Journalism Today. Oct 29 2024

By Gretel Kahn

🗞️ 3 top news stories

1. Prepping up for election coverage. With election day one week away, we wanted to know how the New York Times was preparing to cover the results. In a new piece, our Head of Editorial Eduardo Suárez spoke with deputy Graphics editor Wilson Andrews who explained the newspaper's plans. Andrews has led election results operations for the past eight years and is coordinating this year's news coverage, including the needle, a forecasting model that predicted a Donald Trump victory in 2016 hours before the AP called the race for him.  | Read 

• A key quote. "If you come to us on election night, not only will you see the live results, but you’ll also be seeing how certain types of counties are voting and what kind of shifts we are seeing in the presidential race from 2020," Andrews says in the article.

2. Crisis at The Post. More than 200,000 people have cancelled their digital subscriptions to The Washington Post following the fallout of owner Jeff Bezos’s decision to block an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for president. The figure represents about 8% of the paper’s paid circulation of roughly 2.5 million subscribers. | Read

• Exodus from the Editorial Board. SEMAFOR 's Maxwell Tani has reported that two Washington Post opinion writers resigned from their positions in the editorial board citing the endorsement block. Another Editor-at-Large for the paper resigned last week.

3. Bezos speaks up. Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of The Washington Post, has penned a column in his own newspaper defending the decision not to endorse a candidate in the US presidential election in response to the backlash that decision has brought. | Read

• A key quote. “What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one,” wrote Bezos in his opinion column explaining his decision.

📊 Chart for the day

How will AI impact trust in news? While many of the so-called ‘deepfakes’ have been relatively easy to spot and only a subset of this content is designed to manipulate or confuse audiences, most newsroom leaders in our global sample think AI will lower trust in news. Only 16% think the rise of AI-generated content will raise trust in news. | Read more 

☕️ Coffee break

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has granted Google a five-year exemption from the Online News Act, ordering it to pay $100 million to Canadian news outlets within 60 days. | Read

Semafor’s Max Tani writes about the missteps of the Wall Street Journal that may have put reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was released from his imprisonment in Russia this August, at risk. | Read

Polish radio station Radio Kraków launched a channel run almost entirely by artificial intelligence. They were forced to shut it down after less than a week on air due to backlash against the project. | Read

📚 One piece from our archive

More on AI and elections. As millions of European citizens headed to the polls this summer to vote in the 2024 European Parliament elections, our colleagues Felix M. Simon , Richard Fletcher, Marina Adami , and Gretel Kahn investigated how popular AI chatbots answer basic electoral questions and fact-checked claims about the vote across different national contexts. We also published a similar piece on how AI chatbots responded to questions about the 2024 UK election. | Read 

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