By Jackie Spinner >> The day before the Nov. 5 election, I carried a bundle of poles into the newsroom of the Columbia Chronicle in an attempt to recreate one of my core memories from The Washington Post, where I was a staff writer for 14 years. I made signs for the seven swing states
By Jackie Spinner >> In 1988 I was a freshman in college, and the country had just elected George H.W. Bush president. More than half of young voters (53%), ages 18 to 29, voted for Bush, who beat former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. Still, they represented just 20% of the total voter turnout. Four years
By Jackie Spinner Earlier this year, Will Lewis, the Washington Post’s new publisher and CEO, disclosed in a staff meeting that the Post had lost nearly half of its digital subscribers since the peak of 2020 when Donald Trump was still president and the COVID-19 pandemic was raging. The Post had already announced that it
By Jackie Spinner Before most college students in 2024 were born, the Pew Research Center was already reporting that young readers had turned away from newspapers. Older readers had not fully embraced online news yet in 2002. Only a quarter of them went to the internet for their news and then only three times a
By Jackie Spinner The part-time faculty at Columbia College Chicago, where I teach journalism, was on strike for seven weeks, protesting cost-cutting decisions that will result in fewer teaching opportunities for instructors. It was the longest adjunct strike in US history before a tentative deal was reached on Dec. 18. The student newspaper, the Columbia
