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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.
After a long year, local news looks back and thinks forward
The local news crisis can be tough to describe in national terms, because no two places are exactly the same. Though it’s been a difficult year for regional journalism, following a difficult decade, it’s a diverse media ecosystem, and though industry-wide challenges are rooted in similar trends, every outlet has faced battles of its own. “Local news” comprises many things: newspapers, public radio, television, blogs, newsletters, and as CJR’s newest digital magazine highlights pirate radio stations, text message chains, internet forums. Different outlets had different fates this year. Radio and television stations fared better than newspapers. Nonprofit publications of all mediums soared while many for-profit outlets foundered. Many communities lost a trusted source of information; others lost outlets that were already on the way out; and, as bears mentioning, some communities haven’t had a local news source for
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.”