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Thursday, July 12, 2018
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In Alabama, a small-town paper is figuring out digital advertising — and they’re doing it liveA bet on live video, a busy news year, and maximizing staff talents let the Alexander City Outlook increase its digital ad revenue 80 percent in a year’s time. By Marlee Baldridge. |
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What kind of information — not just content — do you need as a news consumer?Pulse, a project launched by Sarah Alvarez and Andrew Haeg, aims to help news organizations text their communities to find out. By Christine Schmidt. |
What We’re Reading
Wired / Emily Dreyfuss
Judd Legum is leaving ThinkProgress to launch a one-man, paid political newsletter →
“Popular Information will be free for everyone for the first six to eight weeks in order to gain an audience; after that, the Monday edition will be free, and the other three days accessible only to paying members.”
Medium / Freia Nahser
Hi Alexa! Is the monetization conversation moot? →
“Social media had a disruptive effect on our business models, on our relationships with our audiences, and on society and democracy. It's worth thinking about this technology in an expansive way: on the one hand it's exciting and the barriers to entry are low, but it's also worth being deeply aware of the quite rapid pace that it might pick up.”
Fast Company / Aileen Kwun
Michael Bierut on how to reinvent a legacy magazine brand →
“Designers are like doctors: You're an authority, and people are trusting you to make them well. But in able to understand how to remedy them, you have to be very empathetic and have good bedside manner in order to diagnose the problem.”
The Information / Tom Dotan and Jessica Toonkel
Facebook Watch is struggling to win fans →
“In addition to lackluster viewership, [publishers] cited nearly non-existent ad revenue and poor promotion of shows by Facebook. One media executive said the ad revenue it got from its Watch show was in the ‘tens of thousands’ of dollars. Others said the revenue was negligible…’We certainly walked away from that experience saying we're not going to work with these guys again,’ said an executive at a media company.”
NPR / Tim Mak
People trust local news so much, the Russians took advantage of it →
@ElPasoTopNews, @MilwaukeeVoice, @CamdenCityNews and @Seattle_Post: “These accounts apparently never spread misinformation. In fact, they posted real local news, serving as sleeper accounts building trust and readership for some future, unforeseen effort.”
The Conversation / Charles Lewis
The pace of nonprofit media growth is picking up →
“Back when I founded the Center for Public Integrity … it was just the third of its kind in the whole country. Two decades later, when I co-founded what later morphed into the Institute for Nonprofit News, there were at least 27 of these operations.”
New York Times / Jess Bidgood
What did Baby Jessica think of the Thai cave rescue? She had no idea it happened →
“Our internet's very spotty, and we're not willing to pay for cable because it's too expensive.”
Poynter / Rachel Schallom
What it’s like to survive a newsroom shooting →
“It was just one of those things where I couldn't imagine being at work, and I couldn't imagine not being at work. Nothing felt right because it was such a horrible time.”
New York Times / Brian X. Chen
A review of Apple’s new “Screen Time” feature, which limits your (or your kid’s) iPhone use →
“My average phone use decreased 15 minutes a day, to about three and a half hours.”