YULI AHMADA

Jumat, 24 Agustus 2018

Bylines on the homepage? Not The New York Times’ priority anymore in the latest homepage redesign: The latest from Nieman Lab

Thursday, August 23, 2018

Bylines on the homepage? Not The New York Times’ priority anymore in the latest homepage redesign

Bruised journalist egos or important missing metadata? By Christine Schmidt.

The Lenfest Institute is testing new products for local news, and it wants your help

“If we're going to be a test kitchen, let’s cook some stuff!” By Christine Schmidt.

Through the looking glass, backwards: What Nieman Lab’s Predictions for Journalism 2018 tell us about where we’re headed

An academic read through a bunch of smart people’s thoughts on the near-term future for news. Here are the trends he found. By Joshua Benton.

What We’re Reading

Medium / Ned Berke

A checklist of 11 Facebook page optimizations for small publishers →

Make sure you set your call-to-action button. Make sure you have active links in the “About Us” section. Make sure you’ve set how your page is categorized by Facebook in the About section. Try out pinned posts. Declutter your page sidebars and modules (you can change and remove items by visiting Page Settings and going to Edit Page). And more.

Global Investigative Journalism Network / Ying Chan, Siran Liang and Lizzy Huang

Investigative journalists propel #MeToo reporting at China’s universities →

“In China, public reports of sexual abuse first emerged in 2014, but until a year ago these allegations were limited to personal blogs shared on Chinese social media, such as WeChat and Weibo. These accounts were rarely, if ever, followed up by the mainstream news media.”

Columbia Journalism Review / Tamar Wilner

In Texas, a local public radio show defies the 'Google it' age →

“What do you say to people who tell you, ‘Why don't you just Google it?'” “Everybody says that, everybody I meet at parties. But the show is about more than just getting the information. It's this place where people can exchange and contribute and be a part of something.”

Columbia Journalism Review / Himanshu Gupta and Harsh Taneja

An idea for how WhatsApp can fix its misinformation problem without breaking encryption →

“If WhatsApp can identify a particular a message's metadata precisely, it can tag that message as ‘fake news’ after appropriate content moderation. It can be argued that WhatsApp can also, with some tweaks to its algorithm, identify the original sender of a fake news image, video, or text and potentially also stop that content from further spreading on its network. To identify whether a message is fake or not, we suggest that WhatsApp rely on its user community to forward suspected messages to its content moderation system.”

Digiday / Lucia Moses

Google AMP beat Facebook Instant Articles, but publishers start to question AMP's benefits →

“‘AMP had a lot of hype and promise,’ said Chris Breaux, director of data science at Chartbeat. ‘It's really good for users in providing a consistent experience in terms of page-load time. The real question is, do you see more traffic than you would have if you didn't do the implementation? The answer for two-thirds of publishers is, no.'”

BBC News / Soutik Biswas

To combat misinformation on WhatsApp, 150 government schools in India have fake news classes to teach kids about hoaxes →

“If you get a message on WhatsApp saying there will be an earthquake in Kannur tomorrow, would you believe it and share it with your friends?”

Washington Post / Margaret Sullivan

This is the moment all of Trump's anti-media rhetoric has been working toward →

“Journalists can't change the minds of those most firmly in Trump's camp, those who have decided to believe only him. That's a lost cause, and not our mission anyway. But they can stop allowing themselves to be used as tools in Trump's relentless — and successful — campaign to undermine the truth. And do so knowing that it may be too late.”

The Logic / Sean Craig

Hootsuite faces internal, customer discontent amid challenges to its core business →

"The changes have left employees questioning the future direction of the company, some longtime customers disgruntled with what they consider a product in decline, and have likely put a long-rumoured IPO — floated as an option as recently as January by CEO Ryan Holmes — on hold."

Kamis, 23 Agustus 2018

So your news organization has real, paying digital subscribers. Now how do you keep them?: The latest from Nieman Lab

Wednesday, August 22, 2018

So your news organization has real, paying digital subscribers. Now how do you keep them?

One finding: “Need-to-know material converts (related to how to live your life, understand the world), while nice-to-know (guides, arts, reviews) converts badly but is key for retention.” By Shan Wang.

We’re getting closer to the day when news apps and interactives can be easily preserved in perpetuity

Well, maybe not easily, but an NYU team is building a tool to save the entirety of a news app (including underlying libraries and frameworks), as well as a digital repository to hold them for future audiences. By Shan Wang.

Reveal will fuel local, collaborative investigative reporting by helping newsrooms get the awkward conversations out of the way

“There may be two partners who think they can’t work together, but really you could have a meeting or two and talk things out and resolve some questions — and then they actually could work together.” By Laura Hazard Owen.

What We’re Reading

Poynter / Kristen Hare

How The Seattle Times brought in more than $4 million to fund critical coverage →

Some insights: Community funding doesn't improve the profit margin of the Times. The funding itself can take a lot of time. Conversations with one funder started in June of 2015, Chan said, and an agreement wasn't signed until August of 2017. Donor development is not source development. And more.

CNN / Oliver Darcy

McClatchy plans to lay off about 140 staff, among other cost-cutting measures →

Craig Forman, president and chief executive officer of McClatchy added in a memo to employees that “most of our expense savings are in legacy areas,” which would allow the company to “continue to build our future as a digital-DNA, journalism-driven media business.”

American Press Institute

The American Press Institute is hiring a strategist to help newsrooms better use analytics to serve their audiences →

“You will be working with reporters, editors, audience and analytics teams at newsrooms big and small across the country. You will be helping them focus on their audience through analytics and community surveys. You will be training teams to discover what works and what doesn't in their journalism, helping them navigate their analytics and consult on content strategy. This job will also involve writing about success stories from our partners that will be shared publicly.”

Deadline / Nellie Andreeva

Apple is getting TV rights to The New York Times Magazine’s 70-page climate change story →

“‘Losing Earth‘ occupied an entire special August 1 issue of the New York Times Magazine. Produced with the support of the Pulitzer Center, "Losing Earth" is based on more than 18 months of original reporting, well over a hundred interviews, and thousands of archival documents, many previously unknown, from government and industry sources.”

Poynter / Indira Lakshmana and Rick Edmonds

Trust in the news media seems to be up, especially in local news, one new survey says →

“A Poynter Media Trust Survey found 76 percent of Americans across the political spectrum have ‘a great deal’ or ‘a fair amount’ of trust in their local television news, and 73 percent have confidence in local newspapers. The divide in attitudes toward local versus national news is especially pronounced among Republicans: 71 percent said they trust local TV news in their community, 43 percentage points higher than those who trust national network television news.”

Digiday

Business Insider shifts to focus on business as Insider brand takes lifestyle, general news content →

“Some BI editorial teams — politics, news and military/defense — would be moving over to the Insider team, which was publishing on everything from cars to dessert to cheese, initially mostly in the form of social video designed for Facebook. The changes seem to line up with the company's direction into subscriptions. It could be confusing for readers to run up against the BI Prime paywall given the dichotomy between those hard-core business stories and BI's made-for-social, fluffier fare.”

Rabu, 22 Agustus 2018

When it comes to user data, are we done catching Google red-handed?: The latest from Nieman Lab

Tuesday, August 21, 2018

When it comes to user data, are we done catching Google red-handed?

“A dormant, stationary Android phone…communicated location information to Google 340 times during a 24-hour period, or at an average of 14 data communications per hour.” By Christine Schmidt.

Line is another chat app rife with spam, scams, and bad information. The volunteer-supported Cofacts is fact-checking them in the open

Users forward dubious messages to a chatbot; volunteer editors evaluate their credibility; the bot answers back to the user (and anyone wondering in the future). By Kirsten Han.

Alphabet soup: Will the merger of PRX and PRI shift the competitive landscape of public radio (and podcasting)?

Plus: A wave of new releases for the fall, an up-and-down week for My Favorite Murder, and SB Nation goes big on local sports podcasts. By Nicholas Quah.

What We’re Reading

The Verge / Russell Brandom

Google is developing an experimental podcast app called Shortwave →

“Called Shortwave, the new app was revealed by a trademark filing…which describes it as ‘allow[ing] users to search, access, and play digital audio files, and to share links to audio files.'”

News and Observer / Luke DeCock

He had an opportunity to join The Athletic, but he’s staying at The News & Observer →

“I wish The Athletic the best. More jobs for people in my line of work is a good thing, and a little healthy competition is as well. They have hired some of my really good friends, longtime and valued colleagues and people I don't know but whose work I deeply respect. But they can't do what we do: Cover a community from top to bottom with the kind of depth and analysis you can't get from two minutes on TV and the expertise your neighbor posting on Nextdoor doesn't have.”

BuzzFeed News / Alex Kantrowitz

Facebook advertisers will no longer be able to hide their ads from people interested in “Islamic culture,” “Passover,” and more →

“Facebook is planning to remove more than 5,000 ad targeting options in an effort to prevent discriminatory advertising. The bulk of the 5,000 targeting options, slated for removal by this fall, could be used as proxies by advertisers looking to identify and exclude ethnic and religious groups.”

Washington Post / Elizabeth Dwoskin

Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to one →

“The score is one measurement among thousands of new behavioral clues that Facebook now takes into account as it seeks to understand risk. Facebook is also monitoring which users have a propensity to flag content published by others as problematic and which publishers are considered trustworthy by users. It is unclear what other criteria Facebook measures to determine a user's score, whether all users have a score and in what ways the scores are used.”

Axios / Sara Fischer

Fake news 2.0: The propaganda war gets sophisticated →

“Now that platforms are prioritizing the removal of millions of fake accounts, bad actors are looking to hijack real accounts to avoid detection.”

World Magazine / Charissa Crotts, Elizabeth Rieth, Isaiah Johnson

How Liberty University is censoring its student newspaper →

As an administrator told the journalists: “Your job is to keep the LU reputation and the image as it is. … Don't destroy the image of LU. Pretty simple. OK? Well you might say, ‘Well, that's not my job, my job is to do journalism. My job is to be First Amendment. My job is to go out and dig and investigate, and I should do anything I want to do because I'm a journalist.’ So let's get that notion out of your head. OK?”

The Intercept / Sam Biddle

Facebook suspended a leftist Latin American news network Telesur and gave three different reasons why →

“A Facebook customer support agent told the network that the suspension appeared to be due to a technical glitch. The next day, Facebook wrote Telesur again, this time saying that the company's engineers had conducted ‘several tests’ and assured the outlet that ‘technicians’ continued to look for an answer. On Wednesday, after a 48-hour blackout, Facebook wrote once more to say the page had been suspended due to a mysterious ‘instability on the platform,’ which had now been corrected.”

The Idea / Atlantic Media / Mollie Leavitt

A Q&A with Elisabeth Goodridge, editorial director of newsletters at the New York Times →

“If we make sure that we provide stellar products that people will actually want to open, again, that inbox is a very intimate space, it's also a very crowded space, so we need to give them, and habituate them to something that they value, so that they open it up day in and day out. So that's the number one goal, for us, is optimizing these newsletters so we can make them amazing, and number two, launch newsletters people will open. It's considering not only writing a great subject line, all the way down to understanding what's the footer experience.”

The Verge / Nick Statt

A fake Twitter ad campaign encourages users to be more skeptical on social media →

"Don't Believe Every Tweet made the rounds early this morning, fooling tech critics and reporters into thinking Twitter had launched a marketing effort centered on its own inability to police fake and misleading information. The project includes a Twitter account, a YouTube video featuring comedian Greg Barris, and a website, complete with fake quotes from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.”

Poynter / Ren LaForme

How one journalist built a free resource that has already coached hundreds of women in journalism →

“Digitalwomenleaders.com, created by Katie Hawkins-Gaar, is a platform that facilitates a free 30-minute coaching session with any mentor who’s available. It’s first come, first serve and free to any woman working in journalism. All the coaches are doing this on a volunteer basis. I built and am updating the site on a pro bono basis so it’s just like a big gift to the journalism community.”

TheWrap / Jon Levine

The Los Angeles Times poaches veteran New York Times editor Sewell Chan →

“Under new owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, the LA Times moved to expansive new offices in El Segundo and added a raft of marquee hires like Chan, who will serve as deputy manager editor under the paper’s top editor Norm Pearlstine. The Times plans to expand coverage on all fronts, including Hollywood, sports, food, and the environment.”

The Atlantic / Scott Nover

The Sunday shows have a renewed sense of purpose, thanks to Donald Trump →

“At one point, the president would record and watch all five Sunday shows, host of Meet the Press Chuck Todd told me. ‘I remember Corey [Lewandowski] telling me a story about how it took up half his Sunday,’ Todd said, referring to Trump's former campaign manager. The president "fast forwards, but he watches all five." Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders didn't respond to an email about how the president's Sunday-morning viewing habits have evolved.”

Poynter / Kristen Hare

What are your ideas for helping local news? →

Give subscriptions to local papers and sites or donate to local non-profit news orgs as gifts. Could you pay local journalists or newsrooms to rewrite a version for you instead of aggregating it? Local newsrooms, how can you partner up with each other? And more: Get in touch if you have other ideas.

Washington Post / Margaret Sullivan

Editorials defending the press are a nice start. What's really needed is a more practical kind of collaboration →

“One example is the way hundreds of news organizations banded together recently to push back against a new policy of Facebook's: to treat the paid promotions of news articles on political topics as if they were political advertising. The pushback resulted in Facebook's pledge to reconsider the policy that threatened to confuse news with advertising for the platform's billions of users. These instances make you think: What if?”

Sabtu, 18 Agustus 2018

Does your Google News change based on whether you’re conservative or liberal?: The latest from Nieman Lab

Friday, August 17, 2018

Does your Google News change based on whether you’re conservative or liberal?

Plus: “Most of the people reviewing Burmese content spoke English.” By Laura Hazard Owen.

Goodbye, Facebook traffic. Welcome back, SEO, we missed you?

What We’re Reading

The Drum / Ian Burrell

How The Sun took on The Mail online — and won →

“Direct traffic to our platform is up 21 percent year-on-year and we want that to continue growing,” Poole says. Traffic to The Sun's app, which relaunched in February, is up by 60 percent.

The Guardian / Hannah Ellis-Petersen

Malaysia scraps “fake news” law used to stifle free speech →

“Malaysia was the first country in Southeast Asia to introduce a fake news law and rights groups feared it set a worrying precedent for the region, with the Philippines, Singapore and Cambodia all claiming they too were going to table legislation tackling the problem — though none have yet been passed. Baguilat added that the decision to repeal the law ‘sends a signal to the wider region that positive human rights change is within reach.'”

The Atlantic / Scott Nover

“The nation's hyper-partisan political divide — encouraged by a president who calls the media ‘the enemy of the people’ — is creating tensions that can be as challenging for news startups as they are for more established newsrooms. And for a small publication covering the military, the stresses seem magnified.”

Morning Consult / Joanna Piacenza

How perceptions of news accuracy shift with outlet — and topic →

“As illustrated in other media bias research, partisans were divided over the accuracy of the headlines by outlet: Democrats were more likely to say articles attached to CNN headlines would be accurate, while Republicans said the same of Fox News.”

The Washington Post / Paul Farhi

Said something you’d like to forget? CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski won’t let it go. →

“Kaczynski's four-member group — known as KFile after its 28-year-old founder — may be the foremost practitioner of the journalistic equivalent of dumpster diving. Their reportorial MO is simple, if tedious: They dig through social-media posts, old audio and video recordings and forgotten speeches, articles and books to find troubling comments uttered or written by the people they're investigating.”

Journalism.co.uk / Marcela Kunova

Mic uses “selfie-style” video to engage audiences on Snapchat Discover →

“One of the most successful formats has been speaking directly to the camera, as a friend or family member would, making clear eye contact with the audience on Snapchat to add a degree of friendship and personal connection to the story.”

Twipe / Mary-Katharine Phillips

How adblockers can help grow your subscriptions →

“Last year Bay Area News Group, a Digital First Media company, experimented with the message to visitors it flagged as using an adblocker. While typically they had only asked for the adblocker to be turned off, now they asked to turn it off or support their journalism by subscribing. During the experiment, roughly 9 percent of all new subscribers came from this pop-up.”

About the BBC Blog / Bethan Jinkinson

How BBC Ideas, the broadcaster’s short film site, is doing six months in →

“Death is another subject which seems to be preying on our users' minds. Videos such as 'Why dying is not as bad as you think' and 'the Irish approach to death' have been really popular on social media, with millions of views and thousands of comments and shares.”

Jumat, 17 Agustus 2018

How The Globe and Mail is covering cannabis, Canada’s newest soon-to-be-legal industry: The latest from Nieman Lab

Thursday, August 16, 2018

How The Globe and Mail is covering cannabis, Canada’s newest soon-to-be-legal industry

Just for starters, the Globe will have an expanding hub of coverage online, more live events, and a high-priced premium subscription newsletter for industry professionals. By Shan Wang.

Has the GDPR law actually gotten European news outlets to cut down on rampant third-party cookies and content on their sites? It seems so

Some third-party cookies were still present, of course. But there was a decrease in third-party content loaded from social media platforms and from content recommendation widgets. By Shan Wang.

Jack Dorsey says Twitter is experimenting with features to promote “alternative viewpoints” in people’s timelines

What We’re Reading

Nieman Foundation

“What Ever Happened to the Free Press?” →

“Given the threat to democracy and the rise of autocracy around the world, now is the time to support, not decry, legitimate journalism and to reaffirm our commitment to free speech and a free press. The Nieman Foundation stands with its fellows and with all journalists who are working hard — under increasing financial pressure, political attack, and physical threat — to discover the facts and report the truth without fear or favor.”

Medium / Rose Ciotta

The Investigative Editing Corps wants to help connect a volunteer editor with your newsroom →

“Please fill out this form so I can describe the need for extra resources in local newsrooms. I was able to test the idea in two newsrooms over the past year: The Olean Times Herald in rural New York State and the Beaver County Times in western Pennsylvania with the help of the Jim Bettinger News Innovation Fund of the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University. The fund was launched with support from the Knight Foundation and Knight fellowship alumni and friends.”

Poynter

How this Ohio newsroom got the community to contribute nearly $70,000 for journalism →

“Richland Source wanted to create partnerships that allowed local organizations to support journalism while allowing that journalism to be independent in a kind of NPR or PBS underwriting approach. The newsroom created a list of subjects they planned to cover. In about one month, 22 community organizations signed up as newsroom partners to support two major projects with $70,000. They gave money at the $1,000, $2,500 and $5,000 levels. One gave $10,000.”

San Francisco Chronicle / John Diaz

“Why the San Francisco Chronicle isn’t joining the editorial crowd on Trump” →

“It plays into Trump's narrative that the media are aligned against him. I can just anticipate his Thursday morning tweets accusing the ‘FAKE NEWS MEDIA’ of ‘COLLUSION!’ and ‘BIAS!’ He surely will attempt to cite this day of editorials to discredit critical and factual news stories in the future, even though no one involved in those pieces had anything to do with this campaign.”

Phi Delta Kappan / Alexander Russo

How to reinvent education coverage at the Los Angeles Times →

“It might be tempting to focus on broader state and national issues, but that's what the Washington Post did. In the process, the Post missed a series of scandals in the DC public school system.”

Disqus / Tony Hue

Why readers pay for news (and why they don’t) →

Based on 1,215 votes that Disqus collected over a four-week period, 30.45 percent of respondents said that they have paid for online news in the last year.

Digiday / Aditi Sangal

The Seattle Times has attracted 36,000 digital subscribers since a paywall went up in 2013 →

"Newsletters are leads for the Seattle Times funnel. At first it was many things. We wanted writers to be creative and try out a lot of things. But we've refined that to drive subscribers and then retaining them." (The Times has 183,000 subscribers to its seven different types of email offerings, like daily news and food and dining.)

J-Source / Spencer Turcotte

“We actually lost subscribers over the crossword” →

New ownership meant a new crossword, but readers “found it too cryptic.” A replacement puzzle was too “difficult to follow.” The solution: running two crosswords daily.

WAN-IFRA / Daniela Pena

A couple Latin American paywall success stories →

For one, Argentina’s Clarín signed up 100,000 digital subscribers in a little over a year.