“Pink slime” journalism is important. How do we also make it interesting?

The Weekly Wrap: October 11, 2024

“Pink slime” journalism is important. How do we also make it interesting?

“One day this past March, residents received an unfamiliar newspaper…”

This week, Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Floodlight, and ProPublica copublished an investigation: “Fossil fuel interests are working to kill solar in one Ohio county. The hometown newspaper is helping.” The story examines the latest example of how “the oil and gas industry and power companies have exploited a struggling news industry and a fraught political process to fight the transition to clean energy and maximize profits.” Neel interviewed Floodlight’s Miranda Green, a coauthor of this week’s piece, earlier this year.

The “hometown newspaper” featured in the piece is Ohio’s Mount Vernon News, which featured in an article Nieman Lab published in March: “A company linked to a large ‘pink slime’ network is being hired by big publishers like Gannett.” That story followed reporting by the progressive outlet Raw Story on how an executive named Kyle Barnett, affiliated with the Mount Vernon News, was hired as a journalism lecturer at Tennessee Tech University. (He is still teaching there.)

Editing our March piece was difficult, in part because — no offense, pink slime journalism — a lot of this stuff is convoluted and dry and the associated executives often refuse to talk. (Our March story, by freelancer Steven Monacelli, is notable in part because Monacelli got Barnett on the record.) It is hard to track the way various blandly named companies are affiliated, and hard to write about them in a way that’s interesting to readers who don’t already care. (Initial research also suggests few people actually read ink slime sites — though this may change if its purveyors buy more local papers, like the Mount Vernon News.) This isn’t a new problem for investigative journalism. But it is something I’ve been thinking about when it comes to reporting on “pink slime” networks and their web of entanglements.

I think the Tow Center/Floodlight/ProPublica piece does a great job of bringing in the voices of residents of Mount Vernon and including details like the fact that the local university’s new sports complex is named “after the chemical formula for methane.” That on-the-ground reporting of impacts on regular people is something we don’t have enough of; it takes pink slime out of the realm of bland corporations and media-speak, giving it a shape we can wrap our heads around. If you have other ideas for keeping reporting on pink-slime-and-pals interesting, I’d love to hear them.

— Laura Hazard Owen

From the week

With Hurricane Milton looming, NPR stations got a lower-bandwidth way to reach residents In normal times, text-only websites are a niche interest. But a natural disaster is not normal times. By Joshua Benton.

How a 19th-century news revolution sparked activists, influencers, disinformation, and the Civil War Long before anyone was accused of being “woke,” the Wide Awakes used new news technology to rapidly construct a national movement. By Jon Grinspan.

How The New York Times incorporates editorial judgment in algorithms to curate its home page The Times’ algorithmic recommendations team on responding to reader feedback, newsroom concerns, and technical hurdles. By Zhen Yang.

Want to change money in Cuba? It’ll probably involve an exiled news outlet — and AI El Toque’s informal exchange rate is used by taxi drivers, restaurateurs, and small businesses across the island. It’s also grown the news site’s traffic tenfold. By Andrew Deck.

The former host of S-Town has a new subject to investigate: Journalism After more than a decade in the industry, Brian Reed is Question(ing) Everything about it. By Neel Dhanesha.

What’s the journalism we can make for people who don’t trust journalism? “You just need somebody with enough charisma that they would carry people over the line. And it wouldn’t be a traditional journalist.” By Neel Dhanesha.

The typical American TikTok user doesn’t follow a single journalist or traditional media outletEl País sweetens subscription offering with full access to The New York TimesOne year in, the Israel-Gaza war has cost more than 120 journalists their lives Highlights from elsewhereNPR / Bobby AllynHow Louisville Public Media uncovered internal research TikTok has tried to keep secret →“In one of the lawsuits, filed by the Kentucky Attorney General’s Office, the redactions were faulty. This was revealed when Kentucky Public Radio copied-and-pasted excerpts of the redacted material, bringing to light some 30 pages of documents that had been kept secret.”CNN / Brian StelterThe Atlantic will increase print editions, returning to monthly publication for the first time since 2002 →The magazine is increasing its pace of publication from 10 issues to 12 per year. The Atlantic returned to profitability earlier in 2024 and said it had crossed the one million subscriptions mark.Vulture / Nicholas Quah“Good” interviews don’t matter like they used to →“We’ve long arrived at a place where Americans, now polarized beyond recognition, prefer news sources that align with their ideology, if they even consume much news at all. This is, of course, a damning reality for the traditional news business.”Better News / Emily RistowWhat Gen Z journalists want news leaders to know →“I don’t think characterizing younger journalists as ‘disloyal’ is fair — I think that the economic state of the industry makes it harder and harder to have a stable career,” Sonia A. Rao said. “I want stability! But I also want to be paid enough to pay my bills and not go into debt. I think it’s becoming increasingly impossible to have that without jumping around a little bit between jobs.”The New Yorker / Kyle ChaykaTaylor Lorenz’s plan to dance on legacy media’s grave →“Lorenz has long been a vocal critic of traditional journalism’s slowness to embrace digital channels such as YouTube and TikTok that increasingly dominate young audiences’ attention. Her path through legacy media institutions was wandering and marked by public scrutiny.”Press Gazette / Bron Maher“No one wants to read AI-generated news,” says OpenAI exec making deals with media companies to make AI-generated news →“OpenAI’s head of media partnerships has said the company does not currently intend to share ad revenue from its SearchGPT product with publishers whose content it surfaces…But he added that the matter was ‘an evolving space for us right now’ and that it was in OpenAI’s interests to provide enough value to stop publishers opting out of appearing in SearchGPT results.”

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