Coming in hot
Media statistic of the week
“The cost of paper that feeds into presses around the world is rising to record highs, pushing up expenses for newspapers from Mumbai to Sydney,” The Economist reports. In the U.S., newsprint prices were 20-30% higher in 2021 than in 2020, and across Europe, newspapers will have to pay prices that are 50-70% higher in the first quarter of 2022 compared with the year before. Mills are taking out newsprint capacity and diversifying into packaging.
For some publishers, the price hikes will wipe out profits, but one mill executive in North America wasn’t too sympathetic, saying, “We’re not going to save the publishing industry by being unprofitable ourselves.”
This past week in the media industry
These stats
We kick this week off with another story that could have been fodder for our media statistic of the week: A year after the election, America has turned the news off.
In an analysis for Columbia Journalism Review, Caleb Pershan breaks down some Nielsen data showing that between October 2020 and October 2021, CNN viewership was down 73 percent, MSNBC was down 56 percent and Fox News was down 53 percent.
Broadcast TV networks also saw declining figures for their evening newscasts, although to a lesser degree, and digital news consumption is down this year as well, according to data from Comscore. As Pershan points out, news outlets are used to declines following elections, but “the current declines across the industry are unusually precipitous.”
If those numbers are a bit alarming, “These stats are shocking,” as Babette Radclyffe-Thomas says. According to a new report from the Women’s Media Center, men still dominate the news media, accounting for about two-thirds of all media credits and bylines.
Shraddha Chakradhar of Nieman Lab has details from the report, called “Divided 2021: The Media Gender Gap.” The authors analyzed from January 1 through March 31, 2021 for 30 news outlets across print, online, broadcast, cable TV and wire outlets in the United States. Men tended to report more than women, and overwhelmingly so at the wire outlets. The exceptions to this trend were CNN.com, HuffPost and Vox.
Emily Ramshaw says it’s an “Evergreen reminder that YES, the news is still gendered, YES, it affects what stories are told and who’s centered in them, and YES, you should support @19thnews.”
Essential, horrifying investigation
Julia Black of Business Insider published this bombshell story last week: 'I was literally screaming in pain': Young women say they met Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy for sex and it turned violent and humiliating.
“This is the hardest I’ve ever worked on a story, and I hope you’ll take some time to read it,” tweets Black, who adds, “Thank you to the team at Insider for their support, and of course, the brave sources who spoke to me over the last 8 months.”
“My preferred stance on this man and his brand is silence, because it seems like they somehow thrive on being called out for this sort of behavior. I would just ask you, if you still support him for whatever reason, to read this and then assess that again,” Alex Kirshner urges.
Rebecca Ungarino later tweeted that “shares of Penn National Gaming, which owns much of Barstool, were down after missing on earnings this morning and dropped further once @mjnblack’s essential, horrifying investigation into Portnoy went live.”
‘Her journalism was not a crime’
On Friday, Agence France-Presse reported that citizen reporter Zhang Zhan, 38, who was arrested and jailed after reporting on the Covid outbreak, is ‘close to death,’ after going on a hunger strike. Twitter posts by her brother Zhang Ju have sparked fresh calls for Zhang’s release.
The Washington Post Editorial Board also wrote about Zhan’s plight, She told the truth about Wuhan. Now she is near death in a Chinese prison.
“Ms. Zhang should be saluted for her intrepid attempts to record the chaos and cataclysm of Wuhan in those early weeks,” the Board argues. “She was a sentinel of a looming disaster. Her journalism was not a crime. She must not spend another moment behind bars. She must not be allowed to die.”
Ground zero for anti-CRT disinformation
If it seems like Critical Race Theory stories have been dominating the discourse lately, particularly in last week’s Virginia gubernatorial election, there’s a reason for that. For his Popular Information newsletter, Judd Legum along with Tesnim Zekeria and Rebecca Crosby take a deep dive into the Metric Media Network with their piece, Right-wing operatives deploy massive network of fake local news sites to weaponize CRT.
From Legum’s Twitter thread on the story, “The Rosetta Stone of this effort is this tweet by @lansing, the president of @WinRed, the main GOP online fundraising vehicle. Lansing credits an article in ‘West Nova News’ as ‘starting it all’ and helping deliver a win for Glenn Youngkin.”
Never heard of West Nova News? Read the piece to find out what’s going on there. And “If you’ve been wondering why so many Fla. GOP’ers talk about #CRT, it’s because the state is pretty much ground zero for anti-CRT disinformation pushed by fake local news websites,” tweets Peter Schorsch, of this “Must-read report via @JuddLegum.”
Meanwhile, at The Racket Jonathan M. Katz writes about the far right’s secret weapon, which might not be what you think. Sam Thielman describes it as “.@KatzOnEarth coming in hot on the @nytimes’s long-running and incredibly shameless misrepresentation of far-right activists as concerned citizens.”
In the piece, Katz argues that the coverage by The New York Times leading up to the Virginia election normalized extreme right-wing ideas and “often seemed calibrated to launder Republican appeals to white Virginians’ racial insecurities in ways that would be palatable to voters in the ostensibly liberal strongholds.”
Avoid people who aren’t glowing
The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple explains why Newsmax was forced to admit vaccines don’t make you glow. The outlet released not one but two statements after Emerald Robinson, Newsmax’s White House correspondent, tweeted that “vaccines contain a bioluminescent marker called LUCIFERASE so that you can be tracked.”
Unfortunately, Robinson’s tweet was false. Joe Pierre M. D., for one, is “Sorry to hear that #vaccines don’t make you glow. If they did, we could avoid people who aren’t glowing. It would probably also decrease pedestrian vs. motor vehicle accidents at night. I’d call that a win-win.”
At any rate, just after all that happened, this happened: Newsmax to Implement Covid-19 Vaccine Mandate.
That news came courtesy of Joe DePaolo at Mediaite, and Justin Baragona praises the “Nice scoop by @joe_depaolo here. Newsmax is implementing a vaccine mandate and is requiring all employees to be vaxxed by Jan. 4, or undergo weekly COVID tests. Railing against vax mandates has been a regular feature of Newsmax programming.”
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The labor beat
According to the scoop by Josh Eidelson of Bloomberg News, New York Times Wirecutter writers are planning a strike around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, the site’s busiest time of the year.
Speaking of stories about unions and the labor movement, Ben Smith’s latest New York Times column is about Why the Media Loves Labor Now. At a moment of political turmoil, economic change and a pandemic-driven focus on how we work, labor has become a hot news beat, he writes.
“Loved this @benyt column on how newspapers are suddenly all over the labor beat,” says Conor Dougherty. “I also used to have a minor obsession with the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship, so it resonated extra (read on).”
“Would love some historicization here: labor coverage is only *recently* new again — and was a major strain of local coverage (and a reason people subscribed to local news, tbf) until the relatively recent past,” Anne Helen Petersen points out.
And Kelly McBride thinks “It’s super interesting to think about how journalists cover labor. For instance, should journalists in unions disclose that in their stories?”
On that note, should journalists disclose if they worked against union organizing? Because Tim Marchman of Vice notices Smith covers the NewsGuild a lot without mentioning he worked against it at BuzzFeed. By Marchman’s count, “Ben Smith's latest column is at least the fourth he's written mentioning NewsGuild without mentioning a material conflict of interest.”
The whats, the whys and the how-tos
In the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. election, Dhruv Ghulati set out to build a product that could tackle the scourge of fake news online. In a piece for TechCrunch, he shares What I learned building a fact-checking startup.
“After five years of hard work, Factmata has had some successes,” he writes. “But for this space to truly thrive, there are a great deal of barriers, from economic to technological, that still must be overcome.”
For his Simon Owens’s Media Newsletter, Simon Owens spoke with Gordon Edall about Why The Globe and Mail trusts an AI to run its paywall. “Ever wondered how The Globe’s AI-powered paywall works? This is a great interview with @gordonedall on innovations in the business side of journalism,” says Chris Hannay.
And “Speaking of journalism to be in awe of …” tweets Ken Ward: At ProPublica, Irena Hwang, who did Ph.D. work in bioinformatics before becoming a data journalist, explains How ProPublica Used Genomic Sequencing Data to Track an Ongoing Salmonella Outbreak.
Sarah Smith offers this “Alt headline: @irenatfh is one of the smartest people I have ever met.” Adds Ariana Tobin, “.@propublica has an illustrator on staff for the year and it’s so awesome. Don’t sleep on the explainer comics by @dizdizh: (or on the genomic sequencing by @irenatfh!!)”
Getting soooo close
Almost there. Twitter will now let you pay to undo tweets and read ad-free news in the US. The Verge’s Jay Peters has the details on the new features available in the Twitter Blue subscription service. As part of the expansion, Peters writes, “Twitter Blue is about to get a lot more useful for people who love reading and finding news on Twitter.”
“Getting soooo close to the edit button!” tweets Greg Nibler.
Twitter Blue is only available in the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand right now. And Dieter Bohn says, “This is not tweets but editable. @TwitterBlue seems nice, but I’m not convinced it’s $2.99/month nice. (When you tweet, the undo button is not 100% the first thing you see after you hit send, eg if you’re on the replies screen. beware lol).”
Entertainment news
Anita Bennett alerts us to “More infighting and drama at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.” Sharon Waxman of The Wrap reports that the Golden Globes Group is Seeking to End Nonprofit Status Under Interim CEO. The HFPA proposal has alarmed reform-minded members of the group and was discouraged as “unjustifiable” by a lawyer.
Next up, which media company is facing the most active libel suits right now? No, it isn’t The New York Times or Fox News. It’s Netflix.
In his piece for The Hollywood Reporter, Eriq Gardner explains Why Suits Against Netflix Could Shake Streaming. The mega-streamer is facing more defamation complaints than any major news outlet, stemming from projects like “Making a Murderer” and “When They See Us” — but is it a distributor, a publisher or something else entirely? Gardner says, “The piece could just as easily be titled, ‘Why Streaming Could Shake Libel Law.’ I hope it’ll cause people to think slightly differently about some of these issues.”
Speaking of Netflix, three of its 10 top shows right now are South Korean. From BTS to “Squid Game,” Choe Sang-Hun of The New York Times explores How South Korea Became a Cultural Juggernaut. Javier E. David notices, “Everyone’s on the Seoul train these days — you love to see it. ‘Train to Busan’ is still my favorite S.Korea movie, but ‘Parasite’ is a close 2nd.”
And Dan Bilefsky, says it’s “Great to see Korea have its global cultural moment. It’s such an interesting country, marinated by war, dictatorship, democratization, rampant capitalism, and now k-pop and dystopian dramas.”
We’re also feeling Erik Adams’ reaction: “Did a double take at the ‘It wasn’t until last year when Parasite won the Oscar’ part of this story—factually accurate (February 2020 is still ‘last year’ for a couple months) yet cognitively impossible (February 2020 was also several decades ago).”
A few more
From the Muck Rack Team
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3yThat was really interesting. Thank you for sharing.