國際傳媒新聞：2018/05/18~2018/05/24
Inside the BBC’s “innovation incubator”
“We decided to take a snapshot of a typical day in the office, as seen from the desks of seven of our developers, engineers, and producers.”
MEDIUM / BBC NEWS LABS / MAY 24
Snap is launching an accelerator to try to invest in the next big media business
“The new accelerator, which Snap has named Yellow, will invest $150,000 into 10 different creators or startups beginning this fall.”
RECODE / KURT WAGNER / MAY 24
How The New York Times chose parenting as its third standalone product
“A big lure of parenting was the average age of parents — less than the average subscriber. Once in the NYT’s fold, those parenting subscribers may upgrade to the full product.”
POYNTER / DAVID BEARD / MAY 24
Six small papers joined up to cover the opioid crisis in Long Island
“The East End News Project plans to continue for the rest of the year with a focus on opioids. But it’s just the beginning of the partnership, Menu said.”
POYNTER / KRISTEN HARE / MAY 24
“Facebook knows it is at war, and it wants to teach the populace how to join its side of the fight.”
WIRED / NICHOLAS THOMPSON / MAY 23
“Over the last four years, journalists, analysts, and local activists from Iraq and Syria have written about ISIS documents, including some that were taken from the countries in which they were found. But Callimachi appears to be the first journalist to obtain and remove a cache of documents this large. She traveled to Iraq when coalition forces launched a battle to retake Mosul from ISIS in late 2016. There, she was on the front lines, rushing into buildings that were cleared of the militants and stuffing documents and hard drives into trash bags she had brought with her. But her story, and her new ‘Caliphate’ podcast, which is based in part on the documents she obtained, have set off a controversy about outsiders taking historically important documents out of a country at war.”
THE INTERCEPT / MARYAM SALEH / MAY 23
Sinclair is laying the groundwork for a Fox News competitor
“It may be just a matter of time before Fox News gets a real challenger from the right. Conservative media giant Sinclair Broadcast Group, which has long quieted speculation about plans to create a rival to Rupert Murdoch’s cable news empire, is making new moves to lay the groundwork for the plan.”
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER / JEREMY BARR / MAY 23
Indian Country Today returns. Can it protect its editorial independence?
“Freedom of the press is a thorny issue in Indian country, where tribes are sovereign entities. According to the Indian Civil Rights Act of 1968, tribal government can’t deny its citizens a free press. However, since tribes own most reservation-based media, tribal leadership controls the purse strings and can therefore control the news content, theoretically. Although some tribes have adopted guarantees for freedom of the press in their constitutions, leaders can choose to ignore such guarantees.”
COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW / MARY ANNETTE PEMBER / MAY 23
Here’s who owns everything in Big Media today
“The media landscape used to be straightforward: Content companies — studios — made stuff — TV shows and movies — and sold it to pay TV distributors, who sold it to consumers.” Here’s an infographic on the now-tangled web of distributors, content companies, and internet video companies.
RECODE / RANI MOLLA AND PETER KAFKA / MAY 23
Finding data matches “kind of freaked me out, because that meant I had an actual story, and I felt like I was in way over my head. I’m not ProPublica, or even a 2 or 3-person investigative team at a major daily paper. I’m just one person who knew enough about databases to be dangerous. And I was terrified this wasn’t a real story and that I was making it up.”
OPENNEWS / RACHEL ALEXANDER / MAY 23
“While there are local differences, there are highly consistent themes in what we’ve learned from supporters across countries and organization type ranging from traditional subscription-based publishers like Outside Magazine to member-driven, born-digital newsrooms like De Correspondent and The Texas Tribune. Over and over, loyalists to specific, carefully selected news brands say they seek out organizations — and want to see more projects — that exemplify these design principles.”
THE MEMBERSHIP PUZZLE PROJECT / EMILY GOLIGOSKI / MAY 23
The hard truth at newspapers across America: Hedge funds are in charge
“The evolving ownership picture has sparked fresh questions over whether investment firms can really help save local newspapers by making them profitable again — or if they’ll starve them to the point that they collapse instead.”
BLOOMBERG.COM / GERRY SMITH / MAY 22
“The Fourth Estate” shows how far The New York Times has come
“There’s a much more upbeat sense, partly because our economics are better, partly because — remarkably — the newsroom is actually a little bigger than it was in 2010.”
COLUMBIA JOURNALISM REVIEW / PETE VERNON / MAY 22
The New York Times is launching a parenting product with Jessica Grose as editor-in-chief
“We’ve shown that we can create non-news products that add significant value to our business. Cooking and Crosswords are both fast-growing stand-alone subscription businesses, contributing a large number of new subscribers to The Times each quarter. Cooking and Crosswords are also included in our highest priced subscription option. When we added these valuable offerings to our bundle last year, we saw a jump in people subscribing at higher price points.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES COMPANY / MAY 22
Why The New York Times likes short-run newsletters
“People like signing up for them because it’s a short-term commitment, and it’s something they’re passionate about right now.”
DIGIDAY / LUCIA MOSES / MAY 22
How media paywalls work in authoritarian countries
“The reach of paid independent news sites is dwarfed by Putin’s state-owned propaganda media and the websites owned by businesspeople who are loyal to the Kremlin. The main page of RIA Novosti, the state propaganda agency, had an average of 4 million unique visitors a day in April. Outlets like this don’t need subscription revenue to survive.”
BLOOMBERG.COM / LEONID BERSHIDSKY / MAY 22
“An oral history of how the pre-eminent media organization of the 20th century ended up on the scrap heap.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES / SRIDHAR PAPPU AND JAY STOWE / MAY 21
The mafia reporter with a police escort (and the 200 journalists like him)
“‘Don’t stop writing, Paolo,’ read an email Mr. Borrometi received two days after he was assaulted in 2014 outside his family’s country home in Sicily by two men wearing balaclavas. ‘Our countries need free and investigative journalism. You have my respect.’ The note came from Daphne Caruana Galizia, the Maltese investigative journalist who was herself killed in a car-bomb attack last year, after exposing her island nation’s links to offshore tax havens and reporting on local politicians’ crimes for decades.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES / GAIA PINAIGIANI / MAY 21
In Houston, journalists are sorting rumors from fact live on television
TEGNA-owned station KHOU, for instance, created a display to show what information the station has verified, what the station is still trying to check out and what false information is circulating.
POYNTER / AL TOMPKINS / MAY 18
You call that breaking news?: NPR’s public editor on the increasing frequency of push notifications
“NPR puts alerts into two categories: Breaking news that subscribers need to know now and feature alerts, which cover investigative work and original reporting that NPR wants to highlight, as well as live event coverage and new podcasts or programs. (New programming alerts are supposed to be “rare and far between,” per the guidelines.)”
NPR / ELIZABETH JENSEN / MAY 18
The current open rate for the newsletter is 70 percent (CBC wouldn’t share other metrics). While Royal Fascinator will end its run after the Prince Harry-Meghan Markle wedding ends. (But CBC has already launched another limited-run newsletter: The Campaigner, where writer Haydn Watters will look at the Ontario election campaign.)
J-SOURCE / H.G. WATSON / MAY 18
