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Friday, February 9, 2018
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With its new Olympics texting experiment, the Times is saying goodbye to SMS, hello to personalization“What we’ve created is a bot-like exchange, but in the voice and tone of a person.” By Ricardo Bilton. |
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The far-right sharing fake news — or conservatives sharing conservative journalism?Plus: The Brits come to the U.S. to grill tech execs, and spammers come to Instant Articles. By Laura Hazard Owen. |
What We’re Reading
Digiday / Sahil Patel
Publishers with TV ambitions are pursuing Netflix →
Vox Media, Condé Nast Entertainment, and Fusion Media Group have all inked production and distributions with Netflix, which offers both distribution and cash.
Vulture / Nicholas Quah
Pod Save America is heading to HBO →
HBO will produce a series of hour-long specials.
Digiday / Aditi Sangal
In an era of video, podcasts struggle to break through on social media →
“We can't promote podcasts in the same way as stories," said Gold. We learned that first with video, and now we're learning that with podcasts.”
Bloomberg.com / Gerry Smith
NBC wants every viewer to count in new Olympics ad strategy →
The new system will be based “on total viewers regardless of how they're watching. So whether a fan is following figure skating on the NBC broadcast channel or tuned into curling online, that person will count the same toward the audience NBC is promising to advertisers — and cost the same for a marketer to reach.”
MIT Technology Review / Rachel Metz
Social networks are broken. Ethan Zuckerman wants to fix them. →
“I think that building an internet where we didn't have to pay for anything, because our attention was going to be the commodity that was traded, is one of the most destructive and shortsighted decisions that we could have made.”
Journalism.co.uk / Caroline Scott
The Washington Post’s latest augmented reality game brings the Winter Olympics into your living room →
Using AR, the Post’s new game projects a 3D track onto a surface, letting users see the top speeds of nine Winter Olympic events.
In Due Course / Andrew Potter
The perils of paid content →
“When a news organization relies almost entirely on its readership for its revenue, it will inevitably start to cater to what the owners perceive to be the political centre of gravity of that readership. And the readership will in turn make demands on the editors to shape the coverage in certain ways, which will tend to gradually shift that centre of gravity away from the middle, and towards the political extremes.”