Nieman Lab

When Facebook went down this week, traffic to news sites went up

On October 4, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were down for more than five hours. For five+ hours, people read news, according to Chartbeat data from its thousands of publisher clients across 60 countries. (And they went to Twitter; Chartbeat saw Twitter traffic up 72%. At the peak of the outage — around 3 p.m. ET — net traffic to pages across the web was up by 38% compared to the same time the previous week, Chartbeat found.

An old FCC rule is being used to justify shrinking the Dayton “Daily” News to three days a week

To increase the quality of local journalism in Ohio, the Federal Communications Commission is requiring three newspapers to stop printing daily.  Back in 1975, a thousand media ecosystems ago, the FCC passed a well-intentioned rule that said a city’s newspaper couldn’t be owned by the same company that owns one of its TV or radio stations.

Local newspapers are suffering, but they’re still (by far) the most significant journalism producers in their communities

Local newspapers have always been the epicenter of local news ecosystems. While communities may have other sources of journalism, such as TV and radio stations and online-only outlets, the bulk of the reporting serving local communities has traditionally been provided by local newspapers. we conducted a study that explores which types of outlets are the most significant producers of journalism in 100 randomly sampled communities across the US.