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You might have heard: Univision bid $135 million for Gawker Media, but that bid doesn’t include Gawker.com (The Street)
But did you know: After Univision excludes Gawker.com from its acquisition offer, Gawker.com will shut down next week (Gawker)
After 14 years, Gawker.com will end its operations next week after Univision declined to include the website in its offer for Gawker Media. Staff were informed Thursday afternoon that the site would be closing, and J.K. Trotter says Gawker.com staff will be assigned to new roles at either one of Gawker Media’s six other sites or elsewhere in Univision. Yet to be decided is what will happen to Gawker.com’s archives.
+ “Every writer in the United States of America, no matter who they work for, should be terrified by what just happened. Peter Thiel showed the world that you can destroy a media outlet with almost no personal risk” (Esquire); “Gawker’s founding legacy was its attitude and its style, which influenced both those who loved it and those who hated it. Its final legacy will be the way in which it was destroyed, by a man with deep pockets and a lengthy grudge who backed not only Hogan’s lawsuit but several others, under the theory that if one failed to decapitate the site, another might succeed” (Washington Post)
+ Nick Denton says after Gawker.com closes, he’s getting out of the news business: He’ll be working on other projects, but specifies that those are “out of the news and gossip business” (Poynter)
+ Noted: The New York Times is shutting down its NYT Now app next month (New York Times), shifting its focus to driving subscriptions through its main app (Poynter); A new survey from the Engaging News Project finds that newspaper-focused newsrooms are less likely than TV- or website-focused newsrooms to use research and development strategies, such as monitoring digital metrics, partnering with researchers and using A/B testing (Engaging News Project); Reuters is starting to offer its clients captioned videos designed for mobile (Reuters); With a grant from the Dow Jones Foundation, ONA is creating the Women’s Leadership Accelerator to help female journalists gain skills and support (Online News Association)
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 why fact-checking is essential for voters, how politicians build myths, and tips for spotting a lie.
How to choose the right graphic for your data (Financial Times)
Graphics and charts are important reporting tools, but as 35 percent of the adult population has difficulty interpreting charts, Alan Smith writes. For that reason, Smith says it’s essential that newsrooms understand how to make clearer charts that readers will be able to understand. To help reporters answer the question “what graph should I make with these data?” Jon Schwabish and designer Severino Ribecca have worked together to create the Graphic Continuum, a tool with a wide range of charts organized into different categories based on the type of data.
The Guardian is starting to sell time-based ad campaigns (Digiday)
The Guardian is offering advertisers a new way to buy ads, based on the time readers view an ad. Advertisers can buy ads with a guaranteed “time slot” of 10, 15, 20 or 30 seconds, with the ad 100 percent in view. Guardian commercial director Nick Hewat explains: “It’s part of our fewer, better ads strategy, and it develops our thinking that not all ad impressions are the same. This isn’t a one-off problem solver; it’s part of an ongoing objective to deliver more tangible results for our clients.”
Twitter is making its anti-harassment tools available to all users (BuzzFeed)
Twitter announced Thursday that it is making two tools intended to help users handle abuse available to all of its users. The first tool is a “quality filter” that allows the user to filter out “lower-quality content”; the other is a feature that will allow users to limit notifications to messages from users they follow. Previously, these anti-harassment tools were only available to verified users. But BuzzFeed’s Charlie Warzel writes there’s reason to be skeptical that these tools will actually help reduce abuse on Twitter: “The features also only seem to address harassment by limiting what users will see in their feeds when they’re logged on. The settings don’t appear to prevent someone from tweeting abusive things.”
With the lines blurring between media companies and tech companies, tech reporting faces a challenge of accountability (Nieman Reports)
“The lines are blurring, in some cases dramatically, between what it means to be a media company and what it means to be a technology firm,” Adrienne LaFrance writes. “The leaders of some websites with robust newsrooms, like BuzzFeed, even refer to themselves as tech companies first, journalism organizations second.” That presents a “profound accountability challenge” for modern journalism, LaFrance writes: “Who is best served by the coverage we have? And is it the coverage we deserve and need?”
Glossy women’s magazines are giving way to the email newsletter (Nieman Lab)
With the closing of magazines, layoffs and more of a focus on digital, it’s not exactly a “golden age” for women’s print magazines, Taylyn Washington-Harmon writes. But the audience for those glossy print magazines is shifting to email newsletters, with the launch of newsletters such as Lena Dunham’s Lenny Letter and teen-focused Clover Letter. And these newsletters are fulfilling something that print magazines can’t do quite as easily, Washington-Harmon writes: “These newsletters seek the authenticity and personal connection that some find lacking in their print competition.”
FOR THE WEEKEND
+ There’s a growing demand on social networks for less news and more personal connections, Farhad Manjoo writes: “As more of our digital spaces become stuffed with news — and, perhaps more alarmingly, suffused with an anxiety to always put forward your best self — there seems to be a growing appetite for honest, unself-conscious personal sharing online” (New York Times)
+ “When is a distribution method that harms users’ brains no longer an acceptable cost of doing business?” Journalism depends on digital media, Danny Funt writes, but digital media is harming us and fragmenting our attention (Columbia Journalism Review)
+ Inside Instagram’s secret Facebook group for talking to teens: Instagram invites teens into the Facebook groups, where they talk about tech issues, polls, and feedback on new Instagram features (Washington Post)
The post Need to Know: Aug. 19, 2016 appeared first on American Press Institute.
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