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Wednesday, October 11, 2017
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Franklin Foer wants journalism to liberate itself from Facebook“Subscriptions only matter if organizations have a strong sense of who they are. One of the tolls of the platforms has been to sap us of that sort of identity.” By Hope Reese. |
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The share of women in newsrooms has increased barely 1 percentage point since 2001, ASNE data showsThings are almost as bad when it comes to the hiring of people of color: The share of POC working in American newsrooms is up 2.9 percent since 2001. By Laura Hazard Owen. |
What We’re Reading
BuzzFeed / Davey Alba
Ev Williams wants to save media — again. Some writers and publishers are skeptical →
"Ev Williams is trying to brute force his way through the problem of publishing and monetization. In doing so, he has upended people's lives — he has upended good publications.”
Business Insider / Mike Shields
BuzzFeed thinks it has figured out a way to make web ads people might actually like →
The first product allows brands to weave their messages into a BuzzFeed staple: quizzes. The second product, BuzzCuts, promises BuzzFeed can take a TV ad — or even a print ad — and turn it into a short video or gif-like visual that translates well to mobile phones.
CrowdTangle
Here’s a new version of CrowdTangle for local newsrooms →
Features include: The ability to follow conversations in public Facebook Groups, a new feature that allows you to create teams within your organization, designed to more closely mirror how newsrooms are structured, and a dedicated resources section for local newsrooms.
Digiday / Aditi Sangal
The New York Times’ Meredith Kopit Levien on driving subscriptions and the NYT as a lifestyle brand →
"The work is, how do we create gravity in our conversion funnel so people move through their relationship with the Times so that they want to pay and stay? Our international audience is growing at a slightly faster rate than the domestic audience — 300 million college-educated, English-speaking people outside the U.S. We have a global brand. We have to convince people of the relevance of that brand and its worthiness to be paid for."
Digiday / Lucia Moses
As Facebook Live video dreams fade, publishers look again to Twitter →
“The Verge has done a lot of live video and just launched a new live show, ‘Circuit Breaker,’ on Twitter. The focus on Twitter comes as The Verge has dramatically scaled back the number of live videos it does on Facebook, where it used to do as many as four a week.”
BuzzFeed / Alex Kantrowitz
Twitter plans to release a bookmarking feature →
“Likes” are not endorsements: Soon you’ll be able to bookmark tweets for later and find them all in a dedicated section of the app.
Journalism.co.uk / Catalina Albeanu
Behind AM to DM, BuzzFeed’s Twitter-first morning news show →
Work on AM to DM started during the summer, putting together a team of around 18 dedicated staff and building a studio for the show: “We definitely didn’t want to cannibalize the newsroom doing this, so we brought on people specifically for the show rather than pulling everybody out of the newsroom to make it,” Shani Hilton, head of U.S. News for BuzzFeed News, said.
Medium / John Ciancutti, Steve Henn & Steve McLendon
Shortform audio platform 60dB is shutting down →
The audio platform, launched last year by Netflix alums John Ciancutti and Steve McLendon and Planet Money alum Steve Henn, is shutting down on November 10. The team behind the startup is joining Google: “We came to the conclusion that to accomplish our goals we'd be better positioned if we joined someone with scale who shared our vision for what was possible with digital audio.”