Marshall Project editor Bill Keller talks to the Columbia Journalism Review about the website’s recent Ellie win for “general excellence,” rebuilding trust in the media, and how the Trump administration might affect criminal justice reform. Keller says that the website’s response to the current president’s “law and order” platform includes increased immigration and deportation coverage, which he says “could well be the criminal justice story of the year—a massive mobilization of law enforcement, a push to essentially deputize police and sheriffs as immigration enforcers, huge dockets at understaffed immigration courts.”
At Wired, Gabriel Snyder looks at the Times’s strategies for thriving in the digital future and how Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, the new deputy publisher, is implementing these plans. After nearly going bankrupt during the financial crisis in the early 2000s, online advertising became the paper’s main priority. Now, the Times is focused on improving its digital brand by adding personalized apps and developing artificial intelligence, which they hope will get current subscribers to continue paying and convince new readers to sign up. Editorial employees work closely with coders and engineers, but “there are some at the Times—usually those who can’t write code—who chafe at these endless waves of experimentation,” writes Snyder. One anonymous editor told Snyder, “When we’re told this is the new best practice, everyone marches in lockstep. Facebook Live? Yep! Video? On it! The New York Times isn’t a place where people say no, and we’re flat-out exhausted.”
Poynter talks to Adrian Carrasquillo, BuzzFeed’s White House correspondent, about life in the briefing room, having his publication singled out by the president as “a failing pile of garbage,” and his relationship with Trump’s staff. Even though the website has been the target of many insults by the president and his staff, Carrasquillo said that it hasn’t affected his work performance. “I’m in the White House briefing room every day,” he said. “I raise my hand to ask questions every day. Haven’t gotten called on yet, but I think that’s gonna happen, too."
