Newsies

Bad news about the news business? Online millennials (born 1981-1996) and online baby boomers (born 1946-1964) are almost mirror opposites in terms of where they get their political news, the Pew Research Center’s Amy Mitchell, Jeffrey Gottfried and Katerina Eva Matsa report. Of the former, 61 percent say Facebook is their main source of weekly political news, while 60 percent of the latter say local TV is.

As Facebook itself has released research showing that its News Feed algorithm contributes to political cloistering, this heavy reliance by millennials on Facebook for political news could be concerning, though Pew’s researchers are quick to point out their finding that “it is the Facebook users in the oldest of the three generations studied here who are most likely to see political content on the site that supports their own views: 31% of Baby Boomers on Facebook who pay attention to political posts say the posts they see are mostly or always in line with their own views, higher than both Generation Xers (21%) and Millennials (18%).”

Some fun facts buried deep in Pew’s report:

• Among online news sources, the Huffington Post is both better known and more trusted by Millennials than Politico. 62 percent have heard of it and 20 percent trust it; just 20 percent have heard of Politico and only 7 percent trust it.

• BuzzFeed is down in the trashbin side of the media ecosystem, more distrusted than trusted, along with the Sean Hannity Show, Breitbart, the Glenn Beck Program, and the Rush Limbaugh Show. (It’s worth noting, re: the latter four, that Pew didn’t survey the “silent generation” of pre-baby boomers for this report, since relatively few are online.)

• Millennials trust the Daily Show for news a lot more than gen Xers or baby boomers.

Good news about the news business? It could be that Dutch people are crazy. Or, it could be that the innovative journalism aggregator Blendle has figured out how to make micropayments work. In this post on Medium, co-founder Alexander Klopping reports on the startup’s first year, growing to more than 250,000 users mostly under the age of 35, many of whom, he says, are paying for great journalism.

Among his findings: depending on online advertising is a loser’s game; metered payrolls that force readers to pay for bundled content from legacy sites “might work for a huge newspaper (like the [New York] Times) in a huge market, but it won’t for smaller papers in smaller markets”; and in Blendle’s model, news doesn’t sell, but background pieces, great analyses, opinion pieces and long interviews do.

My favorite part of Blendle’s model: users punish clickbait by refunding. That is, people only pay for the articles they read, but they can ask for their money back if they don’t like the story. And something like 50 percent do so for gossip articles, while only around 5 percent do so overall on the site. (h/t Clay Shirky)

Federal Elections Commission chairwoman Ann Ravel guest-blogs on the Sunlight Foundation website describing how the agency is “now updating our website to be more nimble, navigable and to provide more customizable information” and taking other steps to better inform the public.

Related: There are signs of some voter revulsion against billionaires trying to buy elections, reports Emily Flitter for Reuters. She cites the recent defeat of Anthony Williams, who was backed by three local financial moguls, in the Democratic primary for mayor of Philadelphia

Take a dive into the murky world of political list rentals, with Chris Potter and Rich Lord of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Two bus-loads of protesters demanding that Facebook alter its real-names policy to allow for people who use alternative names (like drag queens, sex workers, and abuse survivors) picketed the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, yesterday, CNN Money’s Heather Kelly reports.

In drought-struck California, some residents are turning to Twitter and custom apps for #DroughtShaming, that is, embarrassing their neighbors for wasting water, reports Emily Price for Popular Mechanics.