Now nonprofit, The Salt Lake Tribune has achieved something rare for a local newspaper: financial sustainability
The Salt Lake Tribune has plenty to celebrate in 2021. The first (and so far only) major newspaper to become a nonprofit is financially sustainable and, after years of layoffs and cuts, is growing its newsroom. Executive editor Lauren Gustus announced the news in a note to readers in which the relief of escaping hedge fund ownership was palpable. “We celebrate 150 years this year and we are healthy,” Gustus wrote. “We are...
Address — don’t sidestep — health misinformation to debunk falsehoods, study finds
A common way to tackle misinformation, especially health misinformation, is to ignore it. And this is a strategy often employed by authority figures — sidestep the misinformation, don’t give it airtime, and it might...
A rose is a rose is a rose, but please, please make it clear to your readers what a “subscriber” is
Check your credit card statement and you’ll probably agree: We’re living in a subscription economy. People who want to hear new music used to buy CDs; now they subscribe to Spotify. People who need Adobe Photoshop...
The vulture is hungry again: Alden Global Capital wants to buy a few hundred more newspapers
Nearly 11 years ago — January 20, 2011 — longtime publishing executive Martin Langeveld wrote a particularly prescient piece for us here at Nieman Lab. On the surface, it was about a management change at a single...
Journalism school is broken and expensive. Jessica Huseman will teach you for cheap(er).
In the fall of 2014, Jessica Huseman was starting her master’s in investigative journalism at Columbia University. She remembers having dinner with her cohort and “feeling like an idiot.” “We were all sitting...
About a third of news organizations have already adopted a remote or hybrid working model
Hybrid working will be the norm for many journalists, according to a new report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Just 9% of news organizations plan to reject remote work entirely and return to...
Journalism internships are an education — in precarious work
Internships can be places where young journalists gain crucial experience that can’t be replicated in the classroom, and begin relationships that pay off for decades in guidance and career advancement. But as many have noted in recent years, it’s also a major part of the way the news industry perpetuates homogeneity and elitism, by creating a pipeline to top jobs for students at elite universities and shutting out others from...
How do you fix an “information disorder”? The Aspen Institute has some ideas
It is fall now, and out west, the aspens are turning. In this case, it’s the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder, a group of smart, powerful, and/or ex-royal people tasked with figuring out how to tackle the misinformation seemingly endemic to modern digital life. (Among the names that’ll be most familiar to Nieman Lab readers: Amanda Zamora, Alex Stamos, Kate Starbird, Jameel Jaffer, Safiya Umoja Noble, Deb...
The end of “click to subscribe, call to cancel”? One of the news industry’s favorite retention tactics is illegal, FTC says
Discovering they had to get on the phone to cancel a subscription they signed up for online rankled several respondents in our survey looking at why people canceled their news subscriptions. The reaction to the...
Public access television channels are an untapped resource for building local journalism
On October 20, Community Media Day, Public Media Network (PMN) celebrated forty years of operating Kalamazoo, Michigan’s Public, Educational, and Governmental (PEG) access cable channels. Distinct from local public broadcasting, PMN’s legacy is built on teaching residents how to produce homegrown cable television programs. PMN also cablecasts town council and school board meetings, public safety announcements and municipal job...
Twitter’s subscription product, Twitter Blue, launches in the U.S., and yes, it lets you undo tweets
Can you believe this site is free? It doesn’t have to be! On Tuesday, Twitter announced it’ll roll out a subscription product to lure super users into paying for features like an undo button, a news-aggregating...
Conflict vs. community: How early coronavirus coverage differed in the U.S. and China
How did major Chinese and U.S. outlets differ in their initial coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic? That’s the central question behind a new study published last week in the Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly...
Vox is revamping its editorial strategy to redefine what ‘Voxxy’ means
Last month, Vox.com eliminated its Identities section, which covered a range of topics, including criminal justice, race, religion, gender, and drugs. Some not-so-great personal news: Vox has decided to eliminate the Identities section and thus my position. I’m extremely proud of the work my team has done and the stories and perspectives we’ve centered that mainstream media often does not. 1/12 — Jessica Machado...
The dream of customized audio news isn’t working out (at least not yet)
In 2016, one of the more interesting startups we’ve covered here at Nieman Lab launched. 60dB, named for the volume of a calm human voice, launched on what was still the front edge of the current podcast boom — a year of 2 Dope Queens. Code Switch, and Homecoming. And like all my favorite startups, 60dB was a clear expression of a single idea: People like audio that comes in shorter packages. Podcasting in 2016 was largely a realm...