Talking Biz News / Chris Roush
Nieman Reports / Gabe Bullard
Six months ago NPR left Twitter. The effects on traffic have been “marginal.” →“A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter, now officially renamed X, though traffic from the platform was small already and accounted for just under two percent of traffic before the posting stopped. (NPR declined an interview request but shared the memo and other information).”
the Guardian / Severin Carrell
Europe’s oldest student newspaper turns to emergency crowdfunding to avoid closure →“Joe Sullivan, editor-in-chief at [Edinburgh University’s The Student], told the BBC its greatest expense was the paper it was printed on but the team felt it was essential the newspaper remained in print rather than went online, where it would struggle to remain visible. ‘As a community publication having a presence in print, on counters, in newsstands, across all the student parts of Edinburgh — without that visibility we might not be able to survive as a digital publication.'”
the Guardian / Amy Mae Baxter
The U.K.’s literary magazine scene is “crumbling” →“The White Review, one of the mainstays of the past decade, announced last month that it would cease publishing ‘for an indefinite period’ as it failed to receive Arts Council England funding for three years in a row. The cultural phenomenon that was gal-dem, the magazine by women of colour, which provided a huge amount of literary coverage over the years, closed earlier this year, and the beautifully illustrated literary magazine Popshot Quarterly has announced its move to solely online editions due to ‘recent increases in production costs.'”
New York Times / Sheera Frenkel and Steven Lee Myers
Hamas is seeding violent videos on X and Telegram thanks to little moderation →“Nora Benavidez, senior counsel at Free Press, a media advocacy group, said the state of discourse on X during the conflict was ‘the terrible but natural consequence of 11 months of misguided Musk decisions.’ She cited the rollback of policies against toxic content, cuts in staff and the priority given to subscription accounts, which ‘now allows, even begs for, controversial and incendiary content to thrive.'”
The New Yorker / The New Yorker
Why the Internet isn’t fun anymore →“Remember having fun online? It meant stumbling onto a Web site you’d never imagined existed, receiving a meme you hadn’t already seen regurgitated a dozen times, and maybe even playing a little video game in your browser. These experiences don’t seem as readily available now as they were a decade ago. In large part, this is because a handful of giant social networks have taken over the open space of the Internet, centralizing and homogenizing our experiences through their own opaque and shifting content-sorting systems.”
Intelligencer / Reeves Wiedeman
Shams Charania tweeted his way to the top of the NBA reporting world →“Timesian hackles [have been raised] about Charania in particular, as Times journalists questioned how the instantaneous, anonymously sourced, transactional reporting that he specializes in fit in at the paper of record and whether his arrangement with a sports-gambling company opened him up to the kind of ethical conflict it tries to avoid. ‘He is now a vital part of a de facto sports section for a newspaper that would never hire him,’ a former Times reporter told me.”