 |
Tuesday, September 5, 2017
 |
Frontline aims for a new level of intimacy in its first-ever podcast, The Frontline Dispatch“Film and audio are truly different forms and I had to understand how different they are.” By Laura Hazard Owen. |
 |
These are the most important developments in the podcast business so far in 2017Plus the three most interesting podcast companies out there today. By Nicholas Quah. |
What We’re Reading
Wall Street Journal / Deepa Seetharaman
Facebook tees up WhatsApp to make money →
WhatsApp will eventually charge companies to use some future features in the two free business tools it started testing this summer, WhatsApp's chief operating officer, Matt Idema, told the Journal, but "we don't have the details of monetization figured out.”
AP News / David Bauder
Conservative book publisher Regnery stops recognizing The New York Times bestseller list →
“Regnery Publishing said on Monday it will no longer recognize the Times' accounting of book sales, meaning its writers can no longer claim to be ‘New York Times best-selling authors.’ That's a big deal in the book business.”
Press Gazette / Dominic Ponsford
Survey: 13% of U.K. bloggers think it is not always important to declare sponsored posts →
“Of those who blogged professionally, only 76 per cent said they agreed that sponsorship disclosure was important.”
Medium / Ben Regenspan
Why 16% of the code on the average site belongs to Facebook, and what that means →
“Besides the immediate performance impact of the additive cost of all of this code, this impacts developer morale: imagine working for days to shave off 10 percent of your own code's load time, only to see a giant block of third-party code added that dwarfs the impact of that painstaking effort.”
Engadget / Violet Blue
Google’s comment-ranking system considers “I am a gay black woman” pretty toxic →
“Imagine a system like Perspective deciding whether or not you can use business services, like Google AdSense. Take, for instance, the African-American woman who got an email Thursday from Google AdSense saying she’d violated its terms by writing a blog post about dealing with being called the n-word…on her own website.”
New York Times / Richard Fausset
The new, ambitious regional magazines of the South →
“In the last four years, The Bitter Southerner has emerged, on a shoestring budget, as a kind of kitchen-sink New Yorker for the region. It has tackled issues of race, class, crime and capital punishment, and published profiles of Southern farmers, bartenders, beekeepers, gay teenagers, spiritualists and civil rights pioneers. Begun as a hobby, the web-only magazine now has 100,000 visitors per month, a small staff and a cult readership that supports its journalism with the purchase of T-shirts that broadcast Mr. Reece's vision of inclusiveness (‘All Y’all’) and the good life (‘Drink More Whiskey’).”
The New York Times / Richard C. Paddock
The Cambodia Daily has been shut down →
“The Daily was ordered by the government to close its doors by Monday over allegations that it had not paid millions of dollars in taxes. The newspaper [published] its last print edition on Monday morning. But rather than simply mourn their loss, The Daily's reporters and editors scrambled through the night to cover the arrest of the opposition leader Kem Sokha on charges of treason.”
Business Insider / Bryan Logan
Hillary Clinton promoted a news website “for the 65.8 million” — here’s what its founder says it’s all about →
Verrit “advertises itself as a portal that ‘contextualizes noteworthy facts, stats, and quotes for politically engaged citizens’…Almost immediately after Clinton tweeted in support of the site on Sunday evening, it was hit with a denial-of-service attack, forcing the site offline for several hours.”
WWD / Alexandra Steigrad
Condé Nast employees brace for yet another reorganization →
“Insiders said that the changes will impact the entire company and include ‘heavy’ cuts on the editorial and business teams with a continued structural reconfiguration of the advertising sales teams. The result is rumored to be more centralization and teams working across titles.”
Chicago Tribune / Rick Kogan and Robert Channick
Tronc acquires the New York Daily News →
“This deal for the tabloid, which includes the Daily News’ website and other assets, has been in the works for some months and was finalized Sunday. The deal carries a price tag of $1 and the assumption of operational and pension liabilities.”
MarketWatch / Leslie Albrecht
How a free canvas New Yorker tote became a bigger status symbol than a $10,000 Hermès bag →
“It’s the New Yorker magazine tote — a frequent sight on the streets of brownstone Brooklyn, fodder for countless tweets both snarky and gushy, and recently dubbed 2017's ‘it’ bag by a London fashion editor, the humble carryall is by far the venerable weekly's most popular ‘free gift’ of all time.”