digital news

The details are still murky, but CNN has recently created a new internal group called NewsCo that is developing a suite of digital products, a company spokesperson confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter today.

What’s left of 47-year-old Money magazine has been sold to a 3-year-old digital startup run by a former Google executive. After shutting down its print edition earlier this year when parent Meredith failed to find a buyer, Money has sold its surviving brand, Money.com, to Ad Practitioners LLC, based in Dorado, Puerto Rico. Terms were not disclosed, but sources say the brand went for just over $20 million.

The Wall Street Journal reports that News Corp. has reached a deal to let Facebook feature headlines from The Wall Street Journal and other Dow Jones media properties, as well as the New York Post, in the social media giant’s coming news section, the companies said. Journal subscribers can read the full story here.

If your local news team is just using Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, it is missing out on a platform that often produces unique story ideas: Reddit. As of 2017, Reddit had 330 million average monthly users — which Social Media Today says puts it on par with Twitter. But Reddit is not your typical digital platform.

With these additions, Arc greatly expands its work in the broadcast industry, powering digital experiences and content creation for more than 200 broadcast stations in the U.S and Europe.

Norah O’Donnell and Susan Zirinsky are out to remake CBS’s flagship newscast at a time when journalism is under seige. (Photo: Celeste Sloman for Variety)

Axios has decided to do away with the established model for digital publishers’ video businesses. It is no longer producing editorial videos to distribute primarily on its site or platforms like YouTube and Facebook. Less than 20 months after the news publisher’s January 2017 launch, Axios announced a deal in August 2018 to produce a documentary news show for HBO that premiered three months later, was renewed in February 2019 for a second season and on Oct. 8 was picked up for two more seasons.

How do news organizations find their footing when the ground starts shifting? Here’s a hands-on view into the process that’s unfolding as newsrooms at the Missouri School of Journalism begin exploring and launching over-the-top products and projects.

Quibi is tapping a second NBCUniversal news brand to produce daily news programming for its mobile-first live content platform, set to launch April 2020. Hispanic media juggernaut Telemundo announced today that its news division is partnering with Quibi on two Hispanic news shows for the platform’s curated news and entertainment programming vertical, Daily Essentials.

TikTok is not as well known as Instagram or Twitter, but WFOX’s Bridgette Matter thinks it may just replace them as the next big platform. That’s why the Jacksonville anchor/reporter jumped on board. Matter says that her station, like everyone else, talks about how important it is to interact with social media, but “no one’s focusing on TikTok … yet.”

CBS News will create 60 In 6, a six-minute program produced in the style of its venerable magazine show 60 Minutes, for the mobile audience of Jeffrey Katzenberg’s Quibi.

In an unusual, comprehensive series of broadcast and digital reports, Nexstar Broadcasting sent a team of journalists on a 10-day mission to offer viewers a unique and revealing look at life along the southern border from one end to the other, 1,700 miles. Nexstar’s Border Report Tour started in San Diego on Sunday, Sept. 22, and concluded on Tuesday, Oct. 1 in Brownsville, Texas. Along the way, the team generated more than 50 pieces of original content for digital, hundreds of news stories and more than 130 live shots for broadcast.

How do news organizations find their footing when the ground starts shifting? Here’s a hands-on view into the process that’s unfolding as newsrooms at the Missouri School of Journalism begin exploring and launching over-the-top products and projects.

It’s an ongoing quest whose outcome may determine the future of video journalism: the hunt for those elusive younger viewers. The latest venture comes from NBC’s owned stations. LX launched on Monday with a modest amount of content but ambitious plans to grow into a new linear channel for young people. It’s a dramatic example of how local TV stations are using digital platforms for experiments that might not sit well with traditional broadcast viewers but could point the way to the next generation of news reporting.

It marks the newest expansion of major market local news streaming services from CBS and features local news content produced by WBZ-TV.

“What we do is we peruse through every Nexstar station whether it is Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and we are looking for things that are more appealing than just the average, everyday news story that only affects a Little Rock market, a Fayetteville market, or a Birmingham, Alabama market,” says Aaron Nolan, the host of Newsfeed Now. 

“There are two sides to every story.” We’ve all heard that before, but when it comes to reporting on social media, especially live-tweeting, journalists often sacrifice thoroughness for immediacy — post what you see and hear and the job’s done. That is, unless you’re Joy Wang, a reporter and weekend weather anchor for Hubbard Broadcasting’s KOB in Albuquerque, N.M.

Suddenly, TV news outlets that have found climate-change coverage difficult to emphasize for prolonged periods are warming up to more ambitious reporting.

As tech companies try to make amends with publishers, Google changes its search engine to address an old complaint.

Executives from seven newspaper companies lobbied Capitol Hill this week to urge Congress to pass the “Journalism Competition and Preservation Act,” a bill that fights the dominance of tech companies like Google and Facebook in the digital content business.

The digital news industry in the United States is facing a complex future. On one hand, a steadily growing portion of Americans are getting news through the internet, many U.S. adults get news on social media, and employment at digital-native outlets has increased. On the other, digital news has not been immune to issues affecting the broader media environment, including layoffs, made-up news and public distrust.

More details are trickling out about Facebook’s planned News tab. Facebook has said repeatedly that it isn’t in the journalism business, but a team of human editors responsible for an upcoming news initiative by the company will exercise significant control over the presentation of top stories, including judging them over their use of anonymous sources, according to internal guidelines.

Five takeaways from newsrooms that are starting to re-invent local TV journalism.

Texas Democrat Beto O’Rourke’s campaign found itself in a public confrontation with the aggressive conservative website a day after its senior editor-at-large, Joel Pollak, said he was booted from an O’Rourke speech. He said the campaign told him was being ejected because he’d been disruptive at past events.

The Wall Street Journal reports that News Corp is developing a news-aggregation service, Knewz.com, meant to address concerns that Google News and other digital platforms don’t reward publishers’ work adequately and play down articles from certain types of sites. Journal subscribers can read the full story here.