On the latest “What Works” podcast, Ellen Clegg and I talk with Joshua Macht and Ronnie Ramos. Both are leading an expansion by the MassLive Media Group, which operates MassLive.com.
Macht, the president, previously led the digital transformation of the Harvard Business Review. Ramos is the vice president of content and executive editor of MassLive. Ramos comes to Massachusetts after leading newsrooms in Miami, Indiana, Memphis and Chicago.
MassLive is part of Advance Local, a privately owned chain that operates newspapers and websites around the country, including New Jersey, Alabama, Oregon. Advance also owns The Republican newspaper in Springfield, Massachusetts, but Josh and Ronnie tell us that MassLive — for which they have statewide ambitions — is operated separately.
In Quick Takes, I discuss an announcement Google made last week that could prove to be pretty harmful to local news publishers. Essentially Google is going to merge its search engine with Gemini, its artificial-intelligence tool, which is similar to ChatGPT. Soon, anything you search for on Google will give you not just links but an AI-generated answer. Most people aren’t going to bother with those links, thus depriving news outlets of much-needed traffic.
Ellen reviews the findings from a recent Pew Research Center poll that studied local news habits. It’s perhaps no surprise to see that the U.S. adults surveyed increasingly turn to websites and social media for their news.
You can listen to our conversation here and subscribe through your favorite podcast app.
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