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Tuesday, July 3, 2018
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Thanks to California, a news site (or other business) now has to let you cancel your subscription onlinePower to the people (who hate talking on phones). By Shan Wang. |
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Enough with the “Netflix for audio.” Podcast companies should take a cue from meditation apps insteadThere’s a lot that subscription on-demand audio gambits can learn from the increasingly formidable world of mindfulness apps. By Nicholas Quah. |
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Newsonomics: Atlantic Media’s Quartz sale is as quirky and quartzy as the site itselfIts Japanese buyer Uzabase promises to speed up expansion possibilities for Quartz — and to help build out subscription products. By Ken Doctor. |
What We’re Reading
Poynter / Taylor Blatchford
Digital literacy project sets an ambitious goal: Wikipedia pages for 1,000 local newspapers →
Making [the publication date, circulation size, and editor] more visible will help readers verify the legitimacy of news organizations, Caulfield said, or find out if a paper has a partisan "axe to grind."
Poynter / Daniel Funke
On China’s WeChat, rogue fact-checkers are tackling the app’s fake news problem →
“The No Melon debunking operation is one example of a handful of ‘guerrilla’ debunking projects on WeChat, which has about 1 billion monthly active users worldwide. Another, the Center Against Overseas False Rumors' Anti-Rumor project, also started in the aftermath of the 2016 election and has about 22 volunteer writers. It publishes between three and four fact checks per week to a subscriber base of about 10,000 people.”
Recode / Kurt Wagner
Facebook’s year of privacy mishaps continues — this time with a new software bug that “unblocked” people →
Facebook revealed that a “software bug ‘unblocked’ some people who had previously been blocked by another user, meaning the unblocked user could suddenly see some posts from the person who blocked them. The bug also meant that the person who had been blocked may have been able to reach out via Messenger to the person who blocked them, Facebook said in a blog post. The bug affected 800,000 users and was live for about a week at the end of May and early June.”
Washington Post / Annie Gowen
As mob lynchings fueled by WhatsApp sweep India, authorities struggle to combat fake information on the messaging platform →
“As India's government weighs what to do, local authorities have been left to tackle fake news as best they can, issuing warnings and employing low-tech methods such as hiring street performers and ‘rumor busters’ to visit villages to spread public awareness. One such ‘rumor buster’ was killed by a mob Thursday in the eastern state of Tripura.”
The Splice Newsroom / Alan Soon
18 months in, the South China Morning Post is on a different footing. Here’s how CEO Gary Liu has been trying to turn things around →
“The number one issue with the news organization that I had inherited was the completely, almost irrational, lack of transparency. The default operating cadence was that the senior leadership would make decisions behind closed doors. They would communicate just enough for the operational teams to know what they had to do and almost never communicate the reasons why, and certainly never involved most of the organization in decision-making.”
Digiday / Sahil Patel
Half of Telemundo’s live digital viewers for the World Cup are watching on mobile devices →
“The NBCUniversal broadcaster, which has Spanish-language rights to air every World Cup game in the U.S., said between 48 and 51 percent of its live digital viewers consistently watch the games on their smartphones. The other half flips between connected TV and desktop streaming, said Peter Blacker, evp of digital media and emerging business for NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises.”
The Information / Jessica Lessin
The Information made a documentary series about the wonders of charging people for news →
“I am delighted to share a trailer for the film, to be released this fall. It gives you a taste of how five wonderful journalists, from very different backgrounds, found the drive to give up fancy jobs to do something people don't often associate with reporters: start a business. And it chronicles the highs and lows of what happened next.”