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Tuesday, June 26, 2018
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Instead of abandoning print, the 119-year-old MIT Technology Review is doubling down on itThe rebrand expands each issue from a summary of articles into a small book discussing the past, present, and future of a single technology. By Marlee Baldridge. |
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RadioPublic opens up a new investment platform so individual users can get a stakePlus: Civil + podcasts, Anchor’s troublesome TOS, and IAB’s standards. By Nicholas Quah. |
What We’re Reading
NPR Training / Wesley Lindamood
Take our playbook: NPR’s guide to building immersive storytelling projects →
“It's possible to apply a repeatable formula to make format-breaking stories.”
Columbia Journalism Review / Allison Braden
Charlotte Agenda has a mighty business model. How’s the journalism? →
“The infrequent newsletter Charlotte Rebuttal devotes pages to criticizing the site. Twitter account @AgendaFive mocks the startup's articles with parody headlines and lambasts the perceived cozy relationship between the site's writers and the businesses they cover. Some of the city's legacy-media journalists believe Charlotte Agenda's approach fails to treat readers with intellectual respect. Others notice the page view stats that accompany every article and see the startup as part of a clickbait culture that relies on popularity to determine a story's value.”
The Wrap / Sean Burch
Tim Cook on why Apple News needs human editors: “News was kind of going a little crazy” →
“For Apple News, we felt top stories should be selected by humans, to make sure you're not picking content that strictly has the goal of enraging people.”
Amazon
Amazon launches support for Arabic language books on Kindle →
“Amazon announced today that Kindle customers around the globe can now enjoy reading from a growing selection of more than 12,000 Arabic language Kindle books on Kindle devices and the free Kindle app.”
Poynter / Al Tompkins
Gray Broadcasting to buy Raycom to create third-largest local TV owner →
“Raycom also is unusual in today’s broadcasting business in that it also holds, and now will spin off, a number of print properties including community newspapers and other properties in 23 states.”
Digiday / Max Willens
How Vogue diversified away from Facebook →
Instagram is “used as a news source now…We increased our posting schedule to include breaking news and exclusives, solely as a reaction to the audience."
Axios / Sara Fischer
Publishers ditch viral clips for longform video series →
“In the last year, we’ve seen a shift sort of after the high-high of The Facebook Live ‘watermelon explosion’ era. And publishers across the board, I think, saw a decline in how many people were watching their videos. It was an indication that it wasn’t a direction to keep pushing on.”
Washington Post / Glenn Kessler
Rapidly expanding fact-checking movement faces growing pains →
“Fact-checkers are no longer the fresh-faced journalistic reform movement pushed forward by the tail winds of positive expectations. We are wrinkly arbiters of a take-no-prisoners war for the future of the internet. And yet I think that in too many ways we still behave like in those early days when we were an experiment — when our good qualities were refreshing and our bad ones part of the learning curve.”
Poynter / Rick Edmonds
USA Today Network is launching an opinion newsletter aimed at the “center-right” →
A job posting said: “There are angry shouts on the far end of both sides, but those in the center of the country — literally and figuratively — have no one to speak to their everyday concerns on jobs and taxes, safety and security, and their children's futures.”
TechCrunch / Josh Constine
Start-up Truepic lets users verify a photo, and fights AI deep-fakes →
Truepic verifies the image hasn't been altered already, and watermarks it with a time stamp, geocode, URL and other metadata. It just raised $8 million to go a step further, and identify fake videos or photos generated by AI.