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Wednesday, June 29, 2016
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Facebook is making its News Feed a little bit more about your friends and a little less about publishersThe impact will apparently be “noticeable” and “significant” but “small” and not “humongous.” By Joshua Benton. |
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Drawn to the common aim of covering issues around homelessness, Bay Area media organizations unite for the day“From a purely intellectual, journalistic standpoint, what I think is most fascinating about this is that everybody is more or less covering the same thing, but from their own unique media perspective.” By Shan Wang. |
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First Look Media is building a new platform that aims to include everything from films to podcastsDetails are still scarce, but job listings reveal that it intends to take on everything from video series, feature films, podcasts, photo essays, and “storytelling in other formats and technologies like virtual reality and livestreaming.” By Shan Wang. |
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Sure, people like online video, but that doesn’t mean they want to watch your hard news videos“Even for brands associated with hard news…their top or second videos in terms of Facebook engagement numbers turned out to be animal videos.” By Laura Hazard Owen. |
What We’re Reading
Twitter / Allison McCann
Some of the visual iterations FiveThirtyEight went through for its presidential prediction interactive →
Mostly maps, occasionally giant heads.
Inc.com / John Boitnott
3 social media giants sabotaging themselves by hurting the “Little Guy” →
Some of the biggest players in social media are making moves that, although possibly lucrative for themselves, make the platforms less useful and helpful to small businesses and independent, creative individuals. These potentially shortsighted decisions may come back to haunt the big social media companies involved.
BuzzFeed
Tasty, BuzzFeed’s Facebook-only cooking channel, now has a homepage →
Tasty (and its British counterpart Proper Tasty) exploded on Facebook because the content is tailor-made for that platform, and the channels existed primarily on Facebook. (62 million people like the Tasty Facebook page; 7.7 million like the main BuzzFeed page.)
Vocativ / Efe Kerem Sözeri
Turkey blocks news sites, Twitter, and Facebook following a deadly airport attack →
The order, issued by the Turkish Prime Minister's office on the grounds of "national security and public order," bans sharing of any visuals of the moment of explosion, blast scene, emergency work, of the wounded and dead, or any "exaggerated narrative" about the scene. It also bans the act of sharing any information about the suspects.
Digiday / Jessica Davies
The Financial Times saw a 600 percent surge in digital subscriptions sales over Brexit weekend →
The bump in subscriptions was no accident: "We dialed up our marketing on a real-time basis. We were looking at buying patterns, opportunities in social, and spending our marketing budgets in pretty aggressive ways in an attempt to try and dominate a story.”
Digiday / Sahil Patel
Refinery29 is building a 10-person Facebook Live team →
The specialized-team approach to different social platforms is not new to Refinery29, which already has eight people handling its Snapchat Discover channel (it declined to comment whether it was being paid by Facebook to use the Live feature).
Politico / Eric Geller
BuzzFeed eliminates its Canadian political coverage →
“The elimination of the Ottawa bureau is likely to further the speculation that BuzzFeed is shifting its focus away from its text-centric news division.”