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4/3/17

Need to Know: Apr. 3, 2017

Fresh useful insights for people advancing quality, innovative and sustainable journalism

OFF THE TOP

You might have heard: Facebook recently launched a journalism initiative, which includes outreach to newsrooms in the form of training and collaboration on new products (Facebook Media)

But did you know: Facebook, Mozilla and Craig Newmark are investing $14 million in an initiative to repair trust in news media and advance news literacy (Poynter)
With $14 million in funding, the News Integrity Initiative will “unite an initial group of 19 organizations and individuals around the world to make journalism more informative and help news consumers understand it better.” The initiative will be administered by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, and will conduct research, hold events, and “undertake projects that help people make informed decisions about what they read and share online.” The project’s funders include Facebook, Mozilla and Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, as well as the Ford Foundation, Knight Foundation, Democracy Fund and Tow Foundation.

+ Jeff Jarvis explains the needs and opportunities he sees this initiative addressing: Much of the work to date is being conducted from a media perspective, the conversation around “fake news” has been centered around Facebook rather than the other players, there’s an opportunity to shift the conversation from the negative to positive and to bring together organizations that are working on these issues (BuzzMachine)

+ “Creation of a funders consortium emerged as a major theme from the Facebook-ASU news literacy working group meeting just a month ago. Today’s announcement sends a strong signal that news literacy matters. We can’t upgrade only just the supply of news. We need to upgrade ourselves, to become better, more active media users as consumers and creators,” Dan Gillmor says (Adweek)

+ Noted: According to ad tracking data, big brands’ boycotts of Google’s ad networks has had a limited impact on YouTube (Digiday); Major news outlets partnered to request, gather and publish the financial disclosures of White House staff (Business Insider); New York Post apologizes for a series of push alerts from its app on Saturday, including messages like “Heil President Trump!,” saying the account was “compromised” (Huffington Post); Commonwealth Public Broadcasting Corp. in Richmond, Va., will receive $181 million from the FCC spectrum auction for the sale of two TV stations in Virginia (Current); Rachel Maddow says she has “no regrets” about how she released Trump’s tax returns (Vulture)

TRY THIS AT HOME

‘Windowing’ as a podcast strategy: It can defray production costs, but it’s uncertain whether listeners and advertisers will buy in (Digiday)
“Windowing” is a strategy “where content — a television show, or album, or article — is offered exclusively in one specific place for a fixed period of time,” Max Willens explains. It’s also a strategy that’s starting to be used in podcasting; popular podcast “Missing Richard Simmons” is exclusively available through premium audio service Stitcher Premium, for example. “Podcast producers are embracing this strategy for a lot of different reasons, including an eagerness to move off Apple’s turf and defray the costs of increasingly elaborate productions,” Willens writes on this strategy. “But it’s uncertain whether consumers, who have mostly known podcasts as an ad-supported medium, are going to open their wallets, and whether advertisers, who are already skeptical of the higher rates charged for the premium shows being windowed, are going to buy in too.”

+ 10 rules for responsible big data research: Practice ethical data sharing, acknowledge that data can do people harm, and consider both the strengths and limitations of your data (Plos Computational Biology)

OFFSHORE

A newspaper in Mexico is shutting down, citing an insecure environment for journalists (Associated Press)
A newspaper in Juarez, Mexico, announced Sunday that it would be shutting down due to “the rampant, unpunished killings of journalists” in Mexico. In addition to the unsafe environment for journalists, Norte’s editor Oscar Cantu Murguia also cited “ambiguous” financial pressures from the government in the form of “the arrogant refusal to pay debts contracted for the provision of services.” The AP’s Peter Orsi explains that government ad revenue is a major source of revenue for news organizations — and reliance on that revenue can lead to self-censorship and tamer coverage.

+ In October, 12 news outlets will start sharing data-driven stories and tools for data journalism through the European Data Journalism Network (Nieman Lab)

OFFBEAT

Getting ready for summer interns: Questions to ask yourself before your interns’ first day (Business Insider)
“We’ve all heard the horror stories about inept interns, but it’s time to face facts,” writes Business Insider’s Aine Cain. “If your interns aren’t performing up to your standards, it might be your own fault. You may have hired the wrong person, or thrown them into the fire without establishing clear goals and objectives.” Cain talks to Mark Babbitt, the founder of internship site Youtern, about what you can do as an employer to ensure your interns will add something to your organization and get something meaningful out of the experience. Some questions Babbitt says employers should ask themselves: What does your intern need to learn in the first week to be successful? What does your intern need to learn over the course of the internship to make this a successful step in their career? What relationships does your intern want to make during their internship?

UP FOR DEBATE

Could President Trump make good on his threats to change libel laws? (Poynter)
President Trump has repeatedly said he’ll change U.S. libel laws as a way to crack down on news organizations he sees as objectionable — but is it actually possible for a president to change libel law? Poynter’s Ben Mullin poses this question to First Amendment experts, who say “President Trump couldn’t amend libel law simply because there is no federal statute governing libel. Further, any changes to existing libel laws would likely not favor President Trump, who has a track record of losing defamation lawsuits filed against news organizations.”

+ Trump has repeatedly called CNN “fake news” — but he also wants his surrogates to get airtime there: “If you read between the lines, you see the strategy. Strategically, it makes sense if he’s pushing contributors get on CNN. He knows that we are a critical lifeline,” a CNN executive tells BuzzFeed News (BuzzFeed); “If there is to be a silver lining in the historical dark cloud that is Donald Trump, it’s that we might someday look back and say that he forced journalism to re-invent itself or, perhaps more accurately, to re-embrace itself, to remember what it is supposed to stand for. Maybe we’ll someday say that he forced us to abandon the fantasy that there is no moral component, no human judgment, involved in reporting the news,” writes Leonard Pitts, Jr. (Miami Herald)

SHAREABLE

‘How the new Huffington Post editor turned her outsider perspective into a mission statement’ (Out Magazine)
The Huffington Post’s new editor Lydia Polgreen is bringing a unique perspective to the role, Out Magazine’s Aaron Hicklin writes in a profile of Polgreen. If media organizations like HuffPost can bring people together around what Polgreen calls “fundamental kitchen table interests,” she says it then becomes harder to divide them over cultural issues like transgender bathrooms or political correctness on college campuses. “I’d love Huff Post to be the place where the real conversation is happening about who gets to define what it is to be American, and what the real America is,” Polgreen says.

 

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