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Wednesday, May 31, 2017
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The scariest chart in Mary Meeker's slide deck for newspapers has gotten even a smidge scarierSince 2011, the amount of time Americans spend with print has dropped about 40 percent. But the amount of ad dollars that go to print has dropped even more. By Joshua Benton. |
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The New York Times is eliminating the position of public editor; here’s the Sulzberger memo“Liz will leave The Times on Friday as our last public editor.” By Laura Hazard Owen. |
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The Boston Globe is getting smarter about digital subscriptions — and tightening up its paywall“We've learned a lot in five years about what the levers are, how we can pull them and what are the tradeoffs. We understand a lot of things better than we used to. The changes are the natural evolution of that understanding.” By Ricardo Bilton. |
What We’re Reading
New York Times / Daniel Victor
New York Times will offer employee buyouts →
The buyouts are aimed primarily at editors.
Journalism.co.uk / Madalina Ciobanu
A new tool from Google helps you to visualize data using GIFs →
“Data GIF Maker, launched on 25 May, is a free online tool that can be used to create visual representations comparing data on two different subjects, for example.”
Recode / Rani Molla
People consumed more media than ever last year — but growth is slowing →
“People watched, read, listened, streamed and posted more media than ever in 2016, but that consumption plateaued this year,” according to research firm Zenith.
Recode / Peter Kafka
The New York Times wants to show readers what its reporters look like →
“If we tell them…’This is Alissa Rubin. She almost lost her life covering war, and she's been covering war from the very first time bombs fell on Afghanistan.' If you read that, and somebody in the White House wants to attack that story, I win.”
Digiday / Lucia Moses
How Slate is applying podcasting lessons to test out VR →
“We’re saying, let’s figure this out now and bridge the gap for people interested in using the technology, and when people have headsets, we'll see more adoption and we'll already have our legs under us.”
Stratechery by Ben Thompson / Ben Thompson
Ben Thompson on “the faceless publisher” and The Ringer’s move to Vox Media →
“Presuming The Ringer ends up being not an outlier but rather the first of many similar deals, then that means that Vox Media has far more growth potential than it did as long as it was focused only on monetizing its owned-and-operated content.”
HoldtheFrontPage / David Sharman
Some U.K. weeklies are killing their websites to focus on driving traffic to Facebook →
“In some of our smaller areas we see social platforms as an effective way to stay connected to our readers. We want to focus resource on increasing engagement through those platforms in support of a quality print product.”
ProjetJ / Hélène Roulot-Ganzmann
The French Canadian journalism site ProjetJ is suspending its activities →
“Au cours des prochains mois, une réflexion sera menée par le comité de direction du Canadian Journalism Project, qui gère ProjetJ.ca et le site anglophone J-source.ca, en vue de reprendre la campagne de financement et la publication d'actualités sur le site.”
The New York Times / Jacqueline Williams
Australia’s real estate boom has Wall Street wooing a newspaper publisher →
“Two large American private equity firms, TPG Capital and Hellman & Friedman, are bidding to buy Fairfax, valuing the company at nearly $3 billion. That isn't bad for a company that, just weeks ago, said it would have to sharply reduce staffing at many of its newspapers to contain costs. Australia's remarkable — and unbalanced — property boom appears to be the driver behind the bids.”