The new media networks that rely on user-generated content—primarily Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube— are both a gift of unlimited material to research-savvy reporters on deadline, and a minefield of potential mistakes that could get a clumsy, naive, or hasty journalist fired in a heartbeat. It’s important that journalism students and aspiring reporters learn how to verify information […]

Ahead of the November 6 elections, CJR invited writers to spotlight stories that deserve closer scrutiny, in their states and beyond, before voters cast their ballots. Read other dispatches from “States of the Union” here. About one-third of people in New Mexico are insured through the low-income health program Medicaid, the highest proportion of any state […]

As an investigative journalist, my professional interests have a tendency to be niche. I’ve pursued stories about the United Nations’ staff pension fund, the treatment of Cambodian asylum seekers by the American judicial system and the offshore wealth of government officials. As a freelancer, I accept as an occupational hazard that not every publication will […]

“Membership” is one of the better buzzwords of the media industry today, hopefully; experiments in a post-advertising, reader-revenue-driven market are the newer, healthier “pivot to video.” But the problem that has dogged the news ecosystem remains: How are you going to pay for it (until, you know, members ideally chip in enough to make the...

What would the world look like without Facebook? At Chartbeat, we got a glimpse into that on August 3, 2018, when Facebook went down for 45 minutes and traffic patterns across the web changed in an instant. What did people do? According to our data, they went directly to publishers’ mobile apps and sites (as...

For many U.S. critics, journalism — and the journalistic trade — is all too often seen as elitist, left-leaning, out of touch with non-coastal audiences, and frequently the preserve of white, educated males.

Freelancing is tough! It can be an unpredictable, unreliable grind, and sometimes things fall through even if you’ve done everything right. As Smarter Living editor at The New York Times, the bulk of my job is working with freelancers. On the slowest days, I’ll get around a dozen cold pitches in my inbox; on busy...

The murder of Jamal Khashoggi, along with mounting evidence that the Saudi government was involved in his killing, has brought a fresh round of scrutiny to the kingdom’s actions at home and abroad. Look no further than the front page of Sunday’s New York Times, where the entire above-the-fold space was dedicated to articles on Saudi Arabia. It’s not as if there hasn’t been good reporting on issues like the war in Yemen and the Saudi leadership’s underhanded tactics in the past, but the Khashoggi incident has thrust those stories onto front pages and into national news broadcasts.

The Times’s Declan Walsh and Tyler Hicks report from the front lines in Yemen, where the Saudi-led war “has ground on for more than three years, killing thousands of civilians and creating what the United Nations calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.” Walsh notes that “it took the crisis over the apparent murder of the dissident Jamal Khashoggi in a Saudi consulate two weeks ago for the world to take notice.”

The media world is increasingly, if belatedly, taking notice of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s repression at home and misadventures around the globe as the fallout from the killing of Khashoggi, an American resident and Washington Post columnist, continues. This morning, the Post’s front page features an in-depth look at the “sophisticated Saudi influence machine that has shaped policy and perceptions in Washington for decades, batting back critiques of the oil-rich kingdom by doling out millions to lobbyists, blue-chip law firms, prominent think tanks and large defense contractors.” Meanwhile, the crown prince’s detainment of the Lebanese prime minister, jailing of women’s right activists in Saudi Arabia, and blockade of Qatar have received fresh attention as the world reconsiders the image of a man who cast himself as a youthful refromer.

RELATED: Why Trump doesn’t care about Jamal Khashoggi

President Trump, who drew America even closer to the kingdom’s leadership, has reacted to Khashoggi’s murder with wildly inconsistent responses, accepting on Friday the Saudi explanation that Khashoggi died after attempting to fight his way out of the consulate only to tell the Post on Saturday that “obviously there’s been deception and there’s been lies.” As he attempts to maintain the relationship an American ally, Trump faces a growing bipartisan consensus that the US must punish the Saudis for their role in Khashoggi’s death.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the crown prince was “shocked by the backlash” that has followed Khashoggi’s murder, and, as the Times’s Maureen Dowd argues, he has reason to feel that way. The American alliance with Saudi Arabia has “always been poisoned by cynical bargains,” Dowd writes. Trump isn’t the first US president to attempt to look the other way when Saudi leadership has been involved in an atrocity. “It was accepted wisdom that it was futile to press the Saudis on the feudal, the degradation of women and human rights atrocities, because it would just make them dig in their heels,” she continues. Why it took the murder of a journalist to spark more intense scrutiny of Saudi Arabia’s role in the world is a question worth asking, but the media spotlight is now clearly focused on the kingdom’s leadership, and it does not appear to be dimming any time soon.

Below, more on the coverage of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman, and Jamal Khashoggi.

• Jamal Khashoggi, 1958-2018: The Post’s Sunday front page featured an obituary for Khashoggi, who was described as a man who “spent his life straddling uncomfortable boundaries between occupations and interests that often seemed in conflict.”
• Trump and a murdered journalist: CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope writes that “until the death of Jamal Khashoggi, it was possible to debate whether Trump was an opportunist or a showman or a poser, when it came to his public attacks against the media.” But the president’s reaction to Khashoggi’s murder has shown the truth: “Trump doesn’t care about a dead journalist because he doesn’t care about journalism.”
• The Post’s approach: CNN’s Brian Stelter covers the Post’s attempts to pressure the US government to act while also keeping Khashoggi’s memory alive. “It has taken a multi pronged approach: Newsroom reporters have dug for information and filed multiple stories a day while opinion writers have written forceful editorials and columns. And [Publisher and CEO Fred] Ryan has issued several statements, communicating on behalf of the paper as a whole,” Stelter writes.
• The Saudi image makers: The Times’s Katie Benner, Mark Mazzetti, Ben Hubbard, and Mike Isaac report on a “troll army” employed by Saudi leadership as part of “a broad effort dictated by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and his close advisers to silence critics both inside Saudi Arabia and abroad.”
• No sanctions: Despite growing pressure from lawmakers, US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said it is too early to consider sanctions against Saudi Arabia, reports the Journal’s Ian Talley. Mnuchin, who will visit Saudi Arabia on Monday, said the two countries “have very important issues that we continue to focus on.”
• In the kingdom: The Post’s Kevin Sullivan reports that many Saudis are rallying around their prince, viewing Khashoggi’s murder and the backlash it has cause as part of a foreign plot. “Saudi media, largely controlled by the state, present a pro-government version of events dramatically at odds with what the rest of world’s media is reporting,” Sullivan writes.

 

Other notable stories:

• The New York Times’s Jim Rutenberg visits Brownsville, Texas, where the news trucks have departed but the story continues. Back in June, journalists flocked to the border town to cover Trump’s family separation policy, “but that was when Brownsville was riding the crest of The Algorithm as the trending topic of the day,” Rutenberg writes in his look at the race for ratings and clicks in our modern media landscape.
• The Trump administration’s effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under federal civil rights law leads the Times’s front page this morning. After the piece published online, Media Matters’s Matt Gertz highlighted credulous coverage of Trump’s supposedly progressive stance on LGBTQ issues during the 2016 campaign.
• In a surprise move, Facebook hired former UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg as its VP of global affairs and communications. CJR’s resident British correspondent Jon Allsop writes that, despite “withering bemusement” in the UK over the decision to hire the failed politician, Clegg is actually a good fit for Facebook as it faces stringent new oversight from the EU.
• On CNN’s Reliable Sources, Stelter, Dara Lind, and Max Boot examine the way Fox News and President Trump have stoked fear in their descriptions of a “caravan” of Central Americans making their way north. “It is demagoguery…It is also, I believe, racism and nativism,” Boot said.

• San Francisco magazine is “fighting for its life,” facing budget cuts and increasing editorial involvement from its parent company, reports CJR’s Andrew McCormick. All but two of San Francisco’s staffers quit or announced their intention to depart the outlet after the magazine’s owner, Modern Luxury, implemented recent changes, McCormick writes.

ICYMI: Midterm coverage beyond Trump

Late last week, after Saudi Arabia trotted out its farcical explanation for the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, the response from the American president was something we had come to expect. Donald Trump had already offered a number of reasons in recent weeks why the medieval murder of a […]

In this new position, Byron will grow the reach and impact of Poynter’s digital information literacy project for teenagers.

New LGBT news source, disbelieving the Saudis, fund launches to promote membership for news orgs

ON THIS WEEK’S EPISODE, CJR Editor and Publisher Kyle Pope speaks with Sarah Maslin, the Brazil correspondent for The Economist, about the country’s upcoming October 28 run-off election. Lead candidate Jair Bolsonaro of the conservative Social Liberal party is running a campaign that challenges reporters there much as Trump’s 2016 run did the US press.

The November issue of San Francisco magazine will feature a 6,000-word true crime piece about a kidnapping in Mountain View, California, a profile of Bennet Omalu, the doctor who pioneered research on traumatic brain injury in the NFL, and a ten-page spread ranking the Bay Area’s 101 best cities. (Spoiler alert: San Francisco doesn’t win.) […]

Nick Clegg’s appointment as Facebook’s new vice president of global affairs and communications raised eyebrows on both sides of the Atlantic—Brits’ in withering bemusement, Americans’ in “who he?” ignorance. In Brussels, Berlin, and Paris, however, the hire will have made perfect sense. Clegg has become a punchline in the UK; his spell as a centrist, […]

News is more unevenly distributed in the UK than income is, according to new research from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Antonis Kalogeropoulos and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen found that poorer people consume less news than wealthier people and that the difference is particularly pronounced online, where poorer people are less likely to...

“It is really hard to know what is real in today’s society.” How do college students consume news and information? The team from Project Information Literacy, with funding from Knight, surveyed nearly 6,000 U.S. college students (at public, private, and community colleges). The full report is here. Our sister publication, Nieman Reports, has a good...

After the 2016 contest for the presidency, when many media outlets missed the rise of Donald Trump, they were left grasping for explanations. There had been too much focus on the horse race, not enough coverage of people on the ground, a fundamental misunderstanding of what polls actually say. All were seen as missteps. Now, less than three weeks out from the midterm elections, it’s hard to quantify whether there has been any meaningful shift from empty prognosticating, though news outlets are talking a good game about having learned from the past.

For CJR, David Uberti notes that some newsrooms that got Trump’s election spectacularly wrong have done away with their numerical projections entirely. Others have taken steps to tell their audience understand what the numbers mean. “As news organizations rev up their coverage for midterm elections, the credibility of polling analysis is back on the line,” Uberti writes. “And the question of how to predict what might happen looms ever larger given the political stakes, leaving prognosticators to reconsider how they frame predictions for laypeople—if they produce them at all.”

The midterms have been cast as a referendum on President Trump, but competitions for Senate and House seats are inherently local competitions. Ahead of November 6, CJR invited writers from around the country to spotlight stories that deserve closer scrutiny in their states. The subjects that the writers chose varied from coal to racial divides to voter suppression, and several dispatches lamented the dwindling resources of local news outlets.

RELATED: Covering a country where race is everywhere

From Montana, Anne Helen Petersen writes that the local press “simply lacks the resources or wherewithal to pursue the larger issues, institutions, and money-flows in depth.” The state’s lone congressional seat is held by Republican Greg Gianforte, who assaulted a reporter on the eve of his special election in the spring of 2017. “How do you cover a candidate whose antagonism towards the press includes physical abuse?” Petersen wonders.

Kris Kobach, the secretary of state of Kansas, is running for governor there. Kobach, a Republican who led President Trump’s voting fraud panel (since disbanded), has turned Kansas into the “epicenter of a national voter-suppression crisis,” Sarah Smarsh reports. “Readers, viewers and listeners deserve to understand the forces that might compromise the power of their ballots, from gerrymandering to unlawful purging of voter rolls,” she writes. “With pivotal midterm races across the country, no election coverage—in Kansas, and beyond—is complete without deep investigations into the voting process.”

And in Virginia, journalists are dealing with how to report on the racial demagoguery spouted by Corey Stewart, a Republican candidate for senate who has been abandoned by leading officials in his own party. “The press and public,” Elizabeth Catte writes, are “putting lessons learned covering Trump, about being less reactionary in news production and consumption, in practice.”

Trump’s dominance of national news storylines and his desire to inject his role into hundreds of local races mean that midterm voters may be thinking more nationally than in years past. But as CJR’s dispatches from around the country show, there are plenty of local and regional concerns that deserve coverage, too.

Below, more on the subjects that are driving some of the races around the country.

• Indiana: Though national attention has focused on the tight senate race between Democratic incumbent Joe Donnelly and Republican challenger Mike Braun, Nadia Brown argues that it’s the Fifth District Congressional race, between two women, that provides “harbingers of our political future.”
• Washington: Ryan Bell highlights a ballot initiative that would change the state’s laws about police use of deadly force, which are among the country’s most protective of law enforcement. It’s not the splashiest item on the ballot, Bell writes, but “journalists have a role in informing voters on how the measure will impact local law enforcement.”
• Texas: In an increasingly diverse state, Michael Barajas writes about the impact of mass incarceration, “the prevailing civil rights issue of our time, and a dynamic that deserves more attention each election cycle.”
• Kentucky: Lyndsey Gilpin argues that the competitive race in the state’s sixth congressional district is about more than coal. “For too long, politicians and the media outlets covering them have devoted more attention to the politics of coal than to those people whose lives depend on it,” Gilpin writes.

• Iowa: Lyz Lenz tackles the digital divide, writing that “despite bipartisan support on the issue, the crisis of America’s digital divide has failed to become a headline grabber or garner any real action from politicians as midterms approach. This information disparity undermines our democracy, hampers how we do journalism, and shapes how Americans interact with the news.”

 

Other notable stories:

• The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi tries to figure out why the murder of Jamal Khashoggi captured the outrage and media attention that previous atrocities by the Saudi government did not. “The answer may be a combination of the time and place of Khashoggi’s disappearance, and the gruesome circumstances of his apparent death, which may have made his story more ‘relatable’ to American viewers and readers,” Farhi writes. “The accumulation of details has created the kind of sustained news coverage that the faceless victims of war and violence rarely receive.”
• “This one has caught the imagination of the world, unfortunately,” Trump told The New York Times in a brief Oval Office interview on Thursday. The president acknowledged that he believes Khashoggi is dead, and that high-level Saudi government officials were likely involved, but “stopped short of saying the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, was responsible for Mr. Khashoggi’s death.”
• CJR columnist Trevor Timm addresses the Trump administration’s crackdown on journalists’ sources, focusing on the recent arrest of senior Treasury official Natalie Mayflower Sours Edwards. “Leak investigations strike at the heart of the press’s job,” Timm writes. “We should all consider this growing crackdown on leaks a danger to investigative journalism and stick up for the alleged sources involved.”
• Meanwhile, at a rally in Montana, Trump praised Congressman Greg Gianforte for assaulting Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs last year. “Any guy that can do a body slam, he’s my guy,” Trump said to cheers from the crowd. “To celebrate an attack on a journalist who was simply doing his job is an attack on the First Amendment by someone who has taken an oath to defend it,” Guardian US Editor John Mulholland said in a statement. “We hope decent people will denounce these comments and that the President will see fit to apologize for them”
• Jenn Suozzo has been named executive producer of NBC Nightly News, removing the interim tag from a position she’s filled since Sam Singal left the role this summer. Singal had led the program for three years.

ICYMI: Remembering the man at the center of an international crisis

In revulsion, the world keeps telling impulsive, immature Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman it wants no relationship with someone wh

Ahead of the November 6 elections, CJR invited writers to spotlight stories that deserve closer scrutiny, in their states and beyond, before voters cast their ballots. Read more dispatches from “States of the Union” here. Indiana has solidly supported Republican nominees for president since 1980, with Barack Obama the lone exception, in 2008. Conservative voters and […]

A peculiar new circulation strategy, referred to by one industry exec as "reverse redlining," has core newspaper subscribers, especially in higher income ZIP codes, getting hit with big renewal rate increases.

“A woman begins to fall. With her long dark hair in a ponytail and her

And then there were none.

Two new podcasts, "Gladiator" and "Carruth," proved ample training grounds for traditional text reporters, who had learned aspects of visual journalism — but not audio, at least not this type. 

This time I wasn’t empathizing. I was living it. To not know if a child you love is safe, to not know where he is, to not be able to soothe or protect him is terrifying.

Days after the reported murder of Jamal Khashoggi, misinformation has ballooned.

When you hear the phrase “right to be forgotten,” you may think of the European Union, where right-to-be-forgotten regulations allow nearly anyone to ask (and sometimes force) Google to take down search results they don’t like. The result is a clash between free speech, the public’s right to know, and privacy. There are legitimate fears...

WeWork locations, gas stations, local broadcast stations, and now local airwaves — Cheddar, the “CNBC for millennials” by Jon Steinberg, is blaring business news at local viewers in multiple ways. On Thursday Cheddar announced that its programming will air for half an hour every weeknight on CUNY TV, the independent station by the City University...

“It will probably be all video.” In June 2016, Nicola Mendelsohn, Facebook’s VP for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, spent several minutes of a panel at a Fortune conference talking about how Facebook was witnessing video overtake text. “We’re seeing a year-on-year decline on text,” Mendelsohn answered. “We’re seeing a massive increase, as I’ve...

It was clear — definitely by midnight last night, but also in the days and weeks leading up to yesterday — that journalism blockchain platform Civil’s initial coin offering, in which it aimed to raise $8 million, was not going to work. Civil ended up raising about $1.4 million, and around three-quarters of that was...

Penelope Abernathy’s latest report on news deserts is damning. About 1,300 U.S. communities have completely lost news coverage. More than one in five newspapers have closed over the past 15 years. And many of the 7,100 surviving newspapers have faded into “ghost papers” that are essentially advertising supplements. Half of the 3,143 counties in the...

Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 181, published October 16, 2018. The state of Slate. Two seemingly conflicting ideas can be true at the same time. Here’s the first idea, which doubts a line of speculation I’ve been seeing a lot lately: Panoply’s divestment from the content business tells us...

Bots don’t actually write Olive Garden commercials, folks — at least not yet. These "I forced a bot to watch X" posts are almost certainly 100% human-written with no bot involved. Here's how you can tell. 1/12 https://t.co/4wVxfraqZS — Janelle Shane (@JanelleCShane) June 14, 2018 But they can get trapped in an infinite loop of...

Earlier this year, Vox Media closed the closet on Racked, folding the standalone site into Vox.com itself and introducing a condensed version called The Goods as its own section. Now, a new kind of good is coming to Vox.com. And it’s getting a philanthropic boost. Future Perfect, a section led by longtime Vox-er/senior correspondent Dylan...

In this ever-changing industry, new roles are emerging that redefine how we do journalism: audience engagement director, social newsgathering reporter, Snapchat video producer. At ProPublica, I’ve been part of developing a new role for our newsroom. My title is partner manager, and I lead a large-scale collaboration: Documenting Hate, an investigative project to track and...

“Who should be responsible for censoring ‘unwanted’ conversation, anyway? Governments? Users? Google?” Breitbart — yep, leading the column with a Breitbart story! — got leaked a Google presentation, “The Good Censor,” that shows how Google is grappling with the question of whether it’s possible to “have an open and inclusive internet while simultaneously limiting political...

A friend who works at a major tech platform recently posed an interesting riddle to me. Disinformation peddlers were setting up Potemkin local news sites which republished a mix of valid, truthful wire stories and hyperpartisan propaganda. How should the platform differentiate between these bait-and-switch efforts and the real journalistic outfits — say, The New...

The Coastal Courier is a weekly community newspaper in Georgia with an office on Main Street — and a VR channel. “Are they adequately meeting the information needs with their technology?” Jesse Holcomb wondered. “Are they carving out a space on social platforms or avoiding them altogether?” Holcomb, a Calvin College professor and former Pew...

There are some sites that everyone roots for. Scrappy, beloved. See: The Awl. The Toast. Or not so scrappy, but beloved still. See: Grantland. When they shut down, people mourn them. Then there’s The Outline. In April 2016, Joshua Topolsky wrote a Medium post entitled “Your media business will not be saved.” Topolsky, the cofounder...

There are few things that can drive as much nerdy-media debate as the Microsoft Word versus Google Docs battle, circa October 2018. What psychotic journos are still using Microsoft Word in the month of October in the year of our Lord 2018?!?!?!?! https://t.co/o9wIExluph — tom mckenna (@tmckenna1) October 1, 2018 Google docs stink. Word for...

After leading a cohort of metropolitan newspapers through a subscriptions accelerator this year, Facebook is now kicking off its next round, focused this time on membership in nonprofit and digital-only local news organizations. The membership accelerator, now one of three different threads in Facebook’s olive-branch programming for local news, started with an in-person gathering in...

An incomplete list of attempts to finance local news: For-profit newspapers and TV stations siphoning advertising dollars Billionaire benefactors who don’t always play nice and/or play music Started-from-scratch scraggly independent outlets started by bought-out or laid-off reporters A chain-based model scattered across towns with appealing demographics Organizations drawing support solely from foundations and crossing fingers...

The Trust Project, which launched last November as an effort to provide more clarity around who’s behind news by labeling articles with “nutrition label” indicators like author expertise and type of story, announced Tuesday that it’s added a bunch of new publisher partners. (You’d be forgiven for forgetting exactly which one The Trust Project is....

Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 180, published October 9, 2018. Have the Apple podcast charts felt weirder lately? Here’s a familiar scene: I’m trying to pass the time, so I pull up the Apple podcast charts to see what the youths are up to. (Ha.) This was my Sunday...

Is man flu real? Is jet lag worse when you’re traveling east? Does smoking pot make you stupid? These are interesting questions, all of which appeared at one point in “Gut Check,” a column from health/medicine/life science site Stat. The column aimed to go “beyond the headlines to make sense of scientific claims.” But the...

Surveys about “media trust” suffer from a definitional problem. “Do you trust the media?” is a meaningful question only if we know what “the media” is. Is it The New York Times and CNN? Fox News and Breitbart? Occupy Democrats and your uncle’s memes on Facebook? In Gallup’s data on that question — which asks...

C’mon, guys, look at the source! So if you’re assessing the credibility of a possibly fake image online, you’re looking at stuff like the source, how many times it’s been shared, and what the image shows, right? Not so much, according to a new study out of UC Davis. Instead, what matters are digital media...

On June 2, 2016, Tribune Publishing — what was at the time the newly spun-off newspaper half of what had for more than a century been known as the Tribune Company — announced it was changing its name. To…tronc. A name that managed to violate both the rules of English capitalization and the aesthetic sensibilities of...

Imagine a world in which Donald Trump is no longer President.       No, really. Okay, if that concept’s beyond your immediate comprehension, let’s make the question a bit more concrete: Imagine what’ll happen to the news business in a world in which Donald Trump is no longer president. Yes, the Trump Bump in...

Welcome to the jungle, we’ve got fun and games We got everything you want honey, we know the names We are the people that can find whatever you may need So that’s one way that journalists can approach their role. Researchers at the Lenfest Institute and UPenn’s Annenberg School for Communication went hunting for news...

Enough with the “whack-a-mole” claims that as soon as you ban one fake news site, another one pops up: A report released by Knight on Thursday finds that most of the accounts spreading fake news on Twitter during the election are still active today — and that “these top fake and conspiracy news outlets on...