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Wednesday, June 21, 2017
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The Economist is using Medium to give readers an inside look at its reporting and production“We’re always asking: How do I know that I’m not wasting my time on a platform by chasing vanity metrics? If we focus on traffic, we miss quality.” By Ricardo Bilton. |
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What happens when a big news company makes a small bet on “slow innovation”?How do you keep a focus on issues that may be “No. 6 on the list”? How do you make sustained progress on the things that may not impact the bottom line this quarter, but are important for the medium term? By Sam Ford and Federico RodrÃguez Tarditi. |
What We’re Reading
BuzzFeed Tech / Luke Vnenchak
What it’s like to interview with BuzzFeed Engineering →
“Interviewing is stressful! Not knowing what to expect in an interview makes it worse. In order to alleviate some of that stress for potential engineering candidates, we thought we'd answer some common questions, share our views on tech interviewing, and walk you through BuzzFeed Engineering's hiring process.”
Twitter / jbenton
Apple announces demographic metrics for Apple News →
Including male vs. female and age grouping. (Plus third-party ad tags.)
The Wall Street Journal / Austen Hufford
Media startups try a lower-cost model: Unpaid students →
“Originally founded by undergraduates, these sites rely on students to produce localized content for free, in exchange for training and experience. Groups provide a community environment for students, with weekly meetings and social events similar to campus clubs, but members have article quotas—typically one a week—and work to increase the page views and engagement that help their for-profit parent companies succeed.”
The Ringer / Bryan Curtis
All the world’s a studio show →
“The studio show — one of the oldest forms of sports TV — hasn't just escaped extinction. It has leapt, basically intact, from television to the web. The highlight show may be anachronism in 2017. But it feels like the digital media has become one, ever-expanding studio show, and that all of us who write about sports or politics or anything else are cast members, whether we want to be or not.”
MediaShift / Sonia Narang
Why Instagram is this journalist’s favorite tool →
“If you think about it, you'll see that Instagram is a portal of photographs that define who we are as a society, selfies, food pics, and all. For us journalists and storytellers, the benefit of Instagram is two-fold: 1.) Instagram gives us an opportunity to share our view of the world we are documenting 2.) Instagram allows us to peek into the cultures and societies we are planning to cover, thereby offering a plethora of story ideas and potential interview subjects.”
TechCrunch / Josh Constine
Snapchat launches location sharing feature Snap Map →
“Snap Map lets you share your current location, which appears to friends on a map and updates when you open Snapchat. It's rolling out today to all iOS and Android users globally.”
Poynter / Daniel Funke
With Amazon Polly experiment, The Washington Post hopes to capitalize on growing interest in audio →
“For the next month, the newspaper will let its mobile users listen to four audio versions of business, lifestyle, technology and entertainment stories daily using Polly, a web service from Amazon.”
Vox Media
SB Nation’s weekly live show The MMA Hour will be streamed live on Twitter →
The MMA Hour will premiere exclusive extended segments, available only on Twitter, for host Ariel Helwani to take and answer questions from the Twitter audience. The stream will be available for free to logged-in and logged-out users on Twitter and connected devices globally.
Poynter / Rick Edmonds
Inside McClatchy’s plan to reinvent its newsrooms →
“We run about 29,000 pieces of local digital content a month, and 1,000 of those drive more than half the readership. That’s about one story per day per newsroom. If we could do two a day instead, we could double (that part of) the traffic.”
NPR / Sam Sanders
Upworthy was one of the hottest sites ever. You won’t believe what happened next. →
“Upworthy CEO Eli Pariser speaks of the precipitous drop in muted tones. He never says he is mad at Facebook. That would be like being mad at the weather, he says.”
BuzzFeed / Steven Perlberg
How The Guardian lost America →
“The Guardian's US newsroom didn't become the voice of the Bernie left during the election. It didn't break huge campaign scoops. Years after winning a Pulitzer for the Edward Snowden story, Guardian US has slashed costs, leaving employees stewing about mismanagement, infighting, a sexual harassment allegation, and unrealistic business expectations.”
The Conversation / Liz Minchin and Veronika Meduna
The Conversation expands to New Zealand →
“Veronika will work mainly with The Conversation's founding team of editors, based in Australia. But NZ stories will also be shared across the Conversation's growing international network of editions: the United Kingdom, the United States, Africa, France and a Global pilot.”
Source / Kevin Schaul
How The Washington Post tracked cable news chyrons on Comey Day →
“1. Take a screenshot of the news coverage. 2. Crop that image so that just the lower third of on-screen text remains. 3. Run an optical character recognition (OCR) program on the image, and save the resulting text somewhere. I used tesseract for this. 4. Repeat.”