Sam Cholke

Dec 18, 2024 | niemanlab.org | Sam Cholke

The coming year will reveal the final phase in the long unbundling of the news industry. The industry will have to confront the growing class of podcasters, influencers, and Substackers, combined with the waning reach on social media, that has separated those that build knowledge through reporting from the voices that help make sense of the news and the spaces where people discuss the news.

Jan 12, 2024 | medium.com | Sam Cholke

The signs are increasingly clear that the pipelines for free organic audience growth are going to keep contracting over the next year. That means news organizations need to be savvier about capturing the audience that is out there looking for their reporting and smarter about finding the audience that would love certain reporting if they only knew about it. More news organizations looking to grow their audience online are hunting for those rare spaces where people gather specifically for news.

Dec 12, 2023 | niemanlab.org | Sam Cholke

Over the next year, the news industry will have to confront the realities of building an audience in a post-social media world — a world where the news not only doesn’t reach those who aren’t looking for it, but is not a consistent presence in many Americans’ lives. The last year has reminded many news organizations how brittle online audiences can be. , dashing publishers’ hopes that a long fall in referral traffic had finally plateaued.

Nov 6, 2023 | niemanlab.org | Joshua Benton |Andrew Donohue |Sarah Scire |Sam Cholke

“Epistemic” is a good five-dollar word. It means, roughly, “of or relating to knowledge or knowing.” Or “relating to knowledge or the study of knowledge.” (Think epistemology, fellow liberal-arts graduates.) The first time I remember encountering it in mainstream usage was during the early days of the Obama administration, when some of the internal intellectual bonds within the Republican Party were beginning to fracture.

Nov 6, 2023 | niemanlab.org | Andrew Donohue |Sarah Scire |Sam Cholke |Allison Altshule

As the Fourth of July approached last year, The San Diego Union-Tribune prepared to do something it’d never done in its 154 years of existence: For one day, the newspaper wasn’t going to print an actual paper. U-T publisher Jeff Light sounded not just optimistic, but even a little boastful as he unveiled the experiment, part of his attempt to transition what’s left of the old legacy newspaper to a digital future.