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Washington Post
23-07-2025
- Business
- Washington Post
Jamie Stockwell named a Deputy Managing Editor of the News Hub
I am pleased to announce that Jamie Stockwell will join the leadership team of the News Hub as a Deputy Managing Editor, where she will help drive our digital news day and chart our next chapter as we look to deepen engagement with our audience. Jamie brings a wealth of experience and innovative thinking to this critical role at the center of the newsroom. Working in close partnership with other senior leaders, she will help guide our journalism in real time, shape our coverage priorities, elevate our storytelling and ensure The Post's report is urgent, ambitious and essential to readers across platforms. She is passionate about helping to find new ways to connect our world-class journalism with an ever-larger audience, and will draw on her experience as a leader at several news organizations. Jamie – who began her journalism career as an intern and then reporter at The Post – has for the past year and a half been our Executive Local Editor, where she has overseen coverage of major local news including the collapse of the Key Bridge last spring and the midair collision over the Potomac in January, storylines that included round-the-clock reporting, investigations and narrative reconstructs. She also has focused the staff on distinctive and enterprising big swings across a range of beats, including political scoops about the ill-fated arena deal in Virginia, an examination of the unregulated Hajj tourism industry after last summer's pilgrimage left more than 1,300 people dead and the moving story behind a photograph from the 1970s of a group of friends celebrating life with breakfast near the Reflecting Pool. Before her recent return to The Post, Jamie served as executive editor of Axios Local, where she led an ambitious nationwide expansion and pursued many of the same opportunities we now have as we adapt for the digital road ahead. She was also a deputy national editor at The New York Times, where she oversaw award-winning coverage, and before that, held senior leadership roles at the San Antonio Express-News, including serving as managing editor for more than six years. Jamie is a seventh-generation South Texan of Mexican descent who was raised on the border. She is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin. Jamie will move to her new role next week. Please join me in congratulating her. Jason
Times
12-07-2025
- Business
- Times
Why advertisers are wrong to shun news websites
As a former student journalist, pollster and political strategist for both Bill Clinton and Sir Tony Blair, Mark Penn considers himself an avowed 'news junkie'. Research by his advertising group Stagwell suggests he is in good company, with 90 per cent of chief executives and 25 per cent of the public falling into the same category. So when he left politics to work as an executive at Microsoft, Penn was surprised to learn that the tech giant did not advertise its products on news websites. 'It was really puzzling,' said Penn, who rose to become chief strategy officer. He went on to embrace news advertising on Microsoft's behalf, and says it paid off with a significant boost in sales. Later, after Penn launched Stagwell, he learnt that many other large companies were partially, or entirely, withdrawn from digital news. This he describes as 'ludicrous'. Not only does he believe that companies should want to support journalism but he also thinks companies are missing out on reaching large cross-sections of society. Stagwell's claim that a quarter of people in the UK are 'news junkies' — checking reports four times a day — may cause eyebrows to rise but his belief that these people tend to be 'higher-educated, higher-income' than most chimes with others in his sector. In Penn's view, much of the blame for this lies with a handful of outfits, known as 'brand safety companies', that are virtually unknown outside his sector. He speaks of being 'harassed' by these companies to avoid placing adverts next to certain news content. News, he says, has been 'demonetised by this expanding brand safety movement'. In some cases, company bosses have knowingly reduced their expenditure on news for fear of their brands appearing next to politically divisive or upsetting stories. But in many other instances, Penn believes business leaders are unaware of their company's news avoidance. Some ad teams have years-old lists of 'keywords' that will trigger brand safety companies to block adverts from appearing on a news story. Farcical case studies abound. Fiona Salmon, boss of brand safety challenger Mantis, which is owned by Reach, the UK publisher whose stable includes the Mirror and Express newspapers, says BBC Good Food has lost out on adverts because of references to chicken 'breasts'. References to 'shots' have damaged football websites. And, she says, some blocklists still include Ariana Grande eight years after the Manchester Arena attack. Penn estimates that '30 to 40 per cent of stories, generally in newspapers like yours, are being demonetised' in this way. He says: 'I think a lot of CEOs don't realise.' Now Penn and an alliance of peers, concerned about the trend of ad revenues being shunted from journalism to Silicon Valley's tech giants, are encouraging business leaders to return their ad dollars and pounds to news. Among the converted is Tracy-Ann Lim, chief media officer of banking giant JP Morgan. 'Investing in news is not a charitable choice, it's a business decision,' she said at a Stagwell event during the Cannes Lions advertising festival in France in June. She criticised other firms for being 'hypocritical' by advertising with news 'in a fleeting way', depending on the politics of the day. How did it come to this? The rise of the internet gave companies the opportunity to reach potential customers with immediacy and at low cost through so-called programmatic advertising. In the past, companies would appoint media-buying agencies to spend weeks or months negotiating prices to secure marketing slots on advertising boards, television screens, newspapers and magazines. Today, with up to 90 per cent of UK advertising money spent online, media-buying agencies have automated much of this process and deals can be struck in nanoseconds. When an internet user clicks on a link or app, in the time it takes to load, media-buying robots compete in auctions to buy ad slots. That lack of human oversight brings risk, hence the growing business of brand safety. Many trace the term 'brand safety' back nearly a decade. It was around this time when companies began to come under pressure over adverts that appeared alongside, and so inadvertently provided funding for, extremist groups. A 2017 Times investigation found a Mercedes advert running on a pro-Isis YouTube video, and Waitrose being promoted on Britain First's website. Panicked, the ad industry scrambled to find ways to stop this happening without disrupting programmatic advertising. One of the simplest solutions was for companies and their media-buying agencies to draw up long lists of words to avoid. Those charged with implementing the restrictions included DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science (IAS), which are today seen as the world's leading brand safety companies. These are no small outfits. They are both publicly listed in New York and have valuations of $2.5 billion and $1.4 billion respectively. During the split-second process of an advert appearing on a screen, the technology of DoubleVerify and IAS can intervene to block the transaction completing, so depriving the website publisher of funds. The intention of the brand safety movement was to stop wholesome brands from appearing alongside extremist blogs, pornography and other unsavoury content. But as politics became more divisive, many started to expand their lists to rule out web pages that might include serious news stories. Jean-Christophe Peube, chief operating officer of French advertising business Equativ, says that lists grew to 'thousands of words' and 'that's really not the right way to do it'. In 2023, America's Time magazine landed an exclusive interview with Taylor Swift, one of its biggest journalistic hits in recent years. But, says Mark Howard, chief operating officer, the company missed out on significant advertising revenue because it was deemed 'unsafe' by one of the brand safety outfits. He said this was because it included references to the 'sexism' and 'the exclusion of women from power' that Swift had helped to challenge. To further exacerbate the problem, many in the ad sector say teams have been too cautious to remove words from their lists. 'So people are still blocking 'Hillary Clinton',' says Lou Paskalis, chief strategy officer of Ad Fontes Media, another challenger to the brand safety companies that seeks to inform advertisers of political bias in news publishers. 'She's now a grandmother living in upstate New York. She's no longer a controversial figure like she might have been in the 2016 election.' While DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science have earned bogeyman status among some in the sector, it is worth noting that they say their role often consists of merely upholding the wishes, and keyword ban lists, of media-buying agencies and companies. But many believe their technology has not evolved fast enough and that they have not done enough to help struggling publishers. Ross Jenkins, the European boss of media-buying agency Mediahub, says his company has moved away from blocklists and uses new tools, and its own technology, to measure whether a web page is desirable for advertisers. These consider 'context', to avoid keywords being taken out of context, 'sentiment' in an article and an assessment of whether a website or app tends to command 'high attention'. More and more marketing money is going towards big tech platforms and social media. Lukas Fassbender, a senior vice-president for Europe of The Trade Desk, which helps companies advertise on parts of the internet not controlled by big tech, including news sites, said more marketers should trust news outlets. 'Journalism is curated,' he said, while on social media, brands still run the risk of appearing next to 'terrorism or someone just throwing stupid videos on social'. Still many powerful marketing executives live in fear of what will be in the news. Speaking in Cannes last month, Gordana Buccisano, global brands strategy director of Reckitt, the maker of Durex and Strepsils, disclosed that her company had imposed a 'blanket ban' on adverts during last year's US election for fear of 'negative exposure' on a divisive story. Appearing alongside her at an event hosted by European broadcast RTL, Caroline Proto, global media boss for EssilorLuxottica, which makes Ray-Ban and Oakley sunglasses, said her company was also reducing its spend on news advertising, citing the risk to its brands in the 'current climate'. Challenged on how she knew that appearing alongside a story about Donald Trump was bad for a sunglasses brand, Proto admitted: 'We don't. But it's not a risk … that we're willing to take.' Evidence is growing that, in fact, there is no risk. Last year Penn's company, Stagwell, conducted a survey of 50,000 Americans to determine whether placing an advert next to a positive or negative news story made a difference to consumer perceptions. The study found that ads 'placed adjacent to stories covering politics or gun shootings perform as effectively as ads placed next to a positive business story, on par with sport and entertainment'. Penn's conclusion is that marketers' fear of news is 'irrational'.
Globe and Mail
05-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Globe and Mail
When facts are fuzzy, who are you going to call – Joe Rogan?
If you're reading this column online, you're among the majority of Canadians – 73 per cent – who get their news digitally, according to the 2025 Digital News Report published last month by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. What may surprise you is that these digital sources include not only websites and apps, but also podcasts, social media, video-sharing networks such as YouTube, and even AI chatbots. The report, now in its 14th year of tracking news media trends, offers more granular data on the habits of American audiences. More than half of those surveyed – 54 per cent – said they had looked to social and video networks as a source of news in the past week. And that same proportion of young adults said social and video networks are their main source of news. (The picture is somewhat different in this country, given that Meta has banned news links on its Canadian platforms since 2023. Forty-four per cent of respondents said they use social media as a source of news, down two percentage points since last year and down 11 percentage points since 2022, during the COVID-19 pandemic.) Authors of the report were also struck by the attention Americans are paying to unconventional news sources – led, in some cases, by non-journalists, such as Joe Rogan, the podcaster who started as a stand-up comic, then worked as a sitcom actor and TV host. (Remember Fear Factor, the reality show that challenged contestants to wild stunts such as walking onto the wing of an airplane in flight?) Slightly more than one-fifth of respondents (22 per cent) said they saw Mr. Rogan commenting on or discussing the news in the previous week, while 10 per cent said the same of comedian John Oliver, who hosts the satirical current events show Last Week Tonight. For the first time in the report's history, researchers asked whether respondents use chatbots, such as ChatGPT, to get their news. At 7 per cent, the proportion that answered yes is 'probably higher than I expected,' Nic Newman, lead author of the report and a senior research associate at Oxford University, told me on a video call. And, he continued, 'twice as many young people say they're using chatbots to access news in different ways.' That uptake is remarkable given that AI's ability to offer real-time news is relatively new. So, what does this mean for news organizations? What does it mean for the public? Regarding the use of chatbots, Mr. Newman said, 'we can expect that to grow significantly in the next year or so, and that will be hugely disruptive to the news industry.' Already, audiences are losing the habit of visiting news websites or apps directly as their main source of news (topping out at 27 per cent of American respondents age 45 to 54, and reaching a low of 16 per cent of those age 25 to 34). But there are opportunities for legacy news organizations to highlight their strengths. Reuters Institute research has found that audiences 'want institutional media to do their job when they need it to be there,' Mr. Newman said. For example, when international survey respondents were asked where they would fact-check 'something important in the news online that they suspected might be false,' 38 per cent selected 'a news source I trust.' That's a larger proportion than the 35 per cent who selected 'official source (e.g. government website)' and significantly larger than the 14 per cent who selected 'social media or video network' – the domain of Mr. Rogan et al. AI might try to come for journalism – but here's why it won't succeed However, news organizations have come to understand that they need to do more than report news and human interest stories with journalistic rigour, Mr. Newman said. 'It's no longer enough just to produce something, because distribution is now important. If you can't produce something that somebody wants to read, then it won't find its way through the distribution algorithms or chains, and you'll never find an audience.' Rather than copy the influencers and content creators who offer news on social and video networks, he said, news organizations can adapt some of the storytelling techniques that audiences like and engage with, such as vertical video. They can have a presence on other platforms where non-conventional news sources are thriving, such as TikTok, to build their audiences and a sense of community. 'I think that journalism should be absolutely at the forefront of telling people what's new and uncovering things, and they need to work harder at making sure that people read it,' Mr. Newman said.
News24
29-06-2025
- Business
- News24
News24 leads trust in South Africa for the seventh year running
News24 continues to set the standard for trusted journalism in South Africa, receiving the highest score for trust among news brands featured in the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism's Digital News Report 2025, the most comprehensive global analysis of news consumption. In addition to its trust rating of 81%, News24 is also the top-ranked digital news platform in terms of weekly reach, with 58% of the survey respondents accessing News24 weekly and 39% engaging with the platform three times or more per week. Adriaan Basson, editor-in-chief of News24, attributes these achievements to the newsroom's unwavering focus on credibility, engagement, and quality. 'Trust is the cornerstone of everything we do. It's built through consistent investment in accurate, independent journalism that empowers readers to navigate an often-overwhelming world of information. Whether it's uncovering the challenges facing communities – like Sikonathi Mantshantsha's award-winning investigation into the Mogale City sewage crisis – or inspiring South Africans with uplifting journalism through our new Good News section, our approach is rooted in making every story matter. 'This trust is also reflected in our team's incredible achievements, with 10 of our journalists currently shortlisted for the 2025 Standard Bank Sikuvile Journalism Awards. Their work, spanning investigative reporting, hard news, and visual journalism, highlights the depth and diversity of News24's newsroom.' With a committed audience and measurable engagement, News24 leads not just in scale but in fostering deeper connections with its readers. It has built a large subscriber base and delivers significant page views. These accomplishments, combined with investments in fact-checking initiatives such as the full-time Disinformation Desk, reinforce News24's ability to meet the needs of an increasingly critical audience. Minette Ferreira, CEO of Media24 Media, highlights the commercial value of maintaining such a rigorous standard. 'In an age where attention and trust are hard-won, reach alone isn't enough. News24 creates a brand-safe environment where advertisers can align their messaging with high-quality, credible journalism. Trusted media platforms like ours offer unrivalled opportunities for advertisers to engage with audiences thoughtfully and meaningfully, ensuring greater resonance than unregulated platforms. 'News24's continued success reflects the importance of credibility in both journalism and advertising and reaffirms the vital role of trusted media in building a sustainable, reliable environment for audiences and partners.' South Africa's media landscape With a population of 61 million and internet penetration at 76%, South Africa's media environment is highly competitive and increasingly challenged by global digital gatekeepers. Public and commercial broadcasters operate across multiple languages, while print publishers are increasingly adopting an integrated digital approach – often while navigating an uneven playing field where international platform giants capture the lion's share of advertising revenue despite using locally produced content. These overseas technology conglomerates control user data, attention, and distribution channels, yet contribute minimally to the local content ecosystem. Amid these profound market distortions, News24's ability to maintain trust and reach reflects not only its commitment to quality journalism but also its resilience in countering the algorithmic advantages and resource disparities imposed by foreign digital monopolies within an increasingly fragmented landscape.
ABC News
24-06-2025
- Business
- ABC News
ABC NEWS sets new digital audience record in May
ABC NEWS was again Australia's top digital news provider in May with a monthly audience of 13.9 million people, according to the latest Ipsos data released today. That is the highest audience for a news brand in the News category rankings since the Ipsos iris rankings were introduced in January 2023, with coverage of the federal election fueling strong online engagement. Average read time for the ABC NEWS website across the month was a high 35 minutes. Source: Ipsos iris Online Audience Measurement Service May 2025, Age 14+, PC/Laptop, Smartphone, Tablet, Text Only, News excl Weather & Aggregators, Brand Group, Audience (000s), Audience Reach %, Total Mins (MM), AVG Mins PP.
