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You might have heard: Billionaire Peter Thiel spent about $10 million to fund Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker, setting a dangerous precedent that could be emulated by others
But did you know: In an open letter, Nick Denton questions the ultimate intent of Peter Thiel’s decade-long campaign against Gawker (Gawker)
After Gawker wrote a story outing Peter Thiel nearly 10 years ago, it would seem that he’s been on a decade-long campaign to get back at Gawker. In an open letter to Thiel, Nick Denton questions what Thiel’s ultimate goal is with bankrolling Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker. Challenging Thiel to a public debate, Denton writes: “However philanthropic your intention, and careful the planning, the details of your involvement will be gruesome. … The best regulation for speech, in a free society, is more speech.”
+ Weighed down by the legal costs of fighting Hogan’s lawsuit, Gawker Media could be looking into a potential sale of the company (Wall Street Journal)
+ But Thiel is far from the only billionaire going after news organizations, the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Will Evans writes: Jeff Greene filed a $500 million libel suit against the Tampa Bay Times, Donald Trump is threatening to “open up our libel laws” to make it easier to sue journalists, and Frank VanderSloot sued Mother Jones over an article about his company’s contributions to Mitt Romney’s campaign (Center for Investigative Reporting)
+ Noted: New research from the Pew Research Center finds that 62 percent of adults in the U.S. gets news on social media (Pew Research Center); After launching in the U.S. in March, Blendle’s iOS and Android apps are now available in the U.S. (The Verge); Facebook expands targeting for its Audience Network to all users, regardless of whether they’re a Facebook user (Marketing Land); Politico Media drops its paywall and will no longer be a separate website from the rest of Politico (Politico); SB Nation releases Vox Media’s review of the Daniel Holtzclaw story, and promises an increased focus on staff diversity, changes to its long-form program, and improved editorial processes (SB Nation)
API UPDATE
The week in fact-checking
As part of our fact-checking journalism project, Jane Elizabeth and Poynter’s Alexios Mantzarlis highlight stories worth noting related to truth in politics and on the Internet. This week’s round-up looks at topics outside of elections that can be fact-checked, including vacations, bus ads, and hairspray.
Tips for a successful crowdfunding campaign: Make the benefits of donating clear and use your personal connections (Poynter)
Sharing lessons from crowdfunding their 40 Better Hours project, Poynter’s Ren LaForme explains how the project successfully raised $10,000. Among his advice: Personal connections are crucial for a strong start to a campaign, make sure the benefits of donating are clear to potential donors, and crowdfunding is ultimately more successful in getting people talking about your project than raising money.
+ Earlier insights on crowdfunding journalism: How to use crowdfunding to expand your reach and how to use crowdfunding to reduce risk when launching a new product
With 18,000 paying readers, 40 percent of Eldiario.es’ revenue comes from readers who want to support its mission (Nieman Lab)
Spain’s Eldiario.es is a free online publication with a progressive viewpoint, and its deputy editor Juan Luis Sánchez says it’s getting its readers to pay to support its mission of indepdent journalism. Eldiario.es has 18,000 readers paying about 5 euros per month (about $67.31 USD per year) for perks that include early access to stories, a special newsletter, access to Eldiario.es reporters and an ad-free version of the site. But Sánchez says most of these readers are primarily paying because they believe in Eldiario.es’ mission: After high-profile coverage (such as the Panama Papers), Sánchez says they see more people signing on to support the site.
The most valuable tools at work are the ones that make it easier for employees to collaborate, a McKinsey survey finds (McKinsey Quarterly)
Social tools are becoming more common in businesses, but not all of these tools are created equally. The latest McKinsey Global Survey found that employees say the most useful tools at work are those that make collaboration easier: Respondents rated real-time interactions, ability to collaborate with specific groups of individuals, and accessibility across multiple platforms as the most important features for a social tool at work and as the features that would most improve how they work.
Media organizations are writing a lot about Trump, but data shows readers aren’t really that interested in reading about him (Parse.ly)
Analyzing 1 billion page views across 100,000 articles, Parse.ly found that while news organizations are writing about Trump a lot, readers aren’t especially interested. While 50 percent of the articles analyzed on presidential candidates were about Trump, articles about Trump received fewer page views than articles about Hillary Clinton and a similar number of pageviews to articles about Ted Cruz. Parse.ly concludes that while some have said Trump is a “necessary evil” leading to more pageviews and money for publishers, the data show that idea isn’t true, and the huge volume of Trump coverage might not be necessary.
There’s a better question to ask than whether we should give the audience what they want or what they need (Medium)
Asking whether we should give the audience what they want or what they need is the wrong question, Hearken’s Jennifer Brandel writes. A better question is, “What does our community not know that we could help them find out and understand?” To start to answer to that question, newsrooms have to listen to their audiences, and start stories with that information in mind, ensuring that stories are relevant to the readers before they’re even published.
FOR THE WEEKEND
+ “What (Facebook has) is a disproportionate amount of power, and that’s the real story. It’s just concentrated in a way you’ve never seen before in media” (New York Times)
+ Which new media organizations are controlled by old media organizations? A chart from Bloomberg breaks down which traditional media organizations either own or have invested in new media organizations (Bloomberg)
+ Howard W. French explains what he’s learned from three decades in journalism about persisting racism in the U.S.: “The intersection between America’s age-old race problem and the crisis of race in journalism takes two forms. The first is a simple failure of integration: the news organizations that have traditionally comprised ‘mainstream’ journalism have done little to welcome or encourage African-Americans, who are substantially underrepresented by comparison to their numbers in the overall population. … But the second and more subtle issue is a persistent problem of typecasting — a deeply embedded view that regards certain topics as ‘black’ and the rest as ‘white.’” (Guardian)
+ More on what newsrooms can learn from the Knight Foundation’s report on mobile news: News organizations should reach for ways to engage their audiences both offline and online and a more nuanced approach to addressing the diversity of audiences is needed (Medium)
The post Need to Know: May 27, 2016 appeared first on American Press Institute.
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