COVID-19 Media Factsheet

Each week, we’ll be summarizing the many ways COVID-19 has impacted the media industry and updating this factsheet. Subscribe to The Idea, a weekly newsletter on the business of media, for more news, analysis, and interviews.

Traffic, engagement, and viewership are up.

Traffic:

• This has begun to slow down. A Reuters survey found that news avoidance is up in the UK — with 22% saying they often or actively avoid the news compared to 15% in April — after an initial surge in news consumption in March and April.
• In March, BBC.com garnered 1.5 billion page views, 61 million video views, and 179 million unique visitors — setting a traffic record, according to Similarweb.
• 71% of Americans “need to take breaks” from coronavirus news, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.
• Traffic to finance and business news sites increased 42% year-over-year, according to SimilarWeb.
• A new report from the Reuters Institute finds that there’s been a surge in news consumption in Argentina, Germany, South Korea, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S. In the U.K. and U.S., most people are receiving at least some coronavirus news and information from “social media, search engines, video sites, and messaging applications.”
• Traffic to news sites has returned to pre-coronavirus levels, according to Nieman Lab. Taboola found that traffic to coronavirus-related stories declined during the first week of April from 1.4 billion page views to 1.1 billion views. Chartbeat also found that traffic to coronavirus articles declined by 24.6% during the week of March 30, compared with the previous week.
• CNBC set a record of 115 million unique visitors last month, a 98% increase from the previous year.
• Bloomberg.com garnered 100 million monthly unique visitors in March, setting a traffic record.
• Axios accrued more than 26 million unique visitors to its site in March, setting a traffic record. Mobile accounted for about 75% of that web traffic.
• The Financial Times reported a 250% year-over-year growth in traffic in March and an increase in trial subscriptions by a factor of 10.
• Patch, a “hyperlocal news platform,” had its strongest revenue and traffic month ever in March: page views were up from 85 million on average to 148 million and unique visitors were up from 30 million on average to 48 million.
• By contrast, partisan news sites like the Daily Caller have not experienced similar spikes in traffic.
• STAT, the medical news site founded by Boston Globe owner John Henry in 2015, has attracted nearly 30 million unique visitors in 2020, 4–5x its usual traffic.
• Parse.ly found that pageviews increased by 61% in the first two weeks of March compared to the past seven weeks for sites in its network. As of the third week of March, pageviews increased by an average of 122% at metro newspapers.
• According to Bloomberg’s CEO, coronavirus coverage is responsible for 30% of its traffic.
• Interactions with news stories on social media “increased 56% over the last two weeks [March 9–16], compared to the rest of the year” for 10 major publishers tracked by Newswhip.

Newsletters:

• TIME’s coronavirus newsletter has attracted nearly 50,000 subscribers, with an open rate of 60%.

Downloads:

• NYT’s The Daily is downloaded almost three million times a day. (Podcast ad revenue grew 30% year over year in Q1.)
• Overall podcast downloads increased 4% the week of April 20, according to Podtrac data. It’s the first week-over-week increase in downloads since the week of March 2.
• Podtrac data suggests that the drop in podcast listening observed last month is leveling off, with an increase in fiction podcasts in particular.
• News app downloads are up — for news aggregators and digital, radio, and TV news outlets
• News podcast downloads are generally up — Vox Media’s podcasts and Slate’s podcasts are both being downloaded about 50% more than usual. Daily news podcasts in particular are doing well — Vox’s Today, Explained has seen the biggest increase of all its podcasts. Overall podcast downloads are down about 10% while total unique listeners are down about 20% since the beginning of March, disproportionately impacting true crime podcasts, according to Podtrac.

TV ratings:

• Audiences for evening broadcasts on ABC, CBS, and NBC are the largest in years, averaging over 10 million nightly viewers the week of April 13.
• Both broadcast newscasts and cable news networks have experienced viewership surges, the latter of more than 50%.

Subscriptions are also up.

• Last month, The Guardian received support from 870,000 people, 50,000 of whom were new supporters. It has seen contributions and memberships in particular increase “20% year over year to a total of 470,000.”
• The spike in weekly new digital subscriptions many publishers saw at the start of the pandemic is flattening out, though still coming in at pre-pandemic levels, according to aggregate data from Piano and Zuora shared by Digiday.
• Last month, The Atlantic acquired 34,000 new subscribers in April. In March, the magazine drew 36,000 new subscribers.
• Since the pandemic has started, The Boston Globe has added around 60,000 digital subscribers, bringing it to a total of nearly 205,000 digital subscribers. Boston Globe chief commercial officer Kayvan Salmanpour told Digiday that a typical COVID-19 article converts between 300 to 800 subscribers. For context, COVID-19 coverage from STAT News and Boston.com is free, whereas The Globe is keeping its coronavirus content paywalled.
• The Financial Times attracted 50,000 new digital subscribers over the past two months.
• In March, POLITICO attracted more than 70 million unique visitors to its site. Its newsletter, POLITICO Playbook currently, has close to 300,000 subscribers.
• The Washington Post’s Coronavirus Updates Newsletter is the publication’s most popular newsletter and has an open rate of 40%, according to Digiday. The Post’s vp of product told Digiday that new readers are more casual news consumers and slightly younger than its typical audience.
• At The New York Times, digital subscriptions increased by 587,000 in the first quarter, the largest rise in company history, and bringing it to more than 5 million digital-only and 6 million total subscriptions. 468,000 of the net new subscriptions were to the news product.
• The Wall Street Journal now has 3 million subscribers after digital-only subscriptions grew 20% year-over-year to 2.2 million.
• New York Magazine acquired more new subscribers in April than ever before.
• Bon Appetit gained 2,800 new subscribers — its highest three-day total ever — after hosting its first-ever live event on YouTube.
• Gannett announced that digital subscriptions are up 29% from a year earlier to 863,000. (Circulation revenue is down 7.5% overall, however.)
• April was The Portland Press Herald’s second-best month ever for digital subscription growth. It launched a support campaign with TV, digital, print, and social ads and a web landing page giving readers gift and donation options, which brought in $34,000 in donations.
• Bloomberg subscriptions increased 178% in March 2020. Axios reports that Bloomberg’s daily average of new subscribers is “up “4x the historical rate.”
• Disney Plus now has 54.5 million subscribers, which is almost within the 60 million to 90 million user range it projected acquiring by the end of 2024 when it launched. (Disney also announced $1.4 billion in Q1 losses.)
• The number of readers making monthly contributions to The Guardian increased 25% in March, compared with the previous year. The publication also noted that “there were notable increases” in subscribers across its premium version, Daily app, and Puzzles app.
• The Dispatch announced in April that it’s “approaching 11,000” paying members, surpassing its year-one projection of 4,200 members. Despite this, the publication expects a revenue hit due to event cancellations. Events had been the “biggest single revenue line” in its 2020 budget.
• For some publishers, the cost of acquiring a new subscriber is declining. One publisher told Digiday that “the cost of acquiring a newsletter subscriber through Facebook fell from 75 cents to 25 cents” due to lower CPMs and higher clickthrough rates.
• Condé Nast subscriptions increased 85% in March 2020, compared with the previous year. The publisher has also seen a “35% boost in weekly average digital readerships.”
• The Atlantic acquired 36,000 new subscribers in the month of March, according to editor Jeffrey Goldberg.
• At TIME, increased web traffic over the past month resulted in “an 80% increase in gift subscriptions” and “a 70% increase in online orders,” according to Digiday.
• Subscriptions to both U.S. and European publishers rose during the third week of March, compared to the same time last year, by 63% and 267% respectively, according to Piano. Publishers who have taken down meters for coronavirus coverage have also seen subscriber growth, like The Atlantic and Bloomberg, which had their “single best week[s] of subscriber growth.”
• Local news outlets — like The Seattle Times, The Tampa Bay Times, and The Denver Post — also saw between a 2–4x bump in subscriptions. Many of these new subscribers are subscribing before hitting the paywall, and at least one publication has seen churn decrease significantly.

Financial difficulties continue.

• Maven, the owner of brands including Sports Illustrated, forecasts that it will be profitable this year “despite a ‘severe drop’ in ad revenue,” after having laid off 9% of staff.
• Meredith reports that revenue declined 6.5% in Q3 compared with the same period last year with ad revenue down $36 million. The publisher predicts that magazine and digital ad revenue will decrease 30% and 40% respectively compared with the previous year.
• Ad revenue at The Boston Globe is down 30–35% year over year, with programmatic ad revenue decreasing 10–20%.
• The BBC expects an income shortfall of £125 million this year due to drops in license fee revenue and revenues from its commercial operations. The publisher has yet to disclose new information on job cuts. In March, the BBC paused plans to cut 450 jobs.
• 80% “of the U.S. newspaper industry, by circulation” is ineligible for the Paycheck Protection Program.
• The Star Tribune, the largest newspaper in Minnesota, has lost more than 40% of its ad revenue this quarter.
• In April, ad revenue at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette was down more than half.
• Spending on digital advertising decreased in March across all formats — paid search (-25%), social media (-28%), digital video (-32%), digital display (-34%), and digital audio (-35%) — according to eMarketer.
• The Seattle Times projected a 45% decline in April ad revenue as compared to 2019.
• Vice estimates it will be off by 39% in digital ad revenue and by 33% for Refinery29 compared to forecasts.88% of the news publishers surveyed by the IAB have had ad buyers ask to cancel campaigns and 86% have been asked by buyers to pause campaigns.
• Local TV ad sales declined 27% according to the IAB.
• The Los Angeles Times has lost more than 30% of its advertising revenue so far. The publication expects this loss to amount to more than 50% in the coming months.
• NPR is facing a budget shortfall of between $30 million and $45 million over the next year due to declining sponsorship revenue.
• Google is waiving its ad serving fees on Ad Manager for news publishers for the next five months.
• Publisher clients experienced a 24% increase in newsletter ad revenue between March 12–23 compared to March 1–11, according to ad-tech platform PowerInbox. Over those two periods: cost-per-click went down by 8%, while average open rates and click-through rates were up 20% and 22%, respectively.
• Podcast hosting platform Megaphone managed to book “twice as much new business as it lost in March,” according to Digiday.
• Gannett’s ad revenue will be down at least 30% in Q2, according to Nieman Lab.
• Channel 4’s ad revenue is down by more than half for April and May.
• Google is now allowing government bodies, hospitals, health providers, and NGOs to run coronavirus-related advertisements on its platforms. Previously, Google banned all such ads to discourage misinformation.
• Ad spending for March and April declined 38% from what companies had originally planned, according to the IAB. In print publications, ad spending is down 43%.
• Amazon and Walmart are halting commerce marketing deals with digital media firms, including BuzzFeed.
• Digital ad revenue is expected to decline 10% in Q1 at The New York Times compared to 2019. The company expects overall ad declines to be in “the mid-teens.”
• Ad-blacklisting for COVID-19 keywords has led to more than two million blocked ads for The New York Times, CNN, USA Today, and The Washington Post.
• Events businesses are responding by pivoting to virtual events (like Politico, Axios, Slate, and Bloomberg) and moving out of the live events business entirely, as in the case of O’Reilly Media.

Furloughs, layoffs, and closures are widespread.

• The New York Times estimates that around 28,000 people working in news media “have been laid off, been furloughed, or had their pay reduced.”

Closures/Suspensions:

• More than 30 local newsrooms have closed in the U.S., according to Poynter, and more than 150 in Australia due to the pandemic.
• BuzzFeed is shuttering its local news operations in the U.K. and Australia. Ten newsroom employees in the UK and four in Australia have been furloughed. In the U.S., four newsroom employees will be furloughed for three months. Moving forward, the company announced that it will “focus on news that hits big in the United States.”
• Paper Magazine suspended its print edition; four staff were laid off, and the magazine’s highest-paid employees had their pay cut by between 20% and to 30%.
• More than 50 local and regional publications across the U.K. have suspended print or online editions, according to The New York Times.
• Minnesota’s Eden Prairie News and Lakeshore Weekly News, bought earlier this year by a subsidiary of Alden Global Capital, are shutting down.
• BuzzFeed News is halting production of its live morning news show AM to DM and laying off its entire production team after Twitter suspends funding.
• California Times, parent company of The L.A. Times, is closing three local news outlets: The Burbank Leader, The Glendale News-Press, and The La Cañada Valley Sun.
• BuzzFeed will close offices in Germany and Brazil if it is not able to find partners to take over their operations.
• Jewish Chronicle and Jewish News in the UK are shutting down and all staff have been laid off.
• Bustle Digital Group (BDG) has suspended operations of The Outline, a culture and politics site, after laying off its entire staff.
• Diocese of Pittsburgh, a 166-year old weekly in Pittsburgh, permanently closed, as did The Waterbury Record, a newspaper in Vermont.
• Publications like The Stranger in Seattle and The Sacramento News & Review have suspended print publishing.

Layoffs:

• The Atlantic reduced its staff by 68 people, about 17% of staff, and is freezing pay increases along with non-essential hiring. The layoffs affected The Atlantic’s live events, sales & marketing, and editorial divisions.
• Condé Nast is laying off about 100 employees. The publisher also announced that a “similar number” would be furloughed while an unknown number of others will have their hours reduced.
• The Economist Group is laying off 90 employees, nearly 7% of its staff. The publisher is also turning its bi-montly culture and lifestyle magazine, 1843, into a digital-only publication. The CEO, editor-in-chief, leadership team, and board will also take voluntary pay cuts, according to Axios.
• Vice Media is laying off roughly 155 employees: 55 in the U.S. and around 100 globally. According to CEO Nancy Dubuc these layoffs will mostly impact Vice’s digital teams, which currently account for around 50% of headcount costs and 21% of revenue.
• Quartz laid off 80 employees, roughly 35 of whom were newsroom staffers, due to “significant” declines in ad revenue. Net sales declined 54% in Q1 compared with the same quarter last year. At the end of April, the publication had 17,680 paid subscribers. Parent company Uzabase believes that the news outlet will achieve profitability between 2021–2022.
• Parent company Advance Local laid off the last four union reporters at The Cleveland Plain Dealer and will be offering them employment at Cleveland.com, a non-union publication. Previously, Advance laid off 22 union members at The Plain Dealer and offered the remainder of the staff (with four exceptions) the option of a voluntary layoff or reassignment to a new geographic area.
• The Boston Globe laid off an unspecified number of employees, including two salespeople but none in the newsroom. The company has also “delayed the implementation of merit pay increases” and “suspended both its co-op and summer internship programs.”
• TheSkimm is laying off 20% of its staff, roughly 26 employees. Senior executives will also be taking pay cuts.
• The New York Post has laid off more than a dozen staffers. The Post is also implementing furloughs, freezing all new hiring, and has plans for further layoffs.
• Postmedia Network in Canada is laying off 80 employees, shutting down 15 local publications, and cutting the salaries of those making $60,000 or more.
• Vice is considering over 300 job cuts at both Vice News and Refinery29, which would lead to savings of $40 million. The company estimates that this could lead to a 30% decline in web traffic due to less content being published.
• Protocol, a sister site to Politico “focused on the people, power and politics of tech” that launched 11 weeks ago, laid off 13 people across editorial and business.
• Gannett has laid off an unspecified number of journalists around the country.
• Fortune Magazine laid off 35 employees, roughly 10% of its staff. The CEO will take a pay cut of 50% while senior executives will have their pay reduced by 30%.
• Valence Media has laid off 30% of its editorial division, including staff at The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, and Vibe Magazine. The company also laid off its entire IT staff.
• Group Nine Media, which owns digital outlets like The Dodo, Thrillist, and PopSugar, is laying off 7% of its 700 employees and furloughing a smaller percentage. Executives also announced they would be taking 25% pay cuts and that the CEO would forego his salary for six months.
• BDG laid off an additional 17 people across its other brands.
• G/O Media laid off 14 people last week.
• CQ Roll Call also announced that it’s laying off 30 staffers.
• Digital First Media (DFM) has laid off at least 28 employees at local and regional papers including The Denver Post and The Boston Herald.
• Nieman Lab counted around 100 local newsroom layoffs as of mid-March, in newsrooms like The Tampa Bay Times and VTDigger.
• Maven has laid off 31 people, which amounts of roughly 9% of total staff.
• According to a Digiday survey, 38% of publishers said that they expect layoffs at their publication.

Furloughs:

• Tribune Publishing is furloughing 160 union staffers who make at least $40,000 a year for one week in May, June, and July.
• BuzzFeed announced measures to keep losses under $20 million: it will furlough 68 employees, the majority for three months, and extend salary cuts to the end of 2020. It also plans to sublease its offices in Minneapolis and Washington and has announced negotiations to reduce costs in its News division.
• US News & World Report has furloughed 10–15% of its employees for 90 days after implementing pay cuts of between 1% and 20%.
• Tribune announced three weeks of furloughs for employees making between $40,000-$67,000, and decreased the pay of non-union employees making more than $67,000.
• The Philadelphia Inquirer is offering voluntary buyouts in sales and in the newsroom to compensate for an estimated revenue loss of 20% this year. Layoffs on the sales team are likely to happen if 20 people do not take up the offer.
• Vox Media is furloughing 9% of its staff, about 100 employees, for three months. The company is also implementing a pay cut of 15% for employees making $130,000 to $200,000 and a pay cut of 25% for those making more than $200,000. Additionally, Vox Media’s CEO and president will forgo half their salaries.
• The Los Angeles Times announced that it will furlough 40 “business-side” employees. The publication will also be implementing pay cuts for senior management and suspending 401(k) matches for non-union workers.
• Guardian Media Group, parent company of The Guardian and The Observer, will be furloughing 100 non-editorial staff members. For the next six months, board members and senior executives will take pay cuts of 30% and 20% respectively.
• McClatchy furloughed 115 employees, a little more than 4% of its 2,700 staff members.
• Conversely, Hearst announced that it does not foresee any furloughs or pay cuts during the pandemic and that it would be giving a 1% bonus to employees.
• The Bay Area News Group furloughed its sports staff.
• Reach, the British publisher, also announced that it will furlough rough 1,000 employees across its properties, including The Daily Mirror and The Daily Express.
• DFM has also furloughed more than 15 staff across its papers.
• Gannett announced that many staffers would be furloughed through June.
• iHeartMedia also announced that an unspecified number of employees would be furloughed for 90 days.
• Lee Enterprises announced employees not subject to pay reductions would be furloughed for the equivalent of two weeks’ pay.

Print reductions:

• The Tampa Bay Tribune has reduced print publication days to only Sunday and Wednesday; three newspapers in Vermont have also reduced print frequency.

Pay/Hour reductions:

• The Financial Times announced a 10% reduction in pay and hours for non-editorial staff earning at least £50,000 from July to the end of the year.
• NBCUniversal cut senior management’s pay by 20% and those making above $100,000 by 3%.
• Thomson Reuters “is targeting a $100M cost reduction program due to the pandemic” but does not plan any layoffs.
• Journalists represented by the Los Angeles Times’ newsroom guild will take a 20% reduction in pay and hours for 12 weeks beginning May 10. The L.A. Times expects to save more than $2 million as a result, according to The Wall Street Journal.
• Meredith is cutting salaries of 60% of employees through September, “ranging from 15% up to 40% for top executives”
• Fox is implementing a new round of pay cuts for “affect[ing] roughly 700 employees.”
• The U.K.’s Independent Digital News and Media, which owns The Independent, is cutting salaries of everyone earning more than £37,500 per year by 20% and furloughing an unspecified number of employees.
• The Financial Times is implementing pay cuts of 10% for the top 80 managers and editors for the rest of the year, and reducing board pay by 20%. The CEO will also be taking a pay cut of 30%.
• Non-editorial staff at The Telegraph are having their pay reduced by 20% and will be moving to a four-day work week.
• Meredith, parent company of People and Entertainment Weekly, is implementing pay cuts for 60% of its staff: 2,000 staff members will have their pay reduced by 15%, and 750 will receive pay cuts ranging from 20% to 40%. The company is also freezing all hiring.
• ESPN’s most highly paid commentators have been asked to take voluntary 15% pay cuts for the next three months.
• Dallas Morning News’ parent company is “reducing staff pay between 3% and 17%.”
• Condé Nast is implementing three- or four-day work weeks for some employees and pay cuts of between 10% to 20% for employees earning more than $100,000 for five months; its CEO is forgoing half his salary. It also expects an unspecified number of layoffs.
• Tribune announced pay cuts of between 2–10% for non-union employees earning at least $67,000.
• The San Francisco Examiner and SF Weekly are reducing employee hours.
• Publishers including Gannett, Maven Media, Disney, BuzzFeed, Vice Media, Group Nine, Lee Enterprises, and iHeartMedia announced cuts to salaries and benefits.

Executive pay cuts:

• NPR is cutting executives’ pay, from between 10% to 25%.
• The CEOs of Gannett, McClatchy and Tribune are all taking pay cuts, which range from 10% of their base compensation to forgoing their salary entirely.
• Reach, the parent company of the Daily Mirror, Daily Express, and Daily Star announced that it would implement pay cuts of 20% for senior management.
• Vice, Disney, Group Nine, BuzzFeed, Maven, and Lee Enterprises announced that executives would be taking pay cuts or foregoing salaries.

Hiring freeze:

• Group Nine Media has frozen all hiring and cancelled its 2020 summer intern program.
• Condé Nast has frozen all open positions.
• BBC News has paused plans to cut 450 jobs, as it had announced in January, given the heightened demands of covering the pandemic.

Financial relief for some

• The Community Listening and Engagement Fund is giving out grants to 20 local newsrooms totalling $50,000. The money will go towards subsidizing tools and services to support differentiated coverage of the pandemic.
• Splice is distributing grants of $5,000 in partnership with Facebook to small-to-medium-sized news organizations in Asia affected by the pandemic.
• Facebook awarded $16 million to more than 200 local news organizations as part of its COVID-19 relief fund and local news accelerator program.
• Boston’s NPR News Station WBUR raised $1 million over the course of 13 hours in its most recent pledge drive. According to Nieman Lab, the total was up 25% from last year “with 18 percent more donors.”
• Google is launching a Journalism Emergency Relief Fund to help small, medium, and local news outlets stay afloat in wake of the pandemic. The company is also donating $1 million in total to the International Center for Journalists and the Columbia Journalism School’s Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma.

Governments are taking measures to support the industry.

• Last week, new legislation that expands Paycheck Protection Program loan eligibility for local news outlets is expected to be introduced in the House. Currently, 80% of the U.S. news industry is technically ineligible because many local news outlets must report the size of their parent company.
• 65% of Americans support including money for local news outlets in COVID-19 relief legislation, according to a new Gallup and Knight Foundation survey.
• Axios is returning its PPP loan of almost $5 million. The publisher announced that it has secured “an alternative source of capital” to avoid layoffs and pay cuts, after taking a “financial hit” in its physical event and advertising businesses.
• The Seattle Times Co. and Tampa Bay Times both received federal loans, worth $9.9 million and $8.5 million respectively, to help with advertising-related revenue losses.
• Bustle Digital Group received a $7.5 million PPP loan, which will allow it to “partially undo salary reductions across the company and expand hours for part-time and freelance writers.“
• The U.K. government has increased ad spending with news publishers with a coronavirus public information campaign worth approximately $44 million.
• In the United States, Congress passed a $2.2. trillion CARES Act, enabling outlets with under 1,000 staff to apply to a $300 billion fund.
• In Canada, the government is planning to buy $30 million worth of ads to support struggling media businesses.

New initiatives

• Publishers like The Washington Post and The Boston Globe are offering new ad products, according to Digiday and The Drum. The Boston Globe sold sponsorship for a private Slack channel for small business owners, while The Washington Post has created sites highlighting how local and national brands are responding to the pandemic.
• Time for Kids is launching new digital editions in additional languages, starting with Spanish.
• NPR and Counter Culture Coffee are partnering on coffee subscriptions through NPR Coffee Club; a portion of proceeds will go to supporting NPR programming.
• A new WAN-IFRA survey finds that newsletters are the most common product that publishers are releasing in response to the pandemic. 55% percent of respondents reported launching new newsletters to better inform readers on COVID-19.
• The Wall Street Journal has launched WSJ Money, an interactive mobile-first site that seeks to provide readers with information on how to manage finances during the pandemic. WSJ Money is also “part of a strategic effort to reach new audiences with the WSJ’s personal finance reportng,” according to the Journal’s new audiences chief Ebony Reed and chief news strategist Louise Story.
• The Washington Post is partnering with public health and modeling experts from the Yale School of Public Health to report on COVID-19.
• Vox Media is producing a new season of its explainer series, “Coronavirus, Explained” with Netflix. The first episode premiered on April 27, and two more will be released over the summer.
• In March, roughly 150,000 podcasts were uploaded onto Spotify, a 69% increase relative to February. Spotify reports that this was “the largest monthly increase in Spotify’s podcast catalog.”
• McClatchy took over a Colorado nonprofit news outlet called “Longmont Observer,” run by local volunteers, and plans to launch a new iteration, hiring five people to start.
• Gannett’s U.K. daily newspapers are adding a digital registration wall after 20 articles and a paywall after 40, exempting coronavirus-related coverage. Subscribers will also see 80% fewer ads.
• Wired editorial staff, numbering almost 80 people, plan to unionize amidst Condé Nast’s plans to cut pay and layoff employees.
• TED’s annual conference will be fully virtual and stretch over eight weeks.
• The New York Times has temporarily replaced its Sunday sports and travel sections with At Home, which will include “games, tips for fitness and beauty, and easy recipes, … advice on child care and organization among other things.”
• The New York Times is collaborating with Verizon to make access to its news site free for all students and teachers in the United States.
• In Canada, a fast-food chain is partnering with Postmedia, a network of publications, to make coverage free for a month.