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Friday, July 14, 2017
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Expanding post-Y Combinator, OMGDigital wants to win the African millennial media market“In the West, Cracked, BuzzFeed, and Mashable had really picked up steam. We couldn’t relate to the contents; we didn’t get the jokes. So we decided to create content for people like us.” By Christine Schmidt. |
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With help from local papers, USA Today is boosting the ambition and publishing speed of its VR projects“We have to remember that not only we as content creators are new to VR, but so is our audience. For a lot of people, it’s still very experiential.” By Ricardo Bilton. |
What We’re Reading
Slate / Will Oremus
Newspapers’ stand against Facebook and Google lays bare a contradiction at the heart of the industry →
“The contradiction is this: Original news reporting, especially investigative and accountability journalism, is largely a public good. Yet the companies that provide it are, with rare exceptions, private and for-profit. Newspapers have historically been loath to acknowledge the contradiction, because for much of their history, they've been fortunate enough to have it both ways. Yet their request to Congress, and their corresponding pleas to the public, represent a reluctant step toward the necessary admission that they simply can't have it both ways anymore.”
PressGazette / Zainab Mahmood
Survey: Most Britons say broadsheets are the most trustworthy news source, but print is their least-read news medium →
Asked "how do you stay up-to-date with news?" 7 percent of respondents said print newspapers. When asked "which type of media do you think is most likely to provide trustworthy and factually-validated information?" 61 percent said broadsheet newspapers were the "most important.”
The New York Times / Chris Horton
Muffled by China, Taiwan’s president embraces Twitter as a megaphone →
President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan had her first encounter with Twitter's reach in December, when Donald J. Trump, newly elected to the White House, wrote on Twitter that she had called to congratulate him. Weeks later, President Tsai revived her moribund Twitter account, posting regularly in English and sometimes in Japanese. Since then, her followers have nearly tripled.
The Wall Street Journal / Jack Marshall
Online publishers try reducing ads to boost revenue →
“‘Users view more pages, share more content and are generally more engaged,’ said Justin Festa, chief digital officer at LittleThings. He said revenue generated from each user's session grew 38% in June, compared with a year earlier.”
The Nation / William Anderson
Student journalists are our future — we should start treating them like it →
“Student journalism has gained new importance in the face of the deep decline of local news. With the collapse of print advertising in the past 20 years, hundreds of local newspapers have closed and over 20,000 journalists have lost their jobs. At the same time, student journalists at colleges around the nation have felt the pressure of tightening budgets and hostile university administrations.”
Digiday / Lucia Moses
Publishers are switching affections from Snapchat to Instagram →
"This is how little we use Snapchat — I don't know the number of followers of [the accounts]."
The Drum / Jessica Goodfellow & Ronan Shields
How is Google’s two-year-old Digital News Initiative going? Depends who you ask →
"Google’s role in the news ecosystem when you look at the advertising market of display which is the one that is relevant to publishers is we’re a supplier."
Journalism.co.uk / Mădălina Ciobanu
Two years in, the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism is helping other community outlets develop membership programs →
The organization approaches its reporting as “collaboration-first”, working with outlets such as Spare Change News, a Boston street paper that produces a 33-page publication every other week; El Planeta, a state-wide Spanish language newspaper which translates some of BINJ’s features; and local radio and TV stations.
Reynolds Journalism Institute / Jennifer Nelson
How the Columbus Dispatch is experimenting with Amazon’s Alexa platform →
“Producers select stories they believe their audiences are interested in and then summarize them into four or five sentences for the text-to-audio briefings. Only five stories can be sent to the platform at a time, but content can be swapped out for breaking news and other stories throughout the day.”