A chyron on Fox News has stunned news watchers with some unusually charged language, even from a network that recently settled a lawsuit for $787.5 million to avert a defamation trial.
President Joe Biden was giving remarks at the White House on Tuesday evening, hours after Trump was formally charged and at the same time Trump was giving a speech from his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
A chyron below a split screen of the two read: “Wannabe dictator speaks at the White House after having his political rival arrested.”
The message appeared for almost 30 seconds. A spokeswoman for Fox News later provided a statement, “The chyron was taken down immediately and was addressed.”
Insider journalists end strike
Unionized journalists at Insider announced Wednesday afternoon that they had reached a tentative agreement on a first contract with the company and would end their open-ended strike.
More than 250 employees — including reporters, editors, video producers and copy editors — walked off the job June 2, alleging that the company had unilaterally changed workers’ health insurance in violation of federal labor law. Their 13-day strike, the longest digital media work stoppage in history, culminated in an agreement with the company that includes more than $400,000 worth of health care cost reimbursements.
Other protections included in the contract are a $65,000 wage floor, annual raises of at least 3%, a layoff moratorium for the rest of the year and the stipulation that employees cannot be terminated without “just cause.” The journalists, who are represented by the NewsGuild of New York, must vote to ratify the contract.
During the strike, managers and nonunion employees wrote stories to keep the site fresh. (Insider, a global outlet, has reporting staff outside of the United States who are not unionized.) Editors also reposted old content and, at one point, published a striking worker’s incomplete draft article.
Meanwhile, union members published updates to their strike publication, “Business Outsider,” including an interview with Semafor co-founder and former BuzzFeed News editor-in-chief Ben Smith.
The Insider Union’s strike followed a one-day walkout in April after the company announced it would lay off 10% of its staff, including 60 union members. The two parties subsequently negotiated the number of union layoffs down to roughly 40 people.
Though one-day walkouts have become an increasingly common tactic among media unions, open-ended strikes are relatively rare. The last digital media union to go on strike was Gizmodo Media Group Union, which represents employees at Gizmodo, Jezebel, The Root and three other newsrooms. Those journalists struck in March 2022 for less than a week. Meanwhile, reporters and other noneditorial workers at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette are still on strike, eight months after they first walked off the job.
Insider top editor tears down pro-union posters
Days before Insider journalists ended their open-ended strike, which had reached its second week, top editor Nicholas Carlson bicycled around Brooklyn, tearing down pro-union posters from lamp posts and mailboxes.
The posters, with the text “HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MILLIONAIRE?” accompanied by a headshot of Carlson and a message from the union, were specifically placed in Carlson’s Windsor Terrace neighborhood of Brooklyn. Nearly identical posters showing Insider CEO Henry Blodget were placed in his neighborhood, as well.
The New York Post reported on Carlson’s poster-tearing on Tuesday afternoon. A 56-second clip obtained by the Post shows Carlson, wearing a bike helmet and standing astride a Citi Bike with a basket stuffed with the posters, speaking with Insider employees who recognized him.
“Nicholas is a big boy and can handle attacks made on him on social media, but he was quite alarmed to see the posters plastered all over his neighborhood, including especially around his seven-year-old son’s school,” an Insider spokesman told the Post.
The strike, which launched on June 2, caused more than 250 unionized employees to stop producing news content for Insider for two weeks.
News consumers across the globe are searching for and avoiding news
The annual Reuters Institute Digital News Report, based on data from six continents and 46 markets, was published this week and lays out key findings around how average people find information about the world around them.
The report highlights shifts in:
- How people access news.
- Perceptions of algorithms’ role in news.
- “Winner takes most” with subscriptions.
- Continued news avoidance.
The institute grounds its findings in current events: “This year’s report comes against the backdrop of a global cost-of-living crisis, a continuing war in the heart of Europe, and further climate instability across the world.”
Last year’s report looked at how people avoid the news. The main reason people avoid news was the depressing nature of particular topics — a third of users referenced this in the survey. For example, an increasing proportion of people both in the United States and Japan, around 15%, did not tend to engage with news and or social media on a weekly basis.
And while trust in news was not as low as it has been, the 2023 report indicated audiences’ preference for accessing news through tech platforms over going directly to news outlets. This accounts for search on social media, particularly video-led platforms like TikTok, but also through aggregators like Google News.
The survey asked whether news consumers prefer to start their news journey through search or directly through news sources. The latter fell by about 10 percentage points from last year. The researchers attributed this directly to younger people’s habits around using social media and aggregators.
“Our data show, more clearly than ever, how this shift is strongly influenced by habits of the youngest generations, who have grown up with social media and nowadays often pay more attention to influencers or celebrities than they do to journalists, even when it comes to news,” the report reads.
While last year’s findings point to a need to make news accessible and relevant, as well as giving disheartened news consumers agency, this year’s report indicates that news consumers have taken back some control through search.
The Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism “Future of Journalism” podcast talked with Nic Newman, the lead author of the report, and co-author Rasmus Nielsen in a 30-minute podcast special (for those of you who have also become enamored with new ways and habits of consuming information beyond reading, much like the respondents in the survey).
¡Mira! ¡The Boston Globe!
The Boston Globe will drop its first newsletter Friday to be written in both English and Spanish, by Globe Opinion columnist Marcela García. It’s called ¡Mira! — in English, “Look!” In an announcement last month, García (who is also an associate editor and serves on the Globe editorial board) described the newsletter as her “once-a-week take on politics, policy, people — and pets!”
“It’s no secret that Boston is a majority-minority city where 1 in 5 Bostonians is Latinx,” García wrote. “Without question, the Hispanic community has become a meaningful part of the fabric of the city.” And yet, she pointed out, “there aren’t enough quality information sources to meet the demands and needs of the Latino population and the immigrant community at large.”
Earlier this year, Poynter reported that daily newspapers cut their Spanish-language outlets due to a variety of pressures like declines in advertising revenue. We’re curious to see where this effort by the Globe to serve their Spanish-speaking population takes them.
Media tidbits
Today’s edition of the Poynter Report was written by Annie Aguiar, Amaris Castillo, Angela Fu, Josie Hollingsworth and Ren LaForme.
More resources for journalists
Have feedback or a tip? Email Poynter senior media writer Tom Jones at [email protected].
