Journalism Today. 18 Nov 2024

By Matthew Leake and Eduardo Suárez

??? 3 top news stories

1. An Italian investigative team receives death threats. Earlier this month the editorial team behind Report, one of the most prominent investigative TV programmes in Italy, received death threats on social media. Someone said they should receive the same treatment as the journalists from Charlie Hebdo. The threats followed a documentary exploring how Israel has become a policy lab for the far right around the world. | Read

?? From our archive. Back in October our journalist Marina Adami published an article on the decline of press freedom in Italy. The article digs into the risks posed by litigation and the future of the country’s public broadcaster. | Read in English · Leggere in italiano

2. Bluesky is gaining momentum. Will it last? Digital platform Bluesky reached 19 million users over the weekend. With many journalists and academics joining, the platform is seen as a possible substitute for X, increasingly perceived as a breeding ground for conspiracy theories. But we’ve been here before, with platforms such as Mastodon, Post and Threads gaining ground and fizzling out. So is the exodus now for real? This piece by Mike Isaac on Bluesky is a great primer on the platform, its origins and the challenges it faces. | Read?

• A few tidbits from the piece. Bluesky’s CEO is 33-year-old Jay Graber. The platform has 20 employees and is built with an open protocol, meaning the decision making is out of the hands of any one company or group of people. More than 116,000 Americans deactivated their X accounts the day after the election. But decisions by big newspapers such as the Guardian and La Vanguardia have also nudged users in other countries into joining the new network.??

?? More pieces on the changing nature of social media by: Ian Dunt | Sarah Scire | María Ramírez | Gaby Hinsliff | Carmela Ríos | Pedro Vallín?

3. Did incidental exposure to news help Trump? A new piece by New Yorker journalist Nathan Heller looks at the role that news consumption may have played in the result of the US election. The key point in the piece is taken from researcher Pablo Boczkowski, co-author of Argentina’s country page of our Digital News Report. An increasing number of people, he says, are “rubbed by the news,” rather than getting news by seeking it out. This is a point our researchers have often made in the past when writing about news avoidance, young audiences and trust in news.?

• A quote: “In a country where more than half of adults have literacy below a sixth-grade level, ambient information, however thin and wrong, is more powerful than actual facts. Donald Trump has polluted the well of received wisdom and what passes for common sense in America. Until Democrats, too, figure out how to message ambiently, they’ll find themselves fighting not just a candidate but what the public holds to be self-evident truths.” | Read

?? From our archive. A few weeks before the election, we spoke to researcher Ben Toff about the role news avoiders and people who don’t consume much news could play in this year’s election. Ben is the co-author of a seminal book on the topic and the leader of our Trust in News Project. Here’s one of the most alarming quotes in the piece: “News avoiders see journalists as part of the same disconnected elites. They see them just like politicians who are out to serve themselves.” | Read

?? Chart of the day

?? Attention vs respect for time. Despite many audiences feeling overwhelmed by the amount of news there is to consume, more than half of the 270 news leaders we surveyed for our annual Trends and Predictions report say their companies are more focused on maximising attention rather than being respectful of audiences’ time. This reflects the dilemma that many face between immediate business and audience needs. | Read the report

?? Coffee break

YouTube has become the main destination for consuming podcasts in the US as many audiences actively watch rather than passively listen to their favourite creators. | Read

Some of France’s biggest billionaires are behind a group investing in France’s oldest journalism school, Superior School of Journalism of Paris, to the concern of several worried for journalistic independence from moneyed interests. | Read

The editor of Scientific American Laura Helmuth has resigned after after she made a series of online posts on election night criticising Trump supporters for being “fascist” and “bigoted”. | Read

The Wall Street Journal is testing AI-generated article summaries, checked by an editor, at the top of news stories alongside explanations of how it works with AI tools. | Read

A Palestinian journalist from the West Bank, Rasha Harzallah, has been sentenced to six months in jail by an Israeli military court. She was detained in June without charges or trial. | Read

?? One piece from our archive.

An AI tool for explainer videos. One of the best creators and advocates for vertical explainer videos is Sophia Smith Galer. Earlier this year she explained in a piece on our website how she launched an AI chatbot called Sophina to help creators and newsrooms emulate the type of content she’s gone viral for, particularly on TikTok. Sophina repurposes existing written content into a script, particularly useful for those who have limited time or knowledge of what makes such explainer videos successful. “I want a healthier internet, and more journalists making good content on Instagram and TikTok will help make that happen,” Sophia says. | Read

• Sophia has just been awarded the Georgina Henry prize for innovation by Women in Journalism. Judges called her project Sophina “an exciting innovation in an important new journalistic field. Not only does it explore the commercial benefits of AI, this eponymous innovation is also dedicated to combating disinformation.”

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