About a week after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, Laura Walker lis

This week on The Kicker, Meg talks with Wisconsin-based journalist Cassandra Willyard about the challenge of covering climate change. Then Pete is joined by Emily Bell, director of the Tow Center for Digital Media at Columbia, and Nausicaa Renner, CJR’s Tow editor, to discuss the news swirling around Facebook as it wrestles with the responsibilities […]

The bloom has come off the rose for the big tech companies. The last few weeks have not been good to the likes of Facebook, Google, and Twitter, which are taking increasing heat for their unwillingness — or inability — to grapple with the their outsize influence, particularly as it relates to the results of...

An X-ray reading of the allusions, patriotic associations and parallel constructions in the speech.

The relationship between media outlets and social platforms like Twitter has always been tense. On some level, publishers know they have to be on social media, because that’s where the news happens, and it’s also where content gets shared—but at the same time, they are afraid of what might happen if reporters and editors speak […]

Earlier this week I was on Good Day Philadelphia discussing a

A bill to make Internet companies reveal who is paying for ads. U.S. Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Mark Warner (D-VA), and John McCain (R-AZ) on Thursday announced the Honest Ads Act, which aims to increase the transparency of online political ads by forcing Internet companies to disclose who’s buying them. The full text of the...

Who knew? Who was harassed? Who else is out there? Two weeks after The New York Times blew the lid off the Harvey Weinstein story, developments continue and an increasing number of women are speaking out about their experiences in Hollywood and beyond. On Thursday, the Los Angeles Times reported that an Italian model-actress accused […]

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?

AUSTIN JONATZKE of Stevensville, Michigan, didn’t live a long life, but his family wants you to know how meaningful it was. He adored his redheaded nieces and nephew. He fished, camped, and cheered for the Dallas Cowboys. He had a kind heart. His family also wants you to know that when he died at age […]

Is audio part of your digital storytelling? This week we explore three tools that can help make that happen.

A study released today about online misinformation posits a few existential questions.

Despite a Pew Research study‘s finding last year that two-thirds of Facebook users rely on the site for news, the COO of the world’s largest social network insists that Facebook isn’t a media company. “At our heart we’re a tech company… we don’t hire journalists,” Sheryl Sandberg told Axios. Although Sandberg admitted that her company […]

The advertising landscape is undergoing its most sweeping transformation in years. Apple just released the new version of Safari, which prioritizes user privacy; an updated version of Google’s Chrome, with a new ad filter, comes out in January; and new rules on data protection in the European Union take effect in May. These changes will […]

Read other Survival Stories from around the country. In June 2015, I traveled to Gillette, Wyoming—a gleaming town off Interstate 90 in northeast Wyoming, and the heart of America’s coal country. I was living and teaching in Laramie, the university town in the southeast part of the state. At the time, the school and state […]

It took a terrorist attack for Google to enter the news business. On September 11, 2001, after hijackers crashed two commercial jets into the World Trade Center as well as a third plane into the Pentagon and another into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, Internet users turned to the search engine for information. Again and...

A burgeoning music scene and the political revolutions of 2011 in the Arab world created the perfect opening for better music writing. In the online space, the entire genre of music was largely unexplored, with very few single-subject outlets of any topic publishing in Arabic. Seizing the opportunity, Ma3azef.com launched in late 2012 to cover...

The obituary of an era is being written in real time. Recent weeks have seen the departure of several top editors from prestige magazine titles, the death of iconic figures like Hugh Hefner and Si Newhouse, and the announcement that Rolling Stone is on the block. Wednesday’s news that Michael Duffy, deputy managing editor of […]

Editor's note: This article was updated with a study from the Pew Research Center and Elon University.

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?

It can be nice to hear from experts (even the so-called experts) how things are going to shake out. But in the case of fake news and misinformation online, unfortunately, all we have is more uncertainty: 51 percent of “internet and technology experts” surveyed by the Pew Research Center and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet...

Rolling Stone’s legendary cofounder, editor, and publisher Jann Wenner had been fairly quiet, publicly at least, in the few years since Joe Hagan signed on to write his biography. Well, no longer. As Sticky Fingers: The Life and Times of Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone Magazine nears its October 24 publication date, Wenner has made […]

A widely known investigative journalist loses her life in a

Last August, Bethany Barnes, the lone K-12 education beat reporter at The Oregonian, got a tip. New documents had been unsealed in a lawsuit against a local teacher accused of sexual misconduct. The $650,000 lawsuit alleged that Mitchell Whitehurst, a veteran teacher who was at one point among the highest paid in the city, had […]

A new report from the American Press In

For news organizations, the physical newsroom has increasingly become a reflection of the digital mindset. Walls are coming down, collaboration-focused huddle spaces are replacing team silos, and managers are being dragged out of their private offices and being forced to sit side by side with their teams. It’s not a universal trend, however. A new...

In 1999, a group of radio hosts at Neza Radio, a small community station in the Mexican city of Nezahualcoyotl, began transmitting content for about 1 million people living just past Benito Juarez International airport and over the Mexico City line. With little radio experience and virtually no budget, the hosts used transmitters and antennas […]

April 4, 2018 marks the 50th year after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. April 4, 2018 is also a bookend for MLK50, a digital journalism project centered around the issues of economic justice in Memphis, where King was assassinated in 1968. The year-long effort to address a yawning opening in the city for...

When Matter managing director Corey Ford helped launch the accelerator in 2012, things were already looking bleak for media companies, which were struggling both culturally and economically in the the era of the web. And then Donald Trump became president, and, in his repeated attacks on media institutions, made things feel even worse. In the wake...

He doesn’t listen to many podcasts, and he doesn’t even own an Amazon Echo or Google Home, but Michael Barbaro has become one of this year’s breakout audio stars. Barbaro began hosting The New York Times’ The Daily at its February launch, and the show’s five-day-a-week window into the news has added a brighter, warmer...

Facebook groups and campaigns. Twitter ads. Ads on YouTube, on Gmail. Promotions on Pokémon Go?! And now Outbrain, one of the companies responsible for those ubiquitous content recommendations no one ever thought they needed, is investigating whether Russia-linked groups purchased ads on its platform to somehow meddle in the 2016 U.S. elections, according to a...

Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 136, published October 17, 2017. 60dB → Google. Google has acqui-hired the team behind 60dB, the personalized short-form audio app. The team, which goes by the name of Tiny Garage Labs, announced the move last Tuesday, and a Google representative confirmed the development to Business Insider. As part of...

When you hear the words “data journalism,” you also often hear words like “revolution” and “future.” But — according to a new paper that looks at a couple hundred international data journalism projects nominated for awards over four years — most of the journalism itself hasn’t changed as much as you’d think: It still mostly...

In 2014, when Shekhar Gupta stepped down as CEO and editor-in-chief of The Indian Express, speculation swirled around his next move. Gupta is one of India’s most famous journalists, arguably the last of a tribe of celebrity editors almost as famous as their publications. During his 19-year reign at the English-language publication, Gupta transformed the...

Last night, in an event at George Washington University, New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet talked about his frustration with the social media profiles of some of the Times’ reporters and editors: “I’ve spent full days policing our social media,” executive editor Dean Baquet said, adding that he’s called reporters personally. Baquet said his...

Many smart people are still very bad at evaluating sources. Stanford’s Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew observed “10 Ph.D. historians, 10 professional fact checkers, and 25 Stanford University undergraduates…as they evaluated live websites and searched for information on social and political issues.” What they found: Historians and students often fell victim to easily manipulated features...

Journalism is going through a moment of self-reckoning. News organizations around the world are trying to repair or improve readers’ perceptions of their work, while also trying to figure out how to make real money sustainably while playing on Facebook and Google’s turf (and not just to stem print losses). So they focus increasingly on...

Here’s something surprising about MuckRock, the nonprofit site created to increase access to public records: While the site was founded over seven years ago, neither one of its founders have been working on the project full-time. That’s changing. MuckRock said Thursday that it’s raised $440,000 from The Knight Foundation and The Democracy Fund, which will...

ProPublica is going local. Last week the organization announced the ProPublica Local Reporting Network, a new initiative that will pay the full-time salaries and benefits of six journalists as they do investigative reporting within their local communities. With the effort, ProPublica wants, however slightly, to help fill some of the gaps left by the hollowing-out...

How many push alerts is too many? What are the biggest challenges for news organizations sending out alerts? What happens if readers don’t even click through? Upcoming research from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia and the Guardian U.S. Mobile Innovation Lab takes a look at how news organizations are sending out push...

We missed you at ONA this year to talk shop about local news, fears around monetization, Facebook and other platforms, fact-checking, mobile design, social media best practices, women in media, and more. But not to worry, nearly every session was recorded and audio posted (see this list of resources ONA has helpfully compiled on its...

In March 2012, when Chris Hughes, the billionaire cofounder of Facebook, took over The New Republic and brought back Franklin Foer as editor, the two were filled with a sense of optimism. They quickly got to work spending Hughes’s money: building up an impressive staff, “leasing offices in prime locations and hiring top-shelf consultants,” and...

In what has already been a pretty depressing news week for women, the newly released results of ASNE’s newsroom diversity survey add a little more “meh” news in regards to both gender and racial diversity in U.S. newsrooms. The share of people of color working in the 661 news organizations that took the survey was...

Ready to connect your checking account to Medium? In August, Medium started letting a select group of users — mainly people who’d frequently published content on Medium in the past — put their content behind a paywall. Around the same time, it rolled out a $5/month subscription program that would give paying members access to...

When I met with Khmerload founder In Vichet recently, his wildly popular website was leading with stories typical of its entertainment-driven coverage: Two local pop singers have been spotted wearing the same outfits; a feature on the family of a well-known Cambodian business tycoon; and, with more than 7,500 shares, a series of photographs that...

How far along are newsrooms when it comes to training their reporters to navigate a news ecosystem where people are accessing content via a wide variety of new channels? And how far along are organizations when it comes to truly thinking digital-first? The answers to those questions are a little worrying, a new global ICFJ...

“They were working to lead people along and develop a sense of trust.” Jonathan Albright, the research director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, on Thursday published to Tableau his research into how six election-related, now-closed, Russian-controlled Facebook accounts spread content in the U.S. The Washington Post’s Craig Timberg wrote up Albright’s findings: For...

Facebook’s outsized role in spreading fake news both during last year’s presidential election is, at this point, undeniable. Facebook has taken some responsibility, and on Thursday introduced a new feature meant to give users more context about articles while they’re reading and before they share them with others. The new feature is small but, in...

Chris Best knew he was onto something with Substack when his personal trainer, after hearing Best talk about Stratechery, compared the site to The Quad Guy. That membership site is run by Julian Smith, a longtime bodybuilder who, for $6 a month, offers subscribers step-by-step exercise tutorials, dieting tips, and daily workout videos. “It’s basically...

Crooked Media, the progressive political podcast network run by former Obama administration staffers whose flagship show Pod Save America has been downloaded more than 100 million times since January, is branching out into text. On Wednesday, the L.A.-based company announced the launch of Crooked.com, a website whose editor-in-chief is Brian Beutler, formerly a senior editor...