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Tuesday, February 13, 2018
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Facebook’s Campbell Brown: “This is not about us trying to make everybody happy”“If someone feels that being on Facebook is not good for your business, you shouldn’t be on Facebook. Let’s be clear about that…I don’t see us as the answer to the problem.” By Laura Hazard Owen. |
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Last blog standing, “last guy dancing”: How Jason Kottke is thinking about kottke.org at 20“I am like a vaudevillian. I’m the last guy dancing on the stage, by myself, and everyone else has moved on to movies and television.” By Laura Hazard Owen. |
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Today, Explained, explained: Vox enters the daily news podcast race with a comma-happy, personality-driven showPlus: HBO buys in, ESPN brags condescendingly, big networks scale back, and Call Your Girlfriend plots its future. Also, gifs. By Nicholas Quah. |
What We’re Reading
New York Times Company
The New York Times brings The Daily to public radio with American Public Media →
“Beginning in April 2018, American Public Media (APM) will distribute a radio edition of the popular daily podcast to public radio listeners across the country.”
Recode / Edmund Lee
BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti says Facebook should share revenue as well as traffic →
“Facebook will have no chance to control what's in News Feed if the only lever they have is traffic, because the only way to say we want influence over this content is if you have a lever of content and a lever of revenue…having the lever to demonetize is very powerful.”
The Daily Beast / Betsy Woodruff and Lachlan Markay
Ben Shapiro’s website The Daily Wire eyes buying Glenn Beck’s The Blaze →
“The Daily Wire is owned by members of the Wilks family, billionaire fracking tycoons from east Texas. They have been looking to expand their holdings in conservative media, and briefly eyed purchasing Breitbart. A messy relationship between them and billionaire heiress Rebekah Mercer — who has an ownership stake in the site — kept that from happening. Now, their purchase of TheBlaze appears more likely than not.”
Vanity Fair / Joe Pompeo
CNN, despite Trump bump, prepares for dozens of layoffs on the digital side →
“The cuts will affect employees who work in premium businesses including CNN Money, video, product, tech and social publishing, these people said. Several high profile digital initiatives are being scaled back, including CNN's virtual reality productions and its efforts on Snapchat, where CNN recently nixed a live daily webcast after just four months. CNN's business-oriented MoneyStream app, as BuzzFeed reported earlier this month, is in the gutter as well. A team that works on the digital extensions of documentary-style TV shows, such as Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown and Lisa Ling's This is Life, as well as the Brooke Baldwin series American Woman, is also being reorganized.”
Poynter / Daniel Funke
PolitiFact moves its headquarters from the Tampa Bay Times to The Poynter Institute →
In doing so, it earns a not-for-profit designation and bolsters work already being done by Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network.
Medium / Jarrod Dicker
Blockchain startup Po.et hires Jarrod Dicker, who was The Washington Post’s VP of innovation, as its new CEO →
“Po.et is a shared, open-source universal ledger designed to track ownership, attribution and the marketplace flow of the world's creative assets through a never-before-imagined chain of value.”
Journalism.co.uk / Catalina Albeanu
An alternative to the mobile internet as we know it? CAST tests hyperlocal news network →
“Do we always have to go large when we’re actually trying to achieve local? And do we need to reroute people a little bit in their habits and behaviors?”
Wall Street Journal / Ben Mullin
Google’s new AMP stories bring Snapchat-like content to mobile web →
The format does not yet support advertising.
The New York Times / Brendan Nyhan
Fake news and bots may be worrisome, but their political power is overblown →
“It's very hard to change people's minds, especially when so many are already committed partisans.”
The Information
The Information is offering a one-day bootcamp on building a media business →
“For entrepreneurs and professionals who want to diversify their business models and get profitable.” And at $500, only a 25 percent higher than a one-year subscription to The Information.
Financial Times / Adam Samson
Would you rather see pop-up ads or allow a site to mine cryptocurrency through your “spare computing power”? Salon is trying it out →
In Salon’s FAQ: “We realise that specific technological developments now mean that it is not merely the reader's eyeballs that have value to our site — it's also your computer's ability to make calculations, too. Indeed, your computer itself can help support our ability to pay our editors and journalists.”
Wired / Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein
Inside Facebook’s two years of hell →
“Soon Campbell Brown was put in charge of something called the Facebook Journalism Project. ‘We spun it up over the holidays, essentially,’ says one person involved in discussions about the project. The aim was to demonstrate that Facebook was thinking hard about its role in the future of journalism. But sheer anxiety was also part of the motivation. ‘After the election, because Trump won, the media put a ton of attention on fake news and just started hammering us. People started panicking and getting afraid that regulation was coming.’"