For the Record

New Yorker Launches Subscriber Event Series:

The New Yorker has announced the launch of The New Yorker Live, a new event series modeled after the annual New Yorker Festival. The series will commence with a "two-event premiere" on March 29-31 featuring such figures as poet and activist Amanda Gorman, author Karla Cornejo Villavicencio and Pulitzer Prize Board member David Remnick, the magazine's editor. Future events, which are accessible to subscribers, will be announced every month. "Taking The New Yorker Festival virtual last year made clear that there’s a desire among our readers around the globe for deeply engaging conversations,” Remnick said. “With the launch of this new series, I'm so pleased that we’ll be bringing this community, built around subscribers, together on a regular basis.”

Bainum Considers Tribune Acquisition:

Maryland hotel executive Stewart W. Bainum Jr. " has taken a preliminary step toward making a bid for all of Tribune Publishing" amid a dispute with hedge fund Alden Global Capital as he prepares to reincorporate The Baltimore Sun and two smaller Maryland papers under a nonprofit corporation, Marc Tracy of The New York Times reported Sunday. According to Tracy, Bainum "has asked the Tribune Publishing special committee, a group made up of three independent board members, for permission to be released from a nondisclosure agreement prohibiting him from discussing the deal, so that he would be able to pursue partners for a new bid." If the deal were to manifest, Bainum "would be likely to seek local owners for its other newspapers, which also include The Hartford Courant, The Orlando Sentinel and The South Florida Sun Sentinel." Spokespeople for Bainum, Alden and Tribune declined to comment on the matter. 

Newsrooms Walk Away From Longer Articles, Pivot to Other Formats:

Newsrooms "are pivoting away from large chunks of text online, because the format doesn't suit readers' attention spans on mobile phones," according to Sara Fischer of Axios. Between September 2019 and February 2020, Chartbeat analytics show the average word count of news articles fell from about 449 to about 380, reflecting the increasing prominence of documentaries and podcasts as vehicles for longform journalism. Data from SimilarWeb "shows a similar trend," with average page visit duration and pages viewed per visit "[dropping] at -6.2% and -19.4%, respectively" in 2020 despite an increase in overall traffic. "This suggests that while people are frequenting news sites at higher volumes, they are less engaged with the content, which could indicate interest shifting away from longform journalism, towards shorter, more digestible formats," said Ilana Marks, a marketing insights analyst at the company.

Newsrooms Build Predictive, Dynamic Paywalls:

Amid the increasing consensus that subscription-based models will continue to complement revenue from traditional advertising, news organizations including Gannett-owned newspapers and the Chicago Tribune have implemented predictive or dynamic paywalls that restrict certain content topics and target such niche demographics as out-of-market sports readers, according to Hannah Farrow of the Northwestern Medill Local News Initiative. "If the consumer wants a product, you must pay for the product," said past Pulitzer juror Howard Saltz, the Knight Foundation innovator-in-residence at Florida International University and former publisher and editor-in-chief of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. "And if you don’t want the product, or if too few people want the product, then the product goes away." Fellow past juror Amalie Nash, who serves as Gannett's senior vice president of local news and audience development, said she believes subscription revenue will emerge as the primary funding mechanism among for-profit news organizations: "Reader revenue directly supporting your business is something that you have control over and can continue to grow."

Dallas Morning News Parent Company Considers Name Change:

Dallas Morning News parent company A. H. Belo Corporation announced during its quarterly meeting Tuesday that it will seek to change its name to DallasNews Corporation in May, citing its namesake founder's ties to the Confederacy," according to Staff Writer Maria Halkias. Belo served in the Confederate Army for the duration of the Civil War. "We are keenly aware that the relationship of our company's name to a person who figured prominently in the Confederate Army is the source of discomfort, even pain, for many of our fellow citizens,” Robert W. Decherd, the company’s president, said during the call. “And that is intolerable to the leaders of this enterprise." As part of its ongoing social justice efforts, the newspaper appointed past Pulitzer juror Leona Allen, a Dallas native and longtime editor, "to the new position of deputy publisher responsible for diversity and inclusion across the company" last summer.

COVID Relief Legislation Assists Community Newspaper Pension Liabilities:

After it is signed into law by President Biden Friday, the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 will "[throw] a lifeline to the imperiled local news business" by providing "much-needed pension relief to help keep retirement plans solvent," according to venture capitalist and former McClatchy Chief Executive Craig Forman in a piece for NiemanReports. "Had this law been in place just 13 months ago, McClatchy [...] would likely have been able to avoid the painful Chapter 11 restructuring that resulted in its nearly 25,000 pensions being absorbed by the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation," Forman said. "These pension rules would have provided McClatchy, having paid down all but 16% of the multibillion-dollar debt from its 2006 Knight Ridder purchase, 15 additional years to add to the $1.3 billion it had already contributed to its pension plan."

Des Moines Register Reporter Acquitted:

Des Moines Register reporter Andrea Sahouri "was acquitted of all charges by a jury Wednesday following her arrest while covering a Black Lives Matter protest last summer," according to Linh Ta of Axios. Spenser Robnett, her then-boyfriend who accompanied her at the protest, also was acquitted. While testifying, Sahouri asserted that Officer Luke Wilson pepper-sprayed her amid "no clear dispersal order and no evidence showing [Sahouri and Robnett] disobeying police commands." Sahouri continues to work as a breaking news reporter at the newspaper.

Apple Podcasts To Stop Using 'Subscribe':

Apple Podcasts will stop using the word "subscribe" in a few weeks, citing potential confusion with digital news products that offer fee-based subscriptions, James Cridland of Podnews reported Tuesday. "Today, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube are the three most widely used services to play podcasts, and now the word Subscribe means ‘automatically download for free’ in exactly none of them," said Tom Webster of Edison Research. "Podcasters will have no choice but to adapt their language accordingly or risk confusing listeners." Other podcast distributors already have modified their styles, with Spotify, Audible and Stitcher employing "follow" or its derivations.

State Court Dismisses Trump/Times Lawsuit:

The New York State Supreme Court has dismissed "the Trump campaign's defamation lawsuit against The New York Times on Tuesday, saying the campaign had failed to prove that the Times intentionally defamed" the former president, Mychael Schnell of The Hill reported Tuesday. The campaign sued the newspaper after a 2019 op-ed by 1972 International Reporting winner and former Executive Editor Max Frankel "argued that there was an 'overarching deal' between Russia and the Trump campaign to help former President Trump get elected." In his decision, Judge James E. d’Auguste asserted that "the campaign had failed to establish actual malice with its lawsuit, as it had not shown that Frankel and the Times had knowledge that the statements were false, or that they were made with a 'reckless disregard for the truth,'" while the publication of the piece in the op-ed section "[signaled] to readers that words such as 'deal' and 'quid pro quo' were meant as opinion and not facts." The Trump campaign refused to comment on the matter, while New York Times Deputy General Counsel David E. McCraw lauded the decision's reaffirmation of "a fundamental point about press freedom: we should not tolerate libel suits that are brought by people in power intending to silence and intimidate those who scrutinize them."

BuzzFeed Eliminates 47 HuffPost Positions:

Less than a month after completing its acquisition of the news organization, BuzzFeed "laid off 47 workers at HuffPost and closed the publication's Canadian edition" Tuesday, according to Katie Robertson of The New York Times. At a virtual company meeting, CEO Jonah Peretti "said the layoffs were meant to stem losses at HuffPost," which lost more than $20 million in 2020 and was "on track to lose the same amount this year." In a statement, the HuffPost Union confirmed that the layoffs affected 33 members, accounting for nearly a third of its membership. "We are devastated and infuriated, particularly after an exhausting year of covering a pandemic and working from home," the bargaining unit said. Peretti also confirmed that Executive Editor Hillary Frey and International Executive Editor Louise Roug have decided to leave the company as the search for a new editor in chief (who will report to 2000 International Reporting winner Mark Schoofs, BuzzFeed News's editor in chief) is completed.