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Tuesday, December 4, 2018
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A year in, Apple’s podcast analytics have been an evolution, not a revolutionPlus: The BBC is fully on board with podcasting now, Serial has its biggest season yet, and boy, the new Ron Burgundy podcast escalated quickly. By Nicholas Quah. |
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Alert! Alert! The information demands on the modern digital journalist are overwhelming and leading to burnout“We have a problem with the ways traditional managers view technology in this new environment.” By John Crowley. |
What We’re Reading
NPR / David Folkenflik
NPR CEO Jarl Mohn will step down in June →
“He has been a relentless cheerleader of the durability of terrestrial broadcasting as a platform for public radio, and his tenure has been marked by significant growth in NPR’s radio and digital audiences, though it has softened of late. That growth has been accompanied by notable financial gains.”
The Atlantic / Julianna Goldman
It’s almost impossible to be a mom in television news →
“For female television reporters, the decision to have kids can be a career-ending one.”
NBC News / Jason Abbruzzese
The Correspondent has raised $1M of its $2.5M crowdfunding goal →
There are two weeks left to go. We wrote about The Correspondent here.
The Information / Jessica Lessin
The Information turns 5 and takes a victory lap →
“…we are seeing a dangerous new threat: agenda journalism. Journalists are playing to public sentiment by becoming pundits, using Twitter to celebrate — not elucidate — companies' failures. They have forgotten that their job is to inform rather than entertain. Unchecked, this will erode trust in the media and these news organizations' business. No one pays a news organization year after year to tell him or her things they already believe.”
AI Initiative
Meet the 66 finalists in the AI and the News Open Challenge →
A brief selection of words used in their project proposals: “leverage,” “convene,” “blueprint,” “meme,” “so-called deep fakes,” “deep neural network architecture,” “machine learning,” “automatically constructing narrative event flows,” “supermarkets,” “real-time escalating warnings,” “FakeRank,” and “smoosh.”
The Washington Post / Margaret Sullivan
The digital media bubble is bursting. That’s hurting a generation of promising young journalists. →
“With the tragic demise of local newspapers, places like Mic have become the entry point into the craft for a lot of young journalists. What's more, their newsrooms have been admirably diverse, a diversity that their journalism has admirably reflected. As they go under, such entry points disappear. And the journalists who have been through this ugly process — sometimes more than once — burn out.”
New York Times / Liam Stack
At least a dozen journalists this year have been killed by members of organized crime, Reporters Without Borders says →
“As opposed to Syria or Afghanistan, where the press is often killed by terrorist groups, this report shows the link when government and corrupt organizations work in tandem to silence the work of journalists in a really covert way,” said Noni Ghani, a spokeswoman for Reporters Without Borders. “These things don't just happen in conflict zones or countries at war. They really happen everywhere.”
Wall Street Journal / Benjamin Mullin
Who’s reading that news story? This startup, Memo, will help marketers find out →
“The company, Memo, aims to capitalize on advertisers' growing demand for data by creating a marketplace where they can buy audience metrics for editorial coverage measures such as page views, scroll depth and engaged reading time. Publishers closely track page views and related information, but don't typically share it…Publishers including Meredith Corp. , BuzzFeed Inc. and PopSugar Inc. have agreed to provide their data to Memo, said Eddie Kim, the company's founder and chief executive.”
The Guardian / Hannah Ellis-Petersen
Maria Ressa, editor of the Rappler, has turned herself in to Philippine authorities →
“Speaking outside the courthouse after posting bail, Ressa said that ‘now is certainly not the time to be afraid…We need to hold government to account, and part of the reason I'm here is precisely that,’ she said. ‘I'm not a criminal but I've been fingerprinted like a criminal. We feel that we did not get due process.'”
Chicago Tribune / Nina Metz
Chicagoist returns, with Chance the Rapper and a side of Schoolhouse Rock! →
“The video's creators have also made smart and specific choices about who's voices they want to amplify: primarily black and Latinx Millennials, including aldermanic candidates such as Rossana Rodriguez (running for the 33rd Ward), Ugo Okere (running for the 40th Ward) and Cleopatra Watson (running for the 9th Ward). That framing is so often missing — and it marks Chicagoist's re-emergence as a potential force to be reckoned with.”
The New York Times / Andrea Kannapell, Jeanie Kay, Melissa Loder, Shannon Smith, and Albert Sun
How The New York Times reimagined the Morning Briefing (with 1.7M subscribers) →
“By improving signaling in top stories in the new briefing, we allow readers to get the gist of events quickly and choose what to engage with. We use bold lead-ins as labels, to help the reader know what kind information they are being offered.”
Gizmodo / David Bixenspan
“Where there are limits, there are loopholes”: When the Internet Archive forgets →
“When a site admin elects to block the Wayback crawler using a robots.txt file, the crawling doesn't just stop. Instead, the Wayback Machine's entire history of a given site is removed from public view.”
Business Insider / Richard Feloni and Sarah Wyman
Heather Dietrick, from bankruptcy at Gawker to CEO at the Daily Beast →
“A company in its 12-, 13-year history said: ‘We are proudly independent. We won’t raise money. We won’t sell.’ And we were in a position where we very quickly raised money with a lot of hair on the business. Went through this massive public trial, sold the assets, and that was all just a great challenge that I think we were, ultimately, really successful with, considering the headwinds.”