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Thursday, September 7, 2017
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News startup Purple is now a service that lets creators charge people to text with themThe newly pivoted Purple, now in private beta, is aimed largely at journalists with large personal followings on social media already. By Shan Wang. |
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Newsonomics: Mort to Ferro: Take My Paper, Please! (and a few other headlines about the New York Daily News)Is Tronc’s acquisition of the New York tab a linchpin to a national strategy, or just another declining property to add to its portfolio? By Ken Doctor. |
What We’re Reading
ProPublica / Julia Angwin and Jeff Larson
ProPublica launches an initiative to monitor campaign ads on Facebook →
“Today we are launching a crowdsourcing tool that will gather political ads from Facebook, the biggest online platform for political discourse. We're calling it the Political Ad Collector — or PAC, in a nod to the Political Action Committees that fund many of today's political ads.”
The New York Times / Tiffany Hsu
With Rupert Murdoch’s help, Tab Media targets the young and cheeky on campus →
“Tab, a British import that recently received financing from backers including Rupert Murdoch and the Knight Foundation, is largely unknown to the general public but is gaining currency on college campuses around the country. It relies on a network of unpaid student journalists who write about youth and campus culture. It also has a small cadre of writers commenting, usually snarkily, on issues of interest to young women.”
Columbia Journalism Review / Mary Annette Pember
Indian Country Today’s hiatus is a blow to nuanced coverage of indigenous peoples →
“Indian Country Today was rebranded as the Indian Country Today Media Network in 2011. From the beginning, the news organization was mostly a losing financial proposition for the Oneida Nation — part vanity project, part desire to influence movers and shakers in Washington….But rather than being misquoted and overlooked by the media, Indians were finally part of setting the news agenda.”
Fast Co. Design / Mark Wilson
Hackers may be able to control popular voice assistant devices by addressing them in frequencies humans can't hear →
“They could also tell an iPhone to ‘call 1234567890’ or tell an iPad to FaceTime the number. They could force a Macbook or a Nexus 7 to open a malicious website. They could order an Amazon Echo to ‘open the backdoor.’ Even an Audi Q3 could have its navigation system redirected to a new location.”
Digiday / Lucinda Southern
How The Economist shifted its Line strategy to grow to nearly 1 million followers →
“The Economist has increased the number of push notifications it sends from three a week to one a day, usually opting for stories related to Thailand or Indonesia, where the Asian app has a big following. Stories about technology also perform particularly well. Some of these are behind the paywall, so they encourage readers to subscribe.”
The Verge
BBC is making interactive radio plays for Alexa and Google Home →
The BBC’s new science fiction story, The Inspection Chamber, will work similarly to a choose your own adventure book or game. Listeners will hear a chunk of the story, and then be presented with a choice of what should happen next (it was developed by the BBC’s R&D division).
Politico / Jason Schwartz
Facebook undermines its own effort to fight fake news, hindering the initiative by its refusal to share data →
Fact-checkers enlisted by Facebook in its fact-checking initiative say they have no way of determining whether the tags they're affixing to fake news articles slow or speed the articles’ spread. (Facebook says privacy concerns prevent them from sharing this internal data.)
The Conversation / Misha Ketchell
The Conversation launches in Indonesia →
“This is the first edition of The Conversation in Asia and the seventh in the global network after Australia, the United Kingdom, France, the United States, Africa and Canada.”