Weekly Media News
So last week, The Hill sold to Nexstar for $130 million and The Week sold to Future for more than $400 million. So that was peanuts. This week? Axel Springer acquired Politico for what insiders are reporting for $1 billion. It is a “winner takes all” landscape out there as Poynter publishes a round-up of all the local news layoffs since Covid emerged. This week, the one read is Jill Lepore in the New Yorker on Facebook and its deep impact on society. I also did a bit of a dive on Naomi Oreskes’ view of how unreplicable science fares in the media and what we can do to ensure science remains an integral part of our news ecosystem. Nonprofit CODA has a report on scientific findings recently curbed by politicians in some countries. Nieman Lab says cue cards and data visualizations are now mainstays at NYT, and WashPost is hiring two more TikTok editors. Lots in here this week!
Enjoy the waning days of August,
Heidi
Axel Springer to Acquire Politico – WSJ
Acquisition of news website adds to German publisher’s portfolio of U.S.-based media holdings. Axel Springer SE has agreed to buy Washington, D.C., publisher Politico, expanding the German publisher’s portfolio of U.S.-based media holdings. The deal is valued at more than $1 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.
Axel Springer will also acquire the remaining 50% share of its current joint venture Politico Europe, as well as tech news site Protocol from Robert Allbritton, founder, and publisher of Politico and Protocol, the companies said Thursday.
Forbes to merge with Spac as Axel Springer buys Politico - FT
Axel Springer and Politico did not disclose the terms of the transaction but two people familiar with the deal said it valued the political news service at more than $1bn.
The Forbes agreement with Magnum Opus Acquisition, backed by the private investment firm L2 Capital, will mean the US business publication will receive $600m, including cash raised by the Spac as well as commitments from other investors. Forbes, founded by Bertie Charles Forbes and Walter Drey more than a century ago, published its first issue in 1917 and is known for tracking the world’s wealthiest individuals.
Berlin-based Axel Springer has pursued expansion beyond its domestic market in recent years. Since missing out on the sale of the Financial Times six years ago, the publisher of Germany’s Die Welt and Bild has bought the online news site Business Insider for $343m in 2015. More recently, it purchased a majority stake in newsletter publisher Morning Brew. Axel Springer is already in a 50/50 joint venture with Politico for a Europe-focused version of its website. Thursday’s deal included the remaining 50 percent of Politico Europe as well as Protocol, a technology news website also founded and controlled by Politico publisher Robert Allbritton.
Axel Springer’s decision to delist in early 2020 after KKR became its largest shareholder has allowed the media group to accelerate investments in digital media free from the scrutiny of public investors.The company also operates one of the world’s largest portfolios of digital classified businesses, which includes the jobs portal StepStone as well as property sites such as Immonet.
Facebook Said to Consider Forming an Election Commission - NYT
The social network has contacted academics to create a group to advise it on thorny election-related decisions, said people with knowledge of the matter.
The proposed commission could decide on matters such as the viability of political ads and what to do about election-related misinformation, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the discussions were confidential. Facebook is expected to announce the commission this fall in preparation for the 2022 midterm elections, they said, though the effort is preliminary and could still fall apart.
Outsourcing election matters to a panel of experts could help Facebook sidestep criticism of bias by political groups, two of the people said. The company has been blasted in recent years by conservatives, who have accused Facebook of suppressing their voices, as well as by civil rights groups and Democrats for allowing political misinformation to fester and spread online. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, does not want to be seen as the sole decision-maker on political content, two of the people said.
Experts React to Report on Facebook Election Commission - Tech Policy
According to a report by Ryan Mac, Mike Isaac, and Sheera Frenkel in the New York Times, Facebook is expected to announce that it is forming a commission- separate from its quasi-independent Oversight Board- to advise it on election issues:
Facebook has approached academics and policy experts about forming a commission to advise it on global election-related matters, said five people with knowledge of the discussions, a move that would allow the social network to shift some of its political decision-making to an advisory body.
The proposed commission could decide on matters such as the viability of political ads and what to do about election-related misinformation, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the discussions were confidential. Facebook is expected to announce the commission this fall in preparation for the 2022 midterm elections, they said, though the effort is preliminary and could still fall apart.
TechCrunch’s Taylor Hatmaker, referencing the Times report, noted that like the Oversight Board, a “similar external policy-setting body focused on elections would be very politically useful for Facebook. The company is a frequent target for both Republicans and Democrats, with the former claiming Facebook censors conservatives disproportionately and the latter calling attention to Facebook’s long history of incubating conspiracies and political misinformation.”
Emily Bell, Founding Director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School
“Facebook- and other ad platforms for that matter- have a role in society they are ill-equipped to perform. Efforts like this could provide mitigation for the worst practices internally, and help Facebook better understand its own responsibility. Which might be beneficial – to Facebook.
But an initiative like this can only be seen as an expression of corporate self-interest, not a long-term solution for civil society. It is designed, constructed and paid for by Facebook – it will never substitute for better regulation centered on civic society. We don’t allow other critical functions that affect our safety and welfare to be regulated by private businesses. Elections are no exception. They are not Facebook’s business, they are everybody’s concern.”
Facebook’s Broken Vows – Jill Lepore for New Yorker
How the company’s pledge to bring the world together wound up pulling us apart.
Facebook’s stated mission amounts to the salvation of humanity. In truth, the purpose of Facebook, a multinational corporation with headquarters in California, is to make money for its investors. Facebook is an advertising agency: it collects data and sells ads. Founded in 2004, it now has a market value of close to a trillion dollars. Since 2006, with the launch of its News Feed, Facebook has also been a media company, one that now employs fifteen thousand “content moderators.” (In the U.S., about a third of the population routinely get their news from Facebook. In other parts of the world, as many as two-thirds do.)
Since 2016, Facebook has become interested in election integrity here and elsewhere; the company has thirty-five thousand security specialists in total, many of whom function almost like a U.N. team of elections observers. But its early mantra, “Company over country,” still resonates. The company is, in important respects, larger than any country. Facebook possesses the personal data of more than a quarter of the world’s people, 2.8 billion out of 7.9 billion, and governs the flow of information among them. The number of Facebook users is about the size of the populations of China and India combined. In some corners of the globe, including more than half of African nations, Facebook provides free basic data services, positioning itself as a privately-owned utility.
McClatchy promises more journalists and expanded Sunday print – Poynter
When a hedge fund acquires a newspaper chain, cuts, cuts, and more cuts ensue, right? That has proven true for Alden Global Capital, most recently after it took over Tribune Publishing in late May.
But perhaps budget slashing is not the only move for Chatham Asset Management, which bought McClatchy out of bankruptcy roughly a year ago.
The Kansas City Star, one of the largest of McClatchy’s 30 newspapers, looks to be a hedge-fund-owned outlier, this month rolling out an expanded Sunday print edition, adding journalists and trying to improve its e-edition and digital site.
The new iteration of the Star debuted this past Sunday and Monday. Similar changes are underway at The Wichita Eagle, which, like the Star, is branding itself as “reimagined.”
Reddit Responds to Calls From Moderators to Fight Disinformation – Vice
Some of the most popular subreddits are protesting the proliferation of COVID-19 disinformation and conspiracy theories on the platform. Moderators from several high-profile subreddits, including r/ww, r/showerthoughts, and r/pics, are now calling on the site to do a better job of curbing the spread of disinformation.
The CEO of Reddit has responded to calls from users to purge the site of disinformation, saying “dissent is a part of Reddit and the foundation of democracy.”
Huffman’s post doesn’t grapple with the fact that antivax content is all over Reddit. Reddit has long had a disinformation problem that the pandemic brought into sharp relief. In February 2020, it quarantined one of the subreddits that frequently discussed COVID-19 conspiracy theories. The subreddit is still there, available to anyone willing to click through a warning about its contents. As of this writing, a stickied post in the group is asking if it should join in with the other subreddits calling on admins to ban disinformation. Earlier this month, Reddit quarantined NoNewNormal, an antimask, antivax subreddit.
Here comes pay-per-watch news! AT&T pulling global CNN feed from UK cable systems – The Desk
CNN International will still be available on Sky satellite and CNN's own website. Starting September 1, CNN fans in the United Kingdom will have to pay £2 a month or £20 a year (about $2.75 a month or $27.50 a year) to watch a live stream of CNN International via the new streaming service CNN Live, which is currently available on CNN’s website.
Apple will take 15% of publishers’ sales if they join Apple News – The Verge
Apple has a new offer for publishers: join Apple News, and it’ll only take 15 percent out of your in-app purchases and subscriptions instead of 30. Publishers can apply to Apple’s News Partner Program to take that bargain, but they have to agree to Apple’s requirements. The list of specific eligibility requirements to apply is short:
You must maintain a robust Apple News channel in Australia, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, and publish all content to that channel in Apple News Format. If you’re based outside of these regions and do not publish in Apple News Format, you must share content via an RSS feed.
The primary function of your app must be to deliver original, professionally authored news content.
Your app must be available on the App Store and allow users to purchase auto-renewable subscriptions through Apple’s in-app purchase system.
The Account Holder of an Apple Developer Program membership must agree to a separate addendum to the Apple Developer Program License Agreement.
Publishers are expected to maintain their Apple News channel, publish in the Apple News Format (ANF), and offer an app in the App Store that offers auto-renewable subscriptions and only “original, professionally-authored news content.” Apple says the News Partner Program will also support and fund organizations that educate readers on news media literacy and “further efforts to diversify newsrooms and news coverage.”
Politico, Vice, and the circular digital-news story – CJR
As Edmund Lee and Lauren Hirsch wrote recently in the New York Times, sites like Politico and Axios, with their relatively niche but loyal audiences, sit at one end of a media-industry “barbell.” Legacy national newspapers with strong print and digital subscriber bases sit at the other end; ad-supported digital publishers are balanced precariously in the middle. With Google and Facebook hoovering up online ad revenue, it’s been tough for the likes of BuzzFeed, Vice Media, and Group Nine, which have all consolidated to remain competitive.
Vice laid off more workers while Axel Springer says they will hire more. But unions are seen by more and more journalists as the only way to protect themselves.
Vice Media Makes New Round of Layoffs in Digital and Refinery29 – Variety
A Vice Media Group rep confirmed the company had made layoffs but declined to comment further.
In a joint statement the Vice Union and R29 Union, both of which are affiliated with WGA East, said that 17 staffers were laid off “in what has become a macabre annual ritual at this company.”
Why good graphics are essential for reporting on climate change – Nieman Lab
Maps can be an invaluable weapon against this misunderstanding. For the first time, the IPCC has released an “interactive atlas” with its latest report, allowing audiences to pan and zoom through the data themselves. But if you give the IPCC’s atlas a try, you can see how it’s hard to capture complexity for a specialist audience while retaining simplicity for a global audience.
The global attack on science – CODA newsroom funded by Luminate (Pierre Omidyar) Content Fund, Robert Bosch Stiftung, Fritt Ord, Reva and David Logan Foundation, European Endowment For Democracy, ICFG International Center For Journalists.
From political leaders who deny the effects of climate change to Big Energy’s funding of university research, scientists across the world are facing severe funding cuts, harassment, and pressure from vested interests.
Coda reporters looked at five examples of countries where the scientific community is being targeted. I found the look at Mexico and Denmark quite interesting. Curious what you think about Denmark.
The full text of the proposal, which was supported by Denmark’s governing Social Democrats and a number of right-wing and libertarian parties, states that the parliament expects university leaders to ensure proper self-regulation of scientific practices within their institutions, meaning “that there should be no standardization of research in order to produce politics disguised as science.”
The intensifying charge against activism within academic circles has been led by two MPs: Henrik Dahl of the right-wing populist Danish People’s Party and Morten Messerschmidt of the Liberal Alliance. Both argue that Denmark’s higher education system is being overrun by identarian political theories imported from the United States.
In Brazil: Under President Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil has become an increasingly hostile place for environmentalists and epidemiologists, while climate scientists and conservation experts in Australia say they are routinely prevented from raising straightforward ecological facts to the public and government.
Why Bad Science Is Sometimes More Appealing Than Good Science - Naomi Oreskes, Scientific American
A recent paper makes an upsetting claim about the state of science: nonreplicable studies are cited more often than replicable ones. In other words, according to the report in Science Advances, bad science seems to get more attention than good science.
The paper follows up on reports of a “replication crisis” in psychology, wherein large numbers of academic papers present results that other researchers are unable to reproduce—as well as claims that the problem is not limited to psychology. This matters for several reasons. If a substantial proportion of science fails to meet the norm of replicability, then this work won’t provide a solid basis for decision-making. Failure to replicate results may delay the use of science in developing new medicines and technologies. It may also undermine public trust, making it harder to get Americans vaccinated or to act on climate change. And money spent on invalid science is money wasted: one study puts the cost of irreproducible medical research in the U.S. alone at $28 billion a year.
In the new study, the authors tracked papers in psychology journals, economics journals, and Science and Nature with documented failures of replication. The results are disturbing: papers that couldn’t be replicated were cited more than average, even after the news of the reproducibility failure had been published, and only 12 percent of postexposure citations acknowledged the failure.
If you say science is right, you’re wrong – Naomi Oreskes, Scientific American
One popular move is to insist that science is right—full stop—and that once we discover the truth about the world, we are done. Anyone who denies such truths (they suggest) is stupid, ignorant, or fatuous. Or, as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg said, “Even though a scientific theory is in a sense a social consensus, it is unlike any other sort of consensus in that it is culture-free and permanent.” Well, no. Even a modest familiarity with the history of science offers many examples of matters that scientists thought they had resolved, only to discover that they needed to be reconsidered. Some familiar examples are Earth as the center of the universe, the absolute nature of time and space, the stability of continents, and the cause of infectious disease.
Science is a process of learning and discovery, and sometimes we learn that what we thought was right is wrong. Science can also be understood as an institution (or better, a set of institutions) that facilitates this work. To say that science is “true” or “permanent” is like saying that “marriage is permanent.” At best, it's a bit off-key. Marriage today is very different from what it was in the 16th or 18th century, and so are most of our “laws” of nature.
Can student journalists and local media collaborations work together? – Medium by Resolve Philly funded by Lenfest Journalism Institute
Collaborative reporting doesn’t always feel instinctive. Especially in a university environment where the student media organizations are isolated in different buildings across campus with little history of working together. But, working together can push journalists to pool their individual strengths and create more informative and multidimensional storytelling.
There were several institutional barriers in place before the reporting even began: our four student media outlets were largely siloed across the university, there was a legal process to get through for publishing the work, and the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic was still complicating workflows. But from the beginning, we saw the value in finding a way for professional and student journalists to work together in an urban reporting setting and forge a model to introduce students to collaborative journalism.
Instagram slides and Twitter cards to make stories more digestible – Nieman
Slides and cards are a good way to highlight the strongest part of a story, whether it’s a visual component or a tidbit that competitors don’t have.
Nguyễn wrote about how those slides, while attention-grabbing, ran the risk of oversimplifying issues, stripping them of their importance, and potentially spreading misinformation:
But slides like these, when done right and with care, make complex stories (about, say, a mutating virus!) more digestible and accessible. At The New York Times, the audience team has been experimenting with variations of these slides and cards on its social media platforms, deputy off-platform editor Jake Grovum said.
“When there’s either an important, complicated news story or something that [would benefit from] context, there’s a real good journalistic reason to do this kind of thing,” Grovum said. “If you look at some of the examples when it works best, it’s almost like you get the first three or four grafs of a news story all in one post. You have the copy of the tweet, a couple of lines in the card, and then it’s just a lot more information and context, and everyone knows that context can be lacking on social.”
At the Times, using slides and cards on social became more of a priority around the beginning of the pandemic last year. The audience team wanted to have a more “visual presence” on Times platforms and wanted to make more use of the maps and data visualizations that lived on the website.
Single cards work better on Facebook and Twitter because those apps don’t have a carousel feature (you know, where you swipe left to see more images in a single post) the way Instagram does. Grovum said he’s found that Facebook and Twitter lend themselves well to text-heavy cards and that users are actually taking the time to read and share them.
The cards have been particularly useful to the Times in debunking misinformation, though Grovum said a broader challenge is designing cards in ways that are still helpful even if they’re screenshotted and stripped of context.
Washington Post is now hiring two more TikTok News Editors – WashPost
Job Description: The community editor is responsible for growing the reach and engagement of The Washington Post’s TikTok channel. The community editor also maintains a consistent voice on TikTok and other Washington Post platforms while moderating comments and responding to questions. Candidates should have experience working on social content produced in a newsroom, exceptional news judgment, and experience developing and implementing tone and voice for a media organization or brand. The ideal candidate also has experience producing and editing news-driven content. The community editor will ensure full optimization of subscription…
Canopy Atlanta wants to equalize how journalism is produced – Nieman Lab
“Our theory about how you build trust in information is to help people access it on their own.”
Canopy Atlanta is a nonprofit community news project that was started in 2020 by a group of around 25 journalists in Atlanta who were disappointed with the state of the city’s current media landscape. They train local fellows and pair them with seasoned journalists.
Yahoo Pulls Plug on News Websites in India Over FDI Rules – The Wire India
Last year, HuffPost had shut down its India office over the same rules implemented by the Narendra Modi government, leaving 12 employees jobless.