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Tuesday, February 6, 2018
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With an increased focus on paid newsletters, Substack is opening up its tools to more creators“People will always pay for news they can put on the company credit card, but we've always believed that that it’s far from the only thing people will pay for.” By Ricardo Bilton. |
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Can public radio powerhouse WNYC navigate a crisis of its own making?Plus: RadioPublic stands up for the little guys, everybody’s going Hollywood, and Gannett wants to build “The Wire” (but non-fiction). By Nicholas Quah. |
What We’re Reading
Financial Times / Aliya Ram and David Blood
Ultra-rightwing conservatives are the most active when it comes to sharing fake U.S. news on Facebook →
“University of Oxford academics analyzed political affiliations and posting patterns of almost 48,000 public Facebook pages and 14,000 Twitter users to identify which groups posted the most misinformation from dubious websites. They found that groups on both extremes of the political spectrum consumed and shared the most junk news in a period between October 2017 and January this year. Trump supporters are the most polarized and share a wider range of misinformation than any other U.S. audience group on Twitter.”
Abacus / Karen Chiu and Xinmei Shen
China’s Weibo tweaks its platform after a government rebuke →
“In late January, the microblogging site shut down Hot Search, its trending topics section. The reason? State media said Weibo failed to censor content that contradicts with Communist Party values, including vulgar and pornographic materials. Now Hot Search has re-emerged with a difference: State propaganda articles are given prominence above other trends.”
The New York Times / John Herrman
What I learned from watching my iPad’s slow death →
“On examination, almost nothing about the device seems to have changed. And yet it's starting to give up, and so am I.”
Axios / Sara Fischer
Google says 1% of publishers would be initially affected by Chrome’s adblocker →
“Google reviewed over 100,000 websites in North America and Europe since June as part of an ongoing audit of publishers’ ads to ensure they’re compliant with third-party industry standards, and says .5% were at the “warning” level of potentially being blocked. It also said that 37% of sites found in violation of the Coalition’s standards have already fixed their advertising issues.”
Reuters / David Ingram
Seattle says Facebook is violating city campaign finance law →
“Facebook must disclose details about spending in last year's Seattle city elections or face penalties, Wayne Barnett, executive director of the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission, said in a statement. It was not immediately clear how Facebook would respond if penalized. Facebook said in a statement it had sent the commission some data.”
Los Angeles Times / Hailey Branson-Potts
A family-run bilingual chain of newspapers in Los Angeles County is closing down after nearly 40 years →
“The death of the Eastside community papers has been particularly painful because they cover a largely Latino area that residents say other media organizations typically ignore. Eastern Group was a longtime, vital cultural institution on the Eastside, covering the little stories that built the fabric of a bustling immigrant community.”
Digiday / Lucinda Southern
How Axel Springer’s Welt gets people to watch video on its own site →
“Developing video strategies for their own platforms is more important than ever for publishers in the wake of Facebook's latest news-feed algorithm purge. Welt is testing new video features and products designed to keep people on site. In the past few weeks, the publisher made the link to its live stream more visible and placed it at the top of its web page. People are now averaging 18 percent more time on article pages with video in them than article pages without video, although the publisher wouldn't share absolute numbers.”
Digiday / Sahil Patel
NBCUniversal and BuzzFeed are teaming up for a new parenting channel called Playfull →
Hoping to replicate BuzzFeed's success with verticals like Tasty and Nifty, the two organizations are launching Playfull on Facebook first. Its target audience is parents aged 20 to 34. Initially, the focus will be giving parents valuable and relatable information with a BuzzFeed bent. NBCUniversal will provide marketing support in the form of a 15-second commercial that will air during the Winter Olympics.
Big If True / Mollie Bryant
Bikini slideshows and other clickbait: Do paywalls usher in better content? →
“A paywall didn't stop one of the papers where I worked from running a weekly slideshow of a bikini contest that took place at a bar auspiciously named Midnight Rodeo. A banner across our homepage teased to the slideshow, so the journalism we were taking so seriously and that multiple female reporters were working painstakingly to produce was wedged above or below T&A.”
Medium / Damon Kiesow
The UX of why people hate their new job after three months →
“For new employees, the expectation we need to set is that while the initial learning curve is steep, the on-boarding process actually never ends nor does it move in a predictably straight line.”