"Disasters do not inflict damage equally. And adding insult to literal injury, the most ill-equipped communities when it comes to #climate disasters are almost always ones without #newspapers. “Folks were already struggling and now they don’t know where to turn, who to talk to,” she said. “That leaves a huge, huge hole for industries or politicians or other players to feed them misinformation or accidentally give inaccurate information.”"
#UK#Media#News#Journalism#Newspapers: "What links Russell Brand’s baptism in the Thames with Sir Paul Marshall, a co-owner of GB News and potential purchaser of the Telegraph? Both have found salvation through the strand of evangelical Christianity promoted by one incredibly influential church in central London.
Marshall, a hedge fund boss, is not yet a household name. Yet he is on his way to building a media empire and accumulating political power to rival Rupert Murdoch’s. First he launched the website UnHerd, aimed at Westminster opinion-formers, then he helped fund the populist rightwing news channel GB News, and in the coming weeks he will launch a bid to buy the Daily Telegraph.
Taken together, the trio of outlets would give him enormous influence over Tory party members when they come to choose Rishi Sunak’s replacement as leader. Conservative officials whisper about him being the kingmaker in what’s left of the party after the next general election.
But what sets Marshall apart from other media owners is the way his belief in evangelical Christianity influences his work in media and politics.
Alice Enders, a media analyst, said this was unlike most owners of British newspapers, who are motivated by raw power and wealth: “Rupert Murdoch is in thrall to the religion of capitalism, and I would assume that to be true of others too.”"
A3a #genchat@genchat Some examples from last night were: pages of the censuses (showing neighbors who they may have known in the old country), newspapers, letters, family stories, naturalization records
@genchat@genchat on newspapers, I only recently discovered the free NYShistoricnewspapers site which complements some of the commercial newspaper sites. Quite a treasure trove as often reports are copied or syndicated from one title to another. #NewYork#newspapers#genchat
#Newspapers in rural areas are folding, leaving vast #news deserts. But there are bright spots
"The U.S. has lost more than 2,800 newspapers since 2005, many of them in rural areas. Now some journalists are redoubling their efforts to provide local news and trying new models in a difficult industry."
"Flint's Black historical newspapers could easily have been lost to the eroding effects of time. These publications, which ran from the late 1930s to the late 70s, chronicled the lives, perspectives and priorities of Flint's African American community.... these historical publications are not only digitized for posterity but also freely accessible online for the public."
#Journalism#Media#News#Newspapers#NYT#IdentityPolitics#Trump: "Pay attention if you are white at the Times and you will hear black editors speak of hiring consultants at their own expense to figure out how to get white staff to respect them. You might hear how a black journalist, passing through the newsroom, was asked by a white colleague whether he was the “telephone guy” sent to fix his extension. I certainly never got asked a question like that. Among the experienced journalists at the Times, black journalists were least likely, I thought, to exhibit fragility and herd behaviour.
As wave after wave of pain and outrage swept through the Times, over a headline that was not damning enough of Trump or someone’s obnoxious tweets, I came to think of the people who were fragile, the ones who were caught up in Slack or Twitter storms, as people who had only recently discovered that they were white and were still getting over the shock. Having concluded they had got ahead by working hard, it has been a revelation to them that their skin colour was not just part of the wallpaper of American life, but a source of power, protection and advancement. They may know a lot about television, or real estate, or how to edit audio files, but their work does not take them into shelters, or police precincts, or the homes of people who see the world very differently. It has never exposed them to live fire. Their idea of violence includes vocabulary.
I share the bewilderment that so many people could back Trump, given the things he says and does, and that makes me want to understand why they do: the breadth and diversity of his support suggests not just racism is at work. Yet these elite, well-meaning Times staff cannot seem to stretch the empathy they are learning to extend to people with a different skin colour to include those, of whatever race, who have different politics." https://www.economist.com/1843/2023/12/14/when-the-new-york-times-lost-its-way
Hugh Grant has settled his illegal snooping lawsuit against Rupert Murdoch's Sun newspaper. The actor explained on X that he did this in order to avoid possibly heavy court costs, but made clear that he would not stop his quest to see justice done for victims of unlawful information gathering such as phone hacking. "As is common with entirely innocent people, they are offering me an enormous sum of money to keep this matter out of court. I don’t want to accept this money or settle. I would love to see all the allegations that they deny tested in court,” he wrote, adding “Murdoch’s settlement money has a stink and I refuse to let this be hush money,” and said he would use the proceeds of his settlement to “expose the worst excesses of our oligarch-owned press." Here's more from the Hollywood Reporter.
Ten Minnesota #newspapers, some in operation for more than 140 years, are ceasing publication in April.
All are owned by Alden Global Capital, which has been accused of "vulture" #capitalism by "taking over legacy newspapers and making drastic cuts, reducing #publishing frequency and slashing #newsroom jobs in an effort to boost profit margins."
#AI#GenerativeAI#Chatbots#Journalism#News#Media#Newspapers: "The Financial Times has a new generative AI chatbot called Ask FT that can answer questions its subscribers ask. Similar to generalized AI bots (like ChatGPT, Copilot, or Gemini), users can expect a curated natural language answer to whatever they want to know — but with answers derived from the outlet’s decades of published information rather than sources that are harder to explain or are subject to ongoing legal action. So don’t expect it to give you an answer for the best recipe for fettucini alfredo.
(...)
It’s available to a few hundred paid subscribers in the FT Professional tier, which is geared toward business professionals and institutions. Ask FT is currently powered by Claude, the large language model (LLM) developed by Anthropic, but that could change. In an interview with The Verge, FT chief product officer Lindsey Jayne says the outlet is “approaching this as ‘model agnostic’ and seeing which one meets our needs best.”"
#Journalism#Media#News#TV#Newspapers#NewsAvoidance: "A few serious news media will survive as special-interest publications, like ham-radio magazines in bygone days. Their content is mostly argued about by well-educated men with polarised views, notes the Reuters Institute. Politicians will disproportionately woo this group, ignoring the apathetic mainstream.
The no-news era will change politics. “If a nation expects to be ignorant & free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was & never will be,” wrote the American founding father Thomas Jefferson. Expect rising abstention at elections, as is already happening in France. Polarisation pushed turnout in the US’s 2020 election to 66 per cent, the highest since 1908, but that should prove a peak. Internet influencers may displace TV personalities such as Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy as election-winners. And with citizens losing interest, leaders will find it easier to dismantle democracy à la Viktor Orbán.
The #UK government said Wednesday it will back legislation banning foreign state ownership of British #newspapers and magazines, a move that could upend a planned takeover by a United Arab Emirates-led consortium of the #TelegraphMediaGroup.
"the #banning of #books, #magazines, #newspapers and #music, the outlawing of the #freedom to read and write and listen, the censoring of educational materials while criminalizing educators and librarians, and repressing speech — have roots in the anti-literacy laws of colonial slaveholding #America...
#Journalism#News#Media#Newspapers#Automation#Algorithms: "News organizations have turned to news automation to innovate specific processes in the newsroom. Despite the many advantages for news organizations in producing innovative news content, the news automation process is opaque and often not easily accessible for news consumers – undermining the core journalistic ethic of transparency. In this case study we examine how institutional dynamics shape internal and external algorithmic transparency practices at The Washington Post. Our findings, based on 16 expert interviews, reveal that while engineering teams at The Post exert great efforts to make some algorithmic systems transparent and explain their functions to the public (external), less information is being shared inside the newsroom (internal). This lack of internal algorithmic transparency is a potential pitfall as it could lead to mistakes in the news production and the reporting process in general."