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Tuesday, October 30, 2018
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Sorry, New York: Los Angeles is making a play for the Podcast Capital of the World titlePlus: 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. |
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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. |
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.”