YULI AHMADA: September 2017

Sabtu, 30 September 2017

Bunk aims to set history free with a site that doesn’t feel like a textbook: The latest from Nieman Lab

Friday, September 29, 2017

Bunk aims to set history free with a site that doesn’t feel like a textbook

“We wondered what it would mean to build a machine that thinks like a historian.” By Laura Hazard Owen.

“Platforms for all ideas.” Russian misinformation for all swing states. Obituaries for all fake news writers.

Also: Mark Zuckerberg has regrets, and the Russians’ role as cultural flame-fanners. By Laura Hazard Owen.

Here are 6 different kinds of collaborative journalism and the good and bad things about each

What We’re Reading

Digiday / Lucia Moses

Facebook loses attention as publishers shift focus to other platforms →

The Huffington Post: “Merely being platform-centric represents an older way of thinking that often doesn't always take into account what the audience is looking for.”

BuzzFeed / Craig Silverman

Publishers overseas are making money by targeting Americans with cheap — and sometimes false — information →

“One surprising area where the impact of this trend is being felt is with Native American news and content. A raft of overseas-based publishers of content about Native Americans continue to forge ahead and experience growth and revenue primarily thanks to Facebook: TheNativePeople.net, for instance, which has two associated Facebook pages with close to half a million fans between them, is run by a man in Kosovo.”

Open News / Hamilton Boardman, Alastair Coote, and Tiff Fehr

Building better story formats for live coverage, from live blogs to mobile alerts →

“Our most recent experiments in live coverage forms are often tied to special events like elections or sports, because they benefit from having a strong data source. Meaningful updates for readers becomes a mix of news, analysis, and significant data changes (updated counts, shifts in momentum, winner calls, etc). Another shared characteristic in these experiments is a focus on mobile.”

First Draft News / Nic Dias and Claire Wardle

10 questions to ask before covering mis- and dis-information →

“When, how and why do we report on rumors and fabricated content?”

Factual Democracy Project

Poll suggests that Americans disapprove of Facebook’s allowing Russian election advertising →

“There’s broad bipartisan agreement that Russia shouldn’t be allowed to buy political ads targeted at American voters.” The poll of 865 registered voters was conducted Sept. 22-25 by Public Policy Polling for Factual Democracy Project.

Medium / Anchor

Social audio app Anchor raises $10M in new series A funding →

Bringing its total amount raised to just under $15 million.

Local News Lab / Nancy Watzman

Lessons from Berkeleyside’s direct public offering →

“We had to learn how to stand up before a crowd, say, ‘You should give us money, write us a check right now.'”

LION Publishers / Matt DeRienzo

How Charlotte Agenda got to $1 million in revenue →

“Almost all of our clients are inbound leads — we don’t even have an official sales person on staff, and nobody is compensated based on commission. We put a ton of resources into producing it, reporting on performance, and customer service. We’ve been able to maintain and expand margins this year, but…I don’t want to become an ad agency with an additional cost of a newsroom, that’s stupid.”

The Guardian / Benjamin Haas

Wall Street Journal stops publishing Asian and European print editions →

“The decision comes after the paper's parent company, News Corp, reported a loss of $643m (£479m) for the most recent fiscal year, which ended on 30 June. That compares to a $235m profit during the previous year. The paper began publishing a separate Asian edition in 1976 and its European edition followed in 1983.”

Jumat, 29 September 2017

All the news that’s fit for you: The New York Times is experimenting with personalization to find new ways to expose readers to stories: The latest

Thursday, September 28, 2017

All the news that’s fit for you: The New York Times is experimenting with personalization to find new ways to expose readers to stories

“Instead of thinking about having stories compete for limited space on the homepage, we’re trying to shift the conversation to a different understanding of our distribution.” By Ricardo Bilton.

The internet isn’t forever. Is there an effective way to preserve great online interactives and news apps?

“I like to talk about it as reading today's news on tomorrow's computer.” By Shan Wang.

Facebook’s about to launch its news subscriptions initiative. The New York Times is reportedly sitting out; The Washington Post is in

What We’re Reading

The Next Web / Rachel Kaser

YouTube builds a wall between creators and Patreon →

According to several YouTube creators, the site is no longer allowing them to add Patreon links at the cards at the end of their videos, unless they monetize said content. Meaning that, unless you allow YouTube to run ads on your videos, it's going to be a little harder for you to make money from your work.

GXpress

New York Times subscribers in Australia have nearly doubled year-over-year →

“Local content is being added to a full digital edition, produced by a team of American and Australian journalists. [Bureau chief Damien] Cave says the NYT was expanding globally had already built up a significant number of digital subscribers in the country.”

Digiday

‘The future of news is not just an article’: VGTV’s CEO on developing Schibsted’s video playbook →

“Video ads are a huge opportunity, but we need to push more user-friendly products. We are experimenting with six-second ads: 30 seconds of muted autoplay video content, then a bumper ad, and that has been very successful; it's a good user experience. It's possible to tell an engaging story in six seconds.”

Thomas Baekdal

Data that looks like it means something, but doesn’t →

“[W]hen journalists complain about the metrics on Google and Facebook, it’s kind of a fake outrage, because our own metrics are often even worse….I see that media is losing the advertising market. And the main reason this is happening is because what we tell advertisers isn’t really that good.”

Journalism.co.uk / Catalina Albeanu

In 2010, women were ‘significantly underrepresented and misrepresented’ in the media. Where are we now? →

“Some 46 percent of stories reinforced gender stereotypes and only 13 per cent of news stories focused centrally on women, a study published by the Global Media Monitoring Project in 2010 showed. In Britain, diversity in newsrooms remains an issue. A study published in 2016 showed the British media was 94 per cent white and 55 per cent male.”

Ad Age / Garett Sloane

Do two-second videos work on Facebook? →

One new study conducted by Oracle Data Cloud and Facebook suggests that video ads seen for less than 2 seconds still drove 52 percent of the sales lift measured from campaigns. (The average ad view on digital platforms is 1.7 seconds; two seconds counts as a ‘view.’)

Washington Post / Abby Ohlheiser

Who do you believe when a famous Internet hoaxer is said to be dead? →

Horner was one of the earliest and best-known creators of fake news on the Internet. On Tuesday, the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office confirmed that Horner, 38, had died Sept. 18. However, not everyone who has covered Horner is completely convinced. Despite the police confirmation of Horner's death, Snopes managing editor Brooke Binkowski said it was "not impossible that some other Paul Horner in Maricopa County died."

Mashable / Kerry Flynn

Evan Spiegel’s anti-Facebook bet for Snapchat is taking shape-with hard news at its core →

“That effort not only involved launching Snapchat Discover, a network of media partners but also hiring journalists to cover breaking news for Snap’s audience of 173 million daily active users. Last month, Snap hired Xana O’Neill, formerly managing editor for digital at ABC News, to serve as an executive producer and help manage the team Hamby built.”

The European Journalism Centre

€800k of European grants awarded for innovative development reporting →

Throughout next year, seven media organizations will be granted around €120,000 each to create news verticals on selected United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The organizations are: Society (France), Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (Germany), de Volkskrant (the Netherlands), VPRO (the Netherlands), CNN (UK), ELLE UK (UK) and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (UK).

Kamis, 28 September 2017

Social video giant NowThis gets a “Newsroom,” working out its real-time reporting in public: The latest from Nieman Lab

Wednesday, September 27, 2017

Social video giant NowThis gets a “Newsroom,” working out its real-time reporting in public

“To us, it's a workspace — a place where a group of NowThis journalists can help the public better understand how emerging news stories develop while giving the rest of the NowThis newsroom a competitive edge in reporting them.” By Shan Wang.

Self-driving cars are coming faster than you think. What will that mean for public radio?

“The connection between cars and public media is so strong. What happens when that connection is shaken a little bit?” By Laura Hazard Owen.

Publishers are seeing real performance gains from Google AMP and Facebook Instant Articles (but $$$ remains a question mark)

What We’re Reading

Medium / Brent Merritt

A brief history of media measurement →

“If you've ever wondered why digital media analytics are dominated by measures of volume — pageviews, clicks, and their many cousins — you have to dig back far beyond the advent of the internet to find the answers. Below is the story of how media measures designed for radio broadcasters during the Depression still shape today's digital media economy.”

Fusion Media Group / David Ford

Gizmodo Media Group is launching an environmental site called Earther →

“Environmental journalism is often perceived as bleak and dystopian, or too detached from the issues affecting humans here and now. Earther won't sugar-coat the latest ecological disaster or alarming climate milestone, but we'll strive to make our stories urgent and engaging, based on science and facts, while injecting hope and humor whenever we can.”

The Daily Beast / Katie Zavadski and Ben Collins

Facebook blew off Russian troll warnings well before Election 2016 →

“‘I've been blocked [from Facebook] because of a post about a rainbow. I put a picture of my city [with] a picture of [the] rainbow. The picture said, “Everything will be okay,”‘ one Ukrainian activist, Yaroslav Matiushyn, told The Daily Beast. ‘I was blocked for a month.'”

The Verge / Casey Newton

Twitter just doubled the character limit for tweets to 280 →

And you probably have an opinion about it.

Juliette Pretot

Here’s an easy way to get access to 280-character Twitter →

It works.

the Guardian / Alex Hern

Sites like The Pirate Bay are using visitors' computers and phones to mine cryptocurrency →

“It's a controversial practice, with some likening it to running malware on visitor's computers, but it is a potentially lucrative endeavour for websites. The downside is that at best it slows down visitors' machines, and at worst it can also drain their batteries or send their electricity bills soaring.”

The Ringer / Alyssa Bereznak

Can tech startups do journalism? →

Yes, says Van Winkles editorial director Elizabeth Spiers. “I think we're kind of past the point where anybody would look at it and be like: 'Oh, well, that story's fantastic but I hate it because it's being sponsored by a brand.’ That's kind of irrational given that most media is ad supported. This is just a more direct way of creating ad-supported media.”

Digiday / Max Willens

People is launching a $60-a-year subscription program →

The program’s perks will include deals at retailers and chances to win tickets to Time Inc. entertainment events.

Poynter / Daniel Funke

From breweries to GOP meetings, PolitiFact is on a quest to win over conservative America →

The project is targeting states that went Trump in 2016.

Digiday / Aditi Sangal

Spirited Media’s Jim Brady: Growing audience through display advertising is ‘not natural’ →

Says Brady: “[Display advertising] may help your business in the short term, but it will kill it in the long term. The loyalty you need to succeed in a local market won't exist if you terrorize your users with all the tricks that are required to get your pageviews up that fast. So we just went into it thinking we'll do events as our primary business model.”

CNNMoney / Brian Stelter

Washington Post digital subscriptions soar past 1 million mark →

And digital-only subscriptions have more than tripled since the same time last year.

Digiday / Jessica Davies

The FT warns advertisers after discovering high levels of domain spoofing →

"The scale of the fraud we found is jaw-dropping," said Anthony Hitchings, the FT's digital advertising operations director.

Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia / Tim Wu

Is the First Amendment obsolete? →

“The most important change in the expressive environment can be boiled down to one idea: it is no longer speech itself that is scarce, but the attention of listeners. Emerging threats to public discourse take advantage of this change. As Zeynep Tufekci puts it, ‘censorship during the Internet era does not operate under the same logic [as] it did under the heyday of print or even broadcast television.’ Instead of targeting speakers directly, it targets listeners or it undermines speakers indirectly.”

Rabu, 27 September 2017

Newsonomics: Our Peggy Lee moment: Is that all there is to reader revenue?: The latest from Nieman Lab

Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Newsonomics: Our Peggy Lee moment: Is that all there is to reader revenue?

Will more than 2 percent of digital readers ever pay for news? “There is a whole universe living between ads and subscriptions.” By Ken Doctor.

Newsonomics: Tony Haile wants to build the TSA Pre✓ for how we consume news

His new startup Scroll aims to target readers who are engaged but not willing to sign up for a dozen digital subscriptions across their favorite sites. “Publishers have to make more money from this than they would have from advertising. Which, thankfully, is increasingly easy to do.” By Ken Doctor.

Don’t try too hard to look cool (and other lessons from European newsrooms’ digital experiments)

What We’re Reading

Columbia Journalism Review / Heidi N. Moore

Mic and the secret cost of pivoting to video →

“Publishers must acknowledge the pivot to video has failed.”

Stratechery / Ben Thompson

Ben Thompson: “The lowly blog has fully disrupted the mighty book” →

“[While] books remained a fantastic medium for stories, both fiction and non, blogs were not only good enough, they were actually better for ideas closely tied to a world changing far more quickly than any book-related editorial process can keep up with.”

Poynter / Melody Kramer

This 22-year-old digital news publisher is ready to go old-school with print →

“The Gales Creek Journal — which covers Gales Creek, Glenwood, and Hillside — is now four years old, and expanding into a print newspaper, which will publish once a month.”

Medium / Tristan Ferne

Beyond 800 words: new digital story formats for news →

“Developing and popularizing useful and attractive new formats could make news stories more recognizable when aggregated and consumed on other platforms, and provide more compelling reasons for people to visit the source sites and apps.”

New York Times / Caitlin Dickerson

How fake news turned a small town upside down →

“There were days where we felt like, Godammit, what are we doing here? We write a story and it's going to reach 50,000 people. Breitbart writes a story and it's going to reach 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 million people. What kind of a voice do we have in this debate?”

Facebook Media / Christopher Miles and Amber Burgess

How hyperlocal news platform Patch uses Facebook’s CrowdTangle to track pages in 1,200 towns →

"Which region has the highest follower growth? What is that editorial team doing differently? What type of content is resonating with our readers there? Then we get more granular by downloading Leaderboard reports, focusing on interaction numbers and follower growth at the town level."

Digiday / Ross Benes

Axios is holding off on its high-end subscription product, for now →

“Part of the challenge for the publisher is figuring out how to provide information that is unique and valuable enough that business professionals will get their companies to pay five figures for it.”

Vox / Ezra Klein

Vox is launching a daily explainer podcast →

Also: Lauren Williams is the new editor-in-chief of Vox, Ezra Klein is editor-at-large.

The Verge / Jacob Kastrenakes

Twitter pledges to update public policies after Trump threatens North Korea →

“Twitter says it will update its public guidance on what factors may lead to a tweet being pulled from the platform — or allowed to stay on it — to include a consideration of newsworthiness, as part of an effort to make the rules clearer to users.”

Selasa, 26 September 2017

With Old Town Media, three former Politico execs want to help publishers figure out the future: The latest from Nieman Lab

Monday, September 25, 2017

With Old Town Media, three former Politico execs want to help publishers figure out the future

The company is a little difficult to describe, but its mission is less so: to help a wide variety of news organizations develop new ideas, be more efficient, and build new ways to stay in business. By Ricardo Bilton.

Most Americans are annoyed by online ads — but many would rather just endure them than pay up, according to a new survey

With $4.5 million, Knight is launching a new commission — and funding more new projects — to address declining public trust in media

What We’re Reading

CNN / Kaya Yurieff

Joe Biden has partnered with startups on a curated news briefing →

“The former vice president has launched a new daily podcast-like program called ‘Biden’s Briefing’ in which he shares the articles he’s reading…Biden gives a brief intro, and then a voice over actor reads the entire article…Articles are sourced through partnerships with more than a dozen news outlets, including Bloomberg, BuzzFeed and Politico.”

The New York Times / Keith Bradsher

China blocks WhatsApp, broadening online censorship →

“The disabling in mainland China of the Facebook-owned app is a setback for the social media giant, whose chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, has been pushing to re-enter the Chinese market, and has been studying the Chinese language intensively. WhatsApp was the last of Facebook products to still be available in mainland China; the company's main social media service has been blocked in China since 2009, and its Instagram image-sharing app is also unavailable.”

CBC

The CBC will start automating some of its comment moderation →

“Over the last few years, we’ve had to limit the number of stories open for comment at any given time. Yet, we still regularly see more than 300,000 comments posted to our sites in an average month. It’s clear our current manual/human approach to moderation is no longer sustainable….As it works, the algorithm will be learning continuously, meaning if the algorithm makes a decision that a human moderator later decides to reverse or change, the machine learns to act in line with the human’s decision.”

Wall Street Journal / Lukas I. Alpert and Suzanne Vranica

Mashable, having pivoted to video, is now looking at a possible sale →

“Mashable has had extensive discussions with German TV broadcaster ProSiebenSat.1 , PSM 0.59% the people said. It is possible another suitor could emerge. U.S. media giant Viacom Inc. also explored a deal but isn't currently engaged in talks, one of the people said.”

BuzzFeed / Joseph Bernstein

Steve Bannon sought to infiltrate Facebook hiring →

“The email exchange with a conservative Washington operative reveals the importance that the giant tech platform — now reeling from its role in the 2016 election — held for one of the campaign's central figures….The idea to infiltrate Facebook came to Bannon from Chris Gacek, a former congressional staffer who is now an official at the Family Research Council, which lobbies against abortion and many LGBT rights.”

The Street / Ken Doctor

The Los Angeles Times tops 105,000 in digital subscriptions →

The LA Times can claim more than 105,000 digital subscriptions. (The Boston Globe passed its own milestone on Monday, Sept. 18, reaching 90,000 paying digital only-subs, while the smaller-circulation Star Tribune of Minnesota’s Twin Cities “closes in” on an impressive 50,000.)

The New York Times / Sydney Ember and Michael M. Grynbaum

The not-so-glossy future of magazines →

“Quietly, optimists in the business say that it may be healthy for a younger generation of editors to take the reins. Older editors are less accustomed to the rhythms and forms of web journalism; Jann Wenner, for instance, famously resisted posting Rolling Stone stories online. Many of the industry's rising stars are finding ways to raise revenue and gain readers on the digital side.”

Schibsted / Ciaran Cody-Kenny and Eivind Fiskerud

How Schibsted used machine learning to boost news subscriptions →

“The model predicts the likelihood of an individual user purchasing a subscription, based on their behavior on our websites and apps. To do this, we train a machine learning algorithm on a dataset of all logged-in users from a given observation period during which they do not have an active subscription, but some of them do go on to subscribe in the following target period. The algorithm learns the difference in behavior patterns between those that do not purchase and those that do purchase during the target period.”

London School of Economics / Portia Roelofs and Max Gallien

“Academia is replicating the structure of the mass media” →

“Initially spurred by the desire for professors to reach out and engage with the world outside the ‘ivory tower,’ the impact of academic articles came to be measured by blogs, page views, download stats, and tweets. Academic articles are now evaluated according to essentially the same metrics as BuzzFeed posts or Instagram selfies. In fact, the impact factor is an especially blunt example of online metrics: Reddit, Youtube, and Imgur at least allow users to up-vote or down-vote posts.”

The Guardian

Time Inc UK, publisher of NME and Marie Claire, is being put up for sale →

Time Inc said on Friday it was looking to sell several assets including its British division Time Inc UK after warning that revenue from both sales and advertising had fallen more than expected during the current quarter.

Washington Post

The Washington Post will now sell publishers a white-label version of its mobile apps →

“The app incorporates best-in-class features, including a reader experience that's been battle-tested in The Post's newsroom, and can support a publisher's specific requirements for advertising, subscriptions and analytics.”