Weekend Update, March 27

Quick hits to start your Saturday

Have a nice weekend, folks.

Making corporate media more corporate

Domino’s Pizza has a job posting up for a data journalist which, naturally, a lot of people in journalism think is funny.

I’ll say that while I don’t have a particularly clear vision for a Domino’s-centric digital publication, I do think corporate loss-leader journalism is a potentially good idea. The basic story of how the internet changed journalism is that it’s made it a lot cheaper to produce and distribute content, but also harder to monetize. That should be an advantage to anyone — be that a pizza chain or a nonprofit — who wants to do journalism for reasons other than a desire to directly monetize journalism.

Like, imagine if Tesla ran a small newsroom covering the electricity and transportation industries from a basic editorial perspective of “solar power and electric cars are good.” It could delve into boring-but-important subjects about how electrical grid regulation works. Coverage of research into the harms o…