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Tuesday, April 17, 2018
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The New York Times has signed up a lot of subscribers. Here’s how it plans to keep them.“My team believes that by investing in the subscribers we have and making the subscription experience better and better, we'll be able to help all parts of the subscription business.” By Meena Lee and Sarah Guinee. |
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Phew, we’ve apparently solved 97% of the podcast measurement problem — everybody relaxPlus: The impact of bad true crime podcasts, programmatic advertising is coming for your show, and the first children’s podcast festival. By Nicholas Quah. |
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Fact-checking the network: The most interesting digital and social media research of early 2018Journalist's Resource sifts through the academic journals so you don't have to. Here’s their latest roundup, including research into fake news, audience analytics, populism, VR, and fact-checking. By Denise-Marie Ordway. |
What We’re Reading
BuzzFeed / Pranav Dixit
Facebook starts a fact-checking partnership in India →
“On Tuesday, the social network announced a partnership with Boom, an independent, Mumbai-based fact-checking organization that's certified by the International Fact-Checking Network, to run a pilot project for the Indian state of Karnataka, which goes to polls on May 12. A Facebook blog post said that Boom will review English-language news stories shared on the platform that are flagged by users, check facts, and rate their accuracy.”
Wall Street Journal / Benjamin Mullin
Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight is moving to ABC News →
“What's really happening here is that FiveThirtyEight is moving to a home that's better suited to what FiveThirtyEight does,” said James Goldston, ABC News president. “Obviously, FiveThirtyEight also does sports, but the balance of what FiveThirtyEight does is politics.”
Columbia Journalism Review / Gustavo Arellano
A visit to LA Weekly, the most turbulent newsroom in America →
“I imagine that to the casual observer,” says Joe Donnelly, who served as deputy editor from 2002 until 2008 and whom the paper just profiled, “what's going on now feels a bit like fighting over who claims the remnants of a once-great building that's been bashed by various wrecking balls for more than a decade.”
BuzzFeed / Craig Silverman
How to spot a DeepFake like the Barack Obama–Jordan Peele video →
“Right now the technology to create effective fakes is widely available, thanks to FakeApp. The tech to spot them is not. This is where you come in.”
NBC News / Ken Dilanian and Rich Gardella
One tiny corner of the U.S. government pushes back against Russian disinformation →
“Polygraph is a relatively new fact-checking arm of an obscure, diminutive media effort by the U.S. to highlight Russian misdeeds and counter Russian propaganda. It’s an anomaly in the Trump administration — perhaps the only part of the U.S. government whose job is to regularly punch back against what experts say is a stream of Russian disinformation aimed at America and the West.”
TechCrunch / Sarah Perez
Netflix says it’s not looking to expand into news beyond documentaries →
“Our move into news has been misreported over and over again,” Ted Sarandos, Netflix chief content officer, said in an earnings call. “We're not looking to expand into news beyond the work that we're doing in short-form and long-form feature documentary."
News Guild of New York
New Republic editorial staff moves to unionize →
“Joining the growing ranks of editorial employees seeking union representation, including most recently at the L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune, and Mic.com, the staff of TNR hopes to collectively strengthen the magazine at a time of instability and uncertainty in the media industry.”
Medium / Malcolm Harris
How much is a word worth? →
A look at freelance pay rates over time.
Medietrends / Jan Birkemose
Facebook’s Adam Mosseri: We’ll “quite likely” launch up- and down-vote buttons →
“I think it's an established pattern that is as an effective way of having people self-monitor their conversation.”