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Friday, October 7, 2016
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A “paranoid moment”: As Gimlet grows its stable of podcasts, so does anxiety over how to make ends meet“The audience numbers for the past few months, which had been growing gangbusters before, have plateaued and even kind of fallen for pretty much almost all of our shows.” By Shan Wang. |
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ProPublica’s Data Store, which has pulled in $200K, is now selling datasets for other news orgs “So many news organizations have these kinds of datasets, but don’t have the resources to build out a marketing channel or sales support system to do anything with them. We want to offer that support.” By Ricardo Bilton. |
What We’re Reading
Nieman Foundation
Juan Manuel Santos, a 1988 Nieman Fellow, is awarded the 2016 Nobel Peace Prize →
From a Nieman classmate: “Sometimes we joked this guy one day will become president of Colombia. It was kind of the class joke. A couple of decades later, sure enough he was and is the president of Colombia.”
Wall Street Journal / Tom Corrigan
The fate of the embattled Gawker.com is still uncertain →
“Gawker.com, wasn't included in last month's sale of most of Gawker's other assets to an arm of Univision Communications Inc. It remains a potentially valuable asset to be sold or otherwise monetized, Gregg Galardi, a lawyer for Gawker Media, said Thursday during a bankruptcy court hearing in Manhattan.”
The Verge / Nilay Patel
How The Verge’s traffic sources have changed in the past year →
“And here's the trend: almost all of our growth is in video, particularly Facebook video. In particular, look at those Circuit Breaker numbers — most of the content posted to the Circuit Breaker Facebook page never makes it to The Verge's website, but it's still way out ahead of YouTube and our custom player, all of which get boosted when we embed them on article pages on the web.”
Digiday / Max Willens
A look at The New York Times podcast operations, six months in →
The podcasts are all free for now, although Times editorial director for audio Samantha Henig pointed out, "ultimately, we are a subscription company. We need to figure out how they're serving our subscribers."
Digiday / Lucia Moses
The Economist is joining Snapchat Discover →
The channel will publish 14 to 17 snaps each weekend, telling business, politics, science and technology stories through a mix of graphics, video, animation and text. "This is a really good way to challenge the problem we have. In the U.S., 60 percent haven't heard of us at all, and among the 40 percent who have, there's a misperception that all we care about is economics and finance.”
Poynter / Matt DeRienzo and Dylan Smith
If Gannett buys Tronc and cuts, could a new crop of grassroots sites follow to fill a vacuum? →
“The experienced and committed journalists and revenue-side staff who will likely lose their jobs in the coming months could use their severance packages to support their own efforts to become local news entrepreneurs,” Matt DeRienzo and Dylan Smith of LION Publishers argue optimistically.
Facebook Media / Julia Bain and Beth Loyd
Here are some Facebook Live best practices from Facebook →
Videos on breaking news, suspense, weather, and journalists’ personalities do well, Facebook said. But a new Pew report out today says younger consumers prefer to get news in text, not video.