digital news

After creating a white paper based on working groups, the new LMC moves to offer a scalable, privacy-compliant consumer path to news, increased value for advertisers and enhanced monetization for publishers.

Rohit Agarwal, CNN’s chief product officer, informed staff of his departure via email on Thursday afternoon. A product veteran who previously held roles at HSBC, Last.fm and AOL, Agarwal joined CNN nearly five years ago to lead the product and design operations for CNN Digital at a time when newsrooms across the country were investing in building out more robust online businesses.

The deal with News Corp follows a standoff over legislation passed by the Australian government to compensate publishers.

Former CNN Great Big Story VP Ashley Codianni is joining NBC as executive editor of Today Digital, and Missy Dunlop Parsons is being promoted to executive producer of Today All Day, the morning show’s 24/7 lifestyle streaming channel. In this new role, Codianni will manage the Today.com editorial and social teams, working in tandem with the Today broadcast team to highlight programming across all our digital platforms.

Lobbyists for Facebook and Google threw their weight against new U.S. legislation that seeks to aid struggling news publishers by allowing them to negotiate collectively against the tech companies over revenue sharing and other deals. Google, which declined comment on the proposal, launched a website on Thursday asserting it is “one of the world’s biggest financial supporters of journalism” by virtue of the ad revenue and content licensing fees it provides to media.

The company’s ties to more than a dozen sites illustrate how conservative media companies are branching out after Facebook and Twitter began stiffer policing of false information.

BuzzFeed slashed 47 positions at HuffPost in Tuesday in one of the company’s first actions since acquiring the rival news site in a deal with Verizon Media just three weeks ago. BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti said Tuesday that the cuts were part of an effort to “fast-track the path to profitability” for the newly acquired property.

Streaming service NBC News Now has added two live hours to its weekday lineup, installing Washington TV veteran Aaron Gilchrist as its anchor. The noon-to-2 p.m. ET block will cover cover national and international news. Gilchrist is a former anchor of News4 Today on NBC’s Washington O&O WRC.

NBC News announced Thursday that Catherine Kim has been upped to SVP, global digital news, where she will continue to oversee all digital newsroom activities for NBC News and an expanded digital effort at MSNBC. David Firestone will now run the daily coverage as executive editor, NBC News digital. He will report to Kim.

Once the last pay TV bastions, along with sports, is fast becoming a free, add-supported services programming staple.

CNN Beijing-based reporter David Culver, CNN International producer Yong Xiong and photojournalist Natalie Thomas earned the Polk award for Foreign Reporting. Their win marks the first time in the 73-year history of the Polk Awards that the award for Foreign Reporting went to a television report. All previous TV awards were in the Television category. the award for Television Reporting went to Vice News Tonight correspondent Roberto Ferdman and his crew for breakthrough coverage of the shooting death of 26-year-old Breonna Taylor in a “no-knock” police raid in Louisville and the investigations that followed.

Al Jazeera, the media company funded by Qatar, is launching a news platform targeted to American conservatives. The company — which shuttered its unsuccessful left-leaning cable channel Al Jazeera America five years ago — says that the new digital platform, dubbed Rightly, is not aimed at the far right, but at “center-right folks who feel left out of mainstream media.”

Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and Facebook confirmed that they have agreed on amendments to proposed legislation to require the social network and Google to pay for Australian news that they feature. Facebook’s cooperation is a major victory in Australian efforts to make the two gateways to the Internet pay for the journalism that they use.

“Our country’s public discourse is plagued by misinformation, disinformation, conspiracy theories, and lies” says a letter from Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which was sent to Comcast, AT&T, Amazon, Apple, Verizon, Charter, Hulu and Roku.

Australia’s government has condemned Facebook over its suprise move to prevent Australians sharing news that had also blocked some government communications. The digital platforms fear that what’s happening in Australia will become an expensive precedent for other countries as governments revamp laws to catch up with the fast changing digital world.

Content management systems are the workhorses of local stations’ digital operations. Executives from Tegna, NBCU, CBS, Gray, Nexstar and Fox have discovered that user simplicity and integrations for multiplatform distribution have become essential attributes. Note: This story is available to TVNewsCheck Premium members only. If you would like to upgrade your free TVNewsCheck membership to Premium now, you can visit your Member Home Page, available when you log in at the very top right corner of the site or in the Stay Connected Box that appears in the right column of virtually every page on the site. If you don’t see Member Home, you will need to click Log In or Subscribe.

Swati Sharma, 34, prepares to take over the 90-person newsroom of a digital outlet known for its clearsighted articles on knotty issues in the news.

Asheville, N.C. is by no means a news desert. Residents there have access to The Asheville Citizen Times, Mountain Xpress and Blue Ridge Public Radio as well as other local publications. Yet, a small coalition of veteran professional journalists and media executives want to help produce more local journalism in the area.

Savannah Guthrie’s next one-hour special won’t appear on any of NBC News’ best known properties, which include Today and NBC Nightly News. And yet, it may be of more critical importance to the NBCUniversal-owned news organization than any in-depth report she’s presented in recent months. Guthrie will today kick off a week-long focus by NBC News on the mental health of young people during the pandemic, the first of what NBC News President Noah Oppenheim says will be a year-long effort to provide deep reports — one a week — around specific topics across NBC News media properties.

Also announced were the promotions of Michael Arroyo and Kelley Kramer to deputy managing editors.

ViacomCBS is reviving a streaming version of the newsmagazine 60 Minutes, hoping the series can draw viewers to its new online service Paramount+, according to people familiar with the situation. The company had created a spinoff of the show called 60 in 6 for the short-lived Quibi, but it was left in limbo when the streaming startup announced plans to close down in October.

Fox Corp. streaming service Tubi is expanding the live news offering it debuted last fall, adding nearly 80 stations owned by Cox, Hearst, Scripps and Tegna. The 24-hour live feeds will join those of 17 Fox-owned stations and Altice USA’s News 12 New York in a section of the streaming app called News on Tubi. National streaming outlets run by Fox, NBC, Bloomberg and others are also on the free, ad-supported platform.