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How Gannett’s Knoxville News Sentinel got a wakeup call and shifted its coverage for Black communities — betternews.org

The Knoxville media market has typically served an audience that is primarily white and affluent, while practically one in four residents is a person of colour. Coverage by major news outlets followed a familiar script: lots of stories about crime, and from a perspective that was almost exclusively institutional: police, prosecutors and judges. Few stories featured Black communities in positive ways.

After a few wake-up calls, the team realised they could no longer emphasise 'mayhem reporting'. Through a new audience engagement initiative called the Digital Advisory Group, they paired a Facebook group with one-year digital subscription trials to listen to Black voices and earn their trust. A number of other Gannett titles across the country did the same in their local areas.

I know we rag on Facebook a lot (see below) but this is a first-class example of a publisher using it for good to get deeper into the communities they're supposed to be serving. The DAG itself is not a quick fix. But as a way of reaching into traditionally marginalised groups and beginning to repair relationships, it's a strong start.

The Athletic co-founders explain why they sold to The New York Times in their first post-deal interview — www.cnbc.com

Let's play a game: pour yourself a drink. Open this article. Every time Mather and Hansmann deflect a question with, "The New York Times won us over," drink.

Good luck reaching the end of this newsletter!

Facebook has a superuser-supremacy problem — www.theatlantic.com

Most public activity on the platform comes from a tiny, hyperactive group of abusive users. But Facebook relies on them to decide what everyone sees. And if things are this bad in the United States, where Facebook’s moderation efforts are most active, they are likely much worse everywhere else. An excellent (albeit depressing) piece of research from The Atlantic.

America’s top 25 titles have lost 30% of print sales in two years — pressgazette.co.uk

The country’s top 25 newspapers now have a combined average weekday print run of 3.1m, down from 4.4m in late 2019. The chart halfway down this article shows the particularly brutal effect on the Wall Street Journal and USA Today, both of whom cliff-edged in early 2020. The main reason for this is that both papers lost significant hotel sales, which have yet to recover.

This week's podcast:

The Fix Founding Editor Parusinski on cracking the media management puzzle — voices.media

On this week’s episode we hear from Jakub Parusinski, founding editor at The Fix, a trade magazine for media professionals. He and Peter spoke about Jakub’s background across journalism and management consulting, and how that has informed the nuts and bolts approach the Fix takes to ‘cracking the media management puzzle’.

Shortlist 2022 - The Publisher Podcast Awards — publisherpodcastawards.com

Last week we revealed the shortlist for 2022’s Publisher Podcast Awards. Over 120 podcasts have made the list, and it really does reflect the best of the best in the industry. Tomorrow, we'll be releasing tickets to our actual, real-life awards ceremony in April. 🤩🤩🤩