When 2,529 people were offered a free subscription to their local newspapers, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Philadelphia Inquirer, only forty-four accepted—less than 2 percent—according to an academic study set to be published this year in the American Journal of Political Science.  Dan Hopkins, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, conducted the […]

pCJR · Introducing Red Pen: A Grammar Podcast   There’s a famous scene from the final season of The Wire—y’know, The One With the Newspeople—where cub reporter Alma Gutierrez, new to the show’s (thinly) fictionalized version of the Baltimore Sun, receives a crash course in the paper’s lofty lexical standards: “Gutierrez!” her editor shouts across […]/p

Partisan media impacts voting behavior, yet what changes in viewers’ beliefs or attitudes may underlie these impacts is poorly understood. We recruited a sample of regular Fox News viewers using data on actual TV viewership from a media company, and incentivized them to watch CNN instead for a month using real-time viewership quizzes. Despite regular Fox viewers being largely strong partisans, we found manifold effects of changing the slant of their media diets on their factual beliefs, attitudes, perceptions of issues’ importance, and overall political views. We show that these effects stem in part from a bias we call partisan coverage filtering, wherein partisan outlets selectively report information, leading viewers to learn a biased set of facts. Consistent with this, treated participants concluded that Fox concealed negative information about President Trump. Partisan media does not only present its side an electoral advantage—it may present a challenge for democratic accountability.

Is it time for journalists to get off Twitter? One of the nation’s leading newspapers has made a presence on the social platform optional. We’ll talk about why, and what effects this could have on the quality of reporting and the safety of reporters. Also, Warner Bros. Discovery’s takeover of CNN and HBO, the collapse of Black News Channel and the USA Today’s innovative use of comic journalism. From Missouri School of Journalism professors Amy Simons, Earnest Perry and Kathy Kiely: Views of the News.

This annual report, based on a survey of senior executives, looks at the key issues facing journalism in 2022 and beyond.

pResponses to this report written by journalists and media scholars. Each focusing on a specific issue raised,  including legal considerations (Victoria Baranetsky), online harassment (Michelle Ferrier), representation (Leonor Ayala Polley), audience trust (Benjamin Toff), and objectivity (Laura Wagner), can be read here. Executive Summary Journalists increasingly rely on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter […]/p

"If I was queen for a day, what I would honestly do is fire every journalism professor and hire adjuncts working in the field. That's, like, my dream."

I hadn't seen this from Matt when it first came out last month, but it hit me timely today: When tech oversteps its mandate as a too...

Rural adults are less likely than suburban adults to have home broadband and less likely than urban adults to own a smartphone, tablet or computer.

Article originally published in Issue 4 of Rupture, Ireland’s eco-socialist quarterly, buy the print issue:

Studies of the social impact of the Internet must consider the changing lifestyle of the new economy and not relate solely to industrial-age concepts.

Artist Heather Benjamin discusses the importance of homemade zines, why she continues to switch up her process, the complications of running your own business, and why art school wasn't useful.

“To be truly countercultural in a time of tech hegemony, one has to, above all, betray the platform.”

“This is a work of criticism. If it were literary criticism, everyone would immediately understand the underlying purpose is positive. A critic of literature examines a work, analyzing its features, evaluating its qualities, seeking a deeper appreciation that might be useful to other readers of the same text. In a similar way, critics of music, […]