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Thursday, May 31, 2018
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Newsonomics: Tronc's selling, and buying, and just generally shapeshiftingFor a company that’s known little but chaos in its short life, the degree of uncertainty is now as high as ever. Just about the only thing we know: Tronc execs will come out well in the end. By Ken Doctor. |
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How a political satire puppet show unsettled the Kenyan elite“At the start, we understand the intention of the show, and that's to promote good governance and social justice in Kenya. So before each season begins, we have a list of issues that we feel are major things that we should address or highlight.” By Loi Awat and King Muriuki. |
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The scariest chart in Mary Meeker's slide deck for newspapers has gotten even a teeny bit scarierSince 2011, the share of Americans’ media consumption that happens in print has dropped about 40 percent. But the share of American ad dollars that go to print has dropped more than 60 percent. By Joshua Benton. |
What We’re Reading
Times Open / Véronique Brossier
The New York Times’ iOS app will now let you be nicer to your data plan →
“I developed a low bandwidth mode during last year's Maker Week, The Times' annual week-long event where employees can experiment with new ideas…Our Pulitzer-winning photography is a great enhancement to any story. However, removing the visual narrative in exchange for making the story available to the bandwidth-challenged reader can be a valuable compromise.”
Columbia Journalism Review / Steven Greenhouse
What's driving the new wave of unionization sweeping digital newsrooms? →
“For all of the changes in journalism since Broun's call to arms, today's journalists are streaming into unions for many of the same reasons as reporters in the 1930s: poor wages, long hours, skimpy benefits, and worries about layoffs.”
Digiday / Max Willens
“A pain in the ass for users”: Subscription publishers wrestle with delivering exclusive audio →
“While there are a number of podcast hosting and distribution solutions, Apple and Google don't have the option of paywalling or gating content. Creators are left to deliver the content through a standalone mobile app; create a separate RSS feed, then share it only with subscribers; or hide an embeddable player on an owned and operated site.”
Journalism.co.uk / Catalina Albeanu
From social media to in-story experiences, chatbots help the BBC “do things faster and at scale” →
“The royal wedding bot was added to 25 stories about the topic, which were loaded in 3 million browsers. About 20 per cent of the people who loaded the stories used it, and each person who interacted with it asked between five to seven questions.”
Digiday / Sahil Patel
News is helping drive BuzzFeed’s Hollywood ambitions →
“With social, over-the-top and linear TV content buyers seeking more unscripted and documentary content, BuzzFeed News has an opportunity to be a bigger revenue driver for BuzzFeed while helping the company diversify its revenue streams beyond advertising. While sponsorships fund ‘AM to DM,’ Netflix is paying BuzzFeed to produce Follow This." BuzzFeed was also able to snag a license fee from Apple News, which exclusively premiered the first three episodes of the documentary series ‘Future History: 1968’ before they aired on BuzzFeed's site, apps and social channels.”
Pew Research Center / Monica Anderson and Jingjing Jiang
95 percent of U.S. teens have access to a smartphone — and 45 percent say they’re online ‘almost constantly’ →
In 2018, three online platforms other than Facebook — YouTube, Instagram and Snapchat — are used by sizable majorities of this age group. Meanwhile, 51% of teens now say they use Facebook. The shares of teens who use Twitter and Tumblr are largely comparable to the shares who did so in Pew’s 2014-2015 survey. (“Teens" refers to those ages 13 to 17.)