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Thursday, May 18, 2017
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“Won’t work for exposure”: The financial nitty-gritty of commercial–nonprofit news partnerships“Some nonprofits do good journalism but don’t solve a problem faced by commercial news outlets.” By Laura Hazard Owen. |
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With a big Amazon streaming deal, Berkeley’s journalism program is building a new revenue streamStreaming services like Amazon Prime Video and Netflix are desperate for more content and are willing to pay for it. A new offshoot of Berkeley’s investigative journalism program is trying to take advantage of that. By Ricardo Bilton. |
What We’re Reading
Washington Post / Philip Bump
A month of breaking news alerts, visualized →
“The outlet with the most alerts over the 30-day period was USA Today, which issued 263 alerts, many of them general interest or sports related. The most judicious outlet was Politico, which alerted 55 times.”
Current / Julie Drizin
Current is adding a $10/month paywall →
“Print subscriptions have waned over the years as more of our readers are choosing to get our news from our website. We need our online readers — both individuals and institutions — to pay for this content.”
ABC News
The Australian kids’ newspaper Crinkling News reaches its AUD $200K crowdfunding target →
Crinkling News, which we wrote about earlier this week, needed to raise AUD $200,000 to survive, and it has.
Wall Street Journal / Lukas I. Alpert
The Daily Beast hires former Gawker president Heather Dietrick to become its new president and publisher →
Dietrick joined Gawker as its general counsel in 2013. She was promoted to the role of president in 2014 and remained on as president after Univision shuttered the flagship site, Gawker.com and renamed the company the Gizmodo Media Group.
The New Yorker / Jia Tolentino
The personal-essay boom is over →
“There's a specific sort of ultra-confessional essay, written by a person you've never heard of and published online, that flourished until recently and now hardly registers.”
Medium / Wikitribune
Wikitribune donations will be matched up to $100,000 →
“Craig Newmark and Jeff Jarvis of the News Integrity Initiative have both agreed to match your pledges to WikiTribune dollar-for-dollar up to $50,000.”
Editor & Publisher / Rob Tornoe
After releasing part of Trump’s 2005 tax return, what’s next for David Cay Johnston and DC Report? →
“I view this thing as a way to help create a connection between voters and their own government, and if that means I don't take a salary from this, so be it.”
New York Times / Amanda Hess
Lost in the digital swamp, link by link →
“I squinted. Was this some kind of … butt-related mystery? I clicked the link.”
Patreon
Patreon says it’s doubled in a year, to 1M patrons and 50K active creators →
“Overall, each fan on Patreon pays about $12 directly to creators every month.”
New Brunswick Today / Charlie Kratovil
Samantha Bee helped a local newspaper raise more than $20,000 →
“But the situation remained dire at [New Brunswick Today]. We soon had to ditch our downtown office space shortly after the interview was taped, and we were unable to produce our print edition for the first five months on 2017. Thankfully, due to the big boost from Bee’s program and everyone across the globe who subsequently contributed to our cause, the print edition of New Brunswick Today is returning to circulation on June 1.”
The Atlantic / Jeffrey Goldberg
The Atlantic redesigned its homepage →
“You will find double the number of "above the fold" stories on the homepage as you would have found yesterday. This new density (miraculously, our designers managed to achieve it without diminishing clarity) goes a long way toward solving a key problem of ours, that of too much great journalism, coming out too fast.”
Shorenstein Center / Thomas E. Patterson
Trump dominated news coverage during his first 100 days →
“President Trump dominated media coverage in the outlets and programs analyzed, with Trump being the topic of 41 percent of all news stories—three times the amount of coverage received by previous presidents. He was also the featured speaker in nearly two-thirds of his coverage.”
Poynter / Kristen Hare
In Philadelphia, 3 newsrooms had to become 1. Now, they’re taking on a whole new kind of change →
“The ongoing reorganization outlines 36 new beats with 10 coverage teams. It reassigns copy editors to become multiplatform editors and establishes a bigger investigative team capable of rapid work. There’s an experimental desk for trying out new things, from software to storytelling. A physical reorganization of the newsroom has also begun.”
Slate / Christina Cauterucci
A negative take on The Skimm →
“Every blurb is painstakingly neutered of political slant or analysis, and boring (read: important) stories are loaded with conspicuous snark about how uninteresting news can be.”
Thomson Reuters
Reuters is launching a new client-facing platform for multimedia coverage →
“Reuters Connect is available via subscription and features a new points-based spending model, Reuters Points, which provides clients with the freedom to access and utilize both Reuters and partner content across multiple topics and multimedia formats. Points are available in quarterly allocations so clients can optimize their editorial spend in line with the ebb and flow of the news agenda. Clients can also continue to subscribe to unlimited content consumption.”