Media Insider: Internet Media Employment Triples, USA Today Launches Bilingual Series, The Sun Launches U.S. Site
Welcome to Media Insider, PR Newswire’s roundup of media stories from the week.
AD AGE | BRADLEY JOHNSON
Internet Media Employment Has Tripled Over the Last Decade
What’s up in media jobs? Internet media. What’s down? Everything else. Internet media over the past decade surpassed TV, radio, magazines, and newspapers to become the biggest employment sector in media. Employment at internet media firms has more than tripled to 277,000 jobs since 2009, according to Ad Age Datacenter’s analysis of job figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Over that period, internet media’s share of U.S. media jobs has surged to 36% from 11%. The big losses came in print media, with newspapers’ share of U.S. media jobs tumbling to 17% from 35%.
Read next: What 2020 holds for the media and entertainment industry.
DIGIDAY | KAYLEIGH BARBER
USA Today Tests Bilingual Content With New Series
USA Today is looking to make deeper connections with Spanish speakers by launching a new series in English and Spanish. Hecho en USA will tell stories about the lives of Spanish-speaking Americans. The project will aim to publish a baseline of two longform pieces each month, covering topics including Latinos being the only growing demographic of college students and this demographic representing only 1% of elected officials in the U.S. Content will be published in English in print and in both Spanish and English online. While the series’ stories will be created by dozens of bilingual writers, editors, videographers, and graphic designers from across the network’s 260 newsrooms, a freelance Spanish editor was hired to help make sure dialects and language nuances are consistent across the content.
USA Today hopes to succeed where others have failed: Last year saw the shuttering of The New York Times’ NYT en Español project and Tribune Publishing’s Spanish-language newspaper Hoy.
PRESS GAZETTE | CHARLOTTE TOBITT
Sun US Website Goes Live As Title Looks to Mirror UK Success
The Sun, the U.K.’s biggest news brand, has officially launched in the U.S. with a website dedicated to publishing news for an American audience. The tabloid, part of Rupert Murdoch’s News UK, which itself is a subsidiary of U.S. company News Corp, has acquired the-sun.com as its URL. The new site will feature some new content aimed directly at the U.S. market, but also will build on the Sun’s existing entertainment and royal coverage, which already is popular in the States. While the site is managed from the U.K., it is being run by a team of about a dozen people based in New York. Several editorial vacancies for The Sun U.S. are still live, including a head of audience, SEO editor, digital photo editor, digital news reporter, digital entertainment reporter, and social media journalist.
ICYMI: Community Impact Newspaper expands into Atlanta region.
THE WASHINGTON POST | BEN STRAUSS
The Staff of Sports Illustrated, Its Newsroom ‘Gutted,’ Is Planning to Unionize
The staff of Sports Illustrated plans to unionize, saying it wants a greater say in the future of the iconic magazine and raising concerns about the magazine’s direction under its new operator, Maven. Of the 80 or so staffers eligible for the bargaining unit, more than 90% signed a petition supporting the union drive, according to unionizers. Their quest to join the NewsGuild of New York comes at a time of turmoil for the magazine. Maven, a Seattle-based media and technology company, took over editorial operations of SI in October after buying the rights to publish the magazine from its new owners. Around 40 staffers were laid off during the transition and many of the remaining employees have been raising concerns about SI’s direction in the months since.
Is unionization part of media’s new normal? WWD takes a look at three trends affecting media outlets in 2020.
VARIETY | TODD SPANGLER
Michelle Obama Sets Launch of First Series on Instagram’s IGTV
Michelle Obama is turning to Instagram’s IGTV video platform with a new series aimed at inspiring young people to plan for college careers. The former First Lady teamed with progressive digital-news outlet ATTN: on “A Year of Firsts,” which will follow students as they navigate their freshman year of higher education. The six-episode series is slated to debut in mid-January and conclude in June 2020. “A Year of Firsts” is produced by ATTN: in partnership with Reach Higher, the organization founded by Obama during her time at the White House to inspire and support students to pursue higher education.
In more Instagram news, the app could become a bigger source of revenue than Facebook’s main app.
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Maria Perez is Director, Web Experience & Operations at Cision. She founded Bags of Love Foundation, a local nonprofit that provides cancer patients with care packages aimed at making their treatment more comfortable. In her spare time, she loves nothing more than cuddling with her blind Maltese, Toody, who thinks he rules the world.
