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Wednesday, August 14, 2019
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America's largest union of journalists is doing a rewrite of its leadership electionThree decades of age separate the incumbent and his challenger, who present different views of the NewsGuild's effectiveness organizing new newsrooms. By Joshua Benton. |
What We’re Reading
The Verge / Nilay Patel and Julia Alexander
Auttomatic’s CEO on what’s next for Tumblr →
“I guess we're still a corporate parent but we're very friendly one, and we're all about blogging, innovation, publishing communities. So I would love for Tumblr to become a social alternative. That's in line with Automattic's values around privacy, and freedom of speech, and publishing, but has the fun and friendliness of some of the other networks we use, but without that democracy destroying… oh, I don't know what you want to call it.”
ProPublica / Rachel Glickhouse
ProPublica shares its guide to collaborative data journalism (and yes, the guide itself is collaborative) →
Topics covered: “Types of newsroom collaborations and how to start them, how a collaboration around crowdsourced data works, questions to consider before starting a crowdsourced collaboration, ways to collaborate around a shared dataset, how to set up and manage workflows in data collaborations”
TVNewsCheck / Harry A. Jessell
The Black News Channel, first announced in 2008, may finally be happening →
“What I have noticed is, in most of the situations, the overall context of news as it relates to the African-American community largely is negative…Our news will differ. We will tell news from the inside out, a sort of viewer-perspective journalism, and the perspective will be that of an African-American person.”
The Verge / Ashley Carman
Snap is trying again with Spectacles (two cameras this time) →
Double the cameras, (more than) double the price — $380 a pop this time.
Digiday / Tim Peterson
YouTube is testing a members-only feature →
“After introducing its Memberships program in June 2018 to sell subscriptions for individual YouTube channels, YouTube has begun testing an option for channels to upload members-only videos, according to a document published to the platform's support forum. A YouTube spokesperson did not provide a comment by press time.”
The Guardian / Emine Saner
Susan Wojcicki on YouTube’s new hate policies and removing content →
“Still, it is hard to resist picturing Wojcicki in her garden on a day off, attempting to nurture something beautiful while holding back the unstoppable force of weeds that just keep coming.”
The Verge / Casey Newton
Twitter will let users follow topics in the same way they follow accounts →
No spoilers!! “You'll also be able to mute topics, so if you're following a TV show but haven't seen the most recent episode, you can temporarily hide tweets about it from your feed.”
Poynter / Tom Jones
GateHouse Media lays off two dozen in newsrooms →
“GateHouse started making cuts this week at at least four papers, but it's unknown if these cuts have anything to do with the potential merger or are more tied to disappointing quarterly results at New Media, which owns GateHouse. These layoffs come less than three months after GateHouse laid off several dozen journalists at newspapers all across the country.”
Axios / Sara Fischer
Group Nine and iHeartMedia are launching a podcast partnership →
iHeart will co-produce all of the podcast content for NowThis, The Dodo, Seeker, and Thrillist.
Recode / Peter Kafka
CBS-Viacom won’t be big enough to compete with Netflix or Apple unless it keeps acquiring →
“But if you are arguing that you can compete with those companies by getting bigger, you have to acknowledge that while you are working out how to get bigger, they are going to be getting bigger while you work on that theory.”
Variety / Todd Spangler
Barstool Sports’ founder threatens to fire employees who try to unionize, which is illegal →
To someone who wished Barstool employees would form a union: “Me too. Just so I can crush it and reassert my dominance.”
The Guardian / Elle Hunt
This guy who makes impressive deepfakes isn’t all that worried about them →
“It's an arms race: someone is creating deepfakes, someone else is working on other technologies that can detect deepfakes. I don't really see it as the end of the world like most people do.”