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Thursday, February 14, 2019
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Clicks are an “unreliable seismograph” for a news article’s value — here’s new research to back it up“People frequently click on stories that are amusing, trivial, or weird, with no obvious civic focus. But they maintain a clear sense of what is trivial and what matters.” By Christine Schmidt. |
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Acing the algorithmic beat, journalism’s next frontierIn a world where key decisions are increasingly driven by algorithms, journalists need to take a closer look at how they work and how they impact individuals and society. Here’s how The Wall Street Journal is approaching it. By Francesco Marconi, Till Daldrup, and Rajiv Pant. |
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Inside Inside’s new local newsletters and its plans to keep scaling (with 750,000 active subscribers on board)Inside.com recently raised $2.6 million from SeedInvest, Jason Calacanis, and “hundreds of our readers” to keep the growth going (but not relying on reader revenue). By Christine Schmidt. |
What We’re Reading
New York Times / James Wagner
From a church in Philadelphia, Sports Reference informs the world →
“The ubiquitous Sports Reference family of websites — Baseball-Reference.com, Basketball-Reference.com, Pro-Football-Reference.com, Hockey-Reference.com, and so on — are some of the most popular sports almanacs on the internet. They draw users of all kinds, from people casually searching for a trivia answer to owners of professional teams. Aided by an overhaul of its mobile website, Sports Reference's founder and president, Sean Forman, said the group of sites drew one billion page views last year, a record for the company.”
Slate / Will Oremus
Apple could save online journalism — or strangle it →
“For serious news organizations, the subscription model holds appeal partly because it's based on reader loyalty; Apple's subscription would put publishers back in the position of competing for shares of readers' attention.”
The Billfold / Nicole Dieker
“Why I’m shutting down The Billfold” →
“I can hear you saying ‘we would have given you money!’ but… it wasn't just the issues with The Billfold LLC. Over the past year, I've earned roughly $13 an hour (pretax) for my work on The Billfold, at 20+ hours of work per week. An influx of cash might have kept The Billfold going for a while longer, but that doesn't solve the ‘I'm putting a lot of work into this site and drawing very little money from it’ problem.”
Recode / Kurt Wagner
How hard is it to have a conversation on Twitter? So hard even the CEO can’t do it. →
“Despite the public interview and a dedicated hashtag (#karajack) for the event, it didn't take long before the dozens of tweets between the two started to get confusing. They were listed out of order, other users started chiming in, and there was no way to properly follow the conversation thread.”
Better News / Randy Essex and Anjanette Delgado
The Detroit Free Press reinvented how it does projects and saw a boost in digital engagement →
“We started brainstorming with the autos and digital teams together at the outset, and that's where we all agreed on two key things: 1) Each ‘Truck Wars’ story had to stand on its own merits and not just be complementary material to another story. 2) We would watch our analytics and adjust as we go, which included the possibility of killing some stories and adding others where readers showed unexpected interest.”
Twipe / Mary-Katharine Phillips
Why some newspapers are stopping the short-term subscription offers →
At Telegraaf Media Groep in the Netherlands, “shorter subscription offers did not result in long-term relationships while still incurring a high acquisition cost. In a bold move, [it] stopped offering [its] short term subscriptions, and focused on only [its] longer subscriptions.” Meanwhile, NRC Handelsblad “[does] not offer any type of trial, and [has] just three subscription offers: one, two, and three years.”
L.A. Times Guild / Carolina A. Miranda
An open letter to Los Angeles Times management about its intellectual property proposals →
“If we have a book idea related to our work, even if fictional, the company wants unfettered power to claim control over whether it gets written, who owns the copyright and what we might get paid for it. The company also wants to claim the film rights to such books even if the company grants permission for the book to be written, on unpaid leave, for an outside publisher. No other newspaper has contract language this strict — not the New York Times, Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal.”
Digiday / Sahil Patel
Facebook Watch has a new program to fund publisher shows starring influencers →
“Facebook has been meeting with publishers and studio production partners in an effort to solicit pitches for shows that would be funded by Facebook, produced by the production partner and starring influencers with a huge number of followers on Facebook, Instagram and other social platforms, according to sources familiar with the matter.”
Recode / Rani Molla
It will take more than NewsGuard’s team of journalists to stop the spread of fake news →
“if you've even heard of NewsGuard (let alone downloaded the extension), chances are you're already a pretty savvy news consumer; people who consume fake news aren't usually people who also consume fact-checks.”