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Tuesday, May 8, 2018
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With “straightforward and unsexy” email, The Christian Science Monitor has hit 10,000 paid digital subscribers in a yearWith a move to a paid daily email newsletter, “the conversation around what we’re going to write has totally changed.” By Laura Hazard Owen. |
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So why is a coalition of public radio giants buying a podcast app, exactly?Plus: The BBC World Service leans into podcast-first development, Revisionist History returns, and Trader Joe’s podcast is the new Two-Buck Chuck. By Nicholas Quah. |
What We’re Reading
The Information / Tom Dotan and Mike Sullivan
The New York Times generates twice as much revenue per employee as BuzzFeed →
That’s $443,000 for the Old Grey Lady versus $205,000 for the Young GIF Lady. Overall, the Times generates roughly 5.5× the revenue and has roughly 2.5× the number of employees that BuzzFeed has. Other digital publishers: $157,000 for Axios, over $700,000 for Twitter, and $289,000 for Snap.
Variety / Brian Steinberg
Vox Media punches up podcast ads with ‘Silicon Valley’ interview →
“Listeners to Recode’s Recode/Decode podcast this week may have been surprised to hear host Kara Swisher take a break from the program and start to interview Russ Hanneman, the erratic technology investor from HBO's comedy Silicon Valley. In the exchange — laden with profanity — Swisher quizzes the fictional character on his efforts to launch cryptocurrencies, which is one of the current plotlines of the program. The interview will also be heard on The Verge's Vergecast and Recode's Recode Media.”
CBC / Steve Rukavina
Montreal’s La Presse to become nonprofit entity →
“The Desmarais family has owned La Presse for more than 50 years as part of its conglomerate, Power Corp. The family will donate $50 million to the new entity before severing ties.”
Politico / Ashley Gold
Facebook rolls out issue ad rules in new move to combat Russian meddling →
Facebook will require the buyers of ads on issues like race, abortion, immigration, and guns to verify their identity and location and who is paying for them.
Poynter / Daniel Funke
These academics are on the front lines of fake news research →
“From professors to doctoral researchers, here are some of the people who are working to advance our collective understanding of misinformation.”
Columbia Journalism Review / Mathew Ingram
New data casts doubt on Facebook’s commitment to quality news →
“In its ranking for April, Fox News climbed from third place to first with more than 30 million engagements, while previous leader CNN dropped to second with 24 million. The Daily Mail rose to fourth from seventh and a site called Daily Wire, which specializes in conservative news, climbed to eighth with 14 million engagements.”
Medium / The Times Open Team
Reimagining the New York Times digital story experience →
“May 8, 2018, marks the culmination of a years-long project to create an article ecosystem that promotes internal efficiency and delivers an enhanced reading experience for our users. We now have a single responsive article for both mobile and desktop on the web, and we use a subset of the same code to render stories in our native apps, Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and our content management system.”
Washington Post / Eric Wemple
CNN fights to keep internal editorial guidelines under wraps. Why? →
It’s “a lot of lawyering to protect documents that other news organizations put online for all to view.”
Digiday / Lucia Moses
The New York Times has redesigned all its online article pages →
“For the editorial side, the goal was to have a story page designed for personalization as the Times moves in the direction of making recommendations that are specific to the user, and push people down the funnel to subscribe. The resulting page has containers at the bottom of articles that can be customized more easily than before, so they can be used to show related stories or personalized recommendations as the editor sees fit.”
Thinknum / Joshua Fruhlinger
Apple hiring activity shows a clear mission to get deeper into editorial publishing →
“We see an uptick in editorial-creation-focused openings. The above graph illustrates Apple openings filtered for ‘Editor’ while solving for positions that are not for the TV App, iTunes, App Store, and Engineers. Those jobs, as of today, include titles such as Politics Editor, Business Editor, US Editor (London Based) Apple News, and more.