All tagged Poynter

Gannett Lays Off Journalists Across the Country

Gannett Lays Off Journalists Across the Country

Damien Willis
On The Media

In preparation for a presumed sale, what happened today at Gannett properties across the country was an absolute tragedy — cutting the local newspapers in so many American cities to the quick. It's remarkable what a single corporation can do in a single day to damage Democracy and eliminate oversight at ALL levels of government.

Local news matters. And an awful lot of hard-working reporters who take great pride in their work woke up this morning with jobs, but are out of work tonight.

Why PolitiFact Doesn’t Use the Word ‘Lie’—Except Once a Year

Why PolitiFact Doesn’t Use the Word ‘Lie’—Except Once a Year

Damien Willis
On The Media

You might expect a website that fact-checks American politics to use the word “lie” a lot. But at PolitiFact, we don’t.

We use the word lie once a year, when we consider a year’s worth of fact-checking and pick one falsehood that we consider the most egregious. We call it the Lie of the Year, and we’ve named one every December since 2009. This year’s Lie of the Year was the online smears against the Parkland students.