As the fallout from the Capitol invasion continues to dominate the news cycle, media business happenings haven’t stopped. Here are three that caught my attention.
Where social users get their news
A new and timely Pew Research study advances the picture of where social media users get their news.
No surprise, Facebook is dominant — 68% of a large survey sample use the site and 38% get some news there.
The picture gets more complicated with some other well-known platforms. About a quarter of the sample used Twitter and a quarter used LinkedIn. However, 60% of the Twitter users got news there while only 16% of the LinkedIn users did.
YouTube was the second biggest news source in the survey.
How Sheldon Adelson’s death affects the Las Vegas Review-Journal
The Adelson family’s ownership of the Las Vegas Review-Journal rated only a couple of paragraphs in obituaries of 87-year-old billionaire Sheldon Adelson. His rags-to-riches business empire and kingmaking Republican political contributions were by far the bigger story.
I don’t look for big changes at the paper. The family, rather than Adelson himself, bought the paper, and it has been run, with a light hand, by his son-in-law.
On the downside, the sale in late 2015 was a public relations and journalistic disaster as the Adelsons tried, with no success, to conceal their identity; then ran off their own reporters and editors who exposed it.
Adelson tended to champion Israel and favorite candidates in editorials. But he also invested in growing the Review-Journal’s staff and, according to publisher Keith Moyer, he and other family members never ventured into the newsroom.
Votebeat will keep going after the inauguration
Votebeat, the 90-day pop-up nonprofit news site, will keep going at least through the 2022 election cycle, according to a tweet from founder Elizabeth Green. Green hinted as much in an interview I did with her on the venture last month.
The idea had garnered $1 million in philanthropic funding. It will be run from Green’s original education site, Chalkbeat, and operate on the Chalkbeat model with affiliates covering the nuts and bolts of registration and tallying the vote in various local markets.
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