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Friday, January 18, 2019
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Newsonomics: Tribune’s Thursday night surprise rescrambles the consolidation puzzleCould the moves presage the major rollup that's been increasingly talked about in America's now-in-play, ever-struggling daily newspaper industry? By Ken Doctor. |
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Anti-vaxxers are among the WHO’s top 10 global health threats, and Ebola fake news is killing peopleDuring an outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo, “as rumors surface, communications experts rebut them with accurate information via WhatsApp or local radio.” By Laura Hazard Owen. |
What We’re Reading
Variety / Janko Roettgers
NPR has turned “Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me” into a game for smart speakers →
“Owners of speakers powered by Google's Assistant or Amazon Alexa will be able to play along to questions about the news of the week.”
TechCrunch / Josh Constine
Facebook is secretly building LOL, a cringey teen meme hub →
“It's divided into categories like ‘For You,’ ‘Animals,’ ‘Fails,’ ‘Pranks,’ and more with content pulled from News Feed posts by top meme Pages on Facebook.”
Columbia Journalism Review / Emily Bell
Facebook should treat the cause, not the symptoms, of journalism’s plight →
“Absent from both the Reuters Institute report's suggestions and from Facebook's current journalism funding scheme is the one thing journalism actually needs: a guarantee that the conditions on the platform will benefit those producing high-quality reporting, which would obviate the need for sudden cash infusions. This simple pledge might be implicit in the myriad changes that Facebook is making to its own products and business models but it is not yet explicit.”
Columbia Journalism Review / Andrew McCormick
New York’s Adam Moss talks about moving on from his 15-year home →
“There are many readers who will read Vulture or The Cut, for example, and only those sites, with no interest in sifting through everything else we do and potentially no knowledge that these sites even belong to a larger network. For those people who are vertically minded, we give them sort of self-contained universes.”
Press Gazette / Charlotte Tobitt
BuzzFeed UK editor-in-chief Janine Gibson is leaving the company →
“The journalist's departure comes a year after Buzzfeed UK saw an exodus of newsroom talent following 23 editorial redundancies.”
HuffPost / Ashley Feinberg
A Q&A with Jack Dorsey: “The reason his impassioned defenses of Twitter sound like gibberish is because they are.” →
“In other words, the most the CEO of Twitter was able to tell me about specific steps being taken to solve the rampant, site-wide harassment problem that's plagued the platform for years is that they're looking into maybe making the report button a little bigger, eventually.”
WWD / Kali Hays
Condé Nast’s transformation continues with cuts at Wired, Glamour, GQ, and more →
“Since it's coming off a 2017 loss of about $120 million, which includes the cost of reinvestments and the ongoing internal restructuring, it's easy to spin anything that isn't an increased loss as a win for the company, but it's thought that the reduction of the loss in 2018 was significant.”
Recode / Peter Kafka
Netflix says it now accounts for 10 percent of TV viewing time →
“Netflix, which tacks back and forth between telling the TV establishment that they're coming for it (‘The goal is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us’) and telling the TV guys that there's room for everyone, seems to think that this is a peace offering.”