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Wednesday, October 31, 2018
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This new project wants to do for news trust what FiveThirtyEight does for polls: Aggregate a bunch of signals into something meaningful“The goal is to make those signals more useful and to help platforms…make better, more informed decisions about ranking and ad purchases — which we hope will help drive both promotion and financial support to quality news and away from disinformation, misinformation, and junk.” By Joshua Benton. |
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New York Times and chill: With a new video series, the paper pushes for binge-watching“We’re a subscription business, so we’ve been looking a lot at binge-watching and creating a body of work that, when people find one, they will spend time with multiple episodes.” By Laura Hazard Owen. |
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How the BBC built one of the world's largest collaborative journalism efforts focused entirely on local newsNews publishers of all sizes are partnering to “save democracy” at the local level; more than 35,000 stories have been published. By Tara George. |
What We’re Reading
Wired / Issie Lapowsky
Bots drove 23 percent of the Twitter activity from the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting →
“‘These big crises happen, and there's a flurry of social media activity, but it’s really hard to go back and see what's being spread and get numbers around bot activity,’ says Ash Bhat, a Robhat Labs cofounder. So the team built an internal tool. Now they’re launching it publicly, in hopes of helping newsrooms measure the true volume of conversation during breaking news events, apart from the bot-driven din.”
The Hollywood Reporter / Natalie Jarvey
Vice’s adult in the room, Nancy Dubuc, has a plan to fix a media pioneer (and keep its youth cred) →
“The first outside CEO in Vice’s 24-year history, the 49-year-old former television programmer was hand-selected by Smith to help transform his company from a skyrocketing startup into an enterprise that can live up to its eye-popping $5.7 billion valuation. Smith had lured investors like Disney ($400 million), Fox ($70 million) and private equity firm TPG ($450 million) by touting his Svengali-like ability to deliver millennial eyeballs and ‘become the biggest fucking media company in the world.'”
Report for America
Report for America will place 10 local reporters in California newsrooms next year →
“Report for America has previously placed a regional corps in Appalachia, where corps members have driven a substantial increase in reporting on under-covered parts of Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia. This second region-specific initiative marks the beginning of a major effort to create similar geographically-focused, locally-funded reporting corps. The goal is to both address areas that have large ‘news deserts’ and draw in new, local philanthropic support for community journalism.”
Business Insider / Shona Ghosh
Facebook approved fake political ads “paid for” by Cambridge Analytica →
“Business Insider set up a page posing as an NGO, called ‘Insider Research Group,’ and ran two ads with the disclosure of ‘paid for by Cambridge Analytica’…We accompanied them with inflammatory captions and links to Leave.EU’s and Cambridge Analytica websites.”
Recode / Kurt Wagner
The “Stories” product that Facebook copied from Snapchat is now Facebook’s future →
“‘This happened very quickly. This whole trend has been — is much newer than the trend with News Feed and feeds overall,’ Zuckerberg said of the user adoption. On the monetization front, Zuckerberg was blunt. ‘We're earlier in developing our ads products for Stories,’ he said. ‘We don't make as much money from them as we do from feed ads.'”
The Hollywood Reporter / Paul Bond
56 percent of Americans say cable TV has become unaffordable →
“In 2015, there were 205.4 million subscribers to traditional TV, according to eMarketer, but that will drop to 169.7 million by 2022. If TV executives intend on wooing some of those defectors back, they have their work cut out for them, as the THR/Morning Consult poll indicates that 72 percent of those who have cut the cord have little or no interest in resubscribing.”
Washington Post / Editorial Board
Jamal Khashoggi was brutally murdered four weeks ago. We're still waiting for answers →
“Yet the Saudis are deflecting questions by pretending to investigate what happened; the kingdom's chief prosecutor traveled to Istanbul on Monday to meet his Turkish counterpart. Worse, rather than demand a genuinely independent investigation, the Trump administration is playing along. It has withheld its own conclusions about the murder while pretending to believe that the Saudis can conduct a credible probe — even though a chief suspect is the kingdom's own autocratic ruler.”
The Gazette / Wayne Heilman
Digital First Media is laying off 107 people at its Colorado Springs service center →
Nearly all of the jobs are in finance, and the work will be shifted to a New York-based business outsourcing company.
PressGazette
British and Canadian parliaments still want Mark Zuckerberg to testify about disinformation →
“The joint hearing, said to be the first of its kind, is due to take place on 27 November and will be led by the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee. Zuckerberg has until 7 November to reply to the call….Other parliaments are also being invited to send representatives to the hearing.”
The Daily Dot / Andrew Wyrich
Twitter suspends right-wing activist Laura Loomer until after the midterms →
“In a screenshot shared with Loomer's post, the social media site said her account was suspended for violating its rules. It did not specify which rules she broke.”