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Tuesday, April 18, 2017
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A Boston Globe memo puts the spotlight on an emerging consensus on how to transform metro papersThe Globe is the latest paper trying to “once and for all break the stubborn rhythms of a print operation, allowing us to unabashedly pursue digital subscriptions.” By Joseph Lichterman. |
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Newsonomics: Crimetown shows the podcast potential for local media partnershipThe Providence Journal has found ways to cooperate with — and benefit from — the successful true-crime podcast. By Ken Doctor. |
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“If a Serial episode was a mountain peak, S-Town was the Himalayas”Plus: Civics 101 expands its syllabus, an Apple tease, a new kind of daily news podcast, and Midroll tightens up its brands. By Nicholas Quah. |
What We’re Reading
Medium / Kurt Gessler
Facebook’s algorithm isn’t surfacing one-third of the Chicago Tribune’s posts. And it’s getting worse →
“In December of 2016, we had only 8 posts with 10,000 reach or less. In January of 2017, that had grown to 80. In February, 159. And in March, a ridiculous 242 posts were seen by fewer than 10,000 people. And while late 2016 saw record lows in that lowest quartile, that 242 is far above any prior month in our dataset. And we were seeing a steady decrease in that 25,001 to 50,000 quartile. That had gone from 248 in January 2016 to 141 in March 2017.”
Medium / Taylor Lorenz
Lots of people are saying that Instagram just officially ‘killed Snapchat’ Here’s why they’re wrong… →
“But to compare Instagram Stories' 200M DAUs with Snapchat's total 161M daily active users is to equate apples with oranges. And, despite the fact that Instagram has made an effort to copy nearly all of Snapchat's signature features, treating the two apps as similar platforms to begin with is a fruitless exercise.”
Newswire
Nuzzel now has a Facebook Messenger bot →
All Nuzzel newsletters will now be available for subscription via Messenger, in addition to email, with no additional work required by the newsletter curator. This new distribution channel can be used by publishers, marketers, or individual influencers to expand their audience.
The Washington Post / Thomas Heath
A news org that Warren Buffett would love →
“Industry Dive's business is journalism, but its subject matter is of a distinctly unsexy nature. It lives in that growing space where journalists create narrowly focused products that the general public rarely sees but private industry eats up. Sports Illustrated and Vanity Fair, it ain't.”
TheStreet / Ken Doctor
How Trump is helping Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and other publications shift to a completely new business model →
“On Thursday, Conde Nast all but acknowledged that Vanity Fair would join The New Yorker as just Conde Nast’s second publication to charge for digital access. Within six months, the Graydon Carter-edited Vanity Fair will try to cash in on the Trump Bump, that post-election phenomenon that matured into a subscriber surge in the first quarter of 2017.”
Poynter / Benjamin Mullin
How The New York Times decides which stories to link to (and which ones to match) →
“Controversial (but worthy) opinion pieces, harrowing first-person accounts and profiles of reclusive celebrities all exist beyond the walled garden of nytimes.com. In years past, The Times might’ve ignored these stories, rolled them into a longer article or tried to match them.”
The Outline / Adrianne Jeffries
How Google ate CelebrityNetWorth.com →
“For most of its history, Google was like a librarian. You asked a question, and it guided you to the section of the web where you might find the answer. But over the past five years, Google has been experimenting with being an oracle.”
Digiday / Tanya Dua
This granola bar company wants to pop your filter bubble →
“On Tuesday, Kind Snacks' non-profit wing will launch ‘Pop Your Bubble,’ a Facebook plugin that connects Facebook users with people vastly different from them in order to force them to embrace different points of view. Consider it a Tinder swipe, except that instead of trying to find something in common, it's a mismatch designed to steer you toward debate and discussion.”
Poynter / Melody Kramer
Comparing parental leave policies in American newsrooms →
“I asked people in many different types of newsrooms to anonymously report what kind of parental leave policy existed in their newsroom.”