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Tuesday, July 23, 2019
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How do exclusive podcasts fit into the forever war between Apple and Spotify?Plus: Anger at Amazon, a Q&A with Rose Eveleth, and we may have reached Peak “Peak Podcast.” By Nicholas Quah. |
What We’re Reading
The Information / Alex Heath
Internal Facebook research warned of a “tipping point” in sharing behavior →
“In confidential research Mr. Cunningham prepared for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, parts of which were obtained by The Information, he warned that if enough users started posting on Instagram or WhatsApp instead of Facebook, the blue app could enter a self-sustaining decline in usage that would be difficult to undo.”
The Washington Post / Andrew Van Dam
Neil Postman, call your office: “TV that's not explicitly about politics can have an effect on politics” →
In Italy, as the lowbrow network Mediaset spread across the country, watching more of its “vapid programming was followed by an enduring boost in support for populist candidates peddling simple messages and easy answers.” Young Mediaset watchers “grow up to be ‘less cognitively sophisticated and less civically minded’ than their peers who had access only to public broadcasting and local stations during that period.”
GEN / Darryn King
The “we didn’t land on the moon” conspiracy theory started out as a joke →
“John Grant, a homeless heroin addict and Vietnam vet who bonded with [writer Bill] Kaysing over a mutual contempt for the system…suggested that Kaysing could use his influence as a writer to undermine the government. ‘Why don't you write something outrageous?…Like, we never went to the moon?'”
Slate / Ruth Graham
Graydon Carter’s new “Air Mail” is a big glossy magazine stuffed into a single newsletter →
“Financial backing for Air Mail came from a private investment firm, and Carter has evidently found ways to spend it. He has 15 full-time staffers, and a masthead of 31 that includes co-editor Alessandra Stanley (late of the New York Times), cartoon editor Bob Mankoff (late of the New Yorker) and several former Vanity Fair staffers (late of Vanity Fair). It would be foolish to bet against Graydon Carter's Rolodex and his 31 experienced team members. Air Mail may find an audience. But in the meantime, it's a suggestion that whether or not the era of the celebrity editor is permanently past, this particular celebrity editor has only one editorial mode.”
Pacific Standard / Brent Cunningham
Post-bankruptcy and Pulitzer: What happens to the Charleston Gazette-Mail now? →
“I asked him to describe his journalism philosophy, and he did so in a single sentence: ‘You’ve got to kind of balance what people want to hear with what they need to hear.’ … Finding that balance, never easy, will be even harder in a newspaper business that continues to struggle. It will be harder still given that Reynolds is entangled in what could be the biggest economic shift in the state since industrialization: the pursuit of shale gas.”
HuffPost / Maxwell Strachan
“I didn't want to work for Facebook”: The fall of Mic was a warning →
“Hindsight is 20/20, but somehow all of the big forces we've seen impact digital newsrooms over the past five or so years, Mic seems to have found themselves swept up in just about all of them.”
Axios / Sara Fischer
Patch is trying to focus on hyperlocal calendars instead of advertising →
“Calendar payments are Patch’s first major foray into local transactions, and will hopefully open up a world into other local transactions that Patch can monetize, St. John says.”
Om Malik
“The lack of forward thinking in this industry stems from the predominance of sales executives as leaders of media companies” →
“Keep this story in the back of your mind (along with a gigantic pinch of salt) whenever you hear media mandarins bemoaning the ills wrought by Craigslist, Google and now Facebook on their industry. Self-accountability is sorely missing from media company board rooms.”
Digiday / Lucinda Southern
Why News UK halved the number of podcasts it produces →
“One year in, the result: Double the collective downloads and triple the ad revenue.”
The Drum / Katie Deighton
The New York Times’ commercial plan for live events? Put editorial in charge →
“There’s this idea of readers wanting to get to know the journalist behind the stories that they’re reading…and so we knew that we wanted to bring our editors to life for our readers.”
CNN / Brian Stelter
Puerto Rico’s mass protests were partly sparked by this news outlet’s publication of leaked texts →
“Hundreds of thousands of Puerto Ricans have been taking to the streets to demand the resignation of Gov. Ricardo Rosselló. The extraordinary burst of outrage is due in part to a massive leak of private messages between Rosselló and his inner circle. The messages were posted on the web by [Puerto Rico’s Center for Investigative Journalism] on July 13.”
The Righting / Howard Polskin
The Washington Examiner has doubled its traffic year over year →
It’s become a clear (if still quite distant) No. 2 to Fox News among conservative news sites.
Medium / Wudan Yan
“I was owed more than $5,000 from late-paying publications. I tried to hold them all accountable. Here’s what happened.” →
“It seemed to me the publications I worked with here are not accustomed to having to pay out late fees likely because others haven't bothered in the past.”