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You might have heard: In 2016, Tribune Media acquired Television Without Pity, a popular TV commentary site that was shut down by NBCUniversal in 2014, and planned to relaunch the site (A.V. Club)
But did you know: Tribune Media abruptly pulled the plug on the digital media site it planned to launch in just two weeks (Politico)
Tribune.com was supposed to launch on April 25 — but Tribune Media abruptly shut down the site on Wednesday, laying off the site’s employees and scrapping its plans to relaunch popular TV commentary site Television Without Pity. Tribune.com was going to include “a combination of breaking news, in-depth feature reporting and opinion content,” as well as aggregated content from Tribune Media’ 42 local TV stations. The company had already hired staff for the site away from companies like The Intercept, Vice and New York Daily News, and the PR roll-out for Tribune.com had already started. “Today we are taking another step in the strategic review process, reorganizing our centralized digital operation and fully integrating it into Tribune Broadcasting,” Tribune Media’s interim CEO Peter Kern said in an email to employees.
+ You can read Kern’s full memo to staff here (Variety)
+ Noted: After layoffs at BH Media Group newspapers, the company is facing a “familiar playbook as fortunes dim” (CJR); The FCC spectrum auction ends with 175 TV stations receiving a total of $10 billion: The biggest payout of $304 million is going to Chicago’s WWTO-TV, which is owned by Trinity Christian Center (Variety); Facebook is ramping up its efforts to get rid of “sham” accounts that spread fake news and rolling out technical systems that will make it harder to create such accounts (USA Today); Condé Nast is hiring a dedicated Snapchat team as Wired, GQ and Self will start publishing weekly editions on Discover (Adweek) and Vanity Fair is planning to introduce a digital paywall (Yahoo Finance); Instagram Stories now has 200 million daily active users, the company says (VentureBeat)
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 includes an analysis of Trump’s use of the term “fake news,” fact-checking research to look out for this year, and a fact-checking challenge from a newspaper editor in Idaho.
Tips for nonprofit newsrooms on measuring social media metrics that matter (Nonprofit Quarterly)
There are three questions nonprofit organizations should be focusing on when thinking about social media metrics, Community Organizer 2.0 founder and digital engagement strategist Debra Askanase says: Does it inform our decisions, does it check our progress, and does it show if we matter? While Askanase’s advice is directed toward nonprofits, her tips are relevant for nonprofit and for-profit newsrooms alike. Some other topics Askanase covers: what to include in social media campaigns, when and why to use advertising, and how to set goals on social media.
+ A tool to help journalists protect their sources: Signal, which is widely adopted outside the U.S., is a private messaging and calling app, and it partners with WhatsApp to offer its encryption to its app as well (Poynter)
Facebook is buying full-page ads in German newspapers advising readers on how to detect fake news (Bloomberg)
Following pressure from the German government to do more about its “fake news” problem, Facebook is taking out full-page ads in newspapers in Germany with 10 tips for readers on how to detect fake news. The ads were printed Thursday in several major German newspapers, including Bild, Sueddeutsche Zeitung and Die Welt. The ad’s tips include analyzing the headline and source URL, and looking for other stories on the topic.
+ Newspaper consolidation in Canada: The Halifax Chronicle Herald, Canada’s oldest independent newspaper, acquires Transcontinental Media and its 27 newspapers to create a new company, SaltWire Network (Montreal Gazette)
A Silicon Valley training program is helping young high school grads get into the closed-off tech world (The Atlantic)
Year Up is a training program based in San Jose with the mission of helping young, lower-income high school grads move into the tech industry. “The model solves a growing problem in a tight economy: Across the country, hundreds of thousands of people are stuck in low-paying jobs with little room for upward mobility, while employers complain that they can’t find enough qualified workers for jobs that don’t require college degrees,” explains Alana Semuels. Year Up offers six months of training in classrooms and from mentors. After that, the participants are then connected with six-month internships in fields like business, technology and finance. And in many cases, those internships lead to full-time jobs for the Year Up participants, who also receive a stipend while going through the program. There’s also a clear value for Silicon Valley in this program, Semuels explains: “Year Up is providing a service that is of real value to them, helping them diversify their ranks.”
New net neutrality rules could hurt large and small publishers alike (Digiday)
“Rolling back net neutrality would relegate independent publishers to the slow lane of the internet because they’d be unable to afford access to high speeds,” Ross Benes writes on new proposed net neutrality rules from the FCC. “Large publishers with more cash can overcome this obstacle, but they’ll be hit with onerous fees and face possible competitive disadvantages from subsidiaries of internet-service providers receiving preferential treatment.” FCC chairman Ajit Pai is considering replacing the existing net neutrality rules with “a set of voluntary principles that ISPs would agree to as part of their service terms.” And while larger publishers have a greater chance to overcome the challenges the new rules would present, some argue that they could still be disadvantaged given that many publishers aren’t that profitable to begin with, Benes writes.
+ “The mainstream and conservative media are living in different worlds. So are those who read them” (Los Angeles Times); A survey from BuzzFeed News and Ipsos Public Affairs suggests “news on Facebook is an area rife with confusion and contradictions for users”: 51 percent of respondents said content from a traditional news outlet shared by one of their friends was “news,” while just 31 percent said “content from non-traditional news sources, (i.e BuzzFeed, VICE, Occupy Democrats, Breitbart etc.)” shared on the outlet’s own Facebook page is “news” (BuzzFeed)
‘Storm Lake Times Pulitzer win highlights decline of family newspapers’ (Wall Street Journal)
With its Pulitzer win for editorial writing, Iowa’s Storm Lake Times is also putting a spotlight on the reality of newspaper consolidation in America, Lukas I. Alpert writes. Today, just 15 percent of the U.S. daily newspaper circulation is under independent control (i.e., the publisher operates a single newspaper); in 1990, that number was 90 percent. And according to data compiled by newspaper merger-and-acquisition adviser Dirks, Van Essen & Murray, five out of the six newspaper sales in the first quarter of 2017 included a family selling a newspaper to a large media group — such as when the Frederick News-Post in Maryland was sold to Ogden Newspapers in March.
+ Here’s what editor Art Cullen says the Storm Lake Times will be spending its Pulitzer Prize money on: “We intend to put a jag on, then donate the rest of the money half to [Iowa Freedom of Information Council] and other local charities, probably all the other half to Catholic Charities to help resettle refugees in Storm Lake. After the bash, that means IFOIC gets $5 and the refugees get a Big Mac and fries” (Washington Post)
FOR THE WEEKEND
+ Walt Mossberg is retiring in June, but will continue to work on the News Literacy Project (The Verge): “The industry that has most dramatically felt the impact of the Internet is the media, and the arc of Mossberg’s career as a technology columnist reflects that,” Ben Thompson writes (Stratechery); “I think the good thing that happened to journalism was that thousands of voices of people, who are just as smart as the staff of The New York Times and The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, got a chance … to start their own site, their own blog, their own whatever, and I think that was a great thing,” Mossberg says on technology’s impact on the journalism industry (CJR)
+ Lara Setrakian’s TED talk on 3 ways to fix a broken news industry: Build news on “deep-domain knowledge,” create a Hippocratic oath for the news industry, and embrace complexity to make sense of a complex world (TED)
+ “The role of ‘public editor’ is a strange one. The person in the job is supposed to serve as an advocate for the readers of whatever publication employs them to be public editor. But in this modern age, it’s hard to define what composes a reader, no less which readers’ concerns deserve to be addressed in the Times, the local paper of New York and also the world,” writes Leah Finnegan on the role of NYT public editor. “Should CuckBoi420’s online comments be given equal weight as those faxed in by Stan from Cincinnati? … Who is the public editor for? Here is the answer: The public editor is mainly for journalists.” (The Outline); “[Liz] Spayd essentially ignores the evidence that the sports section is thriving, burying information about the Times’ sports readership far below the quotes from the cranky local sports fans. … Why give a voice to the incurious and un-resourceful if the data shows the section is doing just fine?,” Lindsey Adler writes on the problems with Spayd’s recent column on the NYT sports section (Deadspin)
+ The legacy of Lucky Peach in food media as it publishes its last two issues (New York Times): “Inside, there were no serene beauty shots of recipes, no recurring, urbanely serifed display font. There were barely any photos, and the ones that were there felt snapshotty and scrapbooky. Instead, it was a riot of illustration styles and color palettes and visual references. … It’s not that no one had ever published a drawing in a food magazine before … but the straightforwardly presented photo had reigned as king for over half a century.” (Eater)
The post Need to Know: Apr. 14, 2017 appeared first on American Press Institute.
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