Civil Weekly Newsletter: 12/7 Edition
What Civil Newsrooms wrote about this week.
Thanks to everyone who donated to The River’s successful Kickstarter last week. With your help, the Newsroom raised over $22,000 to support their independent, local news outlet in the Hudson Valley.
Here’s some other news that came from Civil Newsrooms this week:
- $4.3 million has been allocated to New York City’s 2020 census. But community groups — particularly those tasked with raising awareness about the census among immigrant communities — have yet to receive any of this critical funding to support their outreach, reports Documented.
- Like many of its print newspaper counterparts, Malaysia’s oldest tabloid has been hit by dramatic declines in circulation and ad revenue. As such, the publication has stopped its print operations, says Splice.
- Colorado’s bid to host the 2030 Winter Olympics hinges on Olympic organizers agreeing to split the events between the state and Utah, writes Jason Blevins at the Colorado Sun.
- Bottled water is clean. But why don’t we guarantee that tap water is equally clean — especially in poor communities that may not be able to afford an alternative? ecoWURD answers this question as it relates to Philadelphia.
- Further south, the absence of clean, reliable drinking water is a daily reality. Read from Groundtruth Project what this means for families in parts of Kentucky and West Virginia.
- With a vote on allowing dual citizenship on the horizon for Norwegian Parliament, one Popula author who’s lived her life split between the U.K. and Norway explores what citizenship means to her.
- The impacts of global warming are being felt all over the world. The River investigates what this might mean for a warming Hudson Valley.
- Since 2015, one billionaire family in California has donated over $1 million to Republican lawmakers whose policies help the family’s logging business. Sludge explains how this support for the logging industry at a time when wildfires run rampant comes at the expense of lives, homes and the health of American forests.
- After hearing that his employer would deny coverage for his gender reassignment surgery, one bus driver in Chicago worked to change the insurance policy to approve surgeries for trans people, according to Block Club Chicago.
- Colombia has both fertile soil and climate, as well as twelve hours of sunlight a day — which has drawn a proliferation of foreign cannabis companies there. Cannabis Wire explains why Canadian companies have been particularly invested in this industry.
- On this week’s ZigZag episode, we hear from award-winning journalist Julia Angwin about how she recently received $20 million to start her own publication.
- Scram anklets, urine tests, the Soberlink Sobrieter. These are some of the realities on the path to sobriety, and are necessary tools for Clancy Martin of The Small Bow to spend time with his kids.
- On Monday, President Trump tried to openly tamper with a witness. Hmm Daily explains why this behavior is indicative of a new standard for the presidency.
Civil en español
- Hay alta tensión del gobierno para los taxistas en Cuba, según 14ymedio.
For a daily feed from Civil Newsrooms, follow @CivilStories on Twitter.
6 months, 6,000 paid subscribers, 7 million pageviews: Block Club Chicago is off and running.
Just over six months after it began publishing, Block Club Chicago, which was founded by a team of three former DNAinfo editors, has quickly established itself as a major journalism force in Chicago and beyond, and already has more than 6,000 paid subscribers. At a time where many local papers have had to roll back local coverage of many of the city’s neighborhoods, Block Club Chicago has taken the opposite route, and focused exclusively on them. Their success is impressive — but certainly not surprising, given the focus the team has put on reporting about the things that matter most to their community.
Shamus Toomey and Stephanie Lulay, two of the founding editors of Block Club Chicago, sat down to discuss how their success is helping to validate the need for local news. Read their story here.
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The Random Musing Section
Another week, another existential Facebook scandal…
Earlier this week, the British government published a series of damning emails from Facebook executives. They covered, among other topics, previously undisclosed “whitelist” agreements Facebook had with other tech giants to share privileged access to user data, efforts to stamp out competitors by either acquiring them or restricting their access to data and, most damning, how it aimed to monetize user data. While it shouldn’t surprise anybody at this point, it’s the latest reminder that Facebook’s oft-repeated rallying cry that it’s driven by mission, not profit, is about as authentic as much of the “news” that’s served through its platform.
The common thread across each individual revelation: Facebook’s deeply unethical practices around user data. They’re being rightly excoriated for that, but expecting them to change at this point is wistful thinking at best. It’s time to focus on how we collectively move past that model, and it starts with the idea of data ownership. Facebook and a host of other tech giants grew tremendously powerful due to their ability to productize their own users. Knowing who you are, where you live, who your friends/relatives you are, what movies you like, etc. — and not having to compensate you for such valuable information — is a wildly lucrative business. We’re now living with the consequences of enabling such a model.
It’s not too late to change course, but it’s critically important that we start having a more vocal conversation around the idea of data ownership. Just as journalists are (rightly) keen of saying, “Never write for free,” we as consumers need to start questioning when and why we’re sharing our data, and whether we’re being compensated for it. A failure to do so means we remain on our alarming, current trajectory towards living inside of a George Orwell novel.
— Matt Coolidge