Journalism

David Zurawik: “A boy can hope. On the eve of a new year and at the end of one of the most challenging ones I have faced in decades of media coverage, here are some of my best hopes for media in 2021 locally and nationally.”

CBS’s pioneering newsmagazine is consistently one of the most-watched programs on television and its viewership is up 9% over last year, Nielsen said. That’s more than any other primetime program on ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox, and also one of only four to show a year-to-year increase.

Plus, how Covid-19 has changed their industry and what trends are likely to stay.

It was a year unlike any other in most of our lifetimes, and RTDNA wanted to take a moment to recognize and thank the journalists who have gone above and beyond this year.

The newsletter service is a software company that, by mimicking some of the functions of newsrooms, has made itself difficult to categorize.

The complete broadcast, cable and pay TV ratings ranker for 2020 in total viewers and adults 18-49.

New jobs posted to TVNewsCheck’s Media Job Center include openings for an assistant news director, a general sales manager, and a creative services photographer-editor for Sinclair, Quincy and Cox stations.

There has been a quantifiable shift in the number of people who watch Newsmax, a much-smaller, would-be Fox News competitor that has seen a dramatic uptick in viewers in the weeks since the election by capitalizing on conservative frustration with Fox, and, some say, a desire from President Trump’s fans to keep alive the flailing narrative that he will ultimately serve a second term, despite Biden’s coming inauguration.

Journalism is becoming a steadily more dangerous profession around the world, including in the United States. The year 2020, with its global pandemic and widespread social unrest, continued the trend. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists’ annual survey, more journalists were in prison on Dec. 1 — 274 — than in any previous year.

She is the breakout star of the newsletter platform Substack, doing the opposite of most media as she calmly situates the news of the day in the long sweep of American history.

President Trump has signed into law the Fallen Journalists Memorial Act, which authorizes the building of a national memorial in Washington honoring journalists who have died in the line of duty, that duty being keeping the world informed.

‘Tis the season for making resolutions and setting goals for the New Year. It’s the perfect time for broadcast meteorologists to re-evaluate their weather coverage on-air, online and on social media. Those are the three general outlets TV station weather teams cover. Each should have a unique approach: the same essential message but different techniques.

Growing chatter that Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron could soon retire is complicating searches for several other high-profile top news jobs, including the quest for a new head of the Los Angeles Times, media sources say.

Trump’s repeatedly discredited attempt to overturn the November results has been given continued sustenance by the Fox News star.

Eric Coomer, security director at the Colorado-based Dominion Voting Systems, said he wants his life back after being named in false charges as a key actor in “rigging” the election for President-elect Joe Biden. There has been no evidence that the election was rigged. His lawsuit, filed Tuesday in district court in Denver County, Colorado, names the Trump campaign, lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, conservative columnist Michelle Malkin, the website Gateway Pundit, Colorado conservative activist Joseph Oltmann, and conservative media outlets Newsmax and One America News Network.

At least 30 journalists were killed this year, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, with 21 slain as a direct result of their work. Above, children of the slain journalist Julio Valdivia stood by his coffin at their home in Tezonapa, Veracruz, Mexico, in September. (Felix Marquez/Associated Press)