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Wednesday, September 28, 2016
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Collaborate or die: A new initiative wants to make it easier for national and local outlets to work together“Where you find resistance to collaboration is where you're finding news enterprises hastening their own demise.” By Ricardo Bilton. |
What We’re Reading
Poynter / Benjamin Mullin
Why did BuzzFeed redesign its homepage? →
It seems at odds with BuzzFeed’s distribution strategy that the company spent the last six months overhauling its homepage, which relaunched today. The new homepage will also be pulling double duty as an entry point for BuzzFeed’s two now separated divisions, BuzzFeed News and BuzzFeed Entertainment Group.
Broadcasting & Cable / Jon Lafayette
YouTube had nearly 2 million concurrent Clinton-Trump debate viewers →
“YouTube says this breaks all political programming records for live streaming and is one of the biggest livestreams of all time. Compared to four year ago, this debate had 14 times more live viewers, five times more watch time and 4 times more peak concurrent viewers.”
AdWeek
Medium / Save the Chicago Reader
“Help us win the fight for the [Chicago] Reader” →
“In 2012, each issue of the Reader ran from 72 to 80 pages. Now, it's generally 44 to 48 pages.”
VentureBeat / Jordan Novet
Twitter now lets any user create and curate Moments →
“Until now Moments have been editorially curated, presumably by Twitter staffers, and being included in a Moment was considered an achievement. It won't have that effect anymore because it's been democratized.”
Wesa / Christopher Ayers
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review will publish its last print edition on Nov. 30 →
“With the print edition’s departure, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette will become the only widely circulated daily newspaper left in the market. Pittsburgh has been home to at least two printed daily newspapers dating back to the mid-1800s.”
Mashable / Stan Schroeder
BlackBerry gives up on building phones →
“The company plans to end all internal hardware development and will outsource that function to partners.”
Chalkbeat / Ryan Sholin
Chalkbeat opensources MORI, its impact-measurement-for-journalism tool →
“MORI grew out of one of our key beliefs: Journalists can make a difference, but the ability to measure the difference we make can multiply our impact over time. If we can document how, why, when, and where we made a difference, we are more likely to repeat our success.”
Columbia Journalism Review / Shelley Hepworth, CJR
‘There’s gotta be a better way’: Ethical dilemmas surround eyewitness video →
“As news sharing on social platforms gathers steam, breaking news videos shot by eyewitnesses are going viral every other week. The phenomenon raises a host of questions for publishers, platforms, and eyewitnesses themselves”
Ad Age / Jeremy Barr
Why don’t more women run media companies? →
“The relative lack of female CEOs today stands out all the more because it wasn’t so long ago that historical norms seemed to have been broken: Time Inc., The New York Times Co., former Financial Times parent Pearson, NPR, the Fairchild Publications division of Condé Nast and Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia all had female CEOs in the first decade of the 2000s, and Hearst Magazines was run by Cathie Black as president from 1995 through 2010.”
The Guardian / Chris Wilk
The Guardian now has its own skills for Alexa, Amazon’s voice service →
With the new skills, Amazon Echo users can ask Alexa to play Guardian news, reviews, and even podcasts. (Only in the UK for now, though.)
Columbia Journalism Review / Emily Bell
Facebook is being taken somewhere it never wanted to go →
“Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has hit a rough patch in his quest to prove to the world that his company is a technology platform rather than an editorially driven, sentient publisher of the world's self-expression, which carries a social responsibility beyond its next earnings call.”
Digiday / Jemma Brackebush
What the Associated Press has learned from a year of VR →
One of AP’s big early realizations: sometimes VR is’t the best way to tell a story.
Recode / Kurt Wagner
Facebook is about to take the training wheels off Facebook at Work →
“This product has been a long time coming. Facebook has been using a version of Facebook at Work internally for years, and reports first surfaced that it was building an office tool for other companies almost 15 months ago. When, exactly, Facebook will launch the product is still unclear. So, too, is whether or not it will be able to convince customers to forgo their existing office products, in some cases with years of archived messaging and documents stored on them.”
Columbia Journalism Review / Alex T. Williams
Employment picture darkens for journalists at digital outlets →
“According to OES data, the number of journalists in the newspaper industry declined sharply in the past decade. Consider that in 2005, there were 66,490 newspaper reporters or editors. In 2015, there were 41,400, a decline of 25,090 journalists, or 38 percent. During the same time period, the number of journalists at digital-only publishers more than tripled, growing from 3,410 to 10,580.”