 |
Thursday, January 19, 2017
 |
Can Marketplace reach an audience beyond those who already care about explainer journalism?The stated mission is big: raising the economic intelligence of the country. “It’s our job to do more of that storytelling, but also to think more about how we are telling the story outside the traditional audience of public radio.” By Laura Hazard Owen. |
 |
A new collaboration: NPR stations nationwide are working together to spot trends in state governments“By inviting in anybody who covers these things and letting them be participants and part of the conversation, the bar gets raised for everybody.” By Joseph Lichterman. |
What We’re Reading
Recode / Peter Kafka
Quartz cancels its high-end ‘Next Billion’ conference →
“The company is laying off three employees who worked full-time on its conference business…[editor-in-chief Kevin] Delaney said Quartz, which has a staff of 190, planned to hire 68 employees, including 20 new marketing specialists, in the first half of this year.”
The Hill / Alexander Bolton
Report: Trump plans to privatize the Corporation for Public Broadcasting →
“The preliminary proposals from the White House budget office will be shared with federal departments and agencies soon after Trump takes the oath of office Friday, and could provoke an angry backlash.”
Canadaland / Moira Donovan
Editorial staffers have been on strike for the past year at Nova Scotia’s largest newspaper →
“We believe that they've been offering proposals that we simply cannot sign and they knew it.”
FiveThirtyEight / Nate Silver
What reporters — and lots of data geeks, too — missed about the election, and what they're still getting wrong →
“National journalists usually interpreted conflicting and contradictory information as confirming their prior belief that Clinton would win,” Nate Silver writes. “The most obvious error, given that Clinton won the popular vote by more than 2.8 million votes, is that they frequently mistook Clinton's weakness in the Electoral College for being a strength.”
The Wall Street Journal / Jack Nicas
Google uses its search engine to hawk its products →
“Google searches for ‘phones’ virtually always began with three consecutive ads for Google's Pixel phones. All 1,000 searches for ‘laptops’ started with a Chromebook ad. ‘Watches’ began with an Android smartwatch ad 98% of the time…After the Journal shared the analysis with Google on Dec. 15, many of the ads disappeared.”
CNNMoney / Tom Kludt
Telecoms mogul Carlos Slim is launching a TV channel for Mexican audiences in the U.S. →
“The channel, called Nuestra Visión (“Our Vision” in English), will be provided by Publicidad y Contenido Editorial, a unit of the Slim-owned America Movil, which is the largest cellular phone company in Latin America. Nuestra Visión will compete against a pair of Spanish-language giants already operating in the U.S., Univision and Telemundo.”
Wall Street Journal / Thomas Gryta
The FCC’s TV airwaves auction nears end with about $18 billion in bids →
“The auction is wrapping up after attracting about $18.2 billion in bids, far less than the last sale of government licenses amid weaker demand (overshadowing the results was the surprising success of the previous FCC auction that closed in early 2015 with almost $45 billion in bids).”
The New York Times / Farhad Manjoo
Clearing out the app stores: Government censorship made easier →
“Blocking a website is like trying to stop lots of trucks from delivering a banned book; it requires an infrastructure of technical tools (things like China's "Great Firewall"), and enterprising users can often find a way around it. Banning an app from an app store, by contrast, is like shutting down the printing press before the book is ever published. If the app isn't in a country's app store, it effectively doesn't exist. The censorship is nearly total and inescapable.”
Digiday / Max Willens
Scaled back: Why publishers are rethinking their pursuit of huge numbers →
"The industry's kind of in a retreat," Josh Topolsky, the founder of The Outline, said. "People are numb to the volume right now. While I think 95 percent of the businesses that exist in digital are still volume businesses, I think there's another business emerging."
Gizmodo / Matt Novak
Russia Today has been banned from posting articles, photos, and videos to Facebook until after inauguration →
The ban was instituted yesterday after RT allegedly ran a pirated stream of Obama's last press conference. While RT has been banned from posting articles, the news outlet is still able to post text directly to Facebook. The Kremlin-funded media outlet was an early and vocal supporter of president-elect Donald Trump, leading some people to find the timing of the ban suspicious.