 |
Friday, March 25, 2016
 |
The game of concentration: The Internet is pushing the American news business to New York and the coastsRather than create geographic diversity, digital news has pushed the industry into a few tight clusters. That has real impacts on the journalism we get. By Joshua Benton. |
 |
Think you’re bad at math? A new Tow Center report explores the principles behind data journalism“The future is very hard to know, but standards of journalistic accuracy apply to descriptions of the future at least as much as they apply to descriptions of the present, if not more so.” By Shan Wang. |
What We’re Reading
Poynter / Benjamin Mullin
Meet Beta, the team that brings The New York Times to your smartphone →
In less than three years, Beta has developed and released a series of products that touch nearly every cranny of the Times newsroom: NYT Now, the Times’ aggregation-fueled news app, was the first product released by Beta in April 2014. NYT Opinion, a subscription-based app that attempted to monetize the Times’ opinion content, came a few months later. In September 2014, Beta rolled out NYT Cooking, an interactive guide to the Times’ enormous library of recipes.
AdAge / Jeremy Barr
Ev Williams talks about Medium’s future and the spinoff of Matter Studios →
“Long-term it’s clearer and clearer I think to the world that Medium really is a platform, and there may be flagship publications that we own, but that’s not the gist of it.”
Poynter / Benjamin Mullin
Mark Horvit to step down as executive director of IRE →
He’s taking a new job at The University of Missouri.
The New York Times / Emily Steel
Apple is making an original TV show →
It’s about apps. “Apple's ambitions to go head to head with Netflix and create its own lineup of exclusive movies and TV shows has long been the subject of much chatter and speculation.”
NetNewsCheck
Jeff Jarvis to broadcasters: “I'd be on whatever platform I can be on” →
“I'm not saying that we should all make PewDiePie in the news business, but there are lessons to be learned from rethinking fundamentally how video fits in people's lives. It's not media consumption. It's an element in conversation.”
Quartz / Lisa Rabasca Roepe
America’s obsession with social media is undermining the democratic process →
"Our data shows that one of the things that has developed along side of the proliferation of news sources and social media platforms is that the political environment is also becoming more divided rather than more cohesive," Amy Mitchell, Pew's director of journalism research, tells Quartz.
The Verge / Ashley Carman
Here are some basic cybersecurity tips →
What one Verge journalist learned after her phone was stolen on a Mexican vacation
The New York Times / Liriel Higa
This is what it’s like to work for a New York Times columnist →
Here’s how Nicholas Kristof’s outgoing assistant Liriel Higa describes it: “I fact-check and give feedback on his columns, run his blog, produce his newsletter, answer his phone, enter expenses, cajole embassies into giving him visas, investigate new social media platforms, provide mediocre tech support and rib him about his abysmal pop culture knowledge. I've never ghostwritten for him or fetched him coffee.”
Politico / Alex Spence
It’s the last day in print for The Independent →
Working on a British bank holiday, no less.
The Wall Street Journal / Jack Marshall
Publishers are now hiring specialists to coordinate relationships with platforms such as Facebook and Snapchat →
"It's very much a people and relationships role. It's the person who builds, maintains and nurtures relationships with their counterparts at platforms," said Condé Nast International's chief digital officer, Wolfgang Blau.
Poynter / Rick Edmonds
The National Association of Broadcasters has started investing directly in tech startups →
“It was news to me that the industry group has had an active involvement in tech experiments for years — a contrast to the newspaper industry, which typically showcases tech vendors at its conferences and stops there.”
Digiday / Lucinda Southern
Not all platforms: Cosmopolitan, The Washington Post and The Guardian on the platforms that matter to them →
The Cosmopolitan for instance got a first-mover advantage by signing up early on Snapchat Discover — it gets 3 million views there a day. The Guardian, meanwhile, has seen little benefit to being early on Facebook's Instant Articles, highlighting the risk of handing over that distribution control.
NPR
NPR names Thomas Hjelm chief digital officer →
“Currently the digital leader at New York Public Radio, Hjelm will be responsible for guiding NPR’s digital strategy in ways that keep ahead of the changing ways audiences are consuming news and cultural content. He will report to NPR President and CEO Jarl Mohn and will step into the role in late April.”
From Fuego
Gawker’s Season of Fear and Loathing —www.thedailybeast.com
Media Metrics Roundup —pbs.us2.list-manage1.com
How millennials should deal with baby boomers at work —www.latimes.com
MediaShift #191: Hulk Hogan Beats Gawker; Quartz Texts the News; David Cohn on Incubating at Advance by MediaShift Podcast —soundcloud.com
Fuego is our heat-seeking Twitter bot, tracking the stories the future-of-journalism crowd is talking about most. Usually those are about journalism and technology, although sometimes they get distracted by politics, sports, or GIFs. (No humans were involved in this listing, and linking is not endorsing.) Check out Fuego on the web to get up-to-the-minute news.