Plus: Bon Appétit gets further filleted, and McClatchy is giving employees a raise.
By The Objective Staff Feb. 12, 2021, 12:01 p.m.
Feb. 12, 2021, 12:01 p.m.
Editor’s note: The Front Page is a biweekly newsletter from The Objective, a publication that offers reporting, first-person commentary, and reported essays on how journalism has misrepresented or excluded specific communities in coverage, as well as how newsrooms have treated staff from those communities. We happily share each issue with Nieman Lab readers.
“Despite even major public failings, they keep coming back because they work behind the scenes to protect themselves and each other to stay in power and preserve the status quo,” writes Jennifer Barnett in her Medium piece: “I Left My Career in Prestige Media Because of the Shitty Men in Charge and They Are Still In Charge and Still Fucking Up.” While working as managing editor of The Atlantic, Barnett discovered a pattern: Men, after leaving newsroom
The Boston Globe is rethinking its approach to the crime beat.
Their newly-introduced Fresh Start initiative allows subjects of crime stories to ask the newspaper to be removed from past coverage in online articles.
A few paragraphs and a mugshot on the internet can mean losing a job or being refused a loan. It can also have lasting consequences that disproportionately impact communities of color.
After last year s racial reckoning across the country, journalists nationwide have been questioning the crime beat, including Mike Rispoli, news voices director of the Free Press.
In December, Rispoli and his colleague Tauhid Chappell co-wrote a Nieman Lab 2021 prediction for journalism calling on newsrooms to defund the crime beat.
October 18, 2018In 2018, we told you about how The Plain Dealer in Cleveland1 was rethinking its practices: reducing its use of mugshots, not naming those arrested for minor crimes, and allowing people to request their information be removed from old stories in some cases. And now the movement is gathering speed.
On Friday, The Boston Globe announced a new program called “Fresh Start: Revisiting the Past for a Better Future”:
Following the nationwide reckoning on racial justice, the Globe is looking inward at its own practices and how they have affected communities of color. As we update how we cover the news, we are also working to better understand how some stories can have a lasting negative impact on someone’s ability to move forward with their lives.
The media reckoning that came and went
Plus: The New York Post works to destroy trust in journalism, and Public Media for All.
By The Objective Staff Dec. 18, 2020, 12:15 p.m.
Dec. 18, 2020, 12:15 p.m.
Editor’s note: The Front Page is a biweekly newsletter from The Objective, a publication that offers reporting, first-person commentary, and reported essays on how journalism has misrepresented or excluded specific communities in coverage, as well as how newsrooms have treated staff from those communities. We happily share each issue with Nieman Lab readers.
It’s
Friday, December 18th.
This time on The Front Page: The media reckoning that came and went, The New York Post works to destroy trust in journalism, and a shitty media man in Pittsburgh.
Facebook and antitrust: A slam-dunk case, or a decades-long fight in the making?
It’s not surprising that the announcement last week of an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook has gotten a lot of media attention. Mammoth cases like this one (which involves the Federal Trade Commission and 46 states) are extremely rare. There have only been half a dozen or so of this magnitude in the last 50 years, and only the Microsoft case from the late 1990s and possibly the AT&T breakup even come close to this one in size and impact. But the history of such cases shows that what almost inevitably happens is not a swift victory for justice (however one might define that term) but years, and in some cases decades of protracted legal wrangling, a process that is almost mind-numbingly boring for most people, satisfying no one apart from the legions of corporate lawyers and academics for whom it provides something close to full employment. After all that, the ending is likely to be a carefully negoti