 |
Monday, July 3, 2017
 |
The Wall Street Journal shutters eight blogs: “The tools for telling” stories have changedGoodbye to Law Blog, China Real Time, India Real Time, Speakeasy, and four others. By Christine Schmidt. |
 |
This paper has a text marketing editor (who compares the job to picking people up at a bar)Süddeutsche Zeitung’s text marketing editor selects which stories will be only available to subscribers and tries to format those pieces to attract new subscribers. By Joseph Lichterman. |
 |
Two years in, state government site CALmatters is collaborating to make a name for itself“Looking ahead, we are at something of a pivot point. For our mission purpose of just informing voters, does it matter if CALmatters wrote a story that appears in the L.A. Daily News?” By Christine Schmidt. |
What We’re Reading
International Journalists' Network / Nicole Smith Dahmen
What a survey of 1,300 journalists can teach us about covering mass shootings →
“A recently published study — a collaboration from myself and three other media scholars — examined this issue and other attitudes toward news coverage of mass shootings, using data from a national survey of more than 1,300 U.S. newspaper/online journalists.”
The Next Web / ABHIMANYU GHOSHAL
This art project brings podcasts out of your headphones and into your hands →
“Podcast producers are always looking for ways to get listeners to pay for their work (while also offering up their shows for free); I imagine that fans will be only too happy to pay for memorabilia that's so cleverly tied to their favorite episodes.”
Journalism.co.uk / Caroline Scott
‘One man, his bike, and a lot of patience’: How Irish broadcaster RTÉ produced a travel series using mobile journalism →
“The person who does this needs to have confidence to explore the possibilities that mobile journalism presents to any reporter, and have the hunger to be picking away at smaller projects before they go for a bigger project like this.”
Recode / Kurt Wagner
Facebook found a new way to identify spam and false news articles in your News Feed →
Facebook claims that users who post 50-plus times per day are very often sharing posts that the company considers to be spam or false news. So it’s going to identify the links that super-posters share and cut down on their distribution. Facebook isn't actually looking at the content from these links — the correlation between these types of users and spammy/false content is strong enough that it doesn't have to, according to Adam Mosseri, Facebook's VP in charge of News Feed.
Poynter / Benjamin Mullin
What can newsrooms learn from churches? More than a month in, the Membership Puzzle Project is asking big questions →
“In the news industry, it’s very common for managers, when confronted with something different, to say: ‘Who else is doing this?’ But what they mean by ‘who else is doing this’ is, ‘who else in news?’ And, more specifically, ‘who else in our category?’…They tend to look horizontally at their own kind.”
Medium / Denise Law
The evolution of The Economist's social media team →
“Does this mean that we dive enthusiastically into every new product launch or platform? Quite the opposite; we strive to be disciplined about saying ‘yes’ only to the ideas we believe will help us achieve our goals and asking ‘why?’ to help us stay focused on the right things.”
New York / Brian Feldman
Tumblr’s unclear future shows that there’s no money in internet culture →
“Maybe more importantly, platforms like Tumblr and Vine never had data-mining operations as sophisticated as, say, Facebook’s. That's why most of the advertising money in the industry has drained toward Facebook, which has 2 billion users, mounds of data, and can better assure advertisers of content cleanliness. Facebook is instructive: It's less a place for creation or debate than it is for hosting all of the nitty-gritty, more boring data about your life.”
Poynter / Kristen Hare
A month ago, Facebook launched a pilot program with 6 local newsrooms. Here’s how it’s going →
“I think in some ways it’s something as simple as a mechanism for an answer back. Just to be able to say, ‘We’ve had success in a dealing with Facebook,’ it’s not just ‘go see my links for certification’ or ‘go to the FAQ page.’ It’s something beyond that.”
Digiday / Lucinda Southern
Snapchat expands Discover in France with Vogue, MTV, L'Express and Society →
“In December, Snap announced there were 8 million daily Snapchat users in France, 75 percent of whom are over 18…. Snap said Snapchat Discover has doubled since December, and time spent within Discover has more than tripled.”
Fortune / Will Friedman
It's not the screen that makes Amazon's Echo Show interesting. It's the strategy. →
“Right out of the box my new Echo Show was pre-configured to my Amazon account. When I set it up, Alexa already knew who I was, had my favorite “skills” enabled, knew my commute, could control my lights and thermostat, had contact information for people I communicate with, had my music, knew my favorite sports teams, and knew my upcoming appointments.”