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When misinformation meets scarcity: a Q&A with Kiera Butler
News deserts are complicated things. Penny Abernathy the primary researcher behind the oft-cited “news deserts” map told me last year that while the term originated to mean “a town without a newspaper,” it had evolved in her thinking to mean “a place where there is limited access to the type of critical news and information that [one] need[s] in order to make informed decisions.” Many factors can limit access to critical information: geographic news deserts, undercovered communities, infrastructural or economic barriers, lack of trust, misinformation. We aren’t always adept at illustrating the complex ways in which people navigate the world beyond the news; it’s easier to report on the presence of bad information than the absence of good information, and it’s even trickier to define the ways in which the two inform one another. But even in news deserts be they geographic, cultural, digital, or philosophica
Five competition ministers discuss regulating Big Tech
Regulating big tech has become a global preoccupation; how such regulation might affect journalism is less clear. A couple of months after the controversial Australian News Media and Digital Platform Bargaining Code came into force, requiring Google and Facebook to pay for news in the country, competition ministers around the world are considering whether to adapt it and adopt it at home.
In the past, European governments have tried to use copyright law to get Google and Facebook to pay for news; they are continuing down that route with the recent European Copyright Directive.
The local news crisis is a labor story
As the pandemic spread across the world last year, newsrooms worldwide took a hit, as furloughs, layoffs, salary freezes, print reductions, outsourcing, consolidations, and closures accelerated across an already-beleaguered industry. Last week, Axios reported that 2020 yielded a record number of unionization efforts in US newsrooms, a trend that has been intensifying for years. Even as the economic crisis as exacerbated by COVID shows signs of slowing, the union movement is trending in the opposite direction. “It’s going to explode,” Jon Schleuss, president of the NewsGuild-Communications Workers of America, told Sara Fischer. “This will be a record year for unionization in the industry.”
Addressing the information gap for Black West Virginians
When Crystal Good was sixteen years old, she tried to buy one of the last Black newspapers in West Virginia. “Looking back, I’m not sure how I thought I was going to pay for it,” Good says, laughing. “And of course, they wouldn’t sell me the paper, but they asked me to sell ads for them. And I was like,
Oh, hell no.” Years later, Good is building a publication of her own, one “that allows for Black voices to have their own microphones, not the microphone passed to them and then taken back,” she says.