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Tuesday, August 15, 2017
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New York City makes the claim that it’s the podcast capital of the world (but is that a good thing?)Plus: Another daily news podcast — this time from Vox and Midroll, Radiolab controversy, and are there too many celebrity podcasts? By Nicholas Quah. |
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Newsonomics: Lessons for the news media from Charlottesville“The New York Times, The Washington Post, and ProPublica, among others, have risen to the national occasion. But they can't be expected to grapple with the real, transcendent issues state by state, community by community.” By Ken Doctor. |
What We’re Reading
Digiday / Lucinda Southern
Inside Spiegel’s 70-person fact-checking team →
Each week, Spiegel’s database automatically incorporates 60,000 articles from German and international media and other official sources like government documents. Within the dokumentation database, a team of seven people has trained algorithms in the database to pull in specific sources based on content — from articles fed from Germany's news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur to more in-depth analysis pieces from around the world that need more contextual knowledge to understand.
Digiday / Sahil Patel
With $20 million in new funding, The Young Turks looks to grow paid subscribers →
TYT Network now employs 70 full-time staffers, and its founder and CEO Cenk Uygur hopes to double the size of the company as it builds out its subscription business and pursues other growth areas (the network currently has 30,000 subscribers who pay $10 per month to access ad-free shows and up to six hours of exclusive programming per week).
Reuters / Kane Wu and Julie Zhu
Chinese news aggregator Toutiao is said to be raising at least $2 billion (for a valuation of over $20 billion) →
“With about 100 million daily active users as of the first quarter, Toutiao is targeting annual revenue of $2.5 billion for 2017, according to a person close to the company. Toutiao’s two biggest competitors in the market are Tencent’s Tian Tian Kuai Bao and Baidu’s newsfeed.”
The New York Times / Daniel Victor
Amateur sleuths aim to identify Charlottesville marchers, but sometimes misfire →
Amateur sleuths doxxed an unrelated University of Arkansas professor of engineering, based on his resemblance to one of the white nationalist rally marchers photographed in Charlottesville, who had been wearing an “Arkansas Engineering” tshirt. (Journalists at Storyful, a news agency that verifies social media content, aim to find eight to 10 pieces of corroborating information before confirming an identity, said Ben Decker, a research coordinator.)
Axios / Sara Fischer
Print advertising revenue ↓ 17% between Q2 of 2016 and Q2 of 2017 →
According to Standard Media Index’s total ad spend report: “Newspaper revenue was down 20 percent, compared with 4.3 percent the prior year. Magazine revenue was down 16 percent, compared with 9.6 percent the year before.”
Poynter / Daniel Funke
Last month, Baltimore City Paper said it was closing. Now, a nonprofit is working to restore the city’s alternative media →
A new, Baltimore-based affiliate of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism launched an IndieGoGo campaign to raise $25,000 over the next month to support local community journalism projects (here’s some background on BINJ, when it was among the first group of publishers to join Medium’s then-promising subscriptions program).