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Wednesday, September 6, 2017
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Are nonprofit news sites just creating more content for elites who already read a lot of news?“The potential for nonprofits to offer a radical alternative to commercial media is being lost.” By Laura Hazard Owen. |
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The Atlantic launches a paid membership program for its “diehards” called The MastheadBut not just the diehards — it’s also an attempt to forge tighter connections with its growing web audience. “We're trying to create a product that's a supplement, not a replacement.” By Shan Wang. |
What We’re Reading
Twitter / pns_news
Charges against that West Virginia reporter arrested for asking a question have been dropped →
“The State has determined, after a careful review of the facts, that Mr. Heyman’s conduct, while it may have been aggressive journalism, was not unlawful and did not violate the law with which he was charged, that is, willfully disrupting a State governmental process of meeting.”
The Washington Post
The Washington Post launches the Coral Project’s Talk commenting platform →
“Using this technology, The Post is more readily able to engage with its readers at scale. Talk's moderation panel serves up statistics to help moderators understand a commenter's contribution history at a glance. Then using ModBot, the system can remove comments that violate Post policies, approve comments that don't, and provide analytics for moderators about the tenor of a conversation.”
Digiday / Ross Benes
Ads.txt, created to help publishers fight fraud, isn’t being adopted by publishers →
“Few publishers have adopted ads.txt because their tech teams are overcommitted to other projects, and they don't understand how ads.txt will benefit them. Plus, some publishers want to avoid notifying ad buyers that they rely on unauthorized resellers to drive demand for their inventory.”
Poynter / Benjamin Mullin
Scribd is now bundling its subscriptions with news organizations (starting with The New York Times) →
“The company is betting that ‘subscription fatigue’ — the state of having too many monthly subscriptions to keep track of — will propel users to pick one service that gives them access to everything they want to read.”
Digiday / Brian Morissey
Business Insider’s Henry Blodget: ‘We don’t want to aim for reach growth anymore’ →
Blodget also had some real talk about all those video pivots you’ve been reading about: “A lot of people who are going to be embracing video now are going to have a rude awakening. It's very difficult; it's not like it can suddenly save a print business. People are talking as if the future is going to be video. It's crazy.”
Recode / Peter Kafka
Podcast network Gimlet Media has raised another $5 million – this time from ad giant WPP →
This brings the company's total funding to $27 million.
New York Times / Sydney Ember and Michael M. Grynbaum
At CNN, retracted story leaves elite reporting team bruised →
“In the weeks since the story was retracted, the investigative team has been reshaped and redirected. Its members were told they should not report on perhaps the most compelling political story of the year: potential ties between the Trump administration and Russia. That subject is now largely handled by CNN's reporting team in Washington. The political whizzes of KFile, a group of Internet-savvy reporters poached from BuzzFeed that was untainted by the retraction, were transferred out of the investigative team.”
BBC News
Brazil’s ‘surfing war photographer’ Eduardo Martins, an Instagram hit, is a fake →
“For years, someone using the name Eduardo Martins had been stealing pictures taken by professional photographers who had risked their lives in conflict to get them. He was able to fool journalists and editors by making slight alterations to the images, such as inverting them, just enough to elude software that scans pictures for plagiarism.”
The Information / Tom Dotan
Mic is looking to cable TV for video revenue →
“The news site is in discussions with several companies that sell so-called "skinny" bundles of cable channels to offer a channel of Mic-produced videos, said people close to Mic. If successful, Mic would join Cheddar and Vice as new-media firms that have tapped the cable TV market for revenue.”
Digiday / Lucinda Southern
Axel Springer now has 13 million users for its Upday news app →
“This growth is partly because Upday is available in 16 European countries, where it now has eight editorial hubs, twice the number of hubs it launched with in March 2016. Upday has roughly 50 editorial staffers, double the amount in February, split across its eight European editorial hubs, who verify news and add a local editorial focus to the top global trending stories.”
Shorenstein Center / Matthew A. Baum
Network Sunday morning talk shows have replaced policy with politics, despite policy getting higher ratings →
“The primary takeaway is that the Sunday morning interview shows potentially could improve their audience ratings by rebalancing their interviews to feature greater proportions of substantive policy content, relative to process-oriented, purely political content.” Also: Guests are substantially more likely to be Republicans than Democrats — nearly twice as likely in 2015.