Old News
“The press seems relentlessly focused on the status of the elderly,” Lucy Schiller wrote for CJR last year. She was referring to Joe Biden, the oldest president the United States has ever had; Donald Trump, his predecessor and rival; and the record-breaking age of the Senate. This was before the CNN debate, before ABC’s George Stephanopoulos interview, before Stephanopoulos said, to a passerby, “I don’t think he can serve four more years.” Before political journalism turned its full attention to gerontology.
To examine journalism’s obsession with age, and aging news-obsessives, Schiller visited Schenley Gardens, a personal care facility in Pittsburgh—home to the oldest areas of the country—where residents receive help with “activities of daily living” (dressing, eating, bathing) and ceaselessly follow politics. Everyone has an in-room television; many subscribe to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and check in with coverage on their iPads, computers, cellphones. Sometimes, they gather to watch reports on a television in their common area. Pew Research has found that 85 percent of people over sixty-five often tune in to the news on TV. “Their consumption of the news is viewed as an unchanging fact, even as who is ‘old’ changes with time,” Schiller wrote. “That is, to become old is to become a news watcher.”
“More than the rest of us,” she found, “Schenleyans discuss the news with one another, in close quarters, every day.” But when asked about how journalists cover the subject of aging—or even candidates’ policies surrounding old age—residents expressed far less interest than in LGBTQ rights, immigration, and how the news has changed in their lifetimes. “Rather than empty nostalgia, to care about what you’ve always cared about—political concerns of all stripes, not just the concerns of ‘senior citizens’—makes basic sense,” Schiller observed. “Coursing inside Schenley Gardens were opinions and beliefs that reflected the complex selfhood of the residents, and eluded whatever filter age might suggest.”
The dialogue over very old politicians comes with a question: When is it time to quit? In her piece, Schiller raised the idea of “disengagement theory,” through which gerontologists have suggested that “not only are we naturally and inherently inclined to isolate ourselves as we age, but that society, eventually, is done with us.” A troubling thought. Still, she wrote, “there is a difference between calling for the retirement of oldest-old politicians—whose net worth usually far surpasses that of their average constituent, and who play a central role in determining the realities of all Americans—and calling for the mass retirement of older people from society, on the basis that shelving them is somehow natural.” The residents of Schenley Gardens, at least, are profoundly, persistently engaged with current events. You can read Schiller’s full piece here.
Sewell Chan appointed executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review
Sewell Chan, the editor in chief of the Texas Tribune, will join the Columbia Journalism Review full time as the new executive editor, effective September 16, 2024.
With over two decades in key editorial positions at leading publications across the country, Chan brings to CJR a commitment to integrity and innovative journalism that aligns closely with CJR’s mission—to be the intellectual leader in the rapidly changing world of journalism. “Sewell Chan possesses a deep well of experience, incredible insights into the challenges confronting media at this moment, and an abiding passion for journalism,” said Jelani Cobb, Dean and Henry R. Luce Professor of Journalism. “We could not be more excited about working with him as he charts a new course for the Columbia Journalism Review.”
Most recently, Chan has led the newsroom of the Texas Tribune. Since he began, in October 2021, the nonprofit publication shared a National Magazine Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize—both firsts for the organization. “Journalism faces challenges from all sides: technological disruption, changing business models, rising misinformation, and threats to democracy,” Chan said. “Since 1961, the Columbia Journalism Review has been vital to understanding journalism ethics and decision-making and the future of our craft. I believe CJR must be an essential voice for working journalists worldwide as they grapple with these challenges, while helping the public understand what journalists do and why it matters more than ever.”
Previously, Chan worked at the Los Angeles Times, first as a deputy managing editor and then the editorial page editor, where he oversaw coverage of criminal justice reform that was awarded a Pulitzer for editorial writing in 2021. From 2004 to 2018, Chan worked at the New York Times, as a metro reporter, Washington correspondent, deputy op-ed editor, and international news editor. His career began in 2000 at the Washington Post, where he reported on local government, among other beats. He has also written for the Wall Street Journal and the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Chan is a native New Yorker and grew up in an immigrant family. The first in his family to finish college, he graduated from Harvard with a degree in social studies. He studied at Oxford on a British Marshall scholarship, where he received a master’s degree in politics. Chan was elected to the board of the Pulitzer Prizes in 2022 and was a 2024 fellow in the Columbia Journalism School Sulzberger Executive Leadership Program. He joined the CJR board in 2021.
“The Columbia Journalism Review has a storied and important role in covering journalists and journalism. No one is better suited than Sewell to take CJR to new heights and audiences around the country and the world, in this challenging and crucial moment for the press,” said Rebecca Blumenstein, chair of the CJR board and NBC News president, Editorial. “I know I join Dean Cobb and the entire CJR board in saying that we look forward to working with Sewell.”
Chan is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and PEN America. He serves on the boards of the Henry Luce Foundation, Freedom House, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and Harvard Magazine and on the national judging panel of the Livingston Awards.
Is Facebook quitting the news business?
In March 2019, the company now known as Meta announced the Facebook Journalism Project, a plan to spend $300 million over three years “supporting local journalists and newsrooms with their newsgathering needs in the immediate future, and helping local news organizations build sustainable business models.” At an event in Denver that same month, called the Accelerate: Local Media Summit, Facebook’s news-partnerships team insisted their commitment to helping journalism was genuine, and that this commitment was shared at the highest levels of the company. “This is something Mark cares about,” one staffer said of the company’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg.
If that was true, it doesn’t seem to be the case anymore, as Meta has spent the past year cutting funding for and downsizing most of its journalism efforts. Last month, it laid off a number of staffers from its journalism programs, including several who were in charge of local news partnerships, as well as Meta’s director of international news partnerships, according to the Sydney Morning Herald. Campbell Brown, who was previously in charge of news partnerships for Meta, was recently moved into a broader role.
In June, the Wall Street Journal said Meta was “reconsidering” its payments to publishers as part of the Facebook News program, which featured news stories from certain outlets in a special News tab. The company reportedly paid annual fees of more than $15 million to the Washington Post, just over $20 million to the New York Times, and more than $10 million to the Journal. Those payments have since been halted and are not expected to resume.
Sources with knowledge of Meta’s journalism operations note that while funding may have stopped, large media outlets such as Axel Springer or the New York Times still have staff at the social network who will help them. Small publishers, however, who mostly worked with Meta through programs or grants, never had that many people helping to begin with, and the ones they did have are now gone.
Meta still has a director of news partnerships for Asia Pacific, but a strategic manager and another director have both left the company, the Morning Herald reported. According to the Nieman Journalism Lab, other journalism staff at Meta who have lost their jobs recently include a program manager for news, two program managers for news integrity, and multiple staffers in news communications. And while the Meta Journalism Project website is still open, with a number of announcements about partnerships, the training courses it used to offer to journalists appear to have vanished.
In June, Meta decided to retire the term “news feed” for the main stream of content on a user’s page, and Axios reported that one of the reasons given for the change was that Meta was “de-emphasizing its investment in news content.” In July, the Journal quoted from an internal memo sent by Brown, in which she said that the company was “reallocating resources” away from the Facebook News project and Bulletin, the newsletter platform Meta launched just over a year earlier, in an attempt to compete with Substack.
In October, the Times reported that Bulletin is officially dead. That same month, Meta said it would shut down its Instant Articles mobile format next year. Instant Articles was launched in 2015, ostensibly as a way of helping media outlets shift their news distribution to mobile. Many news companies, however, said they saw little benefit from adopting the company’s standard, and it failed to gain much traction.
Asked about the unwinding of Meta’s financial commitments to journalism, a Meta spokesperson said the same thing the company told Axios in October: “Less than 3 percent of what people around the world see in Facebook’s feed are posts with links to news articles. As a business it doesn’t make sense to overinvest in areas that don’t align with user preferences.” The spokesperson didn’t comment on how Meta’s repeated changes to its news feed algorithm—which have de-emphasized news—might have affected the level of news awareness among users, or their preferences.
One factor that may have contributed to Meta’s desire to stop funding journalism through its various programs is that the company has been forced to pay a number of media outlets licensing fees as a result of legislation that was passed in Australia last year and is being contemplated in a number of other countries—including the US, where the proposed law is called the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act. Meta has threatened to remove news from its platform completely if the bill becomes law.
While larger news outlets may have no problem replacing the funding they used to get from Meta, Nancy Lane, the chief executive of the Local Media Association, told the Nieman Journalism Lab that local media organizations may not have it so easy, now that the more than $16 million in funding Meta used to provide has vanished. “For all those who hated on FB over the yrs, you got what you wished for. News is now being deprioritized on the platform, despite being the #1 source for so many,” Lane wrote on Twitter. “The news partnership team has been dissolved & many industry labs/accelerators are going away. It’s a sad day indeed.”
In 2018, CJR wrote about the “Facebook Armageddon” for news, saying: “There’s another way the Facebook threat could actually get worse: Instead of continuing to be a primary platform for news companies and trying to strike relationships with them, the company could decide to simply wash its hands of news entirely, either because it isn’t generating enough revenue, or because it has become too much of a political headache.”
The company’s revenue and share price have both been falling steadily all year, wiping hundreds of billions of dollars from its stock-market value, and Meta recently announced plans to lay off about eleven thousand people over the next year, in an attempt to cut costs. One source close to the Journalism Project said that when it began, a senior manager said that if it didn’t generate at least $100 million in revenue it likely would not survive, and Meta appears to have lost faith that this will ever happen.
Nonprofit news employees may be eligible for loan forgiveness
Current employees of nonprofit news organizations might qualify to have their federal student loan balance wiped if they apply for Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) by October 31.
Eligible employees must have made at least 120 monthly payments toward their loan balance while working full-time for a not-for-profit, tax-exempt organization. Only balances on Direct Loans can be erased, not Perkins loans or Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) Program loans.
CJR found, using the government’s employer eligibility search, that employees who work for the following news organizations at the time of submitting their PSFL application are potentially eligible for forgiveness:
- ProPublica
- The Texas Tribune
- The Marshall Project
- Center for Public Integrity
- Foundation for National Progress (Mother Jones)
- Lost Light Projects Inc. (InsideClimate News)
- Center for Investigative Reporting
- Institute for Nonprofit News
- National Public Radio
- The Trace
- Grist
Our search was not comprehensive, merely illustrative. Other nonprofit newsrooms may be eligible for forgiveness. For more information on how to apply for PSLF, visit this website.
WNYC removes dozens of articles over attribution issues
WNYC removed forty-five stories from its websites, wnyc.org and Gothamist.com, according to an announcement on the site today, because they contained “unattributed passages from other sources,” in forty-two of the cases, and had been “published on other websites by the author” in three of the cases.
It is the latest development in a long-running series of investigations at the station and its websites over attribution, which CJR detailed as part of a longer story about the newsroom’s recent struggles.
The articles were all written by one person, as Audrey Cooper, the station’s editor in chief, told her staff in a newsroom-wide meeting today, according to a recording of that meeting. She declined to name the person, but said the time frame for the retracted stories stretched back to 2010.
The stories were uncovered after the station commissioned an outside auditor, she said. Cooper then reviewed the articles herself using Grammarly and Copyscape software. Cooper said the station appended editors’ notes to each article “as soon as we confirmed the findings of an outside auditor.”
She said the station will continue to remove articles that violate editorial standards as it finds them, and that the station has searched for plagiarism on air, though that process is much more challenging.
“We take these issues really seriously and we are addressing them as part of a process with our legal and HR teams right now. Due to the fact that we are doing that process and the confidentiality of those processes, I’m afraid I don’t have a lot more to say than that,” she said.
Unionized journalists at Miami Herald, sister papers to walk out
Unionized staff at three newspapers in Florida—the Miami Herald, its Spanish-language sibling El Nuevo Herald, and the smaller Bradenton Herald—are refusing to work for one day Friday amid ongoing contract negotiations with their owner, McClatchy.
The union has been engaged in more than two years of bargaining over demands including the introduction of paid parental leave and pay equality between Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald journalists.
Joey Flechas, a city hall reporter at the Miami Herald and a union cochair, cited a fifteen-year veteran of El Nuevo Herald still earning $49,000 a year—while a ten-year employee at the English-language paper is earning $80,000. “It’s the same work,” Flechas said. “And it’s especially offensive in Miami, where our culture is deeply tied to the Hispanic diaspora and Spanish-speaking population.”
In October 2019, prompted by rounds of layoffs and buyouts, a majority of the combined newsroom of the Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald (which totals about 100 people) voted to unionize with the NewsGuild–Communications Workers of America. Employees of the Bradenton Herald unionized in 2020 and are in the midst of negotiating their own, separate contract.
“They unionized to save their own publications and their jobs,” said Jon Schleuss, president of the NewsGuild-CWA. “The thing that always surprises me with these companies like McClatchy is how aggressive they are at fighting journalists.”
A McClatchy spokesperson did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The company, based in Sacramento, operates thirty daily newspapers, seventeen of which are unionized. It has owned the Miami Herald since 2006, when it purchased Knight Ridder, the paper’s previous owner.
Herald employees described today’s action as a “walkout,” but they don’t mean it literally. There’s nowhere to walk out of. In the summer of 2020, McClatchy gave up the lease at its physical newsroom in a Miami suburb, citing the covid-19 pandemic and cost-cutting measures. Just before contract negotiations began, in February 2020, McClatchy filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection; Chatham Asset Management, a New York hedge fund, bought it for $312 million.
During the virtual walkout today, the union bargaining committee and its supporters are gathering at a hotel conference room downtown. There they will talk to McClatchy (and their lawyers from Jones Day, a firm famed for fighting unions).
Other union demands include experience-based salary floors, protections against outsourcing, and higher gas mileage reimbursement. Their current rate is 33 cents per mile, though the IRS standard mileage rate is now 58.5 cents per mile.
Many union demands have been met by McClatchy since bargaining began—they are just not extended to union employees. Last year, McClatchy implemented a company-wide parental leave policy, its first ever, but denied it to a new mother in the Miami Herald newsroom.
