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Tuesday, April 9, 2019
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We’ll finally get to see what Luminary, the paywalled podcast(ish?) app, has been cookingPlus: Maximum Fun seeks maximum funds (and gets enough), calling podcasters sellouts is so 1991, and it turns out Apple can sell an audio bundle to people in large numbers. By Nicholas Quah. |
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Goodbye “moderators,” hello “audience voice reporters”: Here’s how The Wall Street Journal is refocusing the comments to incentivize better behavior“In the case of commenting, we have concluded that overly focusing on the small subset of users who comment frequently and want no one intervening at all in their comments is costing us the opportunity of engaging with our much larger, growing, and diversifying audience.” By Louise Story. |
What We’re Reading
The New York Times / Andrew Sondern
How The New York Times adapted Amanda Hess’s “Internetting” video series for the print paper →
“The internet is rife with interruptions and distractions, so Ms. Hess and Mr. O'Neill annotated the essay transcripts with fresh context, digressions, and comments from viewers — all of which appear only in print, breathing new life into the essays and adding extra layers of nuance to the arguments.”
The Atlantic / Taylor Lorenz
How incoming college freshmen are recreating Facebook on Instagram →
“Claire has now found all three of her freshman roommates on Instagram. ‘Their Instagrams looked cute; I felt like we had a lot in common. I DM'ed them and…you could just tell it was a perfect match,’ she said. ‘Assigned roommates are sort of scary. You don't know who you're gonna get stuck with. So everyone really wants to choose people.'”
The Economist / Sarah Leo
Mistakes, we’ve drawn a few: Learning from our errors in data visualization →
“I grouped our crimes against data visualization into three categories: charts that are (1) misleading, (2) confusing and (3) failing to make a point.”
Digiday / Lucinda Southern
How Swiss news publisher NZZ uses newsletters to increase paid subscriptions →
“Section newsletters such as ‘Economics’ or ‘Digital’ work best to convert people and have an audience size of 25,000 and 15,000, respectively. During that eight-month time frame, the top newsletters had a subscriber conversion rate of less than 10%. Lifestyle newsletters have the lowest conversion rates, according to the publisher. “
BuzzFeed News / Megha Rajagopalan
A look at The Whistle, the only internationally accredited fact-checking group in Israel →
“The only Israeli organization working with Facebook to fact-check news ahead of Israel's elections started last week, just days before voters go to the polls.”
Axios / Marisa Fernandez and Sara Fischer
More than 30 media companies have unionized in the past 2 years →
“Gawker Media's employees voted to unionize in 2015, which opened the door for several other digital outlets to do the same like Vice Media and HuffPost.”
Morning Consult
“Republicans are roughly 20 points less likely to say The New York Times and CNN are credible news outlets than they were in late 2016.” →
“Republicans' perceptions of the credibility of MSNBC and The Wall Street Journal have also fallen by double digits: 48 percent to 31 percent and 64 percent to 50 percent, respectively. The public, overall, tends to hold higher views on the credibility of broadcast and newspapers.”
Press Gazette / Charlotte Tobit
Eight local news providers have signed up for the UK Press Association’s “robot-generated” news service →
“Radar journalists ‘identify, write and template’ stories using open data sets from Government departments, police forces and other public bodies before a bespoke production system using Natural Language Generation technology localizes the stories.”
Rework
Why is it so hard to cancel a newspaper subscription? →
“When you go to cancel, you discover the only way to stop the subscription is to write an email or — even worse, make an actual phone call.”
Dart Center
These are the 2019 Dart Award winners →
Michigan Radio and the Times-Picayune, with honorable mention to Radio Canada International and the Star Tribune.
BBC News / Stephen Dowling
Why there’s so little left of the early internet →
“The Million Dollar Homepage shows that the decay of this early period of the internet is almost invisible. In the offline world, the closing of, say, a local newspaper is often widely reported. But online sites die, often without fanfare, and the first inkling you may have that they are no longer there is when you click on a link to be met with a blank page.”