Journalists at newspapers in Digital First Media's Southern California News Group got a memo on Friday announcing an unspecified number of buyouts, OC Weekly's Gustavo Arellano reported Friday. The news of buyouts was a bit better than the layoffs the newsroom was expecting thanks to a pretty sloppy move, Arellano reported: Those sources were working […]

On the latest episode of The Kicker, we run through some of the week’s biggest stories: what media mergers mean for both journalists and consumers, how to parse all of those anonymously sourced stories, and why Donald Trump keeps sitting down with reporters from The New York Times. Then, Pete Vernon talks with CJR Editor […]

As expected, McClatchy today reported some encouraging gains in several of its digital businesses but a big second quarter loss – $37.4 million on revenues of $225 million. The report also included an ominous forecast with implications for the rest of the industry – deep print advertising losses are not expected to ease in the […]

Sean Spicer, who came to office a respected, if combative, Washington insider, resigned on Friday as White House press secretary, leaving office with a damaged reputation after completing an ignoble six months in the office. Spicer, as first reported by The New York Times, chose to resign rather than serve under new White House communications […]

President Trump's own version of "Game of Thrones" took a predictably melodramatic turn Friday with the resignation of Press Secretary Sean Spicer. Ultimately, the exit reflected a real-world clash of various competing power centers, albeit with no actual sex or bloody murders. So one saw the figurative beheading of Spicer amid Trump's apparently unilateral decision […]

After it was reported that Sean Spicer resigned as White House press secretary Friday, Twitter users reacted in the typical way — by posting GIFs, memes, jokes and other reactions to the news. Spicer, who had served as President Donald Trump's media liaison since December, reportedly left because of the president's appointment of New York financier […]

Editor's note: This story has been updated with the news of Sarah Huckabee Sanders' promotion to press secretary. After President Donald Trump appointed a new White House communications director Friday morning, Sean Spicer resigned as press secretary. Spicer, who had served as Trump's media liaison since December, told the president that he vehemently opposed the […]

Fear not, journalists: Roboreporters are not coming for your jobs, at least not yet. That’s the takeaway from a new report from Alexander Fanta at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, who took a look at how 15 news agencies in Europe have implemented automation in their organizations. While the news agencies have...

This story is co-published with The Grade, an independent effort to improve mainstream education coverage in partnership with PDK International. YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW IT if you live outside of Southern California, but the nation’s second-largest school district—Los Angeles Unified (LAUSD)—recently held a nasty and expensive school board election that culminated in the surprise defeat of […]

Telegram is far from the most popular messaging app in Russia, but it’s been the one under fire recently. At the end of June, the app faced pressure from Russia’s communications regulator Roskomnadzor to register information about Telegram on an official government list and seemed on the verge of being blocked entirely. Russia’s FSB security...

Телеграм далеко не самый популярный мессенджер в России, тем не менее именно он попал под удар российских властей. В конце июня, когда Роскомнадзор требовал Telegram предоставить данные для внесения компании в реестр организаторов распространения информации под угрозой блокировк. Сразу после этого, ФСБ России заявила об использовании террористами для связи мессенджера перед взрывом в Петербурге. Заявления...

Two decades ago, I wrote a critical essay titled “Goodbye Copy Desks, Hello Trouble.” What prompted that Newspaper Research Journal piece was a brief experiment in eliminating free-standing copy desks – an approach taken in the mid-’90s by a few regional newspapers. Those papers thought that moving copy editors onto reporting or production teams would […]

This is part of a series of Q and As with leaders at news organizations. I asked leaders to think about the challenges they face in their news organizations and to share guidance and advice. Whether your news organization is small or large, a start-up or more than 100 years old, the issues are often […]

What will misinformation look like in 2030? A team of researchers worked with the Wikimedia Foundation to consider the future of fake news and propaganda. Here’s the framework they came up with: The full report is here and includes some ideas for how Wikipedia can fight “misinformation and censorship in the decades to come: —...

Another installment in the tale of newspaper earnings woes kicks off this week. In reports on the second quarter, expect to hear CEOs tout how the growth of digital audience and digital subscriptions is a bright spot. But I have been harvesting some statistics suggesting that print circulation revenues are far from a side issue […]

For 14 years, a succession of accomplished journalists held “a job few envied but most people in journalism circles paid close attention to.” That job: public editor of The New York Times. In an excellent oral history for CJR, Andy Robinson spoke with the six people to hold the position, gathering honest, often blunt, recollections […]

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. Surpassed poor Obama record on transparency "Over the first six months of this young presidency, President Donald J. Trump’s approach to the office has been characterized by self-interest, […]

A great interview is one of the journalist’s most powerful tools. It can be informative, entertaining, thoughtful. For the next five weeks, the Columbia Journalism Review and MaximumFun.org will broadcast conversations with some of the world’s greatest interviewers. Hosted by NPR’s Jesse Thorn, the podcast, called The Turnaround, will examine the science and art of […]

Early next year — after almost 38 years in journalism, after 15 years at The Dallas Morning News — Keven Ann Willey is hitting the road. No, really. She's embarking on a road trip with a 17-foot fiberglass Casita trailer, her husband and a long-brewing plan to take a year to travel the perimeter of […]

IN MAY, TOM COTTON—Arkansas’s junior senator, a promising GOP star with ambition and an Ivy League pedigree—became one of 13 Republican senators tasked with drafting new health-care legislation. During the weeks that followed, Cotton stayed conspicuously tight-lipped about the Republican bill. In June, James Arkin wrote for Real Clear Politics: “Cotton hasn’t made any public […]

It’s been a bustling week for Facebook and the news business — not to mention the past six months. Since launching the Facebook Journalism Project — a step toward broader collaboration with the industry or a charm offensive to make nice with publishers, depending who you talk to — in January, the not-a-media-company social media company...

We have an opening for a staff writer here at Nieman Lab. If you’re interested, apply over here! The job’s pretty easy to describe: You see all the stories on this website? The ones about journalism innovation — changes in how news gets reported, produced, distributed, discovered, consumed, and paid for? This job is about...

The public editor is no more at The New York Times. For 14 years, following the Jayson Blair scandal, a succession of public editors read thousands of reader complaints, investigated claims of journalistic malpractices, and published their findings unfiltered, naming names and calling foul when they saw fit. It’s a job few envied but most people in journalism […]

Shortly after The New York Times eliminated its public editor position, BuzzFeed asked: Why have a public editor when Twitter will do it for free? In an attempt to answer the question, BuzzFeed Editor in Chief Ben Smith talked to Margaret Sullivan, a former New York Times public editor who is now a media critic […]

COPENHAGEN — Every weekday at noon, subscribers to the Danish news site Føljeton receive an emoji-filled email notification or push alert. That’s when the site publishes its daily briefing, which has evolved into its core editorial product over its nearly two years of existence. It’s published as an email newsletter, in Føljeton’s app, and on its...

It was circa 2010 when Anna Holmes says she started to fall out of love with digital media. The web, once an exciting place where discussion could flourish, had, in Holmes’ view, become home to a series of parallel monologues as people increasingly talked at each other. Hot takes had taken over the web —...

Over the past decade, Latin American news organizations have made some strides in introducing more women reporters into their newsrooms. In 2000, women made up 27 percent of the journalists working across newspapers, radio, and television in the region; in 2015, they represented 41 percent, according to the most recent report from the Global Media...

On another night jam-packed with news about the president and those in his circle, sad news about one of Washington’s legendary figures provided a moment of unity. Around 8 pm, we learned that John McCain has brain cancer. The longtime Arizona senator, former presidential candidate, and Vietnam War hero recently underwent surgery at the Mayo […]

How can typography save your life? Can bad design actually damage our democratic process? How can sneaker and tire treads tell a story? These are just a few of the fascinating questions ProPublica’s Lena Groeger explores in her “Visual Evidence” essay series. She also speaks regularly at conferences about, for instance, the explanatory power of […]

What’s it like to have a presidential election where misinformation on Facebook clouds what’s informing at least some voters’ decisions? The Philippines found out about half a year before the United States, according to Maria Ressa, CEO of the Philippines-based, social media-savvy news outlet Rappler. I chatted with Ressa the day before a tense session...

British news consumers who get news via social media or search platforms are more likely to remember the platform where they accessed a particular story rather than the outlet that originally published it, according to a study out Wednesday from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford. Just 37...

NBC News is launching morning and evening news programs that will be broadcast exclusively on Snapchat Discover, starting on Wednesday. As part of NBC Universal’s $500 million investment in Snap, Inc., the network is launching a daily news show, two to three minutes long, that will be published on Snapchat Discover at 7 a.m. and 4...

I recently, shamefully fell for a photo plastered all over my timeline last week of Vladimir Putin sitting in a chair at G-20 as other world leaders, including Donald Trump, leaned in for what appeared to be an intense, whispered discussion. The photo was, as Gizmodo put it gently, totally fake. That viral photo of...

Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 128, published July 18, 2017. Radiotopia’s Ear Hustle breaks 1.5 million downloads in its first month, qualifying the show as a “runaway hit” for the podcast collective, as the press release puts it. Also interesting from the release: the podcast, which emerged as the winner...

How would you finish this sentence? Journalism has never been more _______. If you answered essential or exciting or precarious or imperiled — and have ideas for how to make it more of the first two or less of the last — you may be a candidate to join our next group of Knight Visiting...

Sounds like a John Oliver segment, doesn’t it? As we all know from checking our favorite news apps, the line between satire and news has all but vanished anyhow. Last week, in the friendly confines of the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, the News Media Alliance initiative to gain an antitrust exemption lit many fuses....

Working out and getting healthy can be hard for a lot of people. Brothers Anthony and Joe Vennare know this. The Pittsburgh natives had previously owned a gym before deciding to get into the content business when they saw a void in locally focused health and fitness coverage. “A lot of times people are put...

As a college student focused on biotechnology in Ghana, Jesse Arhin Ghansah didn’t predict that he would become the CEO of a pan-African media startup that just raised $1.1 million in seed funding. He just wanted to read entertaining things online that he could relate to. “The news agencies had their websites online, but there...

Earlier this year, Facebook approached the USA Today virtual reality team with a proposal. Facebook’s developer conference, F8, was a few weeks away, and the company was looking to partner with news organizations on VR projects that showed off some new interactive tools that it was building. USA Today was interested, but concerned that its...

If, hypothetically, Georgia and Florida went to war, which state would win? That was one of the questions posed to actress Carrie Preston in the first episode of Conundrums, Slate’s new virtual reality Facebook Live talk show that launched Thursday. Preston and host Dan Kois, Slate’s culture editor, were presented as legless avatars as the...

Many of the digital news organization that used to be called startups have outgrown the term — they’re established players by now. Among that group: the Axel Springer-owned Business Insider, which is turning 10. (Its Silicon Alley Insider brand officially launched July 19, 2007, though the earliest posts were a couple months before.) The main site...

Collaborative journalism is good — until you get lost in email chains, Slack channels, and Google Drives. The one-woman team of Project Facet is hoping to change that, and looking for collaborators for her own venture. “There are newsrooms that want to collaborate but it is logistically painful,” Heather Bryant, a journalist and software engineer,...

Though Republicans and Democrats have differing — and well documented — views of the media, members of both parties still follow the news and access media in similar ways, according to a study out Thursday from The Associated Press, the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, and the American Press Institute. Similar percentages of Democrats...

Last month, The Wall Street Journal pulled the plug on What’s News, its standalone news digest app that offered a different, more swipe-heavy reading experience from its main app. Now, the Journal is keeping to its promise of using some of the lessons from What’s News to inform the design of its main news app, which...

The West End Phoenix is a new community newspaper launching this fall in Toronto’s West End. While the paper will cover a diverse but gentrifying area in Canada’s largest city, its origins can be traced 3,000 km (1,900 miles) away to Yellowknife, the only city in the Northwest Territories. Dave Bidini, a Canadian author and...

When it comes to politics, the first half of 2017 has given people plenty to protest. And while some have responded to current affairs by becoming more politically active, others, certain they can’t have an effect, have shrugged and tuned out. The liberal magazine The Nation is experimenting with new ways to get those on...

The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University made waves last month when it threatened a First Amendment lawsuit on behalf of users blocked by @realDonaldTrump after criticizing him on Twitter, the U.S. president’s well-used, most-followed Twitter account (more than 33 million followers; official @POTUS has 19 million). In a letter addressed directly to President...

For subway commuters, it’s a common enough situation: you get on the train, pull out of the station and…ugh, you’re offline. On your phone: yesterday’s tweets, maybe a news app loaded up with old stories, a newsletter with links you can’t open. Although many news apps now enable offline reading, they don’t ensure that the...

Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 127, published July 11, 2017. The IAB has announced the lineup for its third-annual podcast upfront, and it boasts some changes. Gimlet, Public Media Marketing, and iHeartRadio are added to the mix, while CBS and AdLarge appear to be sitting this one out. This...

The Journalism 360 Challenge announced Tuesday that it was awarding $285,000 to 11 projects to delve further into the journalistic possibilities for virtual reality and augmented reality, going beyond the quarter-of-a-million dollars it originally proposed for the project. Google News Lab, the The Knight Foundation, and the Online News Association launched the challenge back in March...