YULI AHMADA: Oktober 2018

Rabu, 31 Oktober 2018

Sorry, New York: Los Angeles is making a play for the Podcast Capital of the World title: The latest from Nieman Lab

Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Sorry, New York: Los Angeles is making a play for the Podcast Capital of the World title

Plus: The CBC joins the daily podcast game, smart speakers approach a tipping point, and the growing podcast scene in the Middle East. By Nicholas Quah.

Younger Europeans are tuning out of TV news — but they’re into newspaper websites

“While younger Europeans are less likely than those 50 and older to use public news media, they are more likely to name a newspaper or magazine brand as their main source for news.” By Laura Hazard Owen.

Google’s terrible new news feed thinks I’m mainly interested in misogynists and down jackets

What We’re Reading

Medium / Elizabeth Raben

Q&A: Andy Donohue, managing editor at The Center for Investigative Reporting →

“In your quest to be unique, you can end up covering stuff that nobody cares about, and there's a reason it never got any coverage. It's really a fine balance — finding stuff that resonates with people, but also making sure that we're totally unique and saying things that they've never heard from anybody else.”

The Washington Post / Margaret Sullivan

Voter suppression is a crucial story in America, but broadcast news mostly shrugs →

“Obsessed with all things Trump — caravan invasion, anyone? — and occupied with breaking news about hurricanes and mass shootings, the networks have almost ignored voter suppression.”

BuzzFeed News / Charlie Warzel and Ryan Mac

Twitter just launched a midterms page and it’s already surfacing fake news →

“The tab also promoted tweets from pardoned felon and pro-Trump media pundit Dinesh D’Souza, and a tweet from pro-Trump pundit Bill Mitchell that falsely claims Democrats paid for the Honduran caravan to ‘spawn a marauding band of fighting age men.'”

reddit / Gromer Jeffers, Bud Kennedy, Abby Livingston, Madlin Mekelburg, Jeremy Wallace

Five reporters from local Texas outlets are sharing an AMA about the Senate race →

“I’ve heard that voting machines are switching the votes. Can you confirm? If true, what is the reaction of the state and/or the voters themselves?”

The Atlantic / Taylor Lorenz

Twitter should kill the retweet →

“The quest to accrue retweets regularly drives users to tweet outlandish comments, extremist opinions, fake news, or worse. Many users knowingly tweet false and damaging information and opinions in an effort to go viral via retweets. Entire Twitter accounts have been built on this strategy.”

Columbia Journalism Review / Jonathan Albright

The rumor caravan: From Twitter reply to disaster →

“Where and when did these claims originate, and how did they creep into news headlines? In my research, published on Medium last week, I found the earliest social media posts that kicked off the Soros-funded-migrant caravan narrative.”

New York Times / Alexandra Alter

Tiny books “the size of a cellphone and made with paper as thin as onion skin” →

“When Julie Strauss-Gabel, the president and publisher of Dutton Books for Young Readers, discovered ‘dwarsliggers’ — tiny, pocket-size, horizontal flipbacks that have become a wildly popular print format in the Netherlands — it felt like a revelation.”

Columbia Journalism Review / Adina Solomon

What is lost when contracts bar freelancers from discussing pay? →

“I found that a slate of companies — Newsweek, News Deeply, America's Test Kitchen have issued contracts that either specifically bar discussing payment amount for an assignment or prohibit disclosing contract terms altogether.”

Digiday / Max Willens

To get to 3 million subscribers, The Wall Street Journal focuses on product testing →

“Gray's team focuses on product changes that can be implemented as quickly and cheaply as possible, like the copy in existing marketing messages, their placement and design. Of the adjustments that improved outcomes by more than 4 percent, over two-thirds involved text or design.”

Axios / Sara Fischer

The Athletic raises $40 million, for a total of $70 million →

“The money will be used to invest in audience, data and editorial teams that drive subscriptions, per Athletic co-founder Alex Mather, as well as podcasts and video teams. Prior funds were used to poach veteran sports journalists with big salaries.”

The Verge / Dieter Bohn

Will Google’s homepage news feed repeat Facebook’s mistakes? →

“It seems like a pretty inopportune time for Google to decide to put yet another news feed in front of millions (or billions) of people. There has probably not been a time in 2018 when Google could have chosen to launch a new news feed that wouldn't have made me feel this way, but this week seems particularly bad.”

Lawfare / Quinta Jurecic

Gab vanishes, and the internet shrugs →

“As of Sunday, Gab is no longer on the internet, and the tech community is mostly saying ‘good riddance.’ And this change of heart is noteworthy in and of itself.”

Selasa, 30 Oktober 2018

Hunting for reader revenue, Scroll sets up shop for 2019 with more publishers and $10 million raised: The latest from Nieman Lab

Monday, October 29, 2018

Hunting for reader revenue, Scroll sets up shop for 2019 with more publishers and $10 million raised

“The model is designed to reward engagement and loyalty. We think those things are the currency of publishing in the future, that relationship with the consumer. The better you do at that, the better you do under Scroll.” By Christine Schmidt.

A massive Facebook group — made up almost entirely of women — is helping to solve a case gripping Australia

“We couldn’t get the plans, but through the audience we managed to do it. I feel like screaming, hurray, how awesome.” By Laura Hazard Owen.

In its reconstruction phase, everything is up for grabs at Twitter — even the like button?

What We’re Reading

The Cut / Noreen Malone

The Skimm has the ear of millions of women. What are they going to do with it? →

“It's also not that much of an outlier, as inclined as its critics may be to regard the Skimm as some unique degradation. Many more people now get their view of the world not through the original reporting source but some kind of ‘value added’ digest, newsletter or otherwise. Bryan Curtis, the editor-at-large of the Ringer, who writes about the press, says that the tone of the newsletter — like that of Twitter — is best understood as post–Daily Show, which almost everything else is now too: ‘Serious news item plus knowing summary plus pop-culture reference. That's the grammar we now process news in.’ Sites like Vox — which proudly caters to wonks in bone-dry prose — also do patient, from-the-beginning explainers. In other words, the objections to the Skimm are more aesthetic than political.”

CNN / Brian Stelter

A “suspicious package” headed to CNN’s Atlanta headquarters has been intercepted off-site →

“All mail, at all CNN domestic bureaus, is being screened at off-site facilities as of last Wednesday, so this package would NOT have come directly to the CNN Center, even if it hadn’t been intercepted first,” CNN president Jeff Zucker wrote. “Our screening process is working and we will keep you updated as we learn more.”

Lenfest Institute / Joseph Lichterman

Using “radical hospitality” to bring communities together to discuss important issues →

“91 percent of participants said they were inspired to act on the issue by staying in touch with people they met at the event or getting involved in projects dealing with housing issues. 89 percent of participants said they planned to discuss what they learned at the Story Circle with family or friends. And 82 percent of participants said they met people they wouldn't typically meet and were exposed to new perspectives.”

The Verge / Andrew Liptak

Two more platforms have suspended Gab in the wake of Pittsburgh shooting →

“A profile on the site maintained by the alleged shooter, 46-year-old Robert Bowers, surfaced the immediate aftermath of the Pittsburgh shooting, which left eleven people dead and several others wounded. Screenshots revealed that Bowers had published numerous anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and that has placed Gab under increased scrutiny.”

National Observer / Robert Hiltz and Bruce Livesey

Canada’s Postmedia continues its downward spiral →

“Despite crying poverty to its employees, Postmedia's top executives continue to enrich themselves with growing amounts of compensation. A financial statement issued last year revealed that the company gave its top executives a 33 per cent pay raise in 2017 — from $3.9-million to $5.3-million. CEO Paul Godfrey's compensation jumped from $1.66-million to $1.74-million, while COO Andrew MacLeod's increased from $721,000 to $841,000.”

CPJ / Robert Mahoney

CPJ calls on Trump to dial back rhetoric against media and critics →

“While we cannot say that Trump’s speech directly incites violence, it is clear that some people are influenced by it. Journalists across the country feel unsafe because of the constant hostility and belittling of their role in our democracy by the head of state. It needs to stop.”

Variety / Janko Roettgers

Imax closes its New York VR center and forecasts no new VR investments for 2019 →

“Imax had plans to launch a total of 10 VR centers in multiple countries by the end of that year…. However, this year, Imax has been striking a decidedly different tone. The company closed a separate New York location in June, and shut down its Shanghai VR center in early July. ‘The consumer reaction was extremely positive, but the numbers just weren't there,’ Gelfond said during an earnings call earlier this year.”

Facebook Newsroom / Nathaniel Gleicher

Facebook removes 82 pages, groups and accounts for coordinated inauthentic behavior that originated in Iran and targeted people in the US and UK →

“The Page administrators and account owners typically represented themselves as US citizens, or in a few cases UK citizens — and they posted about politically charged topics such as race relations, opposition to the President, and immigration. Despite attempts to hide their true identities, a manual review of these accounts linked their activity to Iran. We also identified some overlap with the Iranian accounts and Pages we removed in August.”

Sabtu, 27 Oktober 2018

Yes, Facebook referral traffic crashed and burned — but not for these nonprofit publishers: The latest from Nieman Lab

Friday, October 26, 2018

Yes, Facebook referral traffic crashed and burned — but not for these nonprofit publishers

“Bottom line: The decline in referrals to publishers from Facebook is not universal, and in the face of those declines, other sources of traffic are more important than ever.” By Andrew Gruen.

What to know about WhatsApp in Brazil ahead of Sunday’s election

“I don’t know where they found my phone number.” By Laura Hazard Owen.

Snapchat is doing badly, and publishers are getting out

Meanwhile, Apple News keeps doing its (sometimes inscrutable) thing. By Laura Hazard Owen.

What We’re Reading

Twitter / Trushar Barot

Facebook hires the BBC’s Trushar Barot to lead its Integrity Initiatives in India →

“This will mean leading their work on combating fake news and digital misinformation, developing digital literacy training programmes, working with startups and most importantly, coming up with big ideas that will bring significant positive impact in the digital development of a country with over a billion people.”

Miami Herald / Scott Berson

McClatchy’s VP of news, Tim Grieve, is leaving for a “new venture in the media space” →

“Grieve oversaw the company's ‘Reinvention’ initiative, which tasked newsrooms with rethinking which stories should be covered and how they would make the most impact.”

Recorded Future / Insikt Group

North Korean elites’ preferred Western social media platform is LinkedIn →

“While the majority of U.S. services continued to experience decreased North Korean leadership use, since April 2018, we observed an increase in the use of LinkedIn.”

Reuters Institute for the Study of JOurnalism / Emma-Leena Ovaskainen

Nine types of visual storytelling on mobile →

For one, “longform scrollytelling.”

Recode / Shirin Ghaffary

As big tech struggles to curb hate speech, civil rights groups have some recommendations →

“This is the first time we've formally put pen to paper, saying this is the kind of world we'd like to see.”

Wall Street Journal / Ben Mullin

Tony Haile’s Scroll expands ahead of 2019 launch →

“Scroll has raised $7 million in new funding for its planned hiring, which includes engineers, marketers, customer-service representatives and executives, said Tony Haile, the company's founder and chief executive. By the end of 2019, Scroll plans to employ roughly 40 staffers, up from its current 10.”

The Outline / Josh Topolsky

The virtual reality dream is dying →

“The media (yes, me included, at least early on) has gone through several cycles of fawning, optimistic prognostication, and… wishful thinking? — but for all the hype we have very little consumer interest to show for it.”

Poynter / Daniel Funke

Facebook is now downranking stories with false headlines →

“As of this week, fact-checking outlets working with Facebook can debunk and slow the spread of headlines that are false even if the whole story isn't — a change that adds nuance to the types of misinformation the platform is asking fact-checkers to flag.”

Digiday / Max Willens

Facebook and Google’s subscription tools offer publishers modest improvements →

“Publishers contacted for this story praised the platforms for being communicative and committed to these products but also groused that the tools were cumbersome to implement and had limited returns.”

Local News Initiative / Mark Jacob

Local news is the “biggest crisis” in journalism, but a sustainability campaign is underway →

“This is the first in a series of articles on America’s local news crisis and the work of the newly launched Local News Initiative at Northwestern University’s Medill School.”

Kamis, 25 Oktober 2018

WikiTribune is handing the keys more completely to its users (after laying off its journalists): The latest from Nieman Lab

Wednesday, October 24, 2018

WikiTribune is handing the keys more completely to its users (after laying off its journalists)

“Effectively, what we are doing is inverting completely how people normally think about communities and journalists — the community is not here to merely help the journalists. Rather the journalists will be here to work for the community.” By Joshua Benton.

A referendum on media experiments? Here’s what news organizations are toying with in the 2018 election cycle

People from 433 out of 435 congressional districts have signed up for ProPublica’s User Guide to Democracy, reporters from the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Times want you to text them, and more. By Christine Schmidt.

What We’re Reading

CNN / Newsroom

CNN evacuated its New York building after receiving a suspicious package →

President Obama, Hillary Clinton, George Soros, representatives of Congress, and more also received packages today and earlier this week. At an afternoon event, President Trump said “acts or threats of political violence of any kind have no place in the United States of America.”

LogRocket / Fatih Kadir Akin

Stop building websites with infinite scroll! →

“Social media applications work with time. The users' intention is to navigate the past. In this case, infinite scroll makes the navigation easier…But if you have an e-commerce, news, magazine or a blog website and the user’s intention is to move around the items or articles, infinite scroll becomes a nightmare for them.”

International News Media Association (INMA)

4 kinds of content readers will actually pay for →

“Content helping the reader understand the news flow”; “content close to readers in their daily life”; “content helping readers understand the world we live in”; and “content close to readers' interests and identities.”

Twitter / Tim Cook

Apple CEO Tim Cook wants a GDPR for the rest of the world →

“It all boils down to a fundamental question: What kind of world do we want to live in? GDPR has shown us all that good policy and political will can come together to protect the rights of everyone. We believe that privacy is a fundamental human right.”

Poynter / Daniel Funke

Facebook is now downranking stories with false headlines, after the ThinkProgress/Weekly Standard fact-checking spat →

“Now fact-checkers can either rate an entire story or just a headline as false, although the latter is demoted in News Feed less than the former. …The new rating is a result of ongoing confusion among fact-checkers about how to tackle stories that could contain valid factual or analytical content, but are posted with an inaccurate headline on Facebook. That confusion came to head in mid-September, when The Weekly Standard Fact Check, one of the company's fact-checking partners, rated a ThinkProgress story about Brett Kavanaugh as false, downranking it in News Feed.”

BuzzFeed News / Craig Silverman

Apps installed on millions of Android phones tracked user behavior to carry out an ad fraud scheme →

“One way the fraudsters find apps for their scheme is to acquire legitimate apps through We Purchase Apps and transfer them to shell companies. They then capture the behavior of the app's human users and program a vast network of bots to mimic it, according to analysis from Protected Media, a cybersecurity and fraud detection firm that analyzed the apps and websites at BuzzFeed News’ request.”

Columbia Journalism Review / Elizabeth Hewitt

How Sarah Kliff’s ER transparency project for Vox started with a $629 Band-Aid →

“Since Kliff started the project, lawmakers have introduced multiple bills to address surprise medical fees, including legislation sponsored by New Hampshire democratic Senator Maggie Hassan that aides told CJR is inspired by Kliff's reporting.”

Digiday / Max Willens

Hearst has created a high-end yoga mat →

As Felix Salmon put it: “because that makes more sense than trying to sell magazines.”

Twitter / Choire Sicha

A reminder to be skeptical of publishers’ statements about their affiliate revenue →

“One of the many frequent misleading statements in media reporting is how publishers describe affiliate revenue (usually from Amazon referral fees). Hearst says it generates $200 million of transactions in a year. That means they gross maybe $12M or, charitably, $18M a year.” [thread]

Media Voices / Claus Enevoldsen

“People really come to Flipboard because they want to advance themselves” →

“Early this year we did…a mindset study where we went out and we studied over 2,000 smartphone users in the US and UK to see what were their motivations to open social apps and news apps…And one of the things that stood out was that Flipboard over-indexed dramatically on the motivation to invest in yourself.”

The Information / Jessica Tookel

Apple’s TV subscription service will be available globally →

“Apple is working to launch its new TV service in the U.S. in the first half of next year and will make the app available globally in the following months, the people said. It will include Apple's original programs free to Apple device owners and also will enable users to sign up for TV network subscriptions owned by other companies,” à la Amazon Channels.

Rabu, 24 Oktober 2018

How I cheated the Apple Podcast charts for $5: The latest from Nieman Lab

Tuesday, October 23, 2018

How I cheated the Apple Podcast charts for $5

Plus: How your favorite shows are covering the midterm elections, The Washington Post named its daily host, and the Spiro Agnew content you’ve been craving. By Nicholas Quah.

Younger generations are actually better at telling news from opinion than those over age 50

The kids, it turns out, are alright. By Christine Schmidt.

When YouTube went down for an hour, publishers’ traffic increased

What We’re Reading

Wall Street Journal / Benjamin Mullin

Refinery29 is cutting 10 percent of its workforce, falling five percent short of its 2018 revenue goal →

“Most of the cuts will come from the company's product, engineering and video divisions, according to another person familiar with the matter. The cuts are part of a reorganization of the company's ad-sales team into a single group that will oversee the people, processes and products of Refinery29's revenue organization.”

Politico / Jason Schwartz and Christopher Cadelago

“Local news is very important, they treat us really well” — President Trump →

“The next day, a White House official came to the back of Air Force One to pass out printouts of the Arizona Republic and Arizona Daily Star front pages with large photos of Trump and McSally. ‘TRUMP IN ARIZONA,’ the Republic's hammer headline blared. ‘President heaps praise on McSally during raucous rally in Mesa,’ continued one subhead on the front page. The official said the president and his staff were eager for the traveling press corps to see the clippings.”

Poynter / Damian Radcliffe

Seven ways news outlets can rebuild trust and sustainability →

“Based on my research over the past decade, much of it in the local news arena, as well as my on-going and previous journalistic work, here are seven recommendations which offer newsrooms — large and small — some potential ways forward.”

YouTube / CNN

Brian Stelter interviews New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger →

“We’re trying to create a market for paid journalism. And this is why I’m cheering on the growth of the WSJ, WaPo. I think all of us are in the same place, which is, we are trying to convince more people that it is worth paying money for quality journalism. What does that market look like? At the biggest level, it’s curious, English-speaking people around the world.”

BuzzFeed News / Hayes Brown

The Epoch Times, a newspaper banned in China, is now one of Trump’s biggest defenders →

“In recent weeks, the newspaper — offered for free in most US cities and published around the world — has published articles and graphics that would be a credit to Breitbart, promoting some of the most strident and paranoid claims from the Trump administration and its defenders.”

Digiday / Sahil Patel

Looking past Facebook’s News Feed, Insider is prioritizing 30-second video views over 3-second views →

“Once we started making longer videos that had more meaty stories to them, our YouTube views exploded.”

Richmond Times-Dispatch / Tom Silvestri

Why the Richmond Times-Dispatch will no longer run political endorsements →

“Endorsements create a perception that complicates the job of our objective journalists and makes their jobs unnecessarily more difficult. No matter how many times we explain that Editorial and News are separate, the side that didn't win the endorsement often takes out its frustration on our reporters.”

The Guardian / Emily Bell

Can Tortoise, a “a membership boutique for slow journalism” from the BBC’s former head of news, be more than a rich person’s club? →

“A Kickstarter campaign for Tortoise membership rocketed past £300,000, offering those who buy the highest tier for £8,000 their own named chair in the news conference. Vanneck-Smith said a large number of younger contributors had given small amounts on Kickstarter, and that the intent of the startup was to be redistributive — using the expensive membership tiers and other funding to broaden access.”

CNN / Oliver Darcy and Rob McLean

Twitter bans more InfoWars accounts →

“The suspensions came just days after The Daily Beast reported accounts affiliated with InfoWars were continuing to disseminate its content.”

NBC News / Dylan Byers

The temptations of Twitter: Why social media is still a minefield for journalists →

“The nature of Twitter itself makes particular examples of partisan behavior stand out, in turn opening news organizations to accusations of partisan bias. While that has been true since the social media platform was created more than a decade ago, the vulnerability seems especially acute in this combative and hyperpartisan political climate.”