國際傳媒新聞：2018/08/31~2018/09/06
Axios is up to 11.8 million monthly uniques and 360,000 newsletter subscribers
“We try not to think about time spent as an important piece of data. That’s just an incentive to waste a reader’s time, we think. We look instead at how many articles the reader clicks through.”
INMA / SHELLEY SEALE / SEP 6
Are you a coder who wants to become a programmer-journalist? Here’s a free master’s at Northwestern for you
“There’s enough money left for just two more skilled developers — people with computer science degrees and/or software experience — to spend a year earning a journalism master’s degree at Medill, tuition-free.”
MEDIUM / RICH GORDON / SEP 6
How a local Chinese newspaper used WeChat to reach new readers and build a business
“The readership of Metro Chinese Weekly consists mostly of local Chinese Americans, Chinese students studying abroad, and Chinese travelers visiting Philadelphia. Tsao realized the untapped potential of reaching a wider audience through WeChat, and Metro Chinese Weekly’s official account, PhillyGuide, was created in 2015.”
LENFEST INSTITUTE / ANH NGUYEN / SEP 6
How much can the Athletic grow as a disruptor if it reads like the newspapers it’s poaching from?
“It’s difficult to square the Athletic’s claim that it’s providing stories that readers cannot find elsewhere with the fact that almost all of its writers and editors come from that most conventional of elsewheres. . Its most high-profile hires have been the guys Mather and Hansmann admired most growing up, when sports writing was almost entirely white and male.”
SLATE / AARON GORDON / SEP 6
Correctiv, the German non-profit investigative outlet, is adding a local arm inspired by a UK model
Correctiv is adopting the model of the UK collaborative reporting project Bureau Local: “In just 18 months, the Bureau Local has established a journalistic infrastructure enabling over 750 journalists, technologists, community-minded citizens and specialist contributors to work together to tell important local and national stories.” Read more about Correctiv in our past coverage here.
JOURNALISM.CO.UK / MARCELA KUNOVA / SEP 6
The story behind the New York Times’ anonymous op-ed blasting Trump
New York Times op-ed page editor Jim Dao “declined to say whether he pressed the person to speak on the record. He said, ‘we felt it was a very strong piece written by someone who had something important to say and who’s speaking from a place of their own sense of personal ethics and conscience. That was our main focus.’”
CNN MONEY / BRIAN STELTER / SEP 6
Google launches a search engine to help scientists sift through datasets
Dataset Search will be a sibling of Google Scholar: “Institutions that publish their data online, like universities and governments, will need to include metadata tags in their webpages that describe their data, including who created it, when it was published, how it was collected, and so on. This information will then be indexed by Google’s search engine and combined with information from the Knowledge Graph. (So if dataset X was published by CERN, a little information about the institute will also be included in the search.)”
THE VERGE / JAMES VINCENT / SEP 6
The BBC is getting into ASMR
“The British public broadcaster’s Radio 3 programming this autumn will invite listeners to relax to the sounds of Irish cows being herded up a mountain and leaves crunching on walks through the country.”
QUARTZ / ROSIE SPINKS / SEP 5
Apple News is preparing for launch in Canada
“Apple Inc.’s mobile news aggregation app is also recruiting editorial staff who will curate what Canadian stories are featured in the app, which has been a major driver of traffic for U.S. digital publishers.”
THE LOGIC / SEAN CRAIG / SEP 5
How the magazine industry’s identity crisis is playing out on its front page
“A magazine cover is all at once a cultural statement, a conversation starter, a negotiating asset, a digital selling point, a mood…. Magazine covers are now beginning to better reflect society—not only with their changing cover subjects, but with stories that strive to better understand identity and representation in the world of pop culture and beyond. ‘The aspiration has shifted to being not so much about material things but to a kind of cultural aspiration,’ said Vanity Fair deputy editor Claire Howorth.”
THE RINGER / ALYSSA BEREZNAK / SEP 5
Meet “misinfodemics” — the spread of a particular health outcome or disease facilitated by viral misinformation
“When 75 percent of Pinterest posts related to vaccines are discussing the false link between measles vaccines and autism, what does it mean for future herd immunity? And what about when state-sponsored disinformation campaigns exploit the vulnerabilities our systems have already created? Just last week, scientists at George Washington University found that a number of Russian bot and troll accounts on Twitter posted about vaccines 22 times more often than the average user.”
THE ATLANTIC / NAT GYENES AND AN XIAO MINA / SEP 5
How the Guardian overhauled its content studio
“Last year, the Labs team published 1,199 text articles, 65 videos, 12 interactives and 55 image galleries on behalf of clients including Natwest, Spotify, Google and Airbnb. On average, an individual spends 2.3 minutes with Guardian Labs content per campaign, according to the publisher. In some campaigns, this has risen to six minutes.”
DIGIDAY / JESSICA DAVIES / SEP 5
Many Facebook users don’t understand how the site’s news feed works
“When asked whether they understand why certain posts but not others are included in their news feed, around half of U.S. adults who use Facebook (53%) say they do not – with 20% saying they do not understand the feed at all well. Older users are especially likely to say they do not understand the workings of the news feed: Just 38% of Facebook users ages 50 and older say they have a good understanding of why certain posts are included in it, compared with 59% of users ages 18 to 29.” Also: Americans are changing their relationship with Facebook.
PEW RESEARCH CENTER / AARON SMITH / SEP 5
Newsrooms at Tronc’s 2 newspapers in Virginia want to unionize
“We’re taking this step to give our newsroom a seat at the table with whoever our owners may be.”
NPR / DAVID FOLKENFLIK / SEP 4
Joshua Topolsky’s The Outline has laid off all of its staff writers
“Editors seem to be the only remaining full-time editorial staff the site has left. It’s unclear what the Outline‘s plans are, or how many people were laid off today. The company does not appear to be folding, but may simply rely on freelance work from now on.”
FAST COMPANY / CALE GUTHRIE WEISSMAN / SEP 4
Myanmar court jails Reuters reporters for seven years in landmark secrets case
Reuters’ editor in chief: “We will not wait while Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo suffer this injustice and will evaluate how to proceed in the coming days, including whether to seek relief in an international forum.”
REUTERS / SHOON NAING AND AYE MIN THANT / SEP 4
WhatsApp kicks off radio campaigns in India to remind users about fake news
“These campaigns advise users to verify authenticity of messages before forwarding them and to report content that they might find to be inflammatory. It also cautions users to be careful about forwarding messages that contain misinformation and said doing so could have serious repercussions.”
TIMES OF INDIA / SEP 4
It’s time for the press to stop complaining and fight back
“I’m not advocating for a more activist press in the political sense, but for a more aggressive one. That means having a lower tolerance for talking points, and a greater willingness to speak plain truths. It means not allowing ourselves to be spun, and not giving guests or sources a platform to spin our readers and viewers, even if that angers them. Access isn’t journalism’s holy grail—facts are.”
THE ATLANTIC / CHUCK TODD / SEP 4
He helped create insider political journalism — now he says it’s time for it to go away
“A Brazilian editor once told me that you could tell his country was in political crisis because everyone was talking about politics all the time. In a normal country, nobody cares about politics. And I think that most of all, the political journalism of that crisis is no longer a special genre of journalism, but instead the core of the profession: getting to the truth, explaining the world, and often telling stories with a clear right and wrong.”
BUZZFEED NEWS / BEN SMITH / SEP 4
