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UK journalism still has a problem with working class
This is a really powerful first-hand account from a working class journalist about the struggles they’ve faced to ‘make something of themselves’. They write about having degrees and jobs ‘punctuated by chaos and crises that are part and parcel of precarious, poor and working class life in Wales.’
What really struck me about this is that I actually can’t remember the last time I read anything remotely like it. And that’s pretty sad in a country where this type of story is the reality for way too many people. Stories about benefit cheats, ten a penny. Stories about hard work against the odds, not so much.
Looking at Wales specifically, Diffwys Criafol says that in a country where one in five children live in poverty, it is an almost exclusively middle class demographic that creates culture and discourse. The point for all our media is that we need to get better at telling real working class stories and to do that we need more working class journalists and editors.
Niemanlab’s Joshua Benton says that, for better and for worse, Apple has a new way to mess with ad tech in iOS 17. Basically Apple is planning to strip out the components that identify individuals from URLs in Apple Mail and some other applications. “It’s another reminder of the value to publishers to owning your own first-party audience data,” says Joshua, “and of how much of the media business depends on digital infrastructure that publishers don’t control.”
Paul Bradshaw has been teaching digital journalism for a long time and, as you would absolutely expect, he is all over the arrival of AI. In this piece he’s outlining his priorities for teaching students about the fast rising tech. These include developing a general understanding of what AI is and does, figuring out attribution and using AI tools as an editing tool. There are several more and we could all benefit from taking them on board.
We’ve been saying for a while that print is destined to become a ‘luxury’ offering and I love the high-class restaurant analogy used in this case study. The authors say, “Anyone who wants to run an appealing newspaper restaurant today must first clean up thoroughly.” That means keeping your newsroom staffed with top talent, keeping writing tight, and not overdoing major events, bad news or polarisation. Tasty!
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