Jim Brady: “While we’ve been chasing that adulation and virality, social has been chipping away at the core of what journalism has spent decades building.”
Spirited Media, a digital-native local news pioneer, is selling its outlets after the company couldn’t raise the next round of investment it felt it needed to “get over the hump.” CEO and founder Jim Brady sees the development as offering a positive lesson for local TV stations. “Local television stations, in my opinion, are perfectly positioned to be the dominant players in their market.”
ESPN Public Editor Jim Brady looks at how anchor Jemele Hill’s tweets about President Trump — and the fallout that followed them — reflect the network’s difficult navigation of sports, politics and culture. “Media companies are simultaneously asking many of their personalities to be active and engaging on social media but not partisan or opinionated,” he writes. “It’s a line that is, at best, blurry and, at worst, nonexistent.”
Brady: Let’s Stop Killing Local News
Billy Penn’s Jim Brady says local journalists are often their own worst enemy in the struggle to keep their news organizations alive. That’s because they’ve been slow to adapt and have drifted away from a focus on their customers and communities. He says refocusing there creates opportunity for a robust events business drawing from the news, and it opens the possibilities to more engaging ads that will circumvent the blockers for their utility value.
Jim Brady, Journal Register Co. editor in chief and former TBD GM, on TBD and local news sites: “If you could make [TBD] work in DC, then the hope was that it might be replicable in other cities. I’m not sure whether that would have worked, though. Local sites are not easily scalable. For local sites to be good, you need local bodies. So while you can centralize some back-office functions, the core journalism can’t be easily scaled.”
