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Thursday, January 31, 2019
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2009: The internet is killing (print) journalism. 2019: The internet is killing (internet) journalism.Is there really no sustainable form for digital news other than B2B vertical media? By Jeff Israely. |
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Facebook roadblocks ProPublica’s ad transparency tool (gee, what a good time for a safe harbor)“The fact that Facebook wants to be the ones who determine what kind of journalism gets done about Facebook is just not happening.” By Christine Schmidt. |
What We’re Reading
Digiday / Aditi Sangal
“I want to turn all sports fans into bettors” →
One potential future for sports media: “I want the casual bettors but also not alienate the deep-end bettors who are looking for tools and data. People will want to come out of the shadows and bet and get information from a clean, well-lit place.”
Product Hunt
Inside.com had $1.1 million in revenue last year and just raised $2.6 million more →
Also from the newsletter company: “Today we're launching 20 newsletters today on top of the 30 we're already running (all listed below)…We're launching a first-of-its kind ad server that allows brands to run native ads targeting broad demographics like ‘developers,’ ‘tech founders/execs,’ ‘sales,’ ‘high-earning consumers,’ ‘people who work in tech,’ and lots more.”
New York Post / Keith J. Kelly
New York magazine is now a union shop →
The NewsGuild of New York announced the mag's owner, New York Media, has voluntarily agreed to recognize the union as the bargaining agent for approximately 180 full- and part-time editorial staffers.
Women's Media Center
Men produce 69 percent of wire service bylines, 60 percent of online bylines, and 59 percent of print bylines →
The newspapers that come closest to parity when it comes to women getting bylines: The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Arizona Republic, The Dallas Morning News, and The Washington Post. Farthest: USA Today, the Chicago Sun-Times, and The Wall Street Journal.
The New York Times / Tina Rosenberg
Why magazines — with different political views — in Poland are publishing each other’s work →
“Spiecie works like this: One of the five magazines is the host, and writes an article of about 2,000 words. The article makes a policy proposal on an important issue in dispute; so far, the group has covered Poland's educational system, constitutional reform, pensions, Poland's place in Europe, generational change and migrants. The author circulates the article to the other four magazines, which write 1,000-word responses. Then all the magazines publish all five articles at the same time.”
Columbia Journalism Review / Mathew Ingram
BuzzFeed’s cuts should mean the end of metric-obsessed media →
“Almost as soon as the first blog post hit the internet back in the late Pleistocene age, publishers started tracking page views, impressions, clicks and other metrics, to see whether anyone out there was actually paying attention — and, eventually, to prove to advertisers those people existed. But digital-first publishers like Gawker and BuzzFeed took this obsession to its logical conclusion.”
Poynter / Rick Edmonds
Six years later, the jury is still out on Advance newspapers’ abrupt swing to digital →
“Significantly, almost no one in the industry has followed the Advance digital-print playbook now rolled out in all the company's 25 local markets. Not Gannett, Not McClatchy. Not Tribune. Not Hearst.”
The Guardian / Jim Waterson
Who is the offshore investor that just took a 20 percent stake in the Evening Standard? →
“The newspaper's Russian owner, Evgeny Lebedev, sold about one-fifth of Lebedev Holdings, which has a majority stake in the Evening Standard, to a Cayman Islands-registered company in December, according to official filings that suggest the investor has put almost £14m into the lossmaking London newspaper.”
Lenfest Institute / Burt Herman
Inside the thought process of the Lenfest Institute’s recent $475,000 grants →
“For our second round of grant applications, we zoomed in on two of the areas we felt were most critical: new revenue models and local news ecosystem collaboration.”
Fast Company / Jared Newman
What comes next after subscription overload for streaming (ads) →
“In the age of cord-cutting, the reality is not that people will subscribe to a dozen streaming services and fail to save money. What they'll actually do is pick a few subscriptions–as surveys from TiVo and Deloitte have estimated–and pad them out with free services like Tubi.”
Freedom of the Press Foundation / Camille Fassett
How the government shutdown ground transparency to a halt →
“Making an exception to the deadlines the government has in place, for a government shutdown, would weaken FOIA and interfere with people's right to sue. The government has seen those deadlines as necessary, considering they are the law.”
AdWeek / David Cohen
Reddit debuts cost-per-click ads on its platform, its first foray into performance-driven ad bidding →
“The news aggregation and discussion site has supported ads since 2007. It moved to its own ad server with ads stack built on its own technology last March. … Media buyers, however, were not as enthusiastic.”
9to5Mac / Michael Potuck
Apple says Apple News has 85 million monthly active users →
“Another big stat that [Tim] Cook shared was the number of currently active Apple devices. Last year, there were 1.3 billion active devices, with the latest update showing growth of 100M to 1.4B. For more perspective, that's 40 percent growth for total active devices since 2016 when the company hit the 1 billion device mark.”
Reuters / Foo Yun Chee
The EU calls on Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Mozilla to do more against misinformation or else →
“The European Union's executive said signatories to the code of practice had taken steps to remove fake accounts and limit sites promoting fake news but said more was needed. ‘Now they should make sure these tools are available to everyone across the EU, monitor their efficiency, and continuously adapt to new means used by those spreading disinformation. There is no time to waste,’ EU Commissioner for the Digital Single Market Andrus Ansip said.”
Columbia Journalism Review / Alison Langley
Swiss news startup Republik set new crowdfunding records — and then reality hit →
“A week before its self-imposed January 15 deadline, Republik was about 400 renewals away from retaining even the industry average of 50 percent. So it added transparency to its fundraising efforts. It has an interactive site where subscribers can view the totals and play with a tool that shows how editors must adjust for lower budgets. The point of the exercise, Moser says, is to demonstrate how tenuous the business is.”