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Wednesday, March 14, 2018
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It’s mostly older people who watch TV news. Can Netflix and Facebook change that?Facebook and Netflix are reportedly pushing into hard news video. By Laura Hazard Owen. |
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The WikiTribune Way: What it’s like to run a news site with a “neutral point of view”“It is a product for people of good will — which I know sounds ridiculously naive, but so far it’s working quite well.” By Laura Hazard Owen. |
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Enough with the “round-robin hot takes”: Techmeme tries a new kind of aggregation showPlus: Continued steady, unsexy growth for podcasts, The New York Times tries windowing with Caliphate, and in-car podcast listening is growing while audiobook listening stays flat. By Nicholas Quah. |
What We’re Reading
Verificado 2018
60 media organizations, universities and civil society groups are teaming up to fact check the Mexican election →
“This initiative builds on others that have taken place in other countries: Electionland in the US, or CrossCheck in France. The initiative is the result of a concept by Animal Politico, AJ+ Español, Pop-Up Newsroom and Newsweek Español, but #Verificado2018 is a collaborative project in which all media will contribute with their work.”
BuzzFeed / Alex Kantrowitz
Twitter is experimenting with a way to show you even more breaking news tweets →
“A Twitter spokesperson confirmed to BuzzFeed News that the company is creating new, algorithmically curated timelines of news tweets and promoting them at the top of users’ feeds in a test. (The test is an extension of Twitter's ‘Happening Now’ feature that until now only highlighted sports tweets. During big breaking news events, Twitter will promote the curated timelines via a module at the top of the home timeline.)”
TechCrunch / Ingird Lunden
Google says in 2017 it removed 3.2 billion 'bad ads,' blocked 320,000 publishers, 90,000 sites, and 700,000 mobile apps →
“It also broke out how it performed across specific categories of violations. Over 12,000 websites were blocked for scraping and using content from legitimate sites (a rise from 10,000 in 2016). And 7,000 AdWords accounts were suspended for ‘tabloid cloaking’ — presenting websites as news organizations when they are not (this is a big rise: only 1,400 sites were ID'd for tabloid cloaking in 2016).”
The Daily Beast / Maxwell Tani
Elon Musk wanted to buy The Onion. Now his team’s hiring its staffers for a secret project →
“Former Onion editor in chief Cole Bolton and executive editor Ben Berkley left the publication last year due to differences with the company’s management. Since then, the two have been in Los Angeles working on the Musk project, and they recently poached three of the site's writers and a longtime editor to join them, sources confirmed.”
The New York Times / Nate Cohn and Josh Katz
The needle’s back. Maybe this time, it will really be wrong. →
“Tonight, readers will have the option to turn the jitter off. We expect that some readers will opt to do so, but remember this: Switching it off only hides the uncertainty — it doesn't make it go away.”
BuzzFeed / Blake Montgomery
YouTube will link to Wikipedia below conspiracy theory videos →
“‘Information cues’ — links to Wikipedia — will appear alongside videos about topics that have inspired significant debate, like the moon landing and chemtrails.”
Bloomberg.com / Gerry Smith
Google will prioritize stories for paying news subscribers →
Google had already suggested that it would do this at its Digital News Innovation Summit last month.