It seems like everyone is pivoting to video these days. But what are some best practices for news outlets that want to publish exclusively on social media? A new study from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism has the answers. The study, which was published Thursday afternoon, analyzes strategies for producing and distributing video on […]

President Trump's response to racial unrest in Charlottesville was provocative fodder for illustrators at major magazines this week. Both The Economist and The New Yorker have worked the white hooded robe of the Ku Klux Klan into their cover illustrations for their latest issues. Here's The Economist, which shows President Trump using the Klan robe's […]

The Pulitzer Prizes are never a perfect measure of great journalism in a particular era, but they remain a good place to start. On matters of race, the Prizes stand way behind, say, Major League Baseball in crossing the color line. Jackie Robinson was well retired before Moneta Sleet became the first Black journalist to […]

Your maps and guides are all ready. Your reporters and photographers are prepared for the big day. But have you thought about including your audience in coverage of Monday's total solar eclipse? This week, we have some ideas. Kristen Hare: Hi, Ren! Do you have your eclipse glasses yet, or are you making one with an […]

It stung the first time Sheila Hagar saw the billboard. It was late winter, and she and her husband were passing through the outskirts of Dayton, a town 30 miles northeast of Walla Walla, Washington. The billboard, the size an average sheet of plywood, caught her eye. The words stenciled on it, “HEY CROOKED NEWS […]

The Union-Bulletin has been Walla Walla, Washington’s hometown paper for more than a century. While they’ve reached a point of stability after recent downsizing, they are uncertain about what comes next. “We’ve been stung, and I think we’re going to be stung more,” says Managing Editor Alasdair Stewart. They have some good things going for […]

MTV News did it. Vocativ did it. Now it's Mic's turn. The millennial-focused digital news publisher announced on Thursday that it was laying off 25 staffers because "we believe deeply in our vision to make Mic the leader in visual journalism." In other words: Fewer people typing and editing words, more people shooting and editing […]

In a recent issue of The New Yorker, staff writer Peter Hessler brought readers to the western Colorado city of Grand Junction for a piece that delves into the personalities of Trump supporters in a place that becomes a stand-in for rural America writ large. At nearly 6,500 words, Hessler’s story, headlined “How Trump is […]

The Poynter Institute receives broad support from a variety of sources. Here is a list of our funders, including all foundations, corporations, partners and individuals that gave the Poynter Institute more than $50,000 in 2017. Funders Blue Cross Blue Shield Association Charles Koch Foundation Craig Newmark Foundation Foundation for Advancing Alcohol Responsibility Google News Lab […]

The Poynter Institute is a nonprofit school for journalists and a publisher of original journalism. Since 1975, Poynter has hosted seminars on news media ethics, written about ethical controversies and provided news organizations with advice on ethical decision-making — often on deadline. These guidelines describe the values, standards and practices we pursue in our journalism, […]

We spent much of this summer at Poynter refining our ethics policies. It was time-consuming, tedious work — and a reminder of why so many news organizations struggle to create and maintain relevant ethics guidelines. It started by consolidating numerous policies into one place so they could be updated. But when we got them all […]

A new report out of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society shows that, during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, polarization in the media ecosystem was “distinctly asymmetric.” As Yochai Benkler, one of the coauthors of the study and the principal investigator, said in a statement: Whereas the left half of our spectrum is...

For almost a year, Vice has brought its millennial-focused style of reporting to the stodgy establishment of nightly news. Airing on HBO, Vice News Tonight usually features a mix of mini-documentary feature segments and voiceover narration of video clips with slick graphics. On Monday night, the format changed, and the result was something special. “Charlottesville: […]

The Cohort is Poynter's bi-monthly newsletter about women kicking ass in digital media. What a week. It’s a good time to revisit this Cohort about supporting your colleagues of color. Like that edition, this issue draws on the advice of several digital women leaders. Unlike that edition, this issue isn’t about current events. If you […]

Brazil is facing a political crisis, and news organizations are facing down a torrent of breaking news as corruption scandals spanning the last several Brazilian presidents continue to roil the country. In the eye of the storm, the digital outlet Nexo Jornal has tried to carve out a space for itself somewhere in between academic...

“People say you don’t value journalism because you’re not paying for the model, but I think the issue was they weren’t offered a model that resonated in the right way.” That’s the premise on which Alex Clark has been building his journalism revenue startup Press Patron. It’s his attempt to bridge the paywalls and subscriptions...

My producer Brent Baughman and I had planned to run an episode (of our podcast It’s Been a Minute with Sam Sanders) about The Onion (the satirical newspaper) on Tuesday. I had spent a day in their headquarters a few weeks ago and got some great tape. The whole thing was going to be about […]

Whether it's local public radio stations or nonprofit websites, most membership programs launched by news organizations are aimed at a geographic audience. The Marshall Project, which launched its membership program on Tuesday, wants to change that — and it's already getting results. It's been more than a day since The Marshall Project went live with […]

Last May Digital Content Next, a trade organization that represents many of the big digital media companies, launched TrustX, a curated, automated ad-buying marketplace designed to offer advertisers a more consistent, brand-safe way to purchase ad innovatory. Nearly thirty digital publishers — including Hearst, Conde Nast, Vox Media, and Time Inc. — joined the effort,...

Do the people you follow on Twitter—your “followership”—influence your work as a journalist? According to a first-of-its-kind study conducted by a team of researchers at Northeastern University, there is “a modest correlation between the ideologies of who a journalist follows on Twitter and the content he or she produces.” Of course, correlation isn’t causation, so […]

Growing up, Assia Boundaoui felt like she was being watched. She wasn’t the only one. Just about everyone she knew in her Arab-American community of Bridgeview, just south of Chicago, suspected that the US government was spying on them. Even after Boundaoui left Bridgeview in 2010—to attend New York University for her master’s degree in […]

Email, not Facebook, is the largest social network. That’s the view held by the team behind Inside, a company focused entirely on growing and monetizing its motley collection of newsletters. Closing in on a year, the company founded by serial entrepreneur and investor Jason Calcanis — known for Weblogs Inc. and his early investments in...

Last week, Facebook launched Watch, its YouTube-like video destination, with a cadre of big-name partners, including Mashable, Quartz, and Business Insider. These publishers see Watch as a viable new distribution channel for their video series and a new revenue stream: Facebook is both offering creators big bucks upfront to produce new series and also promising...

It’s no secret, after this past weekend’s events in Charlottesville, that political polarization has reached a boiling point—and that much discontent on the right, incited by Trump, centers around the press. And we are all aware of how geographic stereotypes—Main Street versus Wall Street, coastal elites versus “flyover” states, urban cosmopolitans versus “real America”—have come […]

A new study says some of the biggest newsrooms in the country are still failing to fulfill a nearly 50-year-old pledge to increase the employment of people of color in top masthead positions, despite repeated reviews and greater coverage of the issue. The report, titled “Missed deadline: The delayed promise of newsroom diversity” and conducted […]

Political polarization. The so-called urban-rural divide. A growing sense of distrust for journalists. In the wake of a contentious presidential election, how are these national issues playing out in everyday media use? This pilot study examines what political polarization looks like at the local level, and provides recommendations for how local journalists and community members […]

Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 132, published August 15, 2017. Another daily news podcast TK. Got this email yesterday: Vox Media and Midroll just inked a deal to launch a daily news podcast under the news brand Vox banner. The show will have a full time staff of 6...

It’s a new unexpectedly raw moment in America. We find ourselves still able to be stunned, and that in and of itself is stunning given the rapid-fire explosions of news we’ve experienced since the election. For media, the events in Charlottesville have been more on-the-job training covering stories many thought had been relegated to the...

The Associated Press sends its stories off to more than 14,000 member newsrooms around the world, where they’re repackaged and shared from those newsrooms’ own social channels. But the relative success of those stories on Facebook hasn’t always been clear. Articles from the AP got around 34.7 million engagements across Facebook in July, and 31.3...

Alaska Dispatch News — Alaska’s largest news site, which in 2014 acquired Alaska’s largest newspaper, the Anchorage Daily News, from McClatchy — is filing for bankruptcy but also getting new owners, publisher Alice Rogoff announced over the weekend. “Like newspapers everywhere, the struggle to make ends meet financially eventually caught up with us. I simply...

What if you got so fed up with the problems of funding journalism that you just got a bunch of people together and decided to fund it yourself? That’s what Phillip Smith, a senior fellow at Mozilla focusing on misinformation, did with other journalism benefactors in British Columbia. He and a group of eleven other...

Civic journalism, advocacy journalism, engagement journalism: All are buzzwords in the industry right now, particularly as the Internet allows groups underrepresented in the mainstream media to stake their own claims and amplify their own voices. But Anna Simonton, an Atlanta-based freelance reporter and researcher for racial and economic justice nonprofit Project South, hopes that “movement...

When my former colleague Joseph Lichterman wrote about a Norwegian news organization that makes readers pass a quiz on the article before they can comment on it (one of the most-trafficked stories in Nieman Lab history, by the way) the site — NRKbeta, the tech vertical of Norway’s public broadcaster — was lauded for its...

“The unflattering light of conventional eastern European stereotypes.” Let’s not pretend we’re being completely neutral when we write about foreign fake news factories like those in Macedonia, writes Lalage Harris in The Calvert Journal (h/t Adrian Chen). By spotlighting the experience of disenchanted teenage boys, the media cast the whole city in the unflattering light...

Facebook’s ongoing ambitions to push into video have been belied by a single uncomfortable truth: most people don’t go to Facebook expressly to watch video. Instead, for most Facebook users, video is just one content form appearing in the News Feed, without them explicitly seeking it out. Facebook is making an effort to change that...

When Jay Senter decided to pull the trigger on launching a paywall for his local news site the Shawnee Mission Post in northeast Kansas, to say that he was nervous about readers’ reaction is an understatement. “We had huge pits in our stomach. We’d worked really, really hard and built up a very good reputation...

A lot of research into fake news thus far has focused on the spread of content on social media platforms (namely Twitter) or has put people into research settings where they, for instance, read mock fake news articles. But what if you could actually look at how people interact with news as they do it,...

TechDirt is being sued for $15 million by the infamous self-proclaimed “inventor of email” Shiva Ayyadurai, who is represented by lawyer Charles Harder. In the midst of its ongoing legal battle, the site has announced an effort to bolster its own reporting around freedom of speech issues online. The effort is supported through a partnership...

For the past year, the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education has been renovating the organization from the ground up through a major “Maynard Re-Imagined” project, during which it reconsidered what the Institute could and should offer to the media sector in the way of programming, training, and diversity resources; what audiences it might...

Legos, quizzes, and tweetstorms: these are some of the tools and presentations of facts that the American Press Institute highlights as exemplary uses by leaders in accountability journalism, in the API’s latest report on “how to make the best of journalism better for audiences.” The 58-page report examines how accountability journalism — which it defines...

Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 131, published August 8, 2017. Fundraising and futures. The past seven days saw two significant stories about money being raised here in Podcast-land. Taken together, the stories contain a fair bit of meat, because they offer two very different approaches to the industry —...

“Six years is a long time in product,” said Martin Fallon, the Financial Times’ product manager for apps. Six years ago was the last time that the FT’s main app was in Apple’s App Store. In 2011, the company introduced a web app and, a couple months later, pulled its dedicated iOS apps because, reportedly,...

Newsletter > Apple News > podcast > app: In terms of how digital-native news outlets get their information out, the newsletter wins. That’s according to a digital news fact sheet from Pew Research Center, released Monday. It looks at 36 news outlets that originated online and have at least 10 million unique visitors per month...

When you’re reporting on a trip through four continents with countless dialects and local guides along the way — how on earth do you communicate with people both for interviews and for sharing the stories? That’s something that former Visiting Nieman Fellow Paul Salopek is trying to find out, as he has been literally walking...

When the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its jobs report at the beginning of the month, news organizations unleashed their push notifications. On Friday morning, the Wall Street Journal tested live mobile push alerts for their jobs coverage, working closely with the Guardian Mobile Innovation Lab, which has been for the past year tirelessly testing...

This hardly seems like a beachy, devil-may-care summer. Among fears of North Korean missiles, new Russian menace, and a highly unpredictable Administration, we are a nervous people. For the news media, it’s been a year of two tales. Never has the press been so pilloried, relentlessly, from on-high. Never, as well, has the value of...

Facebook is paying its factcheckers now (and giving them more work). Facebook rolled out an update this week that will surround popular articles in the News Feed with related articles — “part of Facebook’s strategy to limit the damage of false news without censoring those posts,” reports The Wall Street Journal’s Deepa Seetharaman. The article...

Want to create your own fake news? Yep, there’s an app for that. Want to have fun while learning how to dump fake news from your media diet? Fortunately, there are a few apps for that too. The epidemic of fake news during and after the U.S. presidential election convinced several game designers and journalists...

A study comparing redesigns of homepages for news organizations in the United States and Canada found that contemporary designs with more images and less text resonate more with readers — but noted that experimenting with the redesign and doing before-and-after testing can reveal some helpful insights. The Engaging News Project, an initiative of the University...

AI to reduce news bias? A Facebook recommendation widget for a site’s own news stories? Facebook’s engineering team has held hackathons for news organizations in four cities — NYC, London, Hamburg, and Paris — over the past few months. In a Thursday blog post, Piyush Mangalick, Facebook’s partner engineering director, outlined a couple of the...