most embarrassing episodes in modern television history.”

Additional examples abound. Intentional deception — knowingly lying by consciously publishing or broadcasting fiction as fact — occurs often enough in professional journalism to cyclically embarrass the industry.

In cases such as Janet Cooke and The Washington Post, Stephen Glass and the New Republic, Jayson Blair and Michael Finkel of The New York Times, and Ruth Shalit Barrett and The Atlantic, the publication of actual fabrications was exposed.

These episodes of reportorial fraudulence were not simply errors caused by sloppy fact-checking or journalists being deceived by lying sources. In each case, journalists lied to improve their careers while trying to help their employers attract larger audiences with sensational stories.

This self-inflicted damage to journalism is every bit equal to the attacks launched by politicians.

Such malfeasance undermines confidence in the news media’s ability to fulfill its constitutionally protected responsibilities. If few Americans are willing to believe even the most verified and factual reporting, then the ideal of debate grounded in shared facts may become anachronistic. It may already be.

Media criticism as democratic participation

The pervasive amount of news media criticism in the U.S. has intensified the erosion of trust in American journalism.

But such discussion can be seen as a sign of democratic health.

“Everyone in a democracy is a certified media critic, which is as it should be,” media sociologist Michael Schudson once wrote. Imagine how intimidated citizens would respond to pollsters in Russia, China or North Korea if asked whether they trusted their media. To question official media “truth” in these nations is to risk incarceration or worse.

Just look at Russia. As Putin’s regime censored independent media and pumped out propaganda, the nation’s least skeptical citizens became the war’s foremost supporters.

As a media scholar and former journalist, I believe more reporting on the media, and criticism of journalism, is always better than less.

Even that Gallup-Knight Foundation report chronicling lost trust in the media concluded that “distrust of information or [media] institutions is not necessarily bad,” and that “some skepticism may be beneficial in today’s media environment.”

People choose the media they trust and criticize the media they consider less credible. Intentional deception scandals have been exposed at outlets as different as The New York Times, Fox News, and NBC News. Just as the effort to demean the media has long been bipartisan, revelations of malfeasance have historically plagued media across the political spectrum. Nobody can yet know the long-term effect the Dominion lawsuit will have on the credibility of Fox News specifically, but media scholars know the scandal will justifiably further erode the public’s trust in the media.

An enduring democracy will encourage rather than discourage media criticism. Attacks by politicians and exposure of unethical acts clearly lower public trust in journalism. But measured skepticism can be healthy and media criticism comprises an essential component of media literacy — and a vibrant democracy.

Fiorella also runs Bellingcat’s server on Discord, where a community of 15,000 people meets daily to discuss news stories, contributes to investigations, and — why not? — chat about their lunch.

Politicians haven’t stopped deleting some of their most cringeworthy tweets, but Politwoops, our project that has tracked and archived more than half a million deleted tweets from candidates and elected officials since 2012, is no longer able to track them.

Since Elon Musk took over Twitter, the platform has disabled the function we used to track deletions — and the new method that Twitter says should identify them appears to be broken. We have been unable to find anyone who can help us, and with Twitter surprising developers by announcing a move to apaid model for gathering tweet data, it’s no longer clear that Twitter is a stable platform on which to maintain this work. It seems fitting to give Politwoops a sendoff, a farewell to not exactly a friend but an odd part of our national political discourse for a decade.

Originally built by the Sunlight Foundation, Politwoops always had a tenuous existence. Born in 2012, it received its first eulogy just three years later after Twitter pulled the plug, only to come back just in time for the 2016 presidential election. (Now-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy welcomed it back, then deleted that tweet.) When Sunlight closed up shop, ProPublica took over the app, which is when I started to maintain it.

Politwoops was built on the idea that what elected officials and candidates said on Twitter mattered, at least a little. Like most users of Twitter, politicians usually tweet pretty mundane stuff: celebrations of victories mixed with jeers for opponents, some local flavor and attempts to jump into trending conversations. Most of the deletions are for mistakes any Twitter user could make: typos, forgotten or incorrect images, bad URLs. The occasional seems-like-a-toddler-grabbed-the-phone posts. Truly forgettable stuff.

But for those politicians who really embraced Twitter as a place where they could be themselves, the deletions sometimes spoke volumes. Some deleted posts are hard to forget, like one from then-President Donald Trump in the early evening of Jan. 6, 2021, not long after a mob invaded the U.S. Capitol and assaulted police officers in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election:

Trump had perhaps the most-watched Twitter account during my time running Politwoops. While he was in office, Trump’s tweets got a ton of attention, but they seldom were a departure from other things he said in public. I would often get emails from reporters asking whether he had, in fact, deleted some alleged tweet they had seen, and mostly he had not; other accounts would post images of fake tweets that never appeared on his timeline. Politwoops became an integral resource for checking whether viral (and often poorly photoshopped) tweets were fake.

All the while, other politicians were posting — and deleting — interesting, newsworthy and bizarre things on the platform. Running Politwoops for the past six years has, strangely enough, made many elected officials seem more human to me. They, and not Trump, are what I’ll remember most about the site.

Sometimes deleted messages appear to be offhand remarks that politicians have instantly thought better of: When political scientist Larry Sabato wrote, “You have to admit, Biden is on fire,” referring to then-Vice President Joe Biden’s debate performance against Republican Paul Ryan in October 2012, Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn retweeted it. And then deleted it 11 seconds later.

Other examples of this genre include Kentucky Republican Rep. Thomas Massie’s deletion of this somewhat cryptic tweet about men and war a minute after posting it, while New York Democratic congressional candidate Nate McMurray did the same for this hot take about The Buffalo News in October 2020.

In other cases, it was harder to tell why a tweet was deleted. Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, famous for his use of abbreviations and sparsely worded posts, is a known booster of the University of Northern Iowa, his alma mater. In November 2021 he posted that UNI was trying to recruit a local volleyball player. Fourteen hours later, he deleted the tweet. That athlete did, in fact, sign with UNI a year later.

As Twitter grew in popularity among politicians, its use became more professional, with staffers posting news and pictures. That led to some interesting conversations as staffers who had access to multiple accounts, including their own personal ones, sometimes clicked the wrong button. I’ve gotten more than one email or phone call asking if a tweet posted by mistake to the wrong account and then deleted could be removed entirely from Politiwoops. (Answer: We don’t do that.)

In December 2020, I got an email from someone who worked on the campaign of then-Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, D-N.Y. The congressman had posted and deleted a tweet that showed up on Politwoops, and would we consider removing it? It’s very rare that we would do that — that’s the whole point of the site — but when I brought up the deleted tweet I saw why he was asking: Maloney had mistakenly sent a public tweet that should have been a direct message, because it included his personal cell phone number. After some conversation, we decided to redact the number.

You can sometimes tell when it’s the actual politician and not a staffer who has posted a deleted tweet. If there’s swearing involved, it’s usually the politician. One of the basic conventions of politician Twitter is that swearing is usually a bad idea, but if you’re going to do it, don’t do it from your official government account, like Rep. Chuy Garcia, D-Ill., did last summer. (And probably don’t lash out at random users, either.)

After the 2016 election, when Twitter became an important part of fundraising for political campaigns, I started to notice a very strange pattern: some accounts, especially long-shot candidates running against high-profile incumbents, dramatically increased the number of their deletions. A good example of this was Kim Mangone, a California Democrat then running against McCarthy for a House seat. Mangone’s deletions consist mostly of her own retweets, which seems like a weird thing to do until you discover that Twitter prevents users from reposting identical tweets or retweets over and over in a short time span. The only way around that restriction is to delete the earlier post and then repost it.

Perhaps the most interesting political deleter is Sen. Brian Schatz, a Hawaii Democrat active on the platform. Like many of his colleagues, Schatz deleted typos and some retweets of others’ posts. But he often posted an informal message — almost always without a link or mentioning other accounts — that gave you a glimpse into his actual thinking. Here’s an example where Schatz could have tagged some of the pundits he was criticizing, but didn’t. And another one in that vein. Or this one with early COVID advice on mask-wearing. Sometimes he’d even acknowledge the deletions, or provide an explanation for doing it. Most politicians do not do this.

Other senators are famous for their folksier tweets — Grassley excels at this — and there are some lawmakers who can be equally blunt on the platform. But I’d like to believe that I learned something about how Schatz thinks that would be hard for me to know otherwise, given that we’ve never met.

That’s one of the things I’ll miss most about running Politwoops: getting a glimpse behind the carefully crafted images that politicians present to the public. ProPublica would be happy to continue running this service, so if anyone at Twitter wants to help out, please get in touch. That includes you, Elon: politwoops@propublica.org.

From The Canadian Press on Tuesday evening:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Joanna Smith (@smithjoanna) February 22, 2023

This explains everything about my failed Google searches this week.

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

— Marieke Walsh (@MariekeWalsh) February 23, 2023

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

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

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

Elon Musk, as he is wont to do, challenged that conventional wisdom when he made Twitter’s blue “Verified” check — previously evidence of actual verification — into a paid product. Verification was initially intended as a confirmation of identity, the sort of small mark that makes a platform sliiightly more trustworthy and secure. But it became some weird marker of status to some of the internet’s worst people, and so it became an $8 SKU.

This conversion — this shift from a “Trust and Safety” feature to a consumer product — had the results everyone predicted, a rash of impersonations, brand danger, and other malfeasance.

But last week, Musk-era Twitter went a step further and said only $8/month customers will be allowed to use SMS for two-factor authentication — a basic layer of security frequently used by journalists, celebrities, officials, and others who fear being hacked. The company tried to explain it as a matter of security (“we have seen phone-number based 2FA be used — and abused — by bad actors”) — but apparently the threat is only to non-paying customers, since Twitter Blue subscribers can keep on using it forever. There will be other ways to use 2FA for Twitter, but they’re not available worldwide and are not without their own risks.

Basic security features going behind a paywall — not good. So it was even less encouraging to see Facebook follow Musk-era Twitter’s lead:

Meta’s testing paid verification for Instagram and Facebook for $11.99 per month on web and $14.99 per month on mobile. In an update on Instagram, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that a “Meta Verified” account will grant users a verified badge, increased visibility on the platforms, prioritized customer support, and more. The feature’s rolling out to Australia and New Zealand this week and will arrive in more countries “soon.”

“This week we’re starting to roll out Meta Verified — a subscription service that lets you verify your account with a government ID, get a blue badge, get extra impersonation protection against accounts claiming to be you, and get direct access to customer support,” Zuckerberg writes. “This new feature is about increasing authenticity and security across our services.”

On Facebook, Zuckerberg engaged in some limited back-and-forth with users over the change. (“Call me crazy but I don’t think I should have to pay you guys to take down the accounts impersonating me and scamming my followers.” “This really should just be part of the core product, the user should not have to pay for this. Clearly it’s known by Meta this is filling a need, why profit additionally from it?”)

One user argues that “direct access to customer support is the real value, much more so than the blue check mark.” Zuckerberg: “I agree that’s a big part of the value.” And indeed, a hotline to Facebook customer service is likely the most valuable piece of the package here. But it doesn’t feel good to see features like identity verification — basic stuff for running a trustworthy platform — put behind a paywall.

For Twitter, there’s a certain mad sense to the move. Elon Musk has set the company on fire, from a cashflow perspective, and he’s desperate for all the user revenue he can generate. If 63% of your best advertisers drop you, you grab at whatever dollar bills you see floating by. (Not many seem to be floating Elon’s way.)

Facebook, meanwhile, is still pulling in more than $30 billion a quarter in ad revenue. But various headwinds, whether economic or Cupertino-driven, have demanded a “year of efficiency,” which includes chasing money from users too.

We’re seeing an addendum to that old conventional wisdom about social networks. You can’t charge most of your users — but you can charge some. Few would be bothered by a subscription product that offered additional features — ad-free browsing, say, or custom icons, like the old Twitter Blue. But it’s sad to watch basic security features put behind a credit card charge.

DeSantis communications director Taryn Fenske sent the proposed request to a writer at a newly launched conservative news website — who then submitted it to the State Attorney’s Office in his own name.

It was, records show, just the beginning of a collaboration between the DeSantis administration and The Florida Standard, which would go on to publish a story alleging that Warren might have misused taxpayer resources — a story that DeSantis staffers then promoted to others as if it were an independent piece of journalism.

The episode is a case study in how DeSantis, who is widely expected to run for president, has cultivated a network of sympathetic conservative news organizations that he and his strategists use to promote the governor — and attack his opponents.

And DeSantis is building this cheerleading machine even as he uses his powers as governor to weaken legitimate journalism.

Separate records show, for instance, that the DeSantis administration was directly involved in recent legislation that allowed cities, counties, and towns to stop publishing legal notices in local newspapers. Attorneys for the governor are arguing in courts that DeSantis does not always need to comply with Florida’s public-records laws. And DeSantis hinted last week that he wants to make it easier to sue news organizations for libel and defamation — an idea the governor has been quietly working on for at least a year.

The governor’s efforts to prop up supplicant sources of news — while trying to destabilize and delegitimize independent ones — make for a dangerous combination, said Michael Barfield, the director of public access at the Florida Center for Government Accountability, a watchdog group that supports transparent government and investigative journalism.

“This is what state-run media looks like,” Barfield said. “Russia, China, and Venezuela use it as a tool to control the message. The strategy has far-reaching and negative implications for freedom of the press and democracy. History is full of painful lessons when the government interferes with and manipulates a free and independent press.”

“We’ll put a nail in the coffin”

Ron DeSantis suspended Andrew Warren on August 4, removing an independently elected prosecutor who had vowed not to criminally punish women seeking abortions or doctors providing them.

The following 24 hours were a frantic period for the governor’s press staff, which stoked the story online while fielding media inquiries from around the world. But things began to calm down a bit after the governor’s office arranged to have Susan Lopez — the attorney DeSantis chose to replace Warren — hire one of DeSantis’ former communications directors to handle media for the State Attorney’s Office.

“Fred Piccolo is now doing their comms,” Taryn Fenske, DeSantis’ current communications director, wrote in an August 5 text message to two other staffers in the DeSantis press shop. The text messages were unearthed during a trial over the suspension. “So I’m going to call him and have him get counter stories out there.”

Then Fenske added, “Will’s team can focus on this one, we’ll put a nail in the coffin.”

It’s not clear to whom Fenske was referring when she wrote the name “Will.” Fenske did not respond to a request for comment.

But two days later, a conservative podcaster and social media personality named Will Witt announced the launch of The Florida Standard, a conservative website covering Florida politics.

“The media landscape of today is nothing more than the corrupt propaganda of the ruling class,” Witt wrote in an August 7 post headlined “Welcome to The Florida Standard.”

“We at The Florida Standard are here to change that,” Witt wrote. “Whether it’s in our daily email updates, our breaking news texts, or anything else we do, our commitment will never be to a political party or hidden agendas.”

The Florida Standard took an immediate interest in Andrew Warren. One of the site’s first news pieces was a one-sided story recapping DeSantis’s decision to suspend Warren.

But the publication was about to do more digging. Three days later, on August 10, emails obtained through a public-records request show that Fenske, DeSantis’ communications director, contacted Josh Miller, a writer at the Florida Standard, with a proposed public-records request.

“Here’s a draft example of a records request if helpful!” Fenske wrote.

The proposed request sought emails from the 13th Circuit State Attorney’s Office that included any of several key phrases, such as “Florida Democratic Party,” “American Civil Liberties Union,” and “fair and just prosecutions,” a reference to an advocacy group that Warren had worked with. The request also asked for work-related communications Warren had sent or received from a personal Gmail account.

Fifteen minutes later, Miller submitted the request in his own name, according to separate records obtained from the State Attorney’s Office. Miller copied Fenske’s draft verbatim — right down to repeating a typo in which Fenske had flubbed the acronym for the ACLU by writing “ALCU.”

The Florida Standard ultimately abandoned the request, according to the State Attorney’s Office. Instead, on the morning of August 17 — the same morning Warren announced that he was suing DeSantis on First Amendment grounds — the publication phoned in a much narrower records request. The more targeted request sought copies of press releases issued by the State Attorney’s Office about work that Warren, a Democrat, had done in conjunction with a task force created by the Florida Democratic Party.

The State Attorney’s Office jumped on it: Records show the agency emailed three press releases to Miller, the Florida Standard writer, at 9:32 that morning.

Eight minutes later, according to a timestamp, The Florida Standard published a story under the headline “Andrew Warren Allegedly Used Taxpayer Money for Activist Agenda.” The story said Warren used his office to “liaise” with the Florida Democratic Party, and that he spent taxpayer money on “events related to his activism.”

The Florida Standard’s story cited a “high-level source in the State Attorney’s Office,” as well as records that The Florida Standard said it had obtained via public-records requests — including the press releases that the State Attorney’s Office had emailed over minutes earlier.

But records show that The Florida Standard may have had those press releases even before the State Attorney’s Office sent them.

As part of its story, the publication included a link to a PDF of its documents — the three press releases issued by the State Attorney’s Office, plus a pair of releases from the Florida Democratic Party and a news story from another publication. The metadata on that PDF indicates that it was created by a scanner in the Governor’s Office — before the State Attorney’s Office sent the press releases to the Florida Standard.

Neither Witt, The Florida Standard’s editor-in-chief, nor Miller, the writer of the Andrew Warren story, responded to a request for comment.

As soon as The Florida Standard’s story was published, Fenske began sending it to other reporters, who were flooding the governor’s office with requests for comment in response to Warren’s First Amendment lawsuit.

Records from the governor’s office show Fenske sent the piece to at least five other news outlets — television stations in Tampa and Tallahassee, plus Fox News, the Washington Times and the Daily Mail. She never betrayed a hint that the governor’s office helped orchestrate the story.

“For background, saw this story earlier this morning and thought it might be of interest to you,” Fenske wrote in an email to Forrest Saunders, a television reporter in Tallahassee who had asked the governor’s press office for a response to Warren’s lawsuit.

Weaponizing the “friendlys”

It’s been well-documented how deliberately DeSantis has cultivated an ecosystem of right-wing writers, social-media influencers and other marketers as he prepares for a possible Republican primary showdown against former President Donald Trump.

In a lengthy profile last year, The New Yorker detailed the governor’s staff assiduously courting producers at Fox News. Semafor reported in December that DeSantis is “building his own media,” citing his work with outlets like The Florida Standard. The Daily Beast reported last month that DeSantis’s team has been recruiting “a secret Twitter army of far-right influencers.”

Records from the governor’s office show his press staff has separate distribution lists of conservative outlets whom it urges to do everything from writing mundane stories about Florida tourism numbers to pushing back against critical coverage in mainstream outlets like The Miami Herald. Staffers in the governor’s press office have referred to them as “friendlys,” according to text messages from the Andrew Warren litigation.

But the Warren attack reveals how the governor weaponizes this network, too.

DeSantis also seems particularly keen on establishing The Florida Standard as a go-to place for Florida political news. The day after the site formally launched, DeSantis gave a 20-minute interview to Witt, The Florida Standard editor-in-chief. “Good luck to you,” DeSantis said at the end of the cozy sit-down inside the Governor’s Mansion. “Welcome to Florida.”

In late August of last year, the governor’s press office asked The Florida Standard to interview DeSantis’ “chief resilience officer.” The publication obliged, and produced a story promoting DeSantis administration grants that help harden coastal areas against rising seas.

And last fall, when The Florida Standard published a list of the state’s “most influential lobbyists,” more than half a dozen DeSantis office and campaign staffers promoted it on social media.

Congratulations to all who made the list. Well deserved! This is the definitive ranking of top lobbyists in Florida, because it's not pay-for-play coverage … it's based solely on interviews with state government officials. https://t.co/ZsMPlkjuks

— Christina Pushaw (@ChristinaPushaw) October 14, 2022

“Truth”

DeSantis is not, of course, the first Florida politician to leak materials to favored reporters or give access to supportive publications. But part of what makes DeSantis different is how he has paired his efforts to elevate partisan media with public policies meant to destabilize independent media.

This goes far beyond the “cut them off” strategy that former DeSantis press secretary Christina Pushaw once boasted about.

For instance, for years, Florida had a law on the books that required local governments to buy advertisements in area newspapers to alert the public of impending government actions — if, say, a city commission was going to raise property taxes or rezone farmland for a subdivision. These legal notices became an important source of revenue for newspapers, particularly as other types of advertising, like classifieds, shriveled.

Some Republican lawmakers in Tallahassee tried for years to cut newspapers out of the legal notice process and allow governments to publish them on other websites instead. But the effort always failed, amid intense lobbying by the newspaper industry.

But then DeSantis got involved. Records show the DeSantis administration personally pushed legislation that passed last year allowing local governments to stop publishing legal notices in newspapers. The law is now reverberating across the industry; Sarasota County commissioners announced just last month that they would stop publishing many legal notices in papers like the Sarasota Herald-Tribune.

DeSantis relished signing this bill. Emails show his press staff pitched stories to conservative outlets about how the governor eliminated “a state-mandated subsidy to prop up a dying industry.”

DeSantis is not done. Just this week, the governor hosted a media event where he attacked “legacy media” that engages in “partisan activism” and suggested that he might lobby the Florida Legislature to pass a law this session making it easier for people to sue news organizations on claims of libel or defamation. It’s an idea that DeSantis has been working on since at least late 2021.

The Florida governor and likely presidential candidate made the comments while sitting at a mock TV anchor desk, in front of a backdrop emblazoned with the word “Truth.”

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

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by The Boston Globe (@bostonglobe)

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

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

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by wbur (@wbur)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by GBH (@wgbh)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by The Washington Post (@washingtonpost)

But for decades now, one recipe has loomed large above the paper of record. It is strikingly un-Instagrammable, sublimely banal, and requires four primary ingredients. It is everything the modern New York Times’ cooking section isn’t. It’s Molly O’Neill’s “Old-Fashioned Beef Stew,” originally published in 1994.

There are no curveballs in O’Neill’s method; no demands to gut your pantry; no mentions of julienne vegetables, mandolins, or the Maillard Reaction. You’ll need potatoes, carrots, onions, and — yes — beef, alongside a fistful of North American mainstays (flour, red wine, oil, herbs). “There is no high drama about simmering a stew,” O’Neill wrote in her 1994 column, titled “A Simmer of Hope.” “However fine, stew is a homey, intimate exchange, a paean to the way living things improve when their boundaries relax, when they incorporate some of the character and flavor of others.” It’s true. You likely don’t need a recipe to make beef stew, unless you’re taking your first few nervous steps toward the stovetop.

The New York Times published 700 recipes last year, but hardly any of them match the vise grip Old Fashioned Beef Stew holds on the cooking division’s search metrics. The recipe, with more than 19,000 reviews and an average rating of 5 stars, has been viewed over 24 million times since 2019, with 6.7 million of those visits occurring in 2022 alone. That averages out to around 18,000 hits per day, the sort of SEO ubiquity that S’Mores Crispy Treats could only dream about. Internally, Times food and cooking editor Emily Weinstein says the dominance of O’Neill’s stew serves as something of a benchmark for the other recipes published by their chefs. “If a recipe happens to have more traffic in a particular week, we’re like, ‘Watch out, beef stew!'” she said. “It’s a Goliath. All of your other piddly recipes are just David in the face of beef stew. It keeps trucking.”

I am part of that flock. The recipe entered my life in late 2020. I had barely explored any of the kitchens I inhabited until the Covid lockdown, when the threat of malnourishment encouraged me to expand my horizons. I graduated from collegiate spaghetti boils to tasteful stir-fries as the months passed in that hallucinogenic year, growing in confidence by deducing the hieroglyphics of food preparation. (Ah, so that’s what it means to reduce a sauce.) So the wintry mix outside my window was the exact sort of calendar excuse I needed to take a half-step up in my epicurean journey. A good beef stew remained just outside my nascent culinary instincts, which is why I Googled up a recipe and became one of O’Neill’s innumerable students. If there is one common attribute among the millions and millions of people who’ve landed on Old Fashioned Beef Stew, I imagine it’s a desire to officially call themselves a cook — which, for my money, can only occur after you’ve simmered broth over the course of a languid afternoon.

“It has a touch of occasion to it, because it’s hearty and going to take a bit of time to cook, but it’s not complicated. It will likely taste the same as beef stew you ate as a child,” said Alicia Kennedy, a food writer who authors a smart, wide-ranging newsletter, when I asked her why she believes O’Neill’s recipe technique reigns supreme. “My hypothesis about really successful recipes is that they’re not usually too complicated or too out of the box. People cooking at home crave novelty at times, sure, but the thing that’ll make a recipe a go-to classic is that it will be simple, accessible, and filling for a family. Does it say something about the demographics of the Times cooking section readers that this wins out, an American classic with a European flavor profile? Absolutely.”

Kennedy is spot-on there, though it should be said that nearly every eating tradition on the planet includes some version of a beef stew (beef bourguignon, Taiwanese lanzhou, Moroccan tagine, Dominican carne guisada. O’Neill’s version possesses a chilly Midwestern vibe — everything, from the “old-fashioned” pretext on down, is designed to feel nostalgic, rustic, and wholesomely American — but an unctuous bowl of braised vegetables and murky chunks of protein ought to be a fixture in any cooking section, regardless of its homely pedigree. I wondered if that ever humbles those who make a living in a pop-culinary expanse. Home cooking has gotten more adventurous over the course of the last 20 years. The New York Times is publishing recipes for foods like vegan chorizo, which call for steps like reconstituting dried chiles. (One reader comment on the Times’ recipe for Homemade Hamburger Helper: “After spending a good hour and a half in the kitchen — on a recipe inspired by a convenience product, of all things — my teen son and I decided it would more accurately be titled ‘Hamburger Complicater.'”) Perhaps the pervasiveness of the Old-Fashioned Beef Stew is just more proof that in a media ecosystem that enumerates its market value by pageviews, the people will always tell us what they want — even if it’s something that we, the professionals, are not especially interested in writing about.

“As writers and editors we are drawn to interesting ideas. Or writing about things that our audience might know less about. We’re excited about new things. It’s the newspaper. We want to tell them about a new method, or making a case for a technique that has fallen out of fashion. If you’re a culinary professional, you don’t necessarily want to be making the simplest foods,” said Weinstein. “But at the end of the day, the vast majority of home cooks want to be making food that’s straightforward. Beef stew isn’t hard.”

Weinstein also believes that O’Neill’s recipe is still delicious. It has avoided many of the pitfalls of other culinary relics from the ’80s and ’90s, in the sense that it isn’t studded with sun-dried tomatoes, or choking on cream, or paired with baked brie. “You can buy a leather jacket that will still look good 10 years from now,” adds Weinstein. “There are not a lot of bells and whistles in that recipe. A lot of recipes from that era feel dated. But not beef stew.”

O’Neill died in 2019, after a struggle with cancer, at the age of 66. She enjoyed the enormous life of a New York food writer, soaking up the flavors of the city and spilling those ideas back into an extensive bibliography. Poke around the internet and you’ll find her guides to pork dumplings, empanadas, and Vietnamese sweet and sour soup. Veterans at the Times remember her as a spiritual ancestor to globetrotting bon vivants like Anthony Bourdain and Jonathan Gold, who nurtured the conviction that the best meal of your life will likely be found a long way from the Four Seasons. “She planted such an incredible flag for food writing in the ’90s,” said Weinstein. “It wasn’t just beef stew. She wrote some amazing, very journalistic pieces.”

Food culture moves at hyperspeed in 2023. A zillion recipes clip through my Instagram feed in the blink of an eye. But piercing through the morass of feta pastas and whipped coffees, Molly O’Neill tells the world the order in which they should simmer their vegetables. We have questions, and she’ll always have the answer.

Women and journalists of color are particularly vulnerable to these attacks, notes Jacob Nelson, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Utah, and author of a recent study, “‘Worse than the Harassment Itself’: Journalists’ Reactions to Newsroom Social Media Policies.”

His study, published last month in Digital Journalism, is based on in-depth interviews with 37 reporters, editors, publishers, freelancers, and social media and audience engagement managers in the U.S. and Canada, who were current or former employees of local, national, for-profit, nonprofit, print, digital and broadcast outlets.

It’s worth noting that Nelson’s study may or may not apply to other countries, as newsroom cultures and approaches to social media, free speech and online harassment varies depending on the country. It also focuses on how journalists perceive their newsroom’s social media policies, rather than textual data collected from the policies themselves. In addition, not all the journalists voiced the same criticisms of their newsrooms, he notes.

But his findings echo what previous small studies based on interviews with journalists have found, highlighting the complicated role of social media in journalism today. While many journalists find platforms like Facebook and Twitter invaluable in their reporting, they also see them as dangerous and unsettling places. And while many newsrooms encourage journalists to have a presence on social media, they do little to protect them when they’re trolled or attacked online.

Several studies in recent years have urged news leaders and organizations to find ways to protect their journalists when they’re harassed online.

“The Chilling: A Global Study of Online Violence Against Women Journalists,” published by the International Center for Journalists in November 2022, is a three-year study among 1,100 participants covering 15 countries, including the U.S., which finds 73% of respondents identifying as women said they experiences online violence. Black, Indigenous, Jewish, Arab, Asian and lesbian women journalists participating experienced the highest rates and most severe impacts of online violence. The authors emphasize the role of various entities, including news organizations, in developing “gender-aware protocols to respond to online violence, stop victim-blaming, and avoid disproportionate restraint on the speech of women journalists when they come under attack.”

A 2021 study published in Journalism Practice, based on interviews with 31 U.S. journalists finds “almost no system-level interventions regarding harassment from audiences on social media or journalists’ long-term mental health.”

The authors of that study find journalists face three types of harassment: “acute harassment such as generalized verbal abuse, chronic harassment occurring over time and often from the same social media users and escalatory harassment that is more personalized and directly threatening.” Women were most likely to experience chronic and escalatory harassment, the authors write.

Studies have shown that online harassment of journalists — particularly women journalists and journalists of color — can affect their mental health.

In the commentary “What will it take for newsroom leaders to support and defend journalists?” published in September 2022 in Journalism & Communication Monographs, Tracy Everbach, a journalism professor at the University of North Texas, writes, “It shouldn’t require someone vandalizing a supervisor’s house to get newsroom leaders’ attention. We all bear responsibility for preparing, training, placing, and retaining journalists in safe and inclusive environments.”

Walking a “tightrope”

In many newsrooms, journalists are encouraged or even required to have a presence on social media and build an audience for themselves and the news organization. Many journalists also find social media an integral part of their reporting to find sources, connect with their community, and even galvanize efforts such as union drives.

At the same time, newsroom social media policies can be confusing for journalists who want to be more authentic in their posts and interact with their audience.

Nelson quotes several journalists in his study.

Shree Paradkar, a social and racial justice columnist for the Toronto Star, told Nelson, “On social media, we are told to have your own voice because [the news organization] recognizes that, if you’re on social media, then your authenticity is really important if you want to have more followers….Have your own voice, but don’t use certain language, certain words….There’s a lot of policing of language. How can you have your own voice when you have all these restrictions?”

It’s a tension between mass media’s focus on neutrality and independence, and social media’s rewards for authenticity, popularity, and connectivity, Nelson writes.

And even if a journalist strictly follows a newsroom’s social media guidelines, no amount of policing and policy can predict how the public is going to respond to a post or a tweet.

As a result, many journalists end up having to navigate a “tightrope,” where the social media platforms they depend on are accompanied by the very real risk of professional, physical, and emotional harm, Nelson writes.

His interviewees expressed deep frustration that they couldn’t control when they might face punitive measures from their newsroom managers for something they posted, because they couldn’t predict what might cause the online audience to perceive something undercutting the neutrality of their publication.

They also were frustrated that the enforcement of newsroom social media policies focused on the organization’s credibility tended to skew unequally toward women and journalists of color.

“As the interviewees consistently explained, because social media policies tend to focus on how posts get perceived rather than how they are written in the first place, enforcement most frequently occurred when the online audience was upset about something,” writes Nelson. “And because the online audience tended to get more upset more often at things posted by women journalists and journalists of color, those journalists paid professional penalties for their use of social media more often than their male, white counterparts.”

In their own words

Nelson’s 37 interviewees included 22 women and 18 journalists of color. They were based in print and digital newsrooms in the U.S. and Canada. One was based in the U.K. The interviews were conducted between July and September 2021 via Zoom.

Nelson lists four key findings from his interviews. Considering the risk of professional consequences, the interviewees could choose to be quoted by name, anonymously, or not at all. They also had a chance to review their quotes.

Participants consistently said social media platforms, particularly Facebook and Twitter, played an integral role in their work. Sewell Chan, editor-in-chief of the Texas Tribune, told Nelson the potential for bringing new audiences to journalism was one of the biggest draws of social media platforms.

“When I’ve talked to journalists about reasons to be on social media, I have emphasized that, at the very, very least, you need to recognize at the point your content is published, that’s actually the beginning of a process, not the end of a process,” Chan told Nelson. “We are in the fight for our lives, for the lives of our institutions, and we need to find readers wherever they are.”

Renata Cló, Arizona schools reporter with The Arizona Republic, told Nelson that social media “gives us an opportunity for people to easily reach out to me and say what they think of my story or leave a suggestion or a criticism to my story or something I hadn’t thought about. When people call me or send me an email about any story, they are usually very mad, and they are very disrespectful. [When I respond to them,] it’s just a matter of me trying to tell people, ‘Hey, I’m not a robot.’”

Interviewees said online harassment was their biggest concern when using social media. One journalist told Nelson when she shared the news about her pregnancy on Facebook, she was thrilled by the thousands of positive comments at first. But when some of her followers realized she wasn’t married, people attacked her for being a “bad role model.”

“They wished death upon my child because I wasn’t married…They were so absolutely horrendous and that emotionally took a toll on me,” she said.

Another reporter, Barbara VanDenburgh, the books editor for USA Today, told Nelson, “It is scary…for people to be calling you a bitch or a whore, and to come after you on Twitter in a really personal way.”

When asked what their newsrooms did to help support them in the face of online harassment, many voiced dissatisfaction. One journalist summed it up to Nelson in one word, three times: “Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.”

Some said the social media policies of their news organizations did not include protections or resources for journalists facing either acute or recurring online harassment.

Jessie Shi, the former social media editor for the San Antonio Express-News, told Nelson, “Reporters are usually on their own when it comes to trolls.”

“The response to online harassment can genuinely be worse than the harassment itself,” Jamie Landers, a former health disparity reporter with Arizona PBS, and a former breaking news reporter with the Arizona Republic, told Nelson.

“You’re constantly told to ‘tough it out,’ which is possibly the most immature piece of advice I’ve heard in my life,” Paradkar told him. “Because not only does it mean that you are not allowed to acknowledge the fear and pain, possibly trauma, depending on the level of abuse, but it also puts in place the ability for someone to do it again to somebody else.”

“This lack of interest in addressing the threats, harassment, and abuse journalists face — particularly women journalists and journalists of color — left some of the journalists I spoke with feeling as though their editors were implicitly suggesting that online abuse was just an inevitable part of working in journalism in an era of social media,” Nelson writes.

Interviewees told Nelson their newsroom policies focused on advising journalists how they should or should not use social media instead of telling them what they should do when they’re harassed online. “It’s pretty wild that there’s this double-edged sword where you’re not sure if you’re going to be punished for using social media, and yet you need to use social media in order to represent the outlet and the brand,” said Gabe Schneider, the editor of The Objective, told Nelson.

Carla Murphy, a former editor for The View from Somewhere podcast and board member of the Journalism & Women Symposium, said, “I think a lot of journalists feel like they’re out there on their own, and they are. They get hung out to dry. But then which journalists get hung out to dry? Some get hung out to dry more than others. Women, right? Black women. Black men. Some people get second and third chances. The penalties aren’t applied equally.”

Advice for news managers

“If I were to take this study to a newsroom, I would say, ‘Look, you’re not just looking at a crisis when it comes to your relationship with your audiences, but you’re looking at a labor crisis, because your journalists feel like they are being really left out in the cold by the policies,” Nelson told me.

“It’s very clear from these interviews that [the lack of policies] is creating ill will between journalists and managers, because they feel like they’re being pushed to do something that carries a risk, but then they’re not given any protection from the organization when it comes to combating those.”

The Media Manipulation Casebook, a research platform on misinformation and disinformation at Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, which is also home to The Journalist’s Resource, offers several tips for newsrooms to support journalists targeted by online harassment:

• Provide every journalist with an annual check-up of their digital security, and prioritize those whose coverage puts them more at risk.
• Provide every journalist with a subscription to a password manager.
• Have at least one person in the newsroom or on call who is a digital security specialist.
• Regularly communicate to staff that your newsroom cares about their well-being and demonstrate it by offering reporters an intake mechanism for sharing when they’re undergoing harassment.
• Have a chain of support ready to help.
• Validate reporters’ experiences and provide places to communicate about their well-being safely.
• Build email filters that scan for racist, sexist, and bigoted language.
• Monitor and report the journalists’ social media threats for them.

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.

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

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

@nytimes

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

♬ original sound – The New York Times

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

— Scott Dodd (@scottdodd) January 24, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

— Francesco Zaffarano (@FraZaffarano) January 25, 2023

The conversation was spurred by questions Sahan Journal’s innovation editor Aala Abdullahi got in response to a new weekly newsletter, called Tani waa su’aashayda, which means “This is my question” in Somali.

Minnesota is home to the largest Somali population in the United States. Sahan Journal was founded in 2019 founded by CEO and publisher Mukhtar Ibrahim to serves the news needs of immigrant communities and communities of color in Minneapolis and throughout the state.

Sahan Journal developed Tani waa su’aashayda after a year of listening sessions with immigrant, refugee, and non-English-speaking communities across Minnesota. (The listening sessions were funded via a grant from the Google News Initiative and conducted in partnership with the media outlets that serve Minneapolis’s large Spanish, Hmong, and Somali-speaking communities: La Raza 95.7 FM, 3HmongTV, and Somali TV Minnesota.) They chose the title “Tani waa su’aashayda” because “we wanted the questions and feedback and the insights of Somalis to be at the center,” Abdullahi said.

Tani waa su’aashayda challenges the traditional newsletter format. Co-produced by Abdullahi and Somali TV’s Diis, it is audio-only. Abdullahi and Diis use the platform GroundSource to send audio files to subscribers via SMS.

Sending the voice notes in this way helps Sahan Journal and Somali TV reach its audience directly instead of relying on social media, and gives them a head start on reporting future stories that affect the community.

When subscribers first sign up, they get a welcoming voice note from Diis explaining what the newsletter is, what users can expect to hear, and how Sahan Journal and Somali TV will incorporate their feedback to grow the newsletter. Every week, Diis records an audio summary of three or four local news stories. When relevant, he also sometimes includes news from Somalia. He then tells subscribers about upcoming local events that Somalis can attend or get involved in.

In the last section, Diis asks subscribers what they did and didn’t enjoy about the week’s newsletter and why. He also asks them to share their questions for journalists. Those question serve as tips and ideas for future Sahan Journal stories, newsletter call-outs, and community discussion. Abdullahi hopes that an increasingly large percentage of Tani waa su’aashayda content’s will come from user feedback and questions.

The sections of the newsletter are recorded in separate voice notes and sent out throughout the week. Abdullahi says she sends out a maximum of six voice notes per week. Then, she compiles all of the audio files and layers on photos and graphics to produce a video to upload to YouTube. That way, people can listen to all of the voice notes in one place with a visual component instead to subscribing to the text message service. Abdullahi also uploads the voice notes to Sahan Journal’s website.

Other than some necessary text to help people navigate the newsletter’s archive page, the newsletter contains no written portions or stories. “The Somali language itself is not one where everyone agrees on the grammar,” Abdullahi, who is Somali herself, said. “There are a lot of dialect differences. We didn’t want to get bogged down by that. It’s a lot more seamless to just make it an audio.”

Sahan Journal had heard in its listening sessions, too, that Somalis living in Minnesota said they preferred to consume news via video or audio rather than reading it. (Sahan Journal has another newsletter called New Home that serves Afghan refugees, but is written and published in Pashto and Dari in a pamphlet format and distributed through PDFs via SMS.)

Breaking away from a traditional newsletter format also means defining new metrics for success. GroundSource doesn’t provide subscriber data or open rates, so Abdullahi instead looks at week-to-week subscriber growth. Today, the newsletter has 211 subscribers, and Abudallahi has received more than 400 texts from 151 users.

By March, Sahan Journal will take its learnings from Tani waa su’aashayda to decide how to best launch similar newsletters for Hmong and Spanish-speaking communities in Minnesota.

“We want to keep it bare bones,” Abdullahi said. “A lot of newsrooms that are similar in size to Sahan Journal are actively thinking about how to incorporate community engagement and feedback into their journalism, and are thinking about distribution models. We want to focus on a model that people could replicate.”