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Wednesday, August 29, 2018
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Newsonomics: It looks like Tronc is about to be chopped up and sold for partsRupert Murdoch owning the New York Daily News? A McCormick controlling the Chicago Tribune again? The L.A. Times pulling a Washington Post, aiming to run the industry’s underlying infrastructure? A lot of change is coming soon. By Ken Doctor. |
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Why do billionaires decide to buy newspapers (and why should we be happy when they do)?“If the Post is like Amazon, happy to sell individual slices of its vertically integrated whole, the Times is perhaps more like Apple, bringing its ethos and voice to a more diverse array of products.” By Austin Smith. |
What We’re Reading
New York Times / Catie Edmondson
Trump’s Canadian newsprint tariffs are overturned →
“In a statement announcing the decision, the International Trade Commission said it has ‘determined that a U.S. industry is not materially injured or threatened with material injury by reason of imports of uncoated groundwood paper from Canada that the U.S. Department of Commerce (Commerce) has determined are subsidized and sold in the United States at less than fair value.'”
Medium / Fergus Bell
More than 100 journalists will collaborate on a pop-up newsroom to fact-check Sweden’s elections →
“As well as real-time election monitoring and coverage, this live environment will promote hands-on training and foster editorial and technical innovation. Sweden's media houses and Swedish voters will be able to ask the newsroom to turn its attention to specific subjects if required.”
Digiday / Lucia Moses
Facebook’s head of news products Alex Hardiman defects for The Atlantic →
“Hardiman will serve as chief business and product officer at The Atlantic. At Facebook, one of her big projects was developing a subscription product for publishers, which released some results in June that it called "promising" but were still small and limited to 12 publishers.”
Washington Post / Abby Olheiser and Alex Horton
A short investigation into Trump’s claims of ‘RIGGED’ Google results against him →
“In all likelihood, however, Trump is repeating a claim that first appeared two days ago on PJ Media, a conservative news site, which published a piece with the headline, ’96 Percent of Google Search Results for “Trump” News Are from Liberal Media Outlets.’ The PJ Media author performed the search “Trump” in Google News a handful of times across a few different computers and then listed the news outlets appearing in the first 100 results for each query.”
Poynter / Jake Batsell
From rural news audiences to Russian tweets, this new research has some useful takeaways for reporters →
“A major part of the Monitor's strategy was paying visits to ‘liars tables,’ the exclusively male breakfast gatherings where farmers, coal miners and retirees meet up at general stores to talk about local happenings. While liars table regulars expressed feelings of general distrust about media coverage, they gave the Monitor credit for showing up and ‘were willing to wait and see what might happen,’ Wenzel said.”
TechCrunch / Catherine Shu
Twitter suspends 486 more accounts for “engaging in coordinated manipulation” →
“While many of the accounts removed last week appeared to originate from Iran, Twitter said this time that about 100 of the latest batch to be suspended claimed to be in the United States. Many of these were less than a year old and shared ‘divisive commentary.’ These 100 accounts tweeted a total of 867 times and had 1,268 followers between them.”
Variety / Robert Mitchell
Facebook Watch rolls out internationally →
Fidji Simo, Facebook’s head of video, “said it had taken a year for the service to launch internationally as the company wanted to beta test in one market first. She also said Facebook wanted to expand its Ad Breaks service at the same time as the international launch, to ensure that partners had a way to monetize their content.”
Axios / Sara Fischer
Progress News Network is launching a daily 2.5-minute Facebook newscast for people over 35 →
“The newscast will launch on Sept. 4 and will air daily on Facebook. It aims to target a general population of news consumers from all sides with the exception of ‘pro-Trump’ Republicans.”
Digiday / Tim Peterson
The Young Turks now has 27,000 paying subscribers accounting for half of its revenue →
“TYT Network's subscriber base remained relatively flat ‘for a long time’ until June 2018, according to Uygur. That month, TYT Network introduced a lower $4.99-a-month tier and reserved some perks, like invites to company events and a swag bag, for the $10 tier. The company had tested the reduced price and saw that people were 2.4 times more likely to sign up for the $4.99 option than the $10 tier, said Uygur. “