OFF THE TOP
You might have heard: Civil, the high-profile, blockchain-backed attempt to nurture nascent digital news sites, shut down in June (Poynter)
But did you know: Former Civil publications are forming Brick House, a new journalism cooperative (The New York Times)
Brick House is an experiment in worker-owned media, similar to the recently founded Defector. Led by Maria Bustillos and other alums of the blockchain-powered Civil, the co-op will offer subscriptions to nine publications for $75 per year. Each publication can own one share in Brick House, which is priced at $1 and can only be sold back to the company. Publications will split revenue but cannot build equity. Existing media outlets moving to Brick House include the online magazine Popula, the investigative news site Sludge, the political podcast FAQ NYC, and the newsletter Hmm Weekly. The network is expected to be fully operational by October.
+ Noted: John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford announces Community Impact Fellows for 2020-2021 (Twitter, JSK Stanford); CUNY launches new online program for Entrepreneurial Journalism Creators (Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism); RJI competition challenges college students to help newsrooms reconnect with audiences (Reynolds Journalism Institute); Free Press launches News Voices: Colorado, a statewide initiative to strengthen local news and information (Free Press); Center for Civic Media at MIT will close at the end of August (Civic Media)
API UPDATE
Providing nuanced information to voters to address voting disparities and difficulties
For local news outlets, providing information about how to vote in this year’s election, whether by mail or in person, is more important than ever. For outlets looking to cover the election from an audience-centric perspective, it’s important to ask questions about who in your community might be overlooked or neglected in your election reporting, and what types of questions those voters may have. Ideas for boosting your campaign coverage include using automated social media posts to remind the public frequently about voting, centralizing voting information on your website and in newsletters, and creating materials that can be shared on social media.
+ Trust tip: Help your audience consume polls responsibly (Trusting News)
+ On September 24, API’s Vice President & Senior Director Amy Kovac-Ashley will moderate a session on community journalism at the Radically Rural conference — learn more and register here. (Radically Rural)
TRY THIS AT HOME
elDiario.es finds success treating users like partners, giving them transparency (IJNet)
While elDiario.es, an independent news outlet in Spain, is free for all to read, the site has attracted 56,000 paying users, which it calls partners. Each partner pays €60 ($66) per year, earning the publication a €300,000 profit in 2019. The site’s co-founder and director, Ignacio Escolar, writes a quarterly newsletter that shares the site’s sources of revenue, names of shareholders, salaries of reporters and how its money is spent. Another basic practice is to respond to all complaints, with Escolar personally writing to anyone who is cancelling their subscription because of a disagreement over news coverage or an opinion piece.
OFFSHORE
Ghanaian media sees growing interest in fact-checking ahead of presidential elections (Poynter)
Ghana’s next general election is in December, and local media outlets are turning to fact-checking organizations to help cover a polarized country. A voter registration drive in July was marred by violence, and many feel that the media must step up to ensure a safe and fair election. A survey in 2019 found that 90% of Ghanaians believed there was a need for a countrywide fact-checking organization, leading to the creation of GhanaFact. Another fact-checking organization, Dubawa Ghana, has trained 100 professional journalists in fact-checking, as well as journalism students, many of whom have volunteered to help fact check during the election season.
OFFBEAT
Open Technology Fund sues administration for $20M in missing funds (Axios)
The Open Technology Fund, a government-supported nonprofit that advocates for internet freedom around the world, is suing the federal government for withholding its funds. OTF, which supports work by activist journalists in countries with government censorship of the press and the internet, is owed $20 million in congressionally appropriated funds. The lawsuit alleges that the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which should be paying out the federal grants, has tried to move the money into a separate fund, which is illegal.
UP FOR DEBATE
The Washington Post editorializes against dishonest ads. The ad team runs them. (Columbia Journalism Review)
Several times in the last year, The Washington Post’s editorial board has called on Facebook to reject ads — particularly political ads — that contain provable lies. But last week, during the Democratic National Convention, the paper’s website was blanketed with ads purchased by the Trump campaign, many of which linked to videos that contained lies about Joe Biden. Some journalists argued that the ads and their prominence on the homepage were problematic, while others saw it as part of the long tradition newspapers of selling political ad space, and argued that advertisers should have “latitude to exercise their First Amendment rights.” Fact-checking veteran Brooke Binkowski suggests that, going forward, a newspaper could require all political advertisements to provide open-source or primary sources for all political claims.
SHAREABLE
Is movement journalism what’s needed during this reckoning over race and inequality? (Nieman Reports)
Freedomways, a journalism fellowship prioritizing women of color and LGBTQ+ people in the South, focuses on movement journalism, which aims to tell the stories of oppressed peoples. In a workshop to learn about the genre, fellows were encouraged to aim not for objectivity, but to think about how they hoped their reporting would lead to change. The leaders of Southern media collective Press On, which practices movement journalism, say it is rooted in the Black freedom struggles of the South, and that the principles can be brought to mainstream journalism organizations, such as Nikole Hannah-Jones’ “1619 Project” at The New York Times.
+ Earlier: A reckoning over objectivity, led by Black journalists (New York Times)
The post Need to Know: August 26, 2020 appeared first on American Press Institute.
from American Press Institute https://ift.tt/3b5EtA7
0 التعليقات:
Post a Comment