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Friday, April 29, 2016
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The Wall Street Journal website — paywalled from the very beginning — turns 20 years old today“From the very beginning it was very clear we needed to cover all the same concerns and sensibilities of the print Journal even though we were online and even though we were a young staff.” By Shan Wang. |
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Newsonomics: In the platform wars, how well are you armed?“Think about platforms as fishing places where you can find large, engaged audiences and build a relationship with them by providing content. Then offer these users some other services off-platform.” By Ken Doctor. |
What We’re Reading
TechCrunch / Ingrid Lunden
Twitter retires @MagicRecs, a DM bot that recommended people to follow →
Bummer. Loved @MagicRecs.
Reynolds Journalism Institute
These are the 2016-17 Reynolds Journalism Institute fellows at Mizzou →
Including residential fellows, nonresidential fellows, and entire institutions (PolitiFact, GroundSource, and Crosscut News).
BuzzFeed / Alex Kantrowitz
Facebook quietly live-streamed its first professional sports game last weekend →
A National Women’s Soccer League game was broadcast on player Alex Morgan’s page. “The game reached an estimated 554,000 unique viewers in all, according to Cycle, the media company that orchestrated the stream.”
Recode / Peter Kafka
Steven Levy is in talks to leave Medium/Backchannel and head back to Conde Nast →
The end of Backchannel would mean “the end of Medium’s role as a traditional publisher, where it paid people to create content for its own platform.”
International Business Times / Max Willens
What’s really killing digital media: The tyranny of the impression →
“Digital publishing is built on ad sales based on impressions, and impressions are a terrible currency for selling advertising on the internet.”
The Guardian / Jasper Jackson
Publishers ‘feeding on scraps from Facebook’, says Bloomberg Media boss →
"They keep the $16bn to $18bn they get in the news feed, and the news feed, with personal sharing down, is effectively all of our content, it's effectively just an aggregation of premium publishers' content.”
Bloomberg / Sarah Frier
Snapchat scores unprecedented deal with NBC to showcase Olympics →
There will be a dedicated channel on its mobile app for the Rio De Janeiro games. BuzzFeed will curate short clips and behind-the-scenes content into a Discover channel on the app for two weeks, while Snapchat creates daily "live stories" using content from NBC, athletes and sports fans at the scene.
Select All / Casey Johnston
The feed is dying →
“Chronological order doesn’t scale well.”
Angus Reid Institute
Young Canadians don’t care as much about the decline of newspapers as their parents’ generation →
But one concern: “fears that the death of newspapers, if it happened, would lead to U.S. stories dominating Canadian news.”
Digiday / Garett Sloane
Twitter and Facebook want publishers and brands to stop promoting their Snapchat accounts →
“They are preventing external links. You cannot add a Snapchat link in your Instagram bio anymore. If you try to do it, it's not possible.”
Digiday / Jessica Davies
Is blocking adblockers really illegal in Europe? →
“It seems that those publishers using scripts to detect whether people visiting their websites have ad blockers installed could be in breach of European Privacy Law.”
Columbia Journalism Review / Chava Gourarie
Exporting Ira Glass-style podcasts to post-Soviet nations →
“In Taxi Taxi, the foreign becomes familiar. And a region that many Americans couldn't point to on a map comes alive.”
Digiday / Jordan Valinsky
Twitter is calling itself a news app, not a social network now →
“In an update yesterday, Twitter now sits in the News category rather than Social Networking. The move shifts it away from its competitors like Facebook, Snapchat and Kik.”
CBC / Kaitlin Prest
10 lessons that helped an indie podcast off the ground →
“There are millions of ways for a podcast to be successful. For us, success is making work we are passionate about and having financial and administrative support in doing that. These are some things that helped us achieve that goal.”
Digiday / Sahil Patel
The Weather Channel seeks scale on Facebook, eyes vertical video →
“Facebook, in particular, is a huge area of growth for The Weather Channel, which did 204 million video views on the platform in March, up 158 percent from the previous month. The growth is credited to the publisher tripling the amount of Facebook content — text-on-videos, in particular — it makes every month.”
Quartz / Amy X. Wang
iTunes is 13 years old, and it’s still awful →
“Perhaps the fate of iTunes is to be ignored until it dies, unloved, in the corner, long after people forget just how revolutionary it was.”
Recode / Noah Kulwin
Reddit’s plan to become a real business could fall apart pretty easily →
Reddit has also reportedly “pulled back its support” of the website Upvoted.
Gawker / Andy Cush
A kid caused a full minute of dead air on NPR during Take Your Child to Work Day →
"One of our junior journalists was some how able to press the exact sequence, and perfectly timed live insert panel to insert studio 42 into the stream 1. I kid you not" the email read. "Feel free to giggle at will."
NewsWhip
The biggest Swedish, French, and Italian sites on Facebook →
“Readers across Europe are as likely to come across stories from BuzzFeed and the New York Times as their own national news sites.”
Wall Street Journal / Jack Marshall
Google tests feature that lets media companies and marketers publish directly to search results →
“Google has built a Web-based interface through which posts can be formatted and uploaded directly to its systems. The posts can be up to 14,400 characters in length and can include links and up to 10 images or videos. The pages also include options to share them via Twitter, Facebook or email.”
The Guardian / Rupert Neate
New York Times CEO Thompson sued over alleged ageist, racist, and sexist hiring practices →
“The lawsuit, filed on behalf of two black female employees in their sixties in New York on Thursday, claims that under Thompson's leadership the US paper of record has “become an environment rife with discrimination.'”
From Fuego
Snapchat Scores Unprecedented Deal With NBC to Showcase Olympics —www.bloomberg.com
The Full Story Behind Bloomberg’s Attempt To “Unmask” Zero Hedge —www.zerohedge.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.