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Monday, July 15, 2019
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Nearly 7,000 people threatened to cancel their newspaper subscriptions. Here’s what got them to stay.Hint: Don’t just throw discounts at them. By Laura Hazard Owen. |
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How Free Press convinced New Jersey to allocate $2 million for rehabilitating local news“I really believe in the power of people to organize and advocate from the bottom up to create some solutions to this. I don’t think these solutions are going to come out of commercial media.” By Christine Schmidt. |
What We’re Reading
The Conversation / MacKenzie Smith
The University of California’s showdown with the biggest academic publisher aims to change scholarly publishing for good →
“It's the latest in a succession of cracks in what is widely considered to be a failing system for sharing academic research. As the head of the research library at UC Davis, I see this development as a harbinger of a tectonic shift in how universities and their faculty share research, build reputations and preserve knowledge in the digital age.”
Bloomberg
Dow Jones and Wall Street Journal content is now on the Bloomberg terminal →
“Bloomberg's investment now aggregates Dow Jones' world-class news coverage and analysis on the Bloomberg Terminal alongside Bloomberg's own award-winning editorial content and stories from thousands of other top news sources.”
WGNO
The city of New Orleans called out fear-inducing media coverage on Twitter this weekend →
“Your headline is not factual and there are multiple inaccuracies in this reporting.”
Slate / Nina Iacono Brown
Congress wants to solve deepfakes by 2020. That should worry us. →
“The great irony that legislators miss when threatening to amend or remove Section 230 is that it is in place precisely to encourage websites to reduce harmful content. The protections of Section 230 give platforms the space to experiment with different ways of moderating content without fear of liability if they do not get it exactly right.”
Cleveland.com / Chris Quinn
Advance Local is launching Lakewood Together, a hyperlocal pay-for-news-via-text experiment →
“With almost no marketing, we have signed hundreds of people up, at $3.99 a month, to receive one or two text messages a day from some of our best beat reporters. The texts are not so much news as they are insights. These reporters bring you the news already, on our website and other platforms, so their messages offer what the reporters are thinking, in a warm and friendly tone like messages you get from friends.”
The New Yorker / Isaac Chotiner
On the legacy of the now-online only, 114-year-old Chicago Defender →
“There was a conscious intent to get people to move to Chicago. And it made sense to use Pullman porters, because they had pretty much free access, although they had to hide the papers somewhere on the train after they picked them up in Chicago until they got to their destinations in Mississippi and along the way.”
Nieman Storyboard / Kim Cross
How the L.A. Times reported on efforts to revive a native lost language →
“But it soon became clear that this story about words needed more than words to come alive. It needed images of the places, people, and things evoked by the words. It needed audio to capture the singular melody of the Tongva language. It needed video to marry voices and images in what LA Times photographer Katie Falkenberg calls ‘a visual poem.'”
BBC News / Stephen Beckett
The BBC made a choose-your-adventure episode for the 1,000th episode of BBC Click →
“Click 1,000 puts a new and different spin on these ideas. As a factual programme, viewers get to choose what level of explanation they hear, how much detail they want and whether they are more interested in the tech or the people behind the tech.”
The Hollywood Reporter / Rick Porter
Americans can’t stop watching TV shows →
“Consider the 52 billion minutes Netflix users spent watching The Office in 2018. Over the course of the year, Netflix had roughly 56.6 million subscribers in the US. (that’s the average of the company’s subscriber count for each quarter). That would mean that the average member account watched about 920 minutes (15.3 hours) of the former NBC series — at 22 minutes per episode, that’s almost 42 episodes for every subscriber.”
TechCrunch / Sarah Perez
Twitch continues to dominate live streaming (despite seeing its first decline in hours watched) →
“According to a new report from StreamElements, Twitch viewers live-streamed a total of 2.72+ billion hours in Q2 — or 72.2% of all live hours watched — compared with 735.54 million hours on YouTube Live (19.5%), 197.76 million on Facebook Gaming (5.3%) and just 112.29 million hours (3%) on Mixer.”
The Atlantic / Taylor Lorenz
At VidCon, TikTok is the new YouTube →
“Vanessa Pappas, the general manager for TikTok, spoke with industry executives at a fireside chat yesterday that was so popular, many people couldn't get in; later, big TikTok stars held a meet and greet that was packed to capacity. Outside the primary entrance to the convention center, teenagers swarmed TikTok creators, shouting their names as they shot dance videos.”