The Green Line combines events, explainers, and solutions to appeal to young Torontonians.
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The Green Line combines events, explainers, and solutions to appeal to young Torontonians.
Updated:
Everything from the Lab, plus what we're seeing around the web.
Nov. 19, 2024
Spanish-language newspapers in the U.S. struggle to localize climate change stories, according to a new study∞
The majority of Latinos in the United States (81%) have said that climate change is one of their top concerns and the issue disproportionately affects their communities. But local Spanish-language newspapers in the United States aren’t localizing climate change stories for Spanish-language audiences, according to a new study.
In a paper published in the Environmental Communication Journal last week, “Localizing (or not) climate change in Spanish-language newspapers in the United States,” researchers Bruno Takahashi (Michigan State University) and María Fernanda Salas (University of Costa Rica) write that “in an ideal scenario, coverage would be localized to inform vulnerable communities of threats, adaptation strategies, and potential solutions to the issue.”
Takahashi and Salas analyzed the headlines and leads of 536 climate-related stories published by seven U.S. Spanish-language newspapers between 2010 and 2021. The newspapers, all in areas with large Spanish-speaking populations, were La Opinión (Los Angeles), El Diario La Prensa (New York City), El Nuevo Herald (Miami), La Prensa (Orlando), La Raza (Chicago), El Pregonero (Washington, D.C.), and Excélsior (Orange County, California). About 40% of the articles (215) were published in the “news” section, 177 in the national section, and 88 in the international section. (The rest were published in other sections, like the editorial pages, lifestyle, or entertainment.)
The study’s authors write:
The coverage of climate change in Spanish-language media resembles that of the dominant mainstream press instead of the community press model that it [displays] in the coverage of other issues of importance to their audiences. The coverage does not follow the coverage in Spanish-language media of other issues such as immigration or health. It also probably does not play an assimilation or acculturation function. This could mean that Latin American immigrants are ill-informed, based in terms of quantity and quality of coverage, of the present and future impacts that climate change has on their health, livelihoods, and economic opportunities.
They found that the number of climate-related stories in their sample peaked at 200 in 2019, but even then “the coverage represents on average fewer than three articles a month in any given newspaper.” After that, coverage dipped, with just 61 climate stories in 2021. Of the 536 stories in the sample, 303 were written by reporters, 108 were republished from national and international wire services, and 125 were attributed to the newsroom.
Stories largely focused on three themes: climate-related impacts; mitigation and adaptation solutions; and policy proposals and political discussions. Although the stories were published by local news outlets, most were focused on the state, national, or international level.
“Newspapers failed to clearly localize issues for their audiences,” the study’s authors write. “Few articles described present or future climate impacts, as well as proposed solutions directly impacting local Hispanic communities. This could suggest that these media are not serving a watchdog function or engaging with the most pressing local climate risks and impacts. This could also have implications for community empowerment or even political engagement, including voting behaviors, since climate adaptation and risk management requires practical actionable information.”
Climate events like hurricanes, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, droughts, flooding, wildfires, and extreme heat were the most frequently mentioned, but only a handful of articles centered the impacts of those events — like air pollution and food insecurity — on local Hispanic communities. A headline from La Opinión in 2020 that read “[Scientists] anticipate that climate change will hit the poor and minorities the hardest – They also warn that there will be more and more forest fires in California and around the planet,” was just one in a handful of the study’s sample to center local impact.
Solution-oriented stories were found to be “broad and largely beyond the immediate needs or interests of Hispanic communities (e.g. international cooperation, national level emissions reduction, infrastructure projects, among others).” The stories about climate mitigation strategies were mostly about awareness efforts, such as art installations, celebrity statements, and protest coverage. There were few stories about technology-based solutions like electric cars and renewable energy.
Policy stories mostly focus on national and international proposals and discussions (“Maduro lashes out against capitalism at UN and calls for climate change actions,” one 2014 headline from El Nuevo Herald read), but rarely centered local policies and politics.
Scientists and government officials were among the most prominent figures mentioned in the stories studied. Local community actors (such as community organizations, farmers, and marginalized communities) were the third most prominent group mentioned but were most often discussed as victims of climate change.
Takahashi and Salas recommend that the newspapers implement solidarity journalism (amplifying the voices of the most affected communities) and solutions journalism (explaining issues and what actions readers can take) strategies to better serve local audiences.
Read the full study here.
Of the Project 2025 proposals I highlighted, the largest share were authored by Brendan Carr, who sits on the Federal Communications Commission. The FCC is the chief regulator of broadcast media in America and plays a big part in Internet policy though issues like net neutrality and broadband access. Carr is best known for his Trumpian rhetoric. Among the things he calls for in Project 2025:
— banning TikTok1
— removing restrictions on media ownership
— eliminating Section 230 protections for publishers
(More details at those links.)
Since Election Day, Carr has been making himself very visible backing Trump’s wishes — falsely accusing NBC of violating equal time rules, saying the FCC should stop doing anything “partisan” until Trump’s inauguration, arguing the “censorship cartel must be dismantled and destroyed” (you know, fact-checkers — he really doesn’t like NewsGuard), and backing Trump’s regular statements that TV networks should lose their broadcast licenses for doing things he doesn’t like. He’s also very tight with Elon Musk, last seen accompanying McNuggets at Trump’s right hand.
Last night, Donald Trump — now president-elect — announced that Brendan Carr would be his nominee to lead the FCC.
Photo of Brendan Carr speaking at CPAC 2018 by Gage Skidmore used under a Creative Commons license.
- Though Trump recently decided he likes TikTok after all, so you can expect Carr to follow suit. [↩]
Nov. 18, 2024
A new Pew Research Center report also found nearly 40% of U.S. adults under 30 regularly get news from news influencers.
Nov. 14, 2024
One variety of “fake news” is taking possession of a far more insidious one.
Even before the U.S. election sped up an exodus from the Elon Musk-owned site, X had reportedly lost one-fifth of its active users in the U.S. and one-third in the U.K.. Bluesky seems to have the juice to win over some of those fleeing users — especially journalists and others interested in news and current events.
Over the past week, Bluesky has gained nearly 2 million new users. On Wednesday, Bluesky surpassed 15 million users and appeared as the No. 1 app in the U.S., U.K., and elsewhere. By Thursday afternoon, the site was close to 16 million users. (Nieman Lab is one of them. You can find us on Bluesky here.)
I wrote about Bluesky’s big week and the post-election realignment in social networks www.platformer.news/bluesky-thre…
— Casey Newton (@caseynewton.bsky.social) November 11, 2024 at 8:05 PM
Another factor? Bluesky is brimming with what Kirshner calls the “wholesome chaos” of early Twitter. People are building things — cool features and custom custom algorithms and “starter packs” of accounts to follow.
Starter packs are genius, but I was surprised there wasn’t a list of them for people to find.
So I built it:
blueskydirectory.com/starter-pack…The website monitors the packs being shared and adds the ones it finds to the database.
Missed your stater pack? Message me and I’ll get it added.
— Mubashar “Mubs” Iqbal (@mubashariqbal.com) November 11, 2024 at 11:13 AM
Bluesky has said it plans to develop a subscription model for “features like higher quality video uploads or profile customizations like colors and avatar frames” but remain free to use. The app has introduced direct messaging, videos, and standard feeds like “following,” “discover,” and “popular with friends” but a lot of the neatest stuff is being built by the broader Bluesky community.
Some of the custom feeds and features we noticed:
- A custom feed with the most popular posts on Bluesky in the past three hours.
- Or one with the most popular links on the platform in the last 24 hours.
- You can set your domain as your handle for verification. (Or, if applicable, self-verify on your MSNBC show.)
“I have to say, I’ve really been enjoying the platform Bluesky. It functions almost identically to Twitter—but without all the baggage,” says @chrislhayes.bsky.social.
— Caroline Ambrose (@carebrose.bsky.social) November 12, 2024 at 9:25 PM
- There’s a TweetDeck-like client called Deck.Blue.
since I’ve gained over 1000 followers in the past hour, quick refresher on deck.blue:
it’s a tweetdeck-like client that I started developing back in august 2023 on the same day the old tweetdeck got paywalled
i have nothing to do with twitter, the original tweetdeck team or even the bluesky team
— deck.blue (@deck.blue) November 12, 2024 at 12:16 PM
- Don’t want to miss “quieter posters”? This feed shows posts from your friends who don’t post often and this one has posts from non-mutuals who follow you.
- Find your favorite Twitter follows with Sky Follower Bridge.
- Miss the handy news aggregator Nuzzel? A similar app – collecting links from Bluesky and Mastodon — is in beta testing.
- See every post that has prompted someone to reply “hell yeah.”
- And a feed of feeds.
What did we miss? Let me know at sarah_scire@harvard.edu.
Nov. 13, 2024
Guardian reporters may still use X for newsgathering, the company said.
Nov. 13, 2024
“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink…Journalists need to understand how distributing true and useful information out into the world can be its own rewarding service — no matter what happens next.”
For a union considering a strike, the phrase “maximum leverage” is always top of mind. If the goal is to push management into action, the withdrawal of labor should be designed to maximize its impact on operations. If you represent longshoremen, you time a strike (and its potential economy-wide impact) to the weeks before a presidential election. If you represent auto workers, you target high-profit plants from all three major U.S. automakers at once to maximize their collective need for action. If you represent workers at a product-reviews site that makes its money off of affiliate revenue, you plan to walk out on Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year.
And if you represent tech workers at The New York Times, you time your action for the publisher’s single biggest traffic day of the year — a presidential election. That’s just what the Times Tech Guild did last week — going on strike Monday morning, just hours before the first polls opened in Dixville Notch.
After our Bargaining Committee continued to push for a fair contract over the weekend, management still refused to get serious and make a deal. Therefore, we are going on a ULP strike. See you on the picket line ✊https://t.co/lms4PNbLNT
— New York Times Tech Guild (@NYTGuildTech) November 4, 2024
We are on ULP strike. We gave @nytimes management months of notice of our strike deadline, we made ourselves available around the clock, but the company has decided that our members aren’t worth enough to agree to a fair contract and stop committing unfair labor practices. pic.twitter.com/jYlANW1ruw
— New York Times Tech Guild (@NYTGuildTech) November 4, 2024
But what happens when that moment of maximum leverage…passes? Election night came and went at the Times without a cataclysmic tech collapse. (The union notes a number of smallish problems in the tech stack; management insists even those were no biggie.) On Monday evening, just over seven days in, the Times Tech Guild called off its strike and said its members would be returning to work.
A WARNING TO THE TIMES: Tuesday, we will be returning to work, after a successful Election Week ULP Strike. We clearly demonstrated how valuable our work is to @nytimes. And now we’ll move our fight inside. pic.twitter.com/PI551454f5
— New York Times Tech Guild (@NYTGuildTech) November 11, 2024
The strike ends not with a new contract, but with a statement that workers had shown “our strength and our value to The Times.” (The initial strike announcement did not set a time limit on its length. While the union is calling it a success, it’s hard to imagine Times management considers it a defeat.) The Times Tech Guild has been in negotiations for its first contract for more than two years; did this abbreviated strike, er, move the needle?
Only time will tell. But union supporters may want to remember the last time a Times union attempted such a time-targeted labor action — at Wirecutter, the product-reviews site, where workers struck from Black Friday through Cyber Monday 2021. Those workers also went back to work without a contract — but the two sides reached a deal only a couple of weeks later.We welcome our @NYTGuildTech colleagues back from their election week ULP strike. We stand in unwavering solidarity with them as they continue to fight for a fair and just contract.
— NYTimesGuild (@NYTimesGuild) November 12, 2024
Some Times newsroom staffers are furious about how @NYTGuildTech handled this. National correspondent Jeremy W. Peters tells me: "The NewsGuild owes us, its dues paying members, an explanation for why they miscalculated so badly here. Unfortunately, when journalists need robust,… https://t.co/nYm9HjhpHH
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) November 12, 2024
Congratulations to all @NYTGuildTech supporters who establish a new Wordle streak of 1 today!
Wordle 1,242 4/6*
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⬜— Daniel Jalkut (@danielpunkass) November 12, 2024
Was this always planned to be a one week strike? I don’t remember seeing that when the strike was announced.
— Mike Brice (@MikeBrice) November 12, 2024
Nov. 12, 2024
Sometimes it’s healthy to do something you love less, and differently.
Nov. 8, 2024
Local news outlets cannot change grocery prices. But they can help their readers deal with them.
Nov. 7, 2024
Launched as a rival to Elon Musk’s Twitter, Threads now has 275 million monthly active users. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the app is signing up more than 1 million users per day.
Google Search may not get a lot of love these days, but a niche Chrome extension launched in March — Google Scholar PDF Reader — counts 500,000 users who leave largely positive reviews : “A revolutionary game changer. Considering naming my first-born child after this chrome extension.”
Google’s promise with the launch of the extension was to “supercharge your PDF reading” by making it easier for academics (or anyone else) to read research paper PDFs — turning all citations into links and giving the ability to jump quickly between sections via an automated table of contents, for instance.
This week, Google updated the extension with AI outlines, intended to help “researchers everywhere read all that is on their pending paper piles quickly and thoroughly.” The outlines appear in a sidebar alongside the PDF, and you can skim them or, in Google’s words, “click on a bullet to deep read where it gets interesting.” Here’s what it looks like when I tested it on a preprint, “The Consumption of Pink Slime Journalism: Who, What, When, Where, and Why?“
I found the feature to be less about AI summarization, more about easier navigation and getting to the parts of a paper most relevant to you. Some disagree. You can see what you think by testing it here.
Nov. 6, 2024
Plus: How newsrooms are using generative AI, what makes news seem authentic on social media, and how to bridge the divide between academics and journalists.
Nov. 5, 2024
When the winner’s name isn’t enough: How the AP is leaning into explanatory journalism to call races
“We’ve learned, especially in the last few cycles, that it’s not necessarily possible or a good idea to let [the electoral] process play out in silence.”
Nov. 5, 2024
“The problem with voting stories is that the people who make themselves most available don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.”
Nov. 5, 2024
The Center for Community News at the University of Vermont is leading “the first nationally coordinated effort to strengthen university-led election coverage.”
Nov. 4, 2024
Led by risk-averse corporate owners, dozens of the biggest U.S. newspapers have decided their editorials should express opinions on everything except who should be president.
The headline: “A Woman Died After Being Told It Would Be a ‘Crime’ to Intervene in Her Miscarriage at a Texas Hospital.”
The future of true crime sounds like…public radio?In 2020, talk of “defunding the crime beat.” Where are we four years later?In a saturated true crime landscape, some content creators try to focus on victims and survivorsIs the crime news people crave the crime news they need?Why criminal courts are still a black box for data journalists10 years after Serial: Nieman Lab looks at crime news nowAbortion is the next front on the crime beatSarah Weinman is the author of two books, editor of two true crime anthologies, and a reporter. When I asked her what’s on her mind now, she mentioned “the fault lines of progress when it comes to bodily autonomy,” and told me, “I’m reporting on topics that we wouldn’t have thought of as crimes” before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, ending the constitutional right to abortion.
“Whether abortion laws target providers, aiders and abettors, or women themselves, the criminalization of abortion necessarily involves the surveillance of women,” Jolynn Dellinger and Stephanie K. Pell write in an introduction to their 2024 paper, “Bodies of evidence: The criminalization of abortion and surveillance of women in a post-Dobbs world.” “Women’s bodies are often the so-called scene of the crime, and their personal data will, more likely than not, be evidence of the crime.”
Nov. 1, 2024
In our package: Digital news outlets reimagine the crime beat; TikTok creators balance ethics and money; public radio stations see more true crime in their future; AI might reshape court reporting.
Oct. 31, 2024
Testify’s groundbreaking investigations in Cleveland show the power of computational methods in courthouse reporting. Why, then, are its stories so hard to replicate?
Oct. 30, 2024
“We need to better understand what people mean when they say ‘safety.’”
Oct. 30, 2024
The Philadelphia Inquirer had its best week for new subscriptions ever and The Guardian U.S. broke its single-day fundraising record — twice.
Oct. 29, 2024
“[Families] know it’s way quicker to get a story out through me than through Univision and Telemundo.”
Oct. 28, 2024
“Sometimes as journalists, we move around with an attitude that the community is just not going to [understand] us….I think that’s a huge obstacle to being able to do this better.”
Oct. 28, 2024
Amid the downturn in audio, some executives think the public radio model — with a dash of true crime — might provide a way forward.
Oct. 24, 2024
I interviewed dozens of journalists and reviewed decades of research on how audiences evaluate journalists’ on-air presentation.
Oct. 23, 2024
This year’s report documents “network local news sites” like Patch and Axios Local for the first time.
Oct. 23, 2024
“We are seeing a huge divide between people who are interested in news and those who are not, and I suspect that this divide is intensifying.”
The Lenfest Institute launches $10 million AI news program for big-city dailies with backing from OpenAI and Microsoft∞
On Tuesday, The Lenfest Institute launched a $10 million AI and local news program in partnership with OpenAI and Microsoft. The program will initially fund projects for AI adoption at five independently owned U.S. metro news organizations — The Minnesota Star Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Chicago Sun-Times owner Chicago Public Media, The Seattle Times, and Newsday in Long Island. Three additional organizations are slated to receive funding in a second round of grants.
OpenAI and Microsoft have each committed $2.5 million in direct funding to the program, which will be used to hire an AI fellow for two years at each of the local news outlets. The companies have also promised $2.5 million in both OpenAI and Microsoft Azure credits to be spread across the participating newsrooms. These amount to vouchers for the cost of running a large language model (LLM) like GPT or other AI computing services offered by the companies.
“Through these fellowships — and by sharing results with the broader news industry — we will help empower local newsrooms to explore, implement and advocate for AI business solutions that uphold the highest ethical standards while strengthening their future prospects,” said Jim Friedlich, executive director and CEO of The Lenfest Institute. Though Lenfest has a particular emphasis on Philadelphia and Pennsylvania in its work, the nonprofit has long offered grants nationwide with the goal of building more sustainable business models for independent local news.
Each news organization submitted an AI-focused project to Lenfest as part of its application. The Philadelphia Inquirer, which is owned by The Lenfest Institute, plans to build a conversational AI chatbot that surfaces content from its archives. Chicago Public Media, which owns both The Chicago Sun-Times and the radio station WBEZ, will use AI for transcription and summarization, as well as for translations to expand its audience reach. The Seattle Times will use AI to assist in its advertising business, integrating the technology into its sales support and sales analytics.
“As an industry, we must embrace and harness new technologies to drive innovation and future viability across our businesses,” Aron Pilhofer, chief product officer for the Minnesota Star Tribune, said in a statement. The daily newspaper plans to experiment with AI summarization and discovery tools using its grant funding.
Earlier this month, OpenAI also announced a new contract licensing deal with Hearst, which encompassed more than 40 of the company’s local newspapers properties, including the Houston Chronicle, the San Francisco Chronicle, the New Haven Register and the San Antonio Express News. Unlike in its contract licensing deals, OpenAI will not receive direct access to the published archives of outlets in the Lenfest program.
“While nothing will replace the central role of reporters, we believe that AI technology can help in the research, investigation, distribution, and monetization of important journalism,” Tom Rubin, chief of intellectual property and content at OpenAI, said in a statement. “Local news is a particularly vulnerable area of journalism, and we believe AI can help it thrive.”
