Pay attention, please?

The Weekly Wrap: August 09, 2024

Pay attention, please?

“I think being a small outlet, in three years, is going to be really, really hard from a discovery standpoint.”

That’s what Kyle Villemain, the founder and editor-in-chief of North Carolina’s The Assembly (yes, the stingray investigative reporting outlet) told Sophie this week.

For Villemain, Sophie wrote, “the clock is ticking on getting The Assembly to sustainability in the sense of building and owning its audience. With ambiguous, but potentially enormous, changes to the infrastructure of the internet looming because of generative AI (and social media companies’ shifting priorities), Villemain is very worried about search and social disappearing, for the purposes of publishers.”

This reminds me of what another local news publisher — Jeff Elgie, of Canada’s Village Media — said last year, in the context of Canada’s Online News Act. “You need Google to stay in this. Otherwise, it devastates the entire industry. You cannot lose Google and Facebook and have some reasonable publishing industry left online. It doesn’t work.”

The problem of attention is certainly not limited to local news. When Axios laid off 50 people this week, CEO Jim VandeHei cited “shifting reader attention and behavior, scattering across social, podcasts, individual creators and influencers, partisan websites, and more” as one of the forces working against news publishers. Another one of those forces? AI, wrote VandeHei, “pushing us to a technological inflection point where models can summarize news, at the same time Facebook, X, and search are faltering as reliable traffic standbys.”

— Laura Hazard Owen

From the week

The 51st aims to replace DCist with something totally new “It’s an incredible place to launch a local news outlet because people always want to know more about the world around them. It’s a town full of nerds.” By James Salanga.

The Assembly aims to be a state-level, digital-first Atlantic Magazine for North Carolina “I was fixated on trying to build a place that could pay good writers good money to spend more time than normal on big stories.” By Sophie Culpepper.

Readers are more suspicious of journalists providing corrections than journalists providing confirmations The challenge for journalists may be figuring out how to provide debunkings without seeming like a debunker. By Randy Stein and Caroline Meyersohn.

What’s a Black journalists’ convention for? Trump’s appearance at NABJ raises questions “Across the board, in all contexts in journalism, there needs to be an emphasis to make sure that you’re not creating harm to journalists.” By Laura Hazard Owen.

A new Louisiana law limits the right of journalists (and everyone else) to film police abuse “You can’t even get an officer’s badge number at 25 feet. So there’s no way to hold anyone accountable.” By Richard A. Webster, Verite News.

Nearly half The New York Times’ digital subscribers pay for more than one Times productAxios has its first-ever layoffs, citing “shifting reader attention and behavior” and AI Highlights from elsewhereSubstack / Parker MolloyThe people’s court reporter: Meghann Cuniff on bridging law and pop culture →“One of the biggest challenges is maintaining momentum while figuring out how to translate that into sustainable income. I have a big presence on Twitter, but the monetization there doesn’t compare to YouTube and TikTok. For example, with the Young Thug trial in Atlanta that I’ve been covering, I’ve focused more on TikTok and YouTube over Twitter because of the greater monetization potential.”The Midcoast VillagerFour local newspapers in Maine are merging into the Midcoast Villager →The Free Press, Camden Herald, The Republican Journal and The Courier-Gazette are merging to create what they say will be “a single, stronger newsroom” which will be “positioned and better resourced to continue to cover the complex issues that affect the region in the decades to come.” Among other things, they’re planning on opening a cafe called the Villager Cafe next year, which — alongside breakfast, lunch, and coffee — will serve as a “community center that hosts events related to local journalism, brings people together to talk about complex issues, and showcases local talent with concerts, readings, discussions and more.” 404 Media / Jason KoeblerWhere Facebook’s AI slop comes from →“‘The post you are seeing now is of a poor man that is being used to generate revenue,’ he says in Hindi, pointing with his pen to an image of a skeletal elderly man hunched over being eaten by hundreds of bugs. ‘The Indian audience is very emotional. After seeing photos like this, they Like, Comment and share them. So you too should create a page like this, upload photos and make money through Performance bonus.'” The Guardian / Lili Bayer“Somewhere between Orwell and Kafka”: Hungary closes in on its media →“Led by a figure with close links to the ruling Fidesz party and granted the power to draw upon the intelligence services without judicial oversight, the office was set up by Orbán’s government, formally to monitor foreign influence. But in practice, critics say, it is serving not as an independent state body, but as a tool to apply pressure on government critics.”Trans Journalists AssociationWhat’s fair? What journalists can learn from the Olympic boxing controversy →“Our industry often hyper-focuses on questions of testosterone and chromosomes, because these are the metrics often being debated on an international stage. But why are some genetic advantages considered fair, and some not? And how and when should the playing field be leveled?”

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