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Thursday, August 16, 2018
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How The Globe and Mail is covering cannabis, Canada’s newest soon-to-be-legal industryJust for starters, the Globe will have an expanding hub of coverage online, more live events, and a high-priced premium subscription newsletter for industry professionals. By Shan Wang. |
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Has the GDPR law actually gotten European news outlets to cut down on rampant third-party cookies and content on their sites? It seems soSome third-party cookies were still present, of course. But there was a decrease in third-party content loaded from social media platforms and from content recommendation widgets. By Shan Wang. |
What We’re Reading
Nieman Foundation
“What Ever Happened to the Free Press?” →
“Given the threat to democracy and the rise of autocracy around the world, now is the time to support, not decry, legitimate journalism and to reaffirm our commitment to free speech and a free press. The Nieman Foundation stands with its fellows and with all journalists who are working hard — under increasing financial pressure, political attack, and physical threat — to discover the facts and report the truth without fear or favor.”
Medium / Rose Ciotta
The Investigative Editing Corps wants to help connect a volunteer editor with your newsroom →
“Please fill out this form so I can describe the need for extra resources in local newsrooms. I was able to test the idea in two newsrooms over the past year: The Olean Times Herald in rural New York State and the Beaver County Times in western Pennsylvania with the help of the Jim Bettinger News Innovation Fund of the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University. The fund was launched with support from the Knight Foundation and Knight fellowship alumni and friends.”
Poynter
How this Ohio newsroom got the community to contribute nearly $70,000 for journalism →
“Richland Source wanted to create partnerships that allowed local organizations to support journalism while allowing that journalism to be independent in a kind of NPR or PBS underwriting approach. The newsroom created a list of subjects they planned to cover. In about one month, 22 community organizations signed up as newsroom partners to support two major projects with $70,000. They gave money at the $1,000, $2,500 and $5,000 levels. One gave $10,000.”
San Francisco Chronicle / John Diaz
“Why the San Francisco Chronicle isn’t joining the editorial crowd on Trump” →
“It plays into Trump's narrative that the media are aligned against him. I can just anticipate his Thursday morning tweets accusing the ‘FAKE NEWS MEDIA’ of ‘COLLUSION!’ and ‘BIAS!’ He surely will attempt to cite this day of editorials to discredit critical and factual news stories in the future, even though no one involved in those pieces had anything to do with this campaign.”
Phi Delta Kappan / Alexander Russo
How to reinvent education coverage at the Los Angeles Times →
“It might be tempting to focus on broader state and national issues, but that's what the Washington Post did. In the process, the Post missed a series of scandals in the DC public school system.”
Disqus / Tony Hue
Why readers pay for news (and why they don’t) →
Based on 1,215 votes that Disqus collected over a four-week period, 30.45 percent of respondents said that they have paid for online news in the last year.
Digiday / Aditi Sangal
The Seattle Times has attracted 36,000 digital subscribers since a paywall went up in 2013 →
"Newsletters are leads for the Seattle Times funnel. At first it was many things. We wanted writers to be creative and try out a lot of things. But we've refined that to drive subscribers and then retaining them." (The Times has 183,000 subscribers to its seven different types of email offerings, like daily news and food and dining.)
J-Source / Spencer Turcotte
“We actually lost subscribers over the crossword” →
New ownership meant a new crossword, but readers “found it too cryptic.” A replacement puzzle was too “difficult to follow.” The solution: running two crosswords daily.
WAN-IFRA / Daniela Pena
A couple Latin American paywall success stories →
For one, Argentina’s Clarín signed up 100,000 digital subscribers in a little over a year.