An editorial company is a strange beast. Ask Verizon.

Remember SugarString? You should, now that AT&T has bought CNN, along with the rest of Time Warner. SugarString was a tech news site started by Verizon. Here’s what happened:

In exchange for the major corporate backing, tech reporters at SugarString are expressly forbidden from writing about American spying or net neutrality around the world, two of the biggest issues in tech and politics today.

Unsurprisingly, Verizon is deeply tangled up in both controversies.

AT&T executives are making all the right sounds about CNN’s independence. They seem to be smarter about it than Verizon was. The point I want to raise is this: a telecommunications giant with no tradition as an editorial company may not realize what a huge challenge it is to make a space for journalists to do their work without interference or restrictions.

An editorial company is organized in a different way than every other kind of business. In one part of itself it has to take actions that can injure another part of the company or anger key customers, and — crazy as it sounds — this is the right way to run the business. Not everyone who understands the telecommunications industry will understand that. Just ask the editors of SugarString, which of course no longer exists.

Trump is a threat to press freedom, yes, but it goes beyond that

“This is not about picking sides in an election,” says the statement released today. “This is recognizing that a Trump presidency represents a threat to press freedom unknown in modern history.”

The statement is from Sandy Mims Rowe, chair of the Committee to Protect journalists, which ordinarily focuses on dictators jailing editors overseas.

On October 6, CPJ’s board of directors passed a resolution declaring Trump an unprecedented threat to the rights of journalists and to CPJ’s ability to advocate for press freedom around the world.

But the Committee’s declaration actually understates the threat. I’m not criticizing it; they’re staying within their brief. But we have to recognize a second layer of danger.

In the world Trump wants for us, the glamorizing entertainment media still exists. The strongman’s propaganda state still exists. The kind of journalism we can use to inform ourselves and check the powerful would be almost pointless. For he is actively running against such basic notions as:

* “We need a fact-based debate or there cannot be consent of the governed;”
* “There is something called the public record that cannot just be wiped away;”
* “A candidate’s position on major issues should be made clear to the voters;”
* “Lying cannot become a universal principle in politics without major damage to our democracy.”

The critic Paul Rosenberg said something important about this last week: “The purpose of the press in a democracy is to help make a society legible to itself.” Exactly: legible to itself.

With his non-stop lying and conspiracy mongering, his refusal to articulate and hold positions, his contempt for the public record — and even for the idea that candidates should have a grasp of the major issues facing the country — with the confusion and hatred of the other that he sows in every speech, Trump stands for the ruin of any fact-based debate to which the healthy practice of journalism can contribute.

Is the Muslim ban still on? How can we debate it if no one knows? As I wrote here, a political style that mocks the idea of a common world of facts is an attack on the very possibility of honest journalism.

It’s bigger than imperiling the freedoms journalists need to do their job. Trump is campaigning to make American society illegible to itself.  That is a threat to pull the press out by its roots.

Trust in news after Trump

On my current list of the top problems in pressthink that I obsess about, number two is this:

A huge portion of the country is effectively “lost” to mainstream journalism because it doesn’t believe what is reported in what it calls The Media.

With Trump the problem has mutated into a crisis, which will be there after the election. I have found only one piece of writing that grapples with this in any honest way: What news needs to do now by John Avlon, editor of the Daily Beast.

To turn the tide, news needs to do two things now more than ever: call B.S. and make important stories interesting.

Amid sprawling spin and superficiality, the value in news today comes from edgy, original reporting pursued without fear or favor. News organizations should be non-partisan, but not neutral — hitting targets on the right and the left, as the facts dictate. We need to be happy warriors who love confronting bullies, bigots and hypocrites on either side of the aisle.

Not on anyone’s team, but not worried about ‘balance’ or being called biased, either. That gets it right, I think. So does this:

While I’m proud that The Daily Beast now reaches more than 1 million readers a day, how a site grows is as important as that it grows. Influence is more valuable than scale for its own sake. A site can boost traffic in the short run by chasing the lowest common denominator, but in the long run this will kill what makes it unique. In a digital age when information is everywhere, content farm commodity news is the killer of differentiation. And differentiation is the soul of a news brand.

What is typically called “click bait” (but it’s really much larger than that) is part of the trust problem, which has both commercial and political dimensions. It can’t be solved by pandering to people, whether that means busy news cruisers on their phones, or right wingers with their pitchforks out. Here’s that link again.

Maybe wait until he does it first, then report it.

That’s usually the sequence. I mean you can do it the other way around, but then you’re… Oh, never mind.

In emergencies newsroom trust is won

The Herald carrier force was decimated by the storm. We assembled a substitute force that included people from every division including publisher and the editor. We distributed the paper free to any house that showed evidence that people lived there. —Doug Clifton, former editor of the Miami Herald

Many times did I listen to editors at the Miami Herald reflect on Hurricane Andrew (1992) and their relationship with the community. What they recalled was extreme devastation: flattened homes and lives in the circulation area that the Herald reached. The newspaper was able to print, but delivery systems were busted, so Herald staffers from the publisher’s office to the mail room had to pitch in and help.

After the storm they rode through devastated neighborhoods with copies of the paper, hurling them into damaged homes without knowing if anyone was in there. To their shock people would emerge out of half-destroyed houses and retrieve the newspapers that had been tossed into the rubble. These people were desperate for news, any kind of news, and they wanted to know if their situation was typical or exceptional.

For the people of the Miami Herald the lesson was: when the users really, really need you, you have to deliver. But if you can deliver, you can earn in a few hours or days a kind of trust that may last for years. In any civic emergency that equation is alive.

Platforms in charge

Recode.net, October 7, 2016.

Snapchat is making a small but important tweak to how it displays, and then plays, user Stories inside its app.

First, Snapchat is putting user Stories at the very top of the Stories page. That means you’ll likely see more of your friends’ Stories “above the fold.”

The new design creates an obvious group of losers: Snapchat’s Discover publishing partners, who used to occupy the top of that page and will now have their channels listed below all of your friends’ stories. Depending on how many friends you have on the app, that could mean lots of scrolling before you come across Discover content.

Recode.net, June 29, 2016

Facebook is tweaking its News Feed algorithm to prioritize posts that come from users’ family and friends, which means you’ll soon see more posts from actual people like your cousins or your college roommates.

But seeing more posts from friends and family also means seeing fewer posts from non-human accounts, specifically publishers like BuzzFeed or the New York Times, newsrooms that rely heavily on Facebook’s massive audience for web traffic and ad revenue.