Last week’s demolition of The Washington Post newsroom is just another sad sentence in the obituary of traditional media. At Flipboard, we’ve watched with alarm as thousands of journalists have been laid off in the past few years and some publications have shuttered entirely. What’s to be done?
We’re doing everything we can to support publishers that produce real journalism — original, fact-based and quality reporting — just as we have for the past 15 years. Especially important now are independent media outlets and the journalists who’ve struck out on their own, impressing us with their entrepreneurial spirit. It’s challenging for one person or small publications to find audiences, particularly in a media ecosystem disrupted by political polarization, AI and “Google Zero.”
We love independent media and want to help. To start, we’ve recently onboarded dozens of new publishers, introducing many of them to Flipboard users for the first time. Here are just a few:
- AfroLA, solutions-based journalism about Los Angeles
- Aftermath, a worker-owned site covering video games and the internet
- All Rise News, “accountability journalism” for the Trump era
- The Ankler, covering the entertainment industry
- The Barbed Wire, a Texas alt-weekly
- Bolts, which focuses on local elections and grassroots movements
- COYOTE Media, indy journalists covering the Bay Area
- Defector, an employee-owned sports and culture site
- The 51st, coverage of Washington, D.C.
- 404 Media, journalist-founded site specializing in technology and society
- Hell Gate, a subscriber-funded outlet covering New York City
- The Lever, investigative news
- The Margin, environmental reporting
- Nifty50Plus, news for the 50-and-up crowd
- NOTUS, veteran and up-and-coming journalists covering American news
- Racket, a reader-funded alt-weekly-style publication in Minnesota
- Status, Oliver Darcy’s site covering media
- Talking Points Memo, political news and commentary
- Trellis Group, sustainability and climate change
- Yale Climate Connections, a climate change news service
We haven’t just added these sites to Flipboard; we’ve taken steps to ensure their content is actually seen. Most of these publications publish far fewer articles than big corporate media so it’s easy for them to get drowned out. Our algorithm team works to give these smaller platforms a chance to surface, while our human editors spotlight their stories in our Daily Edition, elsewhere in the app, and our email newsletters.
“Becoming a Flipboard publisher gave us an immediate and noticeable boost, helping us amplify our original reporting and accessing an audience we hadn’t previously reached,” says Dianna Heitz, director of audience and platforms at NOTUS.
“Flipboard has been a terrific resource,” says Noble Ingram, audience engagement editor for Bolts. “Its editors have helped ensure that our election guides and local politics coverage reach a wide audience that’s hungry for our brand of independent journalism. They’ve consistently helped to amplify our work and I’m grateful for their partnership.”
Beyond the publications we’ve officially onboarded, we ingest hundreds of RSS feeds for small, high-quality sites that our team discovers. Examples include The Coalition For Women In Journalism, Court Watch (covering federal filings), Design Room (videogame coverage), The Flytrap (feminist perspective), Letters From an American (Heather Cox Richardon’s Substack), More Perfect Union (working class views), and the Trans News Network. We suspect many of these names will be new to you and we encourage you to check them out. Or maybe you’ll find them in the relevant Flipboard topics you follow.
And we’ll continue to elevate long-standing nonprofit and independent newsrooms such as The Conversation, FactCheck.org, The Marshall Project, The 19th, and ProPublica.
As I wrote a year ago, “At Flipboard, we still believe in the value of facts, journalism and open discourse.” Our work on behalf of indy media is a key part of the equation. Show them some love by reading, subscribing, and sharing. It can be our collective Valentine’s Day gift to society.
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