Benjamin Mullin

Apparently, Facebook is offering news outlets millions of dollars for the rights to put their content in a news section that the company hopes to launch later in 2019. Representatives from Facebook have told news executives they would be willing to pay as much as $3 million a year to license headlines and previews of articles from news outlets.  The outlets pitched by Facebook on its news tab include Walt Disney Co.’s ABC News, Wall Street Journal parent Dow Jones, The Washington Post and Bloomberg. The news-licensing deals between Facebook and news outlets would run for three years. It isn

Apparently, Nexstar Media Group has reached an agreement in principle to buy Tribune Media Co. for about $4.1 billion. The acquisition would add Tribune Media’s 42 stations in major markets to Nexstar’s portfolio of about 175 TV stations in cities including San Francisco, Phoenix and Tampa. It would catapult Nexstar past rival Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns more than 170 stations, mostly in midsize and smaller markets.

As Facebook and Alphabet's Google continue to dominate digital ad sales, publishers are increasingly teaming up to give themselves a better shot at competing with the tech giants. New York Media, PopSugar and Rolling Stone are all joining Concert, a digital advertising marketplace operated by Vox Media. Concert shares ad revenue with publishers in the network, but declined to disclose the share each party keeps. Concert, which is a joint venture of Vox Media and Comcast’s NBCUniversal, still lags far behind the biggest tech giants in terms of global audience size.

A coalition of advocacy organizations including the Freedom of the Press Foundation, the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Index on Censorship have settled on a name for their forthcoming press freedom website, and a journalist to lead it. Peter Sterne, who has covered digital and print media for Politico since 2014, will spearhead US Press Freedom Tracker, a site dedicated to compiling and maintaining a database of press freedom incidents in the United States. Sterne, who will begin as a reporter for the Freedom of the Press Foundation on May 1, will collect information on journalist arrests, border stops, searches and seizures, leak prosecutions and subpoenas demanding that reporters testify on their confidential sources. It is hoped this data will then be cited in official reports, news stories, legal briefs and even congressional testimony, Sterne said.

Later in 2017, a coalition of organizations including the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, the Knight First Amendment Center and the Index on Censorship will launch an as-yet unnamed news site to track press freedom violations in the United States. The site will not only track incidents spurred by the Trump administration, but his election and anti-press rhetoric was a major catalyst in its founding.

The site, which is slated to launch sometime in the next two to three months, will have one full-time reporter and feature research and analysis from the partner organizations. CPJ is funding the reporting position (they're fresh from a fundraising bump), and the Freedom of the Press Foundation is contributing the site's development work. The project was conceived at a meeting of those organizations about a month ago, said Trevor Timm, the executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. They discussed the lack of a comprehensive database for "press freedom incidents" in the United States — arrests of journalists, border security shakedowns and equipment confiscation.