digital news

As a digital-centric news organization, Newsy was better prepared than many to shift to remote working conditions. What’s changed is a tighter collaborative relationship with other E.W. Scripps-owned sister companies, including Court TV and TV stations.

The Local Media Association’s Jed Williams was working with a trio of TV stations on a pilot membership model when the coronavirus struck. He says the moment made clear TV broadcasters’ importance to their communities. It may also be an ideal moment to deepen the relationship with viewers with an endgame of new revenue streams when normalcy returns.

The party “may have to do a virtual convention,” the former vice president said Sunday. “The idea of holding the convention is going to be necessary. We may not be able to put 10, 20, 30,000 people in one place,” he told ABC’s This Week, calling an online convention “very possible.”

New apps from ABC News Live debut on Fire TV and Android TV platforms with an update coming to the Roku platform and Apple TV apps. The ABC Owned Television Stations are also introducing market-specific apps on Fire TV, Android TV, the Roku platform and Apple TV.

David Zurawik: “Sounds of coughing and moaning throughout the room. Corridors overflowing with gurneys bearing COVID-19 patients, some in postures of distress. Sheets of plastic taped to walls, makeshift borders aimed at protection and some semblance of privacy. This is what ground zero looks like in the war on COVID-19, according to a CNN report that aired Monday. I believe we need to see more of these images from media outlets of the horrible truth shown here.”

Kantar has just released findings of what it says is the largest-ever survey of consumers about the fast-moving pandemic, checking in with 25,000 consumers in 30 markets around the globe. Among the findings: People are doing 70% more web browsing, 63% more TV watching, and spending 61% more time on social media. WhatsApp has become increasingly more important, with an overall 40% increase in use.

More than half of all news consumption on Facebook in America is about the virus, according to an internal report.

The group’s second Facebook Watch show, Field Notes, features pandemic stories from Hearst stations in 26 markets cross the U.S.

Coming off a record overall month this January in digital traffic according to Comscore data, Fox News Digital’s VP and editor-in-chief says FoxNews.com’s consistently strongest story is its home page.

Like every other newsroom, WRAL-TV is grappling with the unique challenges of covering the coronavirus. But the Capitol Broadcasting station in Raleigh is also exploring those challenges publicly in the latest episode of a new podcast called How to Commit Journalism.

Big news stories can dominate the entire news cycle for weeks, months, even years. But very few are as earth shaking as the recent coronavirus outbreak, which is dominating the news cycle and changing the way news organizations work.

Media outlets big and small, from The New York Times to the Telegraph-Forum in Bucyrus, Ohio, are letting people read their coronavirus coverage without a subscription.

Broadcasters including Gray Television and Cox Media Group have been beta testing the new Facebook Messenger Experience app from Social News Desk enabling users to opt in for breaking news and customized content. With 1.3 billion global Messenger users and a 50%-80% open rate, it opens a key new front to reach viewers, particularly as the coronavirus crisis escalates.

Fox News is making a return to Twitter, more than a year after going silent on the social-media platform. Now the news outlet is poised to resurface on the venue, with executives envisioning the chance to use it as a service or a means of getting information about the coronavirus outbreak to followers. Approximately 18.5 million people follow the network on Twitter.

All through February and early March, the voices of doctors and nurses on social media provided a vital antidote to those of confused and complacent political leaders embodied by President Trump. Their voices carried credibility and urgency in a way the always-on crisis of cable news can’t. They fed and were fed by credible journalism. And they helped force the United States to reckon with the crisis.

CBC adviser and news technologist Bruce MacCormack warns that deep fake videos have gotten more sophisticated and difficult to detect. Their creators are also proliferating, he says, and news organizations need to begin arming themselves against what could be “an existential threat” to their legitimacy.

Poynter’s Tom Jones: “Despite early claims that the media was overblowing this story, creating a narrative where there was none and fueling unnecessary panic, this week has turned out to be one of journalism’s finest hours. The journalism on display this week during an ever-shifting and rapidly-moving story has been nothing short of spectacular.”

In the span of just a few weeks, the top editors of two leading digital-news outfits called it quits. Ben Smith, who ran BuzzFeed News for eight years, took a job writing a column at the New York Times; Lydia Polgreen is leaving HuffPost to oversee a podcast company. Two does not make a trend, but it does raise a question: Do their departures — smack in the middle of the busiest news cycle in years — say something about the troubled state of the digital news media?

So many podcasts, newsletters and TV specials have popped up in the outbreak’s wake, that Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation even joked about it last week: “Not to alarm you, but coronavirus-focused news products are spreading very quickly.”

Newsrooms are creating contingency plans to make sure that they can adequately inform the public about the novel coronavirus while keeping their own employees safe.

The Writers Guild of America East says it has negotiated the first contract with CBSN, which the guild said marks the first anchored live streaming service to be unionized.

In a memo issued Monday, NBC News Digital staffers were told that the company plans to explore streaming opportunities for Today and intends to shift some employees assigned to video “to focus on preparing for a streaming experience.” A person familiar with the matter says NBC News is mulling such an initiative, but cautioned that it is in its earliest days and is not guaranteed to come to fruition.

New jobs posted to TVNewsCheck’s MediaJobCenter include an opening for a senior multiplatform producer at WRAL in Raleigh, N.C., who will plan and produce daily coverage — written, video and multimedia.

The senator’s sweeping critique of coverage has more merit than we in the media like to admit.