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Wednesday, September 27, 2017
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Social video giant NowThis gets a “Newsroom,” working out its real-time reporting in public“To us, it's a workspace — a place where a group of NowThis journalists can help the public better understand how emerging news stories develop while giving the rest of the NowThis newsroom a competitive edge in reporting them.” By Shan Wang. |
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Self-driving cars are coming faster than you think. What will that mean for public radio?“The connection between cars and public media is so strong. What happens when that connection is shaken a little bit?” By Laura Hazard Owen. |
What We’re Reading
Medium / Brent Merritt
A brief history of media measurement →
“If you've ever wondered why digital media analytics are dominated by measures of volume — pageviews, clicks, and their many cousins — you have to dig back far beyond the advent of the internet to find the answers. Below is the story of how media measures designed for radio broadcasters during the Depression still shape today's digital media economy.”
Fusion Media Group / David Ford
Gizmodo Media Group is launching an environmental site called Earther →
“Environmental journalism is often perceived as bleak and dystopian, or too detached from the issues affecting humans here and now. Earther won't sugar-coat the latest ecological disaster or alarming climate milestone, but we'll strive to make our stories urgent and engaging, based on science and facts, while injecting hope and humor whenever we can.”
The Daily Beast / Katie Zavadski and Ben Collins
Facebook blew off Russian troll warnings well before Election 2016 →
“‘I've been blocked [from Facebook] because of a post about a rainbow. I put a picture of my city [with] a picture of [the] rainbow. The picture said, “Everything will be okay,”‘ one Ukrainian activist, Yaroslav Matiushyn, told The Daily Beast. ‘I was blocked for a month.'”
The Verge / Casey Newton
Twitter just doubled the character limit for tweets to 280 →
And you probably have an opinion about it.
the Guardian / Alex Hern
Sites like The Pirate Bay are using visitors' computers and phones to mine cryptocurrency →
“It's a controversial practice, with some likening it to running malware on visitor's computers, but it is a potentially lucrative endeavour for websites. The downside is that at best it slows down visitors' machines, and at worst it can also drain their batteries or send their electricity bills soaring.”
The Ringer / Alyssa Bereznak
Can tech startups do journalism? →
Yes, says Van Winkles editorial director Elizabeth Spiers. “I think we're kind of past the point where anybody would look at it and be like: 'Oh, well, that story's fantastic but I hate it because it's being sponsored by a brand.’ That's kind of irrational given that most media is ad supported. This is just a more direct way of creating ad-supported media.”
Digiday / Max Willens
People is launching a $60-a-year subscription program →
The program’s perks will include deals at retailers and chances to win tickets to Time Inc. entertainment events.
Poynter / Daniel Funke
From breweries to GOP meetings, PolitiFact is on a quest to win over conservative America →
The project is targeting states that went Trump in 2016.
Digiday / Aditi Sangal
Spirited Media’s Jim Brady: Growing audience through display advertising is ‘not natural’ →
Says Brady: “[Display advertising] may help your business in the short term, but it will kill it in the long term. The loyalty you need to succeed in a local market won't exist if you terrorize your users with all the tricks that are required to get your pageviews up that fast. So we just went into it thinking we'll do events as our primary business model.”
CNNMoney / Brian Stelter
Washington Post digital subscriptions soar past 1 million mark →
And digital-only subscriptions have more than tripled since the same time last year.
Digiday / Jessica Davies
The FT warns advertisers after discovering high levels of domain spoofing →
"The scale of the fraud we found is jaw-dropping," said Anthony Hitchings, the FT's digital advertising operations director.
Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia / Tim Wu
Is the First Amendment obsolete? →
“The most important change in the expressive environment can be boiled down to one idea: it is no longer speech itself that is scarce, but the attention of listeners. Emerging threats to public discourse take advantage of this change. As Zeynep Tufekci puts it, ‘censorship during the Internet era does not operate under the same logic [as] it did under the heyday of print or even broadcast television.’ Instead of targeting speakers directly, it targets listeners or it undermines speakers indirectly.”