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Tuesday, July 18, 2017
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Live touring is a real business for some podcasts (and you don’t need huge downloads for it to work)Plus: Radiotopia’s Ear Hustle is a hit, Panoply partners with Nielsen for more targeted ads, and The New York Times gets another podcast. By Nicholas Quah. |
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It's time to apply for a Knight Visiting Nieman FellowshipThe Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard wants to hear your idea for making journalism better. Come spend a few weeks working on it in Cambridge. Deadline: September 29. By Ann Marie Lipinski. |
What We’re Reading
WGBH News / Dan Kennedy
Boston Globe CEO Doug Franklin departs after 6 months with the organization →
Franklin cited "differences" with owner John Henry over "how to strategically achieve our financial sustainability." In a separate memo, Henry announced Politico’s Vinay Mehra as the new president and chief financial officer of the Globe. He also wrote that “I will be a more active publisher and Linda will take on more responsibility as we push for financial sustainability in an environment that is extraordinarily challenging for news organizations dedicated to communities where facts and context matter.”
The New York Times / Kevin Roose
Behind the velvet ropes of Facebook’s private groups →
“[I]f Facebook is our global town square, then groups are its gated subdivisions, the private spaces where people gather to share information they might not be willing to broadcast publicly, or behave in ways they might not want their friends to know about. What happens, I wondered, in the V.I.P. rooms of the world's biggest club?”
Poynter / Melody Kramer
Ideas for pushing messaging platforms beyond their boundaries →
Share behind-the-scenes information from a person or group of people. Become the source on a single topic. Cultivate sources and find information. Surface interesting stories from your archives.
Journalism.co.uk / Caroline Scott
Mobile journalism helps reporters get closer to the story, new Reuters Institute research finds →
For his experiment, Finnish journalist Panu Karhunen approached 400 members of the public in a shopping center over two days for vox populi interviews, and found more people would stop to be interviewed by a mobile journalist than a TV crew with a larger camera.
Digiday / Lucia Moses
Publishers forge ahead with VR, even if users and advertisers lag behind →
The VR ecosystem would be more modest if not for the tech dollars feeding it, acknowledged Varun Shetty, executive director of strategy and business development at The New York Times. (When the Times' Samsung partnership ends after a year, the publisher will likely still do 360 video, but may do them less frequently, depending on the newsroom's other priorities.)
Longreads / Matt giles
Inside ESPN’s 30 for 30 Podcasts launch →
“Sports is a visual medium. We consume sports live, often on high-definition televisions — and soon, possibly, in VR — and conveying the intensity of a tackle is difficult to translate through audio. That's why even though we are in the midst of a podcast renaissance, there are few devoted to sports.”
George Washington University / Brent Merritt
The rise of attention metrics: Can a new digital currency help sustain journalism? →
“The report documents the rise of attention analytics, explores the current role of attention metrics in the newsroom and in display advertising sales, and offers analysis of what the future holds for time-based advertising transactions. It offers perspectives from professionals in digital analytics, advertising, and publishing, including practitioners at leading publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and the Financial Times. The findings suggest that certain types of publishers can benefit financially from trading on user attention rather than impressions.”
FiveThirtyEight / Perry Bacon Jr.
When to trust a story that uses unnamed sources →
“Here's a guide to unnamed sources in government/politics/Washington stories — who they are, how reporters use them, and how to tell if you should trust what they say.”
Washington Post / Paul Farhi
What happens to local news when there is no local media to cover it? →
“The pressures on local news outlets have been building for years, driven by the twin devils of recession and the disruption caused by the shift to digital media. The impact was noted in a federal study in 2011. It concluded, ‘A shortage of reporting manifests itself in invisible ways: stories not written, scandals not exposed, government waste not discovered, health dangers not identified in time, local elections involving candidates about whom we know little.'”