Search Google

2/1/16

Need to Know: Feb. 1, 2016

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

OFF THE TOP

You might have heard: The staff of the Las Vegas Review-Journal has been especially transparent in covering its own newspaper’s controversial sale to the family of billionaire Sheldon Adelson

But did you know: Evidence of Adelson’s influence at the Review-Journal is starting to become visible (Poynter)
After former USA Today publisher Craig Moon was named as publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal last week, Rick Edmonds writes that there were plenty of signs that pointed to Adelson’s growing influence on the newspaper. While the Review-Journal relentlessly covered its own sale, a press release on the hire with a few comments added from Moon was printed. A three-page disclosure in the print edition about Adelson’s ownership has been removed. And, staff didn’t live-tweet or put out on-the-record comments about Moon’s hire, a stark difference from the transparency around Dave Butler’s visit to the paper and the appointment of Glenn Cook as interim editor.

+ Noted: Politico’s John Harris and Robert Allbritton deny that tension among Politico’s leadership led to the announced departures of Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen (New York Times); Reorganizing its ad sales, Time Inc. is creating three new ad teams designed to increase sales from its largest clients in the areas of pharmaceuticals, technology and telecommunications, and automotive (Wall Street Journal); New York state will require PR firms to register as lobbyists if they try to influence editorial writers and to disclose their contact with journalists (Crain’s); 30 years and 10,000 episodes of NewsHour will be digitized and available online through the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (Current)

API UPDATE

Best practices for product management in news organizations
After a Thought Leader Summit API recently held with more than 40 product-manager types from leading news organizations, we distilled the best practices and insights from that day of discussions that all news organizations can learn from. The white paper includes how to integrate product management in your organization, how product managers should work with their bosses and colleagues, and how to hire effective product managers.

+ Next week, the American Press Institute’s “Week in Fact-Checking” newsletter will merge with the Poynter Institute’s weekly newsletter produced by the International Fact-Checkers Network. If you’ve already subscribed to one or both of the existing newsletters, you’ll automatically receive the new version. If you’re not subscribed to either weekly newsletter, you can fill out this form to receive the new version.

TRY THIS AT HOME

Why it might be worth it for publishers to invest in apps again (Digiday)
In the last year, publishers including Quartz, The Wall Street Journal and BuzzFeed have launched new apps or announced plans for new apps, showing how publishers are starting to be interested in apps again after they fell out of favor. App users tend to be more engaged and valuable to publishers, a priority for publishers with the rise of Instant Articles and the like. The Wall Street Journal’s chief innovation officer Edward Roussel says: “Some publishers are moving in a dangerous direction by losing complete control over that end-user experience. You want to experiment with the new platforms, but you also have to invest in the experience that you yourself control.”

OFFSHORE

DailyMail Online’s latest quarterly results show the challenges of monetizing online news (Medium)
With 220 million unique visitors each month, DailyMail Online is the biggest English-language news site in the world. But in its most recent quarterly results, it only reported £23 million (about $33 million) in advertising revenue, or 13 cents USD per user. Frank Meehan writes: “As Flipboard and other startups in online news/media continue to struggle as well, the MailOnline results show that a very well run, optimized online news business still finds it hard to extract meaningful revenues per consumer, even at huge scale.”

+ Newsweek’s European sites will be redesigned with a focus on better ad viewability and an improved reading experience for users (Digiday)

OFFBEAT

How Facebook is capturing campaign ad budgets by offering a special program for targeting messages to individual voters (Guardian)
If you live in northeast Iowa and happened to give Ted Cruz’s campaign your email address sometime in the last few months, you’re likely seeing ads in your newsfeed that criticize Donald Trump’s “New York values” in comparison to “ours” in Iowa. To achieve these highly targeted ads, campaigns can upload their email lists and voter files, which Facebook then matches with users’ profiles. The Guardian reports that as much as $10,000 per day is being spent on the targeted ads.

+ In addition to Facebook, the presidential candidates are focusing heavily on digital ads elsewhere on the Internet too: Cruz’s campaign is spending as much as 20 percent of the campaign’s ad budget on digital (Wall Street Journal)

UP FOR DEBATE

If journalism continues operating at ‘peak content,’ the quality of journalism produced will ultimately decline (Quartz)
As journalism hits “peak content,” Erica Berger writes that many journalists are nearing their maximum possible output, ultimately lowering the quality of work they create. Berger writes: “If the media continues to be created and spread at such a rapid rate, we know the effects are unlikely to be positive. Fact-checking already has a troubling tendency to fall by the wayside. The need to churn out constant content also means that editors often lack the time to do more than proofread. … Most worrisome of all, we could lose journalists’ ability to act as watchdogs on behalf of the public.”

SHAREABLE

The Wall Street Journal is testing closing the Google paywall loophole (Digiday)
For Wall Street Journal readers not wanting to pay $200/year for a subscription, Googling the headline was an easy way to get around the strict paywall, but some people are noticing that this trick isn’t working anymore. A WSJ spokesperson told Digiday that they’re testing if closing the loophole would entice those readers to subscribe, but didn’t say how long the test would last or if the loophole could be closed permanently as a result of the test. According to Parse.ly data, Google referrals account for 35 percent of the WSJ’s referral traffic.

The post Need to Know: Feb. 1, 2016 appeared first on American Press Institute.



from American Press Institute http://ift.tt/1nYIQ6h

0 التعليقات:

Post a Comment

Search Google

Blog Archive