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Tuesday, February 5, 2019
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The end of an era: Spotify buying Gimlet signals the start of something new in podcasting. Is that good or bad?Welcome to walled gardens. Plus: Why you should be better at archiving your podcast, the BBC is building a show for kids, and a podcast pops up in a Super Bowl ad. By Nicholas Quah. |
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Researchers crunched 13 TB of local newspaper subscriber data. Here’s what they found about who sticks around.Surprise: “Subscribers who read many stories per visit and read them thoroughly were no more likely to keep their subscriptions than those who skimmed.” By Laura Hazard Owen. |
What We’re Reading
The New York Times / Kim Severson
The Los Angeles Times will revive its separate food section →
“The Los Angeles Times said Tuesday that it would resume publishing a stand-alone print section dedicated to food, and that it had added new staff members to fill its pages.”
TechCrunch / Josh Constine
Reddit is reportedly raising a huge round near a $3 billion valuation →
Reddit is reportedly raising $150 to $300 million.
Axios / Sara Fischer
The New York Times had trouble giving away 3 million free subscriptions to students →
“Some schools in some parts country are not going to want this…There’s a skepticism, [with] people asking us, what’s our ulterior motive? It was harder to give this away than [we] expected.”
The Conversation / Amy Adamczyk, Christopher Thomas, and Jacob Felson
Was it a shift in media coverage that led to more Americans supporting legal marijuana? →
“Support for legalization began to increase shortly after the news media began to frame marijuana as a medical issue.”
The New York Times / Jaclyn Peiser
The rise of the robot reporter →
“The A.P., The [Washington] Post, and Bloomberg have also set up internal alerts to signal anomalous bits of data. Reporters who see the alert can then determine if there is a bigger story to be written by a human being. During the Olympics, for instance, The Post set up alerts on Slack, the workplace messaging system, to inform editors if a result was 10 percent above or below an Olympic world record.”
Axios / Sara Fischer
Facebook adds Lead Stories, which debunks hoaxes and has a “Trendolizer,” as a new fact-checking partner →
From LeadStories.com: “Lead Stories uses the Trendolizer™ engine to detect the most trending stories from known fake news, satire and prank websites and tries to debunk them as fast as possible.”
Digiday / Aditi Sangal
The Atlantic’s Taylor Lorenz: Facebook is irrelevant to Gen-Z →
“I haven't covered Facebook in a year because that platform is irrelevant for young people and it's irrelevant to youth culture. Instagram is everything.”