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Tuesday, March 27, 2018
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Homepages may be dead, but are daily news podcasts the new front page?Plus: What’s going on with Stitcher Premium, Gimlet isn’t actually going to buy NPR One, and how membership works in the age of podcasts. By Nicholas Quah. |
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Newsonomics: Will Facebook’s troubles finally cure publishers of platformitis?The Cambridge Analytica story is a reminder of the value of a trusted, direct connection between publisher and consumer. Building more of them is the news industry’s best strategy available. By Ken Doctor. |
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What The Guardian’s Mobile Innovation Lab has learned after two years of experimenting with better news delivery on phonesTwo dozen experiments, one Brexit and one U.S. presidential election, and hundreds of thousands of readers later, the Mobile Innovation Lab has some thoughts about what newsroom innovation and experimentation requires on a practical level. By Shan Wang. |
What We’re Reading
Axios / Sara Fischer
The Wild West of digital marketing will be getting reined in →
“The Advertising Research Foundation will announce an initiative to develop industry guidelines on consumer data privacy and protection. Such efforts by industry groups and regulators to rein in those practices could have a significant impact on the way advertisers spend their marketing budgets online.”
Variety / Todd Spangler
Turner Sports is launching Bleacher Report Live, a paid streaming service for live sporting events →
“Interestingly, B/R Live will let users buy only a portion of NBA games that are already in progress, instead of (as with the existing model) a full subscription to a package of games. Under the ‘micro-transaction’ model, fans will be able to pay perhaps 99 cents for five minutes of live action, NBA commissioner Adam Silver said.”
Poynter / Kristen Hare
Philadelphia Media Network is adding six fellows to engage diverse audiences that they are ‘simply not reaching’ →
“The six fellows are Kristen Balderas, Jesenia De Moya Correa, TyLisa Johnson, Heather Khalifa, Aneri Pattani and DeArbea Walker. (Lenfest, the nonprofit owner of PMN, gave PMN a $650,000 grant for the two-year program.) In addition to their full-time assignments as journalists, they will all have mentors, participate in regular seminars and work on a fellows-only product development project designed to bring more younger readers to PMN's news platforms.”
Bloomberg View / Joe Nocera
Imagine if Gordon Gekko bought newspaper chains →
Heath Freeman, the hedge fund manager whose Alden Global Capital owns the Digital First Media chain, doesn’t see the papers he owns as institutions to inform the public or hold officialdom to account, but to supply cash for him to use elsewhere, writes Joe Nocera: “According to figures compiled by the union that represents workers at DFM properties, the staff of the Denver Post has fallen from 184 journalists to 99 between 2012 and 2017. Yet last year, DFM’s chief executive sent a company-wide email saying that the company was ‘solidly profitable.'”
Recode / Kurt Wagner
Facebook won’t say if Mark Zuckerberg will testify before Congress →
Officially, Facebook says that it is still undecided, and a spokesperson declined to confirm CNN's story, which states Zuckerberg ‘has come to terms with the fact that he will have to testify before Congress within a matter of weeks, and Facebook is currently planning the strategy for his testimony.’“
Digiday / Tim Peterson
Google’s General Data Protection Regulation consent plan in Europe could become a template for other tech giants →
“Under GDPR, for Google to sell targeted ads to publishers' European readers, it needs to obtain their permission. Legal experts said it's legal for Google to obtain that consent secondhand. Google also said that it would accept the role of co-controller of that data for publishers using its DoubleClick ad server and AdX ad exchange. That joint controller role means Google is taking ownership of the data and can do what it likes with it.”
Shorenstein Center / Wael Ghonim
What’s gone wrong with social media and what can we do about it? →
“We believe that all platforms using algorithms to distribute content should develop a standardized public interest API that provides a detailed overview of the information distributed on their networks, while respecting concerns for user privacy, trade secrets, and intellectual property. Social media companies already use aggregate data as a means to alter their own algorithms, introduce new product features, and define the company's strategy.”