Arguably the biggest newspaper business story of 2016 was Gannett’s failed (for now) bid to take over Tronc. What the broken deal says about the industry, however, is more than a little ambiguous. For starters, consider that 2016 was a particularly hard year financially, with advertising revenue losses that started bad and got even worse in the fall. Both Gannett and Tronc are profitable on a cash […]
I am retiring from the Poynter Institute on New Year’s Eve. As my wife and I watch the ball in Times Square slide down to 2017, our fervent smooch will not just mark a new beginning. It will be the first celebration of almost 40 years well-spent. When my retirement was announced — along with the news that I would continue to work on some important projects […]
More than a month after the election, the following sentence has become a cable news cliché: Journalists in New York and Washington, D.C. are out of touch with the rest of the country. It’s true. There’s a lot of local nuance that doesn’t make the national news. And it’s even true within cities like New York — growing up in the Bronx often meant watching reporters based […]
Eileen Eagar was a single mom, working at a steel mill in Chicago. Feeding her two kids sometimes meant going out on a date, ordering the biggest steak on the menu and bringing the leftovers home. When we met her in the fall of 2016, she had married, moved to Arizona and started a career in real estate — the “best darn” realtor in Tucson, her husband […]
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. Most of us can feel unavoidably like Mongo in Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles,” meaning a self-perception that “Mongo only pawn in game of life.” (YouTube) Yes, we all try to be philosophical but can lapse into merely being dim-witted, like […]
Good morning. A media A-list’s favorite books of 2016 Jake Tapper, the CNN reporter-show host, needed far less time than even a hyperactive wire service rewrite guy to answer a question about his favorite book this year: “‘Moonglow’ by Michael Chabon.” Bam, that didn’t take long. But it’s why amid a Trump- and-terrorism-centric moment, I asked busy and smart journalists to go high when so many others […]
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. It could be a dinner akin to the disastrous ones in “Meet the Parents,” “Talladega Nights” and “Wedding Crashers.” Or maybe “American Beauty,” where newly unemployed Kevin Spacey turns to his wife (Annette Bening) and daughter (Thora Birch) and says […]
As journalists grapple with the rise of fake news, it’s worth examining what happens when policymakers embrace misinformation instead of evidence when it comes to climate change. In September, YourNewsWire breathlessly told its readers that thousands of scientists had declared climate change “a hoax.” This was big news — at least on Facebook — where the YourNewsWire post was shared more than 550,000 times, making it the […]
In the summer of 2015, I left Washington, D.C. and moved to Carrboro, population 19,582, in the middle of North Carolina. I had never lived in the South before, or in a small town. Most of my life had been spent along the Acela corridor, in Philadelphia and New York and Boston and Hartford, Connecticut. I thought we would stay a year, maybe two. This summer, we […]
2016 was fact-checking’s finest year [1]. No it wasn’t, it was the year of “post-truth” [2] — some preferred “post-fact” [3] — and fact-checking is a fool’s errand. The discussion about facts in journalism worldwide has rarely been as fractured and animated as it has been in 2016, so we collected 366 links, one for each day of the year, to try and make sense of what […]
This year. I started out as a managing editor of the L.A. Times. I end it as a vice president at CNN. We lived in Los Feliz, under the hills of Griffith Park and neon signs of donut shops. Now we’re in Jackson Heights, in the shadow of brick buildings and halal butchers and planes headed to LaGuardia. After the move, we let our 12-year-old walk to […]
It’s still hard to believe Orlando is home to the worst mass shooting in U.S. history. Even six months later, it’s surreal to think 49 people were killed at a club I pass every day on my way to work. The shooting changed Central Florida forever and with it, transformed our newsroom and reporters. The news was unbelievable. It made no sense. Even veteran journalists were in […]
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. It could be called the “NBC Very, Very Late Nightly News With Brian Williams.” Instead, it’s “The 11th Hour With Brian Williams” on MSNBC — a new show starring an old face who’s honorably doing what he does well in […]
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. Imagine if Snopes, PolitiFact and The Associated Press fact-checked our holiday cards and letters — or many of our daily declarations — for the truth. Facebook, of course, just announced it would team with PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, the Associated Press, ABC […]
Our annual collection of media corrections is, undoubtedly, an excuse to chuckle at our industry’s missteps. But it’s also a recognition of an honorable practice that not everyone follows. Outlets that mark their corrected articles clearly or collect them in one easily searchable section (for example, The Guardian) may be over-represented in this list, but they should be commended. A note on selection: This is a list of media […]
Facebook on Thursday unveiled a multi-part plan to fight fake news that includes teaming up with fact-checkers in the United States to cut down on the reach of bogus stories. The plan (which Poynter’s International Fact-checking Network is involved with) represents the first time Facebook has given fact-checkers the ability to verify news on its platform, and comes after months of public debate about the social media […]
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. Bob Dylan just won the Nobel Prize for Literature, enough said. “Poet laureate of the rock era.” But media critic, too? Patti Smith gained deserved attention for a notable performance of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” at the Nobel ceremony […]
Newspapers reach nearly seven in 10 Americans in any given month, according to a new report from the ratings agency Nielsen. The report, drawn from a Nielsen Scarborough study, found that “more than 169 million adults in the U.S. read a newspaper in a month — whether it be in print, on a website or via mobile app.” Notably, more than half of monthly newspaper readers are reading […]
The New York Times will vacate eight floors of its midtown headquarters in a bid to make some money and improve its efficiency. “The current way we have configured our office makes us slower and less collaborative,” New York Times CEO Mark Thompson and Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said in a memo to staff Friday. “It is also, frankly, too expensive to occupy this many floors when […]
When President-elect Donald Trump moves into The White House, he’s going to have a lot of company. In the last week, several major news organizations — including The New York Times, Politico and The Washington Post — outlined their plans to dispatch reporters to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. In what is perhaps a nod to the hyper-competitive nature of Washington, D.C. political reporting, each newsroom is devoting more reporters than […]
Vanity Fair is the latest news organization to profit from President-elect Donald Trump’s Twitter ire. The Condé Nast magazine has seen its subscriptions rise 100 fold Thursday after Donald Trump tweeted that the publication was “way down, big trouble, dead.” This is the highest number of subscriptions sold in a single day ever at Condé Nast, according to a spokesperson. Has anyone looked at the really poor […]
Facebook announced today that it is taking several steps to reduce the reach of fake news. One of the initiatives announced by the social network, third-party fact-checking, will allow verified fact-checkers in the United States to review stories to determine if they are true or false. If enough fact checkers mark a story as fake, the post will be marked as such in users’ News Feeds. The […]
Almost a quarter of Americans acknowledged sharing fake news political news online, according to a new report from the Pew Research Center. The report, which is based on a telephone survey of more than 1,000 people, showed that 23 percent of respondents shared fabricated stories. In that group, 14 percent said they knew the story was fake at the time they shared it. Nearly a quarter of […]
Caitlin Johnston and Anthony Cormier spent so much time with a 182-page plan from the Florida Department of Transportation that it became like a bible to them: important, instructive, kind of mysterious and confusing. But the truth that came out of its pages aren’t the result of thousands of words of copy. It’s revealed, instead, through Legos. Johnston, a transportation reporter, and Cormier, an investigative reporter at […]
