Weirdly refreshing news

Media statistic of the week 

Karin von Abrams has a new report for eMarketer on Global Social Network Users 2020. Among other stats, the report shows that in 2020, 3.23 billion people, or 80.7% of internet users worldwide, will have visited a social network at least monthly. In 2021, that number will reach 3.35 billion. China and India continue to rank first and second as the countries with the largest populations of social media users. While Facebook remains the leading social network worldwide, and its reach will remain unchallenged through 2024, other platforms are registering higher annual growth rates.

This week in media history

On December 28, 2002, after recruiting a team of old colleagues from SocialNet and PayPal to work on a new idea with him, Reid Hoffman founded LinkedIn. The platform would officially launch six months later, on May 5, 2003. You can hear my Venture Voice interview with Reid here. 

This past week in the media industry 

‘We regret the error’

It’s been a tough year all around, but at least we can get a good laugh out of these. Pick your favorite from Sara Fischer's round-up at Axios of the best news media corrections of 2020.

Of course, it’s not all fun and games (even when it’s in reference to fun and games), because as Frank Sennett says, “The fourth item on this list makes me wonder how many Baltimore Sun readers were literally driven insane by the error.” Like we said, it’s been a tough year all around.

Baron out (eventually)

“Hmmm, an opening for the top job at WaPo soon,” tweets Esther Davidowitz. Vanity Fair’s Joe Pompeo has some details about Marty Baron’s plans at The Washington Post, reporting that Baron’s Exit Is Now a Question of “When, Not If.” But, Pompeo notes, Baron has indicated he doesn’t plan to step down before his staff can return to the newsroom, which is looking like June 1 at the earliest.”

Pompeo mentions a few potential successors, but Molly McCluskey notices, “This @VanityFair article about Baron’s possible replacement at WaPo is an article: ~about a male editor ~written by a male journalist ~in which only male candidates are floated by name as replacements. Our industry is exhausting.”

The accidental media mogul

Meanwhile, here’s “.?@benyt with a great look at the simple journalistic entrepreneurship of Heather Cox Richardson,” tweets Michelle Jaconi, who quotes from Ben Smith’s New York Times column about Substack’s breakout star, Heather Cox Richardson, “She’s writing for people who want to leave an article feeling ‘smarter not dumber...’” As Jim Dao says, that’s some “Weirdly refreshing news.”

“Like the other Substack writers, Dr. Richardson is succeeding because she’s offering something you can’t find in the mainstream media, and indeed that many editors would assume was too boring to assign,” Smith writes. He adds, “What is unusual is to bring a historian’s confident context to the day’s mundane politics.” Debra J. Saunders calls her “The accidental media mogul.” And it’s “Kind of inspiring!” tweets Paddy Manning.

Would be great, but...

Katie Robertson reported last week at The New York Times that The Village Voice is rising from the dead. The owner of LA Weekly, Brian Calle, plans to restart The Voice next month with the revival of the website and a planned quarterly print edition.

On the one hand, Tracey Lindeman is “(Cautiously?) excited to see what this means for the future of alt weeklies.” On the other, “I'm not sure if it’d be possible to further downplay what a mess LA Weekly has been since Calle bought it,” Willy Blackmore shares. 

As Rosie Gray says, “it would be great if the Village Voice could be revived with a nice owner who really cared about it, but…” However, Scott Tobias says, “Headline accurate in the sense that things that rise from the dead are zombies and should be avoided at all costs unless you can lop off their heads.”

Moving on from zombies to vampires, “How many more cuts can @chicagotribune afford?” Leigh Giangreco wonders. “Odds are the vampires at Alden Global Capital won’t stop the bleeding. The Trib deserves better owners.” Giangreco links to the report by Ally Marotti of Crain's Chicago Business that Tribune Publishing is dangling another buyout offer to newsroom staff. The offer marks Trib’s second round of buyouts for the Chicago newsroom this year. 

It just got worse

It’s not zombies or vampires, but “Holy crap!” says Bob Mondello. “This terrific @davidfolkenflik piece is a virtual master class in journalistic full disclosure...right down to the postscript. Fascinating read.” At NPR, David Folkenflik reveals how Michael Barbaro, the host of “The Daily,” has clouded the New York Times effort to restore trust after the ‘Caliphate’ podcast scandal, and basically, “If you’ve been following the debacle involving the ?@nytimes? podcast ‘Caliphate,’ ?@davidfolkenflik? reports it just got worse,” tweets Renee Montagne.

Garnet Henderson sees it as “More proof that transparency is what should matter in journalism, not the appearance of being unbiased (because nobody is unbiased).” But also, “God give me the confidence of this absolute weenie chastising people for saying his fiancee’s show, which was retracted, was retracted,” tweets Laura Wagner. 

Biased toward outrage

So, um, “social media may have been a mistake.” Emily Stewart links to her story at Vox on America’s growing fake news problem, in one chart, specifically a chart from Axios’s Sara Fischer. According to an analysis released by NewsGuard, which Fischer had reported on, websites that provide “unreliable news” more than doubled their share of social media interactions, from 8% in 2019 to 17% in 2020.

For all the complaints about censorship and bias, it turns out that, “rather than bias toward a certain political leaning, social media algorithms are often biased toward outrage,” Stewart writes. Research shows people are increasingly being drawn to unreliable content, and “that content can influence all sorts of attitudes and cause confusion on even basic facts,” she notes.

Journalists jailed

Reuters reports that Ethiopian police have arrested a Reuters cameraman, Kumerra Gemechu, and will keep him in custody for at least two weeks, his family said. He has not been charged and no reason was provided for his arrest.

“Chinese citizen journalist #ZhangZhan has been sentenced to four years in prison for reporting from Wuhan during the #COVID19 lockdown. I chronicled her journey to Wuhan and talked to those who knew her well.” William Yang links to his story at Vice, China Jails Reporter Who Covered Wuhan Outbreak. Her Crime? Journalism. Yang also reports that at least three other citizen journalists, Chen Qiushi, Fang Bin and Li Zehua, have disappeared from public view after documenting the situation in Wuhan. 

Don’t even know what to say

Welp, in case you missed it, you don’t want to be the only one, so here’s Stephanie Clifford’s story for Elle about The Journalist and the Pharma Bro. 

The gist: Christie Smythe quit her job at Bloomberg and got divorced in order to pursue a relationship with pharma bro Martin Shkreli, aka “one of the least-liked men in the world,” as Clifford puts it, and as Joshua Topolsky says, “Holy hell this story is so depressing.” “O.M.G. Everyone’s tweeting about this for a reason,” notes Nicholas Riccardi. Because “this Shkreli story is a car crash I could not look away from,” tweets Kim Janssen.

Like many of us, Rodrigo Campos is at a loss, tweeting, “If anyone makes sense of this beyond... I don’t even know. This is too 2020 for me rn.” Jason Kersey is no help: “I read every word of this and I don’t even know what to say.” 

FWIW, the follow-up, Christie Smythe, 24 Hours Later, is also not really helpful. “Just when you think things can’t get any crazier…” as Lee DeVito says. But on the bright side, Daniel Papscun shares, “I like how I’m even more confused now than I was before I read it.”

How to get people to buy magazines

As CNN’s Kerry Flynn points out, Korean pop band BTS really can do anything. Now it’s got print magazines flying off the stands. Flynn writes about how BTS cover stories have fueled magazine sales at Variety, WSJ. Magazine and Esquire, among others. 

The impact is pretty remarkable, with Variety, for example, printing 30% more copies than usual of its Grammy issue, which featured BTS on the cover, and creating a digital version for sale. And for the first time since its launch more than ten years ago, WSJ. Magazine had to reprint its November issue with BTS on the cover due to overwhelming demand.

Some (mostly) good news to end the year

And now we know how to get people to buy books. In what Pamela Paul calls “Some (mostly) good news to end the year,” Elizabeth A. Harris reports at The New York Times on a Surprise Ending for Publishers: In 2020, Business Was Good. It turns out, without a lot of other activities available to them in 2020, people have been reading a lot — or at the very least, they’ve been buying a lot of books. It wasn’t a great year for much, but as Andrea Barbalich says, “2020 was a great year for reading.” 

A few more

• Poynter’s Kristen Hare is used to covering media layoffs — she’s been doing it since she became a media reporter in 2013. But, she says, this year was especially brutal. She writes about it in her piece, What I’ve learned from covering a year of media layoffs and closures. Joe Lanane praises the “Great perspective from @kristenhare on a dire year in news media.”
• With details from their new study in Human Nature Behaviour, researchers Sean Fischer, Kokil Jaidka and Yphtach Lelkes reveal in The Washington Post how Google is hurting local news by sending readers — and advertising dollars — away from local news outlets. “You can do something about this,” urges Larry Ryckman. “Find trusted local news sources and go directly to them. Support them if you can. We all suffer when local news goes away.”
• Laurel Wamsley reports at NPR that Russian lawmakers have approved a range of new measures that could block social media sites — and stifle dissent. One law would allow for the blocking of foreign websites that it says “discriminate” against Russian media, while another would allow people convicted of slander to be jailed for up to two years. 
• Since 2019, Spotify has spent hundreds of millions of dollars investing in podcasts. At CNBC, Jessica Bursztynsky takes a look at how it plans to make them pay off.

From the Muck Rack Team

Journalists and news teams are under constant pressure to deliver stories that are digestible as well as engaging. To hold your audience’s attention, it helps to understand the basics of how to create appealing, visual content. On the Muck Rack Blog, Jonathan Harley, who leads Canva's newsrooms and media business initiative, has put together 5 design tips every journalist and media pro needs to know.

We published more than 200 blog posts to the Muck Rack Blog this year — more than any year prior. Check out The 20 most popular Muck Rack posts in 2020.

It’s our last round-up of the cringe in 2020. Don’t miss This month in bad PR pitches: December 2020.