Fresh useful insights for people advancing quality, innovative and sustainable journalism
You might have heard: Tribune Publishing’s board unanimously rejected Gannett’s $815 million bid, saying it “understates the company’s true value and is not in the best interests of its shareholders” (USA Today)
But did you know: After rejecting Gannett’s offer, the Los Angeles Times is key to Tribune’s transformation (Politico Media)
Tribune has rejected Gannett’s $815 million offer and embarking on an “exciting and compelling strategic transformation,” as CEO Justin Dearborn describes it. That’s good news for the Los Angeles Times, which is a central part of that transformation. The LA Times will open seven new overseas bureaus in cities such as Moscow and Hong Kong, with the goal of turning the newspaper into “a global revenue generator.” The LA Times will also now be an individual segment of Tribune, meaning it will be separated from Tribune’s other papers in earnings reports.
+ Tribune board chairman Michael Ferro on what the LA Times’ new bureaus will cover: “We want to cover entertainment and lifestyle in all the media capitals of the world — what’s going on in fashion, restaurants, film, and theater, and see how they compare to each other” (Columbia Journalism Review)
+ Noted: Stressing “company loyalty,” the Las Vegas Review-Journal is telling staff not to share internal information and threatening to fire people who aren’t “loyal” (Politico Media) and features editor Stephanie Grimes says she was fired from the paper for those reasons (Medium); New research from Pew shows that long-form articles get more than twice the engagement time of short-form articles on mobile (Pew Research Center); LinkedIn could be creating its own version of Instant Articles (BuzzFeed); Austin American-Statesman launches a new technology vertical, called 512tech.com (Editor & Publisher); The New York Times will soon sell ingredients for recipes from Cooking, delivering them to readers’ homes in the form of a meal kit (Bloomberg)
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 how fact-checkers can help stop the sharing of false information on social media, how to fact-check whether someone is actually “Lucifer in the flesh,” and how to make fact-checking a budget interesting.
Lessons from the Financial Times on how to get the most out of newsroom experiments (Poynter)
To run a successful newsroom experiment, Financial Times’ special projects editor Robin Kwong writes that making sure your experiment has a distinct purpose is essential. Kwong shares her insights from running experiments at FT on how to hone in on that purpose. Among the advice: If the experiment involves a new tool, think about what you want to get out of using the tool, make sure you can clearly articulate what a success and what a failure is, and reflect at the end on what went well and what could be improved.
How Die Welt uses analytics to define what’s a ‘quality’ story (Nieman Lab)
Germany’s Die Welt uses a grading system for all its online stories, clearly defining what a successful story means for the organization. All stories are assigned a single score, which is made up of five components including time spent, social shares and bounce rate. A top 10 list is emailed out to the newsroom each morning, with comments from an editor. Nieman Lab’s Shan Wang writes that Die Welt’s editors say this creates complete transparency in the newsroom as to what “quality” means for the newspaper: “Not just clicks but also engagement time, not just views on the site but also how well a story travels on social media.”
+ Only a month after The Independent ended its print edition, its publisher ESI Media says it’s already turning a profit and its digital editorial team now has 90 staff members, double its size prior to the closure of the print edition (Press Gazette)
Is the ‘like’ losing meaning on social media? (Select All)
Laura Hajek, a musician and actor known as Edith Pop on Instagram, says in the last year, she’s seen more engagement in the form of a “like,” but she’s also noticed that some of her followers, particularly younger ones, scroll through their feeds “liking” posts indiscriminately. “The value of a ‘like’ is definitely decreasing — there is less thought involved,” says Hajek. “Nowadays, a ‘like’ says more ‘information received’ or ‘I saw this’ than ‘I like this.’ I’ve been getting more likes on Instagram, but it just seems like the pool of people is larger and they are liking posts more, not that they actually like me or my work.”
+ From yesterday: How to correctly and effectively use ‘likes’ as a metric
If we let it, Facebook’s algorithm will control journalism, but we can fight back with better reporting (One Man & His Blog)
“Facebook is not a friend of journalism,” Adam Tinworth writes. Tinworth argues we’re headed in a direction that will easily give Facebook and its algorithm control of journalism. But it doesn’t have to be that way, Tinworth says. Tinworth advocates for reporting with a strong point of view, that contextualizes and explains the facts, but also can make it entertaining for the reader.
+ Another strategy: “Think about platforms as fishing places where you can find large, engaged audiences and build a relationship with them by providing content. Then offer these users some other services off-platform. No publisher’s strategy will be complete without a clear plan to take users out of the platform and bring them to the publisher’s turf for monetization” (Nieman Lab)
Planning a panel? JAWS will help you find women to speak on it (Journalism & Women Symposium)
Panels at journalism conferences are often male-dominated; JAWS is trying to change that by helping panel planners find qualified women to speak. To get JAWS’ help finding women to speak on your panel, conference organizers can fill out a form on their website with location, subject matter and other info about the panel, and JAWS will use its member database to suggest potential panelists. To find more diverse panelists, also check out the Journalism Diversity Project.
FOR THE WEEKEND
+ In the Republican presidential race, journalism lost, Jim Rutenberg writes: “In the end, you have to point the finger at national political journalism, which has too often lost sight of its primary directives in this election season: to help readers and viewers make sense of the presidential chaos; to reduce the confusion, not add to it; to resist the urge to put ratings, clicks and ad sales above the imperative of getting it right” (New York Times)
+ “It’s a better time to make movies about newspapers than to work at one”: Movies such as “Spotlight” and Rob Reiner’s “Shock and Awe” depict the pre-2008 journalism industry, one that looks very different from the industry today (Washingtonian)
+ In Minnesota, the employees of the Pioneer Press are trying to find a local buyer for their hedge-fund owned paper (City Pages)
+ A look at the history of Marissa Mayer’s tenure at Yahoo and how the company got itself into an $8 billion hole (Bloomberg)
The post Need to Know: May 6, 2016 appeared first on American Press Institute.
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