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4/28/16

Need to Know: April 28, 2016

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

OFF THE TOP

You might have heard: Facebook live video is drawing news organizations and other media companies in with big audience numbers, but the opportunities for revenue remain unclear

But did you know: Facebook is paying some media companies as much as $250,000 for 20 live streams (BuzzFeed)
With more social media competition, more social networks are willing to pay for good content, BuzzFeed’s Alex Kantrowitz reports. Facebook, in particular, is seeing a decline in original sharing, meaning that more people are clicking the “share” button instead of posting their own original content. And because Facebook needs original content to be successful, Kantrowitz reports that Facebook is paying some media companies and celebrities as much as $250,000 for 20 live streams over a period of three months.

+ Noted: If Gannett succeeds in acquiring Tribune, Gannett plans to make Tribune’s papers “regional anchors” that help Gannett’s smaller papers produce investigations and other journalism, similar to Gannett’s existing USA Today Network (Poynter); Arianna Huffington is joining Uber’s board of directors, raising questions about The Huffington Post’s editorial boundaries (Washington Post); Bloomberg editor in chief John Micklethwait tells staff automation is crucial and will free up time for enterprise journalism (Poynter)

TRY THIS AT HOME

How Vox Media built a bot for discovering related content (Vox Product)
After talking to editors and hearing a need for a tool to find older articles that people may have forgotten about, the Vox Media product team built a bot to solve the problem. The team chose to build a Slack bot, making it easier for editors to use the bot within their existing workflows. An editor sends a direct message to the bot with a specific article URL and a number of desired results, and the bots returns a ranked list of articles that are most similar in content to the provided article.

OFFSHORE

The Economist and Mic are partnering for a podcast with a global perspective on the 2016 presidential election (Nieman Lab)
While Americans might see Donald Trump’s rise as a historic, unpredictable event, Ricardo Bilton writes that Italians have a different perspective: They see Trump as America’s version of former Prime Minister Silvo Berlusconi, “an entertaining, almost comical spectacle who nonetheless became a very serious candidate, impossible to ignore.” A new podcast from Mic and The Economist called Special Relationship is aiming to bring that kind of perspective to presidential election coverage, covering issues such as national security, how terrorism affects political races around the world, and migration.

+ The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists will release a searchable database of Panama Papers data on May 9 (International Consortium of Investigative Journalists)

OFFBEAT

What global leaders say makes an effective leader: High ethical standards and providing goals (Harvard Business Review)
In a survey of global leaders, Sunny Giles asked what makes a good leader? The respondents ranked high ethical and moral standards (67 percent), providing goals (59 percent), communicating expectations (56 percent) and flexibility (52 percent) as among the most important qualities. Giles says that when a leader holds a combination of these traits, it ensures that problems will be dealt with fairly.

UP FOR DEBATE

The problem with story quotas: ‘Providing a lot of stories is not the same as providing a service to readers’ (Media, disrupted)
When newsroom leaders implement story quotas, John Robinson says they’re measuring the wrong thing: Simply providing a lot of stories isn’t the same thing as providing value and service to readers. Robinson writes: “It is true that every marketing survey of news content I’ve seen says that readers want ‘more.’ But it’s not more ‘stuff.’ It’s more content that affects their lives.”

+ Why “the tyranny of the impression” is killing digital media: “Digital publishing is built on ad sales based on impressions, and impressions are a terrible currency for selling advertising on the internet. … When digital publishers sell ads on impressions, all written content is valued equally. A lengthy New York Times expose is no more or less valuable than a blog post crammed with someone else’s Vines. That makes producing high-quality, expensive content a foolish business proposition” (International Business Times)

SHAREABLE

Google says having a community and healthy comment section can help with search ranking (Search Engine Roundtable)
Though quite a few news organizations are cutting the comment section, Google’s Gary Illyes says that having a healthy comment section can actually help your search ranking. But this doesn’t mean that comments are the easy way to higher Google rankings: Illyes emphasizes that quality content and good links are ultimately more important to Google ranking than having a thriving comment community.

The post Need to Know: April 28, 2016 appeared first on American Press Institute.



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