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Wednesday, November 15, 2017
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Kickstarter’s new product, Drip, lets people charge subscriptions for ongoing projectsThe platform focuses on ongoing support rather than one-time projects. By Laura Hazard Owen. |
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Students: Spend the summer working with Nieman Lab via the Google News Lab FellowshipThe tech giant is offering opportunities for students to work with eight different journalism organizations next summer, including us. The deadline to apply is January 15. By Joshua Benton. |
What We’re Reading
Medium / Andrew McGill
Here’s a browser extension that will show you an Atlantic story every time you open a new tab →
“Right now, the story-recommendation algorithm is simple: We're just using the our homepage's RSS feed. The first time you open a new tab, the extension pulls the latest stories and stashes them in your browser's local storage; that means it works even when you're not connected to the internet.”
The New York Times / Kevin Roose
Snapchat’s new test: Grow like Facebook, but without the baggage →
“If a wildly creative company with an app used by 178 million people every day can still be crushed by Facebook, how is anyone supposed to succeed?”
Wall Street Journal
The Wall Street Journal is testing new commenting software developed with The Coral Project →
“In the first phase of this test, we are offering comments using this software on a limited number of articles, including essays from our Review section as well as Journal Reports. With this test, we're aiming to gather feedback about how our readers use the software as well as monitor and improve the technical performance of the software.”
Poynter / Melody Kramer
Do Facebook and Google have control of their algorithms anymore? A sobering assessment and a warning →
“For machine learning to be effective, it has to train on truly enormous amounts of user data. This drives a dynamic of restless and aggressive surveillance. When these techniques fail, they fail in ways that are not human. AI is simple math, there’s no room in it for ethics, or common sense, or empathy. Some of the egregious errors we will catch, but a lot of them we will not. These systems, which would require an extraordinary level of oversight to run safely.”
Wall Street Journal / Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg
Time Inc. is launching Sports Illustrated TV, a subscription streaming service for $4.99 a month →
“The service will initially be accessible only on Amazon Channels, which allows Amazon Prime members to subscribe to more than 130 subscription video channels. (This will be Time Inc.'s second streaming-video service. The media company also operates PeopleTV, an advertiser-supported service that originally launched in 2016 as the People/Entertainment Weekly Network.)”
Journalism.co.uk / Madalina Ciobanu
3 tips for news organizations looking to launch membership models →
“I am eager to see more organizations undertake really rigorous work into the pricing strategy side, not just copying the amount they see Spotify, Netflix or their local public radio station charge, but really going to supporters and saying ‘what would this be worth to you’?”
The New York Times / Stevan Dojcinovic
“My democracy isn’t your laboratory”: An open letter from a Serbian journalist to Mark Zuckerberg →
“Facebook could be a tool for such alternative spaces to thrive. Instead — at least in Serbia — it risks becoming just another playground for the powerful.”
Digiday / Lucia Moses
Why Spirited Media is taking an NPR-inspired approach to memberships →
“Spirited is working with News Revenue Hub, which has helped other news startups including The Intercept and the Marshall Project develop membership plans. Spirited’s Jim Brady aims to convert 10 percent of Spirited's 25,000 newsletter subscribers to members paying at least $10 a month. Typically, around 3 percent of a publisher's entire digital audience will convert to a paid subscription, although it can be higher depending on the loyalty of the audience and quality of the editorial.”
Digiday / Max Willens
BuzzFeed now has 19 people writing commerce content, with a focus on search traffic →
“Identity-focused posts are still a staple, but that team, which is part of BuzzFeed's editorial operation, has recently begun focusing more on search-centric content, designed to respond to queries people make not only on BuzzFeed's own properties but across platforms like Google and Amazon and using sales data gathered by Skimlinks.”
Margarita Noriega
Follow this automated Twitter account that highlights conversations about news, trust, and misinformation →
Follow @misinfonewsfeed for conversations about reports about how automation, bots, and algorithms are used to (mis)inform, source verification, investigation into 2016 U.S. election meddling, and what even is “fake news.”