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Monday, March 27, 2017
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With its big London expansion, The Atlantic will chase stories — and business opportunities — in Europe“I see this as a chance to bring coverage of what’s happening in America to a large global audience, but also to bring an understanding of what's happening around the world the American audience that we already largely serve.” By Ricardo Bilton. |
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Australia’s public broadcaster is using Apple News push alerts to reach new, younger audiences“It’s gone from being an interesting platform that we’re dipping our toes into to a huge audience.” By Joseph Lichterman. |
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The Bureau Local is stepping in to help U.K. local news outlets that want to do investigative reporting“What is a story that needs to be told? What is the data that’s difficult to get? What would make your life easier? We’ll try to find common threads there.” By Shan Wang. |
What We’re Reading
The Democracy Fund
The Democracy Fund and First Look Media are giving more than $12 million in grants to media organizations →
The two organizations are also granting $500,000 to the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, and $275,000 for a collaboration between Jay Rosen at NYU and the Dutch outfit De Correspondent. The Center for Investigative Reporting, the Center for Public Integrity, and ProPublica will each receive $3 million. (First Look Media and Democracy Fund are also each separately funding several other initiatives.)
Backchannel / Danah Boyd
Google and Facebook can’t just make fake news disappear →
“Fake news is too big and messy to solve with algorithms or editors — because the problem is…us.”
Slate / Ben Mathis-Lilley
Fox Sports 1 serves up every opinion and its opposite. Will the channel reinvent sports television or destroy it? →
“Two years into Jamie Horowitz's tenure, his cable sports network is just as likely to air a bombastically left-wing opinion as a bombastically conservative one. And while it was a relief, on one level, to discover that Horowitz and Ailes are not fellow travelers, I'm not sure that what I did find on FS1 should make anyone feel particularly optimistic about the future of sports TV or human civilization.”
Digiday / Lucia Moses
The $100 million wall: Digital media’s scale struggles →
Why $100 million? ‘Many look at it as a 'proof point' that the business can scale further and have significant longevity/viability because of foundational importance to the advertising community,” said Rich Antoniello, CEO and founder of Complex Media.
The New York Times / Sapna Maheshwari
Brands try to blacklist Breitbart, but their ads are slipping through anyway →
“The problem underscores the challenges companies continue to face with the largely automated nature of online advertising, which tends to show messages to people based on who they are, rather than what site they visit. While errant appearances on unwanted sites may be rare — Nordstrom runs millions of ads daily, it said, and fewer than 200 show up on Breitbart — the risks of being viewed there have spiked, with consumer watchdogs and news outlets using screenshots and social media to call out brands for appearing near questionable content like hate speech or terrorist propaganda.”
Digiday / Max Willens
How BuzzFeed gets its employees data-focused →
“Thanks to a data management platform called Looker, anybody in the organization can gather data about content performance, without any familiarity with programming languages like SQL, which are necessary for querying disparate data sources. It's also an interface that allows users to look through data from multiple platforms at once.”
The New York Times / Sapna Maheshwari
Publishers retreat from the risks of advertising on Google and YouTube →
“Major advertisers including AT&T, Coca-Cola and Walmart yanked marketing dollars from Google last week after reports showed their ads on YouTube videos promoting hate speech, terrorism and racism; some of the videos contained racial slurs in their titles. While Google apologized and outlined steps it would take to guard against those situations, it has also defended itself by pointing to the volume of content it oversees. That has not appeased advertisers, who wonder if they are indirectly supporting hate speech, particularly as social media-savvy watchdogs prove able to turn one inappropriate appearance into viral, brand-damaging moments in and of themselves.”
Digiday / Jessica Davies
The Times of London’s subscription sales jump 200 percent since pivoting from breaking news →
“Subscriber churn is also at a record low, down 4 percentage points compared to the previous year, according to Catherine Newman, chief marketing officer at The Times and Sunday Times. Last summer, total print and digital paying subscribers rested at 413,600, according to the publisher. And in the first half of 2016, new paying-subscriber sales rose 200 percent compared to the first half of 2015.”
Crain's New York Business / Matthew Flamm
Quartz says it made more than $1 million from $30 million in revenue in 2016 →
“Quartz is projecting “significantly greater revenue and profits” for this year, a company executive said, and plans to invest in further growth by adding 50 employees at its Chelsea headquarters, bringing its New York head count to around 180. The company is also looking to create new editorial products, like the interactive app it launched last year; get deeper into coverage of artificial intelligence; and expand its sales and creative services departments. An additional 18 staffers outside New York will bring the companywide staff to about 270.”