Aram Zucker-Scharff

““It is critical that we and other news organizations remain aggressive about putting the next generation of women leaders in place now so that they are ready when their time comes.””

– The Rise (and Fall) of Female Editors.

Going native at the Times | Capital New York:

Meredith Kopit Levien on the paper’s big push

Her rebuttal to the John Oliver segment? “The best way to preserve editorially independent, high quality journalism is to preserve the business model. And I think the idea of branded content that shares a form factor with editorial is a great first step.”

“But there was actually a sense of something even more troubling — a loss of control. Journalists don’t often say this out loud, but we do think there’s an element of art to what we do. And what do most artists want, as much if not more than money? Creative control. But permeating almost every session was a sense of desperation — at regaining some kind of control over how we connect and impact with our audience. The homepages that newsrooms have sunk countless dollars and person-hours into upgrading are already dying a rapid death. Increasingly, story traffic depends on the whim of the swipes — with faceless folks in the bowels of Silicon Valley, at Google and increasingly at the social media giants of Twitter and especially Facebook, exerting an inordinate amount of power. If there was one word that I heard more than “viral” at the ONA, it was “algorithm.” Facebook has completed coded the way that millions of would-be news consumers get information, and no one knows how to crack it.”

– Looking for the soul of journalism’s new machines at ONA2014.

“

“Later in the day, it occurs to me that for the first time I met someone who may be responsible for the murders of many people, and I asked him a polite question.

[…]

“There are also the other stories, the ones about how these neighborhoods were set up, how white men decided where black families would live, how it came to be that Buddha grew up in a place where you carry a gun to come and go from home and kill a boy who looks like a younger version of yourself.

“I don’t have words for these other stories, only the feeling of them inside of me like pebbles piled at the corner of a child’s desk.

[…]

“This is part of the agreement we make by working here, as people of color. We don’t know who harbors doubts about our capacity to think and work and write. We don’t know, not really, who we can trust.

[…]

“It’s been eight years since that day in the theater, and I’m thinking again about a white man confessing to his own people that he cared about the black community, that he thought he could singlehandedly change a hierarchy. I’m thinking about the whiteness of the news organization and how that whiteness reproduced itself with every hire, every promotion, but that is not a scandal.”

”

– You should read all of this, but these are some highlight quotes from: Latina, at the white, male New York Times: “Why are people thinking it’s OK to say racist sh-t in front of me?”