When I visited a dozen news organizations on our Innovation Tour last November, there was a surprising consensus among the biggest players on the next big thing they had in focus: Voice-activated news for devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home. As was true for Virtual Reality/360-degree video a year earlier, the medium is so new that publishers are just beginning to figure out where to start. But […]
“Aaaaaaayyyyooooo!!!” yells Will Buikema, moments before he reaches to shake hands with a man who crushes 300-pound NFL players for a living. Buikema, a video producer with SB Nation, is visiting Eagles linebacker Jordan Hicks in Philadelphia as part of an ill-fated attempt to make friends with the NFL star. It goes south quickly, to hilarious effect: Buikema is comically overexcited to meet Hicks, he botches an […]
Newspapers around the country have left their huge old buildings for smaller new ones for years now. On Monday, the Wichita Eagle officially joined that group. Over the weekend, the Eagle moved from its old 181,000 square foot spot on East Douglas Avenue into the 24,000 square foot site in Wichita’s Old Town. In 1980, the Eagle had 735 employees, Dan Voorhis reported. About 100 people will […]
Perhaps it’s telling that journalism is so absent in The Circle, the movie based on the Dave Eggers novel that paints a dark picture of a future that has nearly arrived. Emma Watson plays Mae Holland, a recent college graduate who takes up the faith of the Silicon Valley digital-life media company she works for called The Circle. Holland comes to believe that omnipresent artificial intelligence embedded […]
Before comedian Hasan Minhaj got up to poke fun at the assembled White House press corps last night, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein got up to celebrate it. The legendary Watergate duo gave a speech evoking their investigative reporting of the Nixon administration and calling on the current generation of journalists to practice careful, thorough and relentless reporting on the current White House. Below are their remarks, […]
When newspaper industry executives gather in New Orleans this evening for their annual three-day MediaXchange convention, the crowd will be thinner than at last year’s edition in Washington, D.C. “(That) just reflects industry conditions coming off a difficult end to 2016,” said David Chavern, CEO and president of the News Media Alliance, which organizes the convention. For those who do make it, Chavern promises plenty of practical […]
President Trump wasted no time before skewering the media at a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on Saturday, calling the press “fake news” as journalists less than 200 miles away in Washington, D.C. were putting on ball gowns and bow ties for the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. “Media outlets like CNN and MSNBC are fake news. Fake news.” Trump said, to a chorus of boos from […]
The clapping had barely subsided before comedian Hasan Minhaj cracked a joke about the elephant not in the room — President Donald Trump. “Welcome to the series finale of the White House Correspondents’ dinner,” said Minhaj, the dinner’s headliner and a senior correspondent at “The Daily Show.” “My name is Hasan Minhaj, or I’ll be known in a few weeks, No. 830287.” Within minutes of beginning his routine, […]
Fox News is “state-run TV” and MSNBC has become “the opposition” in primetime and in the mornings, CNN Worldwide President Jeff Zucker said in an interview, adding that he thinks CNN is “seeking the truth.” Zucker, speaking in an interview with New Yorker Editor David Remnick for the magazine’s podcast on Friday, added that there are “clear agendas” at play at both of CNN’s rival networks. “So […]
This story was originally published on Medium and is being republished here with the permission of its author. Two years ago in Hong Kong, I sat around a conference table with some of the finest journalists to have worked in the Chinese media in the past two decades. Left and right of me were reporters who had broken major stories of corruption, malfeasance and cruelty, and who […]
Bret Stephens made his debut in the pages of The New York Times opinion section today with a column defending climate change skepticism in the face of scientific surety, a take that didn’t sit well with many of his colleagues in the newsroom. Stephens, a 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winner who joined The Times earlier this year after critiquing Donald Trump’s presidential campaign for The Wall Street Journal’s opinion […]
The press freedom situation in the United States is worsening not only because of President Trump’s anti-press rhetoric but because of a constellation of factors including arrests, detainment, lawsuits, physical violence and outright censorship, according to a new report. The report, released by the London-based Index on Censorship this week, chronicles the recent threats to journalist safety and freedom of expression and takes a holistic view of […]
Editor’s note: This is the latest in a series of articles that highlight digital tools for journalists. You can read the others here. Poynter’s Ren LaForme and I have spent several weeks exploring cheap or free tools journalists can use. First, we spent some time on video tools, then a few weeks on tools that can keep journalists more secure on the internet. Now, we’re going to […]
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. When Barack Obama was vacationing recently with Bruce Springsteen, Tom Hanks and Oprah Winfrey aboard a $300 million yacht in Tahiti, one wonders if he ever hummed Springsteen’s “All Or Nothin’ At All.” At the moment, it seems like he […]
Almost every time a hot Silicon Valley startup finally grits its teeth and releases diversity data, the story’s the same. Facebook? Mostly male. Uber? Male-dominated. Google? Same story. It’s a problem that’s gotten plenty of play in the tech press. In 2014, Wired ran an 1,800-word dissection of Silicon Valley male-ness titled “This is what tech’s ugly gender problem really looks like.” The story, which profiled women […]
Sometimes those of us in the news media bust our own balloons, leaving us with lots of clown makeup and nothing to hand out to the kids. And that’s how ESPN, the company that changed the world of sports, looks this week. Journey back in time to 1979 when ESPN was created. The question almost asked was simple: How will you be able to put on 24 […]
The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) and later led to the creation of both PBS and NPR, also recognized the importance of archiving public broadcasting material in the United States. It stipulated that CPB should: …Establish and maintain, or contribute to, a library and archives of noncommercial educational and cultural radio and television programs and related materials and develop […]
Twenty percent of the population will experience sexual violence during their lifetimes, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Covering those crimes requires nuanced reporting, respect for sexual assault survivors and concern for one’s own mental wellness. Here are three tips from Poynter’s News University on the proper way to approach stories about sexual violence: Allow for time Some sexual assault survivors may not be prepared to […]
Breitbart News hit a wall Tuesday in its campaign to storm the ramparts of the media establishment when one of the most influential press associations in Washington, D.C. denied its application for credentials to cover Congress because of concerns over the site’s funding, staffing, workspace and independence. The decision by the Standing Committee of Correspondents of the House and Senate Press Gallery — a body chaired by […]
ESPN on Wednesday went through with a long-awaited round of layoffs that will trim about 100 commentators from the sports network’s payroll as cord-cutters and digital media upstarts continue to disrupt the broadcaster’s business model. Among those laid off are on-camera personalities that have become familiar faces on the network’s coverage of hockey, football and baseball and writers for ESPN’s digital platforms. ESPN President John Skipper announced […]
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. What do you need to unlearn to stay in journalism? This week, two journalists named almost exactly the same thing. That’s not rare, but it struck me as interesting because they’re at such different points in their career. Here’s what they […]
Ever heard of Google Blogsearch, Blogrunner or TechFuga? No? You’re probably not alone. Each service tried and failed to dethrone Techmeme as the place where Silicon Valley die-hards get their up-to-the-minute dose of headlines about the tech industry. Techmeme has hung around for more than a decade in various incarnations and still boasts an influential readership that includes Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. […]
Warnings were that the first quarter of 2017 would be about as bad financially as the final two of 2016 for newspaper organizations. That proved to be the case today as Gannett kicked off the reporting season for publicly traded companies. Acquisitions led to some revenue growth. But comparing same properties: Print advertising revenues were down 17.7 percent compared to the first quarter of 2016. Circulation revenues […]
Late last year, Google tweaked its search algorithm to fix a pesky problem: Users who asked the search engine whether the Holocaust occurred were served a post from the White supremacist site Stormfront denying its existence as a top result. Similar problems occasionally arise with Google’s featured “snippets,” the prominently displayed boxes that highlight highly-cited answers from around the web. For instance, at the time of publication […]
