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Monday, September 25, 2017
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With Old Town Media, three former Politico execs want to help publishers figure out the futureThe 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. |
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.”