Nieman Lab

Patrick Soon-Shiong has finally won his hometown prize. After a number of years of trying to buy his local paper, Los Angeles’ richest billionaire has seized an unpredictable opportunity.   In a move that’s shocking but not really surprising, 65-year-old Soon-Shiong will pay a chunk of his estimated $7 billion-plus fortune to finally split with his erstwhile partner in Troncdom, chairman Michael Ferro.

The Knight Foundation announced that it is boosting local TV news with $2.6 million across five organizations that will help students of color gain experience in local TV markets, bring together broadcast journalists focused on digital innovation in conferences and workshops, and offer ethics, leadership, and data journalism training for newsrooms. The grantees are:

[Commentary]  It is time to discard the perception of “good journalism” as being enough. Whether newsrooms want to acknowledge it or not, there’s a substantial disconnect between them and the public on the role of journalism in our communities and for our democracy. Ignoring that disconnect will not make it go away. Instead, let 2018 be the year that journalism starts by listening and believing that people do actually, deeply care about quality news and information.

The Federal Communications Commission’s anticipated decision on net neutrality has (rightfully) garnered a lot of publicity and scrutiny. The FCC’s repeal of different regulations earlier this fall, however, could reshape a news source often left out of predictions of the industry’s future: local TV newsrooms.

[Commentary] Five months after the US elections, fake news remains high on media, political, and public agendas, having sparked a wave of concern, responses, and counter-responses in countries around the world. The term has become a keyword for both media institutions and the political mobilizations who contest them. Driven by countless reports, position papers, analyses, columns, reflections, op-eds, startups, imitators, accusations, and parodies, and despite numerous attempts to declare the issue “dead,” “meaningless,” or itself “fake” — the issue endures, like a prolonged argument where no one’s able to have the last word.

Below are four ways of seeing fake news differently, drawing on our ongoing research collaborations around A Field Guide to Fake News with the Public Data Lab. The guide focuses not on findings or solutions, but on starting points for collective inquiry, debate, and deliberation around how we understand and respond to fake news — and the broader questions they raise about the future of the data society.

[Jonathan Gray of the Institute for Policy Research at the University of Bath, Liliana Bounegru of the University of Groningen and the University of Ghent, and Tommaso Venturini of the Institute of Complex Systems at the University of Lyon are collaborators in the Public Data Lab.]

[Commentary] One lesson I learned early on in news is that what journalists value and what their audiences value are often frustratingly misaligned. We see high-quality news outlets and low-quality ones and wonder why anyone would choose the latter over the former. But the decisions of customers aren’t driven solely by perceptions of “quality”; they’re also derived from more prosaic factors like customer service, cost, feelings of community and personal connection, and a sense that both sides of the transaction have similar interests at heart.

In an environment where trust is no longer the default — where reading your local daily in the morning and watching a news broadcast at night have moved from standard to niche behavior — doing great journalistic work isn’t enough.

In 2016, the Federal Communications Commission launched an auction that will allow broadcasters to sell all or parts of their broadcast spectrum, which could then be purchased by wireless carriers looking to expand their reach. Some analysts initially projected that just public TV stations could bring in as much as $2.3 billion, according to reported federal estimates. Though New Jersey lawmakers have lowered their expectations for a potential windfall, the advocacy group Free Press last month launched a campaign to encourage New Jersey and other public station license holders participating in the FCC auction to invest at least a portion of the incoming revenue in local news and information.

[Commentary] There are few things that can galvanize the news world’s attention like a change in leadership atop The New York Times. Jill Abramson’s ouster probably reduced American newsroom productivity enough to skew this quarter’s GDP numbers. We don’t typically write about intra-newsroom politics at Nieman Lab, leaving that to Manhattan’s very capable cadre of media reporters. But Abramson’s removal and Dean Baquet’s ascent has apparently inspired someone inside the Times to leak one of the most remarkable documents I’ve seen in my years running the Lab, to Myles Tanzer at BuzzFeed.

It’s the full report of the newsroom innovation team that was given six full months to ask big questions about the Times’ digital strategy. As bad as this report makes parts of the Times’ culture seem, there are two significant reasons for optimism.

First: So much of the digital work of The New York Times is so damned good, despite all the roadblocks detailed here. Take those barriers away and think what they could do. And second: While it was a group effort, the leader of this committee was Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, the publisher’s son and the presumed heir to the throne, either when his father retires in a few years or sometime thereafter. His involvement in this report shows that he understands the issues facing the institution. That speaks well for the Times’ future.