 |
Thursday, September 21, 2017
 |
“The Internet hates secrets”: Clear Health Costs works with newsrooms to bring healthcare costs out of hiding“We think of this as a perfect use case for journalism — finding real, good information and displaying it back to the public.” By Laura Hazard Owen. |
 |
To Philly and beyond: The Lenfest Institute announces $2 million in funding for local news projectsThe Philadelphia Media Network is getting $1 million. Twelve organizations and five entrepreneurs-in-residence will be getting another for projects ranging from local news membership models to experiments in audience engagement. By Shan Wang. |
What We’re Reading
JohoTheBlog / David Weinberger
A look inside how Facebook thinks about taking down hate speech and other content →
“Some is easy. Nudity is nudity, although we let breast cancer photos through. But a beheading video is prohibited no matter what the context.”
Bloomberg
Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan says most jailed journalists are terrorists →
“Most of them have had their names involved in many bombing incidents. Some of them have been involved in robbery. There are even some who’ve been caught robbing ATMs — there are many of those.”
Knight Foundation / Dean Haddock
StoryCorps gets $600,000 in new funding from the Knight Foundation →
“We have also discovered the power of listening to bring people together, through initiatives like our Great Thanksgiving Listen, in which high school students across the country recorded a conversation with a grandparent, teacher, mentor or another elder over the holiday weekend. In 2015, we gathered more than 50,000 recordings from 100,000 participants. Today we announced the Great Thanksgiving Listen 2017, moving us closer toward the goal of touching the life of every American.”
The Courier-Journal / Thomas Novelly
University of Louisville alumni rally around the college newspaper after funding disappears →
“Amid the university’s $48-million budget shortfall, school officials told the student journalism staff they would cease advertising in the independent student newspaper by the end of the 2018 spring semester.” That advertising is about half the paper’s budget.
BuzzFeed / Steven Perlberg
CNN Digital is facing a $20 million budget shortfall →
“Part of the difficulty for CNN Digital has been the tough market for digital ads coupled with the hyper-charged political environment, which has pushed some brands to eschew news content. But CNN has also spent lots of money on digital investments, launching a new ‘MoneyStream’ app, pumping resources into its video startup Great Big Story, and acquiring Beme, YouTube star Casey Neistat's video-sharing startup.”
Street Fight / Tom Grubisich
Facebook on local news partnerships: “We’re just getting started” →
“We plan to continue working with local publishers to help more people discover the news they're publishing on Facebook while increasing the number of users in meaningful groups.”
Digiday / Lucia Moses
Publishers continue to see monetization problems with Apple News →
Advertising on the platform isn’t going well.
Recode / Kurt Wagner
Sheryl Sandberg called Facebook’s ad-targeting embarrassment “totally inappropriate and a fail on our part” →
“Facebook also said it's working on a program to let people ‘report potential abuses of our ads system’ to the company, though it didn't offer details.”
Tech.eu / Jonathan Keane
Swedish podcast platform Acast raises $19.5 million to go global →
“The new funds will be used to grow the engineering team as well as internationalize its service, namely in the US. Earlier this year it launched in Australia.”
SecureDrop
Find a bug in SecureDrop, get $2,500 →
“To further encourage ethical security research, we're also excited to announce today that we are adding rewards for security issues found in SecureDrop — up to $2,500 — to our bug bounty program hosted by Bugcrowd.”
Hackers.Media
The biggest media companies in Europe & their 2016/17 performance →
“Seemingly if you want to make money in media, the key formula is: ‘Video + Sport.'”
eMarketer
Google and Facebook tighten grip on U.S. digital ad market →
“The digital ad ecosystem's so-called duopoly is now expected to rake in a combined 63.1% of US digital ad investment in 2017, up from eMarketer's previous prediction that the duo's total would reach 60.4% in 2017.”
NewsMediaWorks
The Australian launches some content in Chinese →
Chinese is the second most commonly spoken language in Australia.
Ottawa Citizen / Andrew Duffy
Google is linking secret, court-protected names to online coverage →
“Google's powerful search engine is defeating some court-ordered publication bans in Canada and undermining efforts to protect young offenders and victims…In six high-profile cases documented by the Citizen, searching the name of a young offender or victim online pointed to media coverage of their court cases, even though their names do not appear anywhere in the news articles themselves.”