As events unfold the more unlikely it seems to me that Will Lewis will be in charge of the Washington Post by summer's end.

Why do I say that?

First, it's clear that many news stories are yet to come about his time in Murdoch's employ, and other adventures during his climb. 1/ The drip drip drip of disclosure is hard to survive. That Lewis has already chosen not to comment on his Murdoch years is a handicap if new information comes out, but if he reverses himself that is likely to feed the beast even more. 2/

"Fewer grievances, more policy: Trump aides and allies push for a post-South Carolina 'pivot.'"

By Matt Dixon, Kristen Welker, Jonathan Allen, Vaughn Hillyard, Garrett Haake and Carol E. Lee.



NBC has been featuring this. I have some comments

[Thread]nbcnews.com/politics/donal… Thanks for filing this report on time last night.

As your post-publication editor, I have a few questions. You're all experienced professionals so I assume you have good reasons for every call you made here. I just want know what they are. Ready?

2/

News! (And there's time for this to become a wave.) Public radio in Vermont announced it will dial back the horse race and take a 'citizens agenda' approach to covering the 2024 election. 1/vermontpublic.org/local-news/202… In the 'citizens agenda' model, election coverage begins when you ask the public you serve a simple question: what do you want the candidates to be discussing as they compete for votes? Then you build your coverage around their priority list, rather than "strategy" and polls. 2/

Last week CNN asked me how I explain the downturn in the news industry: big layoffs, scant investment, no recovery in sight.

A list of factors is not an explanation, I said. But that is what I have.

So here's my thread. None of it should be news to people in the business. 0/ Factors converging on the news industry to hollow it out, weaken the product, scare investors, and threaten jobs:

1/ With a few exceptions, the search for a stable business model has been unsuccessful, in part because the problem changes faster than R & D in the news business.

Long and complex story. Begins near the start of the 20th century, with the slow professionalization of journalism, which had been a working class trade.

"Objectivity" was a kind of peace treaty among publishers, advertisers and journalists. Each got something they wanted... 1/

https://twitter.com/TerenceBegleyNJ/status/1746211128508600437

The owners wanted a work force that wasn't too political or opinionated, so as to make the advertisers comfortable. The advertisers wanted to offend no one who might buy their products. The journalists wanted cultural status and freedom from the owners or advertisers meddling. 2/

I read every word of this long (VERY long) profile of Jim Jordan by the Washington Post.

"Relentless Wrestler" is the title. [gift link]

As the pages wore on, their central conceit began to seem thinner and thinner, which led to this short thread. 1/wapo.st/47248Fy By conceit I mean a device for organizing the profile that lifts it beyond a series of anecdotes, and "to be sure" paragraphs.

Here the device is unmistakable: Jordan today is the same guy he was as a championship wrestler: relentless, disciplined, "old school"— and a winner. 2/

"Not the odds, but the stakes."

That's been my shorthand for the principle that could most improve election coverage in 2024. Not "who's going to win?" but the consequences for our democracy. Not the odds but the stakes.

Today something happened with this idea. THREAD. 1/ "We’re demoting the horse race and elevating constituent interests."

That's the headline on today's announcement from the editor of Colorado Newsline, Quentin Young.



His newsroom is officially putting "not the odds, but the stakes" into practice. 2/coloradonewsline.com/2023/10/12/wer…

I said I would try to have an open mind as I watched Meet the Press today to see how NBC handled its interview with Trump and the debut of a new host. After viewing the show, reading NBC's fact check, and monitoring the program's Twitter feed, I am left with these impressions. 1/ NBC chose a "zero innovations" model for how to conduct and present a Trump interview at this stage in his degradation. Everything was predictable, nothing was surprising, and new host Kristen Welker did nothing to justify going to the well again with another Trump Q & A. 2/

Bombshell: Texas A&M will pay $1 million to journalism professor Kathleen McElroy in a settlement after pushback to her hiring led the school to water down its offer. An internal report also showed that the president of the university was deeply involved. texastribune.org/2023/08/03/tex… "Some of the system board members wanted the new journalism program to 'get high-quality Aggie journalist[s] with conservative values into the market,' according to a text message between regents Jay Graham and David Bagget." texastribune.org/2023/08/03/tex…

In 37 years as a faculty member, I have never seen anything like this video.

It's the faculty senate at Texas A&M meeting with the university's president, Katherine Banks, the day before she resigned.

The reason she resigned is clear from the clip. 1/ Background:

Texas A&M recruits a new journalism dean, Kathleen McElroy, who held a similar job at UT Austin. She's super qualified (and black) and an alum of the school. Ex-New York Times too.

They announce her appointment in a splashy event.

Then... 2/texastribune.org/2023/07/11/tex…

When you feel you have to conceal a view like this from your viewers, night after night, you develop a deep contempt for them because, night after night, they fall for what you in your heart know is an act. view.newsletters.cnn.com/messages/16782… Suckers.

From the Reliable Sources newsletter. You wonder how Carlson can manage all his hatreds. His hate for the libs is constitutional. His hate for viewers, to whom he could never speak the truth about Trump because they would revolt. His "passionate" hate for Trump. Now it's Fox that hates Tucker!

Just a sea of hate.

The latest filing by Dominion Voting Systems in its defamation suit against Fox theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… nails something critics have long argued for.

Fox is not a news organization. It's something else.

But what is this thing? I will try to answer that.

Next slide, please. 1/ The Dominion suit establishes that Fox stars (like Tucker Carlson) and executives (like CEO Suzanne Scott) were fearful and enraged when some of their own people blundered into delivering a true and accurate report about the 2020 election.

Think about that... 2/

You may recall. An investigative journalist in Las Vegas, Jeff German, was stabbed. Clark County Public Administrator Robert Telles was charged with murder. German was working on a story about Telles the week he was killed. Thing is, German was working on other stories too. 1/3 To continue Jeff German’s work, and as an act of solidarity, "The Washington Post teamed up with his newspaper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, to complete one of the stories he’d planned to pursue."

He had heard about a Ponzi scheme... washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/… 2/3

"CNN won’t ban guests who have supported the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen, but the network will attempt to keep conversations with those people in safe zones of truth, said people familiar with Licht’s thinking." cnbc.com/2022/10/26/cnn… “...Most trusted brand in the world when it comes to journalism, right up there with the BBC,” Licht said. “I think what happened a little bit here in the past was it’s easy to take the quick sugar high of ratings and outrage. So, I’m trying to do no harm to a great brand.”

In 2020 I wrote this thread. Tonight I accidentally deleted it. So I had to do a reconstruction job using the Internet Archive.

The thread is about something pretty big that I feel I got wrong. And it gets more and more wrong as time moves on. So if that's your thing... 1/ In January of 2009, I published at my site: "Audience Atomization Overcome: Why the Internet Weakens the Authority of the Press." archive.pressthink.org/2009/01/12/ato… It was one of my most successful posts. But it had a flaw that I now consider fatal. This thread is the story of that flaw. 2/

"... news organizations that have built world-class climate desks but then let their business desk cover the fast-fashion giant Shein or the quarterly earnings report of Saudi Aramco as if there was no climate expertise in their newsroom whatsoever." ebu.ch/news/2022/10/w… "When I compare climate journalism across the globe, I see the biggest difference between the United States and the rest of the world. In the US, comparatively more journalistic energy is still spent on having to prove and defend basic climate science..." ebu.ch/news/2022/10/w…

If you can't clearly answer that question, your thinking on how to be solidly truthful but not overly ideological has not advanced very far.

Buzbee is editor of the Washington Post. This is by @Jon_Allsop for @CJR. cjr.org/the_media_toda… Via @Jon_Allsop here is the Sally Buzbee response when asked whether democracy is at greater threat from Republicans or Democrats.

Via @froomkin:

After forty years of covering Congress, AP reporter Alan Fram recounts not what he learned, but what he saw. apnews.com/article/fram-c… And here's the part that most interested me. (Next slide...) 1/3 "Congress is dominated by masters of political hardball who’ve survived a Darwinian culling of the nation’s most ambitious politicians. Covering them is like attending a riveting theatrical drama, except you get to wander behind the curtain and chat up the actors." 2/3

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The Post has changed this headline, which was painfully under-thought. Now reads "FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago lands Merrick Garland in a political firestorm." washingtonpost.com/national-secur… The original (below) seemed to say that Garland was shifting course and unduly politicizing DOJ. After news of the search broke, I said that in the weeks ahead we would need to employ a careful distinction: between the properly political and the unduly politicized. This headline (now abandoned by the Post) shows you why I said that.

Conflate the two terms at your peril.

"If our journalists are perceived as biased or if they engage in editorializing on social media, that can undercut the credibility of the entire newsroom."

I am told the New York Times sent this reminder out to staff today. The language is from their social media guidelines. Me, writing about the Times social media guidelines five years ago. pressthink.org/2017/11/pricin… The concern with perception was misguided, I thought.

Ever wonder what journalists themselves think about patterns like bothsidezing, he said/she said, leaving it there, and an indifference to creeping fascism?

I interviewed an experienced editor and journalist about all of those things, none of which he denies. THREAD. 1/ Let me introduce you to @MarkJacob16. He was a newspaper editor for his entire career. At the Chicago Tribune he was nation/world news editor, which meant he edited political stories most nights.

He retired four years ago, and speaks freely. 2/