Famed investment guru Warren Buffet, whose Berkshire Hathaway Inc. has investments in the daily press, says that most newspapers today are “toast.” The decline of advertising has transformed the newspaper industry “from monopoly to franchise to competitive,” the billionaire told Yahoo Finance, and now to "toast... The world has changed hugely.” By 2016, ad revenue for US newspapers was nearly a third of what it was just a decade before, according to the Pew Research Center. Not all papers will perish, however. The New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal will survive, he said.
Source: Yahoo Finance
Investigative journalist Julia Angwin was fired Monday from her role as editor in chief of The Markup, the much-anticipated nonprofit news site dedicated to investigating technology and its effects on society that has raised more than $23 million in funding. This comes just weeks before the site’s July launch date. Angwin, formerly of ProPublica, had been working on the site the past year. In a letter to Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, who gifted $20 million to The Markup, Angwin said she was being pushed out by executive director Sue Gardner, who along with Angwin and Jeff Larson is one of the site’s three co-founders. Angwin claimed Gardner wanted to change the site’s purpose to advocating against tech companies instead of “producing meaningful data-centered journalism about the impact of technology on society.” Contacted by The New York Times, Gardner denied any change in the site’s mission. Larson will succeed Angwin as editor in chief.
Source: The New York Times
Lyra McKee, a Northern Ireland journalist, was shot dead during rioting in the city of Londonderry on Thursday. McKee was "one of the most promising journalists in Northern Ireland, according to the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) and a "woman of great commitment and passion." In 2011 she formed a blog called The Muckraker, which became an investigative reporting nonprofit and joined GIJN in 2013. The Muckraker never really took off, and she withdrew it from GIJN's membership a year later, but Lyra's reporting kept going strong. She had signed a two-book deal with Faber and Faber, with her book The Lost Boys due out next year. Her death is being blamed on dissident Irish republicans after police searches in Londonderry.
Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-47987807
The 2019 World Press Freedom Index compiled by Reporters Without Borders shows how hatred of journalists has degenerated into violence, contributing to an increase in fear. The number of countries regarded as safe, where journalists can work in complete security, continues to decline, while authoritarian regimes continue to tighten their grip on the media. The RSF Index, which evaluates the state of journalism in 180 countries and territories every year, shows that an intense climate of fear has been triggered — one that is prejudicial to a safe reporting environment. The hostility towards journalists expressed by political leaders in many countries has incited increasingly serious and frequent acts of violence that have fuelled an unprecedented level of fear and danger for journalists. Only 24 percent of the 180 countries and territories are classified as “good” or “fairly good,” as opposed to 26 percent last year. As a result of an increasingly hostile climate that goes beyond Donald Trump’s comments, the United States has fallen three places in this year’s Index and the media climate is now classified as “problematic.”
Source: RSF
Columbia University announced the 2019 Pulitzer Prizes on Monday, with 14 prizes awarded in journalism. The investigative reporting award went to Matt Hamilton, Harriet Ryan and Paul Pringle of the Los Angeles Times for their reporting on a University of Southern California gynecologist accused of violating hundreds of women for more than a quarter-century. Other notable awards went to The New York Times for their investigation into President Donald Trump’s finances, the South Florida Sun Sentinel for exposing failings by school and law enforcement officials before and after the shooting rampage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the Associated Press for a yearlong series detailing the atrocities of the war in Yemen and Hannah Dreier of ProPublica for her work on Salvadorian immigrants on New York’s Long Island whose lives were shattered by a botched federal crackdown on the international criminal gang MS-13.
Source: Pulitzer
A new initiative will identify and invest $1.5 million in promising news media startups in Latin America. Velocidad (which means “Velocity” in Spanish) is supported by the International Center for Journalists, SembraMedia and Luminate. The funders plan a rigorous selection process. A total of 75 digital news outlets will move forward in the first round, 25 semifinalists will continue to the second and eight to 10 will be chosen to receive investments.
Source: Velocidad
