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Friday, February 22, 2019
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The New York Times’ Mark Thompson on how he’d run a local newspaper: “Where can we stand and fight?”“I believe that if you’re producing journalism of value, there is no reason to expect that consumers wouldn’t be prepared, in some way, to support that — potentially to pay for it. And that’s probably, ultimately, true of regional and local journalism as well as national and international journalism.” By Ken Doctor. |
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Newsonomics: Can The New York Times avoid a Trump Slump and sign up 10 million paying subscribers?And what lessons can the rest of the industry draw from the Times’ outsized success? By Ken Doctor. |
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How Your Voice Ohio worked with Youngstown’s WFMJ to highlight solutions in the opioid crisis“If it’s half of what we think it could be, then everyone here is going to reach more people with this subject of such critical importance here.” By Christine Schmidt. |
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While YouTube and Facebook fumble, Pinterest is reducing health misinformation in ways that actually make sensePlus: Big advertisers ban YouTube (not over vaccines), the National Cancer Institute wonders how to respond to health misinformation, and how to fill a data void. By Laura Hazard Owen. |
What We’re Reading
Miami New Times / Chuck Strouse
More than 200 McClatchy employees take buyouts (out of the 450 offered) →
“In a letter that left several longtime employees shaking their heads, CEO Craig Forman wrote that ‘these efforts are building the future of our company, and its role in our communities — and in the future of our republic.'”
YouTube / Arthur W. Page Center
Dean Baquet responds to Trump’s anti-New York Times tweet →
“Enemy of the people is not just a tossed-off line that sounds good in a tweet. It is a particularly pernicious phrase with a deep history…No president has ever uttered those words in public.”
Bloomberg / Gerry Smith
How The New York Times approaches finding subscribers outside its typical markets →
“‘We tend to have a subscriber base broadly that's skewed to urban areas,’ Times Chief Operating Officer Meredith Kopit Levien said. ‘The interesting thing about [the paid NYT Cooking app] is its audience and subscriber base tend to be the opposite.'”
Nieman Reports / Gabriella Schwartz
Why tech platforms need to be built on journalistic values →
“One of the risks for the tech industry that values what's new, who's hot, and what's next is a failure to draw on knowledge gained through experience and the people who hold the keys to that knowledge. If a company has the potential to disrupt, then it must understand the industry it could purposefully or accidentally upend. Tech platforms failed to do this with journalism, and we as a society are paying the price.”
Columbia Journalism Review / Mathew Ingram
Google says it’s fighting misinformation, but how hard? →
“Facebook continues to get the bulk of the press (mostly bad) for its role in helping to weaponize misinformation networks during the 2016 election and elsewhere, but Google's search and recommendation algorithms arguably have more impact—it's just not as visible or as obvious as Facebook's.”
Mashable / Karissa Bell
Twitter opens a beta program to test new conversation features →
After Jack Dorsey and Kara Swisher’s Twitter chat devolved, the company is testing “redesigned threads that use color-coded labels and a chat bubble-style design, nested replies that make it easier to track offshoots of a particular conversation, replies that hide like and retweet counts behind an additional menu.”
Longform / Max Linsky
HuffPost EIC Lydia Polgreen: “If Hillary Clinton had won the election, I have a feeling that I would still be a mid-level manager at The New York Times” →
“But after the election, I really started to think about journalism, about my role in it, about who journalism was serving and who it was for, and I just became really enamored with this idea that you could create a news organization that was less about people who are left out of the political and economic power equations, but actually for them.”
Global Investigative Journalism Network / Breno Costa
“Like a punk rock band”: How The Intercept built out its local investigative branch →
“We have this goal of training journalism readers — open-minded young people, who aren't attached to old dogmas. The crowdfunding also brought us closer to them through the creation of a private group on Facebook.”
Press Gazette / Charlotte Tobitt
The U.K.’s “fake news unit” secures funding to continue its battle against disinformation →
“When the Times reported last year that murder rates in London had outstripped those in New York for the first time, the RRU took action to "prevent panic" in the face of what it said were ‘alarmist news stories’.”
Digiday / Tim Peterson
What podcast advertisers are thinking about →
“People are not always rushing to listen to the latest episode of their favorite podcasts. For ESPN's documentary series ’30 for 30 Podcasts,’ 65 percent of episode downloads happened more than a week after the episode was released, according to ESPN senior writer Ramona Shelburne.”
Texas Monthly / Dan Goodgame
Texas Monthly is putting up a (metered) paywall →
“We're asking those who read our work online to do what our print subscribers have done for 46 years: subscribe to Texas Monthly and become part of our vibrant community of readers and storytellers.”