When an astonishingly realistic deepfake of Tom Cruise spread across the internet in March, many people were quite rightly shocked. Its pinpoint realism suggested artificial intelligence had leapt forward several years.

But one important feature was easily missed. By using the social media handle “deeptomcruise,” the creator was transparent about the fact it was a deepfake.

In a future full of media manipulated by artificial intelligence, we will need methods like this to indicate what is real and what has been faked with AI.1

And this won’t just be a question of ethics. The EU may require that users be told when AI has generated or manipulated something they are viewing.

How should we label AI media in ways that people understand? And how might it backfire?

To start making sense of this phenomenon, we’ve conducted a landscape review of how AI media is currently being labeled. It draws on our previous research on labels, and the insights of many experts in this field, focusing on any media that is generated or manipulated by automated technologies, especially through the use of AI.

In this report, we explore emergent tactics and offer a vocabulary for anyone who wants to label the role AI has played in their creation. In part two, we’ll reflect on the questions, tensions, and dilemmas they raise.

Labels: Covering the media

We use “labels” to refer to any verbal or iconographic item superimposed over content to indicate that it has been manipulated or generated by AI.

Promo watermarks. Watermarks are icons or filters that visually cover content to advertise or cite the tool used to create it. They are also often automatically applied by commercial AI manipulation tools, such as impressions.app, as a means of promotion. This offers insight into the fact that the media was edited and a specific tool used to do so. (At right: Example of a promo watermark applied by Impressions.app; source: TikTok.)

While their effectiveness for different users may vary depending on the language and design, these labels have one simple advantage: If someone saves or screenshots an image or video and recirculates it out of its original context, the watermark travels with it. The more it covers the image or video, the harder it is to remove through editing techniques such as cropping or blurring.

Indeed, this technique has been used by stock image services, such as Shutterstock, for years to prevent the use of images without proper crediting or citation. However, editing out a watermark is certainly not impossible, a limitation that may be countered with stronger media authentication infrastructure, as we will discuss.

Filter tags. Filter tags are labels applied by an app to indicate when one of its filters has been used.

Filter tags have become a familiar convention on TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram, and have a specific advantage over other kinds of labels in that they are interactive. If you click on a filter tag, you can use it, giving you a practical understanding of what the filter does. It’s also possible to see other videos that have used the filter. These are distinguished from promotional labels because they are applied consistently and interactively within a particular platform. Here’s an example of a “Neon Shadow” filter tag, from TikTok.

The disadvantage is that they are not hard-coded onto the media, meaning that if you download a filtered video from TikTok, the tag will be lost. Additionally, the names of the filters tend to offer little insight into the nature and extent of the manipulation itself.

Platform warnings. Twitter’s synthetic and manipulated media policy outlines the conditions for applying warning labels on Tweets, using the same space as the platform’s fact check labels. While not covering the video or images, the placement of the warning in the middle of the post makes it visible simultaneously with the media. As with the filter tags, they are easily removed when the video is downloaded or recorded.

Here’s an example of Twitter’s manipulated media warning, applied to a cheapfake (we have not yet seen an example of its use on AI content).

Non-platform warnings. Non-platform warning labels describe how third parties, such as journalists and fact checkers, cover media to add an explanation or context. This may be in the form of debunking a claim, or simply a label to describe provenance or note manipulation. At right, an example of a warning label from the News Literacy Project.

One example is the use of overlays that cover misinformed or manipulated content to prevent their recirculation when featured in news stories. This can be an effective technique in journalism. First Draft will be publishing guidance as part of this series on signposting online content, with recommendations for journalists on how to design overlays to reduce the amplification of misinformation.

Metadata: Describing the media

We use “metadata” to refer to any description that is manually added to information that accompanies the content.

Title and caption. The title and description of a post provide a space to offer detail on the role of AI. In certain online contexts, they can be highly visible ways of alerting audiences. “The Deepfake Queen,” a video by Channel 4 News, alerts audiences to the use of deepfake technology in the title.

However, titles rarely have much space for detailing the role of AI, especially when needing to also describe something about the media’s content. What’s more, titles and descriptions often do not travel with the media, and the visibility of this metadata changes substantially depending on the platform and screen size.

Profile information. Profile information, such as username and bio, can provide an indication or explanation of the synthetic nature of the account’s content. For example, the “deeptomcruise” TikTok account name provides an indication that the account contains deepfake Tom Cruise videos, for those aware of this usage of the term “deep” as terminology for AI-generated media. Here’s the Instagram profile of the virtual influencer @lilmiquela.

However, this can result in a single explanation for every post on that account, when each one may have used slightly different techniques. On most platforms you also have to click through to the profile page to see bio information, and so this may easily be missed. And because these details are added voluntarily by account creators for various reasons, they may be subtle or satirical in a way that is not widely understood.

Byline. A byline can attribute authorship to AI. It is similar to the username on an account, but it is worth distinguishing because a byline carries significant weight in journalism. An example outside the journalism context could include a signature on a painting — fine art’s equivalent of a byline. An example from a controversial Guardian article is below.

The use of bylines to credit AI authorship has caused controversy because of what’s called the “attribution fallacy,” a term coined by AI researcher Hamid Mattioli Ekbia to describe when people uncritically accept that a task was performed autonomously by AI. A byline can fall afoul of this fallacy by suggesting sole authorship by the AI agent, overstating the capability of the technology and concealing the role of human editors.

Interruption: During the media

We use “interruption” to refer to any indicator that occurs during content display to explain the role of AI in manipulating or generating it. This may be during time-based media (e.g., at the opening of a video) or through delaying access to content (e.g., a pop-up notice).

Pre-roll. In AI-manipulated video, a common tactic is to use a pre-roll label: a notice before the video starts that explains the role of AI.

Pre-roll labels have the advantage of alerting viewers to the role of AI (and more generally that the events didn’t actually occur) before someone watches the video, so they understand what they’re looking at from the start.

The problem is that this opening notice can very easily be edited out and the video reshared as if it were real.

Reveal. A reveal is the opposite of a pre-roll: It tells viewers after they’ve watched a video that it has been AI-manipulated.

The reveal can have great dramatic effect, inducing a state of surprise and awe in the viewer. This can help to emphasize a point, such as the believability of the deepfake.

This is a common tactic. But, even if well-intended, it involves a form of temporary deception, aiming to trick the viewer. This has the risk of being recalled later on as real if this is how it was initially understood. It also relies on someone making it to the end of the video (many people just watch the opening on social media). And, similar to the pre-roll, a reveal is easily edited out.

Interstitial. Interstitial labels interrupt media one or more times to notify the audience of something. This is most commonly used in advertising; longer YouTube videos, for example, use interstitial ads, as do many podcasts. Interstitial labels would make it harder for audiences to ignore or forget the message; harder to join too late or too early and miss it; and harder to edit out the alert.

We have only seen a few of these in the wild (see example from “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”). We have spoken to technology companies that are conducting internal research on interstitial labels, and are encouraging them to share their findings regarding the impact of those labels more publicly.

Annotation: highlighting the media

We use “annotation” to refer to anything that highlights discrete parts of content, such as areas of an image, durations of a video, or sections of a text.

Annotation. Annotation refers to highlighting specific features of media to indicate where AI manipulation has occurred. This might include highlighting parts of a video that have been manipulated, or could involve narrating over and between snippets of synthetic audio.

1) Ears are nightmare factories, just totally butchered
2) Light source different in the two eyes
3) Teeth are bizarre / wrong
4) Nose just off with nostril and tip of the nose
5) Background is really messed up on the left side

— Aric Toler (@AricToler) June 17, 2020

Annotation is embedded in detection technologies and used by journalists as it provides a tool for precise explanation. This works well for those whose primary subject is the manipulation, but less useful for those who want to focus on content.

One risk is that the degree of confidence implied by precise, thin lines — a common technique of many commercial deepfake detectors — may inspire false confidence that something is AI-manipulated. Such a conclusion, in high-stakes environments, could have real-world impact.

Side-by-side. Side-by-side is another emerging tactic in journalism. It places an unmanipulated piece of media next to manipulated media for comparison by the user.

This tactic allows the viewer to discern the manipulation through comparison. It is also less reliant on long textual explanations, and gives an instinctive feel.

This has been used to explain non-AI manipulation of videos, such as the doctored Nancy Pelosi videos of 2019. It could also be deployed in audio, playing an authentic snippet followed by a manipulated version.

Typography. When it comes to writing, typography —  fonts, for example — offer a way to isolate AI-generated elements. We see this in The Pudding’s part-GPT-3-generated essay “Nothing Breaks like an A.I. Heart,” where AI-generated text is highlighted in a sans serif font (the same tactic used in the part-GPT-3-generated book Pharmako-AI).

This method has the advantage of identifying specific components that are AI-generated in a way that will still be visible when screenshotted and shared. It can also be a way to make the AI manipulation interactive: in The Pudding’s essay, you can click a button to re-generate new text from GPT-3.

Speculation: commentary on the media

“Speculation” refers to the space created for guesses, suggestions and debate about the role of AI media when it isn’t authoritatively labeled.

Another way of looking at the question of labeling AI is what happens when you don’t label media at all. Often a lack of labels creates a kind of data deficit, ushering in speculation. Often this occurs in the comments, with viewers offering their guesses as to whether a piece of media has been manipulated with AI. It could also occur within news articles, blogs or social media posts.

We cannot eradicate speculation, but it is important to recognize the role that labels — or their absence — play in the dynamic of speculation that accompanies videos suspected of being AI-manipulated. This is especially relevant in the context of AI, where our understanding of what is and isn’t possible is constantly being challenged and reset. We further explore risks like these in the second part of this series.

Many uses of AI to manipulate media are, of course, not labeled at all, and perhaps both creators and audiences have little interest in knowing the role of AI media. After all, AI plays some kind of role in almost everything we see online.

One of the most common examples is the iPhone’s “portrait mode,” which uses AI to synthesize a shallow depth of focus by blurring what it detects as the background. This can give the impression that the photo was taken by an expensive SLR camera (though increasingly is suggestive of the iPhone’s portrait mode or another blurring filter).

Examples such as these raise an obvious question: When is it necessary to identify content as being AI-manipulated?

A typology of indicators

We have discovered numerous indicators people and organizations are using to explain the role of AI in the production of content (images, videos, audio or text). To summarize, we’ve grouped these methods into five categories:

• Labels: covering the content
• Metadata: describing the content
• Interruption: before, in between or after the content
• Annotation: highlighting the content
• Discussion: speculating about the content

We have also collated and tagged examples in an Airtable database to facilitate closer analysis and comparison. In some cases, there may be machine-readable metadata (such as Exif), but we focus here on labels that are accessible by general audiences.

Our goal with this short report is not to criticize or endorse any labeling tactic, but to discover what practices are currently in use and to explore what they offer and their limitations.

These examples inevitably raise a number of questions, tensions and trade-offs that are worth exploring. In Part 2 of this series, we’ll explore these considerations for AI indicators.

1. For a more in-depth breakdown of technologies, see Data & Society’s cheap fake and deepfake spectrum.

We knew from the start that this project demanded an unconventional approach to reporting. The crisis of overcrowded housing — particularly as it affects undocumented immigrants and intersects with public health — touches upon a web of public policies, economic structures, and social ideologies that cannot be neatly separated from one another. If we wanted to examine how overcrowding impacts public health, and what we can learn from the Covid-19 pandemic, we had to take a wide lens.

El Tímpano teamed up with Journalism + Design to incorporate tools from a practice called systems thinking as a way to identify the interconnected systems at play in overcrowded housing and surface opportunities to address structural inequities embedded in this largely invisible crisis. While we are still a ways from completing our reporting, we want to pull back the curtain on the process that the Journalism + Design team has led us through to take a systems-oriented approach to this issue, and how it’s informing El Tímpano’s journalism.

Surface insights and information needs from key stakeholders

To start, we wanted to ground our reporting in the insights and information needs of those who experience or work on these issues. By seeking out their insights and learning more about the intersecting issues that contribute to overcrowded housing and poor health outcomes, we can design our reporting to be valuable to multiple stakeholders, build on local expertise, uncover areas in need of investigation, and identify opportunities for change.

We began our work in November by creating a “stakeholder map” — an exercise in identifying the different groups of people who are connected to or impacted by overcrowded housing conditions in Oakland in order to surface the perspectives and information needs of those closest to the issues we are exploring. We generated a wide list of stakeholders that included those living in overcrowded households, as well as landlords, public officials in health and housing sectors, community organizers, legal aid professionals, and journalists.

After mapping these stakeholders, we identified specific people we could interview from each of our stakeholder groups. This initial set of interviews was geared to deepen our team’s understanding of the key drivers and effects of overcrowded housing in Oakland, solicit questions that our reporting could help answer, and seek out relevant resources and information that El Tímpano could provide as part of our reporting.

In addition to these interviews, we drew insights from El Tímpano’s SMS community. More than 1,600 people, primarily Latinx and Mayan immigrants in East Oakland, subscribe to our SMS platform. Many had previously shared their experiences living in overcrowded conditions, so we knew that, in addition to individual interviews, we could surface the insights of dozens of people directly impacted by the issue through our participatory reporting platform.

We asked our community how they thought their housing conditions affected their health, and what they might change about their living situation to improve it. As we sent those call-outs, we also provided information about local tenant protections and financial assistance.

We received dozens of replies that shed light on both the physical and mental health impacts of overcrowding. “I live with three couples and four kids,” one person shared over text (translated from the original Spanish). “One woman got sick and we lived with the fear of getting sick as well. It’s very hard for us, and even harder for our son.”

Other responses provided insight into the forces driving overcrowded housing. “I live in an overcrowded house with several families due to high rent prices,” one person wrote.

Our conversations with county health officials and legal aid organizations uncovered resources and information that addressed many of the questions we heard from those living in overcrowded conditions, as well as a desire for better data and more stories to understand the experiences of affected residents. Several people told us that simply shining a spotlight on overcrowded housing and its impact on health will bring needed attention to a crisis many people don’t realize exists.

“There is this kind of, you know, out of sight, out of mind dynamic happening here,” said a housing policy advocate. “Many people think, ‘Yeah, I may be paying a lot for my apartment, but I’m not sharing it with five or six other people. And so I don’t really feel like it’s a huge, huge issue.’”

An analyst from the county’s public health department said she would like our reporting to provide her with a better sense of how the policies implemented to stave off displacement during the pandemic are working. “That’s something I wonder about a lot, like, how effective is our [eviction] moratorium if people don’t know about it, or are afraid to push back?”

At the same time, members of El Tímpano’s SMS community were sharing stories of being threatened with evictions, and questions about where they could find legal assistance and rental relief. Clearly, there is an important role our reporting can play in connecting the stories and information of these various stakeholders.

Visualize the system’s structure

Early in our process, we also turned to a group of reporters and editors from a variety of local media organizations to both inform our reporting and share our systems-oriented process to help deepen coverage of the housing crisis at a regional level.

We convened reporters and editors from KQED, El Tecolote, The Oaklandside, Reveal, The Mercury News, and Bay City News, using a systems thinking tool called the “iceberg model” to collaboratively map the structures, policies, and ideas fueling Oakland’s overcrowded housing crisis. Participants broke into small groups and brainstormed examples for each layer of the iceberg, pictured below.

In the iceberg model, an event is what occurs above the surface and brings attention, even if fleeting, to the issue. In this case, for example, reports of an outbreak at a Fruitvale supermarket in May of 2020 brought attention to disparate Covid-19 rates in Oakland’s Latino communities.

Trends and patterns occur just beneath the surface. Examples include rising rents in Oakland and stagnant wages at the bottom end of the job market.

The group we convened came up with dozens of examples that illustrated the “system’s structure,” such as immigration policy creating fear and mistrust among immigrants, limitations on rent control, language barriers, and the political influence of property owners. At the bottom of the iceberg model are “mental models” — the values, assumptions, beliefs and ideas that shape the way we see the world, and how systems are designed. Among those that our group identified were the idea that housing is a commodity and not a human right (an idea that KQED’s podcast Sold Out explored last year), the feeling some may feel that “that’s just the way it is,” or that immigrants don’t deserve the benefits of government help. These mental models can be challenging to surface, but can help illuminate some of the core paradigms and belief systems that our journalism can inform, challenge and shift.

If you want to use the iceberg model to visualize the systems at play in an issue you’re reporting on, check out this resource in Journalism + Design’s systems thinking toolkit.

Create a systems map of the relationships between overcrowded housing and health

Our conversations with stakeholders, as well as our call-outs to El Tímpano’s SMS community and the ongoing reporting of El Tímpano’s reporting fellow Héctor Alejandro Arzate, helped us identify numerous forces and factors at play in overcrowded housing and health, which we began organizing using the digital whiteboard tool Miro.

As a group, we discussed elements involved in the system — a family’s ability to afford rent, ability to isolate if someone got sick, immigration status, availability of paid sick leave, etc. — and added them as “sticky notes” on the Miro board. By identifying the factors at play, we sought to make connections between them.

From there, we began to create what systems thinkers call “feedback loops” — visual representations of self-perpetuating patterns, in this case, those related to overcrowding and poor health outcomes among Oakland’s Latino and Mayan immigrant communities. Through this process, we were better able to understand how different factors, such as access to rent relief, can have a domino effect, either improving tenants’ ability to live in healthy conditions, or driving further overcrowding.

Here’s an example of one of the feedback loops we created showing how both access to resources and a family’s ability to isolate during the pandemic can impact overcrowded conditions.

Now, we’re moving on to the next phase, from systems mapping to reporting. We’re in the process of drafting a visual map that details the patterns fueling overcrowded housing in Oakland and its impact on residents’ health. We’ll then share our draft systems map with stakeholders and local reporters to get additional feedback.

The process of understanding and visualizing how the system currently functions will subsequently inform where change is possible. We’ll use this map as a guide for our reporting, exploring possible interventions that could disrupt some of the harmful cycles at play.

Wenzel and Crittenden combined an ongoing ethnography of the two projects with online focus groups of 26 community residents and leaders conducted last April, during the early days of the pandemic. Among the community members, they found frustration with sensational news and a lack of actionable information in local media, even as they consumed more local news during the pandemic. Community members also expected local journalists to act as advocates for the community, holding authorities to account on the community’s behalf.

Both Germantown Info Hub and Kensington Voice did much of what community members were calling for. Kensington Voice, located in a predominantly Latinx neighborhood, asked local news organizations if they could translate important Covid-19-related stories into Spanish and post them on their website or distribute them through community organizations, focusing on actionable information. Local media enthusiastically allowed them to translate and republish stories, thanks to a local news collaborative project called Resolve Philly already in place.

In the predominantly Black neighborhood of Germantown, Info Hub held a virtual town hall for representatives of community organizations to brainstorm collaboration possibilities to meet community needs amid social distancing requirements. In doing so, they acted more directly as a connector than news organizations typically do, connecting organizations to each other rather than simply to themselves.

In both examples (and in other citywide collaborations the study describes), Wenzel and Crittenden offer concrete instances of the value of having newsroom staff that reflect the populations an organization covers (for example, the idea for Kensington Voice’s translation project came from a Latina staff member who was translating Covid-19 stories for her father). They also note that this kind of direct collaboration with community organizations challenges journalists’ traditional notions of objectivity.

But most of all, they find that it’s crucial to have community-centered, collaborative structures already in place when a crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic arises. The roots for those collaborations need to run deep, Wenzel and Crittenden argue, and they truly need to have the community’s needs at their heart.

Research roundup

The head and heart of news avoidance: How attitudes about the news media relate to levels of news consumption. By Stephanie Edgerly, in Journalism.

News avoidance is a hot topic in research and something we’ve covered previously. It’s the apparently growing phenomenon of people sidestepping news despite the plentiful choices that abound. In this study based on a survey of U.S. adults, Edgerly seeks to uncover why some people have especially low levels of news consumption and what might be done about it. For example, she asks, are news avoiders simply uninterested, do they not understand how news works, or is avoidance driven by emotion?

First, news has to matter to people. Edgerly finds that people’s level of interest in politics is “highly predictive” of their overall news use. While this is not surprising, and is not something easily remedied by news organizations alone, “one approach to slowing the growth of news avoidance is for journalists to learn how to tell newsworthy stories (about politics, for example) in ways that better convey its impact on certain segments of the population — like young adults and individuals from lower socio-economic backgrounds.” (See Edgerly’s previous research on seeking and avoiding news among young people.)

Second, news is a turn-off for people who lack self-confidence in navigating an increasingly abundant and complicated media environment, the study finds. If the “cognitive costs” of navigating information seem too high, people check out. This, too, may be challenging for journalists to address, but it points to opportunities for simply improving the presentation of news: How can news be organized and packaged in a way that is less daunting and more inviting?

One curious finding: “Perhaps surprisingly, the emotional toll of news (e.g., news fatigue, upset feelings) did not explain variation in overall levels of news consumption.” This suggests that trying to reduce these feelings among audiences may not really move the needle on overall news consumption, or that perhaps regular news consumers have developed ways of managing (e.g., through occasional detox) what is an inevitable feature of our current high-choice media environment.

How does local TV news change viewers’ attitudes? The case of Sinclair Broadcasting. By Matthew S. Levendusky, in Political Communication.

This study takes up an intriguing question: Can local television news — still some of the most-watched and most-trusted form of news for many Americans — shift viewers’ views on national politics?

The growth of Sinclair Broadcasting, which reaches roughly 40% of U.S. households as the second-largest owner of TV stations, offers a chance to test this question because it focuses more on national topics than its local TV counterparts. And, of course, because of Sinclair’s decidedly right-wing political slant — a bias made infamous with a variety of “must run” segments that local stations must air regardless of their misgivings about the conservative messaging from corporate.

The results are fairly straightforward: “Using data on Sinclair’s acquisition of local TV stations between 2008 and 2018, I show that living in an area with a Sinclair-owned TV station lowers viewers’ approval of President Obama during his tenure in office, and makes viewers less likely to vote for the Democratic nominee for president.” That is, even though viewers’ underlying predispositions and liberal-vs.-conservative self-identifications didn’t appear to change during the period, the mere presence of Sinclair in a market seems to have persuaded roughly 6% of the local audience to disapprove of Obama and become less likely to vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. This “persuasion rate,” which the author presumes is an undercount, is about half the effect of Fox News availability — but still notable because it is occurring via local rather than national media.

The trust gap: Young people’s tactics for assessing the reliability of political news. By Joëlle Swart and Marcel Broersma, in The International Journal of Press/Politics.

What does it mean to trust the news? Anyone reading this is well aware of the many studies documenting the decline of public trust in journalism happening in many countries, in part linked to withering trust in institutions generally as well as increasingly fractured political climates (for a good overview, see these reports from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism). But there’s still so much we don’t fully understand — for example, as this study notes, “the apparent paradox of why people may consume news that they do not trust and may not trust the news that they use.”

Swart and Broersma’s study, based on interviews with 55 young people from 10 nationalities living in the Netherlands, offers a window onto the everyday tactics and thought processes that go into how people — and young people in particular — approach political news and make sense of the complexity surrounding what to trust and why.

Based on the results, the authors develop a taxonomy of nine tactics that came up again and again — consistent across gender and cultural backgrounds — for assessing the reliability of political news. These ranged from prior knowledge and endorsements by others to factors such as news design/tone/format and one’s gut feeling. Overall, the results suggest that “rather than critically evaluating news through comparing and checking sources, users often employ more pragmatic shortcuts to approximate the trustworthiness of news.” And young people were more apt to see trust as nonbinary: for them, it was not a matter of figuring out if a source could or couldn’t be trusted, but rather whether it was “trustworthy enough.”

One sobering finding: “Our interviews confirm that increasing youth’s media literacy and awareness of misinformation may actually be countereffective,” which reinforces danah boyd’s argument about the misguided way that media literacy is being taught to today’s youth. “Emphasizing the risks of trusting what might be misinformation led some of our interviewees to conclude that no source of political information could be trusted.”

Changing the beat? Local online newsmaking in Finland, France, Germany, Portugal, and the U.K.. By Joy Jenkins and Pedro Jerónimo, in Journalism Practice.

Audience perspectives on paying for local news: A regional qualitative case study. By Angela Ross, Libby Lester, and Claire Konkes, in Journalism Studies.

While the shift from legacy to digital has been challenging for legacy news providers of all kinds, it has been especially hard for local media — their business models undercut by shrinking advertising revenue, less direct access to readers in a disaggregated media environment, and a precarious transition to a digital subscriber base that can offset losses elsewhere. Two recent studies offer a view of these dynamics both from inside and outside the news organization.

First, Jenkins and Jerónimo, in their study based on interviews with managers, editors, and journalists in five countries (Finland, France, Germany, Portugal, and the U.K.), show how local news media appear to be defying their innovation-averse tendencies and (finally) gaining traction in shifting their newsroom structures and cultures to adapt to digital-centric needs. This includes developing new beats, positions, and mind-sets. The upshot is that newsrooms now “increasingly prioritize products that do not mimic other digital platforms but are differentiated at the local level.” Finding and cultivating such distinctiveness in an increasingly crowded information market will be key to the future success of any news media.

Second, in their case study of regional Australian media, Ross and colleagues examine the factors that contribute to people being unwilling to subscribe to their local news organization. They zero in on a particular dilemma: Because audiences can too readily bypass the paywall and aren’t convinced that the cost and hassle of a subscription is worth it, news organizations need to fundamentally rethink their relationship with their community in light of what is known about successful brand marketing.

“We argue people need to feel they are a partner in an interdependent relationship where they receive something they value in return for committing to the ‘brand,’” the authors write. “We identified several obstacles to the development of such a relationship. Some participants said the news stories lacked context or quality. Some were disappointed in the lack of diversity of perspectives and others bemoaned what they perceived as content of reduced quality. It was not viewed as ‘extra’ to what they could access for free.”

In an echo of the community-centered journalism we described earlier, Ross et al. conclude that local news publishers need to realize that primarily covering community elites and assuming that qualifies as community advocacy isn’t going to cut it anymore. “They must make courageous attempts to connect with the broader base to understand people’s problems, concerns, fears and triumphs.”

Willing but wary: Australian women experts’ attitudes to engaging with the news media. By Kathryn Shine, in Journalism.

Research has consistently found that women are under-represented as sources in news coverage. The picture looks especially dire in the realm of “expert communicators,” where women can make up less than 1 in 5 of the sources in areas such as science and medicine. But while previous studies have focused on the quantitative tallying up of representation in the news, they haven’t offered a close-up picture of the qualitative experience of women who are cited in the news. As such, Shine’s study, based on interviews with 30 women professors in Australia, seeks to uncover: What do expert women think about being interviewed as sources?

While nearly all of the women experts in the group were willing to be interviewed by a journalist and generally described having positive experiences with reporters, “they referred to various factors that may act as deterrents,” the study found. “These included a lack of confidence, a reluctance to appear on camera, time constraints and a lack of understanding about how the news media operates.”

Such difficulties can rather easily be minimized by journalists with a bit of proactive work in setting up interviews, Shine suggests, which will ultimately lead to greater representation for women experts as one interview leads to follow-up opportunities. This could mean providing more detail up front about the nature of the interview, the time investment involved, and the likelihood of the expert being quoted. “Although many journalists are reluctant to provide questions in advance,” Shine writes, “this is a strategy that is likely to make female sources more comfortable about agreeing to an interview. Even a brief sample of questions would give the source a better understanding of the nature of the interview and what the journalist was seeking.”

The imagined audience for news: Where does a journalist’s perception of the audience come from? By Mark Coddington, Seth C. Lewis, and Valerie Belair-Gagnon, in Journalism Studies.

We talk a lot in this newsletter about how journalists think about their audiences, and about how, from the flip side, people think about the press. Perhaps it’s because we care a lot about these concerns as researchers ourselves. In this study we just published, we tried to bring some clarity to this question: If journalists produce news with a certain image of the audience in their mind, where does that image come from?

Previous research suggests that journalists often use people they know (e.g., family, friends, bosses, frequent sources) as stand-ins for the “imagined audience” they have in mind when they envision who they’re writing for. But digital media present new and different ways of knowing audiences, whether through audience metrics that aggregate and signal reader tastes or in more direct encounters with people on social media. Through a survey of 544 U.S. journalists, we found that journalists’ views of their audience spring from a complex variety of sources, each carrying different consequences for how journalists evaluate their audiences — e.g., whether they imagine their audience as smart/rational or similar to them. Why does this matter? Because, for example, the type of low-brow content often derided as clickbait rests on a view of the audience as irrational masses motivated by emotion, so it’s important to untangle how journalists working for commercial media, let’s say, may come to envision the audience differently than those working for nonprofit outlets.

Like The New York Times — which has highlighted its registered users and newsletter subscribers as audiences ripe for conversion — Bloomberg is focusing on users who have demonstrated an appetite for Bloomberg’s free content.

There was an obvious place to start: Odd Lots with Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal, one of the news organization’s most popular podcasts. The twice-weekly show that takes deep dives into markets and finance topics has seen downloads double in the past year, and since January alone, downloads have increased by 35%.

In an audience survey completed in February 2021, three numbers jumped out to the subscription team at Bloomberg:

• 76% of Odd Lots listeners were non-subscribers
• “Only” 43% work in finance
• 37% said they were in their early-to-mid career

Compared to their existing subscriber base, Odd Lots listeners are younger and less likely to work in finance — but interested enough to listen to a podcast that recently spent an hour on Modern Monetary Theory and another on decentralized exchanges. It was a good place to start.

On Tuesday, Bloomberg launched a suite of subscriber-only content — including a weekly newsletter and daily blog — aimed at the three-quarters of Odd Lots listeners who are not yet subscribed. (The podcast itself will continue to be free.) The hope is that existing subscribers will appreciate the perk, and that some portion of the loyal listenership will become subscribers to access the new posts from Weisenthal and Alloway, said Bloomberg’s general manager of subscriptions Lindsay Horrigan.

“This is the first phase in a broader, ongoing strategy related to subscriber-only content,” she said. “I think Odd Lots was the first place for us to look, just given the success that we’ve had with the podcast and the interest from the audience survey results. In the future, the plan is for us to continue to look for new areas and opportunities to add subscriber-only content to turn around and leverage for new subscribers and continue to use as a way to build up the value proposition [of a subscription] overall.”

It’s a bit of an experiment, but for Alloway and Weisenthal, the return to blogging is a natural one. In 2008, they were launching their careers by leading readers through the Great Recession and its aftermath with daily coverage at the Financial Times’ Alphaville (Alloway) and Business Insider (Weisenthal).

Alloway said she sees parallels between then and our current, upside-down moment. She expects to be thinking and learning alongside readers and listeners as we all make our way out of the Covid-19 pandemic and into whatever comes next.

“One of the great points about blogging is that it’s sort of an iterative process. You can pick up an idea, and then return to it over and over again,” she said. “If you’re talking about inflation, for instance, there are all these different ideas swirling around at the moment about what’s causing that. Why is it happening? Is this a long term problem or a transitory problem? The blog format is really great at dealing with those questions. It’s a great way to cover them in a way that a hardcore news article might not always be well suited for.”

As Alloway and Weisenthal wrote in their intro post, the blog will range from quick posts about an interesting chart to longer pieces of analysis and expanded interviews. Full transcripts, one of the most-requested features from the audience, will also be posted.

The Odd Lots audience has shown a tolerance — even an appetite — for the nitty gritty. Weisenthal said that their most popular episodes have been the ones that get the most technical. (A recent deep dive into the lumber market was their “biggest episode ever, by a large margin.”) The hosts act as guides through the interviews with experts and stop to ask questions that listeners might need to know.

“We tell our guests, ‘You go in deep as possible. Go nerdy, jargon, in the weeds.’ It’s our job to translate, to get them to pause, to get them to clarify,” Weisenthal said. “We see that as our role, as a sort of advocate for the listener, but that way our guests don’t have to hold back at all, or try to calibrate their message to the audience.”

He added, “I think [the blog] really dovetails with the podcast. These are the topics we’re going to keep talking  about over and over again. There’s not one discrete post or story or episode that is complete. We’re talking about an ongoing process of trying to understand something.”

We ask @theappeal to voluntarily recognize our union so that we can get to work on improving The Appeal’s workplace culture and conditions.

— The Appeal Union (@theappealunion) May 10, 2021

We are unionizing to make this a high democracy workplace. pic.twitter.com/uRh4Q1o4hw

— The Appeal Union (@theappealunion) May 10, 2021

With a union, workers and management can turn a corner together, rectify working conditions, and produce more powerful and mission-driven journalism.

— The Appeal Union (@theappealunion) May 10, 2021

News: The overwhelming majority of @theappeal staff unionized this morning. More than 90 percent of our workforce has signed cards demanding management recognize our union. https://t.co/nIJeWeiXGI

— Jerry Iannelli (@jerryiannelli) May 10, 2021

There was one paragraph in the announcement that stood out as a sign of something deeper going on (emphasis mine):

Over the last year, management has repeatedly shifted our structure and goals as an organization, including one major restructuring. Talented journalists, legal experts, researchers, communications workers, and audience engagement staff have been laid off or have felt that they were being pushed out. In the last year, 38 people have left. The Appeal typically has a staff of around 50. The majority of those who left were people of color, and more than two-thirds were women. This high turnover rate isn’t an aberration; it’s part of a years-long trend. In the last four and a half years, at least 70 people have left the organization.

That is…a lot of turnover.

But the nascent Appeal Union didn’t have long to enjoy that initial wash of likes and RTs, because five minutes later, The Appeal announced layoffs and restructuring.

Just minutes after staffers at The Appeal announced they intend to unionize, the organization's leadership said they are laying off some employees and making major leadership changes. https://t.co/4UjouwFaMw

— Max Tani (@maxwelltani) May 10, 2021

This is the email @thisisrobsmith sent five minutes after our email to management announcing our union drive. We demand The Appeal management stop these retaliatory layoffs. pic.twitter.com/fECcgwWgkM

— Jerry Iannelli (@jerryiannelli) May 10, 2021

Some highlights from executive director Rob Smith (I’ll paste the full memo, along with the union’s announcement, below):

• The Appeal is leaving Tides Advocacy and the Tides Center to become an independent nonprofit organization. “This process has started and expect it will be complete in the coming months and The Appeal will be an independent organization later this summer.”

  Tides serves as fiscal sponsor for a lot of young nonprofit organizations, most of them generally on the left, until they obtain 501(c)3 or other nonprofit tax status. It also provides operational support. The Appeal was initially a project of The Justice Collaborative, which was fiscally sponsored by Tides.

  But back in January, Smith announced that The Justice Collaborative’s staff was being folded into The Appeal’s. The news site was initially focused on the criminal justice system, but it had since “expanded to include housing and homelessness, economic stability, climate change, and other policies affecting our most vulnerable communities.”

• “We have made the difficult decision to significantly reduce the size of our team…to better align our organization with our mission and protect the longterm stability of The Appeal amidst volatility in the funding landscape and an anticipated loss to our budget.”
• Smith calls The Appeal a “top heavy organization” and announced the departure of himself as executive director, Jake Sussman as COO/general counsel, and Alex Bassos as chief of products. (All three will remain in part-time advising or consulting roles.) Editor-in-chief Matt Ferner will run The Appeal day to day.

  According to its most recent 990 filing, Smith, Sussman, and Bassos took home salaries of $229,713, $170,416, and $170,159, respectively, in 2019.

• The Appeal is eliminating its audience team, as well as several editor and fact-checker positions: “The Appeal has more people on its audience team than it has reporters, a holdover structure from The Justice Collaborative. That is not sustainable. Similarly, The Appeal has more editors and fact checkers than reporters, which is not sustainable especially with the smaller team that we will have going forward.”

(Smith also says that he plans “to be OOO for two weeks starting this Wednesday.” Whatever “out of the office” means these days.)

The leadership of The Appeal is thick with lawyers — Smith was a law prof at UNC, Bassos is a former public defender, Sussman practiced civil rights law — so I assume they’re at least broadly aware of Section 8(a)(3) of the National Labor Relations Act, which makes taking action against employees because of their support of a union illegal. And what could scream “retaliation” more than announcing layoffs five minutes after a union is announced?

Minutes before we announced @theappealunion @EthanSCorey was told he would be laid off. Minutes after we went public, @theappeal's Rob Smith, emailed staff saying there will be layoffs. We have reason to believe mgmt was aware of our plans to unionize & this is retaliation. https://t.co/u1sQ99oW1w

— Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg (@elizabethweill) May 10, 2021

I just got laid off from my job at The Appeal, along with several other colleagues. I'm really proud of the work I did, and I'm even more proud of the fact that my colleagues have announced their formation of a union today. I'm also looking for a new job, so hmu!

— Ethan Corey (@EthanSCorey) May 10, 2021

What management did here has a very bad odor — and may well constitute illegal retaliation against workers for supporting a union https://t.co/QmmIm9grdR

— Steven Greenhouse (@greenhousenyt) May 10, 2021

We, the @theappealunion, are calling on @theappeal management to immediately rescind the layoffs, cease job cuts, and recognize @theappealunion. We believe these layoffs are retaliatory and illegal. https://t.co/nDMKoD1Pup

— Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg (@elizabethweill) May 10, 2021

To add: This is unfortunately an accurate taste of how The Appeal management has treated workers for quite some time—and why *90 percent* of our workforce signed cards supporting our union. https://t.co/VbLMGzdE7I

— Jerry Iannelli (@jerryiannelli) May 10, 2021

Questionable labor practices would seem particularly dangerous for an outfit like The Appeal, which writes extensively about matters of justice and the law and which is intertwined with a larger network of progressive organizations, foundations, funders, and outlets.

On the flip side, a large share of The Appeal’s funding has come from the tech world — an industry known for mixing progressive views on some issues with, shall we say, less than enthusiastic feelings about organized labor. The Appeal has received grants of more than $1 million each from the foundations of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, and Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, as well as a donor-advised fund of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

and maybe we can have a much larger conversation about how many so called “social justice” nonprofits, despite their lofty liberal rhetoric, are as aggressively anti-union as ALEC or any republican legislator

— Adam H. Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) May 10, 2021

I will also note, though, that from looking at The Appeal’s 49-person staff list, calling it a top-heavy editorial operation seems…pretty accurate. It lists 22 people with “editor” job titles (including an editor-in-chief, three editorial directors, seven managing editors, and six senior editors) versus 4 with “reporter” titles. The Appeal stories I’ve read have been high quality, but their publishing frequency isn’t high for an operation of its size; its RSS feed shows 31 stories published in the 40 days since the start of April. (They also publish some other types of content, like a podcast and live video interviews.)

The staff page only lists two audience staffers, though — both of them women of color — which wouldn’t be “more people on its audience team than it has reporters.” Of course, job titles can be squishy, some editors do a lot of writing, YMMV. And, most importantly, even a legitimate need to restructure wouldn’t justify retaliating against unionization.

A year ago, The Appeal only listed a smaller subset of its staff on its masthead, but of the 22 people posted there then, 9 are no longer listed as staffers. A number of past Appeal employees tweeted out support for their former colleagues.

Every week I worked at The Appeal I worried I was going to be laid off, because it had happened to so many others. Pretty much the only thing that made me feel somewhat better was knowing @EthanSCorey and @chrisgelardi would have my back. https://t.co/Ja6mtTf7Ma

— Molly Minta (@mintamolly) May 10, 2021

I’m proud to stand with my former colleagues who seek to make @theappeal a fair and equitable workplace. All workers deserve union protection, but none more than the incredibly talented staff of The Appeal @theappealunion pic.twitter.com/CHZJqKExgy

— Kira Lerner (@kira_lerner) May 10, 2021

Gertie & I stand with @theappealunion. My talented former colleagues deserve a workplace free of discrimination & bullying. The majority of ppl who left the org in the last year were people of color, & two-thirds were women. This is unacceptable. pic.twitter.com/fIfcGdKlhh

— Lauren Gill (@laurenk_gill) May 10, 2021

A couple of weeks ago, Appeal president Josie Duffy Rice announced she would be stepping down “in early May.” This morning, she expressed support for the new union and offered support to laid-off staffer Ethan Corey.

this is the best possible news and i support this union and their efforts wholeheartedly. i may not work @theappeal anymore but i love our staff and will do what i can to support them. https://t.co/J8ZKoWVSkL

— josie duffy rice (@jduffyrice) May 10, 2021

i would hire ethan for literally any job on earth. he's SO brilliant and so great at what he does, plus everything else. please please please reach out to him. https://t.co/zlKJATWyFm

— josie duffy rice (@jduffyrice) May 10, 2021

We’ll see where this goes next. But until then, it’s pretty clear The Appeal has been subject to some muddled leadership — and today’s response from management lengthens the odds of an improved relationship with its workers.

This is @theappeal mission statement: "The more we fulfill our mission the closer we come to fulfilling our vision: an America where stability and dignity are within everyone’s reach." And is how they live those values. We stand for decency. @newsguild https://t.co/nvYQfIEXzf

— Derek Moore (@deadlinederek) May 10, 2021

Here’s the initial union announcement:

As staff from all departments of The Appeal, we are proud of the work we do every day to produce powerful reporting, live interviews, research, and analysis. We are glad to be part of a mission-driven media organization that exposes injustices, holds those in power accountable, and uplifts ideas that can transform our country’s harmful systems.

The Appeal began as part of a start-up organization, The Justice Collaborative, several years ago with a mission to correct injustices in the criminal legal system and has since broadened its scope. Now, The Appeal strives to help create a society where stability and dignity are within everyone’s reach. We are committed to this vision. It’s why we all wanted to work here in the first place.

But we have urgent concerns that The Appeal is straying from this mission.

Over the last year, management has repeatedly shifted our structure and goals as an organization, including one major restructuring. Talented journalists, legal experts, researchers, communications workers, and audience engagement staff have been laid off or have felt that they were being pushed out. In the last year, 38 people have left. The Appeal typically has a staff of around 50. The majority of those who left were people of color, and more than two-thirds were women. This high turnover rate isn’t an aberration; it’s part of a years-long trend. In the last four and a half years, at least 70 people have left the organization.

Those who remain are left to deal with the fallout from repeatedly losing fellow team members and the institutional knowledge that goes with them. Some staff members have been repeatedly reassigned to multiple teams and jobs, sometimes in areas they know little about. The entire workforce is often subjected to new policies, priorities, and performance metrics we had no say in creating, and which, for many staffers, contradict the very reasons they were hired. More and more of our day-to-day workflow and assignments are dictated from above, with little input from the people responsible for carrying them out and little transparency around these decisions. Some staffers have even experienced demeaning treatment by management. To justify all of this, management’s refrain has been that The Appeal is a “low democracy” workplace.

It is our goal to create a high democracy workplace — one where the staff has a seat at the table when it comes to working conditions, job security, and decision-making. That is why we have formed a union with the NewsGuild-CWA, which represents legacy media like The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Thomson Reuters, along with mission-driven publications like The Nation, Daily Kos, and Jacobin.

This union is in the best interest of The Appeal’s staff, management, and audience. We want to create a workplace where we can offer feedback without fear of retaliation, and where exceptionally high rates of turnover are no longer the norm. We know that The Appeal can be a place that is stable, compassionate, just, and transparent, where racial and gender equity are priorities, not buzzwords, and where we all have a say in the direction of the organization.

We ask that The Appeal’s management commit to a collaborative, good-faith relationship by voluntarily recognizing our union and respecting our right to organize.

Signed,

Seanniece Bamiro, Bilal Baydoun, Molly Bernstein, Rachel Brody, Sarah Clements, Ethan Corey, Chris Gelardi, Molly Greene, Alon Gur, Jerry Lannelli, Brandi McNeil, Meg O’Connor, Sam Schuyler, Erik Shute, Sarah Silins, Anna Simonton, Joshua Vaughn, Malecia Walker, Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg, Nick Wing, Emily Wonder, and the rest of the The Appeal Union

And here’s the memo from Rob Smith:

Hi Team:

I have some news to share that will impact the future of our work and The Appeal. Like many organizations, we have had to adapt over the years to meet the emerging needs of the communities we serve while staying viable as an organization to do our job: provide news and analysis that public officials, journalists, advocates, and scholars use to solve the problems that keep everyday people up at night.

In assessing the funding landscape, our mission, and our structure, I, along with the leadership team, have made the decision to spin The Appeal away from Tides Advocacy and Tides Center to become an independent nonprofit organization. This process has started and expect it will be complete in the coming months and The Appeal will be an independent organization later this summer.

As part of this restructuring, we have made the difficult decision to significantly reduce the size of our team. We need to do this to better align our organization with our mission and protect the longterm stability of The Appeal amidst volatility in the funding landscape and an anticipated loss to our budget.

We have become a top heavy organization, and so the cuts start at the top. Accordingly, I am stepping back as Executive Director, and taking on a part-time role as Founder & Senior Advisor. Jake Sussman and Alex Bassos are leaving their full-time roles at the organization, as well. Both will consult with The Appeal on legal, operations, and programmatic needs. Sara Yousuf is also leaving to pursue a local criminal justice opportunity. Whether or when to replace or restructure any of these roles will be assessed on an ongoing basis

Matt Ferner, as Editor-in-Chief, is the right person to lead the day-to-day operations of The Appeal into its next chapter as a standalone organization. Keisha Hudson will remain at the organization as managing director, working closely with Matt on content and Jessica Murphy on operations, with Rachel Marcuse advising on people..

With our budget outlook in mind, the additional reductions to the team are driven by our mission and ensuring we have the right roles and the right staffing levels to make sure The Appeal continues to have the biggest impact possible.

That starts with restructuring The Appeal around its core mission: providing impactful reporting and analysis. To do that, we are creating a more traditional newsroom communications structure by eliminating the audience team. The Appeal has more people on its audience team than it has reporters, a holdover structure from The Justice Collaborative. That is not sustainable. Similarly, The Appeal has more editors and fact checkers than reporters, which is not sustainable especially with the smaller team that we will have going forward. So, we are eliminating several editor positions and placing fact-checking responsibilities with senior editors.

While these changes are being made to ensure the important work The Appeal does will continue, they also mean some of us will be leaving or shifting roles. The people who are leaving The Appeal helped us build this organization, and, more than that, they are our colleagues and our friends. We’ve reached out directly with every person whose role is implicated, and we are offering severance packages that align with our commitment to ensuring every person is treated fairly within resources we have as a non-profit organization.

Moving forward, with these significant changes, The Appeal’s budget is stable not only for this year, but for multiple years, which provides a solid foundation moving into the future. Our work, and the way we do it, remains the same. I’m so proud of what we’ve all built together, and it’s been incredible to see the team work together over these past few months since we ended TJC and relaunched The Appeal. These steps will allow the organization to continue to produce reporting and analysis that leaders use to solve problems for everyday people, and to do so in a way that is sustainable. While Matt takes over the day-to-day leadership of The Appeal, will continue to support him and the organization with everything I’ve got.

People across the leadership team will be reaching out to staff today and in the coming days to answer any questions. We will also be having follow-up conversations with team members as we get closer to the official departure date from Tides to talk logistics of the employment transition.

I plan to be OOO for two weeks starting this Wednesday but will be available to talk at anytime, so please don’t hesitate to reach out.

With my deepest gratitude, Rob

The official process itself took four months, preceded by more than one year of organizing and several years of conversations among colleagues.

But securing our rights as workers was worth it. After completing contract negotiations, we’ll enjoy the same protections our colleagues have had for years, including vision insurance, “just cause” protections from firing, and more.

Our fight is emblematic of the journalism industry itself. The Seattle Times digital staff is composed of more people of color, more women, and more young people than the newsroom as a whole. We lead the way in innovative, forward-thinking work, but our fragile status underscored that we were being treated inequitably for our contributions.

How we came to this process

Reporters, photographers, copy editors, columnists, news artists, page designers, and others have been unionized journalists at The Seattle Times for decades. But because of an archaic agreement made during contract negotiations in the early 2000s, digital journalists had been an excluded class.

At the time the agreement was made, the company viewed digital workers as separate from the mission of the newsroom, focused on building and fixing the company website. Since then, digital journalism has expanded. SeattleTimes.com rivals our print newspaper as the primary way readers engage with our stories.

As the platforms have grown, so have digital journalism jobs. By the time we unionized on Sept. 25, 2020, 12 people had digital jobs with titles such as news producer, engagement editor, video journalist, and news developer.

Despite these advancements, our status in the newsroom remained tenuous.

A year and a half after I began working at The Seattle Times, I met with two of my fellow digital journalists, Scott Greenstone and Mohammed Kloub, to talk about unionizing. We had frustrations over scheduling, pay, and respect for digital journalism in the newsroom, and we wanted to do something about it.

Scott, Moh, and I got in touch with the PNW Guild president Evan Bush (who is also a fellow Seattle Times reporter), who then put us in touch with then-PNW Guild aministrative officer Brad Sherman. Because of the way the agreement was written, the Guild could not simply absorb digital workers; we had to vote ourselves in.

Prior to our effort, at least three people at different times had discussed unionizing the digital staff. While they pushed the idea forward and laid the groundwork for us to build on, those efforts ultimately fizzled because the people driving them either left or switched into unionized or management roles. Even among our group, Scott became a Guild-represented reporter, and Moh left the company a few months into organizing.

However, with more digital workers engaged after we began organizing, including Lauren Frohne and Corinne Chin, we began conversations in earnest in fall 2019. We had conversations over coffee and met with people over pizza inside the Seattle Labor Temple. We even planned an outing at an ice-skating rink to chat and get to know each other in December of that year.

A foundation had been built and momentum was growing for months, but after the official declaration of the Covid-19 pandemic, we watched fearfully as newsrooms around the country began to implement layoffs. Because we did not have union protections, which include a layoff process, we feared for our job security. The crisis made our union urgent.

Unionizing is a process. Here’s what our process looked like, and how you can do this, too.

How we got started

Communication Workers of America, which encompasses the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild, provided an incredible amount of support and guidance, including a week-by-week timeline to keep us on track and our to-do list organized.

• Four weeks before we publicly announced our campaign, we wrote a mission statement and assigned negotiators to communicate with the company for our request.
• Three weeks out, we collected the personal contact information for every eligible member, designed a logo for our union (here are some ideas), and completed a legal analysis to ensure our petition could move forward
• With two weeks left to go, we sent all of our designs for custom T-shirts, posters, and buttons to the printing press and conducted an assessment of where all eligible members stood with their support.
• By the last week, eligible members signed and submitted union authorization cards.
• The day before our campaign went public, we held a final meeting for all members in the unit to go over any lingering questions. On go day, we sent management an email, with all members CC’d, demanding voluntary recognition. We filed for a union election two days later as a precaution.
• As part of our preparation, CWA also organized an “inoculation training” to prepare us for any potential misinformation or persuasion campaigns the company could run. We identified common anti-union phrases and practiced our responses to counter their claims.

You don’t have to come up with your own plan from scratch! CWA uses the AEIOU acronym: Aggravate, Educate, Inoculate, Organize, Union. There are existing frameworks you can lean on, and people who can give you very specific guidance on how to get started.

Our timeline

In late April, six other digital journalists and I formed an organizing committee, which is a group of people who have taken on the responsibility of getting us unionized. The committee’s job focuses on reaching out to eligible members and doing the logistical work behind organizing. We went public with our union on May 26, 2020.

During those preparatory five weeks, our committee reached out to every eligible member and created a scale to determine the level of understanding each person held about our unionizing process.

On one end were the members of the organizing committee, which represented about half the eligible unit, who we knew would vote in favor. The other end of the spectrum would have been anyone who was actively campaigning against the union, but luckily we did not face that level of opposition. In the middle were people who attended meetings and were on board, people who were neutral and didn’t have enough information, and people who had information but were not interested.

In addition to outreach during that time, our committee put together a plan for a public announcement:

• As a group, we developed a mission statement as our purpose for unionizing.
• Hilary Fung, a news developer who has since left The Seattle Times, created a logo that we used on T-shirts, buttons, stickers, posters and desk tents.
• Taylor Blatchford, a news producer, wrote a press release that was distributed to local and national media. Video journalists Corinne Chin and Lauren Frohne collected video clips from all of us to compile into a campaign video.
• Sports producer Chris Cole and I launched a Twitter account and crafted language to use on social media. We encouraged our entire unit to change their photos on Twitter, Slack, and Zoom to the union logo.

We released all of these materials to our management and online the same day we went public.

At this point, the company had a couple of options for how they could respond. They could have chosen to voluntarily recognize our union that same day. Or, they could have done nothing and awaited a vote among the 12 eligible members four weeks later.

Instead, they took us to court, arguing that the existing union would be in violation of its own contract if it allowed us to join, and regularly emailed the digital team about how the Guild was making the process more difficult (see the “What to expect and watch out for” section below for details), which could have led our eligible members to lose faith or leave the effort. In the end, we endured four months of legal back-and-forth. But despite those efforts, the judge ruled that yes, we had the right to join the existing union, and we were also able to retain enthusiasm for unionizing among our members.

Decision points you might face

Our process was unique because we were a subset of workers within an already unionized workplace.

Decide whether to start a new union or affiliate with an existing guild. As we began initial discussions, we faced the question of whether we should join the existing union that covers workers at The Seattle Times or form our own separate union. We chose to join the existing union because its members already enjoyed a solid, decades-long contract and because we wanted to reinforce that we were journalists just like our colleagues. Our campaign slogan was #OneNewsroomOneUnion.

Our company took our union request to court as an attempt to prevent us from organizing. However, the most important piece of information to know is that all journalists retain a legal right to unionize, under U.S. labor laws.

Create a list of which job titles to include in the union. Our guild includes workers in News (and now digital jobs specifically), Circulation, Advertising, Marketing, and Library, but we exclude jobs in executive or supervisory roles. We find there to be stronger power in numbers, but new unions may want to consider which departments to include.

Evaluate the pace you are comfortable with. Make sure you build a solid foundation of support for the union before you talk with hesitant workers. If word gets out before you’re ready, you may tip off management, who could then begin an anti-union campaign.

Resources (they’re free)

Formal guidance and community support were critical in helping our union get off the ground. CWA provided us access to many of these resources, and the best part is they’re free! Union members don’t pay any dues or expenses until they have a contract.

• Unionization Training and Support: Our greatest resource was Brad Sherman, the former administrative officer of the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild. Along with Enida Shuku, a representative from CWA, they provided counseling, training, and support.
• Legal Training and Support: The Guild provided us free pizza, swag, and access to lawyers who defended us in court. Training sessions prepared us against tactics and strategies the company could implement to try to deter us.
• Solidarity: We also received unofficial support from fellow journalists and community members — solidarity that helped fuel us as we endured a legal battle.

Unions around the country, especially other journalism unions, provided a roadmap for our process and a network of support to lean on.

What to expect and watch out for

Expect to spend a moderate amount of time on this process, outside of work hours. At times, it felt like a political campaign that involved lots of strategizing and engagement.

Be prepared for adversarial company communications. Companies that don’t voluntarily recognize a union use different strategies to prevent people from organizing. Some are extremely friendly, emphasizing the pleasant culture of the company, to dissuade a need for a union. Some plead, asking for a second chance.

Initially, The Seattle Times offered us a form of recognition that came with significant strings attached. Our most important concern was that the company wanted us to waive rights regarding our speech and communication that we would have retained through a National Labor Relations Board process. We declined their offer.

At that point, the company filed a complaint to the NLRB over whether the PNW Guild had the authority to represent digital journalists, and when a judge ruled that we could be represented, the company appealed the decision, which a judge denied. Throughout the process, the company also argued its point of view through regular emails to the digital team, and later to all newsroom employees.

Not all employees will be on board with unionizing. Several employees voiced valid personal concerns and reservations about publicly supporting our union drive. Although we disagreed with some of the hesitations, we respected their viewpoints and we continue to work amicably and productively with them.

What’s next for us

We have begun bargaining for a contract. With the help of our new Guild representative Katie Gillespie, we’re seeking more consistent and reliable scheduling for producers, equipment procedures for our video journalists, and pay scales that align with our job duties and functions.

We continue to hold weekly meetings with our bargaining committee and monthly meetings with the entire unit. Organizing continues even after you unionize.

I am more bothered by the idea that other media executives think like Merrill. If they do, they are hurting their employees and their companies.

The op-ed’s original headline was explicit about the connection between working from home and being fired — “As a CEO, I want my employees to understand the risk of not returning to work in the office” — before being softened to “As a CEO, I worry about the erosion of office culture with more remote work.” On Friday, the editorial staff of The Washingtonian announced that, in response to Merrill’s piece, they are refusing to publish today. (Merrill addressed the opinion piece in an email to staff and sort of apologized, Maxwell Tani reported.)

.@washingtonian editorial staff respond in unison to CEO Cathy Merrill's WaPo op-ed (via @MarisaKashino) https://t.co/WV26q82B7Q pic.twitter.com/TEAaohi8E6

— Benjamin Armbruster (@benjaminja) May 7, 2021

The meat of the piece centers around Merrill’s weird estimate that “20% of every office job” is devoted to creating and sustaining office “culture.”

While some employees might like to continue to work from home and pop in only when necessary, that presents executives with a tempting economic option the employees might not like. I estimate that about 20 percent of every office job is outside one’s core responsibilities — “extra.” It involves helping a colleague, mentoring more junior people, celebrating someone’s birthday — things that drive office culture. If the employee is rarely around to participate in those extras, management has a strong incentive to change their status to “contractor.” Instead of receiving a set salary, contractors are paid only for the work they do, either hourly or by appropriate output metrics. That would also mean not having to pay for health care, a 401(k) match and our share of FICA and Medicare taxes — benefits that in my company’s case add up roughly to an extra 15 percent of compensation. Not to mention the potential savings of reduced office space and extras such as bonuses and parking fees.

Possible labor law violations aside, it’s no coincidence that these nice office “extras” — the things you’ll rarely see listed in a journalism job description because historically nobody has considered them worth paying for — disproportionately fall to women and people of color.

Think back to the office you used to work from. Who unloaded the dishwasher, stocked the snacks, circulated the get well cards, made the coffee, bought the birthday cakes?

Did she get paid for it? And did the man who never did any of those things get paid 20% less than she did? No, because that would be insane, right? Because a mother works for free, right?

There’s another term for the “extras” Merrill mentions. Researchers call them “non-promotable tasks.”

“Across field and laboratory studies, we found that women volunteer for these ‘non-promotable’ tasks more than men,” Linda Babcock, Maria P. Recalde, Lise Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingart wrote in Harvard Business Review wrote a couple years back, “that women are more frequently asked to take such tasks on; and that when asked, they are more likely to say yes.” (Lots of other research bears this out.)

When women agree to these tasks, it takes a toll on their career prospects. (If they say no, the researchers point out, it also hurts them — that’s why the solution has to be for “management to find ways to distribute tasks more equitably.”) From the paper:

Relative to men, women are more likely to volunteer, more likely to be asked to volunteer, and more likely to accept direct requests to volunteer. These results suggest that the allocation of tasks with low promotability may differ even when there are no gender differences in ability and preferences. The resulting differences in task allocations can create barriers to the advancement of women in organizations and in society as a whole.

And though managers claim to value women’s helpfulness, it doesn’t actually, um, help them all that much when it comes to performance reviews. Kate Weisshaar, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and faculty fellow at the Carolina Population Center, summed up some of her recent research for me:

In a study I conducted with Shelley Correll, Alison Wynn, and JoAnne Delfino Wehner, we examined gendered language in performance evaluations and their association with ratings at a Fortune 500 company. We found that women were more likely than men to have “helpful” or community-oriented behaviors mentioned in their performance evaluations. Yet, being perceived as highly helpful was not associated with receiving the highest performance rating (for men or women). We suggest that women are “viewed” as having more communal or community-oriented qualities, but these qualities are not valued highly for top performance outcomes.

Mentoring junior staff, meanwhile, isn’t some hazy nice-to-have that exists outside of “core” responsibilities, and the belief that it is is especially problematic at a time when newsrooms are struggling to hire, retain, and promote employees of color. For too long, informal mentoring, “inclusion” responsibilities, and requests or requirements to provide diverse job candidate lists or check articles for racism have been foisted off on journalists of color, who are never paid or recognized for their extra work.

Mentorship goes hand in hand with staff retention and the creation of a pipeline of future leaders. It’s a skill that connects directly to a company’s bottom line and to its stated values. Not everyone mentors, wants to do it, or is good at it. It’s work that should be stated in the job description (i.e., agreed to) and reflected in salary and with other support from the company.

Merrill writes that she has discussed “in several group calls with [other] chief executives … a great sense of pride in how well our teams have done during the past year.” She argues that’s not primarily because the employees are good at their jobs, but rather because they knew one another in person before the pandemic began and had a shared office culture to work from. She concludes the piece by implying that if employees want to keep their jobs, they’d better come back into the office.

There’s no need to acknowledge, apparently, that it’s pretty remarkable it is that these teams have “done” “well” considering that they were working not by choice from home in a global pandemic, many of them likely taking care of children while attempting to work full time during, again, a hopefully-once-in-a-lifetime-catastrophic event.

What should “doing well” over the last year even mean? Arguably, it could mean you didn’t die of Covid. That your children are still fed and at least partially dressed. That you went and got your vaccine and helped someone else get one. That you managed to eke out a little extra kindness to a neighbor, a child, a friend, a coworker on a bad day. Maybe “doing well” these days means you just got out of bed, put on some pants, and did it all again.

But the hero of this piece is “the son of a friend of mine, a young investment banker who was courted by two firms last fall.” This kid, who I’m assuming does not have dependents, chose to go with the job that said its employees “would be back as soon as it felt safe,” a decision you should definitely feel comfortable having an investment bank make for you.

Compare that banker to the unfortunate colleague of “a friend at a Fortune 500 company.” The colleague, hired “just as the pandemic hit,” “struggled.”

He wasn’t getting the job done. It was very hard for the leadership team to tell what the problem was. Was it because he was new? Was he not up to the work? What was the specific issue? Worse, no one wanted to give him feedback over Zoom when they hadn’t even met him. Professional development is hard to do remotely.

Did they ever ask how he was doing, though? Was the “specific issue” actually somehow related to the pandemic? We have no idea why he wasn’t “up to the work.” We also don’t know if he got fired.

It’s lazy to assert that you can’t be kind to or connect with someone if you don’t just happen to run into them in the office kitchen every day. (“As one CEO put it, ‘There is no such thing as a three-minute Zoom.'” But why not? Most Zoom calls are way too long, anyway. You could also call or text, just to check in, like a human person in the year 2021.)

Working remotely for the last year has revealed just how much of office culture is accidental, arbitrary, and sexist. Much of what’s lumped in with unpaid “culture” should be identified and divided equitably. (Do what we do at the Nieman Foundation: The managers buy the cakes.) And if it turns out people keep pointing to the same things as positive elements of their in-office experience, well, try to find the person who’s making those happy things happen — and recognize them with money and career advancement.

A change in thinking will not mean that nobody ever goes into the office; I’d bet most working journalists really miss being in newsrooms some of the time. There’s clearly value to coworkers sometimes being together in person, and you don’t have to hold their healthcare hostage to make it happen. But we should think about what, exactly, we want out of our in-person time, and go from there.

Much of the “office culture” that eroded during the pandemic was not built intentionally or thoughtfully. It hasn’t benefited everyone equally; in many cases, it’s actually been harmful.

Once we acknowledge that, we can think about building the kinds of places where people really want to work.

A majority said they expected Facebook to track their activity within Facebook, as well as within sibling apps like Instagram and WhatsApp. But 61% said they would not “expect Facebook to track a person’s usage of apps that Facebook does not own in order to make ads more targeted.”

That was survey data, but now we have some real-world numbers — and they look quite a bit worse for Facebook and any other app or ad platform that tracks users across apps.

The latest version of iOS, 14.5, features something called App Tracking Transparency, which requires apps to specifically ask users for permission to track their activity across other companies’ apps and websites.

The app analytics company Flurry is tracking how many iPhone and iPad users are saying “Sure, I’d enjoy being tracked by a corporation across every aspect of my online life” rather than “Um, no.” The answer is: not very many!

Those charts show the percentage of people giving a thumbs-up to cross-app tracking whenever they’re prompted about it, both worldwide and in the United States. The numbers have been quite steady: Only about 4% of U.S. iOS users and about 11% of worldwide iOS users are saying yes to tracking.

That is…not a lot!

This is a problem for Facebook, given that (a) iPhone and iPad users have long been more valuable from a revenue point of view than Android users, (b) iOS users tend to update their phones quite rapidly compared to other platforms, and (c) all that cross-app data is a major part of how Facebook generates the targeting that makes its ads so valuable. (Facebook knows a lot of things about you — but it doesn’t know them all because you wrote a Facebook post about it in 2015 or something.) Some project this one change could cost Facebook 7% of its revenue.

(Which is why Facebook is trying to passive-aggressively “educate” its users into giving in to tracking.)

Facebook will still have a ton of first-party data to work with from all its apps. (So will its duopoly-mate Google, which has similar assets and vulnerabilities.) Indeed, this will hurt a bunch of anonymous adtech companies with odd names like Teramoat, Brangoh, Spongymind, Spercuity, and Quokka most.1

What’ll be the impact on publishers? In the short term, there’ll probably be a revenue hit; news sites fill ad space with targeted ads too, and those will now be a little worse. In the longer term, this increases the chance there’ll be a cleansing flood of adtech middlemen, which is probably a necessary condition for any eventual recovery in publisher-sold advertising. Facebook and Google became the big dog of online advertising by having the best targeting data; now their data will be a bit worse.

The most important takeaway for publishers: Get better and smarter at gathering your own first–party data. Quality publishers tend to have a more substantial relationship with their readers than Some­Random­Site­On­The­Web.com; take advantage.

1. I think I made all those up. Well, quokkas are a thing.

Twitter has made several moves over the last year to improve safety on the platform and curb misinformation. What’s exciting, or at the least a cause for optimism, is that in experiments last year, Twitter says 34% of users who saw the prompt revised their initial replies or decided to not send the tweet at all. Then, after seeing the prompt, people wrote 11% fewer offensive replies.

For now, the feature will only be available to Twitter users who use the platform in English on both iOS and Android devices. It stops short of preventing someone from sending an offensive or harmful reply all together.

“We’ll continue to explore how prompts — such as reply prompts and article prompts — and other forms of intervention can encourage healthier conversations on Twitter,” the official announcement said. “Our teams will also collect feedback from people on Twitter who have received reply prompts as we expand this feature to other languages.”

Twitter will give users the chance to "review" a tweet before sending, if they think it's a potentially harmful or offensive reply.

So now we have "Don't you want to read the article before RTing?" and "Have you considered … not being a jerk?"https://t.co/padii1Cgv0

— Sarah Scire (@SarahScire) May 5, 2021

From our friends at Twitter: Twitter is rolling out "reply prompts" across iOS and Android. These prompts will encourage people to pause and think before they tweet an insulting or rude reply.

A much-needed feature https://t.co/fJ36ejc9NX pic.twitter.com/oETFWkMNq7

— Koromone Koroye (@Koromone_K) May 6, 2021

I feel so validated. Priming WORKS! Spent more time on designing for Safety and less time on whack-a-mole. https://t.co/f55BRDChJZ pic.twitter.com/49nZZKHmfC

— Evan Hamilton (@evanhamilton) May 5, 2021

Mohamed previously served as editor-in-chief and co-owner of the online news site Daily Hive and Wilkinson is a cofounder of Tiny Capital — which owns digital businesses like interface design firm MetaLab, design social network Dribbble, and the podcast app Castro — and launched Capital Daily as a daily local newsletter in his hometown of Victoria, B.C. in 2019. As they saw it, ads made reading local newspapers online a terrible experience and, bloated with syndicated national and regional stories, the coverage wasn’t feeling all that local anyway. Overstory was launched with a different vision: high-quality journalism, starting with a daily newsletter to regularly deliver the local news and events, and expanding from there.

Overstory refers to “the highest layer of vegetation in a forest,” and the new media group will replicate, in some ways, Tiny’s model of providing cover through the pooled resources of a larger organization and growing by building (or acquiring) new businesses along the way. The media group is launching with 10 outlets — including the flagship Capital Daily, Vancouver Tech Journal, Fraser Valley Current, and Burnaby Beacon — and more than 30 full-time staff. The plan is to expand to 50 publications and 250 journalists by 2023.

The model brings to mind Axios, which has expanded into local newsletters by hiring and launching from scratch in some cities and buying existing media companies in others, or — a bit closer to home — IndieGraf, a Canadian network that shares resources to support independent local journalists. Each has predicted that a regular email newsletter is key to gaining a local audience.

Substack and Facebook have also announced local newsletter initiatives in recent weeks. Mohamed said he and Wilkinson had a laugh at all the fanfare around the Substack Local announcement, which promised $1 million split between “up to 30” local news writers. (We wrote about the announcement, which would leave local journalists with around $30,000/year before benefits or other costs.) Overstory, meanwhile, estimates it’s investing about $500,000 into each new publication, including salaries, benefits, and legal support for journalists from day one.

Mohamed says the idea is to make every brand sustainable within 12 to 16 months. (From the “Join Us” page: “We understand ideas are cultivated and quality doesn’t happen overnight, so we’ll give you the time to create thoughtfully for your community.”) Overstory will drive membership and audience growth and provide technology and legal support but expects to leave editorial decision-making to individual publications.

Mohamed said that though the various publications will serve different cities and communities, he and Wilkinson are looking for a “50-50” mix of subscriber revenue (through memberships and perks including events) and securing long-term community partnerships (up to 30 on an annual basis) across them all.

“We’re betting on those two things: that we can bring in a handful of community partners and then we can also turn to our community of members or readers and say, ‘This is what we need in order to succeed in order to be here long term,” Mohamed said. “Every single thing that we do is centered around really high-quality content and having really well-designed brands.”

Part of that design is eschewing banner advertising. (“When you look even at any one of our websites, you’re never going to see a display ad, because we want to focus on quality and we want to focus on user experience,” Mohamed said.) As the former editor-in-chief and co-owner of Daily Hive, Mohamed said he knows, from personal experience, how much money littering a site with ads can make. He said he also knows about the exhaustion and stress that comes with chasing revenue based on page views.

“I was part of the problem. I was the one that was asking for this sort of stuff. I was asking journalists to create 30 pieces of content on a weekly basis, go nonstop, and put a 10-minute deadline on a story that we could get hits from quickly,” he said. “I learned that it’s not the way forward. That’s not how we’re going to create long-term, long-lasting, connected and engaged communities.”

What Overstory thinks will work? Journalists given the resources and time to create high-quality content that their communities actually want. Capital Daily, for example, has seen its email newsletter list swell to nearly 50,000 subscribers, representing roughly one in eight residents. Mohamed said the publication has acted “as a bit of a sandbox for us.” Since 2019, the publication has expanded to include a website, daily podcast, and jobs board. The Vancouver Tech Journal, as another example, has grown from a passion project into a daily publication with two full-time staff within four months.

For Capital Daily‘s managing editor, Jimmy Thomson, being able to focus on what he knows best is a relief.  “I don’t know how to work a sales funnel. I don’t know how to make money,” Thomson said, with a laugh. “When you have people that worry about the money for you, you can do the journalism better.”

Thomson described Victoria as fairly well-served in terms of daily news, but said Capital Daily has been able to fill a hole by producing “magazine-quality journalism” focused on the city. He pointed to a recent investigative feature “The man who stole a hotel” and its companion podcast episode as an example. The theft was a much bigger (and more damning) story than police reports had, originally, led them to believe.

“If it were up to journalists who have two stories to file that day and six stories that week, and editors that need a lot from them on a day-to-day basis, that story never would have gotten told at its full length and full depth. That’s the real luxury of where we are,” Thomson said. “As a news consumer, I’m glad that there’s something like this out here, that’s able to devote that kind of resources to a story. Because I don’t see anyone else doing it.”

Other Overstory publications are brand new. At Burnaby Beacon, managing editor Simran Singh said she’ll lean on Overstory’s head office as well as fellow managing editors Thomson and Tyler Olsen, who leads Fraser Valley Current, as she builds the publication alongside reporters Srushti Gangdev and Dustin Godfrey. Just outside of Vancouver, Burnaby is the third-biggest city in the province by population but Singh said the city gets short shrift in news coverage. She was inspired to join the project, in part, because she realized she didn’t know her neighbors — or the goings-on of the local government — s well as she thinks she should.

“When I really break it down, I want to make sure that there’s a place for the community in Burnaby to access the news — news that they feel connected to, and not just news that tries to chase a headline or get a lot of shares on social media,” she said. “I think when we do that with journalism, especially local journalism, we build really important connections to each other and we bolster our sense of community and belonging.”

Mohamed said the cofounders were focused on sustainability, not profitability. (“We’re not in this to make to make a boatload of money.”)

“I look around at these news organizations and publications that say, ‘We’ve been around for 50 years or 100 years.’ Well, they started somewhere. Why can’t we be that same thing?” Mohamed said. “Our goal is to be around 50 years from now, 150 years from now, and create that new beginning of what the future of community media looks like.”

Seven years, 13 podcasts, one Netflix series, and millions of readers later, Vox’s leadership was ready for change. In 2020, Klein, who was last the editor-at-large, left to join The New York Times as a columnist. Yglesias went independent and started his own Substack newsletter, Slow Boring. SVP and editor-in-chief Lauren Williams left to cofound Capital B, a newsroom to cover Black America. Bell is Vox Media’s publisher.

Enter: Swati Sharma.

Sharma joined Vox as its editor-in-chief in March 2021, the third one in the site’s history and the second woman of color to take on the role. Sharma was previously the managing editor of The Atlantic, where she oversaw all the sections, including politics, culture, technology, ideas, science, family, global, health. All of those became even more relevant in 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic ravaged through every part of daily life as we knew it, and The Atlantic became all the more essential. Before becoming managing editor of The Atlantic, Sharma was its deputy editor. She came to the magazine from The Washington Post, where she was a general assignment editor and a foreign and national security digital editor.

We discussed Sharma’s plans for Vox, the need for diversity, equity, and inclusion in newsrooms, and getting to know her new staff remotely. The conversation below is lightly edited for length and clarity.

[Sharma wrote more to me about this in an email:

It’s important for newsroom leaders to grasp the basic concept that their journalism is failing without a diverse staff and inclusive newsrooms. Until diversity, equity, and inclusion are seen as fundamentally tied to the work, we won’t be able to build the teams we need. Every person in a newsroom needs to see this as part of their responsibility. This isn’t reflected only through hiring, but also through our stories, news coverage, contributors, freelance, visuals, how stories are assigned, policies, and more. And every person of every background should take these initiatives seriously — it shouldn’t fall only on people of color. When hiring, it’s important to really gauge what you need from the position and think about hiring people with different resumes, backgrounds, and experiences. The newsroom — and our audiences — will be better and stronger for it.

We are working to make sure there are coaching and mentoring opportunities so people of color and people with various identities and experiences have equitable access to guidance, context, information, and decision making. We want to create and maintain an environment in a newsroom where people of all backgrounds are seen and heard and feel valued. There are concrete ways to address this — think about who gets praise and why, who gets to speak in meetings, how you set a stage where people feel comfortable chiming in conversations and brainstorms and pushing back.

Management is important, and often an undervalued trait in journalism. A newsroom’s work is only as strong as a newsroom’s culture. Managers should check in during difficult news moments and during difficult life moments. Knowing when to tell people to step away, encouraging them to take time off, and empowering them in their work leads to a better workplace culture and experience.

Now back to our conversation. — HT]

I’ve tried it out and the technology (actually!) keeps me logged in. It sounded cheesy to some ears, but it turns out an uncluttered, ad-free reading experience really can make for a better internet. For publishers watching ad revenue circle the drain, the ability to offer a more streamlined version of their site to readers willing to pay just a bit extra sounded pretty good, too.

But does Scroll make more sense as a feature than as a standalone product? In the months after its launch, Scroll made moves in that direction, forming a bundled partnership with McClatchy and teaming up with Mozilla’s Firefox as part of an offering that promises fewer trackers and faster speeds.

Twitter, it seems, was thinking along the same lines. The social media platform announced Tuesday that it had acquired Scroll as part of a future subscription service. Neither company disclosed the terms of the sale.

Scroll’s entire 13-person team will move over to Twitter and work to integrate the product into a subscription service to be launched “later in the year.” In the meantime, Scroll will go into “private beta” and pause all new signups. (Current users will get to continue using the service.)

Scroll CEO Tony Haile, former Chartbeat CEO, explained the company’s marching orders in a blog post announcing the acquisition:

The mission we’ve been given by Jack and the Twitter team is simple: take the model and platform that Scroll has built and scale it so that everyone who uses Twitter has the opportunity to experience an internet without friction and frustration, a great gathering of people who love the news and pay to sustainably support it.

The acquisition of Scroll — and, previously, the newsletter company Revue — are part of something called “Longform” taking shape at Twitter.

Twitter’s VP of product, Mike Park, said the new project will give readers “a first-class experience” of “articles, threads and newsletters” both “on and off Twitter.” A recent job listing said the project will “help publishers grow, understand, and engage their audience” — so expect analytics and conversation-boosting tools, too.

Readers: we’re planning to re-launch Scroll as part of a future subscription service on Twitter.

Imagine unlocking a clean, fast-loading experience for articles (or even newsletters from @Revue) with a portion of your subscription going to the sites and writers you read pic.twitter.com/nTUwfqk9F5

— Mike Park (@mep) May 4, 2021

But — wait! We have some bad news.

The acquisition means that the handy news aggregator Nuzzel, operated by Scroll since late 2018, will be shut down. Haile explained in a goodbye-for-now post that Scroll’s work on the app has chiefly consisted of “quick fixes and duct tape” and that achieving the scale required for integration into Twitter would mean starting from scratch:

Simply cloning a service conceived in 2012 doesn’t make a ton of sense. Instead we’re going to spend a little time working out how the best of Nuzzel should be expressed in 2021. There may be elements of Nuzzel that also belong in the Twitter app or that can take advantage of new internal APIs. In the meantime, Nuzzel’s app, site and email service will go dark. 

Haile writes that Nuzzel has fans at Twitter and an internal team hopes to “take the best of the Nuzzel experience and build it directly into Twitter.”

But — at least for some of us here at Nieman Lab — a key selling point for Nuzzel was that it allows you to spend less time on Twitter by flagging stories that you can’t miss, and leaving the rest. So we’ll see!

I love Scroll but ending Nuzzel is like killing Google Reader for an even more terminally online group of media people https://t.co/tBxAnkuj2X

— nilay patel (@reckless) May 4, 2021

Joining the chorus of media nerds who are devastated by this news. Nuzzel is hands down one of my most used apps. At the same time, it’s a no brainer for Twitter to offer similar functionality in its main app. Just do it quickly, please! https://t.co/PdsQfsbpfl

— Craig Silverman (@CraigSilverman) May 4, 2021

This is true: For Facebook, news is 90% hassle, 10% benefit. For Google, it’s maybe 60% hassle, 40% benefit. For Twitter, it’s more like 10% hassle, 90% benefit. https://t.co/8yGi9MVq32

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) May 4, 2021

The @tryscroll + @twitter acquisition is interesting. Huge Q for publishers remains: since it moves subscriber $ & relationship to Twitter’s end, how do we ensure the upside doesn’t cannibalize subs? How will Twitter treat pubs who don’t want to play?

— Curt Woodward (@curtwoodward) May 4, 2021

Over the course of April, English-language media coverage related to vaccines revolved around three key themes: opposition to “vaccine passports” in the U.S., the safety of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, and the Pfizer vaccine’s effectiveness in younger adults.

Coverage of vaccines generally peaked on April 13, following the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration’s joint recommendation to pause the Johnson & Johnson vaccine’s rollout because of a possible link to rare blood clotting disorders.

Two other spikes occurred on April 1 and April 7. The first spike coincided with the introduction of a bill aimed at banning “vaccine passports” in the U.S, The second spike coincided with efforts by Republican governors to oppose potential “vaccine passport” mandates. Positive clinical trial results for a new malaria vaccine, along with the CDC and FDA’s recommendation on April 23 to resume rolling out the J&J vaccine, also generated significant media attention.

The Washington Times’ report that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was readying an executive order to ban “vaccine passports” was the most engaged-with article across Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, generating almost half a million social interactions. Several related articles, as well as Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s executive order banning “vaccine passports,” featured among the top ten most-engaged-with articles on social media. These reports fueled pre-existing and misleading online narratives about vaccines infringing on individual liberties.

Reports about Pfizer’s vaccine trial on adolescents, which showed “100% efficacy” — there were no Covid-19 cases observed in the vaccinated group (1,131 participants) versus 18 cases in the placebo group (1,129 participants) — also generated significant traction on social media. Three related articles attracted more than 100,000 social interactions. Despite the positive trial results, narratives questioning the safety and necessity of vaccinating children flourished on social media.

Finally, suggestions from Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla that people might need Covid-19 booster shots within the next 12 months attracted huge interest online. A CNBC report that relayed Bourla’s comments garnered more than 150,000 social media interactions. The news sparked narratives that Pfizer’s vaccine is purely financially motivated. These narratives have begun to gain traction on French and German social media as well as in the US.

Vaccine narratives

Narrative: “Vaccine passports” infringe on your freedom, along with baseless claims they will be used to control the population. Whether it’s masks, stay-at-home orders or mandatory vaccinations, various communities have leaned heavily on concerns about personal liberty to challenge what they perceive as attempts to curtail their rights. As such, the term “vaccine passports” — used to describe digital or physical records of immunization that people might have to show when they enter a business or a public area, or when they board a flight — are being framed by many as a looming encroachment on individual rights by government and Big Tech. Republicans in particular have been accused of leveraging this sentiment to open a new front in the “pandemic culture wars.”

Despite White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki saying the Biden administration would not support a federal mandate for vaccine certificates, false claims and conspiracy theories surrounding “vaccine passports” continue to circulate online. Some of these include the idea that “vaccine passports” are part of the “Great Reset” conspiracy theory — which claims that a cabal of elites is using the pandemic to impose a new globalist world order — and will be used to mandate vaccines and more control over the population. Other misleading claims compare a vaccine certificate program with China’s “social credit” system.

Many groups pushing this narrative downplay the severity of Covid-19 — they often cite misleading statistics around coronavirus death rates or tout the immune system as a more powerful weapon against the virus. They see vaccines and “vaccine passports” as unnecessary and ineffective, rhetoric that could potentially erode trust in Covid-19 vaccines and increase vaccine hesitancy. As employers and schools consider vaccine mandates and the narrative is increasingly politicized, it is likely to remain a constant within Covid-19 vaccine discourse.

Narrative: Covid-19 vaccines are untested and unsafe, citing recent news around the J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines. Narratives challenging the safety of vaccines have been used to spread misinformation long before the Covid-19 pandemic. But the speed of rolling out Covid-19 vaccines in particular has encouraged the pervasive false narrative that the vaccines are untested and unsafe. Unsurprisingly, this narrative has featured heavily in online vaccine discussions over the last month, following the pause of the J&J vaccine in the U.S. and many European countries’ decisions to restrict the AstraZeneca vaccine to certain age groups. Highly followed social media accounts have framed these developments as proof that Covid-19 vaccines are untested and unsafe. In fact, a false narrative claiming that investigations into the safety of the J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines are intended to divert attention away from “more dangerous” mRNA Covid-19 vaccines has now begun to spread in the U.S. and Western Europe. In France, the narrative has been amplified by prominent politicians.

The false claim that Covid-19 vaccines are untested has also been used to support narratives that frame the vaccines as “experimental” and their recipients as “guinea pigs.” This narrative, which first began to gain traction in November, has continued to pervade social media over the last month. For example, Randy Hiller, a Conservative Party MPP in Ontario, linked to the Canadian National Advisory Committee on Immunization’s recommendation to suspend the use of AstraZeneca’s vaccine for under-55s to describe the vaccine’s rollout as “experimentation.” His Facebook post received almost 3,000 shares. The message was then spread on several Canadian-linked Facebook Groups and Pages.

Narrative: Pauses of the J&J and AstraZeneca rollouts are part of a wider conspiracy to push mRNA-based vaccines and alter people’s DNA. Over the last month, unevidenced claims that the pause of the J&J rollout in the U.S. was politically motivated have flourished on social media. These narratives came largely off the back of a statement from former US President Donald Trump on April 13. In it, he suggested that “perhaps all of this was done for politics or perhaps it’s the FDA’s love for Pfizer.”

But more far-reaching conspiratorial narratives have spread in English- and French-language social media communities. Narratives suggesting that governments want to promote mRNA vaccines over viral vector vaccines — such as the J&J vaccine — in order to alter people’s DNA have circulated on 4chan’s /pol message board and among US-linked Twitter accounts. These conspiracy theories have also reached France-linked Twitter communities. Some tweets claiming that young people in particular are being targeted have generated hundreds of interactions.

Emerging threats and data deficits

Data deficits occur when where high levels of demand for information about a topic are not adequately matched by a supply of credible information. Where data deficits exist, rumors, speculation and misinformation are more likely to spread. Countering data deficits requires healthcare providers and institutions to engage in pre-emptive research that can inform proactive messaging related to these data deficits, such as “pre-bunks” and explainer pieces.

Covid-19 booster shots. As mentioned earlier, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla said last week that a third Covid-19 vaccine dose would “likely” be needed within 12 months, adding that annual boosters could be a possibility. Given the persistent data deficit around vaccine efficacy on new strains as well as the relative lack of transparency around manufacturers’ contractual ability to raise future vaccine prices, narratives framing booster shots as financially motivated could flourish. Suggestions that booster shots could be a ploy by pharmaceutical companies to make profits have already spread among French- and German-language users on social media.

Covid-19 vaccine misinformation around children. The topic of children and vaccines is fueling false narratives and claims around the world. News that a Stanford University trial would see children as young as 6 months old receive the Pfizer vaccine prompted social media users to baselessly claim child abuse, despite the strict ethical protocols around clinical trials in children. False claims alleging that a 2-year-old girl died from the Pfizer vaccine and that an infant died from breastfeeding shortly after the child’s mother had received the Pfizer vaccine have added to the panic.

In France, social media users are pushing the hashtag #touchepasamesenfants (don’t touch my children) following a report in the satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchaîné that the government is considering vaccinating children 10 and older by the end of the summer. Meanwhile, an open letter from 100 Israeli doctors urging caution around vaccinating children in the country resulted in the misleading claim that the vaccine is “rushed.”

Because little is known about the effectiveness and effects of Covid-19 vaccines on children — some trials are ending while others are just beginning — the topic remains vulnerable to speculation and rumor.

The use of graphic and emotive visual content to portray vaccines as dangerous is a defining feature of anti-vaccination groups. Children are often used to add even more emotional bite to these messages. As vaccine trials begin on young children and Phase 3 trials wrap up for kids ages 12-15 — paving the way toward their vaccination — we can expect an influx of harmful narratives and graphic visual content.

The widespread weaponization of the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS). VAERS is a CDC- and FDA-managed early warning system and database where individuals voluntarily report potential issues with vaccines. If concerning patterns emerge, the two agencies will investigate. Established in 1990, it is open to the general public, allowing anyone to log and view vaccine reports. But the reports “sometimes lack details or contain errors” — they are effectively unverified claims. Reports of vaccines causing autism — a claim that has been roundly debunked — have often appeared in the system.

Despite the CDC clearly stating that “VAERS data alone cannot determine if the vaccine caused the reported adverse advent,” the system is being used by anti-vaccine activists to undermine the legitimacy of Covid-19 vaccines. A cursory search for VAERS on Twitter reveals a stream of tweets citing the monitoring system as evidence that Covid-19 vaccines are dangerous. Anti-vaccine activists have also established unofficial VAERS sites that include misleading claims about Covid-19 vaccines and their effects.

In focus: “Vaccine passports” and the U.S. right-wing media blitz

The idea of “vaccine passports” is not new. Since the Pfizer vaccine’s emergency use authorization in November 2020, vaccine certificates have been floated as a way to mitigate the spread of Covid-19 across national borders. Most of the early conversations around “vaccine passports” related to proposals in Europe. The EU is now poised to roll out a program that may set the global standard.

There are legitimate questions about how “vaccine passports” might work, such as how they could further discriminate against minority communities that have been disproportionately affected by Covid-19. But in the US, Republicans have fiercely challenged the issue on ideological grounds, framing it as an assault on freedom and an example of government overreach (see Vaccine narratives section above).

Led by The Daily Wire, a news site that has spread conspiracy theories, various right-wing media outlets created an online frenzy that attacked and firmly politicized “vaccine passports” — positioning the idea as a new political flashpoint in the pandemic culture war. Through these efforts, an unnuanced narrative emerged that reduced any discussion of digital vaccine certificates to matters of personal liberty.

Using NewsWhip Analytics, First Draft identified 12,593 online articles that mentioned “vaccine passports” in the headline between March 25 and April 25. The Daily Wire, The Washington Times and Rumble topped the list in sharing news articles mentioning these words. They not only set the agenda by publishing articles on “vaccine passports” before other outlets, but their stories received significant attention on social media. In total, these three outlets produced 35% of the more than 6 million Twitter and Facebook interactions from these articles.

These articles were able to spread widely on social media thanks to a tightly knit group of conservative Facebook Pages that amplified them. These included Ben Shapiro (founder of The Daily Wire), ForAmerica, Dan Bongino, Michael Knowles, Matt Walsh, Dinesh D’Souza, Andrew Klavan and Charlie Kirk. The articles were also helped by an army of public Facebook Groups such as Open Oregon, Pennsylvania Opening Businesses/Defying the Governor, Millions March Against Mandatory Covid Vaccinations, and Fellow Patriots.

Articles published by NBC, CNN, The New York Times, NPR and The Washington Post were picked up by right-leaning Facebook Pages and Groups, such as Health Freedom Minnesota, Gary Bauer, Informed Choice Michigan, Truth Tellers and Keep America Great Warriors, where they reframed the posts to lambaste the idea of digital vaccine certificates. In the current era of information overload, this ongoing tactic underlines the ease with which headlines and news stories on social media can be hijacked and repurposed.

On December 13, 1999, with visions of Y2K dancing in traders’ heads, AOL’s stock price peaked at $94, giving it a market cap of a whopping $224 billion. Less than three weeks later, on the very first trading day of the 2000s, Yahoo hit $118.75 a share, marking its peak at $127 billion. They were worth more than a third of a trillion dollars between them.

But they call them peaks for a reason. A week later, AOL announced its flawed merger with media giant Time Warner, a moment now generally considered the start of the dot-com crash. (Huh, merging a pipes company and a media company didn’t work out so well. Interesting.)

The dot-com crash eliminated 98.3% of Yahoo’s value in less than two years. People increasingly found they had better options than dialup. It’s been a looooooong 20-plus years since then, but Yahoo and AOL have chugged along — in systemic decline, profoundly unsexy, but still attracting a surprisingly large audience of grandparents who don’t know how to change their browser’s default homepage. (Yahoo is still the 11th most popular website in the world — today, in 2021! — right between Amazon and Wikipedia!)

Most recent in the long line of companies who thought they could fix these decayed icons was Verizon, another pipes company that had the bright idea of buying into media. It spent $4.4 billion on AOL in 2015 and $4.48 billion for Yahoo two years later. The idea was all about advertising. We’ll sell video ads! We’ll sell ads at scale — a scale that’ll rival Google and Facebook!

It didn’t work. Its content stable didn’t grow at the pace Verizon wanted; its adtech dreams remained unfulfilled. Barely a year after buying Yahoo, it declared half of what it paid for the two companies a writeoff, value that’d never return.

Today, Verizon gave up, and someone else got in line to fix Yahoo and AOL — if by “fix” you mean “squeeze and extract in classic private-equity style”:

Verizon Communications, signaling that it has given up on its media business, said on Monday that it had agreed to sell Yahoo and AOL to the private equity firm Apollo Global Management for $5 billion.

The sale also includes Verizon’s advertising technology business. Verizon will retain a 10 percent stake in the overall business, it said in a statement.

“This next evolution of Yahoo will be the most thrilling yet,” Guru Gowrappan, Verizon Media’s chief executive, said in a memo to employees Monday, which was obtained by The New York Times.

Apollo Global Management “has a powerful vision,” Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg wrote, “that includes aggressively pursuing growth areas in commerce, content and betting.” I’m guessing the growth targets that count are more in 1 and 3 than in 2.

Verizon had already sold off some of its media parts, handing HuffPost to BuzzFeed and Tumblr to Automattic. Just last month, it announced it was burning down Yahoo Answers, creating the very real risk we may never learn how babby is formed.

You want some takeaways? I got some takeaways for you:

Leadership is important! Duh, right? But a sale like this was fated as soon as Vestberg — who had no media experience and no particular interest in running a media business he had no hand in building — was named Verizon CEO.

Media scale ≠ platform scale. “Let’s get bigger!” has been the most popular corporate media strategy for the past decade or so, increasingly so in the past few years. Scale is fine, but it’s often an indication that your vision for growth is more about cutting duplicate costs than building anything new. And no matter how much scale you have, media companies can’t get anywhere near the scale of Google, Facebook, or, increasingly, Amazon. You can try to match them on size of audience, but you’ll never match them on user data or consumer intent (e.g., knowing what product someone is searching for). Trying to play their game guarantees you’ll lose.

Synergies between pipes and content are always overrated. Any company that owns the AOL trademark should already know this, from that 2000 debacle. Companies that control the pipes — telcos, cable providers, broadband companies — love the idea of controlling some of the content that flows through them, thinking some mixture of exclusivity, adtech, and ~~scale~~ will give them an edge together they lacked apart.

That may have made sense in the era of three TV networks, studio theater chains, or radios the size of a mini-fridge. But the sea of digital content is just too wide and too deep for a company to make major headway by controlling a portion of it. Sites like HuffPost, TechCrunch, and Yahoo News may all have their strengths, but add 100 of them together and you’ll still only capture a tiny fraction of Americans’ time online.

What a shocking ending to those of us who thought it was poppycock back when. This was like watching a telco throw itself down the stairs, walk back up and then do it again. https://t.co/MkJrZMcot3

— Kara Swisher (@karaswisher) May 3, 2021

Private equity and hedge funds appear to be the only ones with the stomach to be investing in media. It was Apollo Global Management that provided the $1.792 billion loan (at loan-shark rates) that let Gannett and GateHouse merge. It’s Alden Global Capital that has gobbled up newspapers coast-to-coast (and looks increasingly set to gobble up more). It was Chatham Asset Management that took the last major family-controlled newspaper chain, McClatchy, private.

It used to be that consolidation in the news business meant media companies buying other media companies. For a while there, the hope was that tech companies (or at least tech zillionaires) would be the ones snapping up media companies.

(2008: “Will Google Buy the New York Times?” 2009: “Should Yahoo Buy The New York Times?” 2009: “Any chance Microsoft might buy the NYT?“)

But now it’s pretty much the pure money guys, the ones who approach the news business with the same dispassionate set of knives they do the widget business. They see cash flow, they see potential cuts, and they see ways to ride the industry’s plane slowly into the ground. Makes you nostalgic for the days when the boundless egos of media barons were what we had to worry about.

It’s hard to overstate the enormity of the public health calamity unfolding in India as the nation of 1.4 billion people fights what seems like a losing battle against the virus. But did it have to be this way?

Answering that question is the responsibility of the free press of the world’s largest democracy. They have the unenviable task of writing the first draft of this wretched chapter in the nation’s history. They shoulder the burden of speaking truth to power — recording the tales of colossal missteps like not preparing for a second wave, calling out the political hubris in allowing massive campaign rallies, and criminal negligence that led to severe shortages of essential hospital supplies like oxygen.

A small group of independent news outlets are doing their best to capture the nation’s descent into Covid hell, but they’re too few and too weak to take on the forces trying to squash dissent. You won’t find the urgent, hard-hitting stories in the country’s mainstream media. Ever since a public image–conscious Bharatiya Janata Party was re-elected in 2019, there has been a steady erosion in the freedom of press. The democratically elected government that failed to protect its citizens has been going out of its way to muzzle journalists who expose its incompetence.

The arrest and detention of journalist Siddique Kappan is an extreme instance of that. Kappan was on his way to Uttar Pradesh to report on the gang rape and murder of a 19-year-old Dalit woman whose body was hastily buried by the local police. He was arrested under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and has been held without bail since October 2020.

It’s not just the government, though; there’s also the problem of media ownership. India’s largest media outlets are owned by the country’s wealthiest industrialists, who take great care to not upset a government that has the power to unleash a politically motivated scrutiny of their non-media businesses. Then there’s the self-censorship by large media houses dependent on government and political ads, especially after the pandemic decimated corporate advertising.

Last week, as Covid-19 wreaked mayhem across the nation, Reporters Without Borders’ latest World Press Freedom Index came out. India was at 142, out of 180 nations.

The nonprofit called India “one of the world’s most dangerous countries for journalists.” At least four Indian journalists were killed in connection with their work in 2020. Equally alarming, the group said, is the fact that journalists are “exposed to every kind of attack, including police violence against reporters, ambushes by political activists, and reprisals instigated by criminal groups or corrupt local officials.”

Who’s to blame for that climate of fear? “Ever since the general elections in the spring of 2019, won overwhelmingly by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, pressure has increased on the media to toe the Hindu nationalist government’s line,” the researchers behind the Press Freedom Index wrote. Under Modi, police in multiple states, especially those ruled by BJP or its allies, have filed criminal cases against journalists for writing stories critical of the government or its political leaders. Often these cases drag on for months or even years under the guise of “investigation” and act as a warning for other journalists.

Modi, who works hard to cultivate the image of India as an emerging global power, didn’t like that India was ranked so low in the Press Freedom Index. He set up a panel of experts to identify ways to improve India’s standing. He even sent the Indian ambassador in France to lobby Reporters Without Borders in a bid to improve the ranking. After a year, and a few meetings, the expert panel concluded that the real issue is not the state of press freedom in India but “Western bias.”

At least one member of the expert panel, prominent journalist P Sainath, disagreed with that assessment, and said as much in a dissenting note.

So if Modi wants to change India’s image, what should he do?

Certainly not sending diplomats after foreign newspapers for laying the blame for the current Covid situation in India squarely at Modi’s door.

Instead of engaging in a “three-pronged communication strategy to actively change the public image of the country,” as the expert panel recommended, Sainath suggested the government start with acknowledging the serious crisis in the freedom of expression in the country, and the “state of emergency” faced by journalists.

Even better, Sainath offered, the government can support journalists by dropping the cases filed against them across the country. Doing that, Reporters Without Borders’ Asia Pacific director Daniel Bastard said, might even lead to a better ranking on the press freedom index.

“For a couple of years, the number of [cases] filed against journalists by members of the BJP or BJP-led regional and local government has sharply increased, which is tantamount to intimidation and harassment,” Bastard said. “Reversing this tendency would help improve India’s score in the Index.”

And if Modi is earnest about improving press freedom in India, he can create laws that hold police accountable for filing trumped-up charges against journalists for doing their jobs. In fact, Sainath has a whole list of recommendations for the government to help journalists do their job without fear of repercussions. But that is all for Modi and his administration to consider. What can the rest of the world do?

A good place to start would be supporting the pockets of independent media in India. The mainstream media may not be willing or able to do its job, but a few small but independent newsrooms in India are doing their best to speak truth to power and keep citizens informed as the virus continues its march across the nation. The journalists at the relatively recent digital upstarts like The Wire, The Print, Scroll.in, The News Minute, Article 14, and Alt News are on the frontline of resistance against India’s slide toward authoritarianism under Modi.

It’s not just media that’s at risk in India. The very foundations of democracy are in peril, according to political researchers at the V-Dem Institute in Sweden. “India is on the verge of losing its status as a democracy due to the severely shrinking of space for the media, civil society, and the opposition under Prime Minister Modi’s government,” the group’s latest report on the state of the world’s democracies warned.

In India, the media’s ability to pursue truth and tell it without fear is a matter of life and death. A government that allows massive political rallies attended by hundreds of thousands of people, and encourages a religious festival attended by a million people in the middle of a global pandemic, has to answer for the avoidable deaths. With the second surge, nearly 3,000 Indians are dying every day, some outside hospitals, some in their homes, and some on the streets. Let’s let a free press shine a bright light on that.

The conference gathered top editors — and one prominent, opinionated Substacker — to discuss the growth of opinion in online journalism. There to talk about the proliferation was Karen Attiah, global opinions editor for The Washington Post; Sewell Chan, editorial page editor at The Los Angeles Times; Katie Kingsbury, opinion editor for The New York Times; and Matthew Yglesias, a writer and editor who left Vox to launch his Substack, Slow Boring. ISOJ said it was the first time the conference had explored online opinion journalism in its 22-year history.

“Ours is a very narrative era,” Chan said in opening remarks. “The power of storytelling is driving everything that we’re seeing in media, regardless of the medium — the podcast boom, newsletters, video. The voice and the opinionated voice are more powerful than ever before.”

Here are a couple of our takeaways.

“Why don’t we let people speak for themselves?”

The editors each called a particular subset of op-ed contributor something different — “professors,” “the interpreter class,” “think tankers” — but agreed they were actively trying to create more space for different types of writers, who draw on different forms of authority, than have been featured in the past.

The impulse is not entirely new. Early feedback on The New York Times op-ed page singled out the section’s “propensity towards ‘names'” and running too “much junk by the famous.” (The New York Times editorial page editor John B. Oakes, who first envisioned the op-ed page, warned specifically against scholars and professors. “Ivory tower equals ivory head,” he quipped.) Resisting the temptation to publish “names” hasn’t gotten easier, but with the ability to publish more perspectives online, it may make for a richer section as a whole.

“I think op-ed pages have become more interesting, in part, because, at least at our page, we are trying to move away from the traditional reliance on elected officials [and] policy experts,” Chan said. “There’s still room for professors and scholars — they are a big part of what we publish still — but we’re increasingly searching for the real voices of people’s authentic, lived experiences, which is oftentimes as important a form of authority, as traditional research scholarship.”

At The Washington Post, Attiah said she was stacking her section with bylines from people actually living in the countries they were commenting on.

“There was a push on my part to push back against what I would call the interpreter class, particularly in Washington, where you have foreign correspondents and think tankers tasked very often to explain [foreign events] to us,” Attiah said. “Why don’t we just let people from the countries, from these cultures, speak for themselves about what’s going on in their country?”

Going local, going global

There was a divide between the regional news organization focused on serving the country’s most populous state and county – and the national publications eyeing an international audience.

Like other regional papers, The Los Angeles Times is moving toward “an ethos of community and service,” Chan said.

“Here at The LA Times, I’m really focused on trying to promote and publish the broadest array of California perspectives as possible, knowing that nationally-known politicians and characters and commentators are already amply reflected in the pages of national publications, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal,” Chan said. “What we can do to try to restore trust and community at the local and state level is an issue that interests me a great deal.”

Attiah said that, at The Washington Post, they were casting the net much wider, and trying to “cultivate and court and appeal to international audiences,” including English speakers in India, Europe, and Africa.

“The digital marketplace is a global marketplace,” Attiah noted.

Attiah — who edited the late Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident Saudi journalist and Virginia resident who was murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul — said her section could be “a refuge” for activists and writers barred from speaking freely in their own countries.

“Being an American newspaper, we’re trying to be a home for international writers,” she said. “We often are getting writers who have not had opportunities or a voice in their countries, whether it’s due to authoritarian governments or something else.”

What readers want

Kingsbury presented some reader research that had driven recent changes at The New York Times’ opinion section, including renaming op-eds “guest essays” and expanding biographies for contributors.

“[Readers] crave more differentiation, clarity, and context,” she said. “In particular, they want to better understand when and why we’re publishing outside writers.”

Opinion content — whether “guest essays” or editorials written in-house — have long drawn on original reporting and sources cultivated by the opinion writers. But readers, Kingsbury said, are starting to see more of that themselves.

“When I arrived, the Times very, very rarely quoted people in [editorials],” she said. “We have to gain trust with readers at every turn, so that is something that we emphasize: showing our work and trying to be more transparent.”

Readers also want a certain amount of curation, the group agreed. The acceptance rate for outside op-eds at major publications hovers in the low single digits, and opinion sections spend a lot of time and effort on standards given the flood of pitches coming across their desks.

“I wouldn’t suggest that anybody, like, browse Substack,” Yglesias said, at one point. “It’s a lot of people out there op-ed-ing and writing and doing whatever.”

Both legacy and independent writers have to work to differentiate themselves from commentators on cable news and armchair experts on social media, Yglesias noted.

“Our question as people who are trying to be professionals and trying to build businesses that are grounded in opinion, is, ‘How do you differentiate yourself from this maw of opinions that are constantly being voiced out there on social?'” he said. “I think you hear all of us on the panel talking about different ways to do that.”

Fact-checking, editing, and elevating different — and differing — opinions are all part of “a business strategy,” Attiah said.

“Our pages, in many ways, are facing competition from right-wing media, individual Facebook accounts, social media accounts, and other alternative forms of voices and viewpoints,” she said. “I think our challenge is to add value. We add value to the conversation with fact-checking, editing, and inclusion. I think we’re realizing that inclusion of various voices is not only a luxury, but an imperative. If we are going to remain relevant and [continue] adding value, we have to continue to uphold these standards.”

Looking ahead, Attiah also said an important shift for opinion sections would be thinking not just about developing writers, but developing audiences.

“There’s a lot more understanding of the importance of digital communities and audiences, what those conversations are like, and how our journalism fits into them,” she said. “It’s more of an audience-first ethos. I think legacy [media] is sort of like, ‘Oh gosh, audience editors really matter? Social media really matters?’ We’re catching up — quickly, I think — to what people are interested in that doesn’t have to do with traditional left-right politics.”

If you want to listen to the entire panel, ISOJ is posting recordings of its events on YouTube, including the one headlined by opinion editors.

The job posting is here, but let me tell you a few more things about it and what we’re looking for. This used to be my job, so I have thoughts.

What kind of experience are you looking for?

First and foremost, we’re looking for somebody who is genuinely interested in the future of news and journalism online, but who also sees this beat as a wide-ranging opportunity. Today, writing about digital media = writing about life on the internet = writing about real life, and many of the challenges confronting journalism are reflective of broader societal rifts. We’re looking for someone who approaches this beat with deep curiosity and openness, who is skeptical or even scathing when warranted but who is also fundamentally optimistic about innovation in digital journalism and wants to play a part in making this industry better and more sustainable.

Okay, now bringing that back down to earth a bit: We’re also looking for someone who has at least five years of experience working in journalism, including significant time spent editing the work of others. It is essential that this person be an excellent writer, reporter, and editor (and reader). Here are some things that we look for:

— You chase down what’s actually going on behind that weird tweet. You dig, dig, dig. You call people and text people and DM people and email people to get a full story and make sure you understand what is going on.
— You get obsessed and passionate; you recognize that being an expert on small things helps you see the patterns behind big things.
— You have a finely calibrated bullshit detector and recognize when something is PR speak or dumb or just a lot of words.
— You are empathetic. You may be able to write brutal takedowns when necessary, but you also understand that most of the time, the people we are writing about are human people with good intentions, trying to make journalism better. There are many terrible ideas in the world, but for the most part, we want to focus on the new things and good ideas.
— You read a lot — a lot of News and a lot of Other Stuff.

What’s the mix between writing and editing?

The job will be roughly half writing and half editing. You’ll get to help conceive, shape, and develop stories that appear on Nieman Lab’s site while also writing stories of your own. As deputy editor, I did quite a bit of writing, including a weekly column on fake news and misinformation that, since I became editor, has become, um, less weekly. (This is to say, please help us fill out our work on fake news and misinformation, if that’s something you’re interested in.) My hope, when we add a deputy editor to our team, is that we’ll both have ample time to write and edit, switching off as needed.

In addition to working with our staff writers, you’ll help find new freelancers (and help develop a Nieman Lab pitch guide), edit freelance posts, and find stories for potential republication and organizations for potential publishing partnerships.

I have [X personal thing] in my life. I get work done at weird hours. I have to go pick up my kids at daycare. I don’t want to live in Cambridge. Should I not apply?

If you think you might be good at this job, please apply. Our team has a wide variety of outside interests and family commitments of various types. We are looking for somebody who is a self-starter and excellent at managing their own time and meeting the deadlines of a daily publishing schedule. You should also be excellent at communicating with members of our team on Slack, since, especially right now, it’s the primary place we hang out. In return, we trust you to have your own life and largely get things done at the times that work for you.

While this position is currently remote due to Covid, Harvard is in the process of reopening, and you will eventually need to work from Cambridge, in that big white house pictured above. You can definitely work from home sometimes, but this isn’t a long-term remote position. One important reason for that is that, when you work at Nieman Journalism Lab, you’re a part of the broader community of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism. In normal times, there are tons of awesome in-person events going on at Lippmann House, amazing fellows to meet, and interesting things to do and talks to attend and libraries to visit all around Harvard.

I should also mention that, as Nieman Lab deputy editor, you will be a full-time Harvard employee, with the truly excellent benefits that entails. These benefits include, but are not limited to, amazing health/dental/vision/life insurance, paid parental leave, a Harvard-funded retirement plan in addition to an employee-funded one, tuition assistance (take Harvard Extension School classes for $40 or other classes for 10% of the normal cost), discounted public transportation passes, a bike commuting allowance, 20 days of paid vacation per year PLUS a week off between Christmas and New Year’s, generous sick time, and personal days — and the list goes on (read my Twitter thread here for more, including specific info for parents).

Apply here. To be considered, you must apply at that Harvard HR site link, where you should include a cover letter telling me why you think you’d be right for the job. Please don’t email me application materials directly; I’m not allowed to consider anyone who doesn’t go through the official HR process.

Really excited to see how this plays out – it's already a such a great time to be a star national / international writer with your own paying audience, making it work at local scale would be awesome (and neighborhood FB groups etc have local scale!) https://t.co/4rEfqAzC54

— Tom Gara (@tomgara) April 29, 2021

Facebook is encouraging applicants of color to apply and is prioritizing applications that focus on covering underrepresented local communities. It’s partnered with the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and International Center for Journalists to evaluate the applications. If selected, terms of the program include the following:

Successful applicants will receive further consideration for an opportunity to enter into a deal with Facebook which includes the following commitments:

• A multi-year licensing fee to give you time to build a true relationship with your audience.
• Monetization tools starting with subscriptions.
• Access to experts, information and services designed to make it easier to start and build an independent business.

As part of any such deal successful applicants will commit to:

• Regularly publish written, public-interest journalism focused on a local community using Facebook’s tools.
• Engage with their audience through Facebook tools such as Groups, live discussions, and other features that help them connect more deeply with their community.
• From time to time, give the Facebook team feedback on their experience so we can improve our products and services.

Last month, Facebook announced that it would develop and launch a free, self-publishing platform to help independent content creators “build businesses online.” It sounds a lot like Substack, but with integrations to Facebook’s existing features like Pages and Groups.

The announcement about Facebook’s new platform was leaked a month earlier in February, around the same time that Twitter announced its acquisition of Revue. At the time, Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie wrote a piece on his platform titled “Welcome, Facebook and Twitter. Seriously.”

“In particular, Facebook and Twitter should do their utmost to give power to writers and readers, McKenzie wrote. “That means letting writers own their relationships with their readers and giving them the ability to take those relationships off the platform whenever they want. It also means letting readers fully control what they see in their feeds by avoiding ads and disincentivizing culture-war superweapons like retweetable quote-retweets.”

Applications close on May 20. Read the full announcement here.

I hope journalists who join this make sure it’s in writing that they own their subscriber list and content and can leave whenever they want. They should not expect support outside of money, while also expecting FB to close/alter this program at any moment. Be mercenary about it. https://t.co/lRY9tX7onu

— Craig Silverman (@CraigSilverman) April 29, 2021

• Only 29% of Americans believe that “a good way to make society better is to spotlight its problems.”
• Just 44% of Americans support the journalistic value of transparency.
• Only half — 50% — of Americans support the journalistic value of giving voice to the less powerful.

In all, the report said, only 11% of Americans support all five of what it considers the core values of journalism. “Bad news for journalists: The public doesn’t share our values,” the headlines said.

I argued that that conclusion was false and that some bad and arbitrary methodology by the researchers had artificially lowered the support levels for journalistic values.

For example, when asked if they agreed with the statement “We need to put a spotlight on problems in society in order to solve them,” 72% agreed and only 6% disagreed. When asked if “it’s important to offer a voice to the voiceless,” 74% agreed that it was, versus 4% who disagreed. These results are very different from the depressingly low “support” numbers the study pushed out — and those lower numbers were generated by a muddled methodology. If you haven’t already, go read my piece to check out my arguments.

After my piece, API’s Tom Rosenstiel wrote a defense of their study; he posted a version of it over at CJR. I do not find it convincing, but you may! Tom makes a number of good points about the merits of complexity in research and the sense that the field has hit a sort of wall in figuring out how to fruitfully examine issues of media trust. I think that’s all correct. But from my perspective, it doesn’t really address the criticisms I raised.

If you have something better to do with your time than reading people argue about survey methodology, I totally respect that! Go check out something else on the site. But I do think it’s important to go into some depth on this. First, because journalists should do more to understand (and critique, where necessary) the ways in which the studies they report on are made. And second, because it is perilously simple for a complex set of methodological decisions to be transformed into a simple headline. That makes it critically important that the headline is right.

The idea that most people took away from this study is, roughly: “Ugh — most Americans don’t believe in the things that we journalists believe, like that the government should be transparent, or that it’s good to expose problems in society.” This study doesn’t show that, and we should get it right before that takeaway achieves a life of its own.

In the interest of transparency — a core journalism value! — I’m going to publish Tom’s statement below along with, well, why I don’t think its arguments are particularly strong. You should read it all and make up your own mind! (Especially if you’re having sleep issues and need a bunch of words about survey methodology to get those sheep a-countin’.)

If you want to read the entirety of the statement before hearing my counterarguments, click here. Otherwise, I’ll tackle it section by section below.

Tom argues that, if you are looking to evaluate people’s psychological responses to something or their core moral principles, it’s better to ask a battery of questions rather than focus in on just one.

To understand people’s reactions to complex psychological/­sociological concepts, one mistake researchers have learned to avoid is to hang too much importance on a single question, or to simply compare two questions to each other. Doing so leaves the research vulnerable to shallow understanding of what people are really thinking. It also puts too much emphasis on the vagaries of wording of a single question. To avoid this problem, a common best practice today is to ask people their reactions to a battery of both multiple positive and negative statements around the same concept and then to combine those results into a score weighting the battery or questions together. Many well known studies use this combined multiple statement and scale approach, among them Moral Foundational Theory, the UCLA Loneliness Scale, the racial resentment scale on the ANES, and the Psychological Wellbeing Scale, just to name a few. That is the method we used, in no small part so that we could compare it to Moral Foundational Theory results.

The idea behind this method is that it provides a much more nuanced, robust and reliable look at how people complex psychological and sociological concepts like values or morality. It is especially valuable methodologically to examine both positive and negative items together. Few attitudes can be easily measured in a single statement.

If Tom thinks I’m opposed to the idea of using a battery of questions — or believe that a single question is always better than multiple questions — I am happy to disabuse him of that notion.

Multi-item batteries can be great! They’re particularly useful in evaluating qualities that need to be teased out of a subject — questions people aren’t likely to answer accurately or honestly if they’re just asked directly.

But a battery of questions still needs to be done well. Adding more questions to a survey instrument can make a survey instrument better, or it can make it worse. It depends on the questions, and what you do with the responses. I raised a lot of reasons in my piece why I don’t believe this particular battery of questions was well done, which Tom doesn’t address here.

Allow me to drift into the world of a hypothetical example for a bit, one that might put all this in more familiar terms.

Say it’s October 2020 and you’re a pollster for Joe Biden. You want to see what his support levels are like in, say, Michigan. So you do a poll that has these four items in it, asking likely voters if they agree or disagree with each statement.

1. I plan to vote for Joe Biden for president over Donald Trump.

2. There are some issues on which I agree more with Donald Trump than with Joe Biden.

3. There is no one alive I would rather have as our next president than Joe Biden.

4. Sometimes, I think it’s good for Republicans to win the presidency.

These are all questions that get at, in their own way, people’s opinions about Biden, Trump, and the election. Agreeing with two of these statements (1 and 3) would suggest that you’re a Biden supporter. Disagreeing with the other two (2 and 4) also suggests that you’re a Biden supporter.

Here’s an important point: Each one of these items could generate valuable information for the campaign.

If someone thinks there are literally zero humans alive better suited for the job, that tells you they’re a very dedicated Biden supporter, not someone who’s likely to waffle between now and Election Day. Same for if someone says there are literally no issues on which they prefer Trump’s position over Biden’s. “Sometimes, I think it’s good for Republicans to win the presidency” can let you know if someone is an ideologically committed Democrat or more of a swing voter. Each statement has its merits as a survey instrument.

Let’s say the results to these questions came in looking something like this:

1. I plan to vote for Joe Biden for president over Donald Trump.

51% agree, 48% disagree.1

2. There are some issues on which I agree more with Donald Trump than with Joe Biden.

79% agree, 14% disagree.

3. There is no one alive I would rather have as our next president than Joe Biden.

22% agree, 71% disagree.

4. Sometimes, I think it’s good for Republicans to win the presidency.

68% agree, 23% disagree.

Again, those are all interesting items that generate useful information. But let’s say you then decided that, to be counted as a “supporter” of Joe Biden, you had to (on average) agree with 1 and 3 and disagree with 2 and 4. In other words, a real “supporter” of Joe Biden would be someone who says:

Yes, I plan to vote for Joe Biden for president over Donald Trump.

No, there is not a single issue on which I agree more with Donald Trump than with Joe Biden.

Yes, there is no one alive I’d rather have as our next president than Joe Biden.

No, it is never good for Republicans to win the presidency.

Or maybe you say a person has to answer three out of the four — a majority — “correctly” to be counted as a supporter.

Remember: Each of those four is a reasonable and useful question to ask someone. And those are the pro-Biden responses to each question. But if you set that high of a bar, you might end up with a finding that that only, say, 17% of people meet that higher standard. These are Biden superfans, but you’ve decided that definition is the one you’re using to define mere “support.”

Would your key takeaway from all this, then, be: “Only 17% of Michigan likely voters support Joe Biden”?

Would you think it made sense to headline a writeup of the poll: “Bad news, Joe. Michiganders don’t share your values”?

Unless you are a terrible pollster, no. You asked people directly if they plan to vote for Biden over Trump, and 51% said they do. You also asked three other reasonable questions that gave you potentially valuable information about people’s opinions.

They’re all legitimate questions, but they do not all have the same predictive value and they do not all reflect a common definition of “support.” Someone who says “Yes, I plan to vote for Joe Biden” but “No, he’s not literally the best candidate on earth — I really liked that Mayor Pete kid” still plans to vote for Joe Biden.

It would be perfectly reasonable to use information from the other questions to inform your opinions about Biden’s support.

“These voters who support Trump on some issues — they’re probably less committed to Biden, so we should discount their support a bit and target some more messaging at people like them. They might be people who aren’t willing to tell a pollster they like Trump, but who won’t have a problem pulling his lever in the voting booth.”

“The fact that so many people think Republican presidents are sometimes good makes me worry they could be swayed by certain GOP endorsements — we have to take that into consideration.”

“These people who literally think Biden is the best candidate alive — I bet they’ll have super-high turnout levels, and we can be a little more confident about the Michigan counties where they’re concentrated.”

Any of those could be a completely reasonable conclusion to draw from the data. But if you’re just trying to gauge support for Biden, you’ll get a more accurate answer by just paying attention to Item 1 than by setting an arbitrary standard that treats all four items equally and just averages the responses together. Item 1 on its own might not tell you everything you need to know — but if your methodology produces a result that’s radically different from Item 1, you should probably have a good justification for why your method is better.

This is what I argued happened in API/AP-NORC’s study. For the journalistic values they wanted to measure support for, they asked some questions that broached the subject directly. They also asked other questions that — while potentially informative and useful — simply aren’t equally predictive of whether someone supports transparency, or oversight, or whatever. Those questions were formed inconsistently and they elicited wildly disparate responses — and then the study treated them all the same and came out with an artificially low number, with no particular justification for why it’s a more accurate result than what the straightforward question generates.

There is certainly nothing wrong with using a battery of questions to evaluate a person’s beliefs of positions. I’m quite a fan of Stanley Feldman’s four-question authoritarianism battery, which I find useful in thinking about political polarization. (Good details on that in Marc Hetherington and Jonathan Weiler’s book Prius or Pickup?) The Donald Kinder/Lynn Sanders racial resentment scale Tom mentions is also a modern classic. (I can highly recommend Kinder’s book with Nathan Kalmoe, Neither Liberal nor Conservative: Ideological Innocence in the American Public, which makes strong arguments for the value of using multiple measures to evaluate a given variable — in their case, ideological commitments.)

But that doesn’t mean they’re above reproach. There are good batteries and bad ones, and they’re only as strong as the questions they contain. These things are imperfect! They get tested, revised, and improved based on how useful their results turn out to be. The UCLA Loneliness scale Tom mentions, for example, has been revised twice to address concerns about whether some of its questions biased responses in one direction or another.

You can find robust debates about the merits and demerits of all of the multi-question batteries he’s talking about. Which one do you like best: the ANES Racial Resentment index, the GSS Racial Resentment index, or the CCES racial resentment index? Maybe you prefer the Pew “Old-Fashioned Racism” five-category variable, or the GSS “Old-Fashioned Racism” five-category difference score? Perhaps you like the 2008-09 version of the ANES Negative White Stereotypes index, or maybe the later version, or even the other ANES version done with CCAP?

There’s one really important thing to know about the various surveys that Tom cites here. (“Moral Foundational Theory, the UCLA Loneliness Scale, the racial resentment scale on the ANES, and the Psychological Wellbeing Scale, just to name a few.”) The researchers who developed each of those batteries put in a lot of work trying to validate their merits statistically. They didn’t just brainstorm a list of items and assume that whatever comes out on the other end is gospel.

For instance, here’s a too-quick summary of the multi-year process that went into developing the first version of the UCLA Loneliness scale:

• an initial set of 75 potential questions, drawn from existing literature (dating to 1964), narrowed first to 25 and then to 20
• an initial test group of 239 subjects, some of them pulled into a three-week “clinic/discussion group on loneliness,” others used as controls
• in addition to the semi-winnowed battery of tests, asking subjects to complete a series of other questionnaires and self-reports to try to measure the validity of the potential questions
• a measure of each question tested based on its degree of correlation with alternate measures of loneliness
• a measure of the internal consistency of the total battery
• a measure of the correlation of the overall scale score with batteries for related states (e.g., depression, anxiety)

And that was just the start. As I said above, the UCLA scale has been revised multiple times to address concerns of internal bias. And it has been the subject of frequent evaluation and critique, especiallylooking at different cultural contexts, in the years since. There have been literal decades of debate over how well it captures loneliness.

How about the API/AP-NORC study — what sort of validation of the quality of their measure did they seek? Nothing like what went into the other batteries Tom mentions.

There was at least a little external validation in picking the five core journalism values; the researchers “identified [the values] through our own experience” and then held a brainstorming session with six journalists and two professors. As I said in my earlier piece, I think the five they came up with are basically fine — they’re not what I have a problem with. But the specific statements they used, the structure of the instrument, the cut point they set for defining “support” — those were not the result of years of testing alternatives and iterative measures of external validation.

And you know what? That’s fine. Someone has to be the first to try out an instrument or a new approach, and I’m glad they did. But that also means that, if someone questions your methodological decisions, you can’t just point at a few classic survey instruments that have been put through the wringer to justify your choices.

The API/AP-NORC researchers write they were building on Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham’s Moral Foundations Theory and wanted to use a methodology to match it. (The API/AP-NORC study gave subjects a version of the standard MFT questionnaire in addition to their journalism-based instrument.)

Moral Foundations Theory is a controversial theory in some corners of academia. But it an established theory, and the tools it uses have been tested and developed with care. Early versions (including alternate sets of questions) were published in 2009 before its official debut in 2011.

So what sort of effort has gone into the validation of the Moral Foundations Theory questionnaire? What did it take to get there? “Multiple rounds of item analysis using large heterogeneous samples” — more than 34,000 people tested. The first version was found to have some “low…internal consistencies,” and some of the items they thought were testing one moral value turned out to actually be testing a different one. To measure the merits of different question combinations, they compared their potential items against three different external criterion scales. They discovered that three-question subsets for each value were often more reliable than four-question subsets; they tested 15-, 30-, 40-, and 43-item surveys to compare their validities. They administered the same test twice to the same people (on average, 37 days apart) in order to measure versions’ Pearson correlation, or how often people generated similar results across multiple administrations of the instrument. They separately analyzed the survey’s robustness among self-identified political liberals, moderates, conservatives, and libertarians (they found “reasonable internal consistency”). They ran a confirmatory factor analysis to generate goodness-of-fit indices. For each of the five moral foundations they were examining, they compared results to multiple different external measures created by other researchers — 15 different external comparisons in all. For certain subsets of their subjects, they surveyed self-reported reactions to social groups aligned with or against the values they were testing. (For example, people whose stance on “authority” was being measured were asked for their thoughts on the military, police officers, and anarchists.) They had 10,652 people complete both their survey and the broader Schwartz Values Scale to measure how they looked at both individual values and the same grouped in aggregate. They ran another cut at their gathered survey data normalized by both country of origin and country of residence, and then ran controls for political ideology, age, gender, religious attendance, and education levels. All of that — and more steps that I’m skipping over — is how they landed at the 30-item 2011 version of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire with confidence that it’s a valid measure.

They put in the work. (And even after all that, plenty of people still don’t like it!)

Smart people can have honest disagreements with the MFQ or the ANES racial resentment scale or any of those classic measures — but you can feel comfortable giving them at least some benefit of the doubt because they’ve been tested and tested and retested and retested, deeply and profoundly and repeatedly.

There’s nothing wrong with using a group of multiple items to measure someone’s values or opinions. But “combining answers” only “allows researchers to obtain a much more supple and accurate measure of the people’s thinking” if the questions are good. I wrote why I didn’t think those questions were good in my previous piece, and I don’t see any response to them here.

Back to Tom:

The reason this is helpful is easy to understand. While a majority of people may agree with an affirmative statement, if many of those same people also agree with a contradictory statement, that’s a strong signal that they have mixed views about the value. If, on the other hand, someone tends to agree with all the affirmative statements and feels strongly about the contradictory ones, that’s a good signal that the person’s feelings are less mixed. Combining answers allows researchers to obtain a much more supple and accurate measure of the people’s thinking. Researchers caution against trying to draw conclusions from any one individual item without considering the full set.

A really, really important word here is contradictory. One of my main complaints last week was that the paired survey items were claimed to represent a value and then “the antithesis” of that value — but they just aren’t.

Let’s look at the UCLA Loneliness survey Tom mentioned. You can find the questions for its survey instrument here. They’re framed as questions rather than statements; instead of agreeing or disagreeing, you answer whether an item describes you “never,” “rarely,” “sometimes,” or “often.” (The affirmative and negative questions are intermingled in the actual survey, but I’ve separated them here to show the distinction.)

Items where answering “never” codes as high loneliness:

How often do you feel that you are “in tune” with the people around you?

How often do you feel close to people?

How often do you feel you can find companionship when you want it?

How often do you feel that there are people who really understand you?

How often do you feel that there are people you can talk to?

How often do you feel that there are people you can turn to?

How often do you feel part of a group of friends?

How often do you feel that you have a lot in common with the people around you?

How often do you feel outgoing and friendly?

Items where answering “never” codes as low loneliness:

How often do you feel left out?

How often do you feel that your relationships with others are not meaningful?

How often do you feel that no one really knows you well?

How often do you feel isolated from others?

How often do you feel shy?

How often do you feel that people are around you but not with you?

How often do you feel that you lack companionship?

How often do you feel that there is no one you can turn to?

How often do you feel alone?

How often do you feel that you are no longer close to anyone?

How often do you feel that your interests and ideas are not shared by those around you?

What do notice about those questions? How they’re all structured in parallel ways (“How often do you feel…”)? How tightly they stick to the concept of loneliness? Each one serves a distinct point of entry into the same phenomenon — a different cut at the same apple. (Maybe someone taking the test happened to have lunch with someone today, so he’s not feeling particularly “isolated from others” at the moment — but he might still feel that his “relationships with others are not meaningful” or that he’s not “outgoing and friendly.”)

This is a well-aligned set of questions. While there will no doubt be variations among and within different subjects, there aren’t any serious logical problems here that could jam up the works. There’s no real confusion about which response to each question tends toward loneliness and which one doesn’t.

Compare them to the four API/AP-NORC items about oversight:

Items where agreeing codes as bring pro-oversight:

The powerful need to be monitored or they will be inclined to abuse their power.

It’s vital that the public know what government leaders are doing and saying each day.

Items where agreeing codes as bring anti-oversight:

It’s important to put some trust in authority figures so they can do their jobs.

Leaders need to be able to do some things behind closed doors to fulfill their duties.

Does that second pair of statements strike you as the “antithesis” of the first pair? Do they clearly represent “contradictory” values?

If you think “the powerful need to be monitored,” but also that “it’s important to put some trust in authority figures so they can do their jobs” — does that mean, as Tom says, that you “have mixed views about the value” of oversight? Or does it mean that the two statements aren’t actually antithetical to one another, they don’t represent conflicting beliefs, or that it’s perfectly consistent to think both are true at the same time?

As it happens, Americans were 70% agree/8% disagree on “the powerful need to be monitored” and 68% agree/9% disagree on “it’s important to put some trust in authority figures” — despite the fact this study considers agreeing with those two statements “contradictory.”

Which do you think is more likely: that all those people really are just that muddle-headed on these issues, or that it’s just a muddled set of questions?

The API/AP-NORC questions are consistently poorly formed if they’re meant to represent contradictory or antithetical values. Just as in the Biden story above, different strengths of opinion get lumped into the same basket, blanket statements paired with occasional exceptions.

Some items are just straightforward statements of general principle:

The more facts people have, the more likely it is they will get to the truth.

The powerful need to be monitored or they will be inclined to abuse their power.

A society should be judged by how it treats its least fortunate.

It’s important to offer a voice to the voiceless.

Some ask you to weigh two different values:

On balance, it’s usually better for the public to know than for things to be kept secret.

Some that don’t just declare something is good, but that it’s the usually the best of all possible options:

Transparency is usually the best cure for what’s wrong in the world.

There are items that ask if there are ever any exceptions to a broader rule:

Sometimes the need to keep a secret outweighs the public’s right to know.

Too much focus on what’s wrong can make things worse.

Sometimes favoring the least fortunate doesn’t actually help them.

It’s important to put some trust in authority figures so they can do their jobs.

Leaders need to be able to do some things behind closed doors to fulfill their duties.

Some ask if something is the way to fix a problem, not just a way:

The way to make a society stronger is through criticizing what’s wrong.

The way to make a society stronger is through celebrating what’s right.

There are items that are supposed to be contradictory, but where sloppy wording makes it possible for both to be logically true:

For most things, knowing what’s true is a matter of gathering evidence and proof.

For a lot of things that matter, facts only get you so far.

There are items addressing an undefined set of circumstances (what problems, exactly?):

Most problems can be addressed without putting embarrassing facts out in the open.

That mishmash of degrees of strength is how you end up with a 20-item survey where more people agreed than disagreed with 19 of the 20. All 10 of the “pro-journalism-value” items got more agrees than disagrees — and so did 9 of the 10 “anti-journalism-value” items.

So imagine survey subject Jane Doe gets to the four items about “giving voice to the less powerful,” and here’s how she responds:

It’s important to offer a voice to the voiceless. “STRONGLY AGREE. It is just so critical to raise up those unheard voices.”

A society should be judged by how it treats its least fortunate. “STRONGLY AGREE. We all have a moral imperative to support the least among us.”

Sometimes favoring the least fortunate doesn’t actually help them. “SOMEWHAT AGREE? I mean, I guess it hasn’t always helped, every single time. Once in a while, it backfires or just doesn’t work.”

Inequalities will always exist and you can’t eliminate them. “STRONGLY AGREE. We can’t eliminate all inequalities, of course — someone will always have more than someone else — but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try our best to reduce inequalities whenever we see them.”

Does it strike you that Jane supports the value of “giving voice to the less powerful”? Well, for the purposes of this survey, Jane officially does not support “giving voice to the less powerful.” Yes, even though she “strongly agreed” that…”it’s important to offer a voice to the voiceless.” Because the muddled questions count just as much as the direct ones.

And if she’s not a supporter of giving voice to the less powerful, she is officially — like 89% of Americans, according to API/AP-NORC — not a supporter of all five of journalism’s core values. (“Bad news for journalists: Jane doesn’t share our values”!)

You may have noticed something about the various classic batteries that Tom listed. Each of them aims to answer questions that many people either won’t or can’t answer honestly if you just asked them.

If you’re psychologically unwell, it’s entirely possible that you don’t realize it — or at least that you would struggle to say “Yes, I am psychologically unwell” in response to a direct question.

Imagine you wanted to find out how racist someone is. If you just straight up asked them — say, “Do you hate Black people?” — even most racist people would be savvy enough to know that saying so out loud will likely earn some sort of social opprobrium — whether a disappointed look, a punch to the face, or something in between. You won’t get accurate or useful answers. That’s why the ANES racial resentment scale instead asks about statements like “Irish, Italian, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up; Blacks should do the same without any special favors,” or “It’s really a matter of some people just not trying hard enough: if blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites.”

In each of these cases, the multi-question approach is useful precisely because the direct question is hard to answer. That’s why you don’t need a complicated battery of questions to figure out if someone had breakfast today — you can just ask and be reasonably confident in someone’s ability to give a cogent answer.

I am willing to be convinced that just asking someone directly about values like journalistic oversight might not give you the full picture. I’m sure there are people who would say they support “giving voice to the less powerful” if you asked them — but who would hem and haw and retreat from that position if you ask them about specifics. But I don’t see any reason to think people are anywhere near as hesitant or unable to share their thoughts on, say, government transparency as they are their thoughts about race or the current state of their brain.

Again, I’m open to the idea that additional questions could generate more accurate outcomes when looking at these values. But there’s no evidence that these particular questions do. And the yawning gap between how people directly answer specific questions and what this methodology produces is evidence that many of these particular questions reduce accuracy rather than increase it.

Back to Tom:

We fear Josh made that mistake. He begins, for instance, by looking at the questions probing the idea of the press as a social critic. He notes that 72% of people to some degree agreed with the statement that “we need to put a spotlight on problems in society in order to solve them.” But he ignores one of the next questions, that only 43% agreed with a variation of the same concept, “the way to make society strong is through criticizing what’s wrong.” It is not part of his critique. While he does show them at the end of his report, he has also condensed the six-answer scale of the agree and disagree options, conflating the results. Even these summarized figures, however, show that 67% of Americans think “the way to make society stronger is by celebrating what’s right,” strongly balancing against the positive statement. And 50% believe “too much focus on what’s wrong can make things worse.” When all the answers to the four-question battery of this concept are combined and weighted, it shows that support for the concept is much lower than if you simply look at one question.

I sought clarification on this part of the statement: While Tom refers to “the answers to the four-question battery of this concept” being “combined and weighted,” there actually isn’t any differential weighting of the four questions in each battery. Each of the four is treated as an equally predictive measure of the value in question. (Which, you may have guessed, I think is a bad idea, given these questions.)

For each item, a subject’s response is coded on a scale of 1 to 6 — 6 being the most “pro-journalism-value” answer (e.g., “strongly agreeing” with “The more facts people have, the more likely it is they will get to the truth”) and 1 being the least (e.g., “strongly disagreeing” with that statement.) With four items per value, that means a maximum score of 24 (6×4) and a minimum of 4 (1×4). To count as a supporter of a particular value in this study, you needed a score of at least 16 — the equivalent of a 4 (“slightly” pro-journalism-value) on each question.

So when it comes to measuring whether someone supports the idea of journalistic oversight, agreeing with “we need to put a spotlight on problems in society in order to solve them” — a fairly direct summation of the value — counts exactly as much as disagreeing with “too much focus on what’s wrong can make things worse,” which simply asks if focusing too much on an issue “can” make it worse.

There’s one other thing I mentioned in my critique that Tom doesn’t respond to here, but I’ll mention it again. This study wants to figure out how big of a gap there is between how journalists think about these values and how the general public does. But they never actually asked journalists how they think about them.

The assumed position of “journalists” here is 100% agreement with the values as the researchers have defined them. But I can assure you that I and many other journalists I’ve spoken to in the past few days would not “fully support all five of the journalism values tested” if we’d taken this exact survey.

Not because we don’t like the values of journalism — just because we wouldn’t recognize the extreme version of those values being portrayed in these questions.

I would agree, to one degree or another, with all of these statements that I’m supposed to disagree with in order to “support” core journalism values. Not because I hate transparency or oversight or reliance on facts — just because they’re structured poorly enough that they seem boringly and self-evidently true:

It’s important to put some trust in authority figures so they can do their jobs.

Leaders need to be able to do some things behind closed doors to fulfill their duties.

A lot of the time you know enough about something and more facts don’t help.

For a lot of things that matter, facts only get you so far.

Sometimes favoring the least fortunate doesn’t actually help them.

Inequalities will always exist and you can’t eliminate them.

Too much focus on what’s wrong can make things worse.

Sometimes the need to keep a secret outweighs the public’s right to know.

Most problems can be addressed without putting embarrassing facts out in the open.

Look at all those wiggle words: “some trust,” “some things,” “a lot of the time,” “for a lot of things,” “sometimes,” “can make things worse,” “sometimes.” I read disagreeing with these as meaning:

It’s important to never put any trust in authority figures so they can do their jobs.

Leaders don’t need to do anything behind closed doors to fulfill their duties.

It’s relatively rare for someone to know enough about something so that more facts wouldn’t help.

Facts are all you need for most things that matter.

Favoring the least fortunate always helps them.

All inequalities can be eliminated.

Too much focus on what’s wrong never makes things worse.

The need to keep a secret never outweighs the public’s right to know.

Most problems can’t be addressed without putting embarrassing facts out in the open.

Maybe there are some on this list that you, my fellow journalist, would answer differently. But because the researchers never asked journalists about them, we don’t know how far we stand from the general public on these values. As Tom told Margaret Sullivan, they start with the assumption that these values as they define them are just universal in the profession.

“Journalism is a tribe,” said Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute. “These are our core values, and we think that everybody shares them.”

I’m sure it’s frustrating to have someone like me complaining about your methodology on a study like this. As I said last, most of the research here I have zero issue with.

The meat of this study is taking these measures of support for journalism values and using them (a) to compare them to a set of moral values derived from the MFT and (b) to test whether experimental changes to a news story can change the reaction of readers with particular value structures. That’s all good stuff. And frankly, I wouldn’t have a real problem with the methodology the researchers used if that was all it was used for. Having this scattershot mix of statement types is fine, even desirable, if your goal is to differentiate people within a group for the purpose of something like a cluster analysis.

Think back to that Biden hypothetical from earlier. If your goal as a Biden pollster was to understand the dynamics within the set of Biden supporters — which ones are hardcore loyalists, which ones could be swayed with a gentle push, which ones might respond to hearing messages x, y, or z — you’d absolutely want to ask a whole bunch of different questions that could help you distinguish between the various clusters among his supporters and figure out their relative size. More questions mean richer data to inform your analysis. The inconsistent shifts in emphasis from question to question can help you segregate people by the intensity or quality of their support.

But if you’re just trying to figure who “supports” Biden, asking all those scattered questions, treating them all as equally predictive, and then just calculating the average response across the board is going to give you a terrible answer.

Same thing here. If you’re going to use this methodology to decide who “supports” transparency, you just can’t do it without justifying why these questions are the right ones to ask, why this structure is the right one, why responses to these items matter more than (or less than, or the same as) these others, and why this is the correct dividing line between “supports” and “doesn’t support.” This study just doesn’t have that. And without that, this study can’t tell us anything about the public’s “support” (or lack thereof) for journalistic values.

Coda: There are two other paragraphs in Tom’s statement that I don’t think are particularly responsive to what I wrote, so I won’t bother responding to them, but I’ll include them here for reference.

Some discussion of the study in journalism circles also seems to infer something the work does not suggest — an implied criticism of the public for not embracing journalism’s values or some inference criticizing journalists for having these values. Nowhere does the study suggest either. Nor do we think it. Great journalism depends on reporting that is inclusive and understands and accurately represents everyone with a stake in the story. There is much more value to journalism when it reaches as much of the potential audience as possible.

The goal of the research was to open a new door into understanding the question of trust in the news media in the same way that moral foundational theory introduced a new way of understanding politics–around underlying values. We used the same methodological approach as moral foundational theory does so we could match the findings. That methodology is well understood and accepted in the research community. It may be new to the study of trust in journalism. But it provides a much more robust way of understanding the data.

1. This was Biden’s actual final margin in Michigan.

This has been possible because scientists have rapidly shared their research on Covid-19, and preprints — scientific papers that haven’t been formally reviewed — have proved essential in this effort. In a new piece of research, my colleagues and I found that the pandemic has resulted in scientists increasing the use of preprints to release findings, and that these papers are also being read more frequently.

This has also produced a cultural shift in how preprints are used and viewed by society. The media and the public are now far more likely to encounter and discuss preprints and their findings on a daily basis.

Scientific papers are traditionally published in academic journals, having first had their quality formally verified by other scientists, in a process known as peer review. Preprints are scientific manuscripts that are instead posted online — usually on specialized servers — and which haven’t been peer-reviewed (though they may be in the future).

Preprints are free to read and are often updated, with readers able to access older versions to see how the manuscript has developed. Releasing research as a preprint therefore allows scientists to receive feedback from more colleagues than if relying just on a formal peer review.

Most importantly, preprints enable researchers to share their research when they deem it’s ready, rather than relying on gatekeepers in the form of a journal’s editors. This makes science more equitable, and has huge benefits for early-career researchers, who can more readily demonstrate their productivity, which can help with job, fellowship and grant applications.

A side effect of this is the acceleration of science. Preprints are typically posted within two days of being submitted to a server, in contrast to the months or years that it can take for research to go through peer review.

Preprints thus have clear benefits for scientists. But because they allow scientific findings to be shared more quickly preprints benefit the public too: quickly disseminating new knowledge — for instance on new variants of the virus, or new treatments — can save lives. Speeding up science has been vital. And although many journal publishers have adopted new practices to help prioritize Covid-19 science, on average peer review still takes 34 times longer to make findings public than posting a preprint (which usually takes 24-48 hours).

This is why it’s good news that preprints have commonly been used to disseminate Covid-19 science. Our peer-reviewed research (itself first posted as a preprint last year) found that during the first ten months of the pandemic, more than 25% of COVID-19 literature (30,260 papers) was first shared as a preprint. Compared to the earlier Ebola and Zika epidemics, both the volume and proportion of research being shared as a preprint is far higher.

And it isn’t just that scientists have been posting preprints more frequently. Covid-19 preprints were viewed 18.2 times and downloaded 27.1 times more than non-Covid preprints posted during that same 10-month period, which shows that they’ve been highly useful during the pandemic.

There’s also been a change in who has accessed preprints. Before coronavirus struck, preprints were rarely mentioned in the news. However, more than 25% of Covid-19 preprints have featured in at least one news article, with high-profile ones receiving attention from large news corporations, such as the BBC.

[News outlets vary widely in how they cover the “Wild West” of Covid-19 preprint studies]

Covid-19 preprints are also being used to directly influence policymaking decisions. The World Health Organization and the European Center for Disease Control have both used preprints in policy documents during the pandemic. Looking at similar policy documents from before Covid-19 arrived, preprints don’t appear to have been widely referred to before, highlighting their new importance.

Unfortunately, all of this sharing has not been without issues. Politicians have shared some egregious examples of poor science — former U.S. president Donald Trump caused damage with his selective use of highly flawed and fraudulent papers. Publishing research that hasn’t been peer reviewed does run the risk that poor-quality science can be spread widely. But poor or fraudulent research can also get through peer review — so it’s wrong to assume that the traditional publication process completely safeguards against these issues.

Twitter has emerged as a key platform for sharing preprints, with almost 100% of Covid-19 preprints having been tweeted about at least twice. When we looked at the hashtags associated with Covid-19 preprints, another problem emerged: while for many their scientific message was being clearly shared, for a subset, their findings were being hijacked to promote the views of right-wing politicians and conspiracy groups. This hijacking also included overt xenophobia and racism.

It’s clear there’s been a cultural shift in the sharing, dissemination, and use of preprints. Scientists who had previously never used preprints have turned to them, policymaking bodies are using preprints to make key decisions, news organizations are refining their reporting practices around preprints, and immunology has become etched into the public consciousness.

There have been some difficult lessons in the responsible use and sharing of preprints along the way. In particular, journalists and scientists need to work together to better educate the public about preprints and to more accurately report the often uncertain findings they contain. Nevertheless, the benefits of preprints have shone through in the dark times of the pandemic, suggesting that their increased use may be here to stay.

[Return of the RSS reader]

But journalist Will Oremus, recently of Medium’s OneZero, found a way around this, essentially turning the “Forums” tab of his Gmail into a mini Google Reader (RIP) for newsletters. (Oh man, Google Reader has been gone for eight years. For those who don’t remember, it was a way to read and comment on things that was not Twitter and it was the best.)

I trained my Gmail to categorize newsletters—and nothing else—as "Forums," so now I have my own little Google Reader in my inbox. Does anyone else do this? pic.twitter.com/9PG65KPSyJ

— Will Oremus (@WillOremus) April 27, 2021

No filters needed. Just take one instance of each newsletter, drag it to Forums, and check the pop-up box to do the same with future emails from that sender. When anything else crops up in Forums, drag it to "Promotions" or "Updates." Gmail learns quick. https://t.co/6CtKpWHxJp

— Will Oremus (@WillOremus) April 27, 2021

The tweet replies include other recommendations on how to manage and filter email newsletters, but “for me, the simple drag-and-drop in Gmail’s tabbed inbox works because I’m not the sort of person who’s great at setting up or maintaining detailed manual rules for what Gmail should do with various types of emails,” Oremus told me via DM. “Any time I set up a specific folder or label, I end up completely forgetting about it, so it’s of no use. The Forums trick works for me because that tab is already built into my everyday browsing experience, and it surfaces things in a way that works for me intuitively on both desktop and mobile.”

I have this up and running now, and it works most of the time. Occasionally stray messages make it into the Forums tab and have to be dragged out. Some newsletters still get away, and there’s still the problem of, well, me still not always reading them. But that’s not a problem that technology can fix!

The caucus requested salary and demographic data from Gannett for 14 newsrooms in various parts of the country and included anonymized data about 466 non-manager employees in the fall of 2020. Its analysis found that employees of color earned a median salary of $5,246 less than white employees, a 10% pay gap. Women of color earned a median salary of $15,727 less than white men, a 27% pay gap.

Women who have worked at newspapers currently owned by Gannett for at least 30 years earned $27,026 less than men in comparable positions.

“I think it’s criminal for Gannett or any other news organizations to have pay inequity based on gender or color while these same organizations expose and condemn other industries of doing the same,” a journalist for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune said in the report. “It’s the typical do as I say, not as I do.”

“I remember the punched-in-the-gut feeling I had the moment I learned that a young male reporter with just a few years of experience had nearly the exact same salary that I had, despite my two decades as a working journalist,” a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel journalist said.

The largest gender and racial pay gaps were at The Arizona Republic, the study found. There, women’s median salary was just 61% of what men made, costing “women nearly $30,000 in median yearly earnings.” The median salary for employees of color was just 63% of what white workers made.

“The pay inequity that I experienced during my time in the newsroom was pretty much in plain sight the entire time. In 2018 and 2019, as a woman of color with a bachelor’s degree, I wrote original content and was paid less than $15 an hour,” one former Arizona Republic journalist said. “Not only were my male counterparts with similar background/experience getting paid more, there were INTERNS in the newsroom paid a higher wage than I was. The low pay continued even after a merit-based promotion in 2020. My official duties in the new position included THREE different jobs with an hourly wage that didn’t even properly compensate me for one of the jobs, let alone all three.”

A current Arizona Republic journalist said, “The company wanted to start me at a similar pay as new college graduates. Some of us journalists of color are in our 30s, yet we still can’t catch up to some of our younger, white colleagues. And when we speak multiple languages, the company benefits from our interviews and translations, but doesn’t pay us for that benefit.”

Gannett’s Chief People Officer Samantha Howland disputed the union’s findings on Monday evening in a company-wide email shared with Nieman Lab, saying that the report was “a misleading document based on outdated data alleging pay inequities on a small subset of Gannett’s more than 250 newsrooms.”

“Numerous actions have been undertaken on compensation,” Howland said in the email. “We are employing an external market-based approach which will ensure a fair review by role and responsibility level with considerations for geographic differences. This includes ongoing pay reviews and alignment, including pay adjustments. With each new hire, we continue to review and integrate our compensation and job structures and evaluate pay by job content, individual contributions, market and job level. Each function is on its own cycle to award selective increases that support equity goals and account for pay history, performance and potential. Gannett is committed to a pay structure that is merit-based, meaning that the company will continue to recognize employees for their unique contributions, abilities and skill, as well as other business-related factors.”

The study was conducted by Emily Hopkins, a data reporter for the Indianapolis Star; Andrew Mollica, a newsroom developer for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel; Andrew Pantazi a former data reporter for the Florida Times-Union; Christopher Persaud, a data reporter for the Palm Beach Post; Justin Price, a data reporter for The Arizona Republic and; Rebekah Sanders, a consumer reporter for The Arizona Republic.

Gannett, which owns 260 local newspapers across the United States, has promised to make its workforce “as diverse as the country” by 2025 last summer. Its initiatives have outwardly focused on hiring and creating new beats related to social justice and racial inequality, but its announcement from August 2020 didn’t mention internal wage gaps.

The study also found that unionized newsrooms fare better in terms of pay compared to non-unionized newsrooms, though pay still wasn’t equal across race and gender. The authors attributed this to the fact that unionized newsrooms implement pay scales as part of their contracts.

“The gender pay gap was $7,676 in newsrooms with longstanding union contracts compared to $14,522 in newsrooms currently negotiating first contracts,” the report’s authors write. “The racial pay gap was $837 in newsrooms with longstanding union contracts compared to $6,280 in newsrooms currently negotiating first contracts.”

Just going to cite this forever: @NewsGuild looked at pay data from Gannett newsrooms and found that pay disparities for women/people of color were dramatically lower in the newsrooms that have union contracts. These are workers ***at the same company*** https://t.co/XiKeQjusey pic.twitter.com/G939f0v2nh

— Matt Pearce (@mattdpearce) April 27, 2021

Hey @LarkMarieAnton, the data was provided by @Gannett, analyzed by @Gannett data journalists & sent to the company ahead of publishing.

If you'd like to share the "critical analysis factors" (LOL) you've got our contact info.

Even better- release data for THE WHOLE COMPANY. https://t.co/R1XCyPtNcn

— Rebekah Sanders (@RebekahLSanders) April 27, 2021

Read the full report here.

But that doesn’t mean it’s not fun and interesting to read about the stuff people have decided not to pay for anymore. So, we’re asking: What was the last news subscription you canceled and why? You can take our survey here, or below. While we ask for your name and email so that we know you’re a real person and so that we can get in touch with you if we need to, you’ll be kept fully anonymous (unless you specify otherwise) in our upcoming story on which publications people are breaking ties with. Be as brutally honest as you want; we’re not judging, and we’re taking the survey too.

With satellite radio, podcasts, and Spotify, a lack of terrestrial stations might not be something most people worry about, but I wondered why options were so limited. Turns out, as most people who live in this part of the country know, the cause of this radio silence is a matter of a couple of facts that far predate the existence of smartphones. Out west, where the population is sparser, the distances are greater, and the landscape itself is larger, radio stations have always been hard to come by.

Geography is one thing (mountains = interference), but population density is a less obvious cause of empty airwaves. To explain this, it helps to think of radio’s underlying structure as a kind of natural resource. Radio is just one sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum. To borrow a phrase itself co-opted from the telecom world, its bandwidth is limited. Sections of it (frequencies) are parceled out by the FCC for public and private uses, and the metric for determining which areas get more or less is the number of people who live there. Christopher Terry, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota’s Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication, says that most FM radio allocations were made in the 1960s and early 70s, when populations in Western states, especially the Southwest, were much lower.

By the time the Telecommunications Act was passed in 1996, wiping out restrictions on how many radio stations a single company could own, radio stations in all parts of the country were primed for consolidation. Today, big radio companies Audacy, iHeartRadio, and Cumulus syndicate the bulk of their programming, which is why it can feel like every classic rock station in the country is playing the same catalog of 100 songs — they probably are. So even when you can pick up a signal, it’s less likely than it used to be that you’re hearing a locally-produced program.

But as the events of the past year have shown, when people need information about what’s happening in their communities, radio is one of the first places they’ll go. Kate Concannon, managing editor of the Mountain West News Bureau, a consortium of NPR stations that serve New Mexico, Nevada, Montana, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming, cites the region’s “shared issues” as the reason why her team has found success and relevance across such a broad area. She manages six reporters embedded in public radio stations, plus one roving reporter who travels the region, sometimes by bike — more on that later.

“During the pandemic, we made all of our content free to smaller, community radio stations that don’t have a news budget,” says Concannon. “We also shared it with small newspapers, and we’ve continued that.” Small affiliate stations who can’t afford a reporter but want access to the bureau’s content pay fees on a sliding scale. “We’re really trying to get the content out, we’re all about collaboration and sharing.” Public land management, conservation, the environment, the fossil fuel industry, Western culture, mental health (“we have more suicides in this region than any other part of the country”) — these are some of the topics Concannon’s reporters cover. With the bureau now going into its fourth year, and getting nearly “100% carriage,” Concannon says that she and her team are finding their niche, content-wise.

Given the size of the region and those spotty terrestrial signals, getting the Mountain West Bureau’s stories onto different platforms is important. Lately, the team has been producing in-depth reports that stations can run on-air, which can then be shared as podcasts. The first of these is the award-winning Facing West, a four-part series hosted by Nate Hegyi, a reporter (and cyclist) who biked around four states this past summer, interviewing people about the upcoming election. “We’d been talking about him traveling the mountain region before the pandemic,” says Concannon. “He came up with the idea of doing it on a bike.” The goal was to “slow the journalism down,” and make people more willing to engage with a reporter riding in at 10 miles an hour rather than “parachuting in an SUV.”

Sharing reporting resources across platforms has become more common across the country as a whole. There have been a number of collaborations between public broadcasters and other media in recent years: See WAMU’s acquisition of DCist, WNYC’s acquisition of Gothamist, KPCC’s acquisition of LAist, and Colorado Public Radio’s acquisition of Denverite. Townsquare Media, a radio network based in New York State, has been investing in local news sites to pair with its radio brands. (It owns over 300 radio stations across the country, mostly in small- and medium-sized markets.) Jackie Corley, Townsquare’s director of digital, says there’s revenue potential in extending radio brands digitally in markets where there are news vacuums. “We’re one of the very few companies expanding and leaning into local news site creation because there’s nothing like the marketing reach of radio.”

Despite the trend toward syndication nationally, a localized approach really does play to FM radio’s strengths, both for advertisers and listeners. By design, it’s a localized medium — signals can only travel so far. As a technology, radio matches the expectations the internet has set for modern media consumers. It’s free to use and — in most parts of the country — easy to access. You don’t even need an internet connection to consume it. You just turn on the tap and it’s there. In this way, radio is uniquely positioned to fill in local news gaps. And when shared on digital platforms, stories can go beyond individual communities and into larger regional and national conversations.

In a post announcing the change, opinion editor Katie Kingsbury described the label — a holdover from print newspaper design referring to opinions published on the opposite (“op”) page as editorials (“ed”) — as “clubby newspaper jargon.”

The term is outdated and, worse, can confuse and alienate readers:

In the digital world, in which millions of Times subscribers absorb the paper’s journalism online, there is no geographical “Op-Ed,” just as there is no geographical “Ed” for Op-Ed to be opposite to. It is a relic of an older age and an older print newspaper design.

So now, at age 50, the designation will be retired. Editorials will still be called editorials, but the articles written by outside writers will be known going forward as “Guest Essays,’’ a title that will appear prominently above the headline …

In an era of distrust in the media and confusion over what journalism is, I believe institutions — even ones with a lot of esteemed traditions — better serve their audiences with direct, clear language. We don’t like jargon in our articles; we don’t want it above them, either.

The Times tested labeling outside opinion contributions as “guest essays” with readers — and were happy with the results. (You can see the label in action here or here.)

“Readers immediately grasped this term during research sessions and intuitively understood what it said about the relationship between the writer and The Times,” Kingsbury wrote. “It reflects our mission to invite and convene a wide range of voices and views.”

The Times is one of many news organizations making changes aimed at helping readers discern the difference between their opinion and news content. As Kingsbury told us in February, the Times will redesign the print and digital sections of Opinion “to further differentiate and contextualize Opinion journalism” from the reporting produced by its newsroom.

The Times also named 16 contributing opinion writers on Monday, noting that “a smaller roster of regular contributors will allow space for even more outside views.”

You can read the full announcement here.

NYT is retiring the word Op-Ed. All publishers should do the same. It’s confusing, it’s antiquated and most importantly, in the digital world, no one is reading these essays opposite of the editorial page! https://t.co/EVx5HGOhhJ

— Adriana Lacy (@Adriana_Lacy) April 26, 2021

Starting today, you’ll see changes meant to better differentiate and contextualize @nytopinion journalism — including a prominent “Guest Essay” label on contributions from outside writers and clearer packaging of divergent arguments. More from @katiekings https://t.co/5HhoT5ji6U

— Tyson Evans (@tysone) April 26, 2021

I've been explaining for YEARS to my students, who aren't mostly print natives, that Op-Ed stands for "opposite the editorials"—and then explaining what an editorial is and why. Op-Ed is a term that's outlived its use—and I suspect that editorials are next. https://t.co/2TldASypU4

— Harry Siegel (@harrysiegel) April 26, 2021

But on the flip side, a very common complaint about the media (particularly from those on the political right) is that reporters spend too much time decoding intentions, describing trends, and deriving meaning — and not enough on reporting. just. the. facts.

There’s a similar debate in academia. How much should researchers invest in answering what versus why and how? Will your work be better if it investigates a hypothesis that might explain a phenomenon? Or would it be more useful to make your goal simply to describe that phenomenon?

In the field of media research, those on Team Describe got a valuable new ally today: a new publication called the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media. Its co-founders are Princeton’s Andy Guess, the University of Zurich’s Eszter Hargittai, and Penn State’s Kevin Munger, all of whom work on issues in and around journalism. Here’s their explanation of their no-explaining model:

We would not be undertaking this endeavor if we thought our journal would simply add to the accumulating stock of existing scholarly venues, mirroring its structure and pathologies through some inescapable process of institutional isomorphism. On the contrary, our hope is that this intervention into the social science journal publishing space pushes the boundaries of the feasible along multiple dimensions methodological, disciplinary, and financial.

We are here to address some of the failures in the existing structure of publishing outlets, particularly those that cater to quantitative social science researchers. Such failures are many:

1. Trending away from “mere” description. There are macro trends in social science that affect all journals. Many of these trends are good; we applaud the growing attention to causality, for example, and to concerns about generalizability that drive attention to sample composition. But as we describe below, these trends come at a cost to quantitative work that can provide a descriptive foundation for research agendas.

2. Lack of clear standards for substantive importance. The topics that are deemed important too often reflect path dependence, the biases of established scholars and institutions, approved theoretical frameworks from the dominant canon, and the focus of media interest. The whiplash of the past few years of digital media research, the attention paid first to “echo chambers,” then to “fake news,” now to “radicalization,’ is inimical to the accumulation of knowledge. All of these topics are worth studying, but we need a more stable metric for “topical importance” than media attention.

3. Adherence to disciplinary and geographic boundaries. Most peer journals are explicitly connected to a single discipline, and all of them are overly concerned with the United States and Western Europe. The topic of digital media is of obvious importance to the entire world.

4. Artificial constraints. Most journals have strict requirements for the length and format of what they publish, making it difficult to find outlets for important contributions of modest scope or idiosyncratic topic. (How many of us have written 8,000-word papers around one interesting finding, or have shelved neat findings because we did not feel like writing an 8,000-word paper around them?)

5. Inefficiencies of peer review. Most will agree that the current mode of journal reviewing is suboptimal. Too many authors wait months only to be told that their submission has been desk rejected; at the same time, too many scholars receive an endless stream of reviewing requests.

Their new journal is meant to address these issues. It has no preset limits on length; it sets its field as “digital media, broadly construed” rather than one of the many disciplinary niches within it; its acquisition process aims to reduce the number of papers that go out for peer review (and increase the share of them that get published). And it’s only interested in “quantitative description…a mode of social-scientific inquiry [that] can be applied to any substantive domain.”

Also, it’s all open access, and it doesn’t require a publishing fee (at least not now).

JQD:DM is interesting both as a concept and as a container for interesting work. The first issue, out today, is probably packed with more papers I’d be interested in reading than an academic journal has had for a long time. A few of the highlights:

Cracking Open the News Feed: Exploring What U.S. Facebook Users See and Share with Large-Scale Platform Data, by Andy Guess, Kevin Aslett, Joshua Tucker, Richard Bonneau, and Jonathan Nagler

In this study, we analyze for the first time newly available engagement data covering millions of web links shared on Facebook to describe how and by which categories of U.S. users different types of news are seen and shared on the platform. We focus on articles from low-credibility news publishers, credible news sources, purveyors of clickbait, and news specifically about politics, which we identify through a combination of curated lists and supervised classifiers.

Our results support recent findings that more fake news is shared by older users and conservatives and that both viewing and sharing patterns suggest a preference for ideologically congenial misinformation. We also find that fake news articles related to politics are more popular among older Americans than other types, while the youngest users share relatively more articles with clickbait headlines.

Across the platform, however, articles from credible news sources are shared over 5 times more often and viewed over 7 times more often than articles from low-credibility sources. These findings offer important context for researchers studying the spread and consumption of information — including misinformation — on social media.

Value for Correction: Documenting Perceptions about Peer Correction of Misinformation on Social Media in the Context of COVID-19, by Leticia Bode and Emily K. Vraga

Although correction is often suggested as a tool against misinformation, and empirical research suggests it can be an effective one, we know little about how people perceive the act of correcting people on social media.

This study measures such perceptions in the context of the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, introducing the concept of value for correction. We find that value for correction on social media is relatively strong and widespread, with no differences by partisanship or gender. Neither those who engage in correction themselves nor those witnessing the correction of others have higher value for correction.

Witnessing correction, on the other hand, is associated with lower concerns about negative consequences of correction, whereas engaging in correction is not.

An Analysis of the Partnership between Retailers and Low-credibility News Publishers, by Lia Bozarth and Ceren Budak

In this paper, we provide a large-scale analysis of the display ad ecosystem that supports low-credibility and traditional news sites, with a particular focus on the relationship between retailers and news producers. We study this relationship from both the retailer and news producer perspectives.

First, focusing on the retailers, our work reveals high-profile retailers that are frequently advertised on low-credibility news sites, including those that are more likely to be advertised on low-credibility news sites than traditional news sites. Additionally, despite high-profile retailers having more resources and incentive to dissociate with low-credibility news publishers, we surprisingly do not observe a strong relationship between retailer popularity and advertising intensity on low-credibility news sites. We also do not observe a significant difference across different market sectors.

Second, turning to the publishers, we characterize how different retailers are contributing to the ad revenue stream of low-credibility news sites. We observe that retailers who are among the top-10K websites on the Internet account for a quarter of all ad traffic on low-credibility news sites.

Nevertheless, we show that low-credibility news sites are already becoming less reliant on popular retailers over time, highlighting the dynamic nature of the low-credibility news ad ecosystem.

Generous Attitudes and Online Participation, by Floor Fiers, Aaron Shaw, and Eszter Hargittai

Some of the most popular websites depend on user-generated content produced and aggregated by unpaid volunteers. Contributing in such ways constitutes a type of generous behavior, as it costs time and energy while benefiting others.

This study examines the relationship between contributions to a variety of online information resources and an experimental measure of generosity, the dictator game. Results suggest that contributors to any type of online content tend to donate more in the dictator game than those who do not contribute at all.

When disaggregating by type of contribution, we find that those who write reviews, upload public videos, write or answer questions, and contribute to encyclopedic collections online are more generous in the dictator game than their non-contributing counterparts. These findings suggest that generous attitudes help to explain variation in contributions to review, question-and-answer, video, and encyclopedic websites.

Characterizing Online Media on COVID-19 during the Early Months of the Pandemic, by Henry Dambanemuya, Haomin Lin, and Ágnes Horvát

The 2019 coronavirus disease had wide-ranging effects on public health throughout the world. Vital in managing its spread was effective communication about public health guidelines such as social distancing and sheltering in place. Our study provides a descriptive analysis of online information sharing about coronavirus-related topics in 5.2 million English-language news articles, blog posts, and discussion forum entries shared in 197 countries during the early months of the pandemic.

We illustrate potential approaches to analyze the data while emphasizing how often-overlooked dimensions of the online media environment play a crucial role in the observed information-sharing patterns. In particular, we show how the following three dimensions matter: (1) online media posts’ geographic location in relation to local exposure to the virus; (2) the platforms and types of media chosen for discussing various topics; and (3) temporal variations in information-sharing patterns.

Our descriptive analyses of the multimedia data suggest that studies that overlook these crucial aspects of online media may arrive at misleading conclusions about the observed information-sharing patterns. This could impact the success of potential communication strategies devised based on data from online media. Our work has broad implications for the study and design of computational approaches for characterizing large-scale information dissemination during pandemics and beyond.

Information Seeking Patterns and COVID-19 in the United States by Bianca Reisdorf, Grant Blank, Johannes Bauer, Shelia Cotten, Craig Robertson, and Megan Knittel

In this paper, we describe how socioeconomic background and political leaning are related to how U.S. residents look for information on COVID-19.

Using representative survey data from 2,280 U.S. internet users, collected in fall 2020, we examine how factors, such as age, gender, race, income, education, political leaning, and internet skills are related to how many different types of sources and what types of sources respondents use to find information on COVID-19. Moreover, we describe how many checking actions individuals use to verify information, and how all of these factors are related to knowledge about COVID-19.

Results show that men, those with higher education, higher incomes, and higher self-perceived internet ability, and those who are younger used more types of information sources. Similar patterns emerged for checking actions.

When we examined different types of sources (mainstream media, conservative sources, medical sources, and TV sources), three patterns emerged: 1) respondents who have more resources used more types of sources; 2) demographic factors made less difference for conservative media consumers; and 3) conservative media were the only type of source used less by younger age groups than older age groups.

Finally, availability of resources and types of information sources were related to differences in factual knowledge. Respondents who had fewer resources, those who used conservative news media, and those who engaged in more checking actions got fewer answers right. This difference could lead to information divides and associated knowledge gaps in the United States regarding the coronavirus pandemic.

All interesting stuff, and there’s more of it.

But it’s also a fun thought experiment to consider what the approach of JQD:DM would look like if it was being used in the world of journalism rather than academia. I’ve always believed that people who want “just the facts” from news outlets wouldn’t actually like it if media companies moved in that direction. (Wanting “just the facts” is often just a cultural signal for conservatism. Trump supporters were far more likely to say they want “just the facts” than Clinton supporters in 2016; a strict allegiance to fact-based reality was not a hallmark of the Trump administration.)

On the other hand, I know there are a thousand things I’d love to write about — that I think would be interesting information that would make the world an ever-so-slightly better place — but which don’t have a particular analytical hook attached to them. “This is some really interesting data I discovered/gathered/generated” is more likely to lead to posting a dataset on GitHub than writing a story for a news site.

I don’t think abandoning analysis and explanation makes any sense for news organizations — especially at a time when subscriber-based business models make the delivery of benefits/service more key to revenue streams than it was decades ago. But I do wish there were more spaces for “quantitative description” in journalism.

I think of Jeremy Singer-Vine’s email newsletter Data is Plural, which highlights “useful/curious” datasets. I think of The Pudding, which “explains ideas debated in culture with visual essays,” but does just as much to be a platform for compelling quantitative data. And I think of some of The New York Times’ best interactives, like its ridiculously popular 2013 dialect map, which are more like UIs for datasets than “stories” or “explainers.” People like this stuff! Let’s do more of it.

Releasing the film with Netflix might have seemed like an odd choice since Beyoncé is a part owner of the streaming service Tidal.

But in an essay titled “Beyoncé’s streaming strategy, explained,”Dan Runcie dove into how Beyoncé was likely thinking about Netflix and how deals with different streaming services reach distinct segments of her fanbase:

Beyoncé’s 2013 documentary “Life Is But A Dream” was released on HBO in 2013. But back then, Netflix was a far less powerful player. Today, the streaming behemoth consistently offers stars eight-figure deals because it’s in aggressive growth mode. It subsidizes its monthly subscription costs to prioritize customer acquisition. Subscribers stay for the massive amount of content. Bad content gets cut, but the top content gets heavily promoted to further drive growth. That’s why Netflix dropped $25 million to try and help “Roma” win the Best Picture Oscar.

And that’s why Bey likely got paid whatever she asked for. Let’s assume Netflix paid $30 million total to produce and market Homecoming. According to the Financial Times, Netflix’s customer lifetime value is just under $200. A 3:1 ratio of ‘lifetime value’ to ‘customer acquisition cost’ is a common target in tech. If Netflix wants Homecoming to meet that, the documentary needs to bring in (or maintain) 450,000 subscribers to justify the $30 million it spent. That’s a relatively small number for a service that has 140 million subscribers and grew 9 million in the first quarter of 2019.

Netflix’s 140 million subscribers (and the millions more y’all who log in with your friend’s cousin’s account) are another reason why Beyoncé chose Netflix. It’s a great way to reach casual fans.

It’s one of Runcie’s most popular essays in Trapital, a digital media venture he started in 2018 to cover the business of hip-hop.

“That piece resonated with a lot of folks and solidified an opportunity to focus more on stories like that, that I felt like I was uniquely positioned to tell,” Runcie said.

As a life-long fan of hip-hop music, Runcie grew up watching MTV and BET. He reminded me about “Making the Video,” which aired from on MTV from 1999 to 2012 and followed artists and directors through the process of making a music video. The episodes often included prices and costs for video elements and the decisions that went into them.

“1999 was also the height of the CD era. If you adjust for inflation, the current music industry has not caught up to the revenue that was coming in back then,” Runcie said. “That kind of stuff really stuck out to me.”

As he got older and studied business, he came to understand that hip-hop artists, a majority of whom are Black, weren’t given the same level of coverage, credit, or praise for their business accomplishments in mainstream media in the same way that finance or technology sectors are covered.

“It’s easy for the media and others to dismiss [entertainers] as just being famous, and whatever they sold was a benefit of their fame and not necessarily the business insights that came from that,” Runcie said. “When we double down on the fact that these are Black entertainers and all of the challenges there, especially when it comes to rising up, money, economic empowerment, there wasn’t as much credit given and therefore, there wasn’t as much coverage. There was definitely a big inspirational aspect of wanting to start Trapital as well.”

When Runcie was in business school at the University of Michigan in 2014, everyone was talking about a Harvard Business School case study about Beyoncé’s surprise album “Beyoncé,” which was released without traditional marketing and promotional strategies. All of the talk about that case study got Runcie thinking about other stories in hip-hop: What if they were covered in the same way on a more regular basis?

After graduating from business school and working in education technology for a few years, Runcie started Trapital in the spring of 2018. By February 2019, it was his full-time job.

I'm often asked if business school prepared me for Trapital.

Yes, I learned a lot about building a case and backing it up that influences how I write.

But how to write well, content strategy, growth, sales, digital media? All that was learned on the job.

— Dan Runcie (@RuncieDan) April 21, 2021

Trapital, which is now approaching 10,000 email subscribers, includes several offerings. The weekly newsletter memo lets Runcie give his take and analysis on the week’s news. The monthly essay is more of an evergreen story about an artist or company whose work offers interesting lessons or insights. He’s written about things like why Rihanna broke barriers that others couldn’t, why Instagram is hip-hop’s quarantine destination, how hip-hop helped Cash App grow faster, and why Latin hip-hop is still undervalued.

The weekly podcast interviews artists and business leaders in hip-hop. Runcie also offers advising and consulting services on strategy and partnership development, customer acquisition, and digital media. Those are currently the main source of Trapital’s revenue, though Runcie also accepts sponsorship for the weekly newsletter and podcast.

Runcie’s business model for Trapital is interesting, as more and more journalists are leaving their legacy media and newsroom jobs to start their own newsletter businesses. While Runcie doesn’t consider himself a journalist, he uses his writing to leverage his most valuable asset: his industry insights.

The writing brings him new opportunities that bring in more money than a subscription model would. He knows that because he tried it. For about a year, Runcie offered both free and paid newsletters, but ultimately decided to sunset the paid one when he figured out that he could be concentrating his efforts in more profitable projects.

“I think Substack and others thrive on the $10 a month or $100 a year model. That type of model is still a scale play, and you’re not necessarily maximizing the highest-utility thing you can get compensated for,” Runcie explained. “So much of my time and energy was spent on trying to convert the small number of people who had already known about Trapital to purchase that $100 annual subscription, as opposed to just getting my words out there. That’s when I started to talk to more people and realized there’s a number of different business models that can work here.”

This week, our team of researchers at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism published a new report that offers somewhat different answers than those most often focused on by journalists and other researchers (much of which we reviewed in a Trust in News Project (funded with a £3.3 million grant from the Facebook Journalism Project), a multi-year effort to better understand trust in news media, which has steadily eroded in many countries worldwide. Building on our last report and in advance of additional data collection, our team of researchers wanted to step back and listen to how people in different political environments understood the concept of trust, thought about news, and made decisions around their own media habits — including the increasingly central role played by digital platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp. In an effort to better capture these perspectives, over the past few months, we held a series of open-ended online conversations with 132 people in four countries — Brazil, India, the U.K., and the U.S.

This qualitative data allowed us to better understand not only the context around how people form attitudes toward news media, but also why they take the positions they do and what kinds of characteristics are most salient when they consider the concept of trust. We highlight three of our main findings here.

First, in all four countries, we found that the line between more trusting and less trusting individuals was often blurry, even though we specifically screened participants on this basis.

People in both groups held complex and nuanced views about the variety of news sources available to them. In other words, trust in news is not a single concept but a mix of attitudes. Arguably, the more important dividing line was often between people who differentiated between news sources (trusting some but distrusting others), which helped them navigate an otherwise confusing media landscape, and those who were largely unsure about which news sources to trust (and often skeptical toward all of them as a result).

For example, some were like “Samantha,” a 33-year-old woman in the U.K. who found it “quite easy” to sort through information online because she was “quite black and white about it” and knew which brands were “entirely trustworthy.” But many others were like “Henry,” a 48-year-old man in the U.S. who relied on aggregator websites to stay informed. He said he frequently felt “overwhelmed” while trying to make sense of the news, “I’m like a hoverer where I want to know what’s going on, but I just don’t have the time to be point/counterpoint of each issue.”

Second, while many emphasized the importance of accurate reporting (however subjectively defined) or voiced their suspicions that political or commercial agendas played a corrupting role behind the scenes in shaping news coverage, the specifics around how news organizations report and confirm information were often less at the forefront of people’s minds than gut feelings they had about brands.

Those feelings were often rooted in how familiar they were with organizations or impressions about their reputations, sometimes based on having grown up around particular news sources. As “Andrew,” a 25-year-old man we interviewed in the U.K., told us when describing how he thinks about trust, “It’s hard to put it into words because it’s very instinctual, I don’t really think about it. I just have a general feeling, really. I suppose I just trust if it comes from a major publication that I recognize.”

Many also described focusing on stylistic qualities in how news outlets presented information as an important cue for brand quality. “Pooja,” a 21-year-old woman in India, for example, said, “When I see something that has been written well grammatically and otherwise, that does lead you to trust it because you can see that the person who’s written it obviously has studied a lot, has studied the language, has a good command of the language.”

Third, social media, search engines, or messaging apps were often valued for their convenience as efficient places to find news, but many also saw digital platforms as places awash in unreliable, divisive, and even dangerous information. Where audiences did not hold strong views about sources based on their offline identities, brands were often lumped together simply by virtue of their association with the platforms.

For example, as “Lia” (43, woman, Brazil) said, “I almost never trust content coming from social media, honestly” or as “Andrea” (28, woman, India) put it, “Honestly speaking, I don’t trust WhatsApp.” Trusted brands were trusted despite appearing on these platforms with distrusted brands (and media personalities) often standing in as negative exemplars for the whole.

There are implications here for how news organizations might go about cultivating trust. It may not be enough for brands to establish trust merely on the basis of their journalism or the transparency of their methods because this may only resonate with small, highly engaged audience segments. The degree to which many people remain unaware — and even uninterested — in what makes one news source distinct from their many competitors suggests that there are opportunities for brands to better, more proactively communicate who they are, what they stand for, and how they do their work.

In crowded information ecosystems, these meta-narratives do not tell themselves. Should news organizations refrain from investing in better defining their identities on their own terms, there are plenty of opponents with vested interests who have shown they will gladly take up that mantle for them.

The full report is available here.

After every protest, it’s a familiar story: journalists, just trying to do their jobs, are harassed, jailed, or injured by police.

But words from within the industry — both from reporters and organizations like the Society of Professional Journalists — never seem to go far enough. They often paint a lopsided picture, where the only thing worth mentioning is the harm done to themselves, ignoring the violence occurring against the communities they are supposed to be serving.

I shudder when I hear authorities in Minnesota saying, “Media and press, leave the area.” Journalists, protected by the First Amendment, go where stories take us. We will cover protests. Don’t arrest us. Let us do our jobs because we, like law enforcement, work for the public.

— Matthew T. Hall (@SDuncovered) April 14, 2021

These sorts of comments are callous, overlooking that protestors are also protected by the First Amendment. Calling attention to journalists, as if we should be protected from police violence but our communities should not, is ridiculous.

Here’s a letter today from @spj_tweets and 23 other orgs. Why do letters like this keep ignoring communities of color?

Journalism is important. But you can’t ignore the ways in which police demonstrably treat communities of color around the country. https://t.co/ZFKIkMHaB2 pic.twitter.com/PHDIYDEFl7

— Gabe Schneider (@gabemschneider) October 30, 2020

We should be using the platforms we have to support communities impacted by police violence and call attention to the fact that police are kettling, harassing, and beating people without journalism credentials in the streets. We should be using the tools we have at our disposal to help people hold their police departments accountable.

As journalist Linda Tirado wrote after police shot her in the eye with a foam bullet last year: “All anyone wants to talk about is freedom of the press, if I am angry, what I will do next. I think that I am angry — but no more than I was this time last week, when I was watching America burn…”

Covering the Chauvin guilty verdict. While de-centering journalists is often a goal for newsrooms, whether reporters should acknowledge the personal effect events like Derek Chauvin’s sentencing have on them is up for debate according to the internet. Some media professionals warned young reporters against commenting on the event, especially because editors and hiring managers may be watching their social feeds. But it’s impossible for many Black journalists to distance themselves from their lived experience, and that should never be asked of them by editors or hiring managers, especially considering that white experiences are often framed as “objective.”

Meanwhile, media professionals have an extensive history of exploiting Black trauma, as contributing writer Hannah Getahun laid out this week in The Objective. The “objectivity” surrounding police violence has negatively affected community relationships with papers. As papers fail to hold power to account, relationships with those directly harmed also fail.

Getahun wrote:

This summer, after a police officer killed George Floyd, mainstream and social media played a role in perpetuating the trauma of Black people by constantly replaying the infamous videos of his final moments. In my mind, it was a gruesome reminder of our place in American society. That people like me must be forced to operate normally after watching these images is a feat in itself. But the news media should not be a part of the problem.

A union with impact. Tech workers at The New York Times might have a union. This is not only a big deal for The New York Times, which has had a union for reporters since the 1940s, but a huge deal for tech workers on the whole. If created, the new unit would contain around 650 workers, making it the largest union of tech workers in the country. That unit would be larger than the one formed by employees at Google this year and significantly larger than the one formed by Kickstarter employees in 2020 (the first union formed by tech workers at a major company).

As KQED’s Sam Harnett put it: “The biggest tech unionization effort is happening at The New York Times.”

Management has denied voluntary recognition of the union and asked representatives to file for an election.

In other union news:

• 300+ newsroom employees at Insider announced their intention to unionize. Their slogan is “a union with impact,” likely riffing on the company’s policy of “impact points,” where retweets from certain journalists are used to measure success.
• Thirty-seven out of thirty-eight employees voted affirmatively for a union at Marketplace.
• The Ziff Davis Creators Guild, which includes the editorial staffs of AskMen, Geek, Mashable, and PCMag, has staged a walkout after two years of slow and grueling bargaining.

Q&A with Jude Ellison S. Doyle on why Substack isn’t about Substack. Substack is still chugging along as a company and a content management system (although we’ll be leaving it soon). The company, now in a fresh new round of fundraising, has either ignored or combatively engaged with the criticism it’s fielded over the last few months — namely, that it does not enforce its community guidelines when it comes to the harassment of trans people, and that it has been (opaquely) providing money to a selection of writers in its “Pro Program.”

Jude Ellison Sady Doyle, a prominent non-binary writer on Substack and beyond, was one of the first people to publicly denounce Substack’s approach. Doyle has now left Substack for Ghost, after clearly breaking down what they think is wrong with Substack and clearly the way The New York Times’ Ben Smith wrote about Substack.

Here is a snipper of the conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity. You can read more here. 

What do you think of writers who remain with Substack or are joining Substack now? Or those that say it’s too hard to find another alternative?

I’m not Jesus. You don’t have to explain yourself to me. I can’t absolve you of sin. I also can’t tell anyone to move their newsletter. I think you should, but there’s a thin line between “protester” and “drill sergeant,” and you have to stay out of people’s faces if you don’t want to cross that line.

What I will say is that I’ve been frustrated by some performative allyship. I saw a few cis people make a big deal about Substack’s transphobia being unacceptable, with all these posts about how they wanted to organize and improve the material conditions of the workers and etc. They’d be raging against the machine, and then they’d get bored, and you’d see, like, a little post about how it doesn’t matter because we’re all compromised under capitalism. We’re all compromised, Debra, but some of us moved to Buttondown.

A bit more media.

• What does movement journalism mean for journalism as a whole? The Objective’s Gabe Schneider writes about “movement journalism” and the journalists that practice it. One definition of the practice is as follows: “Movement journalism is journalism in service to liberation. This does not mean turning journalists into soapboxes for activists, but fostering collaboration between journalists and grassroots movements, and supporting journalism created by oppressed and marginalized people.”
• CNN parachutes into Myanmar. Eleven Burmese sources were arrested after speaking to CNN correspondent Clarissa Ward, who visited the country on a parachute journalism trip sponsored by the state military. In a story for New Naratiff, reporter Aye Min Thant says, “CNN endangered 11 people and their families just to pursue celebrity-driven, parachute journalism that serves no purpose other than chasing higher ratings.”
• The “fringe extremists” pushing flawed science to target trans kids. For Buzzfeed News, Aviva Stahl reports how disinformation groups spouting anti-LGBTQ claims and flawed science wormed their way into state legislatures and were cited by Reuters.
• The spectacle of anti-Asian violence on Instagram. “For the young or tech-savvy, who are arguably the diaspora’s most vocal proponents, sharing such content is a subversive reaction to conditioned expectations of silence. Posting has become a means of processing.” Terry Nguyen reports on the vicious cycle of attention and traumatic imagery that’s become central to Asian Americans news distribution on social media.
• Journalism as infrastructure. As Congress continues to shape its annual infrastructure bill, The New Republic’s Osita Nwanevu argues that allocating even 1% of the bill’s expected $3 to $4 billion total toward local newsrooms would be a “historic and legacy-defining investment in America’s civic infrastructure.”
• “Clean Slate.” A new six-month pilot program at Kentucky’s Lexington Herald-Leader will offer story subjects a chance to have stories about them reviewed and potentially updated, deprioritized on Google, or even removed. The Boston Globe started a similar initiative earlier this year. According to The Sacramento Bee’s Alex Yoon-Hendricks, the pilot may eventually be rolled out at all other McClatchy papers.
• Media’s “utter lack of humanity.” Journalism professor Arionne Nettles writes about Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn, who wrote that the public should “wait before turning slain 13-year-old Adam Toledo into a martyr.”
• Who defines a mass shooting? The media. For Chicago Weekly, Madison Muller explains how a newsroom’s definition of mass shootings can shift coverage away depending on a communities demographics.
• Leah Finnegan’s Gawker (2021). Almost five years after it shuttered, Gawker will rise again — this time under the leadership of Leah Finnegan, who will revive the publication under Bustle Digital Group. New hires include reporters Jenny Zhang, Kelly Conaboy, and Sarah Hagi.

What’s happening.

• April 23: 2021: Journalism Ethics & Local News Now at the University of Wisconsin. A conference that aims to tackle how local outlets, with fewer resources than ever, can cover stories “fully, equitably, and ethically.”
• April 28: “Belonging in the news: Part 3” with Lewis Wallace and Manolia Charlotin. Martin G. Reynolds, co-executive director of the Maynard Institute, will interview Lewis Wallace and Manolia Charlotin, co-founders and co-directors of Press On, a Southern media collective that seeks to advance the practice of movement journalism.
• April 29: How we report on police. This webinar moderated by Lakeidra Chavis of The Trace includes reporters from WGN, the Chicago Tribune, and City Bureau.

Some are starting to speak more openly about the toll. Stacy-Marie Ishmael, the editorial director of The Texas Tribune, resigned after what she called “an absolute brutal year for many people, and especially for nonwhite people.” Texas Tribune’s chief product officer, Millie Tran, left in March as well. Another pair, Scott Rosenfield and Megan Greenwell left top positions at Wired, with Greenwell citing burnout. And Olivia Messer left a position as national reporter covering Covid-19 at The Daily Beast, acknowledging “the profound exhaustion, loss, grief, burnout, and trauma of the past year covering — and living in — a mass casualty event” on the way out.

Institutional support is thin on the ground. A fund to help Black journalists pay for mental health services, for example, notes that “when newsrooms ask Black journos to put their lives at risk to report on racial injustice, they rarely provide resources for them to process the trauma incurred both on the job and in daily life.”

One organization working to bridge this gap is the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, which uses research-backed methods to educate journalists on the impact of trauma on survivors, communities, news consumers, and reporters themselves since 1999. Director Bruce Shapiro said the past year has been the center’s busiest — and “most intense.”

Based at Columbia University, the Dart Center has responded by dramatically scaling up its newsroom trainings, creating new resources specifically for journalists from underrepresented communities, and placing a new emphasis on maintaining resilience during open-ended (read: unrelenting) stress.

One major change since the pandemic broke out? News organizations — rather than individual journalists — are reaching out directly. The center has longstanding relationships with the BBC and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Shapiro said they’ve “been in and out of NPR over the years.” But, overall, there has been less interest in newsroom trainings in the U.S. (The Dart Center also operates regional hubs — Dart Centres — for Asia Pacific and Europe.)

“We have found ourselves faced with an unprecedented demand and unprecedented interest from the news industry, instead of being primarily on the outside luring news professionals in,” Shapiro said. “It actually was hard for the Dart Center to get news companies interested in having us in. That has completely changed.”

Shapiro said he’s personally done seminars for more than 50 news organizations — from major networks like NBC to small, local nonprofit newsrooms — in the past year. Those in-depth newsroom training sessions focus on building a toolkit to ethically cover traumatic events and specific coping strategies for journalists themselves. Shapiro says research (and his experience) show that two of the best ways to maintain resilience are peer support and structuring workflows and leave policies to ensure reporters get enough downtime.

“More than 20 years of research tells us that the most important factor associated with journalists coping well with crisis is collegial connection and social support and the single most important risk factor is social isolation,” Shapiro said. “So I talk a lot about what it means to be a good colleague. I end up talking about specific strategies for unplugging and getting out of a constant cycle of arousal, too.”

Others aspects of the sessions nudge managers and other leaders to think about burnout and open-ended stress as serious vulnerabilities.

“When reporters cover trauma and then come back to a newsroom that’s perceived as unsupportive, or perceived as a hostile or untrusted environment, that’s a measurable independent risk factor for PTSD as significant as the degree of trauma exposure itself,” Shapiro said. “It’s a really important occupational health issue. Managers need to know this stuff.”

Another thing managers need to know? Their instincts on who is — or isn’t — objective enough to tell a certain story may need to be reexamined. As Shapiro told WNYC’s On the Media recently:

Look, in my experience, no one has ever said, let’s say to a combat veteran: “oh, you’re too close to war, you can’t be a war correspondent,” or “you can’t cover veterans.” No one’s ever said to someone who became a reporter after being a law enforcement officer and I know several people in that category, you can’t cover cops. This only comes up when it’s about people who are part of communities who have been left out of the traditional news equation or whose communities are at the center of national debates over injustice. It comes up with women, it comes up with trans folx, and gay and lesbian communities. It comes up, in recent weeks, with Asian-American journalists. It never comes up with the kinds of groups who traditionally have dominated the editorial power structures in newsrooms and for whom the news agenda is so often built.

The Dart Center used a $600,000 grant from Google — received at the beginning of the pandemic — to develop social support programs for journalists, open-to-all webinars, and a targeted program for journalists in Lebanon covering the aftermath of a devastating port explosion in Beirut. They’ve also launched a pilot training program for psychotherapists in treating journalists. Recent tip sheets include safety considerations for journalists and editors covering civil unrest and domestic terrorism, safely and ethically reporting from Myanmar, and handling sensitive interviews that must be conducted remotely during Covid-19.

Shapiro said the Dart Center has responded to an increased awareness of the stress that covering “profoundly challenging identity-focused crises in our society” — whether those be attacks on Asian Americans, police brutality against Black communities, an epidemic of sexual harassment, or otherwise — can affect journalists.

“What we know from research is that when whenever reporters cover trauma involving subjects or communities who they identify with, that raises the risk. It raises the likelihood that eventually stories are going to get under their skin or [create] PTSD or have other kinds of distress,” he said.

Mistakes like The New York Times’ publication of an anti-protest editorial or The Philadelphia Inquirer’s “Buildings Matter, Too” headline frustrate readers, but they affect the news organization’s own reporters, too, Shapiro noted.

“When reporters feel that they themselves or their organizations are committing ethical or social contract violations, or are becoming part of the problem they’re supposed to be addressing, that raises the level of psychological distress and mental stress in a profound way,” he said. “It leads to what it can lead to what clinicians call moral injury — the sense in journalists of being implicated in the very violations our reporting is supposed to address.”

The Dart Center has long relied on bringing journalists and researchers together in person. That, obviously, went out the window with Covid-19. But Shapiro said they’ve found they could create “a surprising degree of intimacy” and foster “trusting conversations” via Zoom as well.

“We were changed by the practicalities of the pandemic,” Shapiro said. “But we’re also changed by a radical shift of awareness in journalism of the challenges of covering these events, and the psychological costs to journalists of unremitting stress.”