The Washington Post announced Sunday night that Matt Murray, former editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal, is the new executive editor of The Washington Post, replacing Sally Buzbee, who has served in the position since 2021. However, the day after the election on Nov. 6, Robert Winnett, a deputy editor of the U.K.-based Telegraph Media Group, will take over the newsroom and Murray will transition to building a new division at The Washington Post focused on service and social media journalism. 

It’s an arguably strange time to organize a shuffle, just five months before the U.S. presidential election — and likely signals the urgent need to make changes at the news organization.

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And there seem to be no plans to change that system for the foreseeable future, at least among six companies including Bustle Digital Group, Condé Nast, Forbes, Hearst, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal require most of their staff to come into the office three days a week, while the other companies allow teams to determine their own in-person work requirements.

Why haven’t digital publishers gone back to working fully in person? The answer seems to be that employees are happy with the flexibility they’ve been given with hybrid work, and employers are willing to continue to offer that to them.

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In this week’s Digiday+ Research Briefing, we examine how publishers are growing their ad products, when agencies and publishers expect deprecation of the third-party cookie to actually happen, and how marketers relied on traditional celebrities for their Super Bowl ads, as seen in recent data from Digiday+ Research.

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As the media industry faced a tough year in 2023, many publishers were able to maintain the numbers on their full-time staff — perhaps because most increased the advertising products they offered.

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Digiday looked at traffic data from Similarweb and published article count data from Muck Rack to find out.

Five media company unions organized work stoppages in the past month, with hundreds of staff walking off the job for one to three days. Condé Nast, the New York Daily News, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post all had 24-hour work stoppages organized by their newsroom unions, while Forbes had a three-day walkout that ended on Monday. 

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Last year was not a great one for publishers’ traffic, it turns out. But even so, many publishers maintained their full-time staff and published titles.

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Typically, freelance journalists are paid around $0.50 to $1 a word, they told Digiday. But that rate hasn’t changed, despite rising inflation and cost of living. (The U.S. inflation rate from January 2020 to January 2024 increased by 22%, according to inflation tracker Truflation.)

“If I was paid $1,000 for a story in January 2020, I should be making almost $1,200 for that same story today. But I’m not. Rates aren’t rising at all to keep up with inflation,” said Kate Morgan, who has written for publications including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Her rates haven’t changed since she became a freelancer in 2015, she said.

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In their quest to capture the attention of a new generation of young readers, news publishers are experimenting with innovative ways to engage and inform Gen Z. As the first socially native generation to have the internet and social media platforms constantly at their fingertips, Gen Z is a critical group for publishers to consider when planning their future content and distribution strategies. 

Members of Gen Z  —  those born between 1997 and 2012 —  have spent their entire lives with access to a digital world. Technology is second nature to them and fundamental to their existence. Unlike older millennials who are considered simply digital natives, the social natives who make up Gen Z grew up in a world that included a social, participatory web. Now, as the oldest members of this generation are reaching adulthood — building careers and gaining more income — news organizations are turning their attention to this fast-growing audience. 

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In this Tactics + Insights guide, Digiday and Upland PostUp explore how publishers are cultivating robust email databases. In doing so, publishers are equipping their advertising partners with increasingly sophisticated insights into their audiences’ behavior and preferences — improving partners’ return on ad spend and driving ad revenue.

Download this new report to learn about:

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Former CRO David Spiegel was let go, and a former HR exec who has asked Digiday for anonymity has left the company, a Betches spokesperson confirmed. The spokesperson said that Spiegel was “terminated as a result of performance.”

The execs declined to comment. A Betches Media spokesperson declined to say on-the-record whether this was part of a broader restructuring.

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Digiday spoke to seven journalists at five digital publishers experimenting with artificial intelligence tools to find out what they thought about their organizations testing the technology to create content. All of them said they wanted their managers to proceed with caution. Their stance is the technology is not good enough for content generation (yet), and ultimately they’re concerned that the adoption of AI for editorial purposes is a threat to their jobs.

“I’m not sure that the technology is ready [in] the way that managers of newsrooms think it is,” said one G/O Media employee, who requested anonymity in order to speak freely. “I don’t think any of us are very fired up about being the guinea pigs [and] having the outlets that we represent being the guinea pigs for this.”

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The presentations were held at this year’s Online News Association four-day conference, which took place in Philadelphia from Aug. 23-26. The event had more than half a dozen sessions dedicated to the emerging technology.

Andrew Rodriguez Calderón, a computational journalist at The Marshall Project, and Mark Hansen, a professor at the Columbia School of Journalism, outlined ways they experimented with ChatGPT for journalism — and how they had to tweak their prompts to get what they wanted from OpenAI’s generative AI chatbot tool.

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Hearst and The New York Times both announced updates to their in-person attendance requirements over the summer, asking employees to come into the office three days a week. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal’s union is negotiating the publisher’s in-office mandate, proposing a three-day cap on in-office work.

Since the onset of the pandemic, which led to the shift to hybrid work models, newsroom unions have continued to press management in an effort to negotiate over return to office policies, from signing petitions to holding outright protests.

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The 2023 Women’s World Cup spans four different time zones across nine host cities in Australia and New Zealand, timing games 12 to 16 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time in the U.S. (The men’s tournament last year was in Qatar, which was an eight-hour time difference.)

That means games are kicking off as early (or as late?) as 1 a.m., 3 a.m., 6 a.m. and 10:30 p.m. EDT, making it tricky for digital sports publishers to cover those matches live — and to find an audience here for that coverage. As a result, their editorial teams are focusing on providing morning recaps and highlights of the games that took place the night before, previews of games to come, and written and video features about the teams and players in the Women’s World Cup, six publishing execs said.

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The topic of AI use is a complicated and nuanced issue and the way the technology is being implemented at media companies varies widely. As employers determine how to adopt AI into their businesses, newsroom unions are also determining how to negotiate with company management around its impact to their members.

Insider’s union reached a tentative agreement on a contract with their employer with language that addresses the topic, stating that the newsroom will have at least one union member involved in conversations about using new tech like AI — as well as the resources to learn how to use it.

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