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Tuesday, June 4, 2019
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Can Spotify and Apple put a dent in podcasting’s discovery problem?Plus: Podcast advertising is up 53 percent, The Telegraph gets nostalgic, and the noises we try not to hear. By Nicholas Quah. |
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R.I.P. iTunes and more power to the iPad: Here’s all the important news for publishers from Apple’s WWDC keynoteIt’s getting a lot easier to build a Mac news app, the words spoken in all podcasts will soon be searchable, and Siri might soon read your news alerts straight into someone’s AirPods. By Joshua Benton. |
What We’re Reading
The New York Times / Marc Tracey
Vice.com’s editors are out in an ongoing shakeup →
“In making changes to the organizational structure of the digital editorial group, we had to make difficult decisions that mean Jonathan Smith and Rachel Schallom are no longer with the company.”
Variety / Todd Spangler
YouTube bans kids from live-streaming video unless accompanied by an adult →
“The updated policies come after YouTube in February announced that it would disable the ability to leave comments on nearly all videos featuring kids… [and] in the wake of a New York Times report Monday, citing research that YouTube's recommendation system has been suggesting videos of ‘prepubescent, partially clothed children’ to users who had watched sexually themed content.”
The New York Times / Austin Ramzy
On Tiananmen’s 30th anniversary, here’s how Hong Kong’s publishing industry is being silenced →
“For years, Hong Kong publishers found a ready audience of mainland Chinese readers who wanted books they could not find at home and could sneak back into mainland China. But the industry has declined thanks to tighter border checks, the consolidation of Hong Kong distributors and retail outlets under mainland control, and the disappearance and imprisonment of independent booksellers.”
Reuters / Paresh Dave
The Dept. of Justice is examining Google’s online advertising dominance as part of a potential antitrust investigation →
“Digital advertising revenue accounted for about 85% of revenue last year for Google parent Alphabet. The U.S. government is gearing up to investigate the massive market power of Amazon.com Inc, Apple, Facebook and Google, sources told Reuters on Monday, setting up what could be an unprecedented wide-ranging probe of some of the world's largest companies.”
Snopes / David Mikkelson
Snopes’ legal battle is still ongoing, consuming “a substantial portion of Snopes’ entire budget in 2018” →
We covered the hoax-debunking site’s struggles last summer, a fight over the control of the company. They’re reupping the GoFundMe.
The Ringer / Alyssa Bereznak
The demise of iTunes: A eulogy for Apple’s inefficient but essential music software →
“I interact with iTunes in its current form in the same way that I interact with that one package of chicken that has become a permanent, icy fixture in the back of my freezer: accidentally and as infrequently as possible.”
TechCrunch / Natasha Lomas
Twitter acquires a deep learning startup working on identifying online disinformation →
Twitter says the acquisition of Fabula will help it build out its internal machine learning capabilities — writing that the UK startup's ‘world-class team of machine learning researchers’ will feed an internal research group it's building out, led by Sandeep Pandey, its head of ML/AI engineering.”
Digiday / Kerry Flynn
TikTok is testing interest-based ad targeting →
“A spokesperson from GrubHub, which was one of the early advertisers on TikTok, told Digiday last month that ad performance has continued to ‘meet or exceed our expectations.'”
Columbia Journalism Review / Amanda Darrach
How did journalists file before Google Docs? →
“There was another way to file, especially sensitive feature material or film rolls, and that was to give it to a tourist who was going back to America.”