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Thursday, December 7, 2017
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In Seattle, GeekWire is building an international audience on top of its coverage of the local tech sceneLike fellow Seattle mainstay KEXP, GeekWire has leveraged its local coverage into international relevance — all the while making itself indispensable to its bedrock Seattle readership. By Ricardo Bilton. |
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Can 5,000 strangers have a productive Facebook dialogue? Spaceship Media is about to try“We think this will be a beacon of civility as the year progresses toward the midterms in this really polarized time.” By Christine Schmidt. |
What We’re Reading
The Texas Observer / Michael Hardy
Requiem for an alt-weekly: The strange and sudden demise of the Houston Press →
“We need journalism more than ever, and alt-weeklies were an important voice. That was where you talked about the things that maybe you didn't talk about in the big dailies or the magazines, the place you could have a different point of view. I don't think it will ever be the same. Maybe it will come back in some other form, but it will never be what it was.”
The New York Times / John Herrman
The return of the techno-moral panic →
“As the internet of 2017 has changed, so has the internet user. We are now in the majority, and our experience is defined by plenitude and freedom, still, but also by a growing sense of exploitation. We find ourselves aware of the power and unaccountability of the new marketplaces in which we socialize, communicate and do business. To cast our recurring panics as technophobic reruns is to misidentify what animates them most: Not fear, but helplessness.”
Digiday / Lucia Moses
Publisher pivot to reality casts doubts on global expansion plans →
Scaled back expansion plans abroad show that the Google-Facebook duolopy is global.
The New York Times / The New York Times
The New York Times now has more than 3.5 million subscribers →
The annoucement comes a week after the Times said that it was cutting back the number of free stories it offers to readers from 10 to five.
Digiday / Lucinda Southern
How The Times of London is using Facebook groups to drive subscriptions – Digiday →
The Times has started three groups over the past six months: One focused on Brexit, a second aimed at book lovers, and a third for movie fans.
Street Fight / Tom Grubisich
Bklyner will shut down at the end of this month unless it hits subscriber goal →
The site is looking to reach 3,230 subscribers for its $5-per-month basic subscription (or $1.99-a-month "Community Subscription"). Editor and publisher Liena Zagare blames the site’s plight, in par, on local advertisers flocking to Facebook and Instagram.
Wall Street Journal / Ben Mullin
Cultura Colectiva targets Hispanic audience with viral posts, branded content →
“The company, like other Spanish-language media outfits, is capitalizing on the fact that many marketers have grown comfortable doing branded or ‘native’ content on sites like BuzzFeed and Vice and want to do the same to reach Hispanic consumers.”