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Tuesday, November 29, 2016
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Hot Pod: Should Apple become a more useful middleman for the podcast industry — and if so, how?Plus: Podcast ad blindness, growth in the potential market for Audible Channels, and how audio ad dollars are seeking scale. By Nicholas Quah. |
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Quartz launches its Bot Studio with $240K from Knight, and plans for Slack and EchoThe Quartz Bot Studio (which the publication intends to maintain after the grant funding is used up) will develop new bots for messaging platforms like Slack and voice interfaces like Amazon Echo or Google Home. By Shan Wang. |
What We’re Reading
BBC
BBC News now plays vertical video in its news app →
“All the videos are created specifically with smartphone users in mind: the videos are succinct and sharply edited, designed to be viewed vertically in full screen, and have subtitles. In addition the app will debut new vertical interstitial ad formats.”
FiveThirtyEight / Christie Aschwanden
We asked 8,500 internet commenters why they do what they do →
“Readers are most likely to comment when they know something about the subject that wasn’t in the article.”
Knight Foundation
Video digitization and Internet archival projects among those receiving Knight funding →
Including $200,000 for the nonprofit Rhizome, which “will work with organizations, social media users, journalists, artists and others to help them easily archive their experience of the web.”
The Wall Street Journal / Jack Marshall
Adblocking rates could be declining in Germany →
Ads were blocked on 19.1 percent of desktop webpage views during the third quarter of 2016, down from 21.2 percent in the same period a year ago, according to data from German digital media trade body Bundesverband Digitale Wirtschaft.
The Information / Tom Dotan
How Silicon Valley passed on conservative media →
“But as a social class that lives in cities like New York or San Francisco and spends time around predominantly liberal folks, they tend to invest in businesses that square with their self-image. As a result, they've largely avoided investing in conservative news sites like Breitbart, TheBlaze or Newsmax in recent years.”
CNBC / Matthew J. Belvedere
The New York Times has added 132,000 subscribers since Donald Trump was elected →
“From the election on Nov. 8 through Saturday, the Times has seen “a net increase of approximately 132,000 paid subscriptions to our news products,” the media giant said in an exclusive statement to CNBC. “This represents a dramatic rate of growth, 10 times, the same period one year ago,” the statement said.”
The Guardian / Mariot Chauvin
The Guardian has moved to HTTPS →
For security reasons, but also: Google is starting to favor HTTPS URLs in its search results.
Digiday / Max Willens
‘A classic commons problem’: Publishers are going notifications crazy →
“Notifications are spreading, too. Updates to the Chrome and Firefox browsers over the past 18 months have made it possible for any publisher to send notifications to readers via their respective browsers; Safari allows this too, but only for desktop — publishers that want to slip onto their readers' iPhone lock screens has to do so via Apple News, using the notifications company Urban Airship.”
The New York Times / Christopher J. Daggett
How an FCC auction could transform local media →
“The proceeds from these sales could produce enormous public benefits if they are used to build a 21st-century infrastructure for public interest media. For states, communities and universities holding licenses in play, the auction presents an important opportunity to invest in new ways to meet the information needs of the public.”