Here are just a few of the global disparities surfaced in a new Pew Research Center report published on Tuesday and covering 39 countries around the world. In South Korea, nearly all of its population — 96 percent — access the internet at least “occasionally,” or own a smartphone. In the sub-Saharan African region, median internet use...

When Zofia Doktorowicz-Kłopotowska moved from Warsaw to New York in 1987, Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood was saturated with local Polish newspapers. She immediately joined the ranks of Kurier Plus, which had only begun publishing that year, and then bought the paper in 1994. Today she and her son run the weekly, which is one of just […]

Immigration has been a contentious topic for much of U.S. history, but Donald Trump's presidential policies have led to fierce debate since his inauguration.

Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 165, published June 19, 2018. In play. The hope had always been for more. Or, at least, for another. On Tuesday, Google officially launched its standalone podcast app for Android. As of right now, it is available for download in the Google Play store....

The Associated Press didn’t call its advice a “stylebook” until 1950. As we saw in the past couple of weeks, the AP’s early iterations of guidelines concentrated on the mechanics of typesetting and transmission rather than language and usage. The New York Times, though, was an early adopter. It started calling its guidebook a “style […]

The Sarasota Herald-Tribune and the Lakeland Ledger unionized in 2016. 

Dead or alive? That question serves as the engine for countless narratives in every story form we can think of, from fiction to nonfiction, from bo

A Q&A with Neil Brown, Rick Edmonds and Ren LaForme about Poynter’s Media Innovation Tour

After weeks of slow-burning coverage, the crisis over family separations at the US border exploded over the weekend, and reporting on the issue dominated the national conversation on Monday. Network and cable news programs broadcast live from the southern border, and journalists pressed administration officials at a heated White House press briefing.

“The Trump administration’s move to separate immigrant families at the border and detain children apart from their parents spiraled into a humanitarian and political crisis Monday as the White House struggled to contain the growing public outcry,” write The Washington Post’s Philip Rucker, Josh Dawsey, and Seung Min Kim on today’s front page. President Trump and his spokespeople have remained defiant, falsely blaming Democratic lawmakers for the crisis, even as a bipartisan backlash grows.

ICYMI: Reporter for The Atlantic has extreme experience with Facebook’s reps

Amid firsthand reports and images from detention centers, Monday’s most impactful reporting came from an audio clip of children crying as they were separated from their parents. ProPublica obtained the recording from inside a US Customs and Border Protection facility. “The desperate sobbing of 10 Central American children, separated from their parents one day last week by immigration authorities at the border, makes for excruciating listening,” wrote ProPublica’s Ginger Thompson. “Many of them sound like they’re crying so hard, they can barely breathe.”

New: ProPublica has obtained audio from inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility, in which children can be heard wailing.

Border Patrol agent jokes, “We have an orchestra here.” https://t.co/pkmD8DKYmo

— ProPublica (@ProPublica) June 18, 2018

The piece published just before a White House Press Briefing from Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who again tried to shift the responsibility for the administration’s decisions to lawmakers. There is no law requiring parents and children to be separated at the border; the administration has made the choice to refer parents crossing the border illegally for criminal prosecution rather than handling the cases in civil court.

Trump, who regularly relies on cable news for information, has been suspicious of the coverage, telling aides that “he believes the media cherry-picks the most dramatic images and stories to portray his administration in a negative light,” according to the Post. On that front, he’s been getting plenty of backup from Fox News’s opinion hosts. Tucker Carlson told his viewers to be wary of those arguing for compassion. “No matter what they tell you, this isn’t about helping children,” Carlson said. “Their goal is to change your country forever.” Later in the evening, Laura Ingraham ignored the growing body of evidence concerning conditions at the detention centers, arguing that the facilities housing separated children are, “essentially summer camps.”

ICYMI: After 25 years, editorial cartoonist fired from newspaper

The administration’s lies about and misrepresentations of its border policy have pushed reporters into unfamiliar territory. From headlines to briefing room questions, journalists are taking a more forceful line against the official line. NYU’s Jay Rosen flagged a comment from veteran NBC News reporter Andrea Mitchell talking about the immigration crisis that sums up the current moment:

“This has precipitated a real soul searching among journalists. Because those of us raised in the traditional frame of ‘on the one hand and on the other hand’ are finding that we can no longer stand quietly and just describe this policy without pointing out that this is being misrepresented. And it’s very uncomfortable for a lot of people of my generation of journalists to constantly be saying the president misrepresented, he misspoke, this is a lie, this is not true. But people have to speak out.”

Below, more on the growing crisis at the border.

• How we got here: CNN’s Brian Stelter traces the build-up in national coverage over the past few days. “Among the reasons for the surge of news coverage: President Trump’s lies about the policy, sustained outrage among immigration advocates, and organized protests by Democratic lawmakers,” Stelter writes. He also noted that local outlets like the Houston Chronicle were early to the story.
• Final word: NBC News’s Lester Holt, anchoring his program from Mission, Texas, concluded last evening’s show with a forceful statement: “What is happening here is testing our better angels, on multiple fronts, challenging our competing values of protecting our sovereignty and honoring our hearts. As the local border chief here told me today, ‘It’s complicated and many-layered,’ to which I thought to myself, ‘Isn’t that the way it is with most matters of the heart?’”
• United front: All five living first ladies have spoken out against the family-separation policy. Rosalynn Carter, Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush, Michelle Obama, and even Melania Trump have, to varying degrees, expressed disgust and concern with the current practice.
• The big picture: As midterm elections approach, The New York Times’s Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman tie the administration’s defense of its border policy to the racist themes that characterized his campaign. “President Trump sent his clearest signal yet on Monday that he intends to make divisive, racially charged issues like immigration central going into the campaign season,” they write.

 

Other notable stories

• On the same day that Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong completed his purchase of the LA Times, he named veteran journalist Norman Pearlstine as its executive editor. The paper’s Meg James and Andrea Chang capture the mood in the building as the Times emerges from years of corporate mismanagement: “The Los Angeles Times has a new owner, a new editor and, after years of upheaval, a new path forward.”
• The New York Times’s Jacob Bernstein has an in-depth look at the complicated history of Interview magazine—and its possible rebirth just months after it folded. Bernstein traces the path charted by initial investor and eventual owner Peter Brant, and the myriad issues the magazine has had in recent years.
• CJR’s Karen K. Ho takes a deep dive into the uncertain future of Consumer Reports. The venerable product guide is still one of the most popular magazine titles in America, but, Ho writes, “income at the company is down, subscriptions are falling, and the 83-year-old magazine faces an ever-growing assortment of advertising-driven and online-only competitors.”
• In welcomed news, New York Post’s Keith J. Kelly reports that Tronc plans to change its name back to Tribune Publishing. “Ex-chairman Michael Ferro pushed for ‘Tronc’ in June 2016. It supposedly stood for Tribune Online Content, but was widely ridiculed at the time of the announcement,” Kelly writes.
• Noah Kotch, who has guided Fox News Digital through a period of growth, has been named the new editor-in-chief of DailyMail.com and MailOnline, according to The Guardian’s Mark Sweney.

ICYMI: Trump’s immigration policy takes center stage

It hasn’t been that long since the European Union caused upheaval on the internet with the launch of the GDPR or General Data Protection Regulation, which brought in a host of cumbersome rules on how consumer data should be protected. Now, some internet activists and free-speech advocates are warning that the EU could take an […]

An epic “manel,” sexist jokes about breasts, and on-stage sexual harassment at the recent World News Congress in Portugal put the gap between acknowledging gender inequality and actually empowering women into stark relief. In response, a group of senior international news professionals has penned this open-letter. It’s time to stop talking about the need for...

“There’s nothing funny about what’s going on." For The Onion, “it’s a satirical commentary on things, rather than ‘let’s laugh about it.’”

Jake Fisher knows what a difference a thorough test can make. About five years ago, near the end of 2012, his two young sons wanted to play with a Lexus ES 350 parked in their driveway. Specifically, they wanted to be locked in the trunk. The 9-year-old rationalized to his dad, “What if I ever […]

It’s been about six years since I launched my first podcast.

AMRA SABIC-EL-RAYESS grew up in Bihac, Yugoslavia, just as nationalist movements across her region unleashed ethnic strife. For years, she suffered as a Muslim whose community was under attack by Serbian forces, all the while working with a local NGO to organize doctors so that children trapped in the siege could be immunized. She survived the […]

"When more media platforms use content from Wikipedia uncritically, that does raise the stakes."

Foundations across the U.S. are helping journalists watchdog the powerful — but who’s watching the foundations? The state of the journalism industry might be much more tattered right now if not for philanthropic dollars helping to sustain national and local news outlets like ProPublica, the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Voice of San Diego, Texas...

Last year, Facebook started

It may have something to do with their trust in media and political awareness.

Since Patrick Soon-Shiong has resolved his “transition issues” with Tronc and has finally taken formal ownership of the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune, many eyes turned toward the NASDAQ at market open today. Their focus: TRNC. What will happen to the price of Tronc shares as investors, a good number of speculators...

Over Father’s Day weekend, stories of children being separated from their parents dominated national news coverage. The Trump administration’s immigration policy, which resulted in 1,995 children being removed from their parents over a six-week period that ended last month, has drawn reporters to the border and placed official explanations in the spotlight.

“Inside an old warehouse in South Texas, hundreds of children wait in a series of cages created by metal fencing. One cage had 20 children inside. Scattered about are bottles of water, bags of chips and large foil sheets intended to serve as blankets,” writes the AP’s Nomaan Merchant. “Sitting on government-issued green mattresses and huddled under Mylar sheets, more than 1,100 migrants awaited an uncertain future at a US Border Patrol facility [in Texas], where resources are strained by the Trump administration’s new ‘zero tolerance’ policy toward people entering the US illegally,” led Politico’s Elana Schor.

The focus on the border comes after the administration shifted its immigration policy, opting to refer parents crossing the border illegally for criminal prosecution. Until April, such cases were usually referred for civil deportation proceedings, a policy that did not require separation. President Trump and his administration’s mouthpieces have adopted the bizarre tactic of placing the blame for the situation on Democrats, with Trump falsely tweeting, “The Democrats are forcing the breakup of families at the Border with their horrible and cruel legislative agenda.”

This morning, both The New York Times and The Washington Post have front-page stories on the growing political pressure the administration faces over its border policy. As Trump has continued to shirk responsibility for his own programs, news outlets have been blunt in their descriptions of his mendacity. “Trump Again Falsely Blames Democrats for His Child-Separation Policy” read the print headline above Julie Hirschfeld Davis’s report in Sunday’s Times.

TRENDING: In Pittsburgh, an unprecedented blow to editorial cartoonist

Immigration policy was a main focus of Sunday shows, and networks have reporters on the ground in Texas. NBC’s Jacob Soboroff was live in McAllen, Texas, for Nightly News, and Gayle King is anchoring CBS This Morning from the border city today.

Immigration policy is a notoriously difficult issue to cover, but reports of children separated from their parents has simplified and focused the narrative. CNN’s Brian Stelter made the observation that the current response—from journalists, politicians, and advocacy groups—is reminiscent of the outrage that followed Trump’s “shithole countries” comment earlier this year. The clear moral repugnance of removing children from their parents has driven attention to the issue, and Trump’s unwillingness to take ownership of the policy has led even those outlets normally cautious about labeling his statements to forcefully identify his claims as false.

Below, more on coverage of the border.

• A “more moral answer”?: Former First Lady Laura Bush, who rarely speaks out on political issues, penned a Washington Post opinion piece criticizing the administration’s policy. “I live in a border state,” Bush wrote. “I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart.”
• Local coverage: The Texas Tribune’s Julián Aguilar reports on a shelter for unaccompanied immigrant minors made up of temporary buildings that has been erected just outside of El Paso.
• Inside a facility: NBC News’s Soboroff was one of the first reporters to tour a facility for detained children. He reported from Brownsville, Texas, where the kids “get only two hours a day to be outside in fresh air. One hour of structured time. One hour of free time. The rest of the day is spent inside a former Walmart.”
• Huh?: Contradicting clear reporting on the ground, Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen tweeted, “We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period.” The clearly false statement drew plenty of pushback.

 

Other notable stories

• As of today, the Los Angeles Times has a new owner. The paper’s Sunday front page had Meg James on biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong’s taking control of the Times and Joe Mozingo on its history of local ownership before Tribune Co. (later renamed Tronc) purchased the paper in 2000. Soon-Shiong wrote a note to readers, promising to revitalize the Times and The San Diego Union-Tribune, which he is also acquiring in the deal.
• The New York Times’s Jaclyn Peiser reports on an effort by former Denver Post staffers to build a new digital outlet in the Rocky Mountains. The Colorado Sun, in partnership with the Civil Media Company, is made up of eight ex-Post reporters and editors, and will focus on explanatory journalism, feature stories, and investigative articles, according to Peiser.
• CJR’s Mathew Ingram looks at the trend of advocacy organizations performing journalism, and questions whether it’s a good thing. “As the media landscape continues to fragment and many outlets struggle to afford more ambitious reporting projects, non-governmental organizations and advocacy groups like the ACLU and Human Rights Watch are increasingly taking on the role of reporter,” Ingram writes. “But even those leading the new NGO-as-muckraker efforts acknowledge that they’re no replacement for traditional news organizations.”
• The Boston Globe’s Michael Levenson reports that the paper has suspended columnist Kevin Cullen for three months without pay following a review that found he fabricated details about his experience on the day of the Boston Marathon bombing. Cullen will be demoted to general assignment reporter for two months upon his return.
• The New York Times’s Ellen Barry reports from Salisbury, England, where doubts have spread about the official story on the poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal. “As the British authorities went silent on the progress of their investigation, English-language Russian outlets flooded social media with more than a dozen alternative theories,” Barry writes.

ICYMI: Tensions boil over in White House Briefing Room

WHAT SHOULD LOCAL REPORTERS make of Facebook’s efforts to shape access? It’s a question journalists have asked themselves in St. Louis, Missouri; Houston, Texas; Des Moines, Iowa; and Greenville, South Carolina, according to interviews I conducted with reporters based in those places. It’s a question I’ve recently had reason to ask myself in Albuquerque, New Mexico, […]

Seeking to correct digital news' fundamental problems

JOURNALISM HAS A COMPLICATED RELATIONSHIP with Facebook, which many view as a serious threat to the Fourth Estate. But for Amy Julia Harris and Shoshana Walter, reporters for the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal, a trail of Facebook friends led to a groundbreaking, months-long investigation into abuses at rehab work camps. Harris and Walter were on […]

ON A RECENT WEEKDAY IN MAY, Jose Joel Marquez perches himself at an intersection near Mexico City’s iconic Angel of Independence, hustling the news. The headlines on May 14 run the usual gamut: Presidential frontrunner Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador vowed to scrap the country’s education reform; hackers had successfully extracted hundreds of millions of pesos […]

The Institute for Nonprofit News held its annual conference in Orlando, Florida, this week and featured two days of speakers trying to share valuable knowledge: how to make money in nonprofit news. The need to find sustainable business practices in nonprofit organizations is just as important as it is for everyone else in journalism. INN...

We’ve gotten a sense of what local publishers can contribute to some of Facebook’s bigger projects, like Facebook Watch. They’ve shared a documentary on a Texas high school football team, a three-season show exploring Long Island’s food scene, and more. Soon, we’ll have a taste of a local publisher’s first news show on Facebook Watch,...

“The biggest single gap between perception and what people actually see.” The Reuters Digital News Report for 2018 — which we wrote up here — includes big sections on fake news and misinformation. A few takeaways: — People worry about fake news, but have trouble thinking of times they’ve actually seen it. In focus groups...

Gather round for this history of the troubled, not totally requited relationship between news publishers and powerful technology companies like Google and Facebook. No publisher wants to be reliant on a platform that isn’t within their control, but few want to miss out, either — whether it’s on free(ish) money from Facebook to produce exclusive...

People are becoming disenchanted with Facebook for news. The “Trump bump” appears to be sustaining itself. And younger people are more likely to donate money to a news organization than older people. These are some of the findings from a big new report out Thursday from Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. The...

As Facebook moves to privilege “broadly trusted” sources in its News Feed, our research — more of which you’ll find in this year’s Reuters Digital News Report — shows that broadcasters and newspapers are more trusted than digital-born outlets across a number of countries. Earlier this year, Facebook announced that it would prioritize news from...

Nearly as many people plan to watch this summer’s World Cup via livestreamed video as on regular ol’ live TV, a new study out today from the Interactive Advertising Bureau says. It’s another sign (if we still need one) of how even live sports — cable companies’ best hope for saving something like the traditional...

Let’s be honest: Are you going to read this or skim this? In a land of feeds, tidbits, and bullet points, readers don’t often get to the end of a piece — let alone absorb each sentence along the way. But what if you couldn’t comment until you actually read the whole piece? (We see...

In the future, all of our news will come from and be about blockchain; at least, I assume that’s true, based on the number of pitches that I’ve received over the past few months. The most prominent blockchain journalism startup, Civil — the “decentralized marketplace for sustainable journalism” — took a step forward this week...

A decade ago, if you decided to create your own nonprofit news outlet to focus on local issues, you were largely operating without a playbook as an early entrant to the local nonprofit news scene. Now, with dozens and dozens of local nonprofit outlets across the U.S., there actually is a playbook, developed by the...

Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 164, published June 12, 2018. Expanding pie. The Interactive Advertising Bureau has released its second annual podcast revenue study, which gives us a clear baseline on the size of the podcast ad business. Here’s the big takeaway for those on the run: The American...

Information wants to be $300 a year — and it wants to be exclusive, high quality, and lower quantity. At least that’s the bet being made by The Logic, the new Canadian subscription news outlet that soft-launches today. Modeled in large part after Silicon Valley news site The Information, its focus will be on the...

Muckcloud? Docrock? MuckumentCloud? Just kidding. They’re keeping their own names, but MuckRock and DocumentCloud are joining into one organization on the quest for sustainability as a hub for some of journalism’s most widely-used tools for transparency. “Joining forces for the sake of joining forces doesn’t make any sense,” Aron Pilhofer, DocumentCloud’s cofounder and executive director....

Americans are fractured over the role of journalists, confused by terms like “op-ed,” and wary of the “watchdog” part of journalism, a new report suggests. Yet they’re also increasingly trustful of their favorite news outlets. A report out Tuesday from the Media Insight Project, surveying 2,019 adult members of the American public and 1,127 American...

Michael Ferro’s deal to get paid a 34-percent premium for his Tronc shares vanished as strangely as it appeared. Just seven weeks after Ferro announced that Sargent McCormick was the lead buyer of Ferro’s Merrick Media 25-percent stake in the company, McCormick turned his pockets inside out on Tuesday evening. He released a hurried statement,...

Institutional trust is down across the board in American society (with a few notable exceptions, such as the military). But trust in the media is particularly troubling, plummeting from 72 percent in 1976 to 32 percent in 2017. There are many reasons for this decline in trust, writes Yuval Levin, but one of the problems...

Blame and pesticides. Fake health news gets less attention than fake political news (and inaccurate science stuff has been shared to Facebook as long as there’s Facebook), but it’s a fascinating thing to study. (And the willingness to believe different kinds of fake news is linked.) A new paper in the American Journal of Health...

It was barely a year ago that PBS and NPR fans were worried about whether American public broadcasting might be about to disappear. President Trump’s initial budget called for eliminating all funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the backbone of the system. But that budget threat turned out to be just that — CPB got...

Get into email newsletters, they said. It’ll be easy, they said. It’s cost-effective, mostly not algorithmically filtered, and good for turning loyal readers into subscribers, they said. The last few years’ fervor for email can obscure the production efforts that go into editorial newsletters and the metrics around engagement and conversion — headaches discussed widely...

María Paulina Baena gets stopped on the streets of Bogota, Colombia. Young people ask to take selfies with her and tell her how much they love La Pulla. The 27-year-old is the public face of the satirical video column that has shaken up the way young people consume news in Colombia. Created two years ago by...

The lack of women in leadership in the journalism industry is not an unfamiliar topic. But what are news organizations actually doing about it? And how can other news organizations take on the gender diversity gap, too? The second annual Women in News summit, hosted in Portugal by WAN-IFRA this week, highlighted depressing (but motivating?)...

Shep Smith, Anderson Cooper, and vertical-video lava: That’s what Facebook is bringing to its underperforming Watch tab soon in its first slate of Facebook-funded news video shows. As Facebook’s Campbell Brown put it in a post: Earlier this year we made a commitment to show news that is trustworthy, informative, and local on Facebook. As...

“We have more than 55 newsletters now,” said Elisabeth Goodridge, newsletter editorial director at The New York Times. “I encourage you to sign up for all of them!” I haven’t signed up for all of them, but I did sign up for a bunch, including one so new that it’s not actually included on the...

There’s no end to the need for fact-checking, but fact-checking teams are usually small and struggle to keep up with the demand. In recent months, organizations like WikiTribune have suggested crowdsourcing as an attractive, low-cost way that fact-checking could scale. As the head of automated fact-checking at the U.K.’s independent fact-checking organization Full Fact, I’ve...

Let’s start by saying that pretty much everyone is exhausted by the news: 68 percent of Americans are “feeling overwhelmed by the amount of news there is,” according to a new Pew survey. But the figure is even higher among Republicans (77 percent of those surveyed are overwhelmed), people who don’t follow news closely/say they...