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Thursday, September 6, 2018
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63 industry leaders, 40 organizations, and 5 opportunities for revitalization on the horizon of local newsDiversifying revenue, building a culture of philanthropy, seeding growth development, and more. By Christine Schmidt. |
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BuzzFeed, Bourdieu, and Samantha Bee: Here’s a collection of new research on where journalism is headed“Recent love letters to journalistic innovations today read like declarations of world peace in 1938. Resisting the temptation to find sure-fire redeemers of journalism is important.” By Joshua Benton. |
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10,000 members, more big donors, new kinds of readers: Here’s where the Texas Tribune wants to be by 2025“Ultimately, our sustainability as a news organization will depend heavily on…fellow Texans who believe enough in our mission to invest in it.” By Laura Hazard Owen. |
What We’re Reading
INMA / Shelley Seale
Axios is up to 11.8 million monthly uniques and 360,000 newsletter subscribers →
“We try not to think about time spent as an important piece of data. That's just an incentive to waste a reader's time, we think. We look instead at how many articles the reader clicks through.”
Medium / Rich Gordon
Are you a coder who wants to become a programmer-journalist? Here’s a free master’s at Northwestern for you →
“There's enough money left for just two more skilled developers — people with computer science degrees and/or software experience — to spend a year earning a journalism master's degree at Medill, tuition-free.”
Lenfest Institute / Anh Nguyen
How a local Chinese newspaper used WeChat to reach new readers and build a business →
“The readership of Metro Chinese Weekly consists mostly of local Chinese Americans, Chinese students studying abroad, and Chinese travelers visiting Philadelphia. Tsao realized the untapped potential of reaching a wider audience through WeChat, and Metro Chinese Weekly's official account, PhillyGuide, was created in 2015.”
Wall Street Journal / Benjamin Mullin
Bleacher Report is launching an NFL show for gamblers →
“Bleacher Report, a site owned by AT&T Inc.'s WarnerMedia, isn't the first media organization to see opportunity in sports betting-related content…. [but] the new Bleacher Report show will come with a twist: Mr. Lefkoe will be given $5,000 to wager on football games over the course of the 2018-2019 NFL season, which gets underway Thursday. He'll find a fan to place a bet with, with Mr. Simms providing commentary on the team selected.”
Slate / Aaron Gordon
How much can the Athletic grow as a disruptor if it reads like the newspapers it’s poaching from? →
“It's difficult to square the Athletic's claim that it's providing stories that readers cannot find elsewhere with the fact that almost all of its writers and editors come from that most conventional of elsewheres. . Its most high-profile hires have been the guys Mather and Hansmann admired most growing up, when sports writing was almost entirely white and male.”
Columbia Journalism Review / Lyz Lenz
An analysis of how Tucker Carlson started shouting so much →
“The question, What happened to Tucker Carlson? is worth answering. If we can figure out how an intelligent writer and conservative can go from writing National Magazine Award–nominated articles and being hailed by some of the best editors in the business, to shouting about immigrants on Fox News, perhaps we can understand what is happening to this country, or at least to journalism, in 2018.”
Journalism.co.uk / Marcela Kunova
Correctiv, the German non-profit investigative outlet, is adding a local arm inspired by a UK model →
Correctiv is adopting the model of the UK collaborative reporting project Bureau Local: “In just 18 months, the Bureau Local has established a journalistic infrastructure enabling over 750 journalists, technologists, community-minded citizens and specialist contributors to work together to tell important local and national stories.” Read more about Correctiv in our past coverage here.
CNN Money / Brian Stelter
The story behind the New York Times’ anonymous op-ed blasting Trump →
New York Times op-ed page editor Jim Dao “declined to say whether he pressed the person to speak on the record. He said, ‘we felt it was a very strong piece written by someone who had something important to say and who’s speaking from a place of their own sense of personal ethics and conscience. That was our main focus.'”
Washington Post / Tony Romm and Craig Timberg
What happened during Facebook and Twitter’s testimony before Congress →
“The era of the Wild West in social media is coming to an end,” Sen. Mark Warner said. “Where we go from here is an open question.” Plus a guest appearance from Alex Jones.
The Verge / James Vincent
Google launches a search engine to help scientists sift through datasets →
Dataset Search will be a sibling of Google Scholar: “Institutions that publish their data online, like universities and governments, will need to include metadata tags in their webpages that describe their data, including who created it, when it was published, how it was collected, and so on. This information will then be indexed by Google's search engine and combined with information from the Knowledge Graph. (So if dataset X was published by CERN, a little information about the institute will also be included in the search.)”
The New York Times / Kevin Roose
Yep, Facebook Groups are now private hubs for fringe groups →
“Much of the empire built by Alex Jones, the Infowars founder and social media shock jock, vanished this summer when Facebook suspended Mr. Jones for 30 days and took down four of his pages for repeatedly violating its rules against bullying and hate speech. YouTube, Apple and other companies also took action against Mr. Jones. But a private Infowars Facebook group with more than 110,000 members, which had survived the crackdown, remained a hive of activity.”
Reuters / Joshua Franklin
The Getty family is regaining control of Getty Images after 10 years of private equity control →
“The deal values Getty at slightly below $3 billion, including debt, less than the $3.3 billion valuation Carlyle placed on the company when it acquired a majority stake six years ago.”