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Friday, July 26, 2019
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Junky TV is actually making people dumber — and more likely to support populist politiciansPlus: Alex Stamos and Renee DiResta are launching an “observatory” for internet abuse at Stanford, and misconceptions about disinformation. By Laura Hazard Owen. |
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What does The New York Times look for in coming up with a new product? These five thingsIncluding global potential, habit formation, and brand leverage. By Joshua Benton. |
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.”