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You might have heard: Mobile is now the majority of traffic for most news sites, and mobile advertising made up 53 percent of all digital ad spending in 2015
But did you know: Facebook isn’t just good at mobile — it’s how mobile works now (Wired)
“Mobile is how Facebook works,” Davey Alba writes, “and increasingly, Facebook is how the mobile Internet works.” With more than 1 billion people worldwide using Facebook on mobile, chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg suggested that businesses shouldn’t bother coding their own websites — instead, they can use Facebook to connect with potential customers. But that argument, Alba writes, changes the mobile Internet as we know it: “That doesn’t just help Facebook become more successful. Facebook killing [the mobile web] doesn’t just mean Facebook makes boatloads of money. The more it succeeds, the more Facebook warps a universe of Internet content, industry norms, and consumer habits around itself. Facebook in effect becomes the mobile Internet.”
+ Noted: McClatchy announces that Tim Grieve will succeed Anders Gyllenhaal as vice president of news; Gyllenhaal will move into a new role as senior editor and director of leadership and development (McClatchy); Nick Denton files for bankruptcy and says that Gawker’s staff will “soon be freed from this tech billionaire’s vendetta” (Politico); Hillary Clinton will address the NAHJ and NABJ joint convention in Washington, D.C., this week (BuzzFeed); Former Verge editor Joshua Topolsky raises $5 million to fund The Outline, a new news outlet that will focus on subject areas such as politics, culture and the future and aim for an audience of roughly 10 to 15 million (Wall Street Journal); WNYC is opening up its Audiogram Generator to other news organizations: The tool helps create shareable audio clips designed for social media (Medium)
The Daily Signal created a custom engagement index to determine which platforms are most important (Nieman Lab)
Many news organizations face questions like, whether a Facebook like or an Apple News reader is worth more? To help answer that question, The Daily Signal created a custom engagement index to put a value on each platform. The Daily Signal, the news site run by the Heritage Foundation, prioritizes email signups and donations the highest, while Facebook likes are prioritized lower. Director of digital strategy Ory Rinat explains: “If we were to look at, say, a Medium pageview the same as a pageview on our own site, it would undervalue Medium’s importance to us as an up-and-coming platform. With this system, we’re able to say: All things being equal, we care a little more about a pageview on Medium.”
The Times of London is experimenting with a ‘subscription funnel’ that allows non-subscribers access to two stories per week in exchange for registering (Digiday)
The Times of London has one of the strictest paywalls in the U.K., Jessica Davies writes, but it’s experimenting with a new way to attract subscribers that lets readers have some stories for free. In exchange for registering, non-subscribers will be allowed to access two stories each week. To register, users have to provide information such as their email address and country of residence. Digital director Alan Hunter explains: “It’s a way of experimenting with the subscription funnel. We’ll continue to do experiments like this for a long time.”
How Netflix does A/B testing: It starts with a hypothesis, tracks key metrics, and uses the results to shape its strategy (uxdesign.cc)
Sharing takeaways from a Designers+Geeks event held at Yelp earlier this month, Jessie Chen explains how Netflix creates great streaming experiences for its users through A/B testing. Netflix’s A/B testing starts with a hypothesis, which ensures that there’s no predetermined outcome for the testing. Once the test is live, Netflix tracks its key metrics — for Netflix, this might be total hours streamed or retention. From there, the efficacy of each test is evaluated and a “winner” is chosen. Chen writes that Netflix runs these sorts of tests regularly to collect user data — but the challenge is ensuring that enough data is available from the experiment to answer the question as fully as possible.
Algorithms rule our lives, and we need to hold them more accountable (New York Times)
Algorithms do more than just determine what stories we see in our Facebook news feed, ProPublica’s Julia Angwin writes: Credit scores are determined by an algorithm, and companies use algorithms to sort through resumes. But many algorithms (including those used by Facebook) are secret, leaving it a mystery as to how the algorithms produced their results. Given the power algorithms hold, we should demand accountability for the algorithms that rule our lives, Angwin writes: “As we rapidly enter the era of automated decision making, we should demand more than warning labels. A better goal would be to try to at least meet, if not exceed, the accountability standard set by a president not otherwise known for his commitment to transparency, Richard Nixon: the right to examine and challenge the data used to make algorithmic decisions about us.”
What newspaper chains can learn from a legal publisher’s growth strategy (Columbia Journalism Review)
Though it’s weathered the changes in the industry better than some other organizations, ALM (formerly known as American Lawyer Media) has still faced downsizing and struggled with digital transitions. But it’s turning that around with a new growth strategy, one that newspaper chains could likely learn from, David Uberti writes. ALM recently reorganized from a city-based structure to a topic-based structure. For example, the litigation desk includes journalists who cover the topic in New York, Miami and Atlanta. And while those journalists still report stories exclusive to their respective cities, ALM is encouraging them to seek out stories that can go beyond a single geographic market.
The post Need to Know: Aug. 2, 2016 appeared first on American Press Institute.
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