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Wednesday, March 15, 2017
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FOIA the Dead uses The New York Times’ obituaries to shine a light on FBI surveillance, for the living“The dream of doing this is to uncover someone that you would not expect to be under FBI surveillance, and discover that they are.” By Laura Hazard Owen. |
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Discors wants people to pay for news via a low-priced subscription that crosses multiple publishersThe offer: $4.99 a month for a limited selection of stories from The New York Times, The Economist, and more. They’re the latest trying to unlock the space between $0 and a full subscription. By Joseph Lichterman. |
What We’re Reading
FOIA Mapper / Max Galka
A new study says journalists submit just 7.6 percent of federal FOIA requests →
“The biggest users of FOIA are commercial businesses. Including law firms, commercial businesses account for 55.7% of all requests in this sample. Private individuals are the second biggest FOIA requester category with a 20.1% share.”
Business Insider / Lara O
Adblock Plus names the members of its Acceptable Ads Committee, which will decide which ads it whitelists →
Media members include Condé Nast, Dennis Publishing, Local Media Consortium, TED Talks, and Leaf Group.
Digiday / Jessica Davies
The Guardian’s sales chief: The digital ad system rewards fake news →
“Fake news is being used as a key weapon to fight truth. And the digital advertising paradigm is helping to fund it, in fact I'd go as far as to say that it rewards it," argues The Guardian's chief revenue officer Hamish Nicklin.
TechCrunch / Jon Russell
Facebook Stories, yet another Snapchat clone, is rolling out to users worldwide →
“Facebook Stories, a feature that puts photos that disappear after 24 hours at the top of the Facebook mobile app, appears to be rolling out to a large number of users across the world. Facebook Stories isn't available to all users, however. The feature was first tested among users in Ireland in January and its extension this week come hot on the heels of a major Facebook offensive to bake Snapchat's core features into its main mobile services.”
The Verge / Casey Newton
Genius quietly laid off a bunch of its engineers — now can it survive as a media company? →
“It's not unusual for tech companies to transform over time, though typically they are loath to lay off engineers. But Genius' shift is more dramatic than most: going from all-encompassing annotator of the internet to a more traditional media company model, chasing video views alongside an ever-growing number of well-capitalized competitors. The move illustrates the company's difficulty attracting contributors — and an audience for their contributions — particularly outside of the music world.”
ABC / Andrew Davies
What the Australian Broadcasting Corporation learned from delivering audio via Facebook Messenger →
“There was something about the intimacy of people listening on their headphones that we felt matched the personalised, one-to-one conversation of the Messenger platform.”
Knight Foundation / David Cuillier
What problems lie ahead for FOIA (and how to solve them) →
“Nearly 9 out of 10 predicted that access to government will worsen because of the new presidential administration. ‘I think it's going to be a backyard brawl,’ said Ted Bridis, investigations editor for The Associated Press in Washington, D.C.”
Business Insider / Lara O
The ad fraud issue could be more than twice as big as first thought — advertisers stand to lose $16.4 billion to it this year →
“That is more than double the $7.2 billion the Association of National Advertisers estimated would be lost to ad fraud in 2016. The World Federation of Advertisers, meanwhile, predicted last year that ad fraud will cost advertisers $50 billion by 2025, describing the malpractice as an organized crime ‘second only to the drugs trade.'”
The Hive / Emily Jane Fox
Axios is expanding into science coverage →
Led by Alison Snyder from The Washington Post, science coverage will be “a great test case of does the Axios way work beyond the core areas we're touching right now,” says co-founder Jim VandeHei.
Digiday / Lucia Moses
From Mimi to The Drive: Time Inc.’s patchy record with digital verticals →
A result of factors both internal and external, Time Inc’s efforts to create digital-only verticals in sections like cars and beauty have largely failed to gain traction.