When is a news alert not a news alert?

No, that’s not a question from a blunted hippie who just read the I Ching and now speaks only in kōans. It’s a question about TikTok and other social apps that have leaned into sending push notifications that look like news alerts but actually derive from the user-generated muck.

The Financial Times has an interesting story out this morning that notes the vertical-video app’s tendency to send pushes that frame non-news as news:

TikTok has been sending inaccurate and misleading news-style alerts to users’ phones, including a false claim about Taylor Swift and a weeks-old disaster warning, intensifying fears about the spread of misinformation on the popular video-sharing platform. 

Among alerts seen by the Financial Times was a warning about a tsunami in Japan, labelled “BREAKING,” that was posted in late January, three weeks after an earthquake had struck.

Other notifications falsely stated that “Taylor Swift Cancelled All Tour Dates in What She Called ‘Racist Florida’” and highlighted a five-year “ban” for a US baseball player [Shohei Ohtani] that originated as an April Fool’s day prank.

The notifications, which sometimes contain summaries from user-generated posts, pop up on screen in the style of a news alert. Researchers say that format, adopted widely to boost engagement through personalized video recommendations, may make users less critical of the veracity of the content and open them up to misinformation.

These alerts are newsy in format but not in content; they are either culture-war agitprop or old stories unstuck in time. Many of these are perfectly accurate, of course, but they are nonetheless produced by someone other than journalists, leaving the door wide open for abuses. And given that their broadcast is governed by algorithms, measures of engagement are more likely to win out over measures of accuracy.

A reminder: News alerts are not nearly as common among the general population as phone-addicted journalists might imagine. As of 2021, only 24% of Americans surveyed said they had received even a single mobile news alert in the past week. (I’ve gotten more than that in the past five minutes.) While that was higher than in most other countries (e.g., U.K. 17%, Japan 13%, Finland 9%), it still means three-quarters of Americans carry an essentially news-alert-free phone in their pockets. So these platform-derived alerts may, for many, be the only ones they see. And, of course, many users will see the alert but not tap through, leaving the false info as the entirety of the message communicated.

TikTok removed the specific alerts the FT brought to their attention, but declined to get into how they managed to rise to the top of the algorithm in the first place.

The New York Times now has 10.2 million digital-only subscribers, and 4.8 million of them are paying for some kind of Times bundle — the news product plus at least one of The Athletic, cooking, games, or Wirecutter — the company said in its second quarter earnings report Wednesday.

A few other bits from the earnings report, which saw The New York Times’ profit up 13.6% compared to this time last year:

• The Times added 300,000 digital subscribers in the quarter.
• Digital revenues are up 12.9% over this time last year, to $304.5 million, “due to an increase in bundle and multiproduct revenues and an increase in other single-product subscription revenues, partially offset by a decrease in news-only subscription revenues.”
• The Times has spent a little less than $3 million this year on its ongoing lawsuit against OpenAI.
• The Athletic, the sports site the Times acquired for $550 million in 2022, is still losing money, but it’s losing less than it was this time last year.

On Tuesday, Axios CEO Jim VandeHei told staff (in an email that used Axios’ “smart brevity” format) the company is laying off 50 people, or about 10% of its employees. These are the first layoffs in the 7-year history of the company, which until now seemed to have dodged the icebergs that had torn holes into many of its competitors; it was so successful, in fact, that Cox Enterprises bought Axios for $525 million in 2022. Its founders — VandeHei, Mike Allen, and Roy Schwartz — stayed on to continue running the company.

In his memo, VandeHei mentioned that reader attention is “scattering across social, podcasts, individual creators and influencers, partisan websites and more,” and that this coupled with AI models’ ability to summarize news makes now “the most difficult moment for media in our lifetime.” In April, VandeHei had told The New York Times he was concerned the rise of AI would “eviscerate the weak, the ordinary, the unprepared in media,” and that Axios’ strategy would shift toward live events, membership programs, and premium newsletters.

Axios’ Detroit and Tampa Bay reporters both posted about being laid off, as did a national news editor. The visuals team was hit particularly hard, according to Axios’ managing editor of data visuals.

NEW: Axios is laying off 50 people across the company. CEO @JimVandeHei just sent out this note — which says the layoffs are because of “changes in the media business” pic.twitter.com/lLVemNFh0N

— Katie Robertson (@katie_robertson) August 6, 2024

There’s just something so unsettling that they used the Axios “smart brevity” bulletpoint format to fire their staffers.

WHY IT MATTERS: You will no longer have a job. https://t.co/oVWTUhUFVE

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) August 6, 2024

Axios laying off people in smart brevity style and doing it as a news dump right before the vice presidential announcement is heartless stuff.

— Scott Nover (@ScottNover) August 6, 2024

Everything else aside here—notable that VandeHei essentially cites AI as a threat to Axios’ business model https://t.co/zJbmTYLzVI

— Damon Beres (@dlberes) August 6, 2024

it’s a sad day for those of us at Axios that are losing beloved colleagues — i promise our internal email format is not the most gutting thing about this news and saying so is not very nice to those laid off!

— Ashley Gold (@ashleyrgold) August 6, 2024

Fun fact: Local news network TAPinto and Nieman Lab share a birthday (month)!

We were both founded in October 2008, in a moment of trepidation and excitement about possibilities for news on the internet. Two years before, in 2006, BuzzFeed had been established; in 2007, the first iPhone had been released; and the same year our respective outlets launched, social media helped bring Obama to the White House.

Mike Shapiro founded TAPinto in 2008 as “an all-online local newspaper” for his hometown at the time, New Providence, NJ, and for two neighboring towns, according to the Local Media Association. In its early years, TAPinto competed with Patch, which was then owned by AOL. Following significant layoffs at Patch, Shapiro saw an opening to expand TAPinto to other communities.

In 2013, TAPinto converted to a franchise model for local news: Franchisees operate on the same platform and can share content, and sell one another advertising, giving local outlets a collective scale that would be virtually impossible to achieve alone. Today, more than 15 years later, TAPinto counts nearly 100 local organizations, including local news outlets and digital marketing platforms, across four states within its network. Beyond New Jersey, franchisees operate TAPinto sites in New York, Pennsylvania, and Florida.

TAPinto CEO Shapiro has said he sees the franchise model as a viable way to support local news in communities that might otherwise be news deserts. In his view, providing backend support makes local news franchisees’ work more manageable and lowers the barrier to entry for creating a news outlet from scratch. More recently, though, he’s zeroed in on an opportunity he sees to support existing publishers who need help with tech and their backend, but want more branding flexibility than the franchise model provides.

In May, TAPinto announced an addition and alternative to its franchising model: a licensing option called the Hyperlocal News Network. Under a licensing model, news outlets have more branding autonomy but can still benefit from being part of the same network, and CMS platform, as the franchisees.

“There are…hundreds, if not thousands, of existing publishers who are really struggling with their digital presence and would benefit from our technology and back office services, yet want to keep their own branding,” Shapiro told me in an email. “Our license model enables them to do just that.”

The model includes à la carte “back office services” like graphic design support, media liability insurance, a customer relationship management system, and contracting software — the kinds of services that can be a heavy lift, operationally and financially, for lean local outlets to figure out themselves. The Hyperlocal News Network plans to add HR services “soon,” Shapiro added.

The program requires a one-time $1,000 “start-up fee” and costs $750 per month after that — similar to Newspack’s pricing for its smallest publisher customers by annual revenue. Shapiro noted that the Hyperlocal News Network is a fundamentally different offering from the WordPress.com-affiliated Newspack. TAPinto’s publishers are typically based in smaller communities and “usually have more modest revenue goals,” he said.

Shapiro also views the new licensing program as “a match for media outlets that would benefit from an enhanced digital presence, additional digital revenue streams, and/or the content and sales collaboration inherent in our platform.” These could include types of outlets ranging from weekly print newspapers, to local and regional magazines, to local radio or TV stations, hyperlocal sites, or “publications for particular audiences,” he said.

The Hyperlocal News Network remains small for now. TAPinto announced a licensing partnership with NJ-based business publication Commerce Magazine in March, before the new program formally launched. Beyond that outlet, Halston Media Group, whose New York newspapers were previously TAPinto franchisees, comprises the other six member outlets of the Hyperlocal News Network.

Shapiro’s vision for the local network’s future is ambitious. Since TAPinto franchisee and Hyperlocal News Network licensee partners are all on the same platform, Shapiro hopes to build “what will eventually be the largest collaborative network of independent publishers in the country,” he said.

The number of digital news startup launches has been slowing since 2022 in Europe, Latin America, and North America, according to the new Global Project Oasis report. Global Project Oasis, a research project funded by the Google News Initiative that maps digital-native news startups globally, cited economic challenges, slow growth, and political conflicts as potential reasons for the drop.

“This decline in digital news startups may also be an indication that markets are approaching a saturation point in some places, especially in big cities, where the majority start,” the report’s authors write, “but it also may be due to the fact that many of the media in the directory started informally, which can make them hard to identify in the first year or two of operation.”

Project Oasis launched in the United States and Canada in 2020 and is led by  LION Publishers and the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media. SembraMedia, which has been conducting this sort of research in Latin America since 2015, launched Project Oasis Europe in 2022 with the European Journalism Centre, the Global Forum for Media Development, the Media and Journalism Research Center , and International Media Support.

The Global Project Oasis report published Tuesday analyzed more than 3,000 outlets from 68 countries across Europe, Latin America, and North America. The report includes 892 outlets from Latin America, 633 from Europe, and 1,533 from the United States and Canada.

The overall findings include:

• More than 60% percent of the outlets studied are for-profit organizations while 32% are nonprofits, 5% are operating informally, and 3% are hybrid organizations that combine nonprofits and for-profits.
• The average annual revenue for outlets in Europe was $649,951; the average revenue in North America was $602,821; and in Latin America: $159,825.
• In Latin America and Europe, 68% of nonprofits reported grants as their primary source of income, while 59% of for-profits said advertising is their main revenue stream. Just 13% of for-profits and 16% of non-profits said audience support was their main source of revenue. (Comparable data was not available for outlets in North America).
• Diversifying staff to include business and sales professionals can boost revenue dramatically, the study found. In Latin America and Europe, outlets with business staff earned an average of $401,000 in revenue compared to the average of $87,000 earned by outlets with no business staff.
• The report found more than 50 cases of media leaders or team members who were forced into exile. In Nicaragua, for example, 20 out of 21 outlets reported at least one team member has had to leave the country and now works for their respective organization in exile.

Regional findings include:

• More digital news organizations in the Latin American directory have stopped operating in the last year than in any of the previous nine years since SembraMedia started tracking them. As of May, 678 profiles had been removed from the Latin American directory because they’d stopped publishing, and nearly a third of those were removed in the last year.
• Grant funding has decreased, according to media outlets and journalism support organizations, as some donors shift their focus or reduce their support for Latin American media outlets. “Emergency grants helped many media survive the pandemic, but as those funds dried up, many were left with a financial hangover that has made them even more vulnerable to new threats,” the report’s authors write.
• More than 40% of European outlets studied said that said human rights issues like migration, refugees, and gender and feminism were key coverage issues for their audiences.
• In North America, the number of new outlets launched peaked in 2020 and 2021. In 2022, only 46 new organizations were launched, according to the report.
• Many North American outlets heavily rely on a single revenue source, usually local advertising. Sixty percent of publishers said locally sold advertising is a major revenue source, though the study found that outlets with multiple sources were more likely to be profitable.

Read the full report here.

Do most Americans want news about local government and politics? Do they follow news on this topic? And are they satisfied with the local political coverage they have?

Those are three of the key questions a new report from the Pew-Knight Initiative, released last week, sought to answer. (The extreme CliffsNotes is “yes,” “yes,” and, importantly, “no.”) This is the second study in the initiative’s research series focused on Americans’ relationship to local news; the first report, released in May, included the sobering findings that Americans are consuming less local news, and just 15% of them paid for local news in the past year. (Both reports draw from a survey of 5,146 U.S. adults conducted in January.)

Back to that first question: Most Americans do want news about local government — researchers found that about seven in 10 Americans are at least somewhat interested in news about local elections, and eight in 10 are comparably interested in news about local laws and policies.

Researchers also found that most Americans (68%) “often” or “sometimes” get news about local government and politics — about the same number as typically get information about local traffic. That’s below the proportion of Americans following news about weather and crime, but greater than those following coverage about schools, the economy, or local sports.

So there’s interest in, and attention paid to, local political news. But researchers found few respondents are satisfied with the local political news they get, both relatively and absolutely. Just one in four Americans are “extremely” or “very” satisfied with coverage of government and politics — meaning satisfaction in coverage of those topics is dead last in a list of eight bread-and-butter local news beats.

Why is satisfaction so low?

The researchers noted one factor they think plays a role: “Many Americans say it is not easy to find the information they need to make voting decisions in their local elections,” the authors wrote. (The report was co-written by Luxuan Wang, Michael Lipka, Katerina Eva Matsa, Christopher St. Aubin, and Elisa Shearer.)

They found “a large gap between the share of Americans who are at least somewhat interested in news about local elections (70%) and the share who say it is at least somewhat easy to find the information they need to make voting decisions in local elections (45%).” (Of that 45%, just 17% — less than one in five people — said it is “very easy” to find this information.)

The report also notes that, when you break down local political news into two sub-categories, there’s higher interest in coverage of local laws and policies than of elections — 80% of Americans are at least somewhat interested in coverage of local laws and policies, with 42% “extremely” or “very” interested.

It’s worth noting that interest in national politics outstrips interest in local politics (whereas “nearly identical shares of Americans” report following local and national news “very” or “somewhat” closely overall). In total, 81% of U.S. adults said they’re at least somewhat interested in news about presidential elections, and 83% expressed comparable levels of interest in coverage of national laws and policies.

Researchers found no partisan difference in local election interest or ease of news access, but did find that Republicans are slightly more interested than Democrats in news about presidential elections (86% to 81%).

Attached to your community? You’re probably a bigger fan of local political news

While most Americans follow at least some local political news, older Americans are far more likely than younger ones to follow such news (matching the general trend in local news consumption by age.) Among adults 65 and older, 81% get local political news at least sometimes; just 56% of adults ages 18-29 said the same. (Relatedly, a finding with concrete implications for civic engagement: “Younger adults are less likely than those ages 50 and older to say it is easy to be an informed local voter.”)

Meanwhile, across racial and ethnic groups, almost three in 10 Black Americans keep up with news about local government often — the highest proportion of any racial group.

Demographic factors aside aside, the research team zeroed in on one factor that correlates strongly with interest in and satisfaction with news about local laws and local elections: level of community attachment.

Specifically, among Americans who feel “very” attached to their communities, more than nine in 10 are at least somewhat interested in coverage of local laws and politics. That’s compared to less than seven in 10 Americans who are “not very” or “not at all” attached to their communities.

For local elections, similarly, 85% of Americans who feel “very” attached reported at least some interest in local political elections, compared to 53% of those with little sense of connection.

(Researchers found this link between community attachment and interest in local political news is consistent when controlling for voter registration status and frequency of local political news consumption.)

The pattern holds for news satisfaction. Among Americans who are very attached to their communities, 40% are “extremely” or “very” satisfied with local political coverage, while just 16% feel the same who are “not very” or “not at all” attached to their communities.

What’s more, U.S. adults who are more attached to their communities say they have an easier time finding the information they need to vote. Of those who are “very” attached to their communities, 61% reported it is “very” easy to find the information they need to vote, while just 34% of those who are not attached to their communities said the same.

We know that local news outlets, increasingly, think about the role they can play in facilitating community attachment and connection. More of them are taking on and articulating a civic connector role in the communities they cover and serve.

The most common source of local political news: Friends and family

Josh Benton recently wrote for Nieman Lab about the extremely fragmented ways Americans received the seismic (international) breaking news about Joe Biden dropping out of the election.

I personally received that news from simultaneous texts from my family group chat and my boyfriend. It turns out my experience is pretty representative of the most common way to receive local political news, too: 70% of Americans “often” or “sometimes” get news about local government and politics from friends, family, and neighbors, and that pattern holds across age groups.

The runner-up most common source overall is local news itself, with 66% of Americans getting their local political news from local media often or sometimes. But it’s worth noting that that number varies significantly across age groups — older Americans are the most likely to receive local political news from news outlets (with 75% of adults 65 and older getting news this way often or sometimes) while only 53% of adults 18-29 said the same.

On the other hand, those younger adults are far more likely to see local political news on social media; 71% see this news there often or sometimes, compared to 36% of adults 65 and older.

You can read the full report here.