Journalism

A shooting in a Texas church left three dead Sunday and countless others reeling — not only because they witnessed it in real life, but because the events were captured on a livestream feed of the service, which was then replayed across the major news networks. But was that replaying ethical?

2019 will go down as the year of the media apocalypse. Nearly 8,000 newsroom jobs disappeared this year in a flurry of layoffs, buyouts and mergers. Digital outlets like BuzzFeed and Vice eliminated entire areas of coverage while legacy media giants like Gannett cut hundreds of positions after a merger. And some local news outlets shut down altogether, leaving huge swaths of the country with no local papers at all.

New jobs posted to TVNewsCheck’s Media Job Center include an opening for a morning news executive producer at the CBS O&O in Dallas-Ft. Worth, KTVT.

Threats of “retribution,” more accusations of “fake news” and the end of the White House briefing made 2019 the darkest yet for journalists in the Trump era.

Ad-supported cable business’ fortunes continue to decline unless it’s live programming — news and sports. Cable news networks Fox News and MSNBC and sports-focused ESPN repeated as 1-2-3 atop all basic cable networks in total viewers in Live+7 Nielsen ratings for 2019. That is all the more impressive because live non-entertainment programming gets very little delayed viewing, and even more important for advertisers who put a premium on ad-supported content where commercials can’t be skipped.

Fred P. Graham, a legal affairs reporter, television anchor and author who covered the Supreme Court, the Justice Department and the major trials and controversies of a tumultuous juridical era for The New York Times, CBS News and Court TV, died on Dec. 28 at his home in Washington. He was 88.

America lost a quarter of its journalists from 2008 to 2018, the vast majority of them covering local issues, according to University of North Carolina professor Penny Muse Abernathy. Newsrooms lost at least 3,800 jobs in 2019 alone. She estimates the country has lost 2,100 newspapers since 2004, 70 of them dailies. In that environment, the chief executives for three top chains, people in charge collectively of more than 700 newspapers reaching more than 12 million subscribers, agreed to interviews with The Washington Post to share their thoughts on the future of their companies and of local news.

David Brooks: “Those of us in journalism primarily do one thing: cover events. We report and opine about events like election campaigns, wars and crimes. But a funny thing has happened to events in this era. They have ceased to drive politics the way they used to. Increasingly, sociology is.”

The Newseum is a period piece. During a recent visit, passing by its early satellite truck, its fragments of the Berlin Wall, its homages to legendary broadcasters and war correspondents, it was hard not to feel a twinge of nostalgia for the bygone era that birthed it.

Chuck Todd has had a front-row seat for the spread of disinformation. Here’s how he sees it happening and the media’s role in it.

It’s impossible to know what, exactly, the future holds, particularly in an era of unprecedented transformation — but that’s never stopped smart people from prognosticating. As the decade draws to a close, The Hollywood Reporter asked more than 40 of them — from the heads of studios to the faces of movements — to weigh in with their predictions for the year ahead.

Cronkite News wanted to test the idea that audiences on-air and online would stay longer and be more engaged with our coverage if we gave them the chance to participate via a live news quiz testing their knowledge of recycling while we reported on the problem. For easy scoring, we opted to go with 10 questions incorporated during the first 15 minutes of our newscast dedicated to recycling coverage. Spoiler alert: This show dramatically overperformed its average for audience engagement.

New jobs posted to TVNewsCheck’s Media Job Center include openings for a news anchor/reporter and a meteorologist/reporter for stations owned by Lockwood Broadcasting and Heartland Media.