Too meta to pass

Too meta to pass

Media statistic of the week 

Bloomberg Quicktake’s live stream channel reached 7.4 million average monthly viewers over its first three full months, December 2020 through February 2021, since launching the network on over-the-top (OTT) streaming on November 9. The network also had 56 million average monthly viewers of its on demand videos across social platforms over the same time period. The network says it’s seeing significant audience growth since expanding its presence beyond social to a 24-hour live stream news channel. 

This past week in the media industry 

The bad news bias

If you’ve mostly been following the US coverage of Covid-19 and thought the focus seems heavily weighted toward the negative, it’s not your imagination. In his New York Times newsletter, David Leonhardt explains that the Bad News Bias in US media is real. 

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Leonhardt highlights a new study that shows the coverage by US publications with a national audience has been much more negative than coverage by any other source the researchers analyzed, including scientific journals, major international publications and regional US media.

The difference is pretty stark: About 87% of Covid coverage in national US media last year was negative, compared to 51% in international media, 53% in US regional media and 64% in scientific journals.

While one theory about the skew toward the negative points to the fact that the most read or shared stories on Facebook tend to be the most negative ones, Leonhardt questions whether journalists are all that focused on audience share. 

“In the modern era of journalism...we tend to equate impact with asking tough questions and exposing problems,” he writes. He goes on to note, “Sometimes, though, our healthy skepticism can turn into reflexive cynicism, and we end up telling something less than the complete story.”

Christi Warren is “Fascinated by this but also unsurprised.” Alexander Russo adds, “So far, at least, I’ve seen lots of self-justification among journalists or educators, and little self-examination. I’d love to hear from more journalists about yesterday’s @dleonhardt newsletter -- agree, disagree, or a little of both.”

Here’s one response, from the Solutions Journalism Network, which tweeted, “So @DLeonhardt wrote this excellent newsletter yesterday. TLDR: he’s right. Despite the talk of political bias, journalism’s bias toward ‘bad’ news is one of our most destructive. So we’re waking up with a thread because we have thoughts.” (Here’s that thread.)

Knew better, went for the clicks

There’s no doubt that bad news travels fast, though. Miles Parks reports on a new NPR investigation that found articles falsely connecting vaccines and death have been among the most highly-engaged-with content online this year. Check out his story, Few Facts, Millions Of Clicks: Fearmongering Vaccine Stories Go Viral Online.

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There's no link between COVID-19 vaccines and death, but NPR’s analysis found that stories implying a connection have gone viral this year at a dramatic rate. “This is on the media, who knew better, but went for clicks,” tweets Peter W. Singer.

Alexander Russo highlights the fact that “The sources of these stories are respectable media outlets like the South Florida Sun Sentinel, whose article on a post-vaccine death was republished in the Chicago Tribune was one of the most-shared that NPR found.”

“You can legislate that social media platforms take down misleading information about COVID, but what about when people ‘lie through truth,’ as with the viral story of the Utah woman who died four days after getting the vaccine?” tweets Chris B. Chester.

A homing beacon for harassment

Next is a must-read from Charlotte Klein of Vanity Fair, “I’m Afraid to Open Twitter”: Next-Level Harassment of Female Journalists Is Putting News Outlets to the Test. Klein’s story highlights how the escalation of attacks on female journalists is proving that newsrooms are still not properly equipped to handle the harassment properly. The old advice of “don’t feed the trolls” isn’t cutting it in an environment marked by a daily deluge of smears.

“Everyone should read this,” tweets Kate Smith. “The level of harassment that female reporters face on this website isn’t normal and it’s not something that people are built to handle. Simple ‘don’t feed the trolls’ is laughably quaint advice at this point.”

It’s so bad that Soraya McDonald says, “part of the reason why i’m not particularly eager to do television is b/c it seems to act as a homing beacon for harassment.” And Meghan Morris shares, “Women journos have told me they’re glad they’re not so good at their jobs - so famous - that they’d attract serious harassment. Newsrooms aren’t equipped for this. Pointing employees to therapy is fine - but few therapists are equipped for this, either.”

A brilliant, fantastic woman

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In an interview with Carmen Rios of Dame Magazine, Elizabeth Green, founder of Chalkbeat, a nonprofit newsroom devoted to local coverage of education, talks about how she plans to fix media

“Local news is a nonprofit public good. It is not going to be supported by markets. Period,” Green tells Rios. “If you care about it, you have to accept the fact that this is not going to be something that market incentives are going to enable the existence of.”

Jessica Huseman shares that she’s “Stupid proud to work for an organization run by such a brilliant, fantastic woman.” As Ken Ward says, “Read this.”

Ceding power to the platform

As we see more stories with tweets embedded into them, here’s a question worth pondering: When journalists put tweets in news stories, do they transfer too much power to Twitter? 

Nieman Lab has published a new analysis by Logan Molyneux, assistant professor in journalism at Temple University’s Klein College of Media and Communication, and Shannon McGregor, assistant professor at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, that reveals something of a feedback loop: 

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“As Twitter becomes embedded in journalistic routine, journalists turn to it during news events. This leads journalists to use tweets in their stories, granting tweets markers of authority,” they write. 

By treating tweets as content instead of sources — whose ideas and messages are subject to scrutiny and verification — journalists are sending repeated messages to audiences that information on Twitter is legitimate and authoritative. In other words, they’re granting Twitter power.

“So smart,” says Tarleton Gillespie. “Amid the discussion of the power of platforms, I love this attention to how other societal institutions, like journalism, cede power and legitimacy to them.”

Disturbing for the future 

In an exclusive for The Wrap, J. Clara Chan reported that leadership of the parent company of the Los Angeles Times and San Diego Union-Tribune told staffers in an all-hands meeting last week that the paper experienced a ‘catastrophic’ $50 million revenue loss in 2020

As Brandon Wenerd says, “Yikes.” But Matt Karolian notes, “Transforming a legacy media company into a modern one is one of the hardest jobs there is.” “Major scoop by @jclarachan who has audio and graphic of $50 million loss at the LA Times in 2020,” tweets Sharon Waxman, who adds, “Disturbing for the future of a paper LA badly needs.” 

Meg James of the Los Angeles Times reports that the paper received a $10-million PPP loan, money that will help cover payroll and other employee-related costs amid a dramatic plunge in advertising revenue. Sammy Roth is “Extremely grateful we got this loan, but 11,000 journalists nationwide still lost their jobs in the first half of 2020 alone. Please please subscribe to your local newspaper.”

More doom and gloom

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“March has been a dark month in digital media. I wrote about some of the reasons why we’ve seen multiple rounds of job cuts this month.” Kerry Flynn links to her CNN piece, The media is slashing jobs again as the Trump news cycle fades and the economy struggles, aka “doom and gloom,” tweets Pete D, Camarillo.

Mark Stenberg calls it a “great piece from @kerrymflynn summing up the recent losses in the media industry. unfortunately, there is reason to believe that things are only going to get worse.” 

Meanwhile, more than a dozen newspapers have outsourced printing and closed production plants so far this year to save costs. But what’s the cost to readers? Rick Edmonds of Poynter takes a look at how the production of print newspapers is migrating — up the interstate — with ever earlier deadlines as a result. “The evening city council meeting gets reported like a West Coast sports score — 36 hours late — if it gets reported at all,” he writes.

Before the jaws snap shut

The battle for Tribune isn’t over yet. Robert Channick of the Tribune-owned Baltimore Sun reported last week that a Maryland businessman, hotel investor Stewart Bainum Jr., has offered $650 million to purchase all of Tribune Publishing, but the Chicago-based newspaper company’s board already endorsed a $630 million offer from Alden Global Capital. “Still a long shot,” Jay Hancock tweeted, adding, “If Alden still wins - at an even higher price and loading Tribune with even more debt - won’t be a good outcome.”

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But then we heard from Marc Tracy of The New York Times that Swiss billionaire and philanthropist Hansjörg Wyss has teamed with Bainum in a bid to upend Alden Global Capital’s plan to acquire the newspaper chain. Wyss explained, “I don’t want to see another newspaper that has a chance to increase the amount of truth being told to the American people going down the drain.”

As Paul Willistein put it, “‘Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.’ And he’s the Big Cheese.”

And then we got the scoop from Lukas Alpert at the Wall Street Journal that a Florida investor, Mason Slaine, has expressed interest in joining an 11th-hour effort by Bainum to acquire Tribune and wrest the company away from Alden. Slaine, who owns a 3.4% stake in Tribune, said he would make the personal investment in order to acquire the publisher’s two Florida newspapers, the Orlando Sentinel and the Sun Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale.

Erik Adams points out that “Rich people won’t save media (but these rich people snatching this segment of the media from the jaws of a hedge fund wouldn’t be so bad).”

More media deals

On to more deal-making stories from the Wall Street Journal, beginning with Ben Mullin’s scoop that startups Axios and The Athletic are discussing a merger and considering a SPAC deal. The potential combination would create a larger portfolio of digital publishers and be the latest example of a company going public through a blank-check firm. 

Colin Kellaher of the Wall Street Journal reported that News Corp, which publishes the Journal as well as MarketWatch and Barron’s has agreed to buy Investor’s Business Daily for $275 million. The New York media company expands its portfolio of publications catering to investors with the acquisition of the digital-first financial news and research publisher. 

News Corp has also clinched a deal to acquire Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s books and media segment for $349 million in cash, planning to combine the publisher with its HarperCollins Publishers subsidiary. Variety’s Todd Spangler has those details.

Seems like a strange business strategy

Katie Robertson reported at The New York Times that Michael Tomasky, editor of the policy journal Democracy: A Journal of Ideas and a columnist for The Daily Beast, will take over as The New Republic’s new top editor. Mark Goldberg tweeted, “Those of us who worked under supreme leader @mtomasky in the early aughts at the @TheProspect will no doubt see this as an ideological victory, 17 years in the making. Interesting!”

But then Laura Wagner of Defector got the inside story from two TNR staffers who were in a meeting where Tomasky laid out his vision for the magazine. The headline: Incoming TNR Editor Lays Out Boring Vision For Magazine In “Depressing” Meeting With Staff

According to what staffers told Wagner, Tomasky proposed what amounts to a restoration of a previous iteration of the magazine, when, during the Clinton years, it was known as the inflight magazine of Air Force One. 

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Bailey McCann thinks “Making a magazine utterly forgettable seems like a strange business strategy in this environment.” 

Also, writes Wagner, “two things are clear: Tomasky has a new (old) vision for TNR, and that vision does not include all current TNR writers.” James Dennin’s reaction sums up what a lot of journalists are saying about the revelations in this story: “well this seems lame as hell.”

This entire thing reads like a parody

That’s Soraya Roberts’ take on the latest Ben Smith Sunday column in The New York Times. For that piece, Smith went Inside America’s Most Interesting Magazine, and Media’s Oddest Workplace, also known as Harper’s Magazine

“Harper’s got lots of attention for the big ‘Harper’s letter’ last year. But that’s not what’s most interesting about it,” as Carolyn Ryan says. 

But Amy Plitt wasn’t so thrilled with Smith’s take. She tweeted, “Wild how a union-busting publisher who forced employees back to an office against the advice of health officials and rails against ~*cancel culture*~ is branded as ‘interesting’ and merely ‘odd’ rather than bad, actually.” 

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Plitt wasn’t alone. John Warner said, “Forget it, I’ll just put it plain because what do I have to lose? This piece is B.S. It treats the audience like suckers and is so full of winks to insiders it actively obscures any deeper understanding. It’s the opposite of what a columnist should do.”

Meanwhile, Meryl Kornfield had a very straightforward idea: “if I was an editor, I would simply pay my interns.” 

More stunt NFTs

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Sure, Nicholas Jackson is saying, “Stop it with this,” but you knew it was coming. Parin Behrooz admitted, “I promised myself I wouldn’t tweet about NFTs but a column about NFTs as an NFT is too meta to pass. Also you can read, listen, AND buy Kevin’s column.”

As Kevin Roose explained on Twitter, “The NYT made a NFT! My new column is about NFTs, and I also turned the column into a NFT and put it up for auction on @withFND, with proceeds going to charity. Bid away, and you could own the first NFT in the paper’s 170-year history.”

As a bonus perk, the winner’s also going to receive a short, personalized voice memo of congratulations from Michael Barbaro, host of “The Daily.” “NFT that comes with Michael Barbaro voicemail. I’m thinking $70 mil,” Kyle Chayka predicted.

If you were quick to act and willing to pony up, you could have bought his column on the blockchain. The next day, Roose tweeted, “We have a winner! The NFT version of this column has sold for 350 ETH, or about $560,000, with proceeds going to the NYT’s Neediest Cases Fund.”

It’s not $70 mil, but it’s still quite a haul for an article you can literally read or listen to right here. And Joshua Benton thinks, “The problem with all these stunt NFTs is that they lead readers to think the value is in the NFTs when it’s really in the stunt.”

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At any rate, here’s Roose with the follow-up: Why Did Someone Pay $560,000 for a Picture of My Column? He says, “I talked to some of the bidders in my charity NFT auction, including the winner @3fmusic, and asked them why they offered as much as $560,000 for a PNG of my column. Their answers were fascinating.”

A few more

From the Muck Rack Team

With Women’s History Month coming to a close, FleishmanHillard communications leader Veleisa Burrell takes a look at the state of PR for Women in her latest for the Muck Rack Blog, Women’s History Month shows it’s past time to do as we counsel: Show up for women

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