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Tuesday, January 30, 2018
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With “Times in Person,” The New York Times puts its national journalists in front of local crowds“If you parachute into a place, whether it’s a foreign place or your own country, and think you’ll never go back, you’re not accountable to people in the same way.” By Laura Hazard Owen. |
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Turns out people really like podcasts after all (and now we have numbers to prove it)Plus: PRX expands, WNYC shuffles, NPR stagnates, Dirty John adapts, Macmillan strategizes, and Gimlet parties. By Nicholas Quah. |
What We’re Reading
Buzzfeed / Ben Smith
Unlike Microsoft and Google, Facebook still hasn’t learned its lesson about taking government seriously →
Silicon Valley has been “humbled, with a single exception: Facebook. While Uber's new CEO completed an apology tour and Google's chief practically begged for higher taxes, the social media giant was strikingly, jarringly apart from the pack: ideological about the power of its algorithms over human judgment and wholly committed to continued, rolling disruption.”
Bloomberg.com / Shira Ovide
How the iPad lost years for Apple’s media partners →
“Some of Apple’s business partners had misgivings, but many devoted time, people and money to tailor newspapers and magazines to the iPad. Last year, Apple sold 44 million iPads, and people bought about 1.5 billion smartphones. The iPad is important, but it never became the ubiquitous, world-changing computer that Jobs pitched in 2010.”
Poynter / Kristen Hare
Lenfest is helping bring The Washington Post’s content management system to Philly →
The Philadelphia Media Network is transitioning to the Washington Post’s Arc Publishing CMS (PMN includes Philly.com, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Daily News). Lenfest, the non-profit owner of PMN, will help pay for PMN's transition to Arc and also share best practices and lessons learned with the 12 newsrooms that are part of the Knight-Lenfest Newsroom Initiative.
Digiday / Lucia Moses
In a shift, publishers can no longer count on guaranteed revenue from content-recommendation services →
“The guarantees previously delivered a predictable stream of highly profitable revenue, something especially attractive to public companies. Two publishing sources said they were paid $1 million to $2 million a year. But the good times are coming to an end, as both players, along with upstarts, move away from a land-grab phase in development.”
Charleston Gazette-Mail
The Charleston Gazette-Mail, which won a Pulitzer Prize last year for investigative reporting, is declaring bankruptcy →
“Wheeling Newspapers is currently the high bidder to assume ownership of the company. The company, operated by the Nutting family, owns more than 40 daily newspapers across the nation, including the Wheeling, Parkersburg, Martinsburg and Elkins newspapers in West Virginia. Just last April, the Gazette-Mail and reporter Eric Eyre received the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting for coverage of the state's opioid crisis.”
American Press Institute / Kevin Loker and Ashley Kang
Four case studies of how focused community engagement can help address journalism’s trust problem →
“In Alabama, for instance, an Alabama Media Group journalist digitized his listening activities, building off a fellowship with the Reynolds Journalism Institute. Creating news ‘deputies’ from particular backgrounds including immigrant communities and families with members who have been incarcerated.”
The Splice Newsroom
A newspaper in Japan is using AI to summarize news stories to get them out quicker. →
“The Shinano Mainichi Shimbun teamed up with Fujitsu, Japan's largest IT services company, to create the software based on technology developed by Fujitsu Laboratories. Staff at the broadsheet have been producing summaries manually, a task that takes up to five minutes per article. The software creates summaries instantly and with greater accuracy than a different summarizing method that begins with the lead and stops when the word limit is reached, according to Fujitsu.”
Medium / Matt DeRienzo
How do you support your local newspaper when its owners are destroying it? →
“Digital disruption might be the oxygen, but companies such as Alden Global Capital's Digital First Media and Fortress Investment Group's Gatehouse have poured the gasoline and lit the matches.”