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Tuesday, September 18, 2018
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The Guardian is getting into the daily news podcast game — here’s what it learned the last time it tried“If you didn't read The Guardian or know anything about it, you should be able to listen to that podcast and get an idea of the stories we thought were important. We certainly tried to reflect The Guardian's values.” By Caroline Crampton. |
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The New York Times Magazine wants to send you on an audio “voyage,” featuring bats, rats, and volcanosPlus: The real-world impact of true-crime shows, Serial prepares its return, and an NBC podcast built around an Instagram account. By Nicholas Quah. |
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Cataclysm looming or a business maturing? How to interpret all the recent shakeups in the podcast industryThe past few years marked a period of unchecked experimentation on a large scale. Now, the tests have been run, the results have come in, and the time has come to shift resources based on what was found. By Nicholas Quah. |
What We’re Reading
The Verge / Dieter Bohn
Google is giving up some control of the AMP format →
“It plans to move the AMP Project to a ‘new governance model,’ which is to say that decisions about the code will be made by a committee that includes non-Googlers. Until now, final decisions about AMP's code have been made by Malte Ubl, the tech lead for the AMP Project at Google.”
Wired / Jack Dorsey
Jack Dorsey nominates ProPublica as a company that will “shake up” digital in the next 25 years →
“I've watched how they use Twitter's technology. Twitter's superpower is conversation; it's carrying the chatter. So traditionally, journalists write a few characters and tweet a link to their article and that's it. But ProPublica threads the key parts of an article, so you end up with a thread that's 10 tweets long. We asked them why they do that and they said, ‘We're going to meet people where they are. They're coming to a service that is focused on brevity, so we need to translate our stories into that format.'”
Facebook / Mollie Vandor
Facebook starts indexing news Pages for its Ad Archive →
“Facebook’s Ad Archive, launched in June, lets people search for ads related to politics or issues of national importance, such as education or immigration. When news outlets run ads on Facebook to promote stories involving elected officials, candidates for public office, or important national issues, we include them in the archive. We believe transparency across all ads is important, but we also know that news is different from other types of political and issue ads, which is why the archive displays them in different sections.”
Breaker / Corin Faife
Here is a crypto tarot reader’s take on Civil →
“So, starting from the eight of pentacles, which is inverted. You know, I don't think the token will stay at the same price as the ICO. I think it's gonna trade lower than the ICO. They will be able to make some kind of merger or infusion with another entity, but the publicity around it is not gonna go so well. And It looks like there are some people who are considerably attached to the project who won't be around for long; people who've been in the project for a long time will be leaving. Some of them might come back again at this merging stage. Let me just pull a couple of other cards…oh my goodness. Well. The launch is not gonna be that successful. You know, it's not a shining time for any crypto really, so I don't think this will go well. That's all I can say.”
Twitter
Twitter will make it easier to get a reverse-chronological, non-algorhithmic feed →
“We've learned that when showing the best Tweets first, people find Twitter more relevant and useful. However, we’ve heard feedback from people who at times prefer to see the most recent Tweets…So, we're working on providing you with an easily accessible way to switch between a timeline of Tweets that are most relevant for you and a timeline of the latest Tweets. You'll see us test this in the coming weeks.”
Columbia Journalism Review / Howard R. Gold
Ten years after the financial crisis, business journalism awaits its reckoning →
“That business journalists are still defending their role in a meltdown that happened ten years ago speaks to how deep the criticism cut and how raw the debate still is. I was editor of Barrons.com before the crisis and didn't see it coming, either.”
TechCrunch / Ingrid Lunden
Amazon taps Getty to provide images for visual searches on the Echo Show and Echo Spot →
“On the side of Getty, the company has for years been trying out different ideas to generate revenues from its vast image catalog. Many of these haven't really panned out — as evidenced by the fact that the Getty family picked up an asset for $3 billion from an owner that had paid $3.3 billion for it — but the sheer numbers associated with the business — over 300 million images, 200 million digitised — also indicate that there is an inherent value as well.”
Wall Street Journal / Benjamin Mullin
Gawker’s new owner Bryan Goldberg plans to spend at least $5 million in the first year of relaunch, mostly on hiring editorial staff →
“The tone of the publication will be determined by the editors and writers hired to run the new site, Mr. Goldberg said, adding that the relaunched Gawker will feature ‘significant original reporting.'”
The Atlantic / Sigal Samuel
How citizen journalists and scholars are using the internet to find China’s internment camps for Muslims →
“Seeing the satellite imagery convinced him that it really was possible that Muslims were being detained en masse in his native country—and that some of the camps kept growing, month after month. He started posting the images on his blog and his Twitter account, along with the coordinates of the facilities, so that anybody could examine them. This project, to which he said he devoted an hour of free time each day on average, soon attracted the attention of professional journalists and scholars. They began to collaborate.”
European Journalism Centre / Ben Whitelaw
Why European journalists struggle to engage with their communities →
“After 25 phone interviews, 11 news organisation visits in five countries and one survey, here's what we found.”
Columbia Journalism Review / Hannah Frishberg
Roosevelt Island has three news outlets and no working water fountains →
“It's a lot of drama in an enclosed community. ‘There's a small number of institutions on the Island people care about,’ O'Conor says. ‘It's a small town next to the biggest city in the world where everyone knows too much about each other.'”
The Intercept / Cora Currier
Can the U.S. government spy on journalists through a foreign intelligence law? →
“Journalists merely by being contacted by a FISA target might be subject to monitoring — these guidelines, as far as we can tell, don't contemplate that situation or add any additional protections,” said Ramya Krishnan, a staff attorney with the Knight First Amendment Institute.