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Friday, May 19, 2017
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This is the story behind that double push alert The New York Times sent about Comey’s Trump memoSo why’d the Times make your phone buzz twice Tuesday afternoon? The inspiration was threaded tweets. By Joseph Lichterman. |
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It’s too early to declare Facebook’s anti-fake news efforts a failurePlus: A new report on the many types of trolls, and what happens when fact and fiction get blended together. By Laura Hazard Owen. |
What We’re Reading
The Guardian / Julia Carrie Wong
Facebook blocks Pulitzer-winning reporter over Malta government exposé →
“Matthew Caruana Galizia, a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists' award-winning Panama Papers team, was temporarily locked out of his Facebook account over four posts, which were deleted for violating the social network's community standards.”
Voice of San Diego / Scott Lewis
Voice of San Diego’s News Revenue Hub is becoming a standalone organization →
VOSD launched the project last year to help nonprofit news organizations manage their membership programs. It says the hub has helped news orgs raise more than $1 million since it launched in November.
Journalism.co.uk / Madalina Ciobanu
The lock screen battle: How The New York Times, CNN and BuzzFeed News pushed the Trump-FBI story to mobile readers →
“Here’s an overview of how The New York Times, CNN and BuzzFeed News applied their push notification strategy to this story, including how many alerts they sent, the type of coverage they pushed and the language and context they used.”
Local News Lab / Jessica Crowell and Kathleen McCollough
Here’s how to run focus groups in your local news community →
“In many cases, the feedback gave newsrooms the confidence to test new ideas and take risks that otherwise might have seemed like blind experiments. We believe that these kinds of focus groups can be important tools for newsrooms to listen to their communities, and we hope that this guide provides journalists with the tools they need to host such discussions.”
Hearst / Michael Donohoe
A typical article page takes 57 seconds to fully load on a 3G network →
And weighs 5.1 MB. “A 1,700-word article might weigh 10KB, but by the time you load HTML, JS, CSS, images, 3rd-parties, and ads, it can range between 2MB to 8MB depending on the web site. Bear in mind, the first Harry Potter ebook is 1.1MB, and that includes cover art.”
The Guardian / Jennifer Rankin
Facebook fined €110m for ‘misleading’ EU over WhatsApp takeover →
“When Facebook took over the WhatsApp messaging service in 2014, it told the commission it would not be able to match user accounts on both platforms, but went on to do exactly that.”
Journalism.co.uk / Madalina Ciobanu
Print and online daily Ara is reaching the ‘politically concerned’ community in Catalonia →
“The outlet has 40,000 subscribers, split evenly between readers who pay for the digital version (€95 per year), and print subscribers who also receive online access (between €30 and €76 year per trimester, depending on print frequency).”
New York / Molly Fischer
Has Slack made the office more productive? →
“Slack is a compulsion, a distraction. A burden. Often, though, our complaints about it carry a note of aggrieved resignation. They're delivered in the same tone used for laments regarding air travel, Facebook, or Time Warner. Slack has become another utility we both rely on and resent.”
Journalism.co.uk / Catalina Albeanu
Local paper Østlands-Posten holds open meetings in its newsroom to create a new scene for public debate →
“This project aims to make people feel like they’re a part of the community again, and a part of democracy, and for them to trust us as a media organisation. We can see that people feel quite distant from a lot of media organisations, so we want them to feel closer to us and for us to feel closer to them and to have a good conversation.”
The New Yorker / Jia Tolentino
The personal-essay boom Is over →
“The commodification of personal experience was also women's territory: the small budgets of popular women-focussed Web sites, and the rapidly changing conventions and constrictions surrounding women's lives, insured it. And so many women wrote about the most difficult things that had ever happened to them and received not much in return.”
The New York Times / James B. Stewart
The Washington Post’s digital ad revenue is reportedly “in the solid nine figures” →
This year "we'll have our third straight year of double-digit revenue growth,” according to the Post’s chief revenue officer Jed Hartman.
American Press Institute / Jane Elizabeth
A Q&A with the fact-checker for the hit Serial spinoff podcast S-Town →
“But you are there to interrogate the living hell out of every single utterance of fact, and a good writer wants you to do it, and is relying on you to do it. It can feel antagonistic and gross. Well, too bad. The alternative is to give your blessing to untruth, which feels intensely grosser.”
American Press Institute / Jane Elizabeth
This is what it was like to fact-check S-Town →
“But you are there to interrogate the living hell out of every single utterance of fact, and a good writer wants you to do it, and is relying on you to do it. It can feel antagonistic and gross. Well, too bad. The alternative is to give your blessing to untruth, which feels intensely grosser.”
VentureBeat / Ken Yeung
Medium now offers audio versions of its stories for paying members →
“The publishing platform provider said that members will now be provided an audio version of every ‘exclusive, member-funded story’ along with some additional selections chosen by the company's editorial team.”
TechCrunch / Ingrid Lunden
Google says AMP now powers 2 billion mobile pages across 900,000 domains →
Google also said the AMP network will now be expanding to more e-commerce sites and covering more ad formats.