Civil Weekly Newsletter: 12/7 Edition

Megan Libby
Civil
Published in
4 min readDec 10, 2018

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:

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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

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Civil
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Published in Civil

Building the New Economy for Journalism.

Megan Libby
Megan Libby

Written by Megan Libby

Brand Marketer at @civil. UCSC and BU COM alum. Loves acronyms. Weekends you'll find me outside. 🏕