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Tuesday, September 26, 2017
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Newsonomics: Our Peggy Lee moment: Is that all there is to reader revenue?Will more than 2 percent of digital readers ever pay for news? “There is a whole universe living between ads and subscriptions.” By Ken Doctor. |
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Newsonomics: Tony Haile wants to build the TSA Pre✓ for how we consume newsHis new startup Scroll aims to target readers who are engaged but not willing to sign up for a dozen digital subscriptions across their favorite sites. “Publishers have to make more money from this than they would have from advertising. Which, thankfully, is increasingly easy to do.” By Ken Doctor. |
What We’re Reading
Columbia Journalism Review / Heidi N. Moore
Mic and the secret cost of pivoting to video →
“Publishers must acknowledge the pivot to video has failed.”
Stratechery / Ben Thompson
Ben Thompson: “The lowly blog has fully disrupted the mighty book” →
“[While] books remained a fantastic medium for stories, both fiction and non, blogs were not only good enough, they were actually better for ideas closely tied to a world changing far more quickly than any book-related editorial process can keep up with.”
Poynter / Melody Kramer
This 22-year-old digital news publisher is ready to go old-school with print →
“The Gales Creek Journal — which covers Gales Creek, Glenwood, and Hillside — is now four years old, and expanding into a print newspaper, which will publish once a month.”
Medium / Tristan Ferne
Beyond 800 words: new digital story formats for news →
“Developing and popularizing useful and attractive new formats could make news stories more recognizable when aggregated and consumed on other platforms, and provide more compelling reasons for people to visit the source sites and apps.”
New York Times / Caitlin Dickerson
How fake news turned a small town upside down →
“There were days where we felt like, Godammit, what are we doing here? We write a story and it's going to reach 50,000 people. Breitbart writes a story and it's going to reach 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 million people. What kind of a voice do we have in this debate?”
Facebook Media / Christopher Miles and Amber Burgess
How hyperlocal news platform Patch uses Facebook’s CrowdTangle to track pages in 1,200 towns →
"Which region has the highest follower growth? What is that editorial team doing differently? What type of content is resonating with our readers there? Then we get more granular by downloading Leaderboard reports, focusing on interaction numbers and follower growth at the town level."
Digiday / Ross Benes
Axios is holding off on its high-end subscription product, for now →
“Part of the challenge for the publisher is figuring out how to provide information that is unique and valuable enough that business professionals will get their companies to pay five figures for it.”
Vox / Ezra Klein
Vox is launching a daily explainer podcast →
Also: Lauren Williams is the new editor-in-chief of Vox, Ezra Klein is editor-at-large.
The Verge / Jacob Kastrenakes
Twitter pledges to update public policies after Trump threatens North Korea →
“Twitter says it will update its public guidance on what factors may lead to a tweet being pulled from the platform — or allowed to stay on it — to include a consideration of newsworthiness, as part of an effort to make the rules clearer to users.”