Fresh useful insights for people advancing quality, innovative and sustainable journalism 

OFF THE TOP

You might have heard: Some had hoped that Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong would use his shares of Alden Global Capital to block the hedge fund’s purchase of Tribune Publishing (The Washington Post)

But did you know: Shareholders approved Alden’s bid to buy Tribune Publishing (The Baltimore Sun)

On Friday, Tribune Publishing’s shareholders approved the $633 million deal that will make Alden the second-largest newspaper owner in the country, acquiring titles including The Baltimore Sun and Chicago Tribune. The vote concludes efforts of hotel executive Stewart Bainum Jr. to make a rival bid, an attempt that came after an arrangement to spin off The Baltimore Sun underneath a Maryland-based nonprofit fell apart. Soon-Shiong, who has a 24% stake in Alden, said he had abstained from voting, but his proxy ballots didn’t check the “abstain” box and were counted as votes in favor of the purchase.

+ Noted: In 2020, a third of large newspapers in the United States experienced layoffs (Pew Research Center); Texas didn’t allow journalists to witness an execution for the first time in 40 years (The Washington Post); iHeartMedia forms Latinx podcast network (Digiday)

API UPDATE

Journalists, hold yourself accountable for earning the trust of BIPOC communities. This rubric will help. (Trusting News)

“When it comes to communities of color, the challenge is often not about rebuilding trust, but about building a relationship from scratch,” writes Joy Mayer. A good starting point is to assess newsroom staff, processes and coverage, using this rubric designed by Letrell Deshan Crittenden of Thomas Jefferson University. Mayer also suggests thinking about where your newsroom has meaningful connections to groups that are hard to reach or that have high levels of mistrust; and offers several questions to ask those people about their perceptions of your coverage. 

TRY THIS AT HOME

How The Oaklandside is working with its new community advisory board (The Oaklandside)

The board, made up of seven paid members who represent each city council district in Oakland, will provide the news organization with feedback on how The Oaklandside’s coverage reflects its values. Each week, the publication sends the board three Oaklandside articles, then the members use an online form to provide input and identify values reflected in the pieces. Oaklandside staff and advisors receive key takeaways from the feedback each week, and staff also have access to advisors’ responses. Cole Goins writes that the group has offered “practical advice on how helpful it is for us to thread links and highlight relevant resources in our stories, to bigger needs like how we can regularly weave more Oakland history into our reporting to contextualize current events.”

+ Earlier: Step by step, how to put together a community advisory board for your newsroom (American Press Institute)

+ How radio journalists are using movement journalism (Current); Why The New York Times trains its newsroom through its CMS (NYT Open)

OFFSHORE

CBC journalists blocked from covering Israel-Palestine after open letter (Vice)

Two weeks ago, more than 2,000 people signed an open letter calling for Canadian news outlets to add more context to Israel-Palestine coverage, noting that Palestinian voices are typically excluded. Two CBC reporters who signed the letter are no longer able to cover the topic and were told they had violated the outlet’s policies on journalistic standards and practices. The Intercept reported that at least three journalists who signed the letter were taken off of Israel-Palestine coverage.

+ Earlier: How journalists can avoid language that obscures power imbalances while reporting on Israel and Palestine (NBCU Academy)

OFFBEAT

What the ephemerality of the internet means for your hyperlinks (Columbia Journalism Review)

As time passes, sites develop “linkrot,” links that stop working after pages are deleted or moved. Harvard Law School researchers inspected about 550,000 New York Times articles from 1996 to mid-2019 for linkrot. The team found that 25% of links to a specific page (example.com/article) were broken, and the older they were, the more likely they were to not work. Almost three in four of the links in articles from 1998 had become inaccessible. The researchers suggest newsrooms find tools and processes to preserve links, such as library partnerships.

+ The startup CaliberAI is building “a warning system for potential libel” and online defamation (Wired); Twitter finds racial bias in image-cropping AI (BBC)

UP FOR DEBATE

The asymmetrical discipline of a CNN star and an entry-level AP reporter (Defector)

Last week, The Washington Post reported that CNN anchor Chris Cuomo had advised his brother, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, on how to respond to sexual harassment allegations, actions that the network described as “inappropriate” but that did not lead to discipline. At the same time, Emily Wilder was fired from The Associated Press after the Stanford College Republicans and conservative publications surfaced previous tweets from Wilder that expressed support for Palestinian people. Wilder, who had been on the job for just 16 days, said she was told she’d broken AP’s social media policy and shown bias. Laura Wagner wrote of Cuomo and Wilder that “two of the country’s largest media institutions chose to side with the powerful over the ethical.”

+ Related: Wilder wrote that after her termination, she had “to ask what kind of message this sends to young people who are hoping to channel righteous indignation or passion for justice into impactful storytelling.” (Twitter, @vv1lder)

SHAREABLE

Trump administration secretly obtained CNN reporter’s phone and email records (CNN)

The Justice Department recently told CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr that prosecutors had obtained two months worth of her phone and email records from 2017, including for her personal phones and email accounts. This marks the third disclosure that the department had obtained journalists’ communication records during the Trump administration, which obtained phone records from three Washington Post reporters and phone and email records from a reporter for BuzzFeed, Politico and The New York Times.