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Under more ordinary circumstances, the cover of the issue for February 13 and 20, 2017—our Anniversary Issue, marking ninety-two years—would feature some version of Rea Irvin’s classic image of the monocled dandy Eustace Tilley. This year, as a response to the opening weeks of the Trump Administration, particularly the executive order on immigration, we feature John W. Tomac’s dark, unwelcoming image, “Liberty’s Flameout.” “It used to be that the Statue of Liberty, and her shining torch, was the vision that welcomed new immigrants. And, at the same time, it was the symbol of American values,” Tomac says. “Now it seems that we are turning off the light.” Here is a slide show of past Anniversary Issue covers....
Breitbart, the website at the center of the self-described alternative online media, is planning to expand in the United States and abroad. The site, whose former chairman became the chief executive of Donald J. Trump’s campaign in August, has been emboldened by the victory of its candidate.
Breitbart was always bullish on Mr. Trump’s chances, but the site seems far more certain of something else, as illustrated by a less visible story it published on election night, declaring a different sort of victory: “Breitbart Beats CNN, HuffPo for Total Facebook Engagements for Election Content.”
It was a type of story the site publishes regularly. In August: “Breitbart Jumps to #11 on Facebook for Overall Engagement.” In June: “Breitbart Ranked #1 in the World for Political Social Media; Beats HuffPo by 2 Million.” Late last year: “Breitbart News #6 for Most Comments Among English Facebook Publishers Globally.”
These stories were self-promotional. But the rankings, released on a monthly basis by a company called NewsWhip, which measures activity on social networks, represented a brutal leveling. They were unelaborated lists that ranked outlets in terms that were difficult to dispute — total shares, likes and comments....
Since he lost his TV reporting job last year, Jarrett Hill has been looking for his next opportunity. It presented itself in an unexpected way. Hill was sitting at a corner table Monday night in a Culver City Starbucks, drinking a venti iced coffee and watching the Republican National Convention on an MSNBC live stream. As Melania Trump spoke, she uttered a phrase that the 31-year-old California native had heard once before — from First Lady Michelle Obama. “… the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams …,” Melania Trump said during her address to the Republican National Convention. Instinctively, Hill finished the phrase aloud to his laptop screen: “… and your willingness to work for them.” “Kind of like a song that you haven’t heard in a long time and you remember the lyrics as you hear them. Or a movie that you know the line to and you kind of respond to it,” he said. He recalled the words from Michelle Obama’s speech because, he said, he had thought to himself at the time that it was “really beautifully written.” “I believe I even wrote it down or typed it,” Hill said. “Obviously having no idea that eight years later I’d hear them again from a woman who wanted to be first lady speaking at a convention in front of 40 million people.”...
If their labor was similar to that of many other reporters in town covering the convention, their nationality wasn't. Reporter Jiwon Park and cameraman Bohyun Bang are with Arirang TV based in Seoul, South Korea. Why were they here? "It's the president of the United States," Park explained. "We have a lot of interest in the United States. It is the number-one country in the world." As NBC's Chuck Todd was hustling to a nearby outdoors studio not too far away and eliciting a news celebrity's typical response from passersby ("hey, that's the guy from CBS!" a Mississippi delegate said to his companion), the two journalists from Arirang were virtually unnoticed and blended into the bustle of conventioneers, media and massive security. The duo has been in the country for 10 days, starting in Washington, D.C. and finishing up in Cleveland.I asked if they had come to any clear understanding of Trump's appeal. They said a little bit but not completely. Perhaps join the crowd, I said....
A population of 100,000 is no longer a guarantee that a city like Richmond, California can sustain a thriving daily paper. Readers have drifted from the tactile pleasures of print to the digital gratification of their smartphone screens, and advertising revenues have drifted with them. Titles that once served up debates from City Hall, news of school teams’ triumphs and classified ads for outgrown bikes have stopped the presses for good.
Last January, however, a site called the Richmond Standard launched, promising “a community-driven daily news source dedicated to shining a light on the positive things that are going on in the community”, and giving everyone from athletes to entrepreneurs the recognition they deserve. Since then, it has recorded the “quick-thinking teen” commended by California’s governor for saving a woman from overdosing; the “incredible strength” of the 5ft 6in high-school freshman who can bench-press “a whopping 295lbs”; and councilman Tom Butt’s warning about the costs of vacating a blighted public housing project.
The Richmond Standard is one of the more polished sites to emerge in the age of hyper-local digital news brands such as Patch and DNAinfo.com. That may be because it is run and funded by Chevron, the $240bn oil group which owns the Richmond refinery that in August 2012 caught fire, spewing plumes of black smoke over the city and sending more than 15,000 residents to hospital for medical help....
So farewell then, Newsweek magazine, which published its last print issue this week. After 79 years — 15 of them as my employer — the venerable old rag is to disappear into an uncertain, web-only future. Many newspapers and magazines have folded as advertising shrinks and readers go online but Newsweek is perhaps the first of the titans to fall. Its demise is all the more resonant because it was one side of one of the great twin peaks of the press: Time andNewsweek, the New York Times and the Washington Post, the Times and the Daily Telegraph. In its heyday Newsweek was an essential part of America’s national conversation. It was controversial, liberal, usually half a step ahead of Middle America....
The vast majority of Americans say they followed coverage of the first presidential debate between Mitt Romney and Barack Obama, including 56% who followed the debate live. Most of these real-time viewers watched on television, but 11% of live debate watchers were “dual screeners,” following coverage on a computer or mobile device at the same time as following television coverage. Another 3% say they followed the debate live exclusively online. The post-debate survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted Oct. 4-7 among 1,006 adults, finds younger Americans are especially likely to be “dual-screeners,” following the debate live on both television and a computer or mobile device. Overall, 32% of those younger than 40 say they followed the debate live online, including 22% who followed it both on television and online, and 10% who followed exclusively on a computer or mobile device.... [Demographics and trends are interesting in this study ~ Jeff]
Ever-shifting business models in a delusional emulation of startups won't save publishers who ignore the techniques that are allowing their new competitors to succeed. I feel rather bad for my colleagues in the national newspaper business this morning. As they trek into their plush central London office, sipping their lattes1, they find the world predicting their doom and destruction. Frédéric Filloux treads a familiar path, contrasting the transitional newspaper approach to selling their stories online ("content marketing", if you insist on jargon) with that of the tech-based news publisher and aggregators: The essence of what we're seeing here is a transfer of value. Original stories are getting very little traffic due to the poor marketing tactics of old-fashion publishers. But once they are swallowed by the HuffPo's clever traffic-generation machine, the same journalistic item will make tens or hundred times better traffic-wise. Who is right? Who can look to the better future in the digital world ? Is it the virtuous author carving language-smart headlines or the aggregator generating eye-gobbling phrases thanks to high tech tools? Your guess. Snappy end to a piece, sure enough. But also, a bit of a false dichotomy, n'est pas?. In theory, the traditional news publishers could learn from the attention tactics of the aggregators a great deal more easily than the aggregators could staff up a full-blown journalism operation. When it comes to the survival of top-flight reporting, it might be time to start holding your nose, and using some more aggressive attention techniques....
Overhyped gaffe coverage is a sign that editors should shift resources to other stories... Since Friday, the national political conversation has been dominated by a debate over the importance of President Obama’s statement, at a White House press conference, that “The private sector is doing fine.” Unfortunately, most of the media discussion has focused on strategy rather than policy.... These claims are representative of the way journalists routinely promote the importance of these sorts of pseudo-controversies, even though there is little convincing evidence that gaffes affect presidential election outcomes. The problem is particularly acute during the summer doldrums between the end of the primary campaigns and the party conventions. As we’ve seen, a bored press corps with space to fill can easily lose perspective.... [Really interesting read with possible PR, crisis implications when you think about it - JD]
Press freedom group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has temporarily suspended its WikiLeaks mirror site following a decision by the group to publish its full trove of 251,000 unredacted US diplomatic cables. In a statement issued late yesterday (1 September), RSF said it took the decision to suspend the site which was set up in December last year while the protection of sources "is in question"....
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Today the New York Times rolled out the big guns in the battle for truth. There, in Jim Rutenberg’s latest Mediator column, were two digits the likes of which I have never seen in the Grey Lady. Footnotes, people. Honest-to-God footnotes. The footnotes were there to annotate a story about the Trump administration’s disregard for the truth: ‘Alternative Facts’ and the Costs of Trump-Branded Reality. By necessity, that story referenced two of the administration’s newly minuted “alternative facts”, a.k.a. lies. The first of these was the claim by Sean Spicer, the new press secretary, that more people had used DC’s Metro system the morning of Trump’s inauguration than had used it the morning of Obama’s 2013 inauguration. The second was the President’s accusation that tensions between Trump and the intelligence community were caused by the meddling media....
If you want some light reading for eternity, Google the question “is the media biased.” The question is a staple of both the political right and the socialist left. Either The Media is partisan against Republicans as part of our obvious liberal agenda, or the Corporate Media insidiously perpetuates the status quo by shutting out dissenting voices and uncomfortable narratives in favor of crony capitalism and entrenched privilege. Choose your favorite. They’re both idiotic....
It was early evening in Politico’s newsroom, four days before the Iowa caucuses. Reporters were working sources and checking TV screens as a presidential debate was about to get under way. But tonight, January 28, Politico’s biggest story was about itself. Outside news organizations were reporting a massive, unexpected overhaul of the company’s leadership. Now executives were scrambling to respond. In a glass-enclosed office at the far end of the newsroom, CEO Jim VandeHei was hunkered down alongside chief operating officer Kim Kingsley and chief revenue officer Roy Schwartz, hurriedly crafting a statement announcing that they—along with marquee reporter Mike Allen—were leaving the company. After months of behind-the-scenes drama, Washington’s most successful media partnership in a generation was busting apart. And all the players had to get their stories straight....
.Once, these analysts would have written “big-picture” pieces, says Mr Kundnani. But 24-hour news and Twitter demand on-the-fly reporting and analysis, which blend into journalism. Nathan Thrall, the ICG’s Middle East analyst, based in Jerusalem, has written about the conflict in Gaza for, among others, the New York Times and the London Review of Books.
Some journalism, meanwhile, is becoming more wonkish. In April the New York Times launched the Upshot, which features data-packed articles—many written by wonks. “Wonkblog”, by the Washington Post, contains stories explained “in one chart”. In January one of its best-known writers, Ezra Klein, left to launch a website, Vox, that does something similar.
For politicians, policymakers and readers, more journalism means more information and choice. Inaccuracies can be quickly challenged and there is always a second opinion. For journalists, the news is not so good. Twitter, blogs and newsletters can get a think-tank’s ideas to its audience direct. Hence a relationship that used to be symbiotic, with wonks helping create news and hacks distributing it, is becoming competitive—especially in the battle for influential readers, such as politicians....
Test your knowledge of prominent people and major events in the news, by taking our short 13-question quiz. Then see how you did in comparison with 1,052 randomly sampled adults asked the same questions in a national survey conducted online August 7-14 by the Pew Research Center. The new survey includes a mixture of multiple-choice questions using photographs, maps, charts, and text.
When you finish, you will be able to compare your News IQ with the average American, as well as with the scores of college graduates and those who didn’t attend college; with men and women; and with people your age as well as other ages.
The polling firm complains operations like FiveThirtyEight could spoil polling for everyone... Did Gallup just blame Nate Silver for ruining the art and science of polling? You don’t have to read too far between the lines of a statement from Gallup’s editor in chief, Frank Newport, published on Friday, to get that impression. Newport first attempts the formidable task of defending Gallup’s polling accuracy during the 2012 campaign. Perhaps he was anticipating Silver’s Saturday column, which labeled Gallup the most inaccurate pollster of all the firms that measured voter sentiment this year. But Silver was hardly alone in wondering why Gallup regularly reported numbers much more favorable to Romney than anyone else in 2012. We deserve an explanation a little less lame than Newport’s: what’s the big fuss? Gallup wasn’t really off by that much.... [Suck it up Gallup and do a better job. ~ Jeff]
The cats-and-celebs site has its Washington bureau in place and is preparing to mix old-fashioned reporting with new-fashioned packaging. WASHINGTON — You should know going in that this is a story about BuzzFeed that BuzzFeed would never run. This story is longer than the last 10 articles out of the new BuzzFeed Washington, D.C. bureau combined. Some recent examples: - An airline ribbon-cutting ceremony attended by Barack Obama and Mitt Romney lookalikes
- A photo of second-button-unbuttoned “Casual Joe Biden” - Paul Ryan’s college fraternity photo
- “Barack Obama Is A Wizard”
- A dozen photos of Tim Pawlenty looking sad... [Can't wait for the sparks and GIFs to fly in the future - JD]
Slavish fidelity to campaign position papers and official statements short-changes voters... As we sipped red wine in Washington last week, Republican pollster David Winston suddenly asked me, “Why doesn’t the media write more about issues that are of central concern to the voters? Why don’t they write more about candidate differences and the implications for the country? Instead we get a litany of process pieces with issues as a sideshow.” When pollsters—yes, pollsters—start sounding like high-minded press critics, it’s a sign that horse-race hysteria has grown to absurd levels. With the election still four months away, we are hooked up to ephemeral data bursts with a shelf life of four hours. As Winston, who has no connection to the Mitt Romney campaign, went on to say, “This coverage makes it difficult for voters to decide whom they want to give the responsibility of governing to.” But, as I struggled to explain to Winston, writing about issues in a presidential race is far more complex than merely listing Romney’s and Barack Obama’s policy proposals side-by-side, while projecting their costs based on green-eyeshade forecasts from a non-partisan think tanks. Covering issues in this formulaic fashion is not only yawn-inducing; all too often it is completely wrong....
The Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), a nonprofit investigative reporting organization, announced this week that it will launch a new channel on YouTube. The channel, which is expected to be launched in July, will be a hub of investigative journalism curated by CIR. The channel is being launched in part by an $800,000 contribution by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. “One of the goals of this partnership will be to raise the profile and visibility of high-impact storytelling through video,” said Robert J. Rosenthal, executive director of CIR. “We hope this initiative generates revenue that supports the work of nonprofit organizations and independent filmmakers everywhere. Collaborative efforts like this are no longer the future of journalism; they are today’s reality.”...
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Francoise Mouly speaks to the artist John W. Tomac about “Liberty’s Flameout,” his Statue of Liberty-inspired cover for the next issue of The New Yorker.