Need to Know: Jan. 22, 2016

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

You might have heard: After buying The New Republic in 2012, Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes has put the magazine back up for sale, saying it needs a new business model

But did you know: Leon Wieseltier says he won’t be buying The New Republic, but he is starting a new publication with Steve Jobs’ widow (New York Magazine)
The New Republic’s longtime literary editor Leon Wieseltier disputed rumors that he’s buying the magazine, but Wieseltier is starting a new publication with Laurene Powell Jobs. The new publication is unnamed right now, but will “discuss the effects of technology on our lives and think critically about it.” But, Wieseltier is clear that this new publication will not be a reboot of The New Republic: “I can’t imagine a more distressed asset. [Chris Hughes] vandalized it. He sacked it.”

+ Noted: Facebook adds new audience optimization tools for publishers, including interest tags on posts, the ability to restrict a post’s visibility to audience segments, and additional page insights (Facebook); Al Jazeera America will lay off 197 employees in April, following the announcement that the cable news network will shut down (Reuters); National Review produces a special issue with 20 essays by conservatives designed to take down Trump’s campaign (Politico), leading the Republican Party to disinvite National Review from co-hosting the Feb. 26 GOP debate (National Review); The Interactive Advertising Bureau abruptly uninvited AdBlock Plus from attending its annual conference at the end of January, offering no explanation (Ars Technica); NPR One is updated with support for Apple’s in-car system CarPlay (9to5Mac); The Wall Street Journal will launch three new apps in the next few months, with “an interest in personalizing the news experience for the enterprise space” (Digiday)

API UPDATE

The week in fact-checking
As part of our fact-checking journalism project, Jane Elizabeth highlights stories worth noting related to truth in politics and on the Internet. This week’s round-up includes why Iowa’s ethanol debate isn’t as complicated as it seems, what gets journalists interested in accountability journalism, and fact-checking survival tactics in the new movie “The Revenant.”

TRY THIS AT HOME

How NPR has formalized its strategy for making Snapchat stories (NPR Social Media Desk)
While Snapchat itself has evolved from a communication tool to a storytelling medium to a distribution platform, NPR’s Vesta Partovi writes about how NPR’s Snapchat strategy has evolved. To produce a Snapchat story today, Partovi says NPR’s social media team is using four key concepts: storyboarding, captioning, collaborating, and engaging. A story is pitched to the social team, reporters and producers collaborate on how to make the story work for Snapchat, a storyboard is created, and the Snapchat story is filmed, with audience engagement and feedback following publication.

OFFSHORE

Taking a cue from Twitter, Chinese social network Weibo will expand its character limit from 140 characters to 2,000 (South China Morning Post)
Just a few weeks after Twitter’s plans to increase its character limit were reported, Chinese social network Weibo says it will also increase its character limit. Weibo is a microblogging platform similar to Twitter. Weibo will begin testing the increased character limit on Jan. 28. Users will still only see the first 140 characters in their timeline, but will be shown a “read more” option to reveal the rest of the post.

OFFBEAT

Why some say the culture of collaboration in the workplace has gone too far (Economist)
“In modern business, collaboration is next to godliness,” but research is starting to show that there’s a downside to open office spaces. University of California, Irvine’s Gloria Mark has found that even short interruptions increase the time needed to complete a task by a significant amount, while other studies have shown that multitasking reduces the overall quality of work. The Economist writes: “Helping people to collaborate is a wonderful thing. Giving them the time to think is even better.”

UP FOR DEBATE

BuzzFeed’s Shani Hilton: Millennials don’t need their own news (Re/code)
Mic CEO Chris Altchek said last week that to get the Millennial generation to care about news, they need a different kind of news than what appeals to older generations. But, BuzzFeed’s executive director of news Shani Hilton explains why Millennials really aren’t that different: “Millennials are interested in the same things that other people are. ‘Tell me something I don’t know. Tell me something I care about.’”

+ Our Millennials research shows that the generation is anything but “newsless,” with 85 percent saying keeping up with the news is at least somewhat important to them

SHAREABLE

Because it’s seeing its audience change, Quartz will launch an app in early 2016 (Nieman Lab)
When Quartz launched in 2012, it intentionally did not have an app because it created a barrier for readers to discover Quartz, publisher Jay Lauf says. Now, Quartz has plans to launch its first app in the first quarter of 2016. That’s because audiences are changing and the app landscape is changing, Lauf says: “Over the past four years, the places where people spend time reading have changed greatly. We’re trying to position ourselves to be wherever those users are.”

+ Quartz says its traffic grew by 65 percent in December, its revenue grew by 85 percent in 2015, and it’s already sold more advertisements in 2016 than it did in all of 2014 (Fortune)

FOR THE WEEKEND

+ Ken Doctor on the new media nonprofit in Philadelphia: “Sprinkling some some nonprofit pixie dust won’t save the newspaper industry. Only new ideas can do that. I have no doubt that the new institute will invest whatever funds it has in some good, small programs or notions. The institute’s board of journalist/academics brings the highest credibility to the task, and the foundation wants to do the right thing.” (Nieman Lab)

+ Podcasts are growing and gaining audiences, but they’re still failing to attract big advertisers because it’s difficult to know who’s listening to podcasts rather than just downloading them and very few podcasts have a large audience on their own (Economist)

+ Conflict between Forbes’ new ownership and the Forbes family could be setting the stage for another sale, just two years after the last sale (New York Times)

+ More on the generation that follows Millennials: They’re very active on social media but prefer more private networks, they’re willing to engage with highly targeted advertising, and they’re rarely disconnected (Reynolds Journalism Institute)