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Tuesday, October 17, 2017
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Newsonomics: The Daily’s Michael Barbaro on becoming a personality, learning to focus, and Maggie Haberman’s singing“To be a Times reporter is to be in some ways a raconteur, right? A lot of the journalists here are great, great storytellers at a bar…I think The Daily taps into that great oral tradition of journalists, enthusiastically talking about a story in a way they're excited about, and it gets people excited about it.” By Ken Doctor. |
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Panoply’s Pinna might just be the first really interesting attempt to get people to pay for podcastsPlus: 60dB goes to Google, waiting (and waiting) for Apple’s new analytics, and the best podcast-related reads of the past few weeks. By Nicholas Quah. |
What We’re Reading
Columbia Journalism Review / Jared Brey
Behind the digital curve, Philadelphia Media Network tries to straighten out its brand →
“The company hopes to rival the Boston Globe for digital subscriptions. To get there, PMN is pushing to improve its digital products, with a series of new email newsletters —a politics dispatch called Trumpadelphia, for example, and a weekly roundup of food news and restaurant criticism — along with an expansion of the online opinion section, more experimentation with topical events, and some ambitious forays into civic convening.”
Wikimedia Blog / Jake Orlowitz
The crowdsourcing fallacy →
“Your crowdsourcing effort will most likely fail if: Your crowd is not diverse. The technical platform is poorly designed or overly complicated. There are not continued areas for growth and engagement over time. The interface and the organizers are not responsive to change. The community lacks social moderation or healthy behavioral norms. You lock it down and people have to jump through hoops to participate. And so forth.”
Variety / Todd Spangler
Snap and NBCUniversal are forming a joint studio venture →
The new studio will work with a handful of creative partners, signing their first deal with indie filmmakers Mark and Jay Duplass. The venture, owned equally by each company, comes after NBCU invested $500 million in Snap earlier this year as part of Snap's initial public offering.
Monday Note / Frederic Filloux
“De Correspondent” and the blueprint for a successful membership model →
In its home country of the Netherlands, it has 60,000 paid-for members. Not bad for a four-year-old publication. Can De Correspondent scale on a market twenty times larger from the one in which it originated?
Journalism.co.uk / Caroline Scott
Prothom Alo is building the largest mobile journalism network in Bangladesh →
Prothom Alo, the country’s most-visited newspaper website, hired a mobile journalism specialist to train its reporters through workshops across Bangladesh: “We’re now using mobile journalism to re-shape our news channel, encouraging our reporters all over the country to produce audio-visual content for social audiences.”
TechCrunch / Josh Constine
Facebook has acquired anonymous teen compliment app tbh, and will let it continue to run →
“Financial terms of the deal weren't disclosed, but TechCrunch has heard the price paid was less than $100 million and won't require any regulatory approval. TBH had scored 5 million downloads and 2.5 million daily active users in the past nine weeks with its app that lets people anonymously answer kind-hearted multiple-choice questions about friends.”
Digiday / Lucia Moses
‘The conversation moved on’: Time-based ad sales are hitting a wall →
“The Economist, one of its early proponents, said time-based ad campaigns aren't growing for the publisher. The Economist expects to sell around 20 campaigns this year, said Paul Rossi, president of The Economist Group, which is about the same number it sold in 2016.”
Poynter / Ashley McBride
Four newsrooms, 350 volunteers ready to engage Virginians on sea’s rise →
“The Virginian-Pilot, the Daily Press, WHRO Public Media and WVEC, the local ABC affiliate, are dedicating coverage to the king tide and co-sponsoring "Catch the King Tide" on Nov. 5. For most of the newsrooms, it's the first time they've collaborated with a competitor for such a project.”
Bloomberg
With a new $13 million funding round, this China-based app wants to ‘fix podcast discovery’ →
CastBox has supposedly been downloaded seven million times, and to hit its target of 10 million monthly active users within 12 months, it’s signing up exclusive content deals, offering Spotify-style revenue sharing.