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1/25/16

Need to Know: Jan. 25, 2016

Fresh useful insights for people advancing quality, innovative and sustainable journalism

OFF THE TOP

You might have heard: The Guardian lost £70 million (about $100 million) in 2015, and Financial Times reported that jobs may be cut as a result (Financial Times)

But did you know: The Guardian’s parent company will cut its budget by 20 percent, with the goal of breaking even within 3 years (Guardian)
Guardian News & Media, the publisher of The Guardian, is aiming to break even within three years by reducing its budget by 20 percent, or just over £50 million (about $71 million). The company’s operating costs have increased by 23 percent in the last five years, while revenue has only grown by 10 percent. Guardian News & Media’s chief executive David Pemsel declined to comment on whether jobs would be cut. Guardian editor in chief Katherine Viner says: “Over the next three years, a growing and far deeper set of relationships with our audience will result in a reimagining of our journalism, a sustainable business model and a newly-focused digital organization that reflects our independence and our mission.”

+ Noted: Twitter product VP Kevin Weil, media VP Katie Stanton, engineering VP Alex Roetter and HR VP Skip Schipper have “chosen to leave Twitter,” Jack Dorsey says (Twitter) and Twitter is expected announced the hire of a “prominent” CMO soon (Re/code); The Washington Post temporarily lifted its paywall for coverage of this weekend’s snowstorm on the East Coast (Washington Post); Verizon and Hearst are in talks to launch a joint video venture that would be “Vice for the red states” (Wall Street Journal); The New York Times celebrates 20 years online, launching the beta version of its website in 1996 after it began publishing on AOL in 1994 (Nieman Lab)

TRY THIS AT HOME

How Vox creates and distributes content for 6 different social platforms (Journalism.co.uk)
Vox’s seven-person engagement team leads the creation and distribution of content to the six platforms Vox publishes to, the newest of which being Snapchat Discover. While the engagement team works closely with beat reporters to package stories for social, director of programming Allison Rockey says their main “focus is to know all the social platforms in and out, to really be the ones to foster communities and make sure they are growing.” Rockey talked to Journalism.co.uk’s Mădălina Ciobanu about the ins and outs of Vox’s workflows for social publishing.

OFFSHORE

When Bild asked users to turn off ad-blockers, the number of people using ad-blockers on desktop declined by two-thirds (Digiday)
Axel Springer’s Bild took a hard approach to ad blocking when it banned all ad blockers from accessing its website, but that approach is proving to be a financial success. In October 2015, 25 percent of its users on desktop were blocking ads. After it starting asking users to turn off their ad blockers, the number of users with an ad blocker enabled on desktop declined by two-thirds to the single digits, which Bild says created 3 million more “marketable visits” each week.

+ Earlier: Forbes has seen similarly successful results, with 42 percent of its users turning off ad blockers after being asked to do so

OFFBEAT

How more publishers and digital marketers are using guilt trips as a UI feature (BuzzFeed)
You might have noticed a new trend in everything from mailing list opt-outs to publishers’ websites: Choosing not to sign up for Elle’s mailing list comes with a message saying, “No thanks, I’m not interested in protecting my skin,” and when GQ asks you to turn off an ad blocker, it says “Please support GQ’s Award Winning Journalism!” Those guilt trips are becoming a more common user interface design feature, Katie Notopoulos writes, forcing users to say that “no, I DON’T care about being well-informed and reading great journalism,” when unsubscribing from a mailing list or choosing not to register with a website.

UP FOR DEBATE

‘For fact-checking to be sustainable, fact-checking organizations need to become obsolete’ (Poynter)
Fact-checking organizations have a big challenge to overcome: “Convincing people that this information a) is available and b) that it is adequate to be used is hard,” Africa Check’s Nechama Brodie writes. “The mandate of fact-checking operations should never focus exclusively on correcting misleading claims. The ultimate goal should rather be kick-starting their readers’ sceptical reflexes, and enabling them, and those in the media, to question and check claims for themselves. … If fact-checking is niche, then it will never be relevant or effective.”

+ Research conducted for API shows that fact-checking is growing rapidly and the number of fact-check stories in the U.S. news media increased by 300 percent from 2008 to 2012, but fact-checking is still heavily concentrated in outlets with dedicated fact-checkers

SHAREABLE

How data journalism and more long-form stories are a challenge for the PR industry (PR Week)
“It’s no secret that fewer and fewer journalists are being asked to write more and more copy.  Only the most short-sighted PR would say this is a good thing,” PR Week’s Robert Bownes writes. Data journalism leads to more in-depth journalism and more interesting stories, but this is also a challenge for those in the PR industry: “This may mean that more pitches are assessed on content rather than the order they appear in a reporter’s inbox. [And] it may mean PRs have to generally raise their game. It’s harder to hide a company’s bad practice or comms ‘spin’ if a reporter, aided by data scientists, can examine open data to verify claims.”

The post Need to Know: Jan. 25, 2016 appeared first on American Press Institute.



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