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Friday, October 21, 2016
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Newsonomics: Here are 10 storylines we’ll be talking about into 2017The next generations of Murdochs and Sulzbergers step up, two newspaper chains chart the consolidation of the industry, and a Trump-driven shift in straight news reporting. By Ken Doctor. |
The Financial Times removed words from stories to convince readers to whitelist its site. 47% agreed
What We’re Reading
Gizmodo / William Turton
This is probably why half the Internet shut down today →
Hackers unleashed a large distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the servers of Dyn, a major DNS host, likely leading to Twitter, Reddit, and a huge swath of other websites being down.
CNNMoney / Tom Kludt
Wall Street Journal seeks ‘substantial number’ of buyouts for news employees →
The buyouts are designed to “limit the number of involuntary layoffs” down the line, said editor-in-chief Gerard Baker.
CNN / Paul R. La Monica and Brian Stelter
Report: AT&T is in talks to buy Time Warner →
Another case of a pipes company (see: Verizon, Comcast) buying a content company. The move would give AT&T ownership of CNN and HBO, among other properties
Variety / Todd Spangler
PBS will distribute two Snapchat-native documentaries on NowThis Media’s Discover channel →
"We are committed to making films in this format. These are exactly how we want them to live," says POV Digital executive producer Adnaan Wasey.
Center for Public Integrity
The Center for Public Integrity is spinning off the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists →
ICIJ, which coordinated the Panama Papers investigation, is spinning off as an independent nonprofit organization after 20 years as a project of CPI.
The Drum / Jessica Goodfellow
YouTube takes a shot at Facebook: ‘Our audience continues to watch, not scroll, with sound on” →
96 percent of YouTube’s audience watches videos on the platform with sound on and an average session is 40 minutes, according to Peter Cory, Google's agency leader.
Recode / Peter Kafka
NBCUniversal is doubling its bet in BuzzFeed, by investing another $200 million →
A year after making a $200 million investment in BuzzFeed, NBCUniversal is doing it again, at a valuation of $1.7 billion (NBCUniversal’s investment in BuzzFeed last year gave it a post-money valuation of $1.5 billion).
Digiday / Max Willens
Facebook-thirsty publishers turn to celebrities to worm into the news feed →
“The strategy is the bread and butter of a whole host of lightweight publishers, but it's also been embraced by A-list publishers like Rolling Stone and Slate too, which pay by the click for celebs, as well as a whole host of other popular Facebook pages, to post their stories.”
Digiday / Lucia Moses
Snapchat’s new terms raise questions for media brands’ Snapchat teams →
“‘If the revenues go down, you have to bring your costs down. It's trying to figure out what makes sense to keep each party motivated.'”
Financial Post / Sean Craig
Canada’s Postmedia is cutting its staffing costs by 20 percent via buyouts and/or layoffs →
“The company said the primarily cause of this was decreases in print advertising revenue, which fell $26.4 million or 21.3 per cent and its print circulation revenue, which fell $5.6 million or 8 per cent.”
Recode / Jan Dawson
An argument that platforms like Facebook’s Instant Articles and Google AMP are making it harder, not easier, to publish to the web →
“Creating content for these formats reintroduces a coding requirement, and online code is vastly more complicated today than it was in the mid-1990s.”
