Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Swisher has never struck me as an apologist. 
  

    

   I generally talk up the Statesman, which has great reporters and has it
seems to me, resisted a lot of the worst that Gannett does to its
publications. But this story in Texas Monthly says despite these successes,
Gannett is starving the Statesman.

<https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/austin-american-statesman-cuts-
gannett/?utm_source=texasmonthly.com&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=sharebut
ton>

   they don't do gift access, but I think the paywall doesn't kick in til
you've had a couple of tastes.
  

    
Do news orgs produce TikTok news items?
  

    
Definitely! I am not a TikTok user myself (although those days may
be winding down, from a professional standpoint), but try to keep up
on the trends, and in the past couple years some significant
analyses of news on TikTok have emerged:

TikTok is becoming the platform where the most adults under 30 go
for news, according to Pew Research:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/11/15/more-americans-are-getting-
news-on-tiktok-bucking-the-trend-seen-on-most-other-social-media-sites/


By the end of 2022, around half of the world's biggest news
publishers were posting on TikTok, according to Reuters Institute of
Journalism. However, Reuters researchers have also found that much
more news is generated by "influencers, activists, or ordinary
people" (their term, not mine!) than journalists:
https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/how-publishers-are-learning-create-
and-distribute-news-tiktok

Outlets are battling the algo to get traction, according to research
published last year: 

" In the context of US-based news audiences, we examine the accounts
TikTok recommends, the videos it shows new users, and its trending
hashtags. We find almost no evidence of proactive news exposure on
TikTok’s behalf. We also find that, while TikTok’s algorithms
respond slightly to active signals of news interest from simulated
users, that response does not lead to increased exposure to credible
news content. These findings highlight a lack of algorithmic news
distribution on TikTok."

<https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231192964>
  

    
Coincidentally to your post, tex, this item arrived in today's API
Need to Know newsletter:

"Viral social media account Betches is teaming up with Vitus “V”
Spehar, who runs the @underthedesknews TikTok account, to create a
political podcast called American Fever Dream, along with
news-driven accounts to connect with young voters. The two
powerhouse social media accounts boast a combined 12.2 million
followers and plan to identify the space between influencer and
media company to report on the election. Betches leans in to memes
and humor in its coverage, and doesn’t shy away from its liberal
slant — but plans to cover both Democratic and Republican news."

The story being summarized appears in The Washington Post
(paywalled):
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/02/06/betches-election-coverage
-instagram/
  

    

Today's API newsletter also includes a couple items that on the
state of covering the police and crime, and of covering extremists:

"A combination of staff reductions and eroding trust between
reporters and police have fundamentally changed how crime reporting
is done, but ... [T]aking a public safety approach to crime
coverage, including identifying a mission for that coverage, might
help newsrooms rethink how they approach the cop beat."

https://www.poynter.org/commentary/2024/better-relationships-with-cops-wont-he
lp-journalists-cover-crime/



"Reporting on people with extreme views? Ditch the shortcuts."

https://poynter.org/reporting-editing/2024/reporting-on-people-with-extreme-vi
ews-ditch-the-shortcuts/

The three main points: "know some basic stats," "avoid stock
phrases" [ejg note: a real challenge, I agree, from my pov of
covering climate science denial], and "ask three key questions":

* Is this actually new and changes how some piece of our democracy
works?
* To what extent is it happening? Is this a one-off, or does it show
up over and over?
* What’s the response of other political or civic actors? Do they
reject and try to tamp down the activity, or do they remain silent
or endorse it?
  

    

  The news business isn't just sitting around waiting to die.
  

    
I think <mazz> made an excellent suggestion above in <160>:

> It occurs to me that in terms of higher education, maybe what the
> news sector could really use are business and non-profit management
> programs that offer coursework on building and running a news
> business! 

The field of Journalism and News are in a condition where innovation and
entrepreneurship are needed in order to create new, viable formats for the
field to thrive (in my opinion) and so people looking to succeed in this
area should be very aware of how the financial aspects work, to help them
develop new, successful modalities.
  

    
That was actually Emily!

But let me again toot the horn for my colleague Rachele Kanigel at
SF State, who pioneered an entrepreneurial class in their
undergraduate program probably close to 15 years ago now.

My experience has been that innovation in education often happens in
programs that AREN’T necessarily considered elite in the field. Jay
Seidel has been teaching drone and VR journalism at Fullerton
College since the early 2010s, for example.
  

    
I will just note that however silval you think Kara Swisher is, I
first knew her (John probably did too) at the Washington Post
decades back, where she was a news assistant in the Style section.
She has legacy media roots. 
  

    
I'm confused by the word silval. I did a search and it doesn't seem
to exist. Curious because I find Kara Swisher interesting
  

    
I'm assuming it refers to SILicon VALley. 
  

    
Silicon Valley
  

    
Paula slipped in while I spent seven minutes readin!
  

    
Ah Thanks
  

    

about my 182:

(I meant that in response to the question from <Tex> about whether news
 organizations are usuing TikTok.) Here's the NYT Tiktok channel, which I
 don't have access to because the University of Texas prohibits access under
 its interpretation of Texas law, which says a lot of what you might want to
 know about Texas law.

 <https://www.tiktok.com/@nytimes?lang=en>
  

    

   Friends of mine also worked on teams to bring NYT coverage to Facebook,
Facebook Live, Snapchat, Instagram, various Google features and every other
possible new iteration of social media. Reporters would undergo training to
work with these various platforms, learn how to shoot short videos with our
phones and use editing software, create podcasts, create made-for-phone
short features based on cards that were easy to read on the phone, and
others I can't even remember. It was a tremendous amount of work, and it
took up time that you might have been working on stories. But I loved it,
for the most part, because when you were don't you'd created journalism in a
different way. I worked with the data journalism folks to create incredible,
computationally rich features, and alerts you could read on your watch.

   Not every newsroom has the resources to try all of these things! And
after you've done them all, it might be that what people get excited about
is Wordle and recipes. But you don't want to be left behind.
  

    
sorry, i do tend to speak/write in my own private language and
started using 'silval' as shorthand yrs ago. 

yes kara does have legacy media roots. 

as someone in and around tech for zillions of yrs, i had a different
take on much of her writing than some here. but i dont wish her
ill...

as to #192, the amount of -time- that it takes to do
multimodal?/multimedia? journalism would seem to subtract from
time/effort to do the traditional stuff. there just arent that many
hours in the day.
  

    
The scramble was on to identify whatever it was that supposedly
would Save Journalism.
At one point, at the NYT, the contender was...blogs. There were
something like 60 of them, a blog for every sport, a blog for polo
for gods sake, blogs for photography and foreign affairs. The New
Old Age started life as a blog.

Then it turned out that producing and editing blogs was expensive
and the blogs didn't pay for themselves, so most of them were
snuffed.


Then it was video. Which maybe it kinda is.


Then virtual reality. Every home subscriber got a cardboard
thingamajig that made VR more V. I never actually tried it; by the
time I dug up my cardboard thing, the VR phase was largely over.


So, maybe it is games and recipes, which would be fine.


But while I am selfishly glad, as a reader and a contributor, that
the Times is gaining subscribers and scooping up fine reporters from
everywhere and promising products like The Athletic (disclosure: my
kid is an editor there) and Wordle, this is not actually a healthy
thing, to have one potent and profitable national newspaper and so
much carnage elsewhere. There has to be a way to spread the wealth,
or at least stem the bleeding. 
  

    
so much agreement with #194.
  

    

   It is definitely not healthy to have just a couple of big, profitable
newspapers.

   (blogs? how could I have forgotten the blogs? And AR and VR and
everything else.)
  

    
I saw "silval" and wondered whether it was a variant of "sylvan", a
claim that she is a forest creature.
  

    
In 1994 when I interviewed for the GM role at SF Gate, one condition
I required was that we would be allowed to create our own content,
and that it would experiment with all forms of multimedia.  They
(Chronicle and Examiner top management) at first were taken aback 
saying "but we create the content."  But I argued that the Gate
project needed to be seen as a grand experiment in partnership with
the readers to see what would work as the tech rapidly evolves. 
They looked around at each other and then agreed.

Then, when I submitted my first budget in 1995, it had $15K set
aside for "unknown good thing."  They went along with that too, some
remarking that this was the first time they authorized money for
something unknown. The money was used to experiment with
then-emerging web-ready cams, digital photos and audio.

Few people in the newspaper newsrooms were much interested in this
evolution, but the people at KRON were enthusiastic.  It was that
news group that provided most of the ground-level support for trying
new things.  Thus we put out the first traffic cams on the net and
we broadcast the first live webcast of a major league sporting event
with the Oakland A's in 1997.  This was all done teaming up with the
KRON news people and their techs.

Dan Rosenheim, who has been both the Managing Editor of the
Chronicle and the News Director at KRON and KPIX, once told me that
"newspaper people self-select for introverts and television people
self-select for extroverts."
  

    
Laughing Out Loud on that one, <karish> since I thot, as well, that
it might refer to a forest creature..
  

    
>Then it was video. Which maybe it kinda is.

OMG, don't get me started on the "pivot to video." Looking back, I
was practically a Cassandra, trying to convince people that there
was no way the numbers Facebook was claiming could be accurate.
Truth!!