YULI AHMADA: Juli 2019

Rabu, 31 Juli 2019

Is it time for “strategic silence” in news coverage of mass shootings?

Tuesday, July 30, 2019

Is it time for “strategic silence” in news coverage of mass shootings?

A study of 6,337 stories about the Christchurch attacks found that only 14 percent of U.S. publications named the shooter and almost none linked to his manifesto or the forum where he posted it. By Jon Marcus.

Apple’s podcast categories are on a brief vacation — and a reminder of how thin the industry’s infrastructure can be

Plus: Slate leans farther into the advice game, In the Dark goes global over the airwaves, and some people just like ads. By Nicholas Quah.

Full Fact has been fact-checking Facebook posts for six months. Here’s what they think needs to change

More scale, more transparency, and more help with health-related posts. By Laura Hazard Owen.

What We’re Reading

Politico / Michael Calderone

Black journalists push media to cover this “hyper-racial” moment in politics →

“Race and politics is really the story of our time.” “While some of y'all reporters are out here talking about how reporting on Trump is ‘fun,’ your black and brown colleagues are having to deal with the psychic impacts of his racism. Maybe try considering that this is neither a game nor entertaining for many, many Americans.”

The Washington Post / Sarah Ellison

CNN promises it’ll do things differently in 2020 →

“The network won't air any candidate rallies live and unedited, as it did repeatedly for candidate Trump. He has put more reporters in the field, to stay closer to the voters in the middle of the country. And CNN has held over 20 town hall events with presidential candidates for 2020 — many of them low-rated — partly as a way to focus on the issues, [Jeff] Zucker said, and partly to make sure that the network is not putting its finger on the scale for any single candidate.”

CNN / Oliver Darcy

John Heilemann and John Battelle launch new a video-driven politics news site →

“The outlet, called The Recount, will be video-driven, featuring short videos that summarize what is happening in the news.”

Digiday / Lucinda Southern

How Le Figaro finds value in more casual readers →

“People subscribe to a promotional offer and cancel several times, but at some point, the time lapse between two subscriptions shortens and they finally stay with us.”

Press Gazette / Charlotte Tobitt

Gay Star News closes suddenly, with 20 jobs lost in “great shame” for LGBTQ media →

“London-based Gay Star News launched in January 2012 with the aim of being ‘the world's only 24-7 LGBT news service.'”

Politico / Michael Calderone

Black journalists push media to cover “hyper-racial” moment in politics →

“‘Sometimes we as an industry don't understand how psychologically and emotionally tolling these conversations can be,’ Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery told Politico, adding that white colleagues are ‘having a high-minded conversation about things that impact your life every day.'”

NewsGuard

More than 10% of the news websites Americans rely on spread misinformation about health issues such as vaccines →

“Of the nearly 3,000 news and information websites that account for 96% of online engagement in the U.S., 11% publish misinformation about health. This means that more than one in 10 news websites accessed by Americans includes bad information about health, such as false information about the risks of vaccines.”

Journalist's Resource / Denise-Marie Ordway

53% of journalists surveyed weren’t sure they could spot flawed research →

Also: “Almost 64 percent of journalists who responded to Journalist's Resource's 2019 user survey said they mention academic research in their work on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. More than 40 percent said their stories focus largely on the findings of new studies with the same regularity. However, 23 percent of journalists said they mention academic research in their coverage only once or twice a year, and 13 percent said they never or almost never do.”

ProPublica

Calling college journalists of color: Apply for ProPublica’s emerging reporters program →

Applications are due by September 8.

eMarketer / Amy He

Ad-blocking growth is slowing, but not going away →

“In the US, roughly one in four internet users will block ads this year on at least one of their internet-connected devices. Penetration will be stable, increasing only to 27.0% of internet users at the end of our forecast period.”

Selasa, 30 Juli 2019

In Australia, a new women’s site is using a charitable pitch to try to break through

Monday, July 29, 2019

In Australia, a new women’s site is using a charitable pitch to try to break through

Started by former magazine editors, Primer blends editorial work and social impact for women: “I think it’s the perfect time to build a website for women that is a real community as well, where people feel that they’re making a real difference.” By Eleanor Dickinson.

Putting a leash on Google and Facebook won’t do much to save the traditional news model

“Social media and search give advertisers better tools to target messages to more precise groups of potential consumers. It is a phenomenally better mousetrap.” By Amanda D. Lotz.

Vice may acquire Refinery29, bringing together two really different audiences and cultures

What We’re Reading

Twitter / John Glidden

The Vallejo Times-Herald now has 1 reporter to cover a city of 120,000 →

“Tough breaking news to report but the Vallejo Times-Herald has eliminated a news reporter position leaving just one (1) news reporter (myself).” (You’ll be shocked the Times-Herald is a MediaNews paper, which means it is owned by Alden Global Capital.)

The Guardian / Jim Waterson

British regulators want to make broadcasters protect the “welfare, wellbeing and dignity” of interviewees →

“The changes could upend how reality TV, which often thrives on showing embarrassing moments that participants may later regret, is made and the extent to which broadcasters can push boundaries in the search for ratings…news reporters and documentary creators will be explicitly required to consider the impact of including members of the public in their broadcasts, with potential implications for investigative journalism.”

Media Nation / Dan Kennedy

The Lowell Sun sports editor’s farewell column was taken down. Here’s every word of it. →

“Corporate cost-cutting is the culprit. Apparently I was making too much money to suit the suits, even with years of frozen wages. I didn't realize I was making so much. I would have spent more.”

Pew Research Center / Carroll Doherty and Jocelyn Kiley

Americans have become much less positive about tech companies’ impact on the U.S. →

“Four years ago, technology companies were widely seen as having a positive impact on the United States. But the share of Americans who hold this view has tumbled 21 percentage points since then, from 71% to 50%. Negative views of technology companies' impact on the country have nearly doubled during this period, from 17% to 33%.”

The Washington Post / Daphne Keller

The stubborn, misguided myth that Internet platforms must be “neutral” →

“CDA 230 isn't about neutrality. In fact, it explicitly encourages platforms to moderate and remove ‘offensive’ user content. That leaves platform operators and users free to choose between the free-for-all on sites like 8chan and the tamer fare on sites like Pinterest.”

Bloomberg / Ira Boudway

The Athletic now has 500,000 subscribers and plans to hit 1 million by the end of 2019 →

“The site's average annual revenue per subscriber is roughly $64, Mather said. Since launching in Chicago three years ago, the Athletic has expanded to nearly 50 cities in the U.S. and Canada and hired hundreds of sports reporters and editors, often from local newspapers. It covers roughly 270 teams from the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL and college sports.”

EFF / Cory Doctorow

“Adblocking: How about nah?” →

“Predictably, industry responded with ad-blocker-blockers, which prevented users from seeing their sites unless they turned off their ad-blocker. You’ll never guess what happened next. Actually, it’s obvious what happened next: users started to install ad-blocker-blocker-blockers.”

Variety / Sven Carlsson and Jonas Leijonhufvud

Inside Spotify’s attempt with TV and hardware →

“Every time you waste a byte, God kills a kitten.”

Washington Post / Margaret Sullivan

How a 10-person news outlet’s investigative reporting took down Puerto Rico’s governor →

“But CPI didn't merely publish the chat messages, as appalling as many of them were. There also were investigative stories revealing ‘the corruption behind the chat’ — the ways in which the Rosselló administration, Minet said, was misusing its public role to benefit their private interests.”

The New Yorker / Susan McKay

The incredible life and tragic death of Lyra McKee →

The journalist and Mediagazer editor was shot while reporting during a riot in Northern Ireland earlier this year and died. “A mural showing Lyra laughing was painted on the wall of the Sunflower Public House near her old home in Belfast. She'd written about the bar in a piece, talking about how dangerous the streets used to be. "Now," she wrote, ‘it's safe.'”

Engaged Journalism Accelerator / Ben Whitelaw

Here’s how the Bureau Local, as a small team, assessed its options for making money →

“The Bureau Local is currently dependent on foundation and major donor funding. Yet we realise that this is not enough to respond to the full scope of the challenge. Going forward, we believe that sustaining our mission and output needs a diversified, hybrid revenue model. The goal of this process is to create additional diversified income streams for the core operating budget of the Bureau Local.”

New York Post / Keith J. Kelly

Newsday is offering voluntary buyouts →

“Dolan, whose brother James runs Madison Square Garden, appears to be cutting costs at the paper generally. Last week, Newsday announced it was moving down the road from its present 40-year-old headquarters at a former sod farm at 235 Pinelawn Road in Melville on Long Island to a new, smaller location in an office park just down the street.”

Medill Local News Initative / Mark Jacob

How Gannett is cutting its content “to be less overwhelming” →

“He said the bottom half of Gannett content used to account for only about 6 or 7 percent of overall readership. ‘What that tells you is, half of your efforts are going for almost no dividend.'”

Rolling Stone / Brian Hiatt

How Media Matters for America became Fox News’ biggest watchdog →

“The guy with the nuclear codes isn't taking advice from Don Lemon.”

Poynter / Susan Smith Richardson

“Are you calling me a racist?” Um, no, it’s not about you →

“Nearly 30 years after sitting in my first newsroom diversity session, I can understand why the facilitator talked about institutional racism. It's simpler to identify robed bigots as the problem than it is to fathom a system of interlacing policies, practices and laws that marginalize entire groups.”

Sabtu, 27 Juli 2019

Junky TV is actually making people dumber — and more likely to support populist politicians

Friday, July 26, 2019

Junky TV is actually making people dumber — and more likely to support populist politicians

Plus: Alex Stamos and Renee DiResta are launching an “observatory” for internet abuse at Stanford, and misconceptions about disinformation. By Laura Hazard Owen.

What does The New York Times look for in coming up with a new product? These five things

Including global potential, habit formation, and brand leverage. By Joshua Benton.

Try not to get whiplash, but publisher engagement on Facebook is rising and native video is, too

What We’re Reading

The Lenfest Institute for Journalism / Kyra Miller

The Guardian’s membership editor functions as the “connective tissue” between supporters and the newsroom →

“I think as a journalist you have really clear ideas and instincts about what is a news story and what is important. These things don't always translate to what works on messaging or acquisition…What you might be sure of in the newsroom can come across differently in terms of attracting support.”

Digiday / Lucinda Southern

French player Le Kiosk is the newest subscription aggregator to hit the UK market →

“French subscription-based platform Le Kiosk is launching in the U.K. with a staff of five and a plan to beat out Apple and others. Le Kiosk, which launched in France in 2006 and gives access to its 450 publishers for a low £7.99 ($9.97) a month, claims well over 1 million monthly active users to its 1,600 titles. It contributes between 5% and 20% of traffic to its French publishers.”

New York Times / Matthew Rosenberg

The ad tool Facebook built to fight disinformation doesn’t work as advertised →

“The social network's new ad library is so flawed, researchers say, that it is effectively useless as a way to track political messaging.”

The Atlantic / Jemele Hill

ESPN backs itself into a corner →

“A no-politics-unless-it's-sports-related policy seems especially naive and tricky to navigate when the president of the United States not only makes overtly racist comments, but also lays into women's-soccer players, NBA owners, and other sports figures who disagree with him. ESPN's policy also backs the network itself into a corner, and asks TV and radio commentators to do something impossible: ignore anything and everything happening outside the four corners of the playing field, no matter how much it offends their basic sense of humanity.”

Flashes & Flames

Will The Athletic’s big expansion to English soccer wake up U.K. newspapers? →

“The Athletic's plans have been known for a few months but UK publishers have been shaken by how the US company has signed up a team of more than 50 journalists including star names and also established regional reporters who know everything that happens at their local EPL club…The Athletic's EPL invasion has hardened the fears that increasingly ambitious digital startups may systematically target other strong areas of daily newspaper coverage — and accelerate the decline of these traditional news brands.”

Digiday / Kerry Flynn

Ad money is shifting from the Facebook News Feed to Instagram Stories →

So from Mark Zuckerberg’s left pocket to his right pocket. “The addition of more interactive elements on Instagram Stories ads also has inspired more use…the best performing ads on Instagram Stories for direct responses are five-second boomerang videos with a poll. That's followed by a 10-second user-generated review of a product.”

CJR / Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope

A new commitment to covering the climate story →

“Co-founded by The Nation and the Columbia Journalism Review, in partnership with The Guardian, Covering Climate Now aims to convene and inform a conversation among journalists about how all news outlets — big and small, digital and print, TV and radio, US-based and abroad — can do justice to the defining story of our time.”

The Spectator / Paul Dacre

The Daily Mail’s Paul Dacre: It’s my fault the kids these days think news should be free →

“Research reveals that 77 per cent of millennials say they never pay for news. Having played a key role in launching the free Metro and free Mail Online, I bear a heavy responsibility for that lethal bacillus — the belief that journalism costs nothing. It doesn't. Journalism is expensive and to argue otherwise is fake news of the most insidious kind.”

Chicago Tribune / Robert Channick

Ebony’s photo archives are sold for $30M to a group of foundations with the goal of maintaining public access →

“The historic collection will go to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Getty Research Institute and other cultural institutions to ensure public access and use by scholars, researchers and journalists.”

The New York Times / John Hermann

FaceApp is the future (and maybe so is this scary aging of Mark Zuckerberg’s face) →

“It was Facebook to which we were uploading photos, for reasons silly and poignant, 15 years ago. And it was Facebook that started asking us to tag them, and then which started tagging them itself. It was Google that started as one thing and become many things, each bigger than the first, carrying with it whatever data we gave it, and whatever permissions we granted to its unrecognizable former selves. And while Facebook's betrayals, both prosecutable and more general, are both more established and far larger than anything a gimmick app like FaceApp could aspire to, Facebook was a gimmick site too, for a while.”

Jumat, 26 Juli 2019

How to cover 11,250 elections at once: Here’s how The Washington Post’s new computational journalism lab will tackle 2020

Thursday, July 25, 2019

How to cover 11,250 elections at once: Here’s how The Washington Post’s new computational journalism lab will tackle 2020

“We’re not super-interested in telling a story about one Iowa county using this infrastructure. But we’re making sure our reporters know which county in Iowa to go if they’re looking for one that has particular characteristics.” By Christine Schmidt.

Five years after crowdfunding, here’s how Krautreporter is keeping its members engaged (and building tools for you to, too)

“You don't feel like you're trying to convince people you're not lying.” By Christine Schmidt.

Should Facebook have a “quiet period” of no algorithm changes before a major election?

Several Facebook News Feed updates leading up to the 2016 U.S. election disadvantaged traditional news sources and favored less reliable information shared by your uncle. Should regulation keep the playing field static? By Jennifer Grygiel.

What We’re Reading

The Conversation / Viktor Mayer-Schönberger

The internet is rotting — let’s embrace it →

“Every year, some thousands of sites — including ones with unique information — go offline. Countless further webpages become inaccessible; instead of information, users encounter error messages. Where some commentators may lament yet another black hole in the slowly rotting Internet, I actually feel okay. Of course, I, too, dread broken links and dead servers. But I also know: Forgetting is important.”

Vice News / David Uberti

“Get ready for local news — brought to you by the Democrats” →

“Rather, Priorities USA is planning to flood swing states — many of which have lost their local papers — with stories favorable to the Democratic agenda. Four ‘news’ outlets staffed by Democratic operatives will publish state-specific information across social media in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Wisconsin. They'll also boost content by independent sources.”

Variety / Cynthia Littleton

NBCUniversal’s streaming service will launch in April →

“Nielsen research shows that viewership of ‘Office’ episodes amounts to 5% of all Netflix volume. The comedy series that aired on NBC from 2005 to 2013 is ‘tied to the DNA’ of NBC, Burke said. ‘We see “The Office” as one of the tentpole programs on our platforms.'”

Ad Age / Garrett Sloane

Amazon wants to put audio ads between songs on your Alexa device →

“Amazon audio ads are interactive in a way Spotify and Pandora can’t match, according to advertisers. Listeners can speak to the ads and tell Alexa to add products to shopping carts and other functions. Amazon also is the default music option on Alexa devices when people ask for any random song or genre.” (Prime members won’t get the ads — for now, at least.)

Pew Research Center / Michael Barthel

Traffic to news websites seems to have leveled off →

“Time spent on these websites has declined as well: The average number of minutes per visit for digital-native news sites is down 16% since 2016, falling from nearly two and a half minutes to about two per visit.”

Digiday / Max Willens

The challenges of doing product at a publisher →

“‘Introduce looking at data, bringing other parts of the product in line and getting the CEO to realize what people we need if we are hoping to get real growth. All our clients want is 10,000 pageviews with zero targeting for $20,000. It's so hard to talk product, user experience or data’ — business head of a digital-native publisher”

Rtdna / Tim Scheld

New York’s “mugshot ban” leaves newsrooms in the dark, but is meant to stop taking advantage of incarcerated people →

“News organization do have a responsibility to use information released by public safety agencies in a responsible and judicious manner. A Tallahassee, Florida, television station, WTXL, recently shut down the popular booking page on its website after careful consideration about the value of posting the information and photos from every single arrest in the local community. WTXL General Manager Matt Brown wrote that the newsroom was getting two to three calls per week from people complaining about the posting of information or mugshots in cases that were ultimately dropped or expunged.”

Engaged Journalism Accelerator

How Bureau Local runs its “open newsroom” Slack discussions for members →

“The team wanted to create regular time and space to enable members to connect, share expertise and ask questions about the stories that Bureau Local was working on, and to ensure the network remained active and informed between investigations. Already using Slack for internal communications, they decided to use it to pilot the first 'open newsroom' in November 2018.”

Quartz / Jeremy B. Merrill

How Quartz used AI to help reporters search the Mauritius Leaks →

“Our AI aided the investigation by applying a journalist's human judgment identifying a particular kind of document—like a tax return or a business plan—across the entire document trove. While the AI didn't do anything a human couldn't do (after all, knowledgeable journalists know what a tax return looks like), it did the job a lot faster, freeing humans to do other tasks.”

Press Gazette / James Walker

Vice U.K. journalists win union recognition after months of negotiations →

“The latest drive for a Vice UK editorial union came three years after an earlier attempt was rejected by management…In March, after the millennial media brand revealed plans to axe 10 per cent of its staff jobs globally — resulting in up to 250 job losses, although no UK editorial staff were affected — UK staff again pushed to unionise.”

Reynolds Journalism Institute

Mizzou launches an investigative fellowship program to support authors →

“The Watchdog Writers Group is supported by funding from The 11th Hour Project of the Schmidt Family Foundation, a nonprofit foundation based in Palo Alto, California. The 11th Hour Project has a long history of funding independent journalism at universities and publications around the country, and the WWG marks its most significant investment in journalism produced in the Midwest.”