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Wednesday, November 29, 2017
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This reporting project wants to get environmental investigations out of PDFs and white papers and to the people affectedInvestigating environmental crimes in Indonesia, The Gecko Project wants “to push these things back into the places where they're reported out.” By Laura Hazard Owen. |
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Taking a cue from ProPublica, The Trace is partnering with local TV stations to report major gun stories“We want to make sure reporters have what they need to do this work and see us as a valuable resource to help them do it.” By Ricardo Bilton. |
What We’re Reading
Wall Street Journal / Lukas I. Alpert
Facing a revenue shortfall, BuzzFeed is laying off about 100 employees and looking beyond native advertising →
BuzzFeed plans to reduce its U.S. staff by 8%, with all the cuts coming from the business and sales side of the organization. Some editorial staffers and business-side employees in the U.K. will also be let go. The company is also moving to create a number of new lifestyle verticals modeled after its food product, Tasty, and will put increased resources into its e-commerce business and focus more on outside development deals for its film and TV arm.
The Atlantic / Derek Thompson
How to survive the media apocalypse →
“In its inexhaustible capacity for experimentation, digital media has pivoted to programmatic advertising, pivoted to native advertising, pivoted to venture capital, pivoted to Facebook, pivoted to distributed, and pivoted to video. Here is a better experiment: Pivot to readers.”
CNBC / Sara Salinas
Snapchat’s redesign will separate its news-heavy Discover page from a user’s friend list →
Snap has long been plagued by criticism that the app is difficult to navigate and not intuitive, dragging daily active users below estimates and burying paid publisher content. The update will start rolling out to some users this week.
Wall Street Journal / Amol Sharma
ESPN to is laying off another 150 people →
In a memo to staff, ESPN President John Skipper said the majority of the jobs being eliminated are in studio production, technology and digital content, "and they generally reflect decisions to do less in certain instances and redirect resources." ESPN has 8,000 employees.
Journalism.co.uk / Damian Radcliffe
10 key principles for data-driven storytelling →
“Don't beat readers over the head with numbers. Data should be used to illustrate key points and help bring a story alive. The data itself is seldom the story, the implications of it need to be unpacked and explained.”
Digiday / Max Willens
As Amazon’s media ambitions grow, some publishers are wary →
“Some publishers said Amazon frequently asks publishers to create content with no clear incentive, leaving many uncertain and frustrated by their inability to make inroads with such a large platform: ‘This is the frenemy question with various platforms,’ said Stan Pavlovsky, the president of Meredith Digital. ‘If we're going to partner with Amazon, or Apple or Google, it has to be a win-win.'”
Washingtonian / Rachel Kurzius
A former DCist editor meets her toughest (and most persistent) critics from the comments →
“I was always curious about the people behind the screen names like sock puppet mayhem, OwCrapThatHurts, and B!tchIt'sSaturday.”
Wall Street Journal / Benjamin Mullin
Wired is launching a metered paywall →
Wired hasn’t yet set a price for the paywall, which will be introduced in January of 2018. (Wired’s editor-in-chief Nick Thompson was previously of the editor of newyorker.com, where he also oversaw the implementation of a metered paywall.) Condé Nast executives say the online subscription models at the New Yorker and Wired may be followed by paywalls at its other properties.
Medium / Jake Shapiro
Podcast startup RadioPublic announces new funding, including from Boston public media company WGBH →
"WGBH is committed to finding innovative models that benefit audiences and stations, helping public media successfully address the evolving media landscape and fulfill our public service mission in new ways. RadioPublic is at the vanguard of radio's transformation into a mobile, on-demand future, and we are proud partners in helping take it to scale."