'The media' & social media: a reading list
Just documenting some of the shifts to the industry in recent years, particularly vis-à-vis social media & pressures to increase engagement in a fragmented landscape:
9 Jul 2025: Can the New York Times Turn Its Writers Into Video Stars?
The strategy increasingly looks like a game of franchise-building: Take prominent characters within and beyond the organization, assemble a show — a brand! — around them, and pump them out through as many platforms as possible. [...]
At the core of this push is a clear bet on star production, arguably the clearest defensive hedge a media company can make against the threats posed by AI. If ChatGPT and “Google Zero” are eroding the web’s infrastructure and redirecting audiences away from news publications by default, and if AI slop threatens to render most text-based journalism suspect, what better check is there than orienting the business around a sense of humanity … or celebrity?
2 Jul 2025: Why The Washington Post is inviting sources to annotate stories
Here’s how the annotations will work: After a story publishes, reporters will send each named source a special link that lets them read the story and add a comment. After a source submits annotations, a member of the audience team will review and decide whether to publish them. They’ll also loop the reporter back in if they think the annotation is worth publishing but deserves a response; in such instances, the source’s annotation and the reporter’s reply will appear next to each other.
When the Post announced From the Source, the reaction online was swift and scathing. Many people, including members of Nieman Lab staff, wondered whether the annotations might give a platform to sources who might want to undermine the reporting, spread misinformation, or simply promote their own political or economic interests. Goldfarb said he’s aware of the criticism — the reaction within the Post’s newsroom itself, he said, has been “wide-ranging,” and journalists are worried about giving up control of a story — but he also hopes the initiative will increase transparency and build trust by breaking down the walls between sources, readers, and reporters. —Nieman Lab
5 Feb 2024: Are creators the future of media? This Substack more optimistically argues that there's room for both creators and journalists — they feed off one another.
People are not opening up TikTok to watch creators cosplay as newscasters. They’re opening up TikTok and to watch regular people discuss the news, and right now, they get their headlines from these discussions. But the people starting the discussions need to get their headlines from somewhere. Journalism is the oxygen that sustains the organism. In the absence of any legitimate reporting, the remaining, more irresponsible creators may rise up and fill the void with ill-informed conjecture and fodder for standom wars. But they could also face legal consequences from the subjects of their coverage—the same consequences that help keep traditional journalism operating at such a high standard. In other words, perhaps the trash will take itself out. —Kate Lindsay, Embedded
31 Oct 2023: Content creators surge past legacy media as news hits a tipping point
While many online news creators are, like Al-Khatahtbeh, trained journalists collecting new information, others are aggregators and partisan commentators sometimes masquerading as journalists. The transformation has made the public sphere much more “chaotic and contradictory,” said Jay Rosen, an associate professor of journalism at New York University and author of the PressThink blog, adding that it has never been easier to be both informed and misinformed about world events. —Taylor Lorenz, WaPo
22 May 2023: How one journalist uses Instagram to pull back the curtain on her reporting process
“The world is kind of moving to people wanting to know the process — they don’t want their journalism to be from a faceless institution,” Zapotosky said. “They want to know who’s behind it; they want to know the kind of discussions that went into it. So we want the Instagram to [share] that.” —Sophie Culpepper, Nieman Lab
4 May 2021: Digital journalism didn’t have to be this way
At a certain point we started to use a word that troubled me, which was content. This is content, or creating content. This is emphasizing the wrong part of what we’re doing. Journalism isn’t just content—it may be content for somebody, but that’s somebody who only cares about very specific aspects of its presence and its exchange value. Neoliberalism has reduced journalism to being content to the extent to which it now has to compete with all the other forms of content that are out there on the internet. —Marcus Gilroy-Ware, CJR
8 Mar 2019: Behind the behind-the-story stories
There’s the ass-covering version: a pre-emptive defense against a lawsuit, or an attempt to avert accusations of bias that might be made by the subject of the piece. [...]
Another kind, that only emerged in the last few years, is presented as a form of reader education. Like so many defensive actions taken by the mainstream press, pieces of this kind read as attempts to teach media literacy to people deeply hostile to the media. No, see, they insist, we didn’t make this up, or pay anyone to make it up, and in fact we worked quite hard to get it right. [...]
The last version of the “how we did it” piece, and by far the most annoying, seems designed to cultivate not merely an audience or subscriber base, but a “fandom.” —Alex Pareene, CJR