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Wednesday, February 7, 2018
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Newsonomics: Inside Tronc’s sale of the L.A. Times (and all the new questions to come)Tronc is getting a big premium for its flagship asset, and the Times is getting a return to private, local ownership. But a lot of questions remain about where Patrick Soon-Shiong will take his new prize. By Ken Doctor. |
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Crowdsourcing trusted news sources can work — but not the way Facebook says it'll do itA new study finds asking Facebook users about publishers could “be quite effective in decreasing the amount of misinformation and disinformation circulating on social media” — but Facebook will need to make one important change to its plan. By Laura Hazard Owen. |
What We’re Reading
BuzzFeed / Jane Lytvynenko
Overseas fake news publishers use Facebook’s Instant Articles to bring in more cash →
“BuzzFeed News found 29 Facebook pages, and associated websites, that are using Instant Articles to help their completely false stories load faster on Facebook. At least 24 of these pages are also signed up with Facebook Audience Network, meaning Facebook itself earns a share of revenue from the fake news being read on its platform.”
Splitsider / Sarah Aswell
How Facebook is killing comedy →
“We’re used to a world where if you put something out there that's good, people see it and share it. But that's just not true in this world. Someone can make something really good, and just because of some weird algorithmic reasons, or if it's not designed specifically for Facebook, it doesn't do well. And then it becomes impossible to know what a good thing to make is anymore.”
Axios / Sara Fischer
Snapchat paid $100 million to media publishers in 2017 →
“Snapchat says it generated $100 million in revenue for content partners on Discover in 2017, up from $58 million in 2016 and $10 million in 2015.”
Fashionista / Tyler McCall
How Choire Sicha went from amateur blogger to New York Times Styles editor →
“The number one struggle in media is we have to begin to address different audiences separately and I think Styles, more than many other places, feels that pressure. Beauty writers know. Beauty writers have to write for people with different skin and different ethnicities and different genders, and that stuff doesn’t travel from audience to audience.”
The New York Times / Farhad Manjoo
A crazy idea for funding local news: Charge people for it →
“After studying Ms. Lessin's and Mr. Thompson's methods, I suspect there's a market for subscription-based local coverage. Someone just has to build it.”
BuzzFeed / Craig Silverman
Russian trolls ran wild on Tumblr and the company refuses to say anything about it →
“The evidence we’ve collected shows a highly engaged and far-reaching Tumblr propaganda-op targeting mostly teenage and twenty-something African Americans. This appears to have been part of an ongoing campaign since early 2015.”
WGBH News / Dan Kennedy
No bang, just fizzle: The iPad revolution that wasn’t →
“The iPad is a fine platform on which to consume media. But it was always unrealistic to think that it would save us from the long, hard slog of developing new economic underpinnings for the journalism on which democracy depends.”
The Drum / John McCarthy
Theresa May to review health of local and regional newspapers, including digital ads →
British prime minister Theresa May has announced her intent to review the state of the UK’s newspaper industry amid a period of noted decline in print circulations.
Twitter / Brian Boyer
“Holy crap I think I know why newspapers are dying” [thread] →
“Ask a SINGLE person, maybe at the Starbucks tomorrow, to use your website to subscribe to your newspaper. Watch them try. And if they fail, fire your f*cking vendor.”
The Atlantic / Ed Yong
I spent two years trying to fix the gender imbalance in my stories →
“Crucially, I tracked how I was doing in a simple spreadsheet. I can't overstate the importance of that: It is a vaccine against self-delusion.”
Columbia Journalism Review / Mathew Ingram
Can BuzzFeed afford to keep funding BuzzFeed News? →
“The larger problem for BuzzFeed, by extension, is that if news isn't making enough money to fund itself despite the company's best efforts to integrate with Facebook and other platforms, and if Facebook intends to further decrease the presence of news in the streams of users, how does BuzzFeed justify continuing to invest in it? An acquisition by Laurene Powell Jobs no doubt looks like an attractive way out of the dilemma.”
OZY / James Watkins & Charu Kasturi
Ozy’s new project: reporting from every country in the world →
“Our approach? To treat all reporting as though it's local,” Ozy says.