Laura Hazard Owen
When Facebook went down this week, traffic to news sites went up
On October 4, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp were down for more than five hours. For five+ hours, people read news, according to Chartbeat data from its thousands of publisher clients across 60 countries. (And they went to Twitter; Chartbeat saw Twitter traffic up 72%. At the peak of the outage — around 3 p.m. ET — net traffic to pages across the web was up by 38% compared to the same time the previous week, Chartbeat found.
From coal to broadband to Trump’s budget, The Daily Yonder reports on rural life for the people actually living it
President Donald Trump’s unveiling of his budget blueprint — and the ensuing analysis and criticism — was probably the first many urban readers had heard of the Appalachian Regional Commission, one of the initiatives he proposes cutting completely. But The Daily Yonder has been reporting on these issues for a long time.
The urban-rural divide has been one of the biggest points of discussion following the election, in which rural voters overwhelmingly chose Donald Trump. And while large news organizations have pledged to pay more attention to that division — at the beginning of the year, The Washington Post assigned a reporter to the divide specifically — the Yonder focuses on the people who have a connection to rural communities because they live in them, used to live in them, or work in them, by reporting on specific issues in depth.