 |
Thursday, December 8, 2016
 |
When 9.4 million followers isn’t enough: NBC News will shut down the Breaking News app on Dec. 31“Experiments eventually need to sustain themselves and in this case, despite every effort, we just weren’t able to get there,” said Nick Ascheim of NBC News, which owns Breaking News. By Nieman Lab Staff. |
 |
The Wall Street Journal is confident its “bendier” paywall will draw the paying readers it needs to surviveDespite a bad fall shadowed by news about ad revenue declines and layoffs, the Journal has ridden what seems to be a post-election wave of interest in paid media. It’s counting on changes in paywall strategy to bring in even more digital subscribers. By Shan Wang. |
What We’re Reading
Poynter / James Warren
Vice founder Shane Smith predicts ‘chaos’ for digital advertising in 2017 →
“What you’re seeing is for a lot of reasons — the death of display advertising, ad blocking — this bloodbath in online media, with online trying to make bridges from new to old,” Smith said.
Vice News / Alex Thompson
Journalists and Trump voters live in separate online bubbles, MIT analysis shows →
“MIT's analysis — which used the social media company's complete data set — shows that on Twitter, Trump supporters formed a particularly insular group when talking about politics during the general election. They had few connections to Clinton supporters or the mainstream media. By contrast, Clinton supporters were more splintered and verified journalists often overlapped within their mutual follower networks.”
The Atlantic / Adrienne LaFrance
The cynical gambit to make “fake news” meaningless →
“It's no coincidence that the public's faith in the media is abysmal at a moment when the institutions that were once our primary informational gatekeepers are no longer the only ones distributing the news. The fact that news outlets have simultaneously lost cultural power and the public's trust represent both a cause and an effect of the fake-news problem: The idea that media can't be trusted is bolstered by the ubiquity of alternative information sources, many of which aren't credible themselves, which further diminishes trust of news sources overall.”
Digiday / Lucia Moses
In the shadow of Facebook, Twitter loses traction with publishers →
“Twitter has ‘lost the attention battle,’ said Paul Berry, founder and CEO of RebelMouse, which helps publishers amplify their content on social. ‘Five, 10 years ago, there was a lot of emphasis building Twitter followings, traffic. For new media companies, Twitter is the afterthought and the side job. It used to be one person on Facebook, one person on Twitter, and now it's three people on Facebook and half a person on Twitter. We don't see any media companies on our platform who are either having success driving traffic on Twitter or have that as a goal anymore.'”
Financial Times / Matthew Garrahan
Breitbart News is set to tap into European politics amid accusations of racism →
“Breitbart is on the move, with plans to surf the populist wave into new international markets. It already has a London operation, run by Raheem Kassam, a former leadership candidate for the UK Independence party. With far-right parties — including Marine Le Pen's National Front — on the rise in France and Germany, continental Europe seems a natural next step.”
ProPublica / Cynthia Gordy
ProPublica is expanding to Chicago →
“The nonprofit newsroom ProPublica announced that it will launch a new Illinois unit in 2017, publishing investigative journalism on key issues in Chicago and across the state. A search for an experienced, Chicago-based editor to lead ProPublica Illinois is underway and will conclude shortly.”
Android Central / Marc Lagace
Quartz’s app is now out on Android →
The app, which has an interface that looks like a chat platform, launched in February on iOS.