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You might have heard: Axel Springer is buying a controlling stake in Business Insider for $343 million (New York Times)
But did you know: Axel Springer’s price for Business Insider sets a new high mark in digital publisher sales, beating out AOL’s 2011 purchase of The Huffington Post (Re/code)
Axel Springer’s deal to buy 88 percent of Business Insider for $343 million sets a new high mark for a digital publisher sale, Peter Kafka writes. The mark was previously held by The Huffington Post, which was acquired by AOL in 2011 for $315 million. The deal values Business Insider at $442 million, as Axel Springer already owned 9 percent of the company and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos will keep his investment in the company.
+ Ken Doctor writes that the deal shows Axel Springer has learned what Google and The New York Times already know: You need to be first or second in your field because “digital business doesn’t reward also-rans, and that often means third-place players and lower” (Politico Media) and a rundown of what you need to know about the German publisher, such as it publishes Bild, the highest-circulation European newspaper, and its ambition is to go from a German print company to a global digital company (Digiday)
+ Noted: Al Jazeera America will not voluntarily recognize union, leading to a vote of digital staff administered by National Labor Relations Board (International Business Times); Comcast launched Watchable on Tuesday with 30 content partners, including Vox, BuzzFeed and Vice (Variety); In redesigning its Top Doctors feature, Washingtonian puts user experience at the core, and the redesign of Top Doctors is a preview of a redesign to the rest of the website that will roll out later this year (Medium); Stanford University is searching for a new director for the John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships Program (John S. Knight Journalism Fellowships at Stanford)
API UPDATE
How Millennials Get News: Paying for content
Today we are releasing a new report that finds the vast majority of the Millennial generation use significant amounts of paid content and there’s reason for optimism, but selling news to young people remains difficult. The report — a product of our Media Insight Project partnership with the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research — found that 40 percent of Millennials personally paid for news products or services out of their own pocket, and their willingness to pay is correlated with their broader beliefs about the value of news.
Craig Silverman’s 4 basic verification tactics journalists should know (Medium)
With 20 minutes and four basic fact-checking tactics, Craig Silverman writes that journalists can uncover important information about a piece of digital content, including news stories, images and videos. Go back to the original source of the piece of content, looking at the sharer’s bio and the kinds of things they tend to share, and look at their profiles across social networks. To find the original source, reverse image search can help find where an image was first shared.
+ Lessons from The Huffington Post’s redesign: Branding is important in a world of distributed content, and it’s important to balance editorial features against site performance (Digiday)
Al Jazeera journalists request a pardon from Egypt’s president after being convicted of terror-related charges (Guardian)
Seven Al Jazeera journalists convicted of terror-related crimes are requesting pardons from Egypt’s president Abdel Fatah al-Sisi. Last week, two Al Jazeera journalists were granted pardons by the president after spending two years in prison, which Oliver Laughland says clears the way for pardons for the seven other journalists. Australian reporter Peter Greste, one of the seven requesting a pardon, says: “Once I was released from prison, I thought I was going to be free. It turns out that I’m not. I still have this conviction and all of its consequences hanging over my head.”
+ Financial Times CEO talks to The New Yorker about FT’s acquisition and why many metropolitan mid-sized newspapers are struggling: “The newspaper industry shot itself in the foot by going for massive reach, low-quality circulation” (New Yorker)
Twitter is building a new product that will let users go beyond the 140-character limit (Re/code)
Kurt Wagner and Jason Del Rey report that Twitter is building a new product that will allow users to share updates longer than 140 characters. That will allow users to post long-form content to Twitter, Wagner and Del Rey write. Twitter is also reportedly reconsidering how it measures 140 characters and may remove things such as links and Twitter accounts from the count. While the 140-character limit has been one of Twitter’s key features, users currently get around the character limit by posting images of text attached to tweets.
Why reader comments may be essential if local journalism is going to succeed online (David Higgerson)
The comment section has been getting a bad reputation lately, David Higgerson writes, but it may be essential if digital local journalism is going to thrive. Higgerson says that a solution begins with treating comments with the respect they deserve, in ways such as encouraging journalists to get involved in the comment sections on their stories or including an opening question at the end of an article. Higgerson writes: “For any newsroom moaning about the quality of the comments under their stories, I suspect they are probably getting comments which reflect the effort being spent attracting the right commenters, and the time spent creating the right environment for the right community to grow.”
+ Interactive Advertising Bureau is forming an Ad Blocking Working Group, which will distribute a code that small publishers can use to detect whether a user has an ad blocker enabled, allowing those publishers to tailor messages to ad-blocking users (AdExchanger)
Snapchat is trying to inject a little bit of news into users’ experiences through Live Stories around news events (Nieman Lab)
Snapchat users may have noticed a Live Story recently about the Hajj, an annual pilgrimage of Muslims to Mecca. Snapchat is using Live Stories, a feature that allows users in a specific location to submit photos and videos that editors curate into a story shown to Snapchat users, to include a bit of news in Snapchat users’ experiences. Snapchat’s head of news Peter Hamby says: “A 19-year-old may not come across what the Iran deal is, but if it’s in their face in Snapchat, where they’re living all day, I kind of see that as a social good.”
The post Need to Know: Sept. 30, 2015 appeared first on American Press Institute.
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