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Tuesday, May 17, 2016
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Millennial-focused local startup Charlotte Agenda is expanding its model to a second city, RaleighThe North Carolina startup says it’s profitable and is looking to expand its reach — but it’s not seeking outside funding. By Joseph Lichterman. |
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Hot Pod: Is This American Life violating the public radio mission by straying to platforms like Pandora?“Here we have a public radio station that seems to not only fail to recognize who its natural friends are, but one that is lashing out at potential allies.” By Nicholas Quah. |
What We’re Reading
WAN-IFRA / Valérie Arnould
A Q&A with Mia Mabanta on Quartz’s revenue strategy →
“…the way that we look at is, the standard online advertising model is very broken for the most part. Pre-roll is a great example…right now the default place to put it online is pre-roll, but you grow to hate pre-roll. I read somewhere that 94 percent of users, when they encounter pre-roll, and they can skip it, they will skip it.”
NPR / Tyler Fisher
What NPR learned from running its live elections app →
“During times the broadcast was live, we served over 475,000 sessions, and over 100,000 of those sessions were listeners. In other words, 22.4% of live event sessions became listening sessions by listening to at least five minutes of audio.”
Kickstarter / Caitlin Thompson & Dave Shaftel
Racquet, a new quarterly magazine about tennis, is launching only in print →
“Racquet is about more than just tennis. It represents the first step in a new model of publishing and journalism in print. Because Racquet's priority will be on a selling a beautiful physical edition, the magazine will not be beholden to the digital-centric model of publishing and advertising that is diluting the quality of so much current journalism.”
Center for International Media Assistance / Daniel O'Maley
Zero-rating the news: How will sponsored data initiatives impact access to journalism? →
“Zero-rating is the practice of not charging customers for data used by specific applications or Internet services… Yet, the participation of news organizations in zero-rating initiatives raises a number of important questions.”
The Guardian / Jasper Jackson
More than 90,000 people sign a petition to prevent the BBC from “mothballing” its recipe archives →
“Although the 11,000 recipes will not be deleted, a source told the Guardian they will be ‘archived or mothballed’ and ‘fall off the face of the internet’ after the food site is closed. The individual URLs of each recipe will remain live, but they will not be linked to from any other part of the BBC website.”
The Drum / Ronan Shields
Adblocking might cost U.S. media owners $12.1B by 2020 →
11.7 per cent of online display ad impressions were blocked in 2015 in the U.S., according to adblocking solutions company Optimal.com. The company forecasts that display ad revenues for U.S. media owners will amount to $38.8 billion, instead of the earlier forecast $50 billion, based on its adblocker tracking data and details extrapolated from a consumer survey by Wells Fargo Security.
The Wall Street Journal / Christopher Mims
Are fears of Facebook’s bias overblown? →
“Here's the question we should be asking about "bias" in Facebook's news feed: Is it substantially worse than in the heyday of newspapers and magazines, when readers in major cities could choose to get their news from among a dozen or more publications tailored to their biases?”
Mashable / Jason Abbruzzese
Facebook’s biggest livestream yet featured President Obama and a lot of confusion →
“The origin of the problem with Facebook’s stream was not immediately clear, although YouTube’s seemed to work well. The two companies have developed a strong rivalry as leaders in online video, with the two arguing over viewing metrics and battling for advertiser money.”
Digiday / Lucia Moses
After a redesign, The Washingtonian saw homepage traffic grow by 18 percent →
"When I ran the numbers, I was really surprised," senior editor Andrew Beaujon said. "I thought because it was responsive we'd get a little bit of a boost in search results, because a lot of people come to us in search, especially looking for restaurant reviews. The homepage just started going up to No. 1 and staying there."
Digiday / Sahil Patel
Publishers say 85 percent of Facebook video is watched without sound →
“The news shouldn't come as much of a surprise, as Facebook has built a video ecosystem that does not require users to turn the volume up — and publishers have been more than happy to play ball.”
BuzzFeed / Jason Reich
BuzzFeed adopts HTTPS →
We also owe a lot to the early movers in this space, particularly the Washington Post whose engineering team provided us with tips from their own experience switching to HTTPS. (See our coverage of Wired’s and the Post’s move.)
From Fuego
I worked on Facebook’s Trending team – the most toxic work experience of my life —www.theguardian.com
What does the First Amendment look like in the digital age? Knight and Columbia are spending $60 million to find out. —www.poynter.org
Defending a Free Press in a Digital Age —time.com
Soon We Won’t Program Computers. We’ll Train Them Like Dogs —www.wired.com
Jeb Bush Has Some Thoughts On Trump’s Cinco De Mayo Tweet —www.huffingtonpost.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.