When The Washington Post broke the story this week that President Trump shared highly classified intelligence from a U.S. ally with Russia, not everything the reporters knew made it into print.

Halfway through the story, this paragraph referring to the ISIS plot revealed by Trump appeared: “The Post is withholding most plot details, including the name of the city, at the urging of officials who warned that revealing them would jeopardize important intelligence capabilities.”

CNN’s Jake Tapper told viewers Tuesday that his network knew details of the ISIS plot to blow up airliners using laptops since March, but deferred to the administration’s appeals not to name the city that Trump had now revealed to the Russians.

“By reporting the city’s name, Trump administration officials insisted, that would tip off American adversaries about sources and methods used to gather the intelligence,” Tapper said. “It would get people killed.” Yet the president, he added, had now revealed to Russian adversaries “the same city that CNN was cautioned not to report.”

From the White House to city councils to foreign capitals, government officials routinely pressure journalists not to reveal reporting that may be sensitive, embarrassing or disruptive to military or law enforcement operations, negotiations or diplomacy. “You’ll have blood on your hands,” is the common refrain.

So what’s a newsroom to do under pressure from an official — whether it’s a small-town police chief or the director of the CIA? The advice from top journalists who’ve frequently come under such pressure is to nail down facts and share information that’s in the public interest, but give officials a fair hearing on the consequences of publishing secrets.

Demand evidence that lives would be at risk if the information is made public — whether officials are embarrassed by revelations isn’t your problem — and don’t undermine your credibility and that of the industry by publishing things that aren’t corroborated.

National security and law enforcement reporting are difficult under any circumstances because of the secrecy involved in operations and sources’ insistence on anonymity. And the consequences of acting irresponsibility are enormous.

By the same token, handling sensitive reporting properly is more important than ever now that President Trump has deemed the press “the enemy,” sought to undermine major media outlets as “fake news,” railed against leaks, threatened to end press briefings and urged then-FBI Director James Comey to jail journalists who publish classified information, according to a New York Times story on a memo Comey wrote after the meeting.

Newsrooms across the country are grappling with new concerns about restrictions to press access, especially those with active Washington bureaus.

At The Washington Post, it was National Editor Scott Wilson who decided — in consultation with his national security editor, deputy national editor and Executive Editor Marty Baron — what to include and exclude from The Post’s scoop on Trump’s Oval Office revelations of sensitive intelligence to the Russian foreign minister.

“Your job is to inform your readers,” Wilson said. “At same time, you don’t want to put people in danger or jeopardize legal operations that are ostensibly protecting the security of the country.”

Wilson and his colleagues determined they could give readers enough context to know why the story mattered without revealing precise details the president had shared — which senior officials warned could expose “sources and methods” of intelligence collection.

The Post reported the intelligence Trump shared was so sensitive that it was restricted to a small number of U.S. officials and wasn’t shared with close allies; that it came from a country that didn’t give permission to share it, and that Trump’s revelation of where it was collected could jeopardize sources within ISIS. Like CNN back in March, The Post didn’t name the city.

After The Post’s story ran, National Security Advisor H.M. McMaster downplayed it, insisting “the president did not disclose any military operations that were not already publicly known” and the city “was nothing that you would not know from open source reporting.”

McMaster’s defense of Trump eroded arguments for why The Post shouldn’t publish everything it knows. If what Trump shared with Russia was already “publicly known,” why shouldn’t The Post publish the details? I asked Wilson.

Wilson, a former White House reporter, acknowledged McMaster’s statement “opens the door to us rethinking and discussing what we did withhold and whether or not it conflicts with [Lt.] Gen. McMaster’s statement. I think there’ll be a discussion in the newsroom of whether that’s something we’d reexamine.”

It’s a case-by-case decision, and Wilson said The Post won’t accede to a request to withhold information that could jeopardize operations if there are other overriding considerations, including: “Is something that’s taking place illegal under U.S. or international law? Does it conflict directly with public statements that the government says it is doing?”

One example was The Post’s and The Guardian’s 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winning stories on the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance activities revealed in files obtained by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, stories that ignited a national debate and changes to policy. Another was The Post’s revelation in 2005 — despite pressure from the Bush administration that it would imperil the “war on terror” — that the CIA was secretly shipping terror suspects to overseas prisons known as “black sites.”

That reporting led to the end of the practice and earned a Pulitzer Prize for reporter Dana Priest.

Priest told me journalists at every level — from local to national to international — should realize the power and the responsibility of what to publish lies with their newsroom, not with the government, no matter how much the officials may intimidate them.

“It’s not a negotiation,” said Priest, a two-time Pulitzer winner who’s also the Knight Chair in Public Affairs Journalism at the University of Maryland. Ever since the Supreme Court’s 1971 ruling that the government could not restrain The New York Times from publishing the classified Pentagon Papers, “the media has held all the cards. But we also hold much of the responsibility for not damaging national security.”

In her reporting on special operations, black sites, the post-9/11 national security state and other stories, Priest said she and her editors sought to “disclose enough details so a story based largely or exclusively on anonymous sources would seem credible to the readers we were asking to trust us. But we didn’t want to disclose so many details that it actually damaged national security” by “putting lives in jeopardy and ruining an important source or a method of collecting critical information.”

The government always claims that revealing classified information impedes intelligence sharing, but Priest said in her experience, that’s “simply not true.”

Pressure on journalists to withhold sensitive information long predates the Trump administration, of course, and it comes from both parties.

As a national security and State Department correspondent in Washington for eight years during the Obama administration, I experienced and observed pressure including government denials that turned out to be false, threats to cut off a reporter’s or news organization’s future access and guilt-trips about dire consequences to lives, privacy or ongoing diplomatic negotiations.

After WikiLeaks’ released hundreds of thousands of State Department cables and Pentagon logs, Obama administration officials tried to persuade journalists that reporting on them would damage national security. Many of the cables were embarrassing to U.S. diplomats — some had to be transferred from their posts — because of their unflattering assessments of foreign leaders.

squelch stories by me and my Bloomberg colleagues and by reporters at The AP, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and other organizations, contradicting our reporting or denying stories after they ran, even though they were correct.

Much of the information we got from other countries involved in the talks or from Americans concerned about elements of the deal or who were floating trial balloons to test Congressional and interest groups’ reactions.

Publicizing the information may have been inconvenient for negotiators while bargaining with Iran was ongoing. But Bloomberg editors — like those at every newsroom I know of — determined the information was in the public interest and not a threat to national security.

Naturally there are cases when news organizations decide the public doesn’t need to know specific information at a certain time. When embedded with U.S. forces in Afghanistan, for example, journalists including myself agreed not to report on planned operations before they occurred.

Marcus Brauchli, a former top editor of The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, recalled a 2009 Afghanistan policy review by Gen. Stanley McChrystal that reporter Bob Woodward obtained before President Obama had read it. Brauchli proposed publishing the full report online. Woodward went back to his sources, and a Sunday morning meeting at the Pentagon was hastily arranged between senior officials and Brauchli, Woodward and Rajiv Chandrasekaran, who at the time covered Afghan policy for The Post.

“In other countries where governments can block you or preemptively prevent you from publishing, journalists are more leery” of telling officials when they have explosive or classified information, Brauchli said. But since the Pentagon Papers ruling established that news organizations can’t be restrained from publishing in the U.S., “it always makes sense to go back to the government and to hear from them what their take is.”

It “improves the quality of your reporting” by providing additional context, he said, and at least some of the time, officials may make a compelling case that lives are at risk.

“Endangering national security” is vague concept and not very persuasive, Brauchli said. Journalists should insist that officials offer compelling evidence “that specific information would endanger lives or specific operations.”

With the McChrystal story, Brauchli said The Post held off publishing for a day because of an ongoing operation, and posted the document with a few redactions that the Pentagon persuaded them were necessary to protect lives.

The decision to post the bulk of the Afghan report was an easy one once they’d verified it was authentic and in the public interest to know the Pentagon’s internal assessment of what was then an eight-year war. It’s harder for newsrooms to make that decision when sourcing is shaky or a document is unverified.

Susan Glasser, the former editor of Politico and Foreign Policy, cautioned that now more than ever, reporters must be sure their reporting is solid to avoid being discredited by an administration that is openly antagonistic to the media.

Trump’s White House has “gone to war against the veracity and credibility of the press,” said Glasser, now chief international columnist for Politico Magazine. “From day one, you had [senior Trump advisor Stephen] Bannon and the president himself deeming the press the ‘opposition party.’ I reject that. I think journalists are doing their job without partisanship. But that means you have to be iron-tight in your reporting.”

Legacy news organizations with a tradition of national security reporting have figured out how to engage on this, she said, but there are “a thousand other news organizations who don’t have same editing culture and set of experiences and they publish things because, ‘Why not, it’s out there?’” — an attitude she described as dangerous to the entire industry.

Glasser criticized Buzzfeed’s decision in January to post a widely circulated but unverified dossier by a former British spy containing incendiary allegations against Trump. The man who compiled the dossier later said in a court filing it was “raw intelligence” that “needed to be analyzed and further investigated/verified,” and the patchy nature of the information made it easy to discredit.

Further complicating newsroom decisions on whether to withhold certain information, the president himself is “blowing up these traditions” of closely holding classified information and National Security Advisor McMaster “made a mockery” of The Post’s and CNN’s careful decisions not to name of the city where ISIS intelligence was gathered by effectively saying, “You can guess the city, what’s the big deal, they already knew,” Glasser said.

The consequences of publishing or airing information that truly imperils national security are enormous, however, not only to individual lives, but to the credibility of the press and journalists’ ability to do their jobs under difficult circumstances. While that shouldn’t intimidate editors, it should make us pause to ensure every story is solid.

“The presumption if you’ve nailed your reporting is to publish. We look for ways to put information in the public purview, not take it away, especially at a time of political antagonism,” Glasser said.

When the White House has declared “war on the press, it makes it more important to do what you do responsibly and get facts straight,” she added. “Our mission hasn’t changed. It has become more important.”

Journalism is still overwhelmingly White. But that won’t change if news organizations don’t talk about it.

It was in that spirit that Gizmodo Media Group on Wednesday sent a report to employees that included a detailed breakdown of racial and gender diversity across the company. Gizmodo Media Group, a subsidiary of Univision that owns all of the former Gawker Media brands plus Fusion and The Root, broke down diversity at various segments within the company.

The analysis is “a good way for us to all to feel accountable” about building “a staff that reflects the diversity of the audiences we want to continue to serve,” Gizmodo Media Group CEO Raju Narisetti wrote in a note to staff accompanying the report.

“There is a lot to be very proud of here, especially in comparison to many of our digital journalism peers, thanks largely to all the amazing talent all of you recommend and attract to GMG,” he wrote.

“And, as it always should be, workplace diversity will remain a work-in-progress and a key priority — from our paid interns to our staff hires — and one where we can strive to do even better than how we are collectively doing now,” he said.

The report shows:

• Fifty percent of the employees identified themselves as White. By comparison, 83 percent of employees at daily newspapers and digital sites identified themselves as non-minorities in the 2016 American Society of News Editors Survey. Seventy-two percent of Vox Media employees identify as White, and 64 percent of BuzzFeed’s U.S. staff is White. (Although Poynter does not release a regular diversity report, our staff is overwhelmingly White.)
• Gizmodo Media Group’s editorial employees are slightly more diverse than the company as a whole. Forty-eight percent (85 employees) of the editorial staff is White; 11 percent (20 employees) identified as Black; 10 percent (17 employees) identified as Asian; 9 percent (15 employees) identified as Hispanic; 16 percent (29 employees) were “not specified.”
• There are slightly more women than men at Gizmodo Media Group. The company is 51 percent (125 employees) female and 49 percent (120 employees) male. That gap widens slightly among editorial employees (52 percent female) and decreases somewhat among non-editorial staff (49 percent). By comparison, Vox is 52 percent male; BuzzFeed is 45 percent male.
• Non-editorial employees are 53 percent (23 employees) White. Fifteen percent (7 employees) are “not specified,” 13 percent (six employees) are Hispanic, 9 percent (four employees) are Asian and 4 percent (two employees) are Black.
• New hires are 62 percent White. Among new hires, 13 percent are “not specified,” 7 percent are Hispanic, 7 percent are Asian, 7 percent are Black and four percent are two or more races. Fifty-three percent of new hires are female.

Here’s the full report:

Diversity at Gizmodo Media Group (May 2017) (Text)

Benjamin Mullin is the managing editor of Poynter.org. He previously reported for Poynter as a staff writer, Google Journalism Fellow and Naughton Fellow, covering journalism innovation, business practices and ethics. He’s also reported for USA TODAY College and The Sacramento Bee, and he was editor in chief of The Orion, Chico State’s student-run newspaper. An Air Force brat who grew up around Northern California, he’s still adjusting to the Florida sunshine.

Yet another nail was hammered into the coffin of clickbait on Wednesday when Facebook announced it was tweaking its News Feed (again) to reduce the reach of made-you-look stories.

The change, which comes on the heels of a similar tweak made by Facebook last year, is aimed at penalizing inauthentic stories that deliberately omit important information.

The latest change penalizes two signals — exaggeration and omission — to serve up stories that users find more satisfying, Facebook engineers Arun Babu, Annie Liu and Jordan Zhang explained in a blog post:

Headlines that withhold information intentionally leave out crucial details or mislead people, forcing them to click to find out the answer. For example, “When She Looked Under Her Couch Cushions And Saw THIS…” Headlines that exaggerate the details of a story with sensational language tend to make the story seem like a bigger deal than it really is. For example, “WOW! Ginger tea is the secret to everlasting youth. You’ve GOT to see this!”

Most pages (read: Most publishers) won’t see their reach penalized as a result of the change, but those who frequently publish clickbait-y stories will, according to the post. The clickbait-smothering tweak is being expanded to other languages, but publishers who cease posting clickbait can expect their post distribution to return to normal.

Benjamin Mullin is the managing editor of Poynter.org. He previously reported for Poynter as a staff writer, Google Journalism Fellow and Naughton Fellow, covering journalism innovation, business practices and ethics. He’s also reported for USA TODAY College and The Sacramento Bee, and he was editor in chief of The Orion, Chico State’s student-run newspaper. An Air Force brat who grew up around Northern California, he’s still adjusting to the Florida sunshine.

Good morning. Here’s our morning roundup of all the media news you need to know. Want to get this briefing in your inbox every morning? Subscribe here.

A few more Americans now know H.R. McMaster, who resembles an aging Mr. Clean with horn-rimmed glasses. But they don’t know him nearly as well as Tom Ricks.

His journalism experience reveals a distinct reason to doubt McMaster’s defense of President Trump amid reports of the president’s disclosure of classified information to top Russians.

You remember the Russian stuff, right? That was…a day or two ago? Yes, so very long ago and already drowned out by reports of a damning memo from former FBI Director Jim Comey. But it’s important, if now sidelined by the latest news cycle.

Ricks was watching television as McMaster made the first of two major appearances in 24 hours to defend Trump. It included the classic parsing of this line in responding to the initial Washington Post disclosure: “The story that came out tonight as reported is false.”

“As reported” was a tipoff. But so were the manner and tone of an initial appearance. Those might have been lost on most reporters, but not Ricks. It’s a reminder of the utility of experience mixed with emotional insight, as was the case for the Pulitzer Prize-winning national security reporter.

As he noted in a blog post in Foreign Policy and later elaborated on during an email chat, Ricks instantly recalled traveling with McMaster in Iraq in 2006 when Ricks worked for The Post and McMaster ran the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment.

He wrote a generally very upbeat story but then heard from an angry McMaster. It wasn’t the large majority of the tale that described his thoughtful approach but a small part that compared his regiment’s success with its “ham-fisted, abusive” actions and “mediocre” performance before he commanded it.

When he saw him on TV about the Trump story, “I heard exactly the same low-key, aggrieved tone. As McMaster spoke, I recognized that weary, dutiful voice. He was being a good soldier.”

That wasn’t a good sign, Ricks believes. It was “one thing for him to defend the honor of his regiment,” another to be the good soldier as national security adviser.

It’s all a reminder that there are limits to journalism skill and even strong intellect if you don’t get out of the office and on the ground, mixing that with emotional and psychological insight, or a well-honed B.S. detector.

You can sit in your office, or in a cable news studio, and crank out as much quick, even cogent analysis as you like. But you can’t replace having reported in Iraq and hearing from a pissed-off story subject with whom you’ve just spent quality time in dangerous locations.

Ricks modestly noted that there are others who’ve been on the defense beat a long time, including a co-author of the Post piece, Greg Jaffe, who’s posted at the White House now but was a veteran Pentagon reporter.

And, amid our back-and-forth, Ricks posted a rather damning note he’d just received from retired Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, who was McMaster’s deputy commander in Iraq. He contacted Ricks because he knows and respects the reporter.

“An officer may not tolerate a lie. This standard requires not only that everything an officer says is true and complete, but also that an officer must correct anyone who lies in his or her presence. An officer can never be content with a half-truth when the whole can be won.”

The evening babble

The sameness of broadcast news was vivid last night — not to mention its virtual daily reliance on elite newspapers, in this case The New York Times (as it had been in recent days on The Washington Post).

ABC News with David Muir: “Tonight, breaking news as we come on. What could be a new bombshell. Did President Trump ask former FBI Director James Comey to shut down the federal investigation into retired Gen. Michael Flynn?”

NBC News with Lester Holt: “Breaking news tonight: President Trump asked FBI Director Comey to drop the investigation into Michael Flynn, according to a memo written by the FBI director himself…A stunning development, as we come on the air.”

CBS News with Scott Pelley: “Breaking News: A source tells CBS News that President Trump asked the FBI director to end his investigation of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.”

ABC had all the proper qualifiers, cited The Times and mentioned how the acting FBI boss has denied White House interference.

Holt one-upped everybody by calling it a “new bombshell” but did have the leavening impact of an able Pete Williams. “Nightly News” mentioned the acting FBI chief’s denial of interference during his Senate testimony last week.

CBS had the coverage’s most dubious line, with a reporter citing a totally unidentified source who claimed, “There’s a whole lot of interfering happening.” What’s the evidence for that? Maybe that will be left for “60 Minutes.”

The more things change…

“Alone in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump began the discussion by condemning leaks to the news media, saying that Mr. Comey should consider putting reporters in prison for publishing classified information, according to one of Mr. Comey’s associates.” (The New York Times)

Shock, outrage, horror! How despicable is Trump, trying to throw the press in jail. It sounds almost like the Obama administration, as James Risen noted in The Times last December:

“If Donald J. Trump decides as president to throw a whistle-blower in jail for trying to talk to a reporter, or gets the F.B.I. to spy on a journalist, he will have one man to thank for bequeathing him such expansive power: Barack Obama.”

Bloom off a Medium rose?

“Last May, Medium made publishers an offer they couldn’t resist: Free hosting. Advertising dollars. More eyeballs. The opportunity to sell sponsorships and recruit members.” (Poynter)

“Facing stagnating readership and a tough market for digital ads, many publishers dropped their old sites and joined Medium’s growing network. Now, after a company-wide shift away from digital advertising, some of them are heading for the exits.”

Tucker Carlson, toilet inspector

The Fox News host spent part of his birthday telling a national audience about the dismal state of Penn Station bathrooms in an exchange with a member of the New York City Council member Corey Johnson about Trump’s tax returns.

“It’s like a homeless shelter, it’s disgusting,” he said about the train station. “And you’re worried about Trump’s tax returns?” (@gaywonk)

Advice to Tucker’s agent: He’ll probably have a lot of leverage, given his ratings, when you negotiate an early renewal of his contract. Hit Fox up for a lifetime supply of Liquid Pine Sol Original bathroom cleanser to ease the pain of his commute from Washington. (Consumer Reports)

Another birthday

As Carlson was turning 48 yesterday, The Undefeated, an entertaining and often nervy exploration of sports, race, culture and politics, turned one-year-old. (The Undefeated) However, they’ve not yet explored the indignities of public restrooms.

Drum roll, please

Hey, it might be as dramatic as the finals of the Chef Junior competition on Fox. There are five finalists for Wednesday’s finale at TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield. They are:

Collider’s flagship printer Orchid, which “makes metal objects that are on par with those that are injection-molded”; Domuso, which “provides more flexible rental terms for tenants”; and NuCypher, which sells companies “a specialized encryption layer that enhances their ability to perform big data analytics while tapping into the cloud.”

Then there’s RecordGram, which “aims to be a mobile recording studio where aspiring artists can find beats, create songs and get signed”; and Sunrise Health, a startup “aiming to improve mental healthcare” via group chat, anonymity, professional therapists and artificial intelligence. (TechCrunch)

Headline of the day

“Slop Machines: How a family of hog farmers manage the excess of the world’s most indulgent city” (Eater)

Say what? It’s about Las Vegas buffets and what we don’t know, namely “Squirming in the sticky spasms of rhapsodic pleasure, we’re not meant to think about what comes after. In the case of your leftovers, the after,’ it turns out, is inside the belly of a hog.”

Medical sleuthing

Remember that great Fox show, “House,” about the weirdo, brilliant doctor?

Well, read this STAT News tale of how a geneticist quickly figured out what doctors couldn’t in four years of treating a confounding little Texas boy born with a floppy windpipe, his head held at an unusual angle, walking and talking abnormally late and needing leg braces.

Sanders v. Kasich

Despite the ginormous “Breaking News: White House in crisis” chyron across the bottom of the screen, CNN offered a measured “debate” (more a discussion) last night between Bernie Sanders and Ohio Gov. John Kasich co-hosted by Dana Bash and Jake Tapper.

And one of the best questions was asked by Sanders of Kasich: “Is Trump a liar?” Kasich danced around it.

News from the art world

Big auctions are underway in New York and at Christie’s “one lot did provide some much-needed fireworks: Constantin Brancusi’s La muse endormie (1909–10), which sold for $57.4 million to a buyer on the other end of a cellphone clutched in the center of the room by former Sotheby’s rainmaker Tobias Meyer.” (ARTnews)

“That price absolutely demolished the artist’s auction record, which was achieved when Bird in Space (1923) sold at Christie’s in 2005 for $27.5 million.”

The morning babble

It was Comey, Comey, Comey as MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough this morning simply read from a Wall Street Journal editorial that opens, “The state of the Trump presidency has been perpetual turbulence, which seems to be how the principal likes it. The latest vortex is over Mr. Trump’s disclosure of sensitive intel to the Russians — and whatever the particulars of the incident, the danger is that presidencies can withstand only so much turbulence before they come apart.” (The Wall Street Journal)

On CNN’s “New Day,” Jeffrey Toobin said “it is striking that the White House has said nothing” about the Comey memo…”Nobody’s come out to defend him.” David Gregory discussed “the outrage of the silliness from Republicans…C’mon, guys, get in the game, do your job, at least to get to the bottom of it.”

“Fox & Friends” was curiously defensive even as it stacked the deck with conservative reporters and pundits. Co-host Brian Kilmeade conceded that the White House is slow to react and Steve Doocy, self-proclaimed chief derider of the meanie mainstream media, said it “was probably a dumb thing” to bring up the Flynn investigation with Comey.

Co-host Ainsley Earhardt then fronted a quickie piece with this: “The mainstream media is turning anti-Trump bias into a business.” Huh?

She showed a few clips of people broaching impeachment and extrapolated, “Is resisting the president the newest form of journalism?”

No, it’s called “democracy” and being a countervailing force to power sometimes. But a free press can be a pretty good business. Ask Rupert Murdoch.

Corrections? Tips? Please email me: jwarren@poynter.org. Would you like to get this roundup emailed to you every morning? Sign up here.

President Trump asked former FBI Director Jim Comey to lock up journalists for publishing classified information during a February Oval Office meeting, according to a memo written by Comey shortly after the meeting summarized Tuesday by The New York Times.

Trump urged Comey to imprison journalists at the beginning of an exchange during which he also asked the former FBI chief to back off an investigation into then-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, according to the story:

Mr. Comey had been in the Oval Office that day with other senior national security officials for a terrorism threat briefing. When the meeting ended, Mr. Trump told those present — including Mr. Pence and Attorney General Jeff Sessions — to leave the room except for Mr. Comey.

Alone in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump began the discussion by condemning leaks to the news media, saying that Mr. Comey should consider putting reporters in prison for publishing classified information, according to one of Mr. Comey’s associates.

This isn’t the first time President Trump has threatened to curtail press access or punish leakers. On March 20, he tweeted, “must find leaker now!” in response to successive stories about the ongoing FBI investigation into possible collusion between Trump’s associates and Russian officials.

This latest revelation is “a disturbing yet unsurprising culmination of Trump’s war on the press,” Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said in an email.

“Reporting on classified information is a bedrock right of journalists, and so I guess it’s only natural, given his past statements, that Trump wants to take that away,” he said. “Any prosecution of reporters for publishing true information about our government would strike at the very heart of press freedom.”

The comments by President Trump “cross a dangerous line,” Bruce Brown, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, said in a statement.

“But no president gets to jail journalists,” he continued. “Reporters are protected by judges and juries, by a congress that relies on them to stay informed, and by a Justice Department that for decades has honored the role of a free press by spurning prosecutions of journalists for publishing leaks of classified information.”

“Comments such as these, emerging in the way they did, only remind us that every day public servants are reaching out to reporters to ensure the public is aware of the risks today to rule of law in this country,” he said. “The president’s remarks should not intimidate the press but inspire it.”

Perhaps the most troubling thing about the exchange is that it represents an “unprecedented” departure from the practices of previous presidential administrations with regard to leak investigations, said Joel Simon, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists. In the Obama administration, reporters were ensnared and subpoenaed in investigations that targeted leakers, not journalists. This is more direct, Simon said.

And it’s in line with an analysis conducted by CPJ that found prosecution of journalists in leak investigations is the No. 1 threat to press freedom posed by the Trump administration, Simon said.

“We did our own internal analysis of what we perceived as the greatest potential threats of the Trump administration,” he said. “This was at the top.”

President Trump asked former FBI Director Jim Comey to lock up journalists for publishing classified information during a February Oval Office meeting, according to a memo written by Comey shortly after the meeting summarized Tuesday by The New York Times.

Trump urged Comey to imprison journalists at the beginning of an exchange during which he also asked the former FBI chief to back off an investigation into then-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, according to the story:

Mr. Comey had been in the Oval Office that day with other senior national security officials for a terrorism threat briefing. When the meeting ended, Mr. Trump told those present — including Mr. Pence and Attorney General Jeff Sessions — to leave the room except for Mr. Comey.

Alone in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump began the discussion by condemning leaks to the news media, saying that Mr. Comey should consider putting reporters in prison for publishing classified information, according to one of Mr. Comey’s associates.

This isn’t the first time President Trump has threatened to curtail press access or punish leakers. On March 20, he tweeted, “must find leaker now!” in response to successive stories about the ongoing FBI investigation into possible collusion between Trump’s associates and Russian officials.

This latest revelation is “a disturbing yet unsurprising culmination of Trump’s war on the press,” Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said in an email.

“Reporting on classified information is a bedrock right of journalists, and so I guess it’s only natural, given his past statements, that Trump wants to take that away,” he said. “Any prosecution of reporters for publishing true information about our government would strike at the very heart of press freedom.”

Benjamin Mullin is the managing editor of Poynter.org. He previously reported for Poynter as a staff writer, Google Journalism Fellow and Naughton Fellow, covering journalism innovation, business practices and ethics. He’s also reported for USA TODAY College and The Sacramento Bee, and he was editor in chief of The Orion, Chico State’s student-run newspaper. An Air Force brat who grew up around Northern California, he’s still adjusting to the Florida sunshine.

Fake news stories are often extremely easy to debunk. Fact-checking “Pope Francis endorses Donald Trump” required little more than an analysis of papal interviews and an email to the Vatican press office. Some fakers don’t even bother writing up an article to back up their hoax headlines.

Yet by the time fact-checkers arrive on the scene of a fake, it may be too late to correct the perceptions of thousands who saw the headline bouncing around their News Feeds.

Maarten Schenk, a Flemish developer, thinks he has built a tool that can reduce the head start that fakers enjoy over debunkers. Much like Tweetdeck, Trendolizer lets users populate columns that update automatically from selected sources. Unlike Tweetdeck, these sources are not tweets but links with many Facebook likes.

Each column on Trendolizer is populated by a source set. These can include websites, Twitter searches and Facebook pages. On a Poynter demo, we included the Twitter search for the word “Trump,” the conspiracy website InfoWars and Facebook pages that had shared hoaxes about Megyn Kelly in 2016. Trendolizer also has pre-populated source sets that Schenk has put together like “fake news sources” or “left-wing clickbait.”

Each link can be analyzed for its total number of likes and the rate by which it is adding them. This makes it more akin to a real-time Buzzsumo than to Tweetdeck.

Trendolizer has other potentially useful features, including a Slack integration that sends alerts when a story starts gathering steam. The web app also allows users to track all websites with the same AdSense or Google Analytics account codes.

The latter is a technique often used by BuzzFeed Media Editor Craig Silverman, who recognized that profit-driven actors make up or hide their contact details — but likely not the information that helps them cash in ad money or track traffic.

Schenk says he has been told Trendolizer is essentially an attempt to create an automated Silverman.

“I don’t know that that is their best sales pitch,” Silverman told me, laughing. “But I welcome any and all automation.”

Silverman has tried out Trendolizer and expects to subscribe to the service soon. He thinks Trendolizer is “not just a fact-checkers’ tool” and is mostly interested in the fingerprinting features that will help his team maintain a database of suspect sites.

For users to get the most out of the tool, however, he thinks users will have to take the time to build source sets that are relevant to the areas they want to monitor. “People need to know what they are looking for,” he said.

This is a key challenge of debunking fake news: You never really know where the next big viral story will come from next. Inaccurate claims by public figures come from more predictable places like speeches, TV interviews, press briefings, Twitter. Viral hoaxes, on the other hand, can come seemingly from nowhere.

The debunking site Snopes has also tested Trendolizer. Founder David Mikkelson said that “in general, fact-checkers do need tools that will help them spot misinformation faster.”

Unless working fact-checkers actually deploy the tool as part of their workflow it will be hard to evaluate to what extent Trendolizer can actually deliver faster spotting of fakes and faster debunking. At $350 per month, it may also be too expensive for some smaller fact-checking organizations. Regardless, Trendolizer points to a future where fact-checkers track misinformation in a more systematic manner.

Seeking to make virtue out of totally predictable and painful necessity, the parent of The Chicago Tribune is seeking to buy its longtime tabloid rival, The Chicago Sun-Times.

The two papers already have a joint printing and distribution agreement and will now enter into a merger discussion that would theoretically maintain them as separate entities.

Any such deal would need Justice Department approval. But the weakened state of the industry, and the coming of the more free market Trump administration, would likely make likely approval of a merger of two business whose revenues and paid circulation are declining.

The Department of Justice announced on Monday that it’s launching an investigation into the possible acquisition of the Chicago Sun-Times by Tronc, a move that may raise antitrust concerns among the paper’s newfound suitor.

In the middle of the deal is Michael Ferro, who was previously the primary owner of the Sun-Times via his Wrapports Holdings Inc. Then, he pulled off a head-turning investor coup at Tronc., or what he later renamed Tribune Publishing, after entering the company as a friendly investor but then booting the CEO who had courted him in the first place.

As a result, he had to exit Wrapports Holdings. But it was the very notion of a future combination of the paper that had led to his entry into the newspaper business and his involvement first with the Sun-Times, the The Tribune.

The Sun-Times will formally announce its intent to sell to a buyer that will keep it a separate newspaper. If nobody comes forward to offer a deal, which is most certainly the case, it would do a deal with Tronc.

“The acquisition is the latest in almost a decade of transactions between the owners of the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times,” said Tim Knight, president of TroncX who also heads mergers and acquisitions for the company.

Knight was also hired as Sun-Times publisher by Ferro during his days at the tabloid. He left to work for the Newhouse chain in Ohio, then has returned to the Ferro fold at Tronc.

Ferro’s arrival at the Sun-Times was a result of his involvement as a board member at the now defunct nonprofit Chicago News Cooperative, of which I was a part.

When the paper’s owner died, Chicago News Cooperative chief James O’Shea, the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, broached the notion of our board buying the Sun-Times.

Led by John Canning, a respected Chicago businessman who chaired the nonprofit’s board, a group did buy it. As a result, Ferro, whose background was in tech, wound up running the paper and getting the newspaper bug.

“I think it’s been obvious for a long time that these two were keeping each other alive,” O’Shea said Monday. The printing contract gives the Tribune much-needed income—indeed the original deal was seen by some as very advantageous to the Tribune and was later renegotiated downward—and also helped keep the Sun-Times alive.

“It’s an inevitable transaction,” O’Shea said. “The only question is Justice Department approval.”

From the day the investor group began planning to buy the Sun-Times, there was a notion that it could eventually position them to buy the Tribune, he said.

Now, the reverse would happen, though a key player in the original strategizing, Ferro, will still wind up a king of the hill, though now as head of Tronc.

“The idea in mind was always putting them into one, since it’s hard to see how Chicago can support two daily newspapers,” O’Shea said.

Alan Mutter, a San Francisco-based industry analyst and Sun-Times alumnus, says, “Sadly, it comes as no surprise that the Sun-Times is no longer viable as a standalone newspaper, given the relentless decade-plus decline that the newspaper, like other metro publications, has suffered in readership and revenues.”

“In all likelihood, Tronc is the only buyer who can sustain the Sun-Times, owing to the ad sales, printing, circulation and digital publishing functions it already has in place.”

“The big question is how much Tronc will invest in preserving a strong and independent editorial voice for the Sun-Times. Will there be a separate and truly competitive newsroom in city once famed for a rich tradition of journalistic jousting? Or, will Tribune content simply be channeled into the Sun-Times print and digital brands? “

“Even if tronc at this writing intends to field a fully competitive Sun-Times, will the deteriorating economics of metro newspaper publishing support the effort?”

BuzzFeed News announced on Monday the addition of Forbes staff writer Ryan Mac to its expanding team of reporters in San Francisco who cover Silicon Valley.

Mac, who’s already based in San Francisco, joins a BuzzFeed News tech team of 20. He’ll be covering “the intersection of wealth, tech and power” under BuzzFeed San Francisco Bureau Chief Mat Honan and technology editor John Paczkowski.

Rather than focus on incremental tech coverage, Mac wants to report out big, high-impact stories, he said.

“I don’t want to be covering the next app launch off of a press release,” Mac said. “I want to be writing about how the next tech billionaire is taking down a newspaper, or an incredible lawsuit between two co-founders. That stuff takes a lot of reporting, and a lot of time to suss out.”

In a memo to his staff, Paczkowski called Mac “a scoop machine” and a “dogged reporter” with a nose for turning up great stories.

“…Whether it’s being first to report that Peter Thiel was financing Hulk Hogan’s suit against Gawker, discovering what went wrong in GoPro’s ill-fated drone program, charting the collapse of 3D Robotics, telling the real story of Silk Road and Dread Pirate Roberts, or diving deep into the tale of Minecraft’s sale to Microsoft,” Paczkowski said.

Mac begins at BuzzFeed News on June 5.

Benjamin Mullin is the managing editor of Poynter.org. He previously reported for Poynter as a staff writer, Google Journalism Fellow and Naughton Fellow, covering journalism innovation, business practices and ethics. He’s also reported for USA TODAY College and The Sacramento Bee, and he was editor in chief of The Orion, Chico State’s student-run newspaper. An Air Force brat who grew up around Northern California, he’s still adjusting to the Florida sunshine.

Arthur Gregg Sulzberger will take responsibility for the opinion pages of The New York Times from his father, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., according to an internal announcement circulated at the company this afternoon, the latest in a series of moves intended to prepare the younger Sulzberger for eventual leadership of The New York Times.

At The New York Times, the editorial page editor reports to the publisher so as to reinforce the divide between the paper’s news and opinion sections. For more than two decades, that’s been the elder Sulzberger. But now, as his son is getting ready to replace him, that’s changing.

“As he did in the newsroom, I expect A.G. to safeguard Times values and standards even as he presses for new voices and new forms of opinion journalism that will help us deepen relationships with our loyal readers and form relationships with new readers,” the note read. “Doing this work means asking hard questions about the old ways of doing things and taking some risks with new ways.”

A.G. Sulzberger was named deputy publisher in October after serving as a masthead editor at the paper. Before that, he was the newspaper’s Kansas City bureau chief and the lead author of The New York Times innovation report, which flagged several areas where the newspaper’s digital journalism was lagging behind its competitors.

Editorial page editor James Bennett will report to A.G. Sulzberger, according to the note. He will work to “diversify and digitize” the section.

Here’s Sulzberger’s full memo:

Dear Colleagues,

Core to the mission of The Times is its role in safeguarding certain values and transmitting them from one generation of journalists, and readers, to another.

Among my most important duties as publisher has been to assure that our opinion journalism, and in particular our editorial line, reflects those values: free expression, openness of inquiry, equality of opportunity, and fundamental fairness. At the same time, I’ve understood my role as helping to make sure our values and their expression remain relevant and powerful in our time.

To that end, I am transferring day-to-day responsibility for this role to our deputy publisher, A.G. Sulzberger. The editorial page editor James Bennet, will now report to him.

As you know, A.G. has played a central role in the transformation of our news department in recent years. He’s now eager to support the efforts begun by James, Jim Dao and the rest of the team to diversify and digitize our Opinion report and continually raise its ambitions for informing the national and global conversation. A.G. has already begun this work, getting to know the operation and the journalists who play such an important role in helping our readers understand this fast-changing world.

As he did in the newsroom, I expect A.G. to safeguard Times values and standards even as he presses for new voices and new forms of opinion journalism that will help us deepen relationships with our loyal readers and form relationships with new readers. Doing this work means asking hard questions about the old ways of doing things and taking some risks with new ways. This is a big challenge for A.G., James, and the rest of the Opinion team, and success is key to maintaining the leadership of The Times. I am very excited to see what you all do together.

Working with you has been one of the most fun and fulfilling parts of my job. It’s hard to believe that more than two decades have passed since I was a new publisher selecting two star reporters to be columnists, Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd. They’ve certainly rewarded my confidence — each has a Pulitzer for their remarkable work. And so have all the rest of you, from our best-in-the-business lineup of columnists, the members of our brilliant and brave editorial board, and all of the editors who bring a diversity of outside voices and opinions to our readers every day.

You all have my sincere gratitude and deepest admiration.

Arthur

From the founding fathers through John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton, American politicians have indulged in extramarital affairs with slaves, movie stars, sisters-in-law and interns.

But, in large part because of the press, the American public still reacts to political sex scandals as if they were completely unheard of.

Americans remain shocked by these events, I believe, in large part because our perception has been shaped more by the press’s behavior than by the behavior of the politicians themselves. While putting together my book “The Sex Effect,” I found a connection between the way journalists cover extramarital affairs and the public’s opinion on sexual matters.

Although the press has generally tried to expose public figures since Watergate, the media’s approach to uncovering the dirty secrets of politicians has fluctuated throughout American history.

One of the first major political sex scandals in the U.S. involved Alexander Hamilton and a married woman named Maria Reynolds. America’s first secretary of the treasury was so enamored with Reynolds that he paid her husband, James Reynolds, to keep the relationship secret.

In the end, though, Hamilton’s affair was exposed by a zealous pamphleteer named James Callender. Callender and his contemporaries were more like activist bloggers than nonpartisan journalists.

“Most pamphlets were written to appeal to some certain emotion or to some particular group of people,” wrote historian Homer Calkin. “Patriotic, religious and economic motives often formed the theme of a pamphleteer.”

The writing in these pamphlets was often extremely ideological because political parties and people with financial power used pamphlets as propaganda tools. After Callender broke the Hamilton-Reynolds scandal, he was hired by Thomas Jefferson to target Jefferson’s political opponent John Adams. But Callender and Jefferson had a falling out, so Callender revealed that Jefferson had a sexual relationship with his teenage slave, Sally Hemings.

Jefferson’s sex scandal was opened to public scrutiny by the sensational media standards of the day. For example, an 1828 Cincinnati Gazette story about Andrew Jackson screamed, “General Jackson’s mother was a COMMON PROSTITUTE, brought to this country by British soldiers! She afterward married a MULATTO MAN with whom she had several children, of which General JACKSON IS ONE!!!”

But media coverage of politicians’ personal lives gradually shifted. During the Great Depression, World War I, World War II and the Cold War, U.S. journalists opted to forego sensational stories about the personal lives of leaders, preferring instead to focus their reporting on matters of national security. By the time Franklin Roosevelt became president, journalists often kept politicians’ secrets hidden in exchange for access. Historians also theorize that journalists protected politicians’ personal lives during this time as a matter of national security.

With the uncertainty brought on by the Great Depression and World War II, journalists decided to help conceal Roosevelt’s personal life. Millions of Americans didn’t realize he was paralyzed until after his death. Today, few photos exist of Roosevelt in a wheelchair.

Journalists also concealed Roosevelt’s sexual relationships. Many Americans still are unaware that Roosevelt had numerous affairs. According to Joseph Persico’s “Franklin and Lucy: Mrs. Rutherford and the Other Remarkable Women in Roosevelt’s Life,” which details Roosevelt’s affairs, journalists who supported Roosevelt prevented other reporters from photographing the president in his wheelchair.

Journalists blocked or knocked aside photographers who tried to shoot images of the president’s disability. In newspapers, cartoonists portrayed Roosevelt as a superhero. If ever cameras began rolling when he was lifted out of his wheelchair, Roosevelt said things like, “No movies of me getting out of the machine, boys.” Journalists often respected the request.

Like Roosevelt, President Kennedy benefitted from a comfortable relationship with the press. Despite all that we now know about Kennedy’s numerous affairs, he never had a public sex scandal while in office, in large part because of the press.

“Before Watergate, reporters just didn’t go into that sort of thing,” said a Hollywood Associated Press writer who helped keep Kennedy’s affair with Marilyn Monroe out of the press. “I’d have to have been under the bed in order to put it on the wire for the AP.”

Not long after Kennedy was assassinated, President Johnson ramped up America’s involvement in the Vietnam War, an action that led to years of anti-government protests. Fewer than 10 years after Kennedy’s death, the presidency faced the greatest scandal in its history with Watergate, which led to President Nixon’s resignation. These events made journalists more aware of their duties to inform the public of unsavory deeds. Reporters undertook a renewed effort to expose secrets as they did in the pamphleteering era.

“Between the Kennedy and the Clinton presidencies, access journalism was replaced by gotcha journalism,” wrote historian David Eisenbach and “Hustler” publisher Larry Flynt in their book, “One Nation Under Sex.”

By Bill Clinton’s second term, 24/7 news networks and the growing power of the internet gave reporters tools to spread indiscretions faster. The world became more connected, and journalists were more aggressive. When Matt Drudge exposed Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, he wasn’t doing anything radical. By then, any journalist would have craved that tip.

By concealing the affairs of the past, journalists unwittingly created the impression that modern sex scandals are a new phenomenon. Not all sex scandals are created equally, and it’s a matter of public interest if a political figure violates consent or other laws. But if the sex in question is legal and consensual, press reports would be more useful if they included some historical context.

Ross Benes in the author of “The Sex Effect,” which Kirkus called “a witty discussion of the indirect role sex plays across political, economic, religious, and cultural landscapes.” He is also a Digiday reporter who has written for The Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, Refinery29, Deadspin, Quartz, Slate, Vice, and Esquire. You can follow him on Twitter @RossBenes and reach him through rossbenes.com.

The Sex Effect: Baring Our Complicated Relationship with Sex

A gripping exploration of the relationship between sex and our society, with a foreword by bestselling author A.J. Jacobs. “The Sex Effect” explores questions like: How did the U.S. military inadvertently help make San Francisco a mecca of gay culture? And what was the original purpose of vibrators? According to Kirkus, this is book is “certain to instigate debate and productive discussion.”

The confusing times at ESPN have produced this strange contradiction: The network says it is increasing its commitment to journalism less than a couple of weeks after it dismissed a virtual All-Star team of the best journalists in sports.

Yet Bob Ley and Jeremy Schaap insist their new Sunday morning “E:60” show represents ESPN’s premium on reporting and storytelling on important sports issues from around the world. In fact, Schaap says, the new format is “a redoubling of ESPN’s commitment to journalism.”

“E:60,” the longform feature and investigative series that aired periodically during the year, now will have a weekly home at 9 a.m. ET on Sundays, with the debut set for Sunday. Hosted by Ley and Schaap in a new state-of-the-art studio, the one-hour show also will feature stories from ESPN’s elite “Outside the Lines” team.

“Let’s face it,” Schaap said. “Many of these stories are difficult to produce. They are time-consuming and they are expensive. It’s not necessarily about eyeballs. It’s about journalism.”

Surely, some eyebrows will be raised by that statement. The timing of the new show’s launch comes on the heels of what felt like a gut punch to the entire industry, not just ESPN. Ley and Schaap also experienced the pain of the network’s stunning cutbacks of top journalistic talent. Many respected colleagues now are out of work.

All week, as they did interviews promoting the new “E:60,” they had to address proverbial elephant in the room — allegations that ESPN is de-emphasizing journalism.

“I hear the voices. I understand what folks are saying,” Ley said. “It was a question of (ESPN’s) distribution (of resources). The company had to make some difficult decisions. But when you talk about the commitment to the stories you’re going to see (on ‘E:60’), the proof is in the product. And the product is very good.”

Schaap takes a historical perspective.

“When you think about ESPN in 1993, it might have had a couple dozen people in news gathering,” Schaap said. “Now we have hundreds of people. (The cuts) were painful. But ESPN still has the single largest news gathering entity in sports broadcasting.”

Ley and Schaap remain as ESPN’s main standard bearers. An ESPN release promoting the show called them “sports journalism giants.” It hardly is an overstatement, given the awards they have received for the quality of their work.

“Anybody who has followed sports in this country, who has paid attention for the last 40 years, knows when they see Bob on the air, they are getting the truth,” Schaap said.

Schaap, meanwhile, has established himself on a myriad of award-winning stories by following in the footsteps of his father, legendary sports journalist Dick Schaap. The new “E:60” show actually is bit bittersweet for Schaap. It will take the place of the long-running “The Sports Reporters,” which Dick made popular as the host in the 1990s.

“It’s tough, but it is exciting to know what’s coming next,” Schaap said.

The new “E:60” will be the sports version of the popular “CBS Sunday Morning.” It will be a platform for longer investigative stories and features.

Ley points to a feature on Sunday’s show in which reporter Steve Fainaru, ESPN producers and crew spent nine months working on a story about the Syrian soccer team. He says it speaks to the potential of the new format.

“We showed a portion of that story to (ESPN president John Skipper) and 20 other people,” Ley said. “When it ended, there was silence in the room. It was like, ‘Wow, that’s why we’re doing this.’ Stories like this will educate people. They will affect people.”

Schaap spoke of the massive commitment of resources by ESPN to produce this story. Also, he said, let’s not overlook the courage required by the reporters to travel to some dangerous hotspots to report the piece.

“You’re not seeing these stories getting covered in other places,” Schaap said.

In addition to the long stories, “E:60” will feature commentary and interaction between Ley and Schaap. That in itself would be worth watching.

Also, Ley is looking forward to working in a new studio that he says “is something out of ‘The Jetsons.’” When he ran through a rundown of the big screens and graphics, Schaap interjected, “And it will make both of us look much more handsome.”

It was a funny line, but the reality is that it always has been substance over style for Ley and Schaap. The new “E:60” will be a welcome respite at a time when the trend in television news, not just sports, is all about who can yell the loudest in the debate shows.

There is no question the cutbacks caused serious damage to ESPN’s brand from a journalistic standpoint. You don’t ax that many people and not feel an impact.

However, the launch of the new “E:60” gives ESPN a chance to say, “Hey, we’re still doing some journalism here.”

“We have the opportunity to open people’s eyes, to engage our audience with these stories,” Ley said. “It still is a central part of our mission.”

Editor’s note: This is the latest in a series of articles that highlight digital tools for journalists. You can read the others here. Got a tool we should talk about? Let Ren know!

Journalists are expected to juggle several different skills nowadays. This week’s tool, as my colleague Ren LaForme explains, offers an easy and free way to do more.

You found a big hit last week, and people were very excited about this tool that accurately transcribes interviews. We kind of shut the site down for awhile, right?

Yeah, we crashed their site. Actually, they took it down a couple days ago, and I think they’re working on buffing it up. We heard from a lot of people who had other really good voice-to-text tools, and we should talk about those for a second.

We heard from people saying VoiceBase is good, and also oTranscribe. I’ve used that one, it works really well, too. So in the event that Scribe is still down, those two are worth checking out.

What do you have for us this week?

I was a little surprised when Scribe took off because it seems like there are so many things like that out there. Maybe I’m in a bubble of tools and I don’t know things, but I want to talk about a tool I’ve known about forever. I think it’s a tool that you use pretty often, too.

What is it?

Let’s talk about Canva.

Oh, I love Canva!

If you don’t know what Canva is, it’s an image creation tool. It lets you pick from different templates, themes and sizes that are preset to fit various things such as social media.

It’s just so easy. What do you use it for?

I use it on a weekly basis for my newsletter and for putting my newsletter on the site. I make quote cards that are great for social and a summary of what’s in the newsletter for Poynter.org. It’s very easy to use, and I am not a great-with-graphics person.

Do those quote cards work pretty well for you?

Yes, they come across as very high-quality. I have to make them smaller on MailChimp so I don’t end up in people’s spam boxes. To me, they look great on mobile and on desktop.

I think that’s the great thing about Canva. If you are an expert Photoshop user, sure, fine, stick with that. But most of us are not. On my computer, Photoshop takes like two minutes to open.

I’m just gonna go to Canva, pick something with a template, make a new thing and have it exported by the time it takes Photoshop to open.

I think this works great when you don’t have an image with your story. There are obviously tons of stock photo sites and there are pros and cons to using those, but they tend to be pretty expensive. Canva lets you pull from their massive stock photo library, and the most they’ll ever charge you is a dollar.

Related Training: Social Media Visuals: Tips and Free Tools

If people aren’t familiar with Canva, what are some ways people can start using it?

I think the most important thing, and the best use I’ve seen for Canva, is creating social graphics. Getting people to read, view or interact with your story is now part of the storytelling process. You don’t send the paper to print and then go home and go to bed anymore.

You’ve got to get your story out there and get people’s attention. And the best way to do that is with whatever you can use that, as people are sliding their thumbs across the screen, makes them say, OK, I want to stop and see this.

With all of its templates and all of its really great designs, I think Canva is a really great way to do that, even if you are completely design inept.

I have had to learn to simplify on Canva. Do you have any basic tips on how to use this and not look like a total amateur?

Stick with their design templates at first. You’re going to look a little like other people out there, but just get a feel for how they look and what works best for them.

Learning from the experts is the best way to go.

Anything you don’t like about Canva?

It would be nice to have a little bit more control over things like text size. But it’s free, so I really can’t complain.

I think one of the reasons that this tool and tools like it are important gets back to something you already said: It’s our job now not just to produce the journalism but to help it spread, and this is a way you can do that.

Right, and editors will love you for adding visuals to your stories, and social media editors will love you for making them shareable. It’s a win-win, especially because it only takes a couple minutes.

I just made a Canva for social media with one of your quotes and very basic template. It took me about five minutes.

See? So easy. Nobody has any excuse to publish a story without visuals anymore.

Good morning. Here’s our morning roundup of all the media news you need to know. Want to get this briefing in your inbox every morning? Subscribe here.

Washington was convulsed last night by icy nastiness, harsh language and people crying foul.

Oh, that was the deciding game in a hockey playoff between the historically hard-luck Washington Capitals and Pittsburgh Penguins, just one of three major sports distractions from 24/7 coverage of President Trump firing FBI Director James Comey.

“Sources: Comey sought to expand Russian probe before firing,” said CNN. They didn’t really need any chyrons to fill the screen since at one point it displayed a panel of nine people discussing the matter, thus resembling less a thoughtful discussion of policy than a long-ago dinner at Hearst Castle.

MSNBC was much the same throughout the day and night, including Rachel Maddow’s show. “WaPo: 30 sources say Comey firing was based on anger over Russia probe.” That’s “WaPo,” as in The Washington Post, an inadvertent reminder of the ongoing impressive, actual reporting done by print-turned-digital bastions.

Meanwhile, Trump’s Fox cheerleaders were in overdrive. They scoffed at the “stuttering outrage” of Trump’s critics, as poetically phrased by Greg Gutfeld, hosting the new and unimproved primetime version of “The Five.”

Gutfeld opened with a dumb screed, as if to show his inner Andrew Dice Clay, saying the Democrats “look two-faced, with requires twice as much Botox.” He lamely alluded to how Trump could have fired Comey in August when “half the media (were) drunk, picking sand from their navel. No one would have noticed.”

“Expecting Trump to stick to formalities is like” — are you ready, America, for this satiric brilliance? — “expecting a dog to meow, or a cat to bark, or Chris Matthews to make sense.” Gutfeld alone makes Matthews resemble a combo of Montesquieu, Kant, Socrates, Aristotle and Charlie Cook.

Fortunately, there were important diversions, at least for Washington sports fans. There was what appeared to be a convergence of happy news with two very important playoff games for the hometown Caps and Wizards and the baseball Nats at home against local rival Baltimore.

As Matt Vita, sports editor of The Washington Post, put it last night:

“It’s a special night for Washington sports, but we’re still skating in our lane. There’s nothing in our world that can compare with the magnitude of what folks in national and elsewhere in the newsroom have been handling. Hopefully we just provide some welcome relief.”

That means live web and mobile updates on the Wizards and Capitals, plus instant analyses and game stories when they ended. Columnist Jerry Brewer was in Boston with the Wizards and columnists Barry Svrluga, Dan Steinberg and Tom Boswell were at home at the Caps game.

In all, four people writing on the Wizards, seven on the Caps and two at the Nats game. As Vita put it, somewhat facetiously, “another night in sports.”

Well, it proved another typical night in Washington sports. The Nats won “on an otherwise dark D.C. night” that saw hockey’s high-priced Caps once again blew it, and thus ended their season. The Wizards lost their big one, too.

Misery breeds company, so it’s now back to cable news and Trump.

Snap’s very poor start

“Snap Inc., in its first quarterly report as a public company, showed it struggled to maintain strong user growth at its Snapchat vanishing-messaging app, sending shares tumbling and sparking worries about its ability to challenge social-media titan Facebook Inc.” (The Wall Street Journal)

The Watergate analogy

The search to in some fashion liken the current political mess to Watergate even prompted Carl Bernstein to get to a Tel Aviv TV studio at 3:50 a.m. local time to talk to Anderson Cooper. Chalk it up to his sincere craving for historical accuracy, or vanity, or maybe both.

I was lucky enough to track down Watergate icon John Dean after he and wife Maureen (yes, still solid after all these years) gave an insulin shot to their dog in Los Angeles. He then explained at great length Watergate’s modest relevance at this point. (U.S. News & World Report)

There are, though, some distinct Watergate analogies suggested in a New York Times video here where reporters Maggie Haberman, Matt Rosenberg and Peter Baker seek to decode the whole Comey mess (after an ad for ExxonMobil).

Mike Bloomberg opines

Bloomberg boss Mike Bloomberg writes, “If President Donald Trump thinks he can fire his way out of the FBI’s investigation into his campaign’s ties to Russia, he is sorely mistaken — and attempting to do so makes him look weak and fearful, undermines the rule of law and diminishes what little prospects there were for bipartisan legislation.” (Bloomberg)

Headline of day

“White House job for Schwab heiress raises new ethics questions for Trump — Samantha Schwab’s grandfather, Charles Schwab, gave $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee. Now she’s working for the president.” (Huffington Post)

Reporter Christine Wilkie writes, “The White House won’t say why Schwab was hired, or give details on her work for the Trump administration.”

Thrush on Trump

The minute-by-minute scrutiny and fact-checking of the Comey firing is unceasing. And it’s not just a matter of reporting, then doing a story, and tweeting it out. Now you tweet while reporting.

Glenn Thrush, a stellar New York Times White House reporter (and occasional “Saturday Night Live” character), yesterday tweeted, “@mike_pence is saying (Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein) initiated Comey ouster — this is not true, according to everyone @maggieNYT and I have talked to. Trump did it.” (@GlennThrush)

Soon came this: “@mike_pence has a reassuring way of defending @realDonaldTrump — but much of what he just said is disputable or inaccurate.” (@GlennThrush)

Traditionalists might gag at the instant analysis cum editorializing. But that train is out of the station. And he combined with “Maggie,” namely Maggie Haberman, on a story that disclosed that Trump said privately that there’s “something wrong” with Comey.

Tit for tat. That’s exactly what many in the media say about Trump, perhaps most notably Mika Brzezinski, MSNBC’s occasional sunrise shrink.

The morning babble

CNN’s “New Day” opened with confusions about why Trump fired Comey. Said pundit Ron Brownstein: “The only thing that is really relevant is that the president fired the senior law enforcement official leading the investigation into the conduct of his campaign and whether it colluded with the Russians to destabilize the election.”

“Fox & Friends” went with Trump’s own “phony hypocrites” construct (via a tweet) about Democratic critics of the Comey decision, then derided the time that network broadcasts spent last night on the Russian collusion angle: CBS with Scott Pelley (7 minutes, 58 seconds), ABC with David Muir (7 minutes, 53 seconds) and NBC with Lester Holt (9 minutes, 13 seconds).

But it was interesting that Steve Doocy said that “Russia will be their (the Democrats’) Benghazi,” as if, after all these years, the conservative mouthpiece was conceding Benghazi was a B.S. story!

MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” maintained that Trump is losing support among conservatives within the FBI who had supported him. “I talk to a good number of them,” claimed Joe Scarborough. And “everybody in the White House is lying through their teeth” about not firing James Comey due to the Russia investigation, he said.

A pipe dream

“Facebook announced on Wednesday that it’s penalizing websites that contain little substantive content and junky advertising, the social network’s latest step to police its platform for content that users find objectionable or irrelevant.” (Poynter)

Imagine if you were King of Media for a day and could eliminate junky ads! The scumbag personal injury lawyers, the tips on selling old gold, the constipation remedy ones with those smiling and relieved idiots, etc. We can dream, can’t we?

If you’re a reporter, get arrested and need help…

The arrest in West Virginia of Public News Service reporter Dan Heyman prompts the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press to remind one and all about its Legal Defense Hotline: hotline@rcfp.org or 800-336-4243. You never know.

A tip on repairing your Rolodex

A discussion with Tom Ricks, a premier longtime defense and national security reporter, included his thoughts on the need for reporters to freshen source lists.

Notice how White males tend to dominate the national security discussions? If not, call your ophthalmologist. Well, “a lot of women have come into the national security establishment since 9/11. They’re still not a majority in numbers, but they may be in the amount of straight talk and clear thinking they’re producing.”

Here’s his cheat sheet on really smart folks:

Susan Hennessey. Former NSA lawyer, now managing editor of the Lawfare blog. @Susan_Hennessey.

Nada Bakos. “If you saw ‘Zero Dark Thirty,’ you have some idea of who she is. But in reality she’s not a redhead.” @nadabakos

Tara Muller. MIT PhD, former CIA analyst. @TaraMuller

Kori Schake. “Defense Secretary Mattis listens to her, OK?” @KoriSchake

Rosa Brooks. Law professor, author, former Pentagon official. @brooks_rosa

Heather Hurlburt. Former White House, State Department, congressional staffer. @natsecHeather

Frances Townsend. Former Bush advisor, now a talking head. @FranTownsend

Loren D. Schulman. Former assistant to Defense Secretary Robert Gates. @LorenRaeDeJ

Sharon Burke. Former Pentagon climate change czar, a position now eliminated @burkese

Anne-Marie Slaughter. Former Princeton dean, State Department official. “Now my boss’s boss at New America, the think tank where I hang my hat.” @SlaughterAM

Anne Applebaum. “One of the best people on Russia.” @anneapplebaum

Joan Johnson-Freese. Expert on military issues in outer space. @JohnsonFreese

Nancy Youssef. Veteran military reporter, tough and funny. @nancyayoussef

Amanda Rousseau. “Private sector cyber warrior.” @malwareunicorn

And a foreigner: Federica Mogherini. Foreign minister of the European Union. @FedericaMog

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It’s unclear where to start with President Trump’s interview with NBC’s Lester Holt that left the White House second-string spokesperson on a precipice better associated with the Flying Wallendas.

“Trump’s account flatly contradicts the White House’s initial account of how the president arrived at his decision, undercutting public denials by his aides that the move was influenced in any way by his growing fury with the ongoing Russia probe.” (The Washington Post)

The interview prompted unpaid Trump courtesan Sean Hannity to double down about “mainstream media lies,” “Trump derangement syndrome” and the “Clinton email server scandal” via a graphic that listed 15 federal laws that he said Hillary Clinton violated.

It all stemmed from a Holt interview whose oddest critic was bumbling Bob Beckel. He accused Holt of being a wuss as he faultlessly played the role of sincere but inept liberal piñata on Fox’s “The Five” (which has been a helter-skelter mess since its shift to primetime).

Nope. When it comes to wussin’ out, Sarah Huckabee Sanders lapped all contenders.

Drawing the short straw by subbing again for Spicer, she said that nobody was in the dark about the firing of FBI Director Jim Comey moments after admitting she was in the dark.

She’d talked to “countless” FBI agents but wouldn’t fork over a real number. She wouldn’t answer questions about lies told the day before about Comey. Her comments over 48 hours were quickly repackaged in unflattering ways and got more attention than her dad’s fleeting 2016 presidential campaign.

And both substance and style were off as she sought to defend a mercurial boss.

“Like Spicer, she suffers from a lack of direction,” says Bill Plante, the recently retired CBS White House mainstay. “How can she know how to put lipstick on the pig if she doesn’t know what Trump’s thinking? Makes for an awkward and unhelpful performance.”

But she was game and at least received divine assurance from an estimable secular source.

“Hey, she only has to satisfy an audience of one,” says Mike McCurry, the former Clinton-era spokesman who directs the Center for Public Theology at Wesley Theological Seminary.

“The rest of us, the press in the room and the American public, don’t appear to matter that much,” he said. “So she did fine.”

Oh, well, those theologians do have more empathy than the rest of us. Pax vobiscum, Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

Tweeting Rosie O’Donnell

His Twitter feud with the comedian continues. Meanwhile, “Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey believes that it’s ‘important’ that President Donald Trump continues to tweet.” (Recode)

It sounds something like Warren Buffett urging him to ride the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway (BNSF), perhaps vaulting into one of those increasingly half-empty coal cars that Trump promises to fill with all those West Virginia jobs.

Lead of the morning

From Jonathan Feigen of The Houston Chronicle on the Houston Rockets elimination at home by the San Antonio Spurs:

“The Rockets did not just lose. That would have been better. This was far more inglorious, far more distasteful. This will be much more difficult to forget.”

“They surrendered. They were hit, and crumbled like an old lawn chair. They were not just whipped; they were humiliated, coming within one point of the worst postseason loss in franchise history.” (Chronicle)

Fox envy?

“Sits down for a long time with Lester Holt (of NBC), a network that has not given him a fair shake almost from day one,” said “Fox & Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade this morning. “It always astounded me in big moments he chooses to go with the people that have not been…if you watch five minutes of the network…they don’t deserve the president’s quality time.”

Poor guy. Has not Kilmeade connected the dots to discern Trump’s craving for legitimacy among the “mainstream media” that Fox so gratuitously (and hypocritically) derides as part of its very business model?

Spicer’s duty

He’s serving his Navy Reserve Duty in the press office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a topic of much discussion at the Pentagon, “where his temporary colleagues covertly snapped cellphone photos of the White House press secretary as he walked the halls and looked over the hot-food bar at a Pentagon restaurant.” (The Wall Street Journal)

“Military officers used to handling questions about North Korea missile tests and the fight against the Islamic State groused that their time is being eaten up by questions about their celebrity reservist. ‘I am answering more questions about him than I am about Syria or North Korea,’ said one military official.”

Fox’s refreshing side

Fox’s Shepard Smith’s back-and-forth with White House correspondent John Roberts Thursday underscored the refreshing curiosity of Smith’s mid-afternoon show.

Yes, there was Smith talking matter-of-factly of how Trump “insulted” Comey in the Holt interview. Fire Comey to undermine the Russia investigation? “That would be obstruction of justice.”

“There’s definitely been an evolution here, Shep,” Roberts conceded when it came to the reasons for booting Comey. And, he added, the “totality of information available” to the communications shop on Comey firing was not complete.

The morning babble

“The press wants to jump on us every day,” said “Fox & Friends” co-host Kilmeade, exhibiting the sense of victimization improbably rife at the No. 1 cable news network. It was his way of saying the White House shouldn’t have been taken aback by adverse press reaction to the Comey decision.

On CNN, “New Day” put together what co-host Chris Cuomo tagged a “mendacity montage” of conflicting statements by the White House on Comey. It was an apt counterpoint to Hannity last night compiling a montage of Democrats hammering Comey last fall and now waxing outraged over his dismissal (Sen. Charles Schumer is an especially egregious example).

“Morning Joe” on MSNBC did likewise with its own montage — does somebody owe Jon Stewart and his old producing colleagues on “The Daily Show” creative thanks? — that was particularly unflattering to Sanders and vice president Mike Pence. Then came co-host Mika Brzezinski in stern and acidic high dudgeon — and in the apparent self-appointed role as a pro bono programming consultant to CNN:

“Kellyanne Conway, Sarah Sanders, Sean Spicer, Mike Pence, now all in the same category, in the Kellyanne category: not credible, proved as a liar, made a fool.”

“Also note to CNN: I love CNN, but you’ve got to stop putting Kellyanne on the air. It’s politics porn. You’re just getting your little ratings crack. But it’s disgusting. Your hosts look pained when they interview her.”

That peroration did conclude with similar, if rather less histrionic analysis from the six White males found in on-air boxes around her. There wasn’t much diversity on any score.

A Facebook blast from Vienna

Even my late Viennese mom might have trouble defending an Austrian court ruling that Facebook “is required to stamp out locally defined hate speech… all over the globe.” (TechDirt)

Huh? “Not only will Facebook need to delete original posts and reposts, but it’s apparently supposed to track down anything that quotes the offending posts verbatim and delete those as well. Simply blocking them in Austria isn’t sufficient.”

Ach du lieber (oh my god).

Free story idea

“Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein pressed White House counsel Don McGahn to correct what he felt was an inaccurate White House depiction of the events surrounding FBI Director James Comey’s firing, according to a person familiar with the conversation.” (The Wall Street Journal)

Following the Lester Holt interview, it’s clear Trump cynically used Rosenstein, a guy who had a good reputation. It’s pathetic. And Rosenstein wants to “correct the record?”

So he’s got a choice between resigning or do the Washington thing and rationalize the seductions of power. Whatever, somebody should compile a list of how many people in high government positions have actually quit out of a sense of honor.

A late Mother’s Day gift idea

“According to a study conducted through heartbeat measurement app Cardiogram and the University of California, San Francisco, the Apple Watch is 97 percent accurate in detecting the most common abnormal heart rhythm when paired with an AI-based algorithm.” (TechCrunch)

“Meet the Press” out,” Fox & Friends” in

There’s been a shakeout in Trump’s media consumption priorities. “‘Meet the Press’ and ‘Morning Joe’ are out, and ‘Fox & Friends’ is “now reportedly one of President Trump’s most senior confidantes and was even rumored to be taking the lead on briefings while the president listened attentively.”

It’s from The Onion, but it may wind up true, anyway.

It will be something for me to mull amid two baseball practices, two baseball games, two soccer games, a piano practice, a bar mitzvah and a Mother’s Day House Walk in Evanston.

I’d planned on inviting Mika Brzezinski and Sarah Huckabee Sanders along on the walk. But, after this morning, I’ll stick with my spouse and kids.

Corrections? Tips? Please email me: jwarren@poynter.org. Would you like to get this roundup emailed to you every morning? Sign up here.

Mother Jones on Friday announced a half-million dollar crowdfunding campaign to investigate any connections between the Trump administration and Russia, asking for reader support to “make sure truth prevails over power.”

To raise money for the project, which Mother Jones is calling “Trumpocracy: The Russia Connection,” the bimonthly magazine is trying to sign up at least 1,000 new sustaining donors at $15 per month. They’ve already lined up a $200,000 grant from The Glaser Progress Foundation, and the foundation is set to kick in an additional $50,000 once they reach their goal.

Mother Jones will use the money to hire fact-checkers, editors, researchers and staffers who will conduct legal reviews, said Monika Bauerlein, Mother Jones’ CEO. They’ve already lined up one investigative reporting heavy hitter for the team: Bill Buzenberg, the former executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, who will be writing a weekly newsletter on the story.

Mother Jones has been on this story since before the election. In October, Mother Jones Washington Bureau Chief David Corn reported that a veteran spy had given the FBI information alleging a Russian operation to compromise Donald Trump. That story has since been matched by CNN, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and other outlets, Bauerlein said, and ballooned into a storyline that touches nearly every corner of D.C. politics.

“It’s about the story on Capitol Hill,” Bauerlein said. “It’s the story at the White House. It’s the story on media. It’s a national security story. It’s a story that has implications for technology and cyber security.”

Mother Jones has had success with crowdfunding before, but this is the first time the San Francisco-based magazine has launched a reader appeal to fund a special project. The magazine previously used reporter Shane Bauer’s prize-winning opus on for-profit prisons to rack up sustaining contributions.

If Mother Jones reports out the connections between Trump associates and Russia and finds nothing, that will be “great for democracy and a great journalistic success,” Bauerlein said. But she framed the importance of digging into the story by putting it in the historical context of major scandals like Watergate, Teapot Dome and the Lewinsky affair.

“We’ve been able to ultimately get to the truth about all of the scandals of the past – whether it was the Lewinsky scandal in a Democratic administration or Iran-Contra or Watergate or Teapot Dome going all the way back,” she said. “We’ve always been able to get to the bottom of it eventually. And this story is ultimately about that — whether we can get to the truth about what our leaders are doing.”

Andrew Restuccia wanted the answer to a simple question: Who was visiting the White House?

After doing some digging, the Politico senior policy reporter was able to show that CEOs in the auto, energy and airline industries were among some of President Trump’s most influential guests. But when the White House announced in April that it would not publish a record of visitor logs, he decided something more should be done.

“I was actually surprised that other people hadn’t done it already — partly because we see it as a resource not just for the Politico newsroom, but for newsrooms all over the country,” Restuccia said.

The fruit of Restuccia’s painstaking labor, “All the President’s Guests,” was published earlier this week. A public database of White House visitors that draws on more than 1,500 individual records, the project is the first of its kind for Politico and a prototypical example of what the newsroom hopes to accomplish with its burgeoning interactive news team.

By creating repositories of information about the government and making them public for everyone to see and download, Politico’s interactive news team aims to team up with its reporters to let a little more sunlight into the corridors of the capital.

“That’s a journalist’s duty, to be as transparent as possible,” Restuccia said. “We tried to take that rule and apply it to our own approach.”

The interactive news team is led by Jon McClure, who was hired away from The Dallas Morning News, where he was data and news applications editor. McClure says he has several vacancies on the team, positions he’s hoping to fill by the end of the year.

Although there are other, better-resourced interactive news teams out there, McClure says he thinks Politico’s fledgling team can operate more nimbly than others and bring to bear the newsroom’s vast trove of information to create informative interactives in the public interest.

“This is a canonical example of the type of work we like to do,” McClure said. “Mostly because it benefits from our reporters’ expertise, it’s something we can do at scale and something we think is novel.”

As of Wednesday, multiple news organizations and a few political gadflies had requested keys to Politico’s applications program interface (API), the protocol used to download and share the data, McClure said.

That’s in keeping with Politico’s aim to work collaboratively with other news organizations that in years past they might’ve competed with, Restuccia said.

“It sounds sort of cliché, but we do see it as a public service, more broadly,” he said. “We want to collaborate not just with our readers, but with other journalists. Who better to fill out this database than the people who cover Trump every day and have a front-row seat who he’s meeting with?”

Thanks to his sleuthing and a little help, Restuccia now has the answer to his question. But he hasn’t heard from the White House yet.

“I’ve been by the phone all the day waiting,” he said with a laugh.

In a mini-tweetstorm Friday that combined references to alleged unfair treatment of his spokespeople and the firing of FBI Director James Comey, President Trump raised the possibility of canceling regular briefings with the White House press corps.

The Fake Media is working overtime today!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 12, 2017

…Maybe the best thing to do would be to cancel all future “press briefings” and hand out written responses for the sake of accuracy???

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 12, 2017

James Comey better hope that there are no “tapes” of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 12, 2017

This isn’t the first time the Trump administration has threatened to upend the conventions of D.C. reporting. In the runup to the inauguration, a senior administration official told Esquire that the transition team was considering evicting the White House press corps from the James Brady briefing room.

That plan never came to fruition, although the White House has changed the briefing process from the Obama administration’s protocol by calling on more conservative outlets and allowing journalists to ask questions remotely via Skype.

President Trump’s tweet came today after “Morning Joe” host Mika Brzezinski excoriated various White House spokespeople, including Kellyanne Conway, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Sean Spicer, saying that they have been proven “not credible” in repeated appearances. Savvy observers of Trump’s Twitter habits have noticed a correlation between the topics on cable news and Trump’s feed.

Trump has made empty threats against the press before on Twitter. In March, he suggested changing libel laws in a tweet that referenced the “failing” New York Times.

The Trump administration’s record on conducting open and regular press briefings has been generally good, with one exception: In February, several news organizations boycotted a press gaggle after their colleagues — including journalists from The New York Times, CNN and the L.A. Times — were excluded.

Benjamin Mullin is the managing editor of Poynter.org. He previously reported for Poynter as a staff writer, Google Journalism Fellow and Naughton Fellow, covering journalism innovation, business practices and ethics. He’s also reported for USA TODAY College and The Sacramento Bee, and he was editor in chief of The Orion, Chico State’s student-run newspaper. An Air Force brat who grew up around Northern California, he’s still adjusting to the Florida sunshine.

In 2005, when Alan Murray was rising through the ranks at The Wall Street Journal, he ponied up for an executive education program at Stanford.

The cost? Around $45,000, back then. The length of the program? A few weeks.

The whole experience left him thinking these programs were ripe for disruption from a competitor who could do it better and cheaper.

“Businesses spend a lot of money on training their executives,” said Murray, who’s now the chief content officer at Time Inc. “And we can help do that in a better and more efficient way.”

In a few months, he plans to do just that. This fall, Fortune is partnering with the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School to offer an executive education class that combines the magazine’s access to the big shots of the business world with the University of North Carolina’s education to create a lower-cost program they say rivals similar offerings from the Ivy Leagues.

The program is divided into two tiers that each have different costs. Take three “Emerging Leader” courses at $950 per course and you get a “Leading With Purpose” certificate. Three Mid-Level Leader courses at $3,500 per course earns you a certificate. Not chump change, but nowhere near the tens of thousands of dollars you might cough up elsewhere.

The program is the second of its kind to debut in recent weeks. Cheddar, the millennial-focused financial streaming network, announced last week that it was creating a series of virtual courses for Strayer University. Both programs are aimed at providing a new revenue stream as ad budgets shift away from newsrooms and toward the twin monoliths of digital advertising, Facebook and Google.

Murray declined to provide a specific revenue figure for the partnership. It’s difficult to estimate, he said, in part because the money Fortune makes is tied to the success of the program itself.

“If no one signs up for the program, we don’t make any money,” Murray said. “But if it’s as successful as UNC’s MBA program, then we make a lot of money.”

For students who purchase executive education, one of the biggest draws is face-to-face time with successful CEOs — the kind of businesspeople that Fortune has access to and a good relationship with, Murray said. Meanwhile, students will also be attending classes with the university’s faculty.

That journalistic energy and access enables them to respond quickly to emerging topics that might be difficult for a different program to tackle on short notice, Murray said.

“If we want to do an education module around change management — a hot topic these days — in a few weeks’ time, we can have six or seven top Fortune 100, Fortune 200 CEOs talking about change management that you can fit into their module,” Murray said. “So, the way this works is, they provide the pedagogy, we provide access to CEOs talking about key issues.”

It’s possible the online education model could be applied to other titles in Time Inc.’s portfolio with a different topic, Murray said. He expects other companies to experiment with the idea, too, just as they did with research and conferences.

“I think you’ll see more of it,” he said. “It’s a natural affinity between information businesses like ours and education businesses.”

The Minneapolis Star Tribune turns 150 later this month. In honor of that milestone, a Minneapolis brewery made a pale ale in the newsroom’s honor. In a press release, Fulton Brewing Company’s head brewer, Mike Salo, explains how the beer was made. (And he just might have a future in writing if the whole beer thing falls through.)

Extra! Extra! Pale Ale is an American pale ale made with American pilsner malt and high-quality German specialty malts. This beer features Cascade hops as well as a new experimental variety (09326) that is a daughter of Cascade. These ingredients come together to create a pleasantly crisp and aromatic pale ale with notes of citrus and tropical fruit.

The new brew will be available statewide the day after the Tribune’s official anniversary, May 25.

This isn’t the first news-inspired ale to debut in recent months. In April, the Toronto brewery Northern Maverick unveiled “Fake News Ale,” a beer that the company says pairs well with “small hands, striking comb overs, HUUUGE egos and all things Mexican.”

Kristen Hare covers local news innovation for the Poynter Institute. Her work for Poynter has earned her a Mirror Award nomination. Hare, a graduate of the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism, spent 5 years as the Sunday features writer and an assistant editor at the St. Joseph (Missouri) News-Press, and five years as a staff writer covering race, immigration, the census and aging at the St. Louis Beacon. She also spent two years with the Peace Corps in Guyana, South America. Hare and her family live outside Tampa.

Local journalism has been hit hard in the last decade. That hasn’t stopped. But in a survey of more than 400 journalists at newspapers with a circulation of under 50,000, the majority of journalists surveyed expressed optimism about the future.

The study, by Christopher Ali and Damian Radcliffe, fellows at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, was published today in Columbia Journalism Review. Ali and Radcliffe also wrote a piece about their findings.

The report is based on an online survey of 420 journalists from across the country.

Despite cuts and job losses over the past decade, as a group our respondents were more upbeat about their future than perhaps might be expected. At the same time, local journalists remain aware of the significant challenges their sector faces. Respondents told us about issues in recruiting and retaining young journalists, the difficulty of establishing relationships with the next generation of local news consumers, and the wider challenge of overcoming general cynicism toward both the journalistic profession and the mainstream media.

Some numbers from the study aren’t surprising:

• Forty six percent surveyed are writing more stories than they were just two years ago.
• Fifty nine percent reported their newsrooms were smaller than in 2014.
• Seventy percent pay attention to metrics.

Want more on the transformation of local news? Join the conversation in our weekly newsletter, Local Edition.

But some of the findings might not be quite as expected for people used to the constant drumbeat of negative news about local news:

• Sixty one percent are “very positive” or “slightly positive” about the future.
• Seventy percent reported they spend more time on digital than they did two years before.
• Local journalists might not have access to newsroom R&D like bigger newsrooms, but many have learned to teach themselves. Seventy nine percent rely on publications such as Nieman Lab, Poynter and MediaShift, according to the study, while 75 percent are just teaching themselves.
• Of the 70 percent of journalists using metrics to measure engagement and unique visitors, 65 percent said those metrics influenced how they formed their stories “some of the time.”

The report also details technology and emerging platforms and the future. You can read it here.

Kristen Hare covers local news innovation for the Poynter Institute. Her work for Poynter has earned her a Mirror Award nomination. Hare, a graduate of the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism, spent 5 years as the Sunday features writer and an assistant editor at the St. Joseph (Missouri) News-Press, and five years as a staff writer covering race, immigration, the census and aging at the St. Louis Beacon. She also spent two years with the Peace Corps in Guyana, South America. Hare and her family live outside Tampa.

Facebook announced on Wednesday that it’s penalizing websites that contain little substantive content and junky advertising, the social network’s latest step to police its platform for content that users find objectionable or irrelevant.

“We hear from our community that they’re disappointed when they click on a link that leads to a web page containing little substantive content and that is covered in disruptive, shocking or malicious ads,” wrote Jiun-Ren Lin and Shengbo Guo in a post on Facebook’s website. “People expect their experience after clicking on a post to be straightforward.”

In the coming months, Facebook will begin rolling out the change across its entire News Feed, the influential, algorithm-driven product that serves as the de facto homepage for the social network’s 1.94 billion monthly active users. Publishers that do not traffic in shabby content or shocking ads will likely see their audiences increase, Facebook announced. Those who do “should see a decline in traffic.”

Related Training: Building Trust on Facebook

Today’s change comes as many industry forces — including Facebook itself — have pushed many publishers away from producing low-quality content for the widest possible audience and toward producing quality content for specific, engaged audiences. The spread of fake news on Facebook and other platforms has led some — including The New York Times — to tout the relative safety and prestige of their brands as a major selling point to ad buyers.

The rise of ad-blocking and revelations about widespread ad fraud have raised serious doubts about the value of programmatic advertising. And Facebook has penalized clickbait and fake news sites on its platform in response to “you’ll never believe what happened next!” headlines.

Meanwhile, Facebook and Google continue to consolidate their dominance. A recent report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau said that Facebook and Google gobbled up nearly all the growth in direct response advertising last year.

Facebook will use machine learning to cut down on sites with trashy content, automating the work a discerning editor might do at a massive scale. According to a report from Marketing Land, the artificial intelligence will refer to a list containing hundreds of thousands of sites and extrapolate its decision-making from there.

“We’re also looking at things like, when you go to visit a page, is there a pop-up full of ads that gets in the way of the content that you’re trying to get to?” News Feed product manager Greg Marra told Marketing Land. “And then we’re looking at the quality of the ads themselves. Are the ads sort of shocking ads that show, like, toenail fungus stuff? Are they really sexualized ads that might be surprising in that context? Are they the kind of the high-quality ads that people don’t mind when they see online?”

A rendering provided by Facebook provided hypothetical examples of ads that would be penalized by today’s change. Many of them resemble the “Around the Web” advertisements that are the bailiwick of companies like Taboola or Outbrain.

Last Friday, The Denver Post reported it was considering relocating the newsroom from its downtown Denver home to one in nearby Adams County, where the Post’s printing facility is located.

On Tuesday, Michael Roberts reported for Westword that the decision has already been made. Publisher Mac Tully confirmed the news in a statement, noting that they plan to keep some kind of office space downtown:

I can confirm that The Denver Post will move the majority of its news and advertising staff to our offices on Washington Street. While we would like to stay in our current building, the move offers a considerable cost savings during this difficult period in the newspaper industry and allows us to keep the most important part of our content generating resources in the newsroom and advertising: the people.

The move means that Denver, which until 2009 was a two-newspaper town, will no longer have a major metro daily headquartered within its city limits.

The Post isn’t the first legacy newsroom to leave its downtown headquarters. The Miami Herald left its home on Biscayne Bay for the suburbs of Doral in 2013.

Other newspapers have left their iconic buildings for newer (and smaller) ones just down the street, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Post, The Wichita Eagle and the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The Dallas Morning News will soon move from its iconic downtown building, known as “The Rock of Truth,” to another space downtown.

The Post is a Digital First Media newspaper. That company recently cut staff at its Bay Area News Group, including at the 2017-Pulitzer-Prize-winning the Pulitzer Prize-winning East Bay Times.

Earlier this year in Denver, Denverite merged with Billy Penn parent company Spirited Media. The company aims to provide the city’s residents with engaging, mobile-first news.

Kristen Hare covers local news innovation for the Poynter Institute. Her work for Poynter has earned her a Mirror Award nomination. Hare, a graduate of the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism, spent 5 years as the Sunday features writer and an assistant editor at the St. Joseph (Missouri) News-Press, and five years as a staff writer covering race, immigration, the census and aging at the St. Louis Beacon. She also spent two years with the Peace Corps in Guyana, South America. Hare and her family live outside Tampa.

Jonathan Hunt, Vox Media’s former vice president of international operations, has left the digital news publisher for a job leading National Geographic’s audience development and digital strategy.

Hunt’s hire is part of an expansion of National Geographic’s digital team. Also new at National Geographic will be Marcus East, formerly the digital director at retail company Marks and Spencer, who will be executive vice president of product and technology. He will be joined by Marcelo Galdieri, previously senior vice president of global consumer digital programs at MasterCard, who will be senior vice president of digital product at National Geographic.

Rachel Webber, executive vice president of digital product at National Geographic, emphasized the importance of building the company’s relationship with readers and viewers in a statement.

“Marcus, Marcelo and Jonathan have strong track records in aggregating audiences and building engaging relationships with communities through smart product, social and video solutions for some of the world’s most beloved brands,” Webber said.

Founded in 1888, National Geographic was purchased in 2015 by 21st Century Fox, which embarked upon a mission to transform it into a kind of “HBO for science and adventure programming,” according to a 2016 Bloomberg assessment of the changing company.

Hunt has spent his career in digital media. He rose to become director of global marketing at Vice Media before decamping for Vox Media to become its vice president of marketing and communications. In September 2016, he was named vice president of international at Vox Media to lead the company’s global expansion.

Benjamin Mullin is the managing editor of Poynter.org. He previously reported for Poynter as a staff writer, Google Journalism Fellow and Naughton Fellow, covering journalism innovation, business practices and ethics. He’s also reported for USA TODAY College and The Sacramento Bee, and he was editor in chief of The Orion, Chico State’s student-run newspaper. An Air Force brat who grew up around Northern California, he’s still adjusting to the Florida sunshine.

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Sean Hannity, the eight-figure archetype of selective moral outrage, last night charged the press with going “completely insane” over the James Comey firing.

Hannity accused it of “selective moral outrage,” proving it takes one to know one amid wall-to-wall Comey coverage replete with reflexive references to Watergate.

Wrote The New York Times’ Peter Baker, “Not since Watergate has a president dismissed the person leading an investigation bearing on him, and Mr. Trump’s decision late Tuesday afternoon drew instant comparisons to the Saturday Night Massacre, when President Richard M. Nixon ordered the firing of Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor looking into the so-called third-rate burglary that would eventually bring Nixon down.”

CNN quickly noted the Democrats “immediately raising comparisons to the Watergate era and claiming that the FBI chief was fired because his investigation got too close to the White House.”

“Trumpian” or “Nixonian?” asked The Washington Post. With the New York Daily News declaring “Coup de Trump,” it was worthwhile asking somebody who knew what he was talking about.

“Not SNM,” John Dean, a party and observer to Watergate and the Saturday Night Massacre, emailed before a CNN appearance. “But totally botched, and done in a manner that looks guilty — not proceeding as an innocent president would.”

Predictably homogenous coverage prevails. By and large, Fox defends Trump, while MSNBC and CNN attack.

On “Morning Joe,” Mika Brzezinski beckoned Bob Woodward to discuss the “echoes of Watergate” and informed viewers in high dudgeon, “this is bad.” Then, White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders called out Joe Scarborough for his own pooh-poohing of the Russian probe (a nothing-there take the White House buys).

In equally alluring TV theater, last night’s CNN coverage found legal expert Jeff Toobin (supported by host Don Lemon) mixing raised eyebrows, shaking of his head and the apparent onset of dyspepsia.

The cause? It was Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz (his former teacher) and Toobin CNN colleague Laura Coates making the case for getting rid of Comey as cable’s penchant for Brady Bunch split screens forced us to stare at the trio.

This morning, returning for CNN duty, he looked rather healthier and composed (wearing more makeup, too) as he opined with those of like mind — The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman (very good on Trump’s mentality), David Gregory and co-host Chris Cuomo — and again called the dismissal an indefensible “outrage” on CNN’s “New Day.”

But long before that major league duel arose last night came perhaps the most provocative articulation of the event. Eric Posner, a University of Chicago law professor, serial blogger and son of legendary judge-academic Richard Posner, wrote this:

“In an ingenious bit of Machiavellian jiu jitsu, Trump fired Comey for incompetence, simultaneously: (1) eliminating an independent official who might act as a check on illegal behavior, (2) paving the way for the appointment of a stooge and (3) enhancing Trump’s tough-guy image.”

Admittedly, jiu jitsu is all about being supple, gentle and using soft power. That’s not Trump. And much of cable news. Or Watergate.

And, given the Trump-driven polarization and increasingly childlike attention span of the public in a social media age, don’t bet on any overwhelming bipartisan indignation.

But there will be selective moral outrage toward “fake news” on “Hannity” each evening, like the sun rising in the East.

Disney’s “ESPN woes”

“Walt Disney Co. failed to assuage investor concern about its cable division, saying profit in the business slumped last quarter as ESPN continued to lose subscribers and spend more to televise games.” (Bloomberg)

“Sales in the cable division totaled $4.06 billion, trailing the $4.2 billion average of analysts’ estimates. The unit’s profit slid 3 percent, the company said, a reflection of higher expenses for NBA games and college football. Disney shares fell in late trading.”

ESPN? “The cable unit’s woes overshadowed positive results in other divisions.” Disney boss Bob Iger was candid about the challenges but also solid in underscoring that ESPN remains a goliath during a Bloomberg TV interview, accentuating its future via mobile devices. “The pessimism is highly exaggerated.”

Another Apple record

“The world’s most valuable listed company just got even more valuable. Shares of Apple rose 0.6 percent to an all-time high of $153.99 Tuesday, sending its market capitalization above $800 billion, a first for any U.S. company.” (The Wall Street Journal)

A unique Comey angle

“Trump’s ousting of FBI Director Comey may open the door for expansion of government surveillance powers.” (Recode)

A wealthy foodie

If you like the business of food, check this Crain’s profile of Rich Melman, 75 and founder of Lettuce Entertain You, the Chicago-based largest independent restaurant group, with 127 very different and very good restaurants nationwide and $580 million in 2016 sales.

Brokaw and Beschloss

Tom Brokaw, 77, surfaced on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show last night after historian Michael Beschloss argued that the Comey firing was Watergate redux.

“I rarely disagree with my very close friend, Michael Beschloss,” he said before correctly making clear, “The Saturday Night Massacre was an entirely different dimension.” Take a deep breath, everyone, he correctly cautioned.

Maddow then informed that every Justice Department she and staff had called “was shocked to the point of disturbed.”

The one former Justice Department official I contacted, a Democrat, was not only not surprised but said he would have canned Comey upon taking office if he were Trump. He, at least, was not disturbed.

Headline of the night

“Trump just fired the FBI director, so the internet recommended a few very depressing replacements.” (Mashable)

Jared Kushner was a favorite choice, especially once he solves the Middle East crisis.

Publishers pissed at Amazon

“A new program from Amazon is drawing a range of reactions from those across the publishing industry, from fear to downright anger.” (Publishers Weekly)

“The e-tailer has started allowing third-party book re-sellers to ‘win’ buy buttons on book pages. The program, publishers, agents, and authors allege, is discouraging customers from buying new books, negatively affecting sales and revenue.”

Lost in Comey mania

A total outrage: The Washington Post reports that Don Heyman, a reporter with Public New Service, was arrested for trying to ask a question to Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price as they walked through the West Virginia State Capitol.

Heyman “repeatedly asked the secretary whether domestic violence would be considered a preexisting condition under the Republican bill to overhaul the nation’s health care system, he said.”

“Then, an officer in the Capitol pulled him aside, handcuffed him and arrested him. Heyman was jailed on the charge of ‘Willful Disruption of State Government Processes’ and was released later on $5,000 bail.”

The “dreck” of local newspapers

Though Ben Thompson lives in Taiwan and cranks out Stratechery on the business of tech, the Madison, Wisconsin native has views on newspapers. He’s unconvinced by the suggestion by Jim Rutenberg, a New York Times media writer, that advertisers have a moral obligation to support papers and thus democracy.

He cited The Wisconsin State Journal and local news that is mostly “uninteresting filler…Were a new publication to come along, offering a five-minute summary of Madison’s local news of the day, plus an actually relevant story or two a week with the occasional feature or investigative report, I’d gladly pay, and I don’t even live there anymore.”

Its problem, he says, is “too much dreck to wade through” and an “obsolete business model.”

“Indeed, the real problem with local newspapers is more obvious than folks like Rutenberg wish to admit: No one — advertisers nor subscribers — wants to pay for them because they’re not worth paying for. If newspapers were actually holding local government accountable, I don’t think they would have any problem earning money; that they aren’t is a function of wasting time and money on the past instead of the future.”

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Doomed children gasp their last breaths in the back of a truck filled with lifeless bodies that could have been their playmates hours ago. Volunteers sprint back and forth in an attempt to salvage the remaining lives. And a camera witnesses it all, capturing video that the public won’t see for more than a month.

That was the scene shown Tuesday, when CNN showed horrific footage of the April 4 chemical weapons attack in Syria’s Northern Idlib province. The footage, revealed to the public for the first time, was accompanied by a warning and a clear argument in favor of its publication by CNN senior international correspondent Clarissa Ward.

“We felt it was vital to show you these images because when you’re watching these children gasping their last breaths, you finally really understand what a war crime is,” Ward said.

CNN’s disclosure of the video raises questions about the justification for exposing viewers to such harrowing footage. Below, Poynter’s Al Tompkins and Newmark Chair for Journalism Ethics Indira Lakshmanan sound off on CNN’s decision, and what lessons it holds for journalists elsewhere.

Indira Lakshmanan, Newmark Chair for Journalism Ethics

“If it bleeds, it leads.” That’s the rap on the tabloid press and ratings-hungry local newscasts, though the truth is that most TV news directors and print and digital editors and publishers struggle almost daily with how to show graphic and disturbing images that are newsworthy and in the public interest without being gratuitous or repelling their audiences.

It isn’t a new struggle, either. From the skeletal forms of World War II concentration camp survivors to the bodies of Black civil rights activists beaten by police like dogs; from terrified Vietnamese children fleeing a napalm attack to people jumping to their deaths from the blazing World Trade towers, the iconic images are seared in our collective memories and sometimes have changed the course of history by altering our government’s actions or triggering mass public outcry.

The difference now is that in the digital age, photographs and videos can be easily captured, shared and spread online and on social media by anyone at warp speed — often faster than news organizations can verify their authenticity.

The six-year-old Syrian civil war that the United Nations estimated a year ago had already claimed 400,000 lives is the latest example of a hugely consequential news story that has pushed the question of what to show and when to show it.

In August 2013, the debate was over the chemical attacks in Ghouta, which a U.N. investigation concluded were unleashed by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, killing hundreds of civilians, including children. The images were arresting: row after row of small corpses lined up, children’s arms folded over their bodies as if they were sleeping, never to awake.

Global outrage ensued. Then-President Barack Obama vowed to strike Assad in retaliation for the use of chemical weapons, which world conventions have deemed a war crime. But when Obama sensed he wouldn’t win support from Congress for a U.S. attack, he backed down and negotiated a deal meant to remove the chemical weapons instead.

Two years later, the world was riveted by a heartbreaking photo of a three-year-old Syrian refugee whose family tried to flee the war for Canada. Their boat capsized and Alan Kurdi’s body, clad in a red shirt, blue pants and brown sneakers like any toddler in the world, washed up drowned on the beach in Turkey. The photo ran on front pages around the world. Still, the war raged on.

Last August, another Syrian boy, 5-year-old Omran Daqneesh, his expression shell-shocked and his face caked in dust from a mortar attack, was photographed in the back of an ambulance, and his image became a stand-in for the suffering of an estimated 100,000 trapped in the brutal siege of Aleppo. The world expressed horror again, and still, little changed.

Which brings us to now: the latest images of the April gas attack that killed more than 80 people, according to the BBC. Western intelligence agencies blamed Assad, who denied it. It was horrific photographs of children foaming at the mouth, contorted as they died that President Donald Trump said prompted him to respond with 59 Tomahawk missiles aimed at Syrian government targets and take the decision, revealed today, to arm Syrian Kurdish rebels. Here we saw what appears to be a direct path from an apparent war crime to U.S. action.

So today, as video footage has emerges of the April gas incident, how should newsrooms grapple with what to show? As in every case, we weigh the newsworthiness of the footage against the harm that showing the images might cause. There’s no doubt that the images are of great importance; it was these pictures that exposed an apparent war crime and provoked action by the U.S. government that affected Syrian government assets, the deployment of American military assets, U.S. military planning — and perhaps may affect the future course of the war.

The public has the right to know as much as possible about an incident with such far-reaching human, legal and budgetary implications.

Whether those images belong on page one or at the top of the newscast is another question. I would argue they don’t because we already saw the photographs in April. I would make the images available to an online audience that can choose to watch or not to watch, preceded by an explicit warning that the video is not for the faint-hearted.

Ideally the video should be accompanied by narration and explanation of the news organization’s decision, much as CNN has done with its online package narrated by correspondent Clarissa Ward, who admonishes us that we are watching evidence of a war crime.

As a former foreign correspondent, I know it can hard for audiences to stomach the faraway and often unimaginable suffering of victims of wars in Bosnia or Afghanistan or human rights abuses in Haiti or North Korea. But that doesn’t absolve us of our duty as journalists to try to help people understand — and to give them reasons not to look away.

Al Tompkins, senior faculty for broadcasting and online

It can be vital for the public to witness graphic images. When images of the Syrian gas attack were first made available to the public in April, they were newsworthy evidence that the war on civilians was escalating and pointed to possible involvement on Russia’s part.

After the first images of the April attack emerged, Syria President Bashar al-Assad denied his regime was behind the attack and in fact called the reports of a chemical attack in Khan Sheikhoun a total fabrication. In that context, the initial use of those images was not only defensible — it was needed, because they offered essential conflicting evidence

Now, a month later, the video that CNN obtained magnifies our understanding of the horrors of gas attacks. But I would argue that they do not give us enough new information to justify their use on television or a newspaper page. We have no doubt that more than 90 people died. There is no doubt that many of them were children. We have no doubt they were killed with chemical weapons. These are already established facts.

If I was a newspaper editor, I would not place the stark images of those dying children on the front page Wednesday morning. If I ran a local TV station, I would not use the images because they do not shed enough new light on what’s happening in Syria to offset the graphic nature of the images.

Online, CNN made the good decision to minimize the potential harm of the images by warning viewers of their graphic nature. Allowing Ward — with her years of experience covering Syria — to explain why CNN believes the images are important enough to put before the public was a good step. Online, readers can make a choice about whether or how much to watch — unlike TV viewers or newspaper readers, who can’t choose the images on the network.

Journalists have faced these tough calls from Syria for years. In 2015, “60 Minutes” aired video of what it said was chemical attacks that killed 1,400 people. That video was from two years earlier, and Assad claimed there was no proof that his government had gassed civilians.

The “60 Minutes” story sought to confirm the presence of poison gas, and anchor Scott Pelley defended the graphic images, saying,”these kinds of things happen in the world too often” because “people don’t see them.”

Remember that every decision to publish or withhold requires a new conversation about “why.” Just because a network has published such images in the past is not a reason to make the same decision today — just as a decision not to publish or air disturbing images before should not mean we would never publish such images again.

We live in a time when some readers and viewers will smell a conspiracy in any decision that journalists make to show or withhold information or images. Journalists should explain their decisions, as CNN did.

On a cold, rainy day at the end of April, more than 30 people gathered at a co-working space in Charlotte, North Carolina for a public conversation about the future of news in the state.

Five days later, more than 50 people got together for a similar conversation at a jazz club in downtown Durham. At both events, attendees — which included local journalists and community activists to retirees and entrepreneurs — were asked to share how they got their local news, how the news impacted their lives and what stories needed to be told about their local communities.

Both events kicked off News Voices: North Carolina, a new initiative from the advocacy group Free Press, which is bankrolled by The Democracy Fund, aimed at fostering collaborations and strengthening the bonds between journalists and the communities they cover in the Tar Heel state.

Over the past decade, North Carolina’s reporters — like those in many states — have seen the newspaper industry consolidate, ownership turnover from family-owned businesses to ones owned and operated by investment firms (which now own 40 out of the state’s 185 papers) and major staff layoffs, which as Matt DeRienzo notes in an excellent piece about recent Gannett cuts, tend to hit “small-town journalism hardest.”

News Voices wants to make North Carolina “a model for the future of news” by bringing listening and community engagement to the forefront of North Carolina’s local newsrooms to create what Fiona Morgan calls “a virtuous cycle of trust, quality news and sustainable media.”

Morgan, a long-time Durham-based resident who directs Free Press’ journalism programs, is co-leading News Voices: North Carolina effort alongside Charlotte-based activist Alicia Bell.

“The fundamental issue [that] we’re trying to work on [is this]: If only journalists care about the future of journalism, we’re in big trouble,” says Morgan.

Over the next months, Morgan and Bell plan to bring journalists and community members together for public conversations about the local news ecosystem across the state, shoring up newsroom capacity and helping communities find ways to connect with the local newsrooms in their areas.

News Voices: North Carolina follows a similar effort in the state of New Jersey, which launched in 2015. I reached out to both Morgan and Bell to learn how they plan to connect with residents across the state and what other newsrooms can learn from this effort.

I know News Voices started in New Jersey and is now in North Carolina. Why those two states in particular, and what learnings from the New Jersey program are being applied in North Carolina?

Morgan: The two things that led us to decide where to bring this project boil down to need and infrastructure. New Jersey and North Carolina rate highly on both, for different reasons.

New Jersey, despite being the most densely populated state in the country with 9 million people, is in a sense a news desert because it lies in between two of the largest media markets in the country: New York (which is number one of course), and Philadelphia, which is number four.

[That means] New Jersey gets very little broadcast coverage of its state and local public affairs and has historically been even more reliant on print newspapers than most places for its news. And print newspapers in New Jersey are experiencing the same problems that print everywhere is experiencing.

Yet New Jersey is also a place with a lot of exciting journalism going on, especially by startups like New Brunswick Today (which you may have seen on Samantha Bee’s show), Jersey Shore Hurricane News and NJ Spotlight. Montclair State University’s Center for Cooperative Media has become a national leader in talking about how to do collaborative journalism, but more than that, their NJ News Commons is a hub for journalists and news outlets of all kinds across the state.

All of that together, I think [is] the infrastructure that made News Voices successful in New Jersey: a great funder who supported us with more than money, a network that had already been established where we didn’t have to talk people into the idea that engagement and collaboration are worthwhile, partners and allies already in place and eager to work with us.

North Carolina has approximately the same number of people as New Jersey, but they’re far more spread out across both square miles and media markets. Like a lot of states, we have an intense rural-urban divide, and that plays out in our media. NC’s got two of the top 25 media markets in the country (Charlotte and Raleigh) and give total primary markets, plus at the edges of the state people get news from Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina and Virginia.

The attention is dispersed, and the main newspapers that used to reach from the mountains the coast — The Charlotte Observer and The News & Observer — have reduced their footprint, seen their newsrooms shrink and as a result of both have lost the reach and influence they once had.

Why is that a problem? Because this is a Dillon’s Rule state, which means that the state legislature has the power to make decisions that affect everything that happens at the county and municipal level.

Metro newspapers that have been critical institutions are getting weaker all the time. Community newspapers are facing market pressures, losing readers and becoming more consolidated (see UNC professor Penelope Abernathy’s report on news deserts). Yet we also have very good public radio stations across the state, especially WUNC and WFAE. We have a public TV system with incredible reach to all these disparate markets. And then there are these individual outlets doing great work.

WRAL is a locally-owned station located in the Triangle investing a lot in its programming both for broadcast and digital and has done a tremendous job on covering the state legislature. There are nonprofit news organizations doing great work: Carolina Public Press, NC Health News, EdNC, NC Policy Watch, Coastal Review Online.

We have ethnic media going strong across the state, too. We have very strong journalism schools at UNC-Chapel Hill, Elon University and NC A&T, plus dozens of other journalism programs that are growing. And beyond just the J-schools, North Carolina is so rich in colleges and universities that are anchor institutions for culture and economic development.

I also hope we can help get at this structural issue around the legislature and reporting that connects the dots between people’s experiences and the policies at work. I would love to find a way not only to bring coverage of the legislature to more people, but to bring the local perspectives around specific issues and specific bills to the reporters covering the legislature.

How do you plan to engage or connect with people beyond the urban areas of Charlotte and the Triangle? I know that Internet speeds and access vary considerably — how do we engage people who are underserved?

Morgan: That’s a great question. And yes, broadband access is a significant issue in our state. I wrote about it quite a bit when I was a reporter.

In terms of geography, our plan right now is to start in Charlotte and the Triangle and to expand from there. We’re talking to folks in Asheville, the Triad (that’s Greensboro Winston-Salem and High Point) and Wilmington. Our goal is to host our first big public forum in Charlotte in August, and the next in the Triangle in October. Leading up to those forums, there will be other, smaller conversations and a lot of one-on-one organizing to figure out what we’ll talk about and what will come out of it.

The big conversation in Charlotte right now is around economic mobility and the inequality that persists there. So we’d like to add to that conversation by talking about the role of news and information in addressing those problems. What are the stories that need to be told about economic inequality in Charlotte? Who needs to be heard from? Those are the questions that drive our planning.

Journalism needs to grapple with the rural-urban divide in a serious way, and it’s tough. News organizations find more bang for the buck covering the areas with more people.

I talk to reporters all the time who tell me they know there are Pulitzer-worthy stories waiting to be told out of small towns, out of counties where no one shows up to report on the commissioners meeting. It’s a matter of capacity.

We have capacity limitations, too. Face-to-face engagement is tough to scale. Engagement is about relationships. It’s about trust. The need is great and the infrastructure is not.

I would love to do some work with rural communities. It all depends on the newsroom and community partnerships we can secure, and probably, to be honest, funding. You don’t have to drive very far outside of Charlotte or Durham or Asheville to be in rural North Carolina. So it may be that we work in a rural community that’s adjacent to one of the cities we’ll be working in.

In my mind, it would probably be a pilot project in one distinct community where we had strong partners and a clear goal in mind. We’re thinking about what we can bring that’s doable and useful and sustainable.

Bell: Part of engaging and connecting with folks beyond the urban areas means acknowledging, learning and deepening understanding about what engagement and connection is already happening. It’s our intention to map out some of the organizing and community, connection oriented work happening outside of the metropolitan areas of our state. Upon completion of that map work, we can reach out to folks to figure out how to support the work they’re already doing.

How will this information be conveyed to newsrooms, and what will they do with it?

Morgan: I’ve already begun reaching out to editors, reporters and producers across the state. We’re using an organizing approach — organizing newsrooms, really.

That means listening to what the newsrooms are trying to accomplish, what stories they want to tackle, what stories they’ve done or are doing that they’d like to have greater impact, what they’d like to do better, what relationships they’d like to strengthen or mend and what sort of engagement they’re already doing or thinking about doing. I’ll think through with them the ways our engagement work can boost their capacity to do what they want to do.

I’m in a position to play a kind of consulting role with newsrooms, in the sense that I can bring examples of work other newsrooms in other parts of the country are doing that they could try. I thinking of things like editorial advisory boards, pop-up newsrooms, issue-based forums, crowdsourced reporting projects.

I can make connections, arrange meetings or phone calls, be available to bounce ideas around, invite them to discussions with community members. And when we plan our big public forums, part of what we’ll do is try to make sure that the content of that forum is valuable to the newsrooms based on their goals.

We published a toolkit for newsrooms on how to do community-based engagement based on what we learned in the first year and a half of doing News Voices in New Jersey.

We’re also collecting feedback about that toolkit from newsrooms and hoping to publish a new-and-improved version in the fall based on what we hear.

What themes or frameworks emerged from the initial conversations in Charlotte and the Triangle?

Morgan: In addition to working on the News Voices project, I’ve also been working as a local news consultant with our funder, Democracy Fund, to produce a report about the media ecosystem in North Carolina. So I’ve had a lot of conversations with folks across the state that have informed all the answers I wrote above about what’s happening here.

What we heard at our launch events echoes a lot of that. Journalists should take heart in the number of people who are outside the profession who care about good reporting and want to help. We’ve had folks approaching us very eager to help and asking how, so that’s part of the work in front of us, to figure out what they can do.

I hear people wanting to share their skills and expertise, both journalists and members of the community. Journalists and educators talk about the urgency of media literacy. There’s also a community literacy piece to this that journalists can benefit from immensely. People in the community are well aware that their local newsrooms no longer have the institutional memory they once did, and they want to make sure the reporters know the local history and context of the place they’re writing about.

A lot of people talk about the disconnect between people’s lives and community problems and the policies that are behind it all. Especially people who work in the nonprofit sector or who are active in civic life, they really want the media to do a better job connecting those dots for the public.

Bell: I’ll add this: People are thirsty and excited about the possibilities of having news and information that’s community rooted and representative of a vast array of community issues. People’s main source of news and information is often another — but who are the vectors? The original folks getting news from publications that are the impetus for things being shared on social media or via email?

And we’re finding that folks don’t always know the basics of a lot of different things. For example, what does it mean to encourage folks to write letters to the editors of their community papers if they don’t know how to format or write such a letter?

I see this as one way to engage the public and get their input to help newsrooms become more audience-centric. But that seems driven in one direction. How does this facilitate a two-way conversation, and are there opportunities not just to report on various underreported communities, but to hire people from within them so that a diversity of ideas is also coming from within the newsrooms themselves?I

Morgan: I’m glad you asked about two-way conversation, because that’s very much at the heart of this project.

I often look at this as a project in inter-cultural communication between people who are journalists and people who aren’t. There’s an element that’s about helping newsrooms become more culturally aware and connected with the communities they serve. There’s an element that’s about helping communities better understand the role journalists play in their communities, the constraints they face and how to think not in terms of issues but in terms of stories that someone can tell.

When we host public forums, that two-way communication is really the goal. We don’t do panel discussions where the experts take turns talking and the audience sits quietly and takes it in until maybe they can ask questions. We use dialogic processes — small-group discussions — to draw out the wisdom of all the people in the room.

This takes us from really general issues to specific people and policies institutions. Journalists walk away from our public forums with stories they can immediately go out and report. Community members walk away realizing the stories they’ve unknowingly been sitting on.

I love that idea of hiring people from within the community to do the work of reporting, so they can bring those perspectives to reporting and to setting the agenda about what gets covered and how. I love what City Bureau in Chicago is doing, pairing experienced journalists with folks with deep roots in the community. That’s one of the models I would present to a newsroom that was interested in doing a better job covering communities.

Bell: A goal of this project is to move past the transactional nature of information gathering into a more relationship based approach to information gathering and sharing. When there are relationships between journalists, newsrooms and other community members, community members have a direct line to uplifting stories and issues.

When community members trust journalists, they’re more willing to be more honest with them or allow them into a greater amount of spaces, which creates a better story for the journalist writing it. Similarly, when journalists are in relationships with other community members, they’re able to be more proactive, rather than reactionary in how stories are told.

The trust building is cyclical. People want their stories told and journalists want to write good stories, but to really do that in a deep and sustained way requires some level of trust and relationship. Perhaps that shifts at some point into newsrooms that are more representative of the communities they’re a part of, especially being representative of more marginalized communities.

In two years, where do you see New Voices in North Carolina? What are news organizations doing with it?

Morgan: I wrote a blog post awhile back where I laid out our Theory of Change, to use a phrase from the nonprofit world. A theory of change is basically a carefully thought out answer to the question, “If you do what you plan to do, what do you think will happen?” With News Voices, our goal is to set in motion a positive feedback loop of community-informed journalism that stimulates community readership and support, which in turn supports more of that kind of journalism.

Our theory is that if news organizations stand up for people by reporting with them in mind, people will in turn stand up for the news organizations. That can mean donations and subscriptions. It can also mean sharing stories with friends. It can mean waving a story in the face of a decision maker and saying “Hey, what about this?” It may also mean that if the legislature votes once again to create more exemptions to public records law, or does something else that reduces transparency, people will stand up and say no.

So in two years, I hope to see signs that we’ve set that cycle in motion in the communities we’re working in. I think we’ll see those signs in the news coverage itself.

By playing consultant or bridge-builder or networker and by showing people the value of engagement and how to do it, I hope we can get to the point where people can move forward on their own and won’t need us anymore.

Bell: In two years, I’d like to see self-sustaining relationships between journalists, newsrooms and other community members to the point that an entity like Free Press or News Voices doesn’t have to curate spaces for conversations and relationships to grow as often or at least not in the same geographic communities because the conversations and relationships are already existent and growing steadily. And perhaps that means that, in whichever cities we work in, we should be making efforts to work ourselves out of the current jobs we hold.

There’s been much written about the need for local reporters on the ground since the election, but there’s also a large pay divide between local and national organizations. How do you keep reporters in NC or attract reporters to NC and get them to stay?

Morgan: None of the reporters I know here in North Carolina are doing it for the money, I can tell you that. I don’t think we need to attract reporters to North Carolina so much as make the lives of the people doing the work more sustainable. I know people who are only able to keep at it because their partners are the breadwinners, or because they don’t have kids, or because they cobble together other kinds of income through teaching or side jobs or commercial work. My friends and compatriots at the NC Newsroom Cooperative are looking at ways to address that problem of sustainability so we can keep the folks we’ve got.

Historically, lots of great reporters have come through media outlets around here and moved on to national outlets. But a lot of people stay because they want to be here, and this is home, and the work needs doing. And there are a lot of great reporters who are now doing other things because they can’t make a living being journalists, but they’re still here and they still have the skills. I want to pull them into this effort.

I’m curious about your thoughts when national reporters drop in for a few days and do a piece on NC. They’re sometimes accurate, but they don’t always paint the full picture. How do we balance the need for good local reporting with fewer and fewer reporting organizations in-state?

Morgan: Ugh. I read so many parachute pieces about North Carolina that are not accurate or at least fail to offer much insight on what’s happening. It bugs me. Fortunately there are some excellent reporters who live here who do write for national publications, who have the institutional memory and expertise to do those stories justice and the skill to pull back the lens and present it to a national audience.

This gets back to the need to make that work sustainable. It would also be nice if national outlets changed the way they think about assigning those stories, if they placed more value on that local expertise.

This piece originally appeared in Local Edition, our newsletter following the digital transformation of local news. Want to be part of the conversation? You can sign up here.

Justin Aglio’s title at Montour School District in McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania includes a word we use a lot in journalism right now.

He’s director of innovation.

When he started that job after creating an alternative evening high school program in Maryland and then working in charter schools, Aglio asked that his public school position include no budget.

“Because if we’re going to truly be innovative, it’s not about buying things,” he said. “It’s about changing culture.”

This week marks an experiment for Local Edition. I wanted to bring in someone who’s not in journalism to talk about what’s working in their industry. Education, a field that worked a certain way for a long time before getting shaken by technology, seemed a great place to start.

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I feel like there are some parallels with what’s happening in education right now and what’s happening in journalism. For people who may know one world but not the other, can you talk a little about the kinds of challenges that your industry is facing right now?

The biggest challenge we’re facing right now is pretty simple. We live in this digital age. And we live in an age where kindergartners are coming to us who’ve grown up with devices in their hands.

Our biggest challenge is: How do we make sure students are safe, responsible and also use this technology in a learning way? Also, how are teachers using technology not just to engage students, but to increase learning and empower students to be learners?

That’s not just our challenge, that’s every school district in the country’s challenge. How do we embrace technology and move forward with it?

Yeah, that sounds familiar. Both our industries are also based on a model that worked one way for a very long time. What are some things that people in education have to unlearn in order to move forward?

That sense that we know everything, and it’s our jobs to put that information out there for our students to memorize it, to regurgitate it back to us like how maybe you and I went to school – those days are over.

I can get on Siri and ask who was the 25th president of the United States, and she can tell me faster than any teacher in this school. Probably.

If you look at the top jobs in 2020, they’re all based around critical thinking, creativity, collaboration and communication skills. So our job is how can we build motivation and independence for students to not just know that information but be able to explain what they’re doing for student-led learning.

And for the teachers to shift that role from the knowledge provider to facilitator is one of the practices that we’re continuing to push and push more and more.

Let’s say you have a teacher who’s been in the district for 20 years. They started in a very different era. Have you found ways of working with those people to help them unlearn what they’ve always known and start to think in new ways?

Absolutely. It’s very simple. I truly believe, and maybe it’s me being naive, I truly believe that everyone has a strength. So when I go in a classroom and I see a teacher that’s been teaching 20-25 years, I learn something every time.

I think checking my ego at the door, walking into the classroom with an open mind and tapping that teacher to share what they know…what you create is a learning culture. To us, that’s so important.

We developed three core values in our school district:

– Putting children first

– Developing a growth mindset

– Developing a learning culture

I’ll give you a great example. I walked into a teacher’s classroom, and I said, “what’s that you’re doing?”

She said, “I call it ‘Flashlight Fridays.’”

I said, “what is it?”

She said, “I wanted to break the monotony when they’re reading, so on Fridays, I shut the lights off and every kid gets their flashlight out and they go and find someplace in the classroom and they read with their flashlight in the dark. And kids love it.”

I’d never seen it before. And this teacher’s been teaching for 25 years. So at our very next staff meeting, I asked her to share that.

A week ago, maybe, I walked into another class, and guess what they were doing?

Flashlight Friday.

It wasn’t a 3D printing thing. It wasn’t a kid making an app. But every one of those kids was engaged, and it was something different, a new idea, that that teacher was able to share.

So, what happens is you create this culture where she’s sharing, she’s excited, it sparks an interest in her, and she’s going to be more receptive to listen to someone else’s ideas now because people are listening to her ideas.

It’s something I think a lot of schools lack. You need trust with each other. You need to be respectful with each other. What it comes down to is treating people with respect and integrity…knowing that innovation comes from people.

Another core principle you mentioned is a “growth mindset.” What’s that mean? What’s that look like?

There’s tons of research on growth mindset, but at the end of the day, it’s just being able to stretch your mind. What you thought of something, traditionally for a long time, how can we think differently?

And a learning culture? What does a learning culture look like?

It’s when someone from the superintendent to someone working in the cafeteria to someone who’s teaching in the classroom to someone who’s a principal, everyone’s learning from each other.

It’s Flashlight Fridays.

Thank you, Justin!

Do any of you work in newsrooms that operate this way, where you’re being taught new things while the things you’re great at are also valued and acknowledged? Is that happening intentionally?

What would happen if we adopted this approach and got the veterans and the newest in the room to teach each other?

I don’t know the answers, but this is a great transition into where we’re headed. But first, next week we’ll wrap up all this unlearning.

Until then, read Tim Griggs on local and national collaborations. Subscribe to these two newsletters if you want to see more great local work. And Poynter has a Webinar later this month on how to write and edit for social media. 

Now, I’m going to go shut the lights off and read by the light of my Kindle. Flashlight Tuesdays could be a thing, too.

This story was originally co-published by ProPublica and IRE Journal.

It’s a great time to be an investigative journalist. Sure, no president has done more to demonize media than President Trump. But nor has anybody done more to boost our standing than Trump.

Millions of Americans have put their faith in us. A few weeks after the election, a friend of mine, pondering the reality of one-party government in Washington, looked at me soberly and summed up her sentiment: “You are our Congress now.”

What she meant, of course, was that we need to keep doing our job: to ferret out facts and expose wrongdoing. It seemed straightforward enough.

Related Training: Introduction to Investigative Reporting

But as my friend was talking, one thought kept running over and over in my mind: How the hell are we going to do this?

At ProPublica, our stories often take months, and occasionally longer than that. How could we cover something as fast moving as a new administration? We also tend to stay away from areas other reporters are already covering. If lots of reporters are already digging into something, why would we want to as well? One of our advantages is that we don’t have to be comprehensive. We can and should skip stories where we’re unlikely to distinguish ourselves.

We could have made the decision to stick with those inclinations ­— to veer away from the pack and focus on areas where others were now even less likely to be.

But we didn’t do that.

Instead, on Inauguration Day, we announced what we would be covering ­— many, many areas related to the new administration. The same day, we reported Trump hadn’t fulfilled his promise to hand over control of his businesses. Two weeks later, we reported that Trump’s daughter Ivanka had failed to do the same.

And our stories kept coming: about how Trump was hiring lobbyists to work at agencies they once lobbied, about the hundreds of officials Trump had quietly installed across the government, and about a Trump trust document that states the president can pull money from his businesses any time he wants. (It’s that last story that got the White House riled up and led Sean Spicer, to blessedly, label us a “left-wing blog.”)

We’re still in flux. We definitely don’t have all the answers. Like many newsrooms, we’re still grappling with how to handle coverage of the new administration. But we have found a few principles to be helpful.

Worry less about zigging when others zag

Rather than tacking away from important topics that already have the country’s attention, sometimes it makes sense to look for opportunities within them.

Take the work last year of the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold, who, of course, could serve as an example in any number of these tips. Countless journalists were covering Trump’s campaign. The size of the scrum covering his candidacy probably set a record. But how many reporters were really digging into Trump’s charity? It turned out none, until Fahrenthold.

That’s obviously not an easy example to replicate. In fact, Fahrenthold has written about how he didn’t know what he was launching himself into.

That doesn’t mean you should chase the week’s news, or worry about matching what other outlets are doing. What it means is deciding you’re going to go after the most important and vital topics, and then giving yourself the task of producing revelatory coverage within them.

A hypothetical I’ve occasionally invoked: Imagine you had been a reporter during the civil rights era and were looking back at your career decades later. What would you have hoped to cover? (I’ve heard BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith tell his staff something quite similar: Write now what you think you’ll be proud of at the end of your career.)

Stop hoarding and start sharing

ProPublica has been collaborating with other newsrooms since we started nine years ago. But over the past few months, we’ve landed on new ways of working with others.

On a Friday night in late March, the White House announced it was making many staffers’ financial disclosure forms “available.” But it didn’t post them online or even disclose which staffers had filed the forms.

To get the documents, reporters first had to guess who had filed the disclosures. Then, they had to fill out a form on the White House’s website for each person. It was like dealing with the world’s worst customer service department ­— only we were trying to wrangle purportedly public information.

Then, one of our editors, Tracy Weber, had an idea: Why not call our friends at other outlets and coordinate. Within minutes, The New York Times and Associated Press had agreed to work with us and post all the documents we gathered.

In another instance, we talked with the Times’ Eric Lipton about our joint interest in documenting the legion of lobbyists joining the administration. The chat led to a very simple and quick collaboration: We shared data on administration hires with the Times, which used it to publish a hard-hitting story that cited our contribution.

It was just one example of many where even the simple act of comparing notes has paid off. That’s clearly not the proper approach all the time. But it can be plenty of the time.

Do it out in the open

For years, we’ve reached out to readers to fuel our journalism. But we’ve been much more aggressive about it recently.

One thing has been to simply say what we’re working on — even if it’s just broadly. On Inauguration Day, we not only laid out our areas of coverage, but we also gave contact information for each of our reporters. And at the bottom of many of our stories now is a reporter’s contact info, and, crucially, an explanation of what information they’re seeking.

Do you have information about the Trump administration’s beachhead teams and their role at federal agencies? Contact Justin at justin@propublica.org or via Signal at 774-826-6240. Here is a guide for how to leak to ProPublica.

It’s not fancy, but it’s effective.

Sometimes readers don’t have insider tips, but they can still contribute. In February, a reader wrote us about a letter she received from Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt criticizing Obamacare. The letter was filled with misleading formation. We wondered if that was true of other congressional letters, so Charles Ornstein and Terry Parris Jr. asked readers to share any similar letters they’d gotten. Again, we coordinated to get the word out with other outlets: Vox, Kaiser Health News and STAT News. Readers sent in hundreds of letters. The result: We were able to lay out how legislators were sending their constituents correspondence “full of lies and misinformation.”

Others are also embracing the approach, and getting results: Last month, the Trump administration disclosed donors who funded the president’s $100 million inauguration committee. The administration posted them as super-unhelpful, non-searchable PDFs. So reporters got together to fix that, turning the documents into data. Then, the Huffington Post’s Christina Wilkie invited readers to dig in and background the donors. It turns out, some of the names were straight-up fake.

You won’t be able to neatly plan and package your stories — and that’s OK

Just about the only certainty with this administration is that nobody knows what will happen. That means if you’re going to cover one of the most consequential stories of our time, you’re probably not going to be able to, say, carefully plot out a year’s worth of stories in advance.

But that doesn’t mean just writing what’s in front of you, either. In fact, it’s more crucial than ever to think carefully about which waters to swim in. You just may need to be at peace with the uncertainty about where exactly your coverage is heading. You may even have some false starts. And there’s no guarantee it will work at all.

Success will require the typical alchemy needed for great journalism ­— doggedness, imagination, and luck. It will also require a leap of faith. Making that leap seems only fair given the faith that readers have put in us.

Thanks to a shoutout from John Oliver, the election of President Trump, an insult from White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer and, oh yeah, its journalism, ProPublica is enjoying a pretty good run.

Just how good was disclosed on Friday, when the nonprofit investigative outlet put out its quarterly report to stakeholders. The report, which contains updates on ProPublica’s strategy and journalistic output, included a by-the-numbers page that reveals audience and donations have been growing by leaps and bounds since Inauguration Day.

• 4.3 million — average ProPublica.org pageviews per month (up 66 percent year-over-year)
• 2.2 million — average unique ProPublica.org visitors per month (up 105 percent year-over-year)
• 120,000 — email subscribers (up 26 percent since Jan. 1)
• 650,000 — Twitter followers (up 40 percent since Jan. 1)
• 320,000 — Facebook fans up 52 percent since Jan. 1)
• 17,000+ donors

In an essay Monday, ProPublica Deputy Managing Editor Eric Umansky explained how ProPublica’s take-no-prisoners approach to covering the Trump administration has unfolded in the months since the election:

…Our stories kept coming: about how Trump was hiring lobbyists to work at agencies they once lobbied, about the hundreds of officials Trump had quietly installed across the government, and about a Trump trust document that states the president can pull money from his businesses any time he wants. (It’s that last story that got the White House riled up and led Sean Spicer, to blessedly, label us a “left-wing blog.”)

We’re still in flux. We definitely don’t have all the answers. Like many newsrooms, we’re still grappling with how to handle coverage of the new administration. But we have found a few principles to be helpful.

Benjamin Mullin is the managing editor of Poynter.org. He previously reported for Poynter as a staff writer, Google Journalism Fellow and Naughton Fellow, covering journalism innovation, business practices and ethics. He’s also reported for USA TODAY College and The Sacramento Bee, and he was editor in chief of The Orion, Chico State’s student-run newspaper. An Air Force brat who grew up around Northern California, he’s still adjusting to the Florida sunshine.

When it comes to international news, The New York Times doesn’t want to be BuzzFeed, HuffPost or The Guardian. It wants to be, well, The New York Times.

Whereas other publishers are looking to lure massive new audiences with editions published in various languages, The New York Times is being deliberately conservative with its foreign-language offerings. It has Spanish- and Chinese- language homepages but isn’t planning to create more. And, for the most part, the Times isn’t systematically translating its stories into different languages.

“We’re not looking to follow the BuzzFeed or HuffPost models of trying to get the most audience possible,” said Stephen Dunbar-Johnson, the president of international for The New York Times. “That’s not really what we want to do or focus on. We’re really intent on finding tools to help people buy digital subscriptions.”

That strategy is an unconventional one in a rapidly globalizing media environment where several major news organizations are betting that building international readership at scale will pay dividends when it comes to selling digital advertising against the largest possible audience. BuzzFeed counts 10 international editions in several non-English languages. HuffPost has editions in more than 13 countries. And Vice is set to expand to dozens of international regions, including Africa, Southeast Asia and Australia.

The Times, by contrast, is “laser-focused” on converting casual international readers to paying subscribers, in keeping with its strategy of doubling digital revenue by 2020, Dunbar-Johnson said. Close to 40 million international readers now come to The New York Times every month across the company’s platforms, many of them from Canada, Australia and the UK. The company is trying to get those readers to buy into the entire news report, not just a single edition, so they’ve emphasized introducing them to the entire suite of New York Times products.

“We need to get them to come often enough to want to pay,” Dunbar-Johnson said. “So our overarching challenge is to drive relevance to that community of people so that we understand who they are, where they are.”

The New York Times has $50 million to spend on NYT Global, but they’ve approached the initiative with an assiduous eye toward cost and revenue. They’ve made inroads into Mexico and Australia, establishing standalone bureaus in those countries.

Last week, The Times announced that it was further expanding its coverage of Australia, tearing down its paywall for a week and recruiting a team of Australia-based journalists. It’s also created a closed Facebook group for the site’s Australian users and plans to send some of its heavy hitters (NYT Cooking editor Sam Sifton, new conservative columnist Bret Stephens) for visits to the continent.

It’s all part of an overarching goal to integrate The New York Times various international bureaus into the bloodstream of the main report, said Jodi Rudoren, the editorial director of NYT Global. That’s led to the use of cost-effective tools like geotargeting on social media in lieu of translation in some cases.

“A lot of our research tells us that readers abroad don’t want a different version of The New York Times,” Rudoren said. “They want the real Times. I think they do need guidance through the report as to what’s most relevant for them.”

While it’s still early days, there have been encouraging signs that the approach is working, Dunbar-Johnson said. Canada has grown its subscription numbers by 86 percent year-over-year. Australia has grown 73 percent year-over year. Much of that is related to the so-called “Trump bump” — international readers hungry for insights about the rise of populism in the United States — but there are other factors, too.

By investing in coverage in areas that have seen the most growth overseas — Canada, the UK and Australia — The Times is trying to capture the low-hanging fruit, Dunbar-Johnson said.

“We have a significant number of people coming to us from those markets and we think that by layering on added layers of relevance to them, we will help secure these subscriptions,” he said.

That’s not to say they’re not experimenting with translation at all. The New York Times has roughly 4.5 million readers of the core site whose browsers are set to Spanish by default. So, in addition to publishing original journalism in Spanish, the Times is translating its marquee English-language journalism. They’ve also experimented with translating topical stories into other languages: Coverage of the French election, for instance, or Daniel Berehulak’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photo essay on state-sanctioned Philippine murders.

The latter garnered more than 100,000 readers in Tagalog, Rudoren said. It’s an encouraging indicator that translation in other formats, including audio, could be successful.

“One of the things that we found out in our research is that in a lot of the places where there’s high English literacy, people still don’t read in English as much,” she said. “Or they don’t live their social media lives in English. So we’re going to try to find ways to use language to reach them.”

Good morning. Here’s our morning roundup of all the media news you need to know. Want to get this briefing in your inbox every morning? Subscribe here.

The image of power was simple: Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump walking off Marine One Thursday, hand-in-hand, and boarding Air Force One for a short trek to New York City with Kushner’s father-in-law.

Yes, Jared Kushner, trusted power broker, to the obvious chagrin of one Elizabeth Spiers.

She’s the founding editor of Gawker and, for 18 months, editor of The Observer, the small circulation arts and politics paper in New York that Kushner bought five years earlier. She worked with him closely (he had a succession of editors), didn’t especially like him and thinks he’s not up to a potent White House role.

Spiers initially broached her views publicly as to why Kushner should be the last person to have a big role in government, especially on the topic of innovation, in a Washington Post op-ed.

She said she quit for a bunch of reasons, mostly that Kushner wouldn’t recapitalize the paper “even though I reached all my numbers.” He seemed intent on raising margins through cost cuts. She sought expansion (and these days is looking for capital for an “unabashedly leftie, adversarial, partisan” startup).

Now she expands her Kushner critique in a chat with Cheddar, the sort-of CNBC startup news service for millennials.

He didn’t display any admiration of journalists or understanding of the craft. He was more focused on the non-journalism aim of getting closer to an audience comprised of Manhattan elites he “wanted to know and influence,” said a rather dour Spiers.

Well, if only she could now hit him up for a very low-interest loan. But as she’s busy with trying to start a media business, he’s in the Oval Office, counseling his father-in-law. Before hopping aboard Air Force One Thursday, he was in the Rose Garden to herald the House passage of the healthcare bill.

And, come to think of it, he’s probably disinclined to help out with her as-yet-unlaunched news organization.

Comparisons to Breitbart, even as an ideological counterpart, are facile and come up short, she says. She’s won’t have any “fake news” or “White supremacists.”

That, too, might give her millennial former boss pause.

Fox probe “widens”

When journalists proclaim exclusives on federal investigations expanding, it can often be that they’ve been clueless about where those probes have been. Now comes this headline: “Scope of federal probe into Fox News broadens — federal investigators have interviewed network executives and on-air talent, asking about sexual-harassment settlements.” (The Wall Street Journal)

It’s a variation on a theme that’s been known, as the government seemingly tries to discern (among other matters) whether material elements of Fox settlements were kept from shareholders. You wouldn’t know it from the Murdochs, but it is a publicly held company.

A Bezos divestiture

“Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos sold about $1 billion in company stock as part of a planned divestiture, a month after the world’s third-richest man said he spends about that amount annually on his space exploration company Blue Origin LLC.” (Bloomberg)

“Bezos sold 1 million shares from Tuesday to Thursday ranging in price from about $935 to $950 per share, according to a regulatory filing on Thursday. He still owns 79.9 million shares, or about 17 percent of the company, down from 83 million shares at the end of 2015.”

Morning Joe + Mika

MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” opened with images of cheering, happy professionals Thursday. There was talk of Bud Lite being rolled in and cigars being smoked. And why not? Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough were at work the day after word they will be married.

Oh, wait. The exulting (of mostly White Republican males) had to do with passage of the healthcare legislation in the House! But one will now watch MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” as if amateur family therapists. We now know the co-hosts are future man and wife and will wonder if the cutting remark here, the interruption there, the melancholy air one morning, the anger on another morning, the collective laughs on a third, are hints of marital distemper or bliss.

So what’s the early line? Are Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough our cable Burns and Allen, Lucy and Desi or Juan and Evita Peron?

Could network programmers have scripted this better? A heavy dose of Donald Trump each sunrise and at least the potential of domestic-inspired psychodrama before our breakfasts.

There was no reference to the big personal news in today’s early going. It was all about healthcare and the show’s regular ensemble (and a Democratic congressman from Ohio) voicing the pervasive media derision toward the GOP’s perhaps premature exultation given the bill’s Senate future. A skeptical Brzezinski pressed a Trump-boosting Australian ambassador on what “American values” Trump really embodies.

But, going to the first break, there was a photo of a happy couple ambling down a hall and, one hopes, a bright future away from the nationally watched intimacy of their day job. May they fare better than legislation they assume is DOA in the Senate.

A bit of context for the press

The media can hyperventilate with a dozen layoffs here, a buyout program there. But the restructuring that’s playing out in other industries dwarfs what it faces. Take this news from Thursday:

“State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co., the largest U.S. home and auto insurer, plans to shut 11 U.S. facilities, displacing about 4,200 workers, after a $7 billion annual underwriting loss last year on auto policies.” (Bloomberg)

The House healthcare vote

As The Wall Street Journal’s Gerald Seib puts it, “A cynic might say: House Republicans wanted to repeal and replace Obamacare in the worst way, and that’s what they did.”

And here from Kaiser Health News read “five of the biggest flashpoints that could make trouble for the bill in the upper chamber.”

Media stocks heading south

“A tepid outlook for television ad revenue and concerns about the longevity of the big pay-TV bundle are causing jitters among media investors.” (The Wall Street Journal) Viacom is one vivid example.

Apple’s China problem

Imagine, it’s less than 10 percent of the market there.

“Unlike the rest of the world, in China the most important layer of the smartphone stack is not the phone’s operating system. Rather, it is WeChat…every aspect of a typical Chinese person’s life, not just online…is conducted through a single app (and, to the extent other apps are used, they are often games promoted through WeChat).” (Stratchery)

Media “drama queens”

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette finds this local angle in an AP story:

“Joe Manganiello is asking for the media to dial down the drama surrounding the upcoming stand-alone Batman film. Mr. Manganiello, a Mt. Lebanon native, is signed on to play the villain Deathstroke opposite Ben Affleck’s caped crusader in ‘The Batman.'”

“Mr. Affleck is writing the screenplay and was also set to direct the Warner Bros. project, but pulled back from those plans in late January. ‘Cloverfield’ director Matt Reeves is now helming the film.”

“Mr. Manganiello tells Robert Irvine Magazine those in the media who suggest the project is in trouble or the script needs revision ‘are drama queens.’ He says ‘everyone on the cast and crew wants to make this the best movie possible.'”

OK, OK, that’s reassuring. Whew.

Savings might help pay Megyn Kelly’s salary

“Comcast rejected funding days before doomed Fyre Festival — The media giant almost gave the company $25 million for its app. Now employees want answers after the disaster in the Bahamas.” (Bloomberg)

Amid the critics’ finger-wagging

In retrospect, there was a fair amount of wishful thinking among the mainstream media about Trump failing again on healthcare. He didn’t, even stipulating the bill’s ills. Says John Feehery, a former top aide to potent congressional Republicans:

“Look, the media is rooting hard against Trump. This disrupts their narrative of Trump as a loser. So a win for Trump and a loss for the media.”

Baseball’s black eye

“The search for Black Red Sox fans at Fenway Park” in The Undefeated is a natural follow to the slurs hurled there at a Baltimore Orioles star player. But in finding a paucity, and juxtaposing them with service workers employed at the stadium, this fails to offer the larger context of an inherent problem in Major League Baseball.

It’s fine, as it goes, but you could do the same story at a bunch of other parks, and not leave perhaps the unintended impression that Boston is alone.

Where are refugees resettling

The Tallahassee, Florida Democrat assembled an interactive map of the U.S to show where refugees who’ve arrived via federal programs are resettling. It’s just over 900,000 since 2002.

I closed my eyes, clicked and found that 37 have resettled in Edmond, Oklahoma, a big chunk of them from Africa. It’s all part of a Gannett-wide project, including a USA Today tale on refugee admissions declining sharply under Trump.

The economics of The (New York) Times

“Twenty years ago, advertising revenue made up 63 percent of the paper’s revenues, while subscription revenue accounted for 27 percent. As of Q1, those numbers are nearly inverted: Subscriptions account for 61 percent and advertising represents 33 percent of the top line.” (Recode)

Journalism about journalism

“Poynter is reopening its Naughton Fellowship, a one-year position allowing the recipient to create journalism about journalism alongside our team of media reporters in St. Petersburg, Florida. The fellowship, which is named after former Poynter president and New York Times correspondent Jim Naughton, has been retooled this year to focus on visual journalism.” (Poynter)

Sports and politics

“Saying that sitting in the same boardroom together still feels completely surreal, former Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter told reporters Thursday that he had finally fulfilled a lifelong dream of starting a business venture with Jeb Bush.”

Yes, he’s bidding for the Miami Marlins with Bush. But that wasn’t from Politico, Axios, The Sporting News or The Wall Street Journal. It’s from The Onion.

Have a good weekend. Our family’s Excel spreadsheet includes three soccer games, three baseball games, a basketball party, piano practice, studying for a Monday math test and a Yankees-Cubs series in high-40s early May chill. Regardless, go Jeter-less Yanks!

Corrections? Tips? Please email me: jwarren@poynter.org. Would you like to get this roundup emailed to you every morning? Sign up here.

When she joined The Outline from Gizmodo Media Group a few weeks ago, Executive Editor Katie Drummond expressed a desire to start breaking more news at the five-month old digital media startup.

Today, she’s hiring a scoopy cybersecurity reporter from her former employer to make good on that pledge.

William Turton, the 19-year-old who’s been covering tech and gaming since he was 14, is joining The Outline as a staff writer covering the intersection of tech, power and Silicon Valley, Drummond said.

“I love to break news, and I think a reporter like him can break some news and start conversations about the power space around Silicon Valley and things of that nature,” she said.

Turton, who joined Gizmodo last year after covering hacking and privacy for The Daily Dot, said he’s excited about his next step.

“I’m going to the Outline because I’m excited about the idea of doing better stories,” Turton said. “Everyone at The Outline wants to try to break the mold of a lot of online journalism, and I’m really excited to give it a shot. I’m also really excited about working with the super sharp team they’ve already hired.”

Turton, who skipped college to move to New York and throw himself into journalism full-time, is joining The Outline in its infancy. The startup, which has a mobile-friendly site that creates the uncanny impression of a digital magazine, is aimed at the nexus of power, culture and the future and now has between 13 and 15 employees on the editorial side.

Although he declined to provide specific figures, Outline founder Joshua Topolsky said the site now counts a monthly audience in “the millions” and has received encouraging response from advertisers. In a letter from the editor at the end of last month, Topolsky wrote that readers are sticking around for longreads like The Outline’s exposé of the wellness-industrial complex and the monolithic rise of Google snippets.

Specifically, he said, average engaged time on Outline stories for the month of April was more than three minutes per visit. People who swipe through The Outline’s “cardicles” often stop to look at each one. Mobile engagement on ads is about nine times the industry average and clickthroughs are 25 times the industry average, he said.

“Every day, I see somebody say, ‘Oh my god, I really like the ads on The Outline,” Topolsky said. “Which to me is super bizarre. Because in my decade of doing this in media, the only thing I’ve ever seen people tweet about an ad is ‘Oh my god, I hate this ad.'”

So far, The Outline is publishing a handful of stories per day, but the staff isn’t in a hurry to ramp up production for the sake of it, Topolsky said. Rather, they’ll curate stories where they don’t have something original to add and focus on producing entirely original work.

“I think, increasingly, you’ll see us do a lot more original reporting and breaking stories,” he said. “And some really smart contextualizing around stories that are out there so you can see a deeper view of what’s going on in the news.”

And they’ll continue producing stories for audiences where they are — video on Facebook, for example, or The Outline’s daily and weekly podcasts for audio junkies.

“I’m very bullish on distributed, if it’s smart distributed,” he said.

Correction: A previous version of this story said The Outline was using Facebook Live. In fact, it is using Facebook for video stories.

An unequivocally positive side-effect of all the “fake news” headlines has been a growing interest among social scientists to research the impact of fact-checking.

In one of the most recent studies (here in English), economists at the Paris School of Economics and Sciences Po found that providing factual information on immigration improved French voters’ understanding but didn’t reduce their likelihood to vote for the fact-checked politician.

This finding is in line with a study published earlier this year conducted on American voters.

The researchers surveyed 2,480 French individuals online in four regions where the far-right Front National party (FN) had done best in last year’s regional elections. The sample was otherwise representative of the French population in terms of age, gender and population.

Respondents were put into one of four groups. The first group received false claims on immigration made by Marine Le Pen, the FN’s presidential candidate. The second group obtained statistics on the same issues. The other two groups were given both or neither, respectively.

Across all groups, the researchers tested respondents’ understanding of the facts, their support for Le Pen on immigration and their voting intentions.

The variation of factual understanding among these four treatments is immediately clear. In one of the three claims tested, Le Pen used photos from the migration influx into Germany and Hungary to claim that 99 percent of refugees were men. UN stats indicate that the actual share of adult males among migrants coming into Europe from the Mediterranean was 58 percent.

In the graph below, respondents are divided into deciles, and the correct answer marked with a red vertical line. The “informed” group correctly determined the share of men more than 60 percent of the time. Individuals given no information or the false claims by Le Pen were far more likely to suggest a higher percentage.

Overall, knowledge of the facts was negatively affected when respondents only read Le Pen’s claims but improved when they were offered the facts alone or both the facts and Le Pen’s claims.

“We don’t get any backfiring on the facts,” said Emeric Henry, one of the authors of the paper (also in line with recent findings). Le Pen supporters “update their facts, even if a bit less than the others.”

More surprisingly, the intention to vote for Le Pen improved not just among respondents subjected to her claims but also among respondents who were offered the facts alone. The study calls this a “backfiring” effect too, though it relates to voting intentions rather than factual understanding.

“Attracting attention to migration increases the support for Le Pen even after controlling for the change of opinions,” said Henry. He thinks this is in part due to the topic of immigration, a central plank of the FN’s program.

The researchers wanted to share their results ahead of the election but are aiming to submit the study for publication — and to study the phenomenon further.

“The natural next step is to replicate on a very different issue,” Henry said. “We targeted a topic and a candidate and we’d like to see if true for other candidates and other issues.”

The Week in Fact-Checking is a newsletter from the American Press Institute and Poynter. Want it in your inbox every week? Subscribe here.

In 2016, U.S. fact-checkers drew record traffic — but the Pants-on-Fire candidate still became the Pants-on-Fire president. This complicated reality could have led to big changes to the ways fact-checking is conducted in America. Yet the formats, tone and methods adopted by fact-checkers have barely changed since Trump’s inauguration. Read about the first 100 days of Trump’s presidency from a fact-checker’s perspective.

Quote of the week

“Fake news is shaping up to be a serious threat to democracy, as you can’t be guided by the will of the people when they’re misinformed. At least that’s the way it’s supposed to work, although in practice modern democracies tend to be oligarchies in disguise with the powerful few lying to the masses who place more stock in feelpinions than facts anyway.” — Adam Turner in the Sydney Morning Herald

The technology of fact-checking

The Google News creator says there are ways social media platforms can check and correct misinformation in real time. And The New York Times writes about automated fact-checking, but omits important efforts.

Final fact checks from France

On Wednesday night, the contenders for France’s presidency went head to head in the final debate before the second round of voting on Sunday. Le Monde’s fact-checking unit summarized it thus: “Marine Le Pen indulged in an onslaught of approximations, lies, untruths and hoaxes aimed at her opponent, while Emmanuel Macron was more sober.”

Also from France, a new study seems to indicate that fact-checking can improve understanding but not change voting intentions. (Similar findings in an earlier study on the U.S.)

No money, please, we’re fact-checkers

Correctiv, the only announced partner for Facebook’s third-party fact-checking work in Germany, doesn’t want the social network’s money. “If Facebook starts paying you, then you are dependent,” said its chief editor to the Financial Times. “When you’re in such a situation, they can tell you what to do, and when you’re working as a fact-checker you need to work independently.”

Who are you calling fake news?

CNN refused to air President Trump’s not-a-campaign ad, which contained this frame. Is that wise?

Three steps for reducing fake news

Academics at Harvard and Northeastern universities put together the proceedings of a “fake news” conference held in February. Their recommendations include citing more conservative voices, better academic-journalistic collaboration and more data from social platforms. Here’s the report and key excerpts.

How ‘corporate citizens’ can fight fakery

Good advertisers do business with good news organizations, says John Avlon in the Daily Beast. “Supporting real news sites—whether national, local, or political—is a sign of social responsibility.”

‘The King of Fake News’ speaks

The man behind “National Report” and several other fake news sites tells the story behind his career of deception and has some tips for journalists on dealing with sites like his. Read his confession in Nieman Reports.

Facebook drops “fake news”

A mere four months after rolling out tools specifically meant to address “fake news,” Facebook has abandoned the term. First, Adam Mosseri used the term “false news” at the International Journalism Festival. Now Facebook Security writes that “the use and misuse of the term ‘fake news’ can be problematic because, without common definitions, we cannot understand or fully address these issues.” (Incidentally, it is also hard to understand the issues if Facebook doesn’t share more data.)

African fact-checking awards, round 4

Through its fact-checking awards, now in their fourth year, Africa Check encourages other journalists around the continent to begin and expand fact-checking. Here are a few thoughts from past winners.

Follow the money

Storyful, a content verification unit of News Corp, and online analytics company Moat, teamed up to launch a fake news tracker aimed at choking these sites’ advertising revenue.

Fact-checking Hollywood

Madonna says a new screenplay about her life is “all lies,” so the BBC did some fact-checking. … This podcast fact-checks Hollywood legends and tales “by researching them from all angles.”

13 quick fact-checking links

(1) Will this new law help kids get smarter about bad information on the Internet? (2) Fact-checkers crowd-fund in Brazil and the United Kingdom. (3) Climate Feedback took a look at that Bret Stephen’s op-ed on climate change and found very few facts. (4) The International Fact-Checking Day lesson plan had a potential reach of 120,000 students. (5) A great dissection (in Italian) of whether ‘post-truth’ means anything. (6) Facebook gave up the term ‘fake news,’ see above, but Italian media didn’t notice. (7) ICYMI: Did fake news sway Jakarta’s mayoral election? (8) Fact-checking science? Here’s a free workshop in St. Petersburg, Fla. (9) Right or wrong, you’re getting Trump tweets. (10) Seattle librarians launch a “Fake News Survival Guidem.” (11) Misinformation plagues a California police department. (12) The Knight Center and Lupa launch a MOOC on fact-checking in Portuguese. (13) Fake news is at the heart of the Star Wars saga? Link ≠ endorse.

HuffPost’s longtime D.C. Bureau Chief Ryan Grim is leaving the company, HuffPost Editor-in-Chief Lydia Polgreen announced in a memo Friday.

“I will miss his wise counsel, his passion and his fine mind, and I know you all will too,” Polgreen said. “I will be hosting a farewell bash for Ryan in DC on Tuesday evening — stay tuned for details. I will also be holding a town hall with the DC staff next week.”

Although Polgreen didn’t say where Grim is headed, Politico’s Hadas Gold reports he will be The Intercept’s D.C. bureau chief.

Grim will be Wash Bureau Chief of @theintercept https://t.co/1LjDjnu0Tz

— Hadas Gold (@Hadas_Gold) May 5, 2017

Grim, who was a reporter at Politico before joining HuffPost, was reportedly under consideration for HuffPost’s top editorial job after Arianna Huffington left the company last year.

Grim was celebrated on Twitter by his colleagues Friday as news of his departure broke.

Indulge me a few words about @ryangrim who, it was announced, is leaving as bureau chief of HuffPost DC

— Sam Stein (@samsteinhp) May 5, 2017

.@ryangrim There are few people in political journalism who have Ryan’s disposition. He is preternaturally calm, kind, and friendly.

— Sam Stein (@samsteinhp) May 5, 2017

.@ryangrim He’s also an incredible mentor and colleague. I’ve co-bylined countless pieces and co-edited many more.

— Sam Stein (@samsteinhp) May 5, 2017

.@ryangrim A few years ago, he, @aterkel and I set out to create a newsroom that was both a place of tremendous journalism and tight knit culture.

— Sam Stein (@samsteinhp) May 5, 2017

.@ryangrim @aterkel Ryan, especially, wanted reporters to feel empowered, to find their own stories and to experiment and push boundaries.

— Sam Stein (@samsteinhp) May 5, 2017

.@ryangrim @aterkel It was a reflection of his own personality. And we all loved it. The work we’ve produced since then is some of our/my proudest.

— Sam Stein (@samsteinhp) May 5, 2017

.@ryangrim @aterkel I don’t want to imagine the bureau without him. So I won’t. Until he officially leaves. But needless to say, I’ll be sad.

— Sam Stein (@samsteinhp) May 5, 2017

Hard to overstate @ryangrim‘s effect on HuffPost in building up and leading DC operation. Will be missed. https://t.co/ZJtVApcMTG

— Michael Calderone (@mlcalderone) May 5, 2017

Stein who has been overseeing HuffPost’s politics report for the last few months, will continue in that capacity, Polgreen wrote.

Grim did not respond to emails or a call seeking comment.

Here’s Polgreen’s full memo:

HuffPosters,

It is with mixed emotions that I let you all know that our mighty colleague Ryan Grim is leaving HuffPost for his next adventure.

It’s pretty much impossible to overstate Ryan’s contributions to the journalism and culture of HuffPost. He’s been with us since January 2009 and has become one of the most authoritative voices in Washington on a wide range of topics, but his speciality has always been giving voice to the voiceless and taking on powerful institutions trying to screw over the most vulnerable among us.

Since he became Washington bureau chief in 2010, reporters there have twice been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, with Dave Wood winning in 2012 for his deep look at life for wounded soldiers after war. He championed, edited and contributed reporting to Jason Cherkis’ masterful piece about treatment for opiate addiction that was a Pulitzer finalist last year.

The jail project, a collaboration that included nearly everyone in the bureau, and led by Dana Liebelson and Ryan Reilly, changed policy in jailhouses around the country. Ryan, along with Arthur Delaney, won the December 2010 Sidney Hillman Award for “The Poorhouse.” His article with Zach Carter on lobbying over swipe fees was included in the 2012 Columbia Journalism Review’s Best Business Writing anthology.

He is the author of the book This Is Your Country on Drugs, an ahead-of-the-curve look at the history, politics and policy of drug use in America. He built the team that made HuffPost the number one voice in politics on the internet. In his spare time, he continued to write and in 2016, he was our highest-trafficked politics reporter. He has nurtured the careers of many young reporters in the bureau, building a generation of political reporting talent.

I will miss his wise counsel, his passion and his fine mind, and I know you all will too. I will be hosting a farewell bash for Ryan in DC on Tuesday evening – stay tuned for details. I will also be holding a town hall with the DC staff next week.

Ryan will have more to say about his next move very soon. His last day will be May 12.

Sam Stein, who has been ably overseeing the politics report over the last couple of months, will continue to manage the bureau.

Lydia

The internet has enabled a more seamless flow of information, thereby empowering journalists to share their stories with the world. It is a unifying medium across borders that help journalists bring their stories to light. Considering the worldwide reach of the internet and the growing impact of news through social media, censorship of journalists has been steadily increasing. The world is reeling from the challenge of maintaining a free press. As technology continues to revolutionize journalism, it also invariably results in a higher number of challenges for journalists around the world. With digital journalism at the forefront of distributing information and news, the kinds of attacks on press freedom are no longer restricted to persecution and violence. Journalists are now victims of cyberstalking, hacks on their emails and devices, malware attacks on their websites, etc. The journalism community has actively begun to use more robust security measures to deal with these issues. Encryption tools for journalists like PGP, SecureDrop, etc., are some of the tools that help the press break these bars of suppression.

For the past two years, .PRESS Domains have been commemorating the month of May as World Press Freedom Month. The goal is to raise awareness of the growing concerns about press freedom and raise funds in partnership with a nonprofit journalism association to curb constraints faced by the journalism community. In the past, Radix has partnered with and raised funds for the International Center for Journalists and the Society of Professional Journalists for their Press Freedom Month Initiative.

This year, Radix has partnered with Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF) — one of the world’s leading independent organizations dedicated to promoting and defending the integrity of journalism around the globe. As part of this initiative, .PRESS Domains will be contributing a portion of their revenue generated through the month of May, 2017, toward RSF’s efforts in defending the freedom of the press.

“Our objective for this year’s campaign is to raise awareness about the challenges faced by the press across the world and support those who stand up for the press to break the bars,” said Parag Barhate, Category Manager for .PRESS Domains at Radix. “Break the bars of censorship, persecution and all other forms of injustice towards the journalism community.”

You can be a part of this #BreakTheBars fundraising effort and learn more about this initiative at www.freethe.press

On Friday, Jan. 5, 1979, Prince made page 1D of the Minneapolis Star.

The piece about the 19-year-old singer’s return to Minneapolis was below the fold, under a piece about Disney.

More than 38 years later, you can see that page in full thanks to the Star Tribune’s newly digitized archives.

Want more on the transformation of local news? Join the conversation in our weekly newsletter, Local Edition.

Until now, archives from The Minneapolis Tribune and The Minneapolis Star, which merged in 1982, weren’t all available in one place. Now, the Star Tribune has digitized more than 54,000 issues from the past 150 years.

“We expect an explosion of discovery and sharing of fascinating things from our archives,” said Cory Powell, director of new and niche products.

The Star Tribune is giving away free PDFs of any front page from the archives right now. Getting to click through the past isn’t free, though. Access for 30 days costs $7.99, and a six-month subscription costs $29.95. The archives were digitized with underwriting from Thomson Reuters and in partnership with newspapers.com.

Other news organizations have come up with ways to repurpose their archives, including mining for unpublished nuggets at The New York Times, resurfacing the relevant at The Washington Post and sharing 100 years worth of images at Alabama Media Group.

The Star Tribune, which will celebrate its 150th anniversary in 2017, has spent the last year rethinking and reworking its legacy approach to news.

“In hundreds of ways, we’re working to become a more modern, digital newsroom,” Powell said. “This is one example of how we’ve replaced an old, manual, analog process of mining paper clippings and microfilm with a digital research resource that’s available to every reporter from their laptop.”

Here are a few clips from the archives:

When NPR’s David Folkenflik was growing up in the Southern California town of Laguna Beach, he would occasionally visit an enormous newsstand where readers could find almost anything they wanted to read.

The Economist was next to Time. The surfer magazines were next to the tattoo magazines. The fake or dubious news — the National Enquirers of the world — were also in their own slots, somewhere in the vicinity of People and Us Weekly.

“You were given visual cues” about what was reputable and what wasn’t, said Folkenflik, NPR’s media correspondent. “…Facebook has, by and large, failed to do that.”

Folkenflik’s comments, made during a Thursday evening panel at The Poynter Institute about the rise of fake news, underscored a troubling new reality described by each of the participants. In a world where the traditional newsstand has been blown apart by technology and plastered on the social media feeds of millions of Americans, it’s gotten increasingly difficult to discern what’s real and what isn’t.

Throw in the growing market for hyperpartisan news, a president that seeks to undermine the mainstream media and humanity’s old-as-dust desire to wallow in its own ideological bubble, and you’ve got the makings of a serious problem.

The panelists — which included CNN senior media and politics reporter Dylan Byers and PolitiFact founder Bill Adair — each suggested different causes and solutions for the problem of fake news in response to questions from moderator Indira Lakshmanan, Poynter’s Newmark Chair for Journalism Ethics.

At the outset of the conversation, which was sponsored by the Duckwall Foundation, Byers noted that fake news and popular anger toward the press is not a new wrinkle in American politics. By way of example, he cited the 1992 re-election campaign of former U.S. President George H.W. Bush, who used the media as a political punching bag to fire up his base. His slogan? “Annoy the media, elect Bush.”

“I think that clearly for at least two decades…there has been a sense among conservatives…not just that their issues aren’t being covered in the mainstream media — almost a sense that they’re being ignored or talked down to,” Byers said.

Part of that, Byers said, stems from bias among journalists who tend to focus on more progressive causes, like LGBTQ rights, over the struggles of coal workers in Appalachia. Some journalists can’t countenance a worldview beyond their own, he said.

“If you think about it on a grid, you’ve got the common narrative in the middle — which we’re really losing hold of, and you have your silos on the left and right,” Byers said.

Although the current “fake news” epidemic is rooted in historical problems with misinformation and propaganda, the fracturing of media brought on by the rise of the internet is partly to blame for the current situation, Adair said.

In decades past, mass media represented a more centrist worldview — people opened the newspaper to read George Will’s conservative column and left-leaning alternatives because they appeared in the same place.

Now, readers are free to make their own media diets, and they’re often not balanced, Adair said.

“Isn’t it wonderful that we never have to encounter an idea that we disagree with?” he said, sarcastically. “We have these silos that we can go into that…everyone says what we believe.”

Fact-checking has been a “disruptive” corrective force, but it hasn’t been a panacea, Adair said. The tribal nature of politics means that voters are often dubious or dismissive of fact-checkers when their side is critiqued yet cheer on the truth squads when they fault their opponents.

That sentiment was echoed by moderator Lakshmanan, who noted that those fact checks may be for nothing if readers choose not to act on them or dismiss them out of hand. Fact-checkers are now being accused of harboring ideological motivations, causing a kind of inflation on the currency of truth.

“At what point do facts wash over people because they don’t believe in facts?” Lakshmanan asked.

“Politics brings strong passions,” Adair responded. “With those passions come love for your team. And when the referees call one against your team, you’re not happy about it.”

The media has occasionally deserved the public’s scorn, Folkenflik said. Trumpeting the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq during the runup to the war when there weren’t any; failing to warn the public about Wall Street’s impending collapse; overlooking Trump’s support among White suburban women; these were all serious errors on the part of the mainstream media.

When outlets like FiveThirtyEight and The New York Times recently forecasted a blowout electoral win for Hillary Clinton, they helped make President Trump’s case that the mainstream media was inaccurate and biased when he won, Folkenflik said.

“That’s known as fallibility,” he said. “And that’s a problem. Donald Trump said, ‘See, folks? I told you all along that they lied to you.’”

Each panelist offered potential solutions to the problem. At the end of the talk, Adair gave a live demonstration of fact-checking done through Amazon’s voice-activated Echo device. He asked Alexa, Echo’s virtual assistant, to fact-check whether former national security adviser Michael Flynn was given his security clearance by the Obama administration. Alexa reported for the audience that PolitiFact rated that statement “true.”

Adair also weighed in on the media’s incentive to prioritize conflict, personality and drama over the more straightforward reporting of traditional news organizations like The Associated Press. Ultimately, the trend toward entertainment-fueled news on network television will continue to thrive as long as there’s an appetite for it, Adair said.

“It’s why there are ice cream parlors and no broccoli parlors,” he said.

Folkenflik harkened back to the newsstand in Laguna Beach, noting that platforms could do a better job of providing signals that indicate which information sources are reputable and which aren’t. An article in The Guardian, Folkenflik said, is probably trustworthy. An article in The Denver Guardian, by contrast, is totally fabricated. But if you weren’t paying close attention, you probably couldn’t tell the difference.

“We are not getting the information we need to determine what we’re deciding to consume,” he said.

Byers put some of the responsibility for stopping the spread of fake and hyperpartisan news on consumers. He cited as evidence the recent backlash in response to Bret Stephens’ debut column for The New York Times. Stephens, who angered liberals by arguing that blind certainty on some finer points of the effects of global warming shuts down a healthy dialogue, sparked outrage and threats to cancel subscriptions. By disregarding Stephens entirely, Byers said, those on the left were tending to their own filter bubbles.

“Don’t shut out the smart, thoughtful Republicans from your life, from your news diet, just because you don’t agree with them,” he said.

The last line of defense against fake news and misinformation is common sense, Byers said. During the campaign, he was often shouted at by voters touting the latest conspiracy theory. When Byers asked where the voters got their information, the answer was often the same: the internet.

Increased media literacy and caution when assessing information is key, he said.

“Every time the conversation of fake news comes up, we ignore the elephant in the room, which is: ‘Don’t be stupid,’” Byers said.