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Monday, September 17, 2018
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Newsonomics: Could a McClatchy-Tronc merger help local newspapers transition to digital?One’s a family-controlled, century-plus-old newspaper chain, known for believing in its civic mission but not for its digital strategy. The other is, well, Tronc. With an assist from L.A.’s richest man, could this be a path forward? By Ken Doctor. |
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“The cure lies within us, if we have the will and the imagination to develop it”“Because journalism is not The New York Times, or BuzzFeed, or the Miami Herald. When you strip everything down to its essential function, journalism is a system for collecting, synthesizing, verifying and distributing news. Everything else is just form.” By Heather Chaplin. |
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$20 million is heading toward local news from the Lenfest Institute and Knight Foundation“It's not just an initiative — it’s an opportunity for others to join to address these challenges for local news, around the country and in Philadelphia.” By Christine Schmidt. |
What We’re Reading
Twitter / Dan Stillman
Here’s a browser extension that will add bylines back to The New York Times homepage →
“The New York Times removed bylines from its homepage. I made a browser extension that adds them back.”
New York Times / David Streitfeld
Marc Benioff explains why he is buying Time Magazine →
“While having a massage late Sunday, the West Coast-based tech billionaire discussed via text message…”
The Guardian / Jim Waterson
U.K. young people already spend nearly as much time watching Netflix as the BBC (both TV and online) →
“This new competition has meant that the time that young audiences spend with the BBC has fallen in recent years. In TV, it's fallen from well over five hours a week eight years ago, to around three hours. In radio, from six and a half hours a week to around four and a half.”
Journalist's Resource / Denise-Marie Ordway
Facebook and the newsroom: 6 questions for Siva Vaidhyanathan →
“But as things are going, advertising-based news outlets might number in the single digits within a decade because all their money went to Facebook and Google.”
Recode / Peter Kafka
Are there any other billionaires out there to buy Fortune or Sports Illustrated? →
“Near-term questions: What happens to Fortune, Money and Sports Illustrated, the other properties Meredith has been selling for most of 2018? Now that Benioff has made his deal, it gets harder to imagine a billionaire/white knight scenario for any of the remaining properties, though Dan Gilbert's name was stlll being floated as a Sports Illustrated buyer a few weeks ago.”
The Atlantic / Scott Nover
Who’s left covering Brooklyn with the big newspapers in retreat? →
“One of the issues that we're wrestling with is: How local do we want to be, and how much do we want to zoom in on some of these stories…In the digital era, one of the big challenges is, if you report a story about a particular neighborhood, how much interest is it to people outside the other neighborhoods? How can you actually ensure that the people in the neighborhood read it? That becomes a platform and promotion and engagement challenge.”
Wall Street Journal / Jeffrey Trachtenberg
Time Magazine sold to Salesforce founder Marc Benioff and his wife, Lynne, for $190 million →
Mr. Benioff said, "We're investing in a company with tremendous impact on the world, one that is also an incredibly strong business. That's what we're looking for when we invest as a family.”
cleveland.com / Chris Quinn
Cleveland.com is expanding its “right to be forgotten” experiment →
“We’re taking an idea from our colleagues at our sister site, nj.com, and forming a newsroom committee to consider requests for removing names from stories where search engines can find them. Once a month or so, we will put the requests on the table for discussion.”
Digiday / Lucinda Southern
“The writing is on the wall”: Unsteady waters for UK publisher social-first publisher Unilad →
“The fate of this social-first publisher is a cautionary tale about overrelying on Facebook for audience, as casualties like LittleThings in the U.S. have shown, as well as access to funding. Last summer a court ruled Unilad owed its former owner a 33 percent stake in the company.”
The Washington Post
Spain’s El País will be powered by The Washington Post’s Arc →
“The agreement also includes Diario AS, one of the most influential sports news and information sites in the world, which draws more than 36 million readers.”
Medium / Tamsin Green
How BBC News Labs is experimenting with AMP’s new “Stories” format for news →
“With our stories published and added to the sitemap, we waited for the traffic to roll in. Unfortunately, it wasn't that simple — without promotion on the BBC site, very few viewers were discovering the stories through search alone. Following a blog on the Russian site and some promotion across social media, our numbers did increase a bit. Our data shows that the Russian-language AMP Stories actually received close to six times as many total views as the English-language Stories.”