Google’s Publisher Pay out: Publisher-hate relationship with Google. Yes, Google search drives millions of views their way, which they can monetize through ads and subscribers. On the other hand, Google (and Facebook) have basically taken over online advertising from newsrooms, costing them untold billions in revenue. Now Google is giving back — a little. Ingrid Lunden for TechCrunch reports Google is paying $1 billion to some publishers to license content for Google News Showcase. We will see how well it works. 

COVID-19 Lessons for Journalists: The pandemic has not been easy to cover. For one thing, reporters are covering a disease where much is unknown, so they have to learn themselves as the science catches up. CJR asked journalists what lessons they learned from their coverage. This is what they had to say.

How journalists covered Trump’s rant: President Trump’s 46-minute rant was filled with falsehood after falsehood. So if you are a news organization, how do you cover it? Carefully, it appears. According to Tom Jones at Poynter, “It’s not an easy answer. Most responsible outlets seemed to do the right thing. Acknowledge it, but don’t spend a lot of energy on it. And spend most of that energy debunking it. In other words, pay attention to it, but not enough to give it unnecessary credibility.”

Journalism & ‘Mutual Aid’: CJR reporter, Darryl Holliday tells how mutual aid’s solidarity network has risen and resulted from untenable economic disparity and social breakdown. From this, Holiday wrote how this should give journalists something they need to hear, saying that when government and civic institutions fail to provide equal benefits across society, marginalized people will create new systems. What does this mean for journalists? This means we have to be more clear in what we report, as well as inclusive such as represent different communities evenly instead of unevenly as the press tends to do. 

How to cover COVID-19 correctly: Journalism has changed a lot during these past few months due to COVID-19. Many media outlets have reported on the matter in their own way and some of them have worked while others have not. Poynter reporter, Roy Peter Clark, provides some writing tools to better cover COVID-19 in a comprehensible way. Clark provides amazing tips for the upcoming future journalists in order to provide accurate knews with the goal to give people what they need to make safe decisions about their personal health and the public’s health and to give readers confidence in their knowledge so they will not be harmed by the type of anxiety that leads to panic-and worse. 

Why the GOP is never coming back to mainstream news: Academic Nikki Usher explains why Republicans have given up on mainstream media and why they seem to love misinformation.

Newsmax election denialism: Newsmax, a cable news show you might never have heard about, is making a play for Fox viewers who are upset that the Murdoch station has taken a (slightly) skeptical view of the falsehood that there was widespread voting fraud in the presidential election. Newsmax is diving deep into conspiracy theories and it seems to be paying off. Newsmax has seen it’s highest ratings with 800,000 tuning in and many people, including with Trump, sharing clips and retweets.

The Inquirer’s service journalism : Why invest in service journalism? For the Philly Inquirer, it’s about creating stories that are “actionable and accessible,” says Megan Griffith-Greene, the Inquirer’s service features editor. She says: “Actionable stories are useful and practical; they help people make better decisions. Accessible stories mean they are easy to read, understand and remember, and we use a variety of techniques to break up the text and make it easier to absorb.”

TV can’t be like Twitter: It may be an odd thing to be reminded about, but the major TV networks are not Twitter, or any other social media platform. That fact was driven home during a Nov. 5 press conference by President Trump, who falsely said massive voter fraud had stolen the election from him. As soon as he started on his rant, the networks — ABC, CBS, NBC, and Univision — cut away to tell people that there was evidence for Trump’s statements.

How news sites reported on the lengthy election: How did newsrooms handle the lengthy election cycle? WaPo reporter Marisa Lati said many focused on the “ambiguity of the race and the unsettled national mood.” Lati reported how Julie Moos, executive director of the National Press Club Journalism Institute, thought how newspapers such the Arizona Republic (“Divided Nation Waits”) had one of the strongest displays, while others  newspapers stuck with cautious language and/or data maps to highlight the progress of the polls. Others, like the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, were accused of confusing American’s by using “Trump: I have Won, Biden: It’s not Over!” as a headline.

Media suppression in Nigeria: Reporter, Ivie Ani, reports on how Nigeria’s media suppression came to light after the country came together back in October to protest corruption and police brutality in the country, also calling for the abolition of Nigeria’s Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), which soon after ended up to be known as “the Lekki Massacre” referred by Nigerian media outlets. This caused the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC), Nigeria’s media regulator, to release some guidelines that were seen as an attempt to censor media outlets reporting, creating suppression while the government was hiding vital information and details about the attacks that happened during the protest. This followed with the NBC’s penalization on the coverage of #EndSARS, alongside many media outlets being fined for trying to report on the matter which further proved the media suppression being established in Nigeria.

NYT’s soaring digital subscriptions: Fox and Trump have tied themselves together tightly. But what happens after the election? Well, Sarah Ellison and Jeremy Barr of the WaPo explain how Rupert Murdoch, whose family controls Fox News parent company, has a plan. The conservative Murdoch that Biden’s possible election will become the new topic of conversation for the news site, as he gave hope that Trump would win because of what he considers repeated “unforced errors.”