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Wednesday, April 27, 2016
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“Keeping it weird”: BuzzFeed's ASMR Facebook Live experiment wants to whisper you the news“This is the Internet and the Internet is weird. It's always been weird. Especially when there's a new format like this, the weirdness comes out.” By Ricardo Bilton. |
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The American Bystander is trying to revive the humor magazine with a reader-supported business model"Our idea was that we were going to create one of these things in a classic format and see if there was enough interest to sustain it.” By Joseph Lichterman. |
What We’re Reading
Vox Product Blog / Elena Zheleva and Yian Shang
How Vox built a Slack bot for discovering related content →
“The simbot solution is able to fetch the full text of an article, analyze it and return similar articles based on this richer search context.”
The Wall Street Journal / Mike Shields
Tubular Labs wants to be the Nielsen for branded web video →
“The startup, which has raised over $20 million in funding to date, is introducing Tubular Video Ratings, a set of new metrics with this goal in mind. Ideally, a marketer will be able to gauge in advance how well a branded video produced by an influencer or media brand will perform compared to the average comparable video.”
MIT Technology Review / Will Knight
Is the chatbot trend one big misunderstanding? →
China’s messaging services show that conversational interfaces aren’t always desirable.
Digiday / Lucia Moses
Vox Media’s Choire Sicha is the unlikely platform wrangler →
“If Sicha may not seem like the most natural choice for his new role at Vox Media, the publishing world hasn't yet settled into a standard way of managing their platform relationships. Publishers are hiring platform ambassadors to fill those roles, but the role varies by publisher in terms of the person's background and where they fit in the organization.”
Business Insider / Nathan McAlone
This startup Odyssey has raised $32M and relies on 10K unpaid millennial writers →
“The concept sounds like a blogging platform at first, but what separates Odyssey is human [paid] editors.”
The Verge / Casey Newton
Nothing Twitter is doing is working →
“Collectively, changes to the product have failed to broaden the appeal of the core service, even as its rivals continue to grow.”
Digiday / Jessica Davies
Inside Business Insider’s aggressive European expansion →
Plus, see our writeup on BI Intelligence here.
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists / Marina Walker Guevara
ICIJ is releasing a searchable database of the Panama Papers on May 9 →
“While the database opens up a world that has never been revealed on such a massive scale, the application will not be a ‘data dump’ of the original documents — it will be a careful release of basic corporate information.”
Recode / Kurt Wagner
Twitter added 5 million new users last quarter, but revenues are down →
Twitter’s letter to shareholders is here.
The Verge / Ben Popper
Apple sees its revenue decline for the first time in 13 years →
Apple doesn’t break out Apple Watch sales; they’re “still lumped in with ‘Other Products,’ and that was the worst-performing piece of Apple’s business this quarter.”
From Fuego
SNOWDEN – Official Trailer —www.youtube.com
A startup that just raised $25 million is like a college newspaper on steroids – and it’s racking up 30 million uniques a month —www.businessinsider.com
An unlikely source predicted Chipotle’s disastrous quarter, and it says a lot about the future of investing —www.businessinsider.com
Satire Is Satire Even When People Fall For It, Mr. Jarvis —popehat.com
Arianna Huffington Joins Uber’s Board of Directors —newsroom.uber.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.