Good blog about a bad blog

Media statistic of the week

Some interesting numbers on the digital ad revenue front.

“The U.S. is expected to make history in 2026 when it becomes the first major media market in the world to see digital newspaper ad revenue eclipse print newspaper ad revenue , according to a new report from PwC,” reports Axios’ Sara Fischer .?

She adds: “U.S. newspaper publishers will lose $2.4 billion in ad investment between 2021 and 2026, largely due to print advertising losses. While digital will grow marginally, it won't be enough to stop the industry from losing ad revenues overall.”?

This past week in the media industry?

A very authoritarian strategy

For The Washington Post, Mark J. Miller outlines what’s happening in Uvalde, Texas as journalists attempt to report on the aftermath of the horrific school shooting there last month.

In the piece, Journalists in Uvalde are stonewalled, hassled, threatened with arrest , he writes: “Journalists have been threatened with arrest for ‘trespassing’ outside public buildings. They have been barred from public meetings and refused basic information about what police did during the May 24 attack. After several early, error-filled news conferences, officials have routinely turned down interview requests and refused to hold news briefings,” he writes.

“Texas is super confusing. They're Johnny on the spot when it comes to abortion but are holding back information about what happened when 19 young lives were lost in Uvalde. That's screwed up,” tweets Carissa Pavlica .

Karrie Jacobs adds, “A very authoritarian strategy: When something horrific happens you deal with it by suppressing the story.”

More police interference in the wake of Roe

The Los Angeles Times’ Kevin Rector has more police interference news in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Roe vs. Wade decision last week.

“Journalists and press observers said the incident fit a broader pattern of aggressive and seemingly unlawful treatment of journalists by LAPD officers during the protests, which followed the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling overturning the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision,” he writes.?

“Despite strengthened laws to protect the media’s right to cover a protest, the always fascist @LAPDHQ did ZERO about the treatment of media at an abortion rights protest in LA,” tweets Brian Ross .

“For all the talk of reform in the LAPD, they never change. Journalists were pushed, struck with batons, forced out of areas where they had a right to observe police activity and blocked from entering areas where police and protesters were clashing,” adds Erika Smith .

Off the charts traffic for SCOTUSblog

“Every time the Supreme Court hands down crucial opinions, tens of thousands of people follow along at the same virtual place: SCOTUSblog,” writes CNN’s Brian Stelter .

The site was founded by Tom Goldstein and Amy Howe, a husband and wife team —and according to Stetler, it has become *the* place for breaking SCOTUS news for journalists, TV pundits and attorneys.

Stetler asked Goldstein how the site makes money: “Goldstein, a partner at Goldstein & Russell, P.C., has argued dozens of cases before the justices. He views SCOTUSblog as a ‘public service,’ he told me, not a profit-seeking venture. In fact, it loses about $400,000 per year, mostly because it employs several full-time staffers. ‘But it does have a little indirect effect on my reputation as a lawyer,’ he noted. He has mulled a subscription model, but said ‘I just don't see the people we most want to educate deciding to pay.’

Needless to say, traffic to the site was off the charts last week.

Canceled

Last week, New York Times’ The Cut published a piece titled “Canceled at 17.” This week, Gawker’s Tarpley Hitt reports on the cover story’s missed opportunity for “both transparency and righting social wrongs.”

Hitt explains: “Last week, we outlined some of the crucial omissions in ‘Canceled at 17 ,’ a lengthy feature about the social plight of a high school student who had been “canceled” after showing a naked picture of his girlfriend to friends at a party. Now, it appears that the piece withheld some even more relevant context: that one of writer Elizabeth Weil’s children attended the school at the center of the story.

Hitt’s piece makes several good points about transparency and disclosures in journalism.

“That author of that @NYMag canceled-teen story has a child at the school that's at the center of the controversy -- a fact not disclosed in the piece. Perhaps that was to protect the kids' identities. But if so, it came at a cost,” tweets Bill Grueskin .?

“Oh, I thought most of those big magazines didn't want folks too close to the story? That's why they don't let other marginalized folks write about their communities, yeah? Hmmmmm,” writes Mike Williams .?

“Good blog about a bad blog,” adds Chris Thompson .

Diversifying the book biz

“For much of its history, book publishing, especially literary book publishing, was an industry built and run by rich, white men,” writes Marcela Valdes for the New York Times in her poignant piece which explores the push to diversify the book business .?

Valdes tweeted that she spent a year reporting for this story.

“Absolutely fantastic exploration of the repeated attempts at diversifying big publishing and what's happening this time around. Thorough, nuanced, deep historical context. Just awesome stuff from @valdesmarcela ,” tweets John Warner .

Valdes dives into the history of the traditionally white publishing industry from the 1920s until today and features Lisa Lucas, SVP and publisher at Pantheon Books.

“The publishing industry does not deserve @likaluca but readers DO and we are very lucky,” tweets Meaghan O'Connell .

LA Times gets a ‘burner account’

Over at Nieman Lab, Sarah Scire has the details on The 404 — a new Los Angeles Times project being billed as “a burner account.”

What does that mean exactly?

Scire explains: “Known informally as the meme team during its formation, the 404 is ‘the first-of-its-kind collective in any major U.S. newsroom.’ Unlike other social teams — including the Times’ own audience engagement staff — the 404 does not create content to amplify existing journalism. And readers won’t see work by the 404 on the Times’ website. Instead, the 404 has been tasked with ‘continually inventing new types of experimental content’ in hopes of reaching younger, more diverse audiences who are not already reading or engaging with The L.A. Times.”

There has been lots of buzz around The 404 in the journalism community.

“I'm absolutely obsessed with this new team at @latimes !” tweeted Brian Patrick Byrne while Ben Whitelaw added “Big fan of the non-traditional experience within the @latimes ' 'meme team', inc puppeteering and sports announcing. I expect there's been a clash of cultures between old guard and new hires (as touched on here). Hope they share more on how to overcome.”?

“.@latimes hired a damn puppeteer and I'm here for it,” said Rachel Molenda .

Not everyone is jazzed though. “This will end badly,” tweeted Brady Dale .?

Behind-the-scenes of the Jan. 6 hearings

Sarah Ellison , Josh Dawsey and Jacqueline Alemany dive deep into “The subtle stagecraft behind the Jan. 6 hearings” for The Washington Post.

They write:

“Timing is everything for the select committee, which is attempting to turn a year-long investigative grind into something like must-see television, spread out over at least a half-dozen live-broadcast hearings, though some conservative critics see it as more of a televised prosecution.?

To tell the complicated story of how Donald Trump and his allies tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election means finding a coherent narrative and breaking it down into chapters, with witnesses rolled out in a careful and deliberate chronology.”

“This story comes v close to what I was asking: How the Jan 6 cttee decided to upend its usual hearings format. But it doesn't answer the critical ? of innovation: Who led the change in thinking & how did they persuade this body to take a novel approach?” tweets E.B. Boyd .?

Book bombs

Sounds like people aren’t as interested in tell-alls about the Trump era as publishers initially thought.

“A number of top aides to the 45th president churned out books after his presidency ended. The public isn’t buying,” reads the tagline of POLITICO’s recent article by Daniel Lippman , Meridith McGraw and Max Tani .?

Here are some telling figures:

“The memoir of Deborah Birx, the Covid response coordinator under Trump, has sold fewer than 6,000 copies; Dr. Scott Atlas’ book sold 27,013 copies; Dr. Ben Carson’s book sold 21,786 copies; former White House press secretary turned Trump critic Stephanie Grisham sold 38,249 books; counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway has sold 42,273 books since it was published in late May; and former defense secretary Mark Esper sold 20,900 books.”

One anomaly? “The one Trump post-White House book sales that did best appears to be Peter Navarro’s, whose “In Trump Time ” has sold 80,218 copies of his book so far,” the trio write.

“I have always wondered who the audiences are for these books. I now have the answer, no one!” tweets Emily C. Singer .

It’s TikTok’s world

If you still think of TikTok as a cute little dancing app for teens, it’s time to think again.

“The free, Chinese-owned video-sharing service sometimes gets described as a social network, but that description masks what it really is: a colossally powerful entertainment app that keeps viewers glued to an endless stream of clips,” writes Peter Kafka for Recode.?

Kafka makes the argument that as a recession looms, TV will soon compete with platforms like TikTok for eyeballs.

In his piece, It’s TikTok’s world. Can TV live in it? , Kafka writes, “And TikTok is getting bigger every day: It now says it has 1 billion monthly users, but even that number likely understates its importance, because TikTok users spend a lot of time on TikTok — a year ago, the company was telling advertisers its users were spending nearly 90 minutes a day on the app. By contrast, US TV and streaming watchers were spending nearly five hours a day watching their shows and movies — but TV skews very old, and TikTok is very young.”

“TikTok is the most addictive video service I’ve ever used. Reminds me of early days of YouTube but on steroids. Crazy how so many traditional media execs can’t see that it is eating their screen time,” tweets Alex Weprin .?

Brian Manzullo makes a good point about TikTok’s impact on news media: “TikTok's meteoric rise impacts news media, too. We live in an attention economy, and every second spent on TikTok is a second NOT spent on a news site or app. And it's on us to respond to that.”

A few more

• Add it to your list of things to watch! Yesterday, HBO premiered “Endangered ,” a documentary about the perils facing journalists around the world. The documentary is produced by Ronan Farrow. Michael Malone from NEXT TV reports, “The film chronicles a year in the life of four journalists living and working in democratic countries where freedom of the press has historically been considered a “given,” according to HBO.”
• For CNET, Oscar Gonzalez published a fascinating piece about YouTubers and Twitch streamers who are combating misinformation through debate .
• In a piece for the New York Post that generated some buzz this week, David Mastio opined about being demoted as USA Today’s deputy editorial page editor after he tweeted “People who are pregnant are also women.” He writes, “Gannett’s top editors and publishers are filling the company with a cadre of young college graduates who share a narrow “woke” ideology that is alien to the values of most of its readers.”
• Thomson Reuters named Paul Bascobert as president of Reuters News , reports Kenneth Li . Bascobert is a former CEO of U.S. print giant Gannett Co.
• MSNBC has named Alex Wagner to succeed Rachel Maddow as the weekday host of its 9 p.m. hour four days a week, according to Benjamin Mullin for the New York Times. “MSNBC said Ms. Wagner is the only Asian American to host a prime-time cable news program,” Mullin writes.
• Meta pulls support for CrowdTangle , a tool used by researchers to keep misinformation in check, reports Davey Alba for Bloomberg News. “It’s almost like they don’t want to know,” tweets Teddy Amenabar .
• Twitter is testing out longform content with Twitter Notes , reports Sarah Perez for TechCrunch. She explains what the new feature will entail: “With Twitter Notes, as the upcoming feature is called, users will be able to create articles using rich formatting and uploaded media, which can then be tweeted and shared with followers upon publishing.”

From the Muck Rack Team

The Trevor Project is the world’s largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization for LGBTQ youth. Muck Rack recently caught up with the organization’s VP of Communications, Kevin Wong, to chat about his career path, his commitment to mental health and his message to PR pros about Pride Month. Head over to the blog for that interview, The Trevor Project’s Kevin Wong on impact-driven work and mental health .