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Monday, February 12, 2018
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Here are the digital media features to watch during the 2018 Pyeongchang OlympicsVR, AR, a podcast, messaging apps, Snapchat shows, voice devices, Uber rides, and more. By Christine Schmidt. |
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Not all news site visitors are created equal. Schibsted is trying to predict the ones who will pay upAcross the sites where it’s currently in use, the company's purchase prediction model has been able to identify groups of readers three to five times more likely than average to buy a subscription, and advertise offers to them differently. By Liam Corcoran. |
What We’re Reading
BuzzFeed / Charlie Warzel
He saw the 2016 fake news crisis coming. Now he’s worried about an information apocalypse →
“‘We were utterly screwed a year and a half ago and we’re even more screwed now. And depending how far you look into the future it just gets worse,’ technology Aviv Ovadya said. That future, according to Ovadya, will arrive with a slew of slick, easy-to-use, and eventually seamless technological tools for manipulating perception and falsifying reality.”
Digiday / Jessica Davies
European publishers look to digital subscriptions to reduce platform dependency →
“Publishers are feeling more buoyant about the future of subscription models, with 70 percent of respondents saying they have evidence that readers' willingness to pay for content has increased in the past year, according to a report from German media giant Axel Springer. (A flurry of publishers in Germany, France, Spain and Scandinavia, including Spiegel Online and Die Zeit, have recently launched new paid content models.)”
Poynter / David Beard
What can the new Los Angeles Times owner can learn from Jeff Bezos? →
“Even on the technology side, where Bezos obviously has more experience, he left in place Shailesh Prakash, the chief technologist he inherited, recognizing him as one of the best in the business. It would have been a disaster if Bezos had ordered Baron to cover this story or not cover that story. But it's good for everyone when Bezos pushes for such things as faster load times, more usable apps, advancements in the content management system, and the like.”
Digiday / Max Willens
Facebook’s new branded-content guidelines will force some publishers to abandon a business model →
“Last month, Diply, a publisher that gets 85 percent of its desktop traffic from Facebook, according to SimilarWeb, informed the owners of many of the Facebook pages that Diply pays to distribute its content, saying it would soon stop sending them content to share, according to multiple publishers that work with the same influencers Diply works with.”
Street Fight / Tom Grubisich
Dr. Soon-Shiong and his new “patient,” the L.A. Times: Will his Rx be “local”? →
“No Times publisher was able to figure out how to cover the L.A. region, whose 4,850 square miles include 470 neighborhoods that today are home to 14 million people. Even the legendary third-generation scion Otis Chandler, who elevated the paper from mediocrity to greatness during his furious 20-year reign from 1960 to 1980, was frustrated in his bold and expensive attempts to win Southland's readers and markets.”
BBC News
What it’s like to work as a Facebook moderator →
“They capped us on spending about one minute per post to decide whether it was spam and whether to remove the content. Management liked us not to work any more than eight hours per day, and we would review an average of about 8,000 posts per day, so roughly about 1,000 posts per hour.”
Medium / Cory Haik
The Algo-pocalypse: Journalism in the digital dystopia →
“The massively misunderstood "pivot to video," or as some see it, the gold rush to creating space junk instead of legitimate storytelling, has been a little controversial, to say the least…No matter your position, it's fair to say that in these go-go-go platform moments, we've lost any sense of relative scale.”