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Tuesday, March 21, 2017
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Word up! This is the story behind The New York Times’ most famous tweet (which is 10 years old today)“Once a month or so, that damn tweet would resurface.” By Joseph Lichterman. |
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Get ready to binge-listen to Serial’s new spinoff S-Town: All 7 episodes will drop at once next weekPlus: Panoply invests in audio fiction, Rookie links up with MTV, and Missing Richard Simmons wraps up its controversial run. By Nicholas Quah. |
What We’re Reading
Storybench / Felippe Rodrigues
Meet the Swedish newspaper editor who put an algorithm in charge of his homepage →
“The Creation Suite, as the CMS is called inside the Schibsted Group, is remarkably similar to the ones most journalists are used to – say, Wordpress or Medium – with one main difference: It relies on a machine to design the website's homepage. After reporters and editors are finished with a story, they set a "news" value — a variable ranging from 1 to 5 — and a "lifetime" value — either short, medium or long — and let the algorithm work its magic.”
The New York Times / Jim Rutenberg
Opposition and a shave: Former Obama aides counter Trump with Crooked Media →
“So as the Crooked Media guys set out to counter Mr. Trump, they realized that they were already on the right track with their podcast. They were going to have to meet him on the terrain that he was quickly overdeveloping. You don't start a super PAC, you start a show; you counterprogram.”
The New York Times / John Herrman
Platform companies are becoming more powerful — but what exactly do they want? →
“Platforms are, in a sense, capitalism distilled to its essence. They are proudly experimental and maximally consequential, prone to creating externalities and especially disinclined to address or even acknowledge what happens beyond their rising walls. And accordingly, platforms are the underlying trend that ties together popular narratives about technology and the economy in general. Platforms provide the substructure for the ‘gig economy’ and the ‘sharing economy’; they're the economic engine of social media; they're the architecture of the ‘attention economy’ and the inspiration for claims about the ‘end of ownership.’
VG / David Bach and Øystein David Johansen
Three Norwegian news organizations are teaming up on a country-wide factchecking initiative →
Verdens Gang, Dagbladet and Norwegian public broadcaster NRK, normally competitors, are contributing financial and editorial resources to the new effort.
Adweek / Sami Main
The co-founders of Mental Floss are leaving to develop podcasts at HowStuffWorks →
“HowStuffWorks podcasts, like Stuff You Should Know or Stuff You Missed in History Class, are frequently ranked in the top five podcast publishers for global downloads, seeing nearly 30 million downloads per month.”
Business Insider / Oliver Darcy
Inside the identity crisis at the Independent Journal Review, the outlet that has become a powerhouse in the Trump era →
“In conversations with more than a dozen current and former employees, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity, several individuals said the incidents were emblematic of larger problems at IJR. Current and former staffers said the website, chasing clicks, has veered sharply to the right in recent months to feed its conservative base the red meat it desired.”
Nytimes / James Barron
In an era of fake news, teaching students to parse fact from fiction →
“At Intermediate School 303 in Coney Island, Brooklyn, lesson plans are aimed at steeping students in news literacy, which involves determining whether an article or a video is real — and if it is real, whether it is, for example, a news story or an advertisement made to look like a news report.”
Digiday / Lucinda Southern
What to know about Germany’s fake-news crackdown →
Germany wants to fine social networks up to €50 million ($54 million) if they fail to remove harmful fake news within 24 hours. Here’s how the law could work.
Digiday / Lucia Moses
From frenemy to friend: How Google won publishers over →
Google’s efforts to charm publishers are paying off for both sides.
Journalism.co.uk / Caroline Scott
With Times Insider, The New York Times is offering readers a behind-the-scenes look at the newsroom →
“We don’t want The New York Times to be this faceless place where nobody ever goes in and no one knows what’s happening there.”
Quartz / Nikhil Sonnad
This is now what happens when you try to post fake news on Facebook →
Try to post the story “The Irish slave trade — the slaves that time forgot” to Facebook. It comes with the warning label, “Disputed by Snopes.com and Associated Press.”