Patterns in philanthropy leave small newsrooms behind. Can that change?

[Nieman Lab: The Daily Digest] Thursday, February 8, 2024 [Patterns in philanthropy leave small newsrooms behind. Can that change?]( “All of these are choices that funders make, and they could choose differently if they wanted to.” By Sophie Culpepper. [Nonprofit news site Chalkbeat gets a shoutout on ABC’s hit show “Abbott Elementary”]( What We’re Reading WIRED / Lauren Goode [Google prepares for a future where search isn’t king →]( “Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai still loves the web. He wakes up every morning and reads Techmeme, a news aggregator resplendent with links, accessible only via the web. The web is dynamic and resilient, he says, and can still—with help from a search engine—provide whatever information a person is looking for. Yet the web and its critical search layer are changing.” Axios / Sara Fischer [Dow Jones CEO: “We’re not going to be a lifestyle company” →]( “It’s about knowing your identity and knowing the area in which you play. For us, that is business and we’re not confused about that,” said CEO Almar Latour, appearing to reference [The New York Times’ business strategy](. “We’re not going to be a lifestyle company. We’re not going to be a gaming company. We’re not going to be a cooking company.” Washington Post / Ashley Fetters Maloy [The millennial women leading a new era of fashion journalism →]( “Reading [former Vanity Fair and The New Yorker editor] Tina Brown’s memoir was so fab because I was like, ‘Ohhh, you just got to give parties and also edit amazing, amazing content.’ There was no, ‘Oh, I have to be an influencer and I have to post from this show and run off somewhere else and then check in on the video and — oh, my Slack’s dinging.'” Washington Post / Taylor Lorenz [An internet media company launches a plan to cover the election for Gen Z →]( “The company, Betches, said it will partner with the creator Vitus ‘V’ Spehar a.k.a. @underthedesknews on a political podcast called ‘American Fever Dream.’ Spehar rose to prominence on TikTok after covering the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and now posts daily news to her over 3 million followers on the app.” (Spehar also [once anchored]( the LA Times’ TikTok.) Vulture / Nicholas Quah [Spotify’s new Joe Rogan deal brings the company full circle →]( “When I say podcasting these days has started to look like what it did in its earlier years, I’m also referring to how wide swaths of today’s podcast mainstays are broadly the same as in the late 2000s: chat shows, iterations of what you’d find on broadcast radio, Rogan. (And Bill Simmons, and Marc Maron … and even Roman Mars. They’re all still here!) Perhaps most importantly, the push toward walled gardens has been abandoned for now, with podcasting swinging back to open publishing.” Press Gazette / Charlotte Tobitt [News Corp — publisher of The Wall Street Journal and more — says a deal with AI companies is “imminent” →]( “News Corp now has more than seven million subscriptions … more than 4.9 million of these are within the Dow Jones portfolio.” What Works / Ellen Clegg [A funding dispute in Baltimore highlights a challenge over nonprofit news and racial equity →]( “MLK50, a nonprofit, is not what I’d call an advocacy site. It doesn’t endorse candidates for election. There are guest essays, but the focus is on investigative reporting and explanatory journalism. [Wendi] Thomas and her executive editor, Adrienne Johnson Martin, focus their reporting team on issues like public health, workplace safety, affordable housing and the racial wealth gap. In a city that is 66% Black, Thomas noted, that makes some observers view MLK50 as a niche publication.” the Guardian [Fox News showed New York vigilantes confronting a “migrant” on live TV →]( “As Sean Hannity was interviewing the founder of the Guardian Angels, a New York City-based vigilante group known for targeting immigrants, an off-screen disturbance took place and the camera panned to show group members confronting an unidentified man, pushing him to the sidewalk and placing him in a headlock.” AJC / Adrianne Murchison [Novelist Tina McElroy Ansa was a trailblazer at The Atlanta Constitution →]( Ansa began her career as the first Black woman hired at the newspaper. The AJC is telling her story as part of Black History Month. Boston Globe / Mark Shanahan [Amid ratings challenges at GBH, an external investigation is probing the NPR station’s workplace culture →]( “People assume there’s a higher level of civility at public media stations, but I want to correct that. People may assume that based on ‘Masterpiece Theater,’ but newsrooms in public radio are exactly the same as they are anyplace else.” Substack / Richard J. Tofel [What just happened at the LA Times? →]( “[Patrick Soon-Shiong] couldn’t quite ever decide if he wanted to run the business itself, even while he continued work in other fields, or to have it run by others—and no one else was sufficiently empowered to do so.” WBUR [“The main character is the voter”: How one small newsroom is covering the election →]( Prism is “working to change the narrative by centering the election’s impact on citizens.” Defector / Tom Ley [There’s nothing innovative about Semafor’s AI partnership →]( “A good question to ask whenever a media company rolls out a shiny new product is: Which came first, the product or the money? In other words, did Semafor launch Signals—which will now demand time and energy from its staff necessary to pump out a dozen short aggregations every day—because of its inherent journalistic value or because Microsoft came to them and said, Here’s a bag of money. Find some way to make our AI tools look valuable?” [Nieman Lab]( / [Fuego]( [Twitter]( / [Facebook]( [View email in browser]( [Unsubscribe]( You are receiving this daily newsletter because you signed up for for it at www.niemanlab.org. Nieman Journalism Lab Harvard University 1 Francis Ave.Cambridge, MA 02138 [Add us to your address book](