Monday, January 02, 2023

News-media roundup: PBS aims to rebuild trust in news media, look at whole country; Nader starts a weekly . . .

"Don’t blame traditional media for being put under the pressure of cataclysmic change and struggling, blame those in leadership for not telling you clearly what was happening," writes Darrell Ehrlick, editor of the Daily Montanan (published by States Neswsroom) and former editor of the Billings Gazette. "Journalists are taught repeatedly that the story – whatever they’re covering – is not about them. . . . Decades of being told that the story is never about journalists or journalism has given publishers and corporate owners just enough leverage to remain silent on what is going on within the company."

The new anchors of "PBS NewsHour," Amna Nawaz and Geoff Bennett, feel “an obligation to do good journalism, and to build back hopefully the trust that the audience has been losing in the overall media industry,” Senior Executive Producer Sara Just told The Wrap. Bennett, who has been PBS's chief Washington correspondent and anchor of its weekend news show, said he hopes to to take “a deeper look at the messaging and the agenda of the Democratic and Republican parties and how that intersects with the greater country” and help viewers understand that “politics is more than just what happens in Washington. . . . It’s what’s happening across the country.”

Consumer advocate Ralph Nader is helping launch a weekly newspaper to eliminate what he calls a “news vacuum” in the small Connecticut town where he lives and five surrounding towns, the Hartford Business Journal reports. The pilot edition of the Winsted Citizen "is slated for publication in early 2023," the HBJ reports. The name is a shorter version of the daily evening paper that served the town of 7,700 until 1984, when it was merged with Hearst Corp.'s Torrington Register to create The Register Citizen. Nader told that paper that the editor and publisher will be Andy Thibault, who teaches journalism and communication at the University of New Haven.

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