It’s a bear dance: this week on Fresh Powder

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A summary of journalism news and pop culture brought to you by  SNO

The lede

In Ann Arbor, Mich., it’s been a decade since the local daily newspaper shut down and The Michigan Daily, the university’s daily student newspaper, assumed the role. “We’ve been given this mantle of holding the powerful accountable, five nights a week, with no department backing us up. It’s a huge responsibility.” The New York Times followed those student journalists, biking through literal rainstorms and figurative hurricane-force course loads to keep their city’s residents informed, challenged, too, by, “the temporary nature of their positions. Unlike their professional counterparts, student reporters and editors learn on the job, and they invariably move on after a few semesters, well before developing sources or truly understanding the complexities of their beat, whether City Hall or the financial markets.” (College journalists are rock stars.)

Seconded

“The chances seemed high that Romney, a known family man, would want to keep close tabs on his offspring. And as luck would have it, Romney has plenty of offspring. Not all of his five sons have public Twitter accounts, and some of them, like the dreaded Tagg, have too many followers to possibly dig through. Romney’s oldest grandchild, Allie Romney Critchlow, however, has just 481 followers, making digging through them an annoying-but-not-impossible feat.” And so, the search for Mitt Romney’s secret Twitter account was born. Slate found it.

TGIF

“In a perfect world, creating the podcast would be their full-time jobs, and it’d pay like it, too. ‘But if we were unable to do that without tipping into a balance of enough listeners that it stops feeling like the community that it is,’ Marshall says, ‘Then I wouldn’t be so crazy about that.’” In the Columbia Journalism Review: “Can a ‘nobody’ make a popular, financially stable podcast?” (Or: The existential question that keeps me up at night.)

#MillennialProblems

What are they teaching kids in schools these days? High schools across the country are endorsing TikTok by sponsoring student-led clubs for it. “We’re thinking this is possibly the new Schoolhouse Rock.” (The New York Times)

. . . “TikTok Girls Dance to Audio of Toxic Exes’ Rants in Latest Darkly Funny (and Empowering) Trend” (Rolling Stone)

Sports!

Maven, the company that bought and gutted Sports Illustrated, “does not have sufficient resources to fully fund its business operations through June 30, 2020,” a report in Fortune detailed this week. “Moving forward, the company will need a ‘significant’ amount of additional capital and even that would produce no guarantee the business is self-sustainable.”

Thinking ahead

Mal and Jason are back in our lives this week with the first of their “Binge Mode: Star Wars” podcast series. May the Force be with them.

This also happened last week: Speaking of “Star Wars,” “The Rise of Skywalker” movie trailer was released Monday, coinciding with the Fall of Darnold.