Need to Know
Wednesday, December 8, 2021
Fresh useful insights for people advancing quality, innovative and sustainable journalism
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You might have heard . . .
Chicago has a thriving experimental news scene (The Guardian)
. . . but did you know:
Chicago newsrooms are thinking about underserved neighborhoods (Poynter)
Like many newsrooms, the Chicago Sun-Times, WGN-TV, and the Chicago Tribune have been working to be more inclusive and representative of their communities, both internally and in their work. Much of the work involves thinking about where sources and audiences live. Both The Sun-Times and WGN are conducting content audits to see what types of people are being quoted in stories, including tracking what neighborhoods their sources tend to live in. Meanwhile, The Chicago Tribune has focused on three neighborhoods with potential for subscriber growth, creating intentional coverage about those areas and including them in larger coverage about city-wide issues.
+ Noted: NiemanLab begins publishing its Predictions for Journalism 2022 (NiemanLab); 75 public media stations selected for Digital Transformation Program (Poynter); Jessica Rosenworcel confirmed by Senate to lead the FCC, making her the first female chair in FCC history (The Verge); France detains man thought to be wanted in connection with Khashoggi slaying (The Washington Post)
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Trust Tip: Invest in building trust with communities of color (part one) (Trusting News)
This fall, Trusting News held its first Trust 101 class dedicated to earning trust with communities of color. Joy Mayer writes that there were three main takeaways from the class. One is that newsrooms need to hold themselves accountable by first assessing their current relationship with traditionally marginalized communities. Second, newsrooms also need to become consistently aware of whose stories are being told authentically and whose are being misrepresented — or are missing entirely. And third, newsrooms need to treat the goal of building trust as a core newsroom priority. Sign up for weekly Trust Tips here, and learn more about the Trusting News project — including how your newsroom can get free coaching — here.
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Bringing a pop-up newsroom to the neighborhoods, armed with chocolates (The Philadelphia Inquirer)
In an attempt to meet more people in her community, Helen Ubiñas, a columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, visited a grade school and asked kids to make mock newspaper front pages about their lives. In addition to engaging with students about journalism, she also found the opportunity also gave her the chance to talk with immigrant parents about their experience with public schools in Philadelphia and the sacrifices they made to come to the U.S. She says she hopes to do more “pop-up” newsrooms in various parts of the city to hear stories that are not being covered elsewhere in the media. “We do a lot of talking about collaborating with other news organizations these days, but what about collaborating with the neighborhood storytellers?” she wrote.
+ How Google and Gannett uncover new stories from archival photos (Google)
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How global news organizations are finding creative approaches to engaging diverse audiences amid a polarized atmosphere (Columbia Journalism Review)
News outlets around the world are grappling with how to reach diverse audiences in a deeply divided time. A new study from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism explores dozens of news organizations that are engaging in “dialogue projects, message-based media programming, and journalistic skills-building” as a means of popular engagement. In Germany, two groups are facilitating conversations between people from different backgrounds and political beliefs. These projects — My Country Talks and My New Homeland, Your New Homeland — promote ongoing conversations among residents. The goal is not to change minds, but to encourage “active listening that builds empathy across lines of difference.”
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Over 200 newspapers have been filing antitrust lawsuits against Google and Facebook for the past year (Axios)
Since HD Media, a holding company of newspapers in West Virginia, sued Google and Facebook in January, more than 30 newspaper groups representing 200 papers have filed similar antitrust suits around the country. The lawsuits allege that the tech companies had a monopoly on the digital ad market, thereby cutting into the revenue that should have been going to local news outlets. The goal of the lawsuits is "to recover past damages to newspapers" and help these papers thrive. All of these cases have been consolidated in the Southern District of New York.
+ Rohingya refugees sue Facebook for $150 billion, alleging it helped perpetuate genocide in Myanmar (The Washington Post)
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Does the New York Times enable right-wing spin in their opinion pieces? (The American Prospect)
The New York Times’ editorial pages too often enable conversative writers who are “disingenuous” and “intellectually dishonest,” argues Robert Kuttner, by not diligently fact-checking opinion pieces. He cites a recent piece that purported to demonstrate that conservatives tend to be happier than liberals due to their marriage rates and church attendance. The piece, he writes, included cherry-picked data and ignored much of the larger conversation about what it means to be “conservative” today. Other times, he writes, a piece is nothing more than a “self-interested trade association op-ed masquerading as opinion commentary,” allowing dubious pro-industry ideas to be published unchallenged.
+ Related: Unmasking polarization: How conservatives make sense of Covid-19 coverage (Columbia Journalism Review)
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High school students in NYC urge the Department of Education to push Free Press charters (The Classic)
In an editorial, the managing editors of The Classic newspaper at Townsend Harris High School in New York City have called on the city’s Department of Education to guarantee a free student press. Only 14 states have passed legislation to protect students’ First Amendment rights as journalists, and New York is not one of them. The editors write that they were covered by their school’s Free Press charter when they published a story about a teacher who was accused of sexual misconduct. Now they’re urging the DOE to “free all student journalists in New York City from the threat of censorship,” calling on all student journalists to be covered by a similar charter.
+ Related: As editorial roles in student newsrooms evolve, governing documents and job descriptions need to keep up (Poynter)
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