Journalism

As local newspapers continue to fall off the map, digital-first websites are cropping up to cover local communities. Local Independent Online New Publishers (LION), a trade organization, has seen its membership double in the past years to 225 members, said Executive Director Matt DeRienzo.

[Commentary] We need to move away from the arguments that the country should care about laid-off reporters or that the suits should be held to account. This can’t be about us. It has to be about why the country should care if local news goes away, which is the trajectory we now find ourselves on. What are the effects on a democracy if local news is no longer in the picture? How is my life as a New Yorker going to be worse now that the Daily News has been so terribly hobbled? If you’re in journalism and you can’t muster an answer to that question, you need to move on.

Newspaper layoffs have far from abated in the past year, and digital-native news outlets are also suffering losses.  At least 36 percent of the largest newspapers across the United States – as well as at least 23 percent of the highest-traffic digital-native news outlets – experienced layoffs between January 2017 and April 2018, according to the Pew study. Among newspapers, those with the highest circulation were most likely to be affected.

President Donald Trump used his Twitter account to make false and misleading attacks against The Washington Post and Amazon, the behemoth online retailer whose founder owns The Post. In the first of his tweets, President Trump said the “Amazon Washington Post has gone crazy against me ever since they lost the Internet Tax Case in the U.S. Supreme Court two months ago.”  The president was apparently referring to a Supreme Court case decided in June  that will allow state governments to compel online retailers beyond their borders to collect sales tax revenue from consumers.

The meeting lasted less than a minute. By the time it was over, reporters and editors at The NY Daily News had been told that the newsroom staff was being cut in half and that the editor in chief, Jim Rich, was out of a job. Grant Whitmore, an executive at Tronc, the media company that owns The News, presided over the meeting. About 50 members of the newspaper’s staff were in attendance. The new editor in chief is Robert York, currently the editor and publisher of The Morning Call, a Tronc-owned daily newspaper in Allentown (PA). 

[Commentary]  Not only has voter participation in local elections fallen to dangerously low levels, but the health of local newspapers, traditional watchdogs for the most direct and abundant form of government in the United States, has also been deteriorating. The Republican Party — yes, the same party whose leader derides the media as “fake news” and “the enemy of the people”  — should be particularly alarmed.

While much of the media remains focused on President Donald Trump’s summit with Putin in Helsinki, an eventful week for media companies has set in motion changes that may alter how Americans get their news. In the past several days, Disney has bested Comcast in the battle for 21st Century Fox, Sinclair’s takeover of Tribune Media was torpedoed by the Federal Communications Commission, and the Justice Department attempted to block the AT&T–Time Warner merger that is already underway.

BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith was confused as hell and he wasn’t going to take it anymore. So while he’s not exactly Howard Beale, the famously pugnacious editor of BuzzFeed pressed hard recently on global news partnerships head Campbell Brown to explain how Facebook defines journalism and who practices it. The focus of his ire was the presence of six conservative publications at a biannual meeting that Brown ran recently with a group of editors and publishers Facebook works with.

President Donald Trump lashed out anew at the news media, suggesting that reporters are slanting their coverage of his relationship with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin with the aim of provoking a possible war. “The Fake News Media wants so badly to see a major confrontation with Russia, even a confrontation that could lead to war,” the president wrote amid a series of morning tweets.

An unusual show of solidarity between rival journalists seemed to signal a new approach by the White House press corps toward an administration that regularly uses briefings to deride, and divide, the news media.