With trust in short supply, sell your credibility

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With trust in short supply, sell your credibility

News outlets in Latin America, Spain, Poland, and the U.S. are tapping this source

James Breiner

Feb 1

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You’re reading the My News Biz newsletter. My goal is to help digital media entrepreneurs find viable business models.

As I mentioned last time, for more than a decade I’ve been tracking the innovators and survivors among the news media around the world. I’ve been trying to answer a question: Who has figured out viable new business models? Many of the most innovative have been small digital media.

Innovation leaders. These media offer models for other industries and activities that have seen their monopolies challenged by digital competitors — real estate, higher education, shopping malls, banking, health care — you name it.

In this post, I’m going to profile media innovators in Spain, Latin America, the U.S., and Poland.

Factchequeado, Spain and Latin America

Two global leaders of fact-checking, Laura Zommer of Chequeado in Latin America and Clara Jiménez Cruz of Maldita.es in Spain, formed a partnership in 2022 to combat misinformation in Spanish-speaking communities in the U.S. It’s called Factchequeado.

“The idea for the venture emerged when Jiménez started noticing that misinformation in Spanish targeting U.S. Latinos was also reaching Spanish speakers in Spain,” Hanaá Tameez reported in Nieman Lab. “She figured that the misinformation must have made its way to Argentina too, so she reached out to Zommer.”

Big Tech companies focus their efforts and resources on battling misinformation in English, so smaller organizations like Chequeado and Maldita.es have to take on the problem in Spanish.

Clara Jiménez Cruz, ( photo from Maldita.es)

Coronavirus rumors debunked: When a video loaded with misinformation about the coronavirus came out, Facebook in English debunked it with a link to the World Health Organization, Zommer said. “But with the Spanish version of the video, Facebook linked to a group called ‘Médicos por la verdad’ (Doctors for Truth), which disseminates misinformation about issues related to the coronavirus.” It was up to the Spanish-language fact-checkers to point out the falsehoods.

Factcheqeado has a team of 11, who work from the U.S., Spain, and Latin America. They partner with some 50 media and community organizations focused on serving Hispanic communities.

Nieman Lab reported that Factchequeado has written about cryptocurrency scams and how to protect yourself from them, fake polls about the popularity of Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, false information about the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp trial, and what might happen to abortion access if the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

More on the partners

Zommer started her nonprofit Spanish-language fact-checking site in Argentina in 2010. In 2014, Chequeado organized the collaborative fact-checking network LATAMChequea, which now includes 40 organizations from 19 countries.

Jiménez and co-founder Julio Montes launched Maldita.es in 2018. It has since grown to a team of almost 50, and it partners with dozens of organizations. It generated revenues of 1.37 million euros in 2022 (report in Spanish) from a mix of services to third parties plus donations and philanthropic sources, including the European Union, Google News Initiative, National Endowment for Democracy, and Porticus.

Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland

Gazeta Wyborcza (literally, “electoral newspaper”) was co-founded in 1989 by Adam Michnik, a critic of government corruption and injustice.

Gazeta has continued its opposition to authoritarian rule and to the current government’s attempts to rein in freedom of expression. As a result, between 2015 and 2022, Gazeta Wyborcza has faced over 90 lawsuits and legal threats from various government entities and associates.

This hostile political environment translated into distribution problems through hundreds of state-controlled distribution outlets. Gazeta responded by launching a digital subscription in 2014 with modest expectations. By 2016, the daily’s subscription revenue exceeded advertising revenue for the first time.

I profiled Gazeta in 2019. At the time it had 192,000 paid subscribers, estimated revenues of $20 million, and a staff of 41 journalists.

Meanwhile, print media suffered. And in 2022, according to the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report, costs of paper skyrocketed and advertisers cut spending.

All this made digital subscription revenue more important. Gazeta announced that in December 2022, its digital subscriptions exceeded 300,000, most of those at the rate of $48 a year. Much of the site’s content is free; the subscribers get access to 30 magazines and local publications.

The World Association of Newspapers recognized the publication with the 2022 Golden Pen of Freedom award for standing as “a beacon of independence and as a bulwark against authoritarianism.”

Its early pivot to digital subscriptions has helped its independent voice survive.

Associated Press and innovation

I recently completed an online course called How to use ChatGPT and other generative AI tools in your newsroom, one of whose instructors was Aimee Rinehart, the Senior Product Manager of AI Strategy for the Associated Press.

Part of the AP’s strategy is to help local news organizations achieve “long-term business stability” through the use of AI. The AP is working with five organizations, as Lauren Easton reported on the AP blog.

Aimee Rinehart – International Symposium on Online Journalism — Aimee Rinehart of the Associated Press

Among the projects using AI tools are:

Automated writing of public safety incidents into the content management system of Minnesota newspaper Brainerd Dispatch.
Automated transcription of recorded videos and summarizing the transcripts to create an article’s initial framework at San Antonio, Texas, television station KSAT-TV.
Expanding the Minutes application, which creates transcripts of city council meetings, to include summarization, keyword identification, and reporter alerts, for staff at Michigan Radio’s WUOM-FM at the University of Michigan.

Some manpower for these projects will come from students at the University of Missouri, Northwestern University, and Stanford University.

Learning from classmates. There were 8,000 students from some 150 countries in the free online course I mentioned above. And what some of them were accomplishing with small staffs and scarce resources frankly dazzled me.

Scott Brodbeck, one of the course participants, described some impressive achievements. And I’m not breaking any confidences here given that he talked with Nieman Lab about how he has automated an afternoon email newsletter that goes to 16,000 subscribers in his northern Virginia audience. It contains story headlines, photos, and links.

But Brodbeck wanted to go beyond that and have a morning email with a voice. Still, he couldn’t spare one of his eight staffers to produce it.

Nieman Lab described how Brodbeck “began experimenting with a completely automated weekday morning newsletter comprising an AI-written introduction and AI summaries of human-written stories. Using tools like Zapier, Airtable, and RSS, ARLnow can create and send the newsletter without any human intervention.”

The AI introduction sometimes produces “corny” results, Brodbeck told Nieman Lab. But it produces acceptable summaries of the publication’s own articles.

The newsletter had 100 subscribers in May of 2023. Brodbeck said no editor checks it before it is circulated. But that might change if the subscriber base grows. Meanwhile, ARLnow cautioned recipients that the summaries “should not be entirely relied upon for decision-making purposes.”

Next time: Innovations in Libya, the Netherlands, and France

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