Andrew Beaujon

A Public Religion Research Institute/Brookings Institute study of Americans’ views on immigration reform finds that people’s media choices have a strong effect on their beliefs.

In fact, the study finds, Fox News may “reinforce and perhaps harden conservative views.” 60 percent of Republicans who trust Fox News most say immigrants “Burden our country because they take our jobs, housing, and health care.” 38 percent of Republicans who trust other news sources most say the same thing.

A quarter of all Americans said Fox News was their most trusted TV news source -- the highest rating for any TV news concern. The research also found that Jon Stewart may not be the most trusted man in news, but he's more trusted than MSNBC.

The Center for Investigative Reporting hopes to raise $25,000 to report on surveillance by local authorities, a practice speeded by technological improvements and federal money.

Subscribers get benefits on a sliding scale -- from a tote bag and a tour of CIR’s newsroom if you donate $350 to email alerts when new stories go up if you pledge $5 per month.

Beacon, which is handling fundraising for the series, refers to those alerts as “subscriptions,” but CIR spokesperson Lisa Cohen tells Poynter any stories that come from this project will be available on the CIR website, and “CIR will be working with partners as the stories warrant,” Cohen writes.

“During the past year, we’ve learned a lot about the federal government’s surveillance program, but we still know very little about how local police collect and mine data,” CIR reporter Amanda Pike says in a video accompanying the pitch.

If the project gets funded, CIR says it will use the money to secure public records, travel around the country reporting and “Create community engagement events where local citizens can learn about and debate the rise of surveillance.”

The Financial Times “broke the law of large numbers last year,” Ryan Chittum wrote in Columbia Journalism Review: It added digital subscribers at a fast rate, seven years after it launched its paywall.

It now has 652,000 paying subscribers across platforms, an FT spokesperson told Poynter.

“We’ve never understood this approach that journalism online should be free,” FT CEO John Ridding said when reached by phone. But FT’s approach goes beyond a metered paywall: When it launched, “I don’t think we really understood the power of the data and the audience understanding that came with the subscription model,” he said. “We’ve been able to build a system of understanding our readers.” That means customizable alerts for customers whenever a story about a client or a competitor hits FT’s website, as well as feeding readers content their “cohort” read as well. “We’ve been able to use the information we’ve already got from our customers to create a virtuous circle,” Ridding said.

The growth in subscriber revenues means advertising is now just one of several revenue streams, he said. “We absolutely value advertising,” Ridding said. But “the most important relationship is with the reader.” FT’s circulation was 8 percent higher across platforms in 2013, an FT spokesperson told Poynter, and digital subscriptions “grew 31% to 415,000, more than offsetting planned reductions in print circulation,” the spokesperson wrote.

The circulation of FT’s print edition in the UK in February dropped nearly 17 percent in 2013, and last October it announced a plan to end what Editor Lionel Barber called a “1970s-style newspaper publishing process -- making incremental changes to multiple editions through the night.” Ridding said 2013 was the first in FT’s 125-year history that the print paper “was profitable before advertising” -- that is, revenue from subscriptions covered its costs.