Nieman Lab: The Daily Digest

Last Night at School Committee distills hours-long public meetings into half-hour podcast episodes

“We have created this podcast as an easy way for any parent, citizen, or interested party to get the highlights, and our take, on what happened last night at School Committee.” By Sophie Culpepper.
What We’re Reading
Press Democrat / Rick Green
“Not our story to tell”: One local news editor on covering a transgender student-athlete →
“As journalists, a pillar in our code of ethics includes the obligation to minimize harm.”
Press Gazette / Aisha Majid
Twitter’s shrinking role as traffic source for news publishers revealed →
“Data from publisher analytics firm Chartbeat shows that Twitter referral traffic, 1.9% of all traffic in April 2018 to 1,350 publisher sites included in the analysis, had fallen to 1.2% five years later in April this year…When broken down by publisher size, the data shows that small publishers in particular now barely get any referral traffic from Twitter.”
Financial Times / Anna Nicolaou and Sujeet Indap
The fall of Vice: private equity’s ill-fated bet on media’s future →
“The fall is also the story of Wall Street colliding with a creative industry that was home to big personalities and towering egos….It raises questions about the tactics of private equity companies, which have in recent years earned a reputation as the curse of the US news media, gutting newspapers for short-term profits.”
inews.co.uk / Chris Stokel-Walker
Twitter is making researchers delete data it gave them unless they pay $42,000 →
“Researchers have used that data to track entire days on Twitter, to analyse the spread of disinformation and misinformation, and to track the rise of extremism and how that bleeds through to offline life.”
The New York Times / Emily Steel
Police used excessive force on 2 Australian journalists, U.S. finds →
“Two U.S. Park Police officers used excessive force against two Australian journalists covering a George Floyd protest outside the White House in June 2020, according to an investigation by the Interior Department’s inspector general.”
Vanity Fair / Charlotte Klein
How the New York Times union finally got a pay raise →
“Everyone gets raises, with the biggest for the lowest earners—who tended to also be those most in support of aggressive union action, like striking—and slightly smaller ones for the higher-paid members.”
Mediaite / Isaac Schorr
Third editor quits The Messenger over “nonstop gerbil wheel” of clickbait →
“The early exodus raises questions over the future of the fledgling operation.”
Slate / Luke Winkie
Actually, the new Zelda is about ethics in journalism →
“The background characters who populate Tears of the Kingdom all hold a remarkably earnest, almost Pollyanna-ish perspective on both the Lucky Clover Gazette and the Fourth Estate as a whole.”
The Verge / Elizabeth Lopatto
Elon Musk and Ron DeSantis’s fiasco shows they didn’t realize Twitter needs TV →
“Recording and rebroadcasting a Twitter Space is more technically challenging and high effort than simply flashing a screenshot. Broadcasting audio on TV is visually boring.”
Poynter / Omar Gallaga
She started an aid network for laid-off journalists and it spread like wildfire →
“We had a jobs team, we had a needs team, we had a financial support team, a moral support team,” said reporter Kati Kokal, who created an aid network for laid-off journalists. “The moral support team ended up starting a letter-writing campaign with encouraging notes, with Starbucks gift cards and things like that.”
The Washington Post / Chris Velazco
ChatGPT has an official app now. You can even talk to it. →
In general, if you don’t want OpenAI to save your chats and use them to further train those language models, there’s a “chat history and model training” option you can manually disable. Though the app initially lacked this option, the option to disable the feature was added in an update — but to work, you’ll need to ensure the option is off on all devices you use to talk to ChatGPT.
The Atlantic / Eli Sanders
Local politics was already messy. Then came Nextdoor. →
“There is no television station devoted to Mercer Island issues, and the shrunken Mercer Island Reporter, the longtime local newspaper, is down to 1,600 paying subscribers for its print edition. Even so, the 25,000 people on this six-square-mile crescent of land remain hungry for information about their community. As elsewhere, the local media void is being filled by residents sharing information online, particularly over the platform Nextdoor, which aims to be at the center of all things hyperlocal.”