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Thursday, February 15, 2018
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The Guardian's new podcast player for the web tries to make listening a little more interactive (but not interruptive)The Guardian Mobile Innovation Lab’s podcast player for the mobile web lets you listen to a show without using a podcast app, and get phone notifications that point you to links and graphics at relevant points in the story as the audio plays. By Shan Wang. |
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Newsonomics: 11 questions the news business is trying to answer in 2018West Coast news chaos, a new leader at WordPress, the decline of digital display — and is The Washington Post really profitable? By Ken Doctor. |
What We’re Reading
Lenfest Institute / Joseph Lichterman
How Oregon Public Broadcasting is managing a 13-year-long reporting project →
“By the time the students graduate high school, OPB will have 13 years of footage and reporting that shows how this group of kids has grown up — a real-life version of the movie Boyhood. That point is still many years away, but it's thinking that it would like to create a documentary or some type of story that wraps everything up.”
BuzzFeed / Katie Notopoulos
How I cracked Facebook’s new algorithm and tortured my friends →
“My post still broke through, thanks to its ability to goad my friends into angrily commenting. Facebook is rewarding me for pissing my friends off, and its new thirst for comments seems to have driven itself into a loop that won't let my friends free from the grasp of a piece of content that they actually hate.”
The Splice Newsroom / Holly Robertson
Cambodia’s Phnom Penh Post wanted a younger audience, so it started rapping the news →
“Despite also drawing a spike in social media followers, the time-intensive experiment in news delivery in Khmer struggled to find a sponsor. One of five shows produced by the Post video team, the rap news series failed to attract an advertiser, while others have achieved financial viability—the travel, food and 'Who is Who' interview segments all have regular or semi-regular sponsors.”
Times of India / Digbijay Mishral
Chinese tech and media companies are backing news apps in India →
“Chinese money in news sites is a hot-button issue. TOI reported last year that the Indian government was considering banning Alibaba's UCWeb here since it received complaints of data theft by the platform. UCWeb has about 130 million active monthly users in India, according to latest numbers by the company.”
Poynter / David Beard
After NPR and the New York Times, Kinsey Wilson joins WordPress →
“And in many ways, I don't feel like I'm leaving journalism at all: WordPress powers millions of news websites, many focused on local communities. I think it creates an opening to work with others to address what is frankly an alarming crisis in local journalism.”
Buzzfeed / Alex Kantrowitz
Twitter’s livestream of the local coverage of the school shooting in Florida was part of a new initiative →
“On Wednesday, Twitter put the initiative into action in a big way, streaming hours of footage from Miami’s WSVN 7 next to the timelines of US users as the news station covered the shooting at Broward County’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida….Twitter’s efforts to promote news contrast with Facebook’s recent moves, which have been to deemphasize news content in its News Feed.”
Columbia Journalism Review / Maria Bustillos
Erasing history: The new battle over journalism’s digital legacy →
"Our digital documents are far more fragile than paper. In fact, the record of the entire present period of history is in jeopardy."
Splinter / David Uberti
The new local media hellscape? →
"This local and regional space was just waiting to be fought over," Jesse Holcomb, a Calvin College associate professor who researches media and civic engagement, told Splinter. "[The midterms] could really be a mess."
MediaShift / Tiffany Lew
Why dialogue journalism is having a moment →
A closer look at Spaceship Media, the Seattle Times’ “Under Our Skin” multimedia project, and AJ+’s lessons learned from a challenging project: “It’s about walking away with that connection, not just the arbitrary comment. The goal to see each other as people, and less as usernames.”
Digiday / Jessica Davies
How the Guardian’s Instagram strategy is winning over new readers →
One new feature is a “weekly Story called ‘Fake or For Real,’ which features a Guardian journalist highlighting some of the biggest fake news that has surfaced that week and asking readers to tap if they think the news is true or false, before debunking it herself. The one-minute story gets approximately 50,000 views each week and has proven popular with people overseas, according to the Guardian's social producer Eleni Stefanou.”