Fresh useful insights for people advancing quality, innovative and sustainable journalism
You might have heard: Gannett could be soon approaching a $1 billion deal to buy Tronc (Politico Media)
But did you know: Ahead of the long-awaited Tronc deal, Gannett will lay off 2 percent of its workforce (Politico Media)
More layoffs are coming to Gannett as the company announced it will lay off 2 percent of its workforce, representing about 350 positions at the company. Gannett will announce its third-quarter earnings on Thursday, and Ken Doctor reports that print ad losses will likely overpower any digital revenue growth. Gannett executives have emphasized that the cuts and the possible Tronc acquisition aren’t related and that “the larger strategic picture requiring both costs cuts and strategic buys,” but Ken Doctor writes that argument “will be a tough sell.”
+ Noted: The New York Times is buying tech blog The Wirecutter for more than $30 million (Recode); The White House Correspondents’ Association expresses “profound concern and consternation” at the failure of both Clinton and Trump’s campaigns to establish a protective pool for post-election press access (Huffington Post); Trump’s campaign is launching a nightly news show on Facebook Live (Wired); Bloomberg says all of its sites will be switched over to HTTPS by the end of 2016 (Bloomberg Media); Business Insider is launching a markets data site called MarketsInsider.com with data coming from Axel Springer’s German finance portal (Wall Street Journal)
Facebook is launching free online training for journalists (Facebook Media)
Facebook is launching free online training courses for journalists around what it calls “the three core pillars of the news cycle”: Discovering content, creating stories and building an audience. The site will include courses on topics such as how to use Facebook Live and 360-degree video, and features for journalists such as verification and Facebook’s privacy options. The courses take about 15 minutes to complete, and journalists will need to login through the Blueprint platform with their Facebook accounts to access the courses.
How a German chatbot startup is trying to help publishers reach larger audiences (MediaShift)
“If Max Koziolek is right, online journalism never had a content problem,” Benjamin Bathke writes. “The crux, he says, has always been distribution.” Koziolek, who founded Berlin-based chatbot startup Spectrm, argues that the shift from homepage to distributed media was just as disruptive as the shift from print to digital. And to address that, Koziolek is trying to help publishers reach larger audiences with chatbots through his startup: Launched through Germany’s Next Media Accelerator, Spectrm helps publishers create and manage chatbots for a variety of platforms including Facebook Messenger and Slack.
How to ask unusual interview questions that will actually tell you something about job candidates (Fast Company)
Some companies are known for asking offbeat interview questions like, “What kind of animal would you be?” But those questions often aren’t helpful in revealing anything about job candidates and are more often weird questions for the sake of weird questions, Gwen Moran writes. But Moran writes there’s a way to ask unusual questions that will actually reveal something about your job candidates: Before you start crafting questions, think about what you want to learn about your job candidates and come up with questions with that goal in mind. And instead of going for totally random questions, ask an unusual question that relates to the job — for example, instead of asking someone to tell you about their leadership style, ask them to tell you about a boss they had who they admired and why.
Why newspapers have struggled with digital: They’re guided by internal business needs, not external customer needs (Medium)
Newspapers are failing the “product solution stack test,” Damon Kiesow writes. The product solution stack test is a series of eight elements a product needs to survive, including things like reader need, business need and user experience. Examining the product solution stack test provides some insight on why newspapers have tended to struggle with digital, Kiesow writes: Newspapers have tended to be guided by internal business needs instead of external customer needs, too many of their backend systems haven’t been modernized, and they’re often organized in a way that can return a false positive on the product stack test.
+ What options do newspapers have in the face of falling print revenue? Chris Sutcliffe argues that The Independent’s success with going online-only could provide some hope for struggling print organizations (TheMediaBriefing)
What journalists can learn from librarians: Develop a set of principles to help people determine what info is credible (Columbia Journalism Review)
In a recent Knight Foundation report, the dean of American University’s School of Communication Jeffrey Rutenbeck wrote, “Journalism has had the luxury of not having to ask itself the existential question of why anyone should pay any attention to us at all.” Rutenbeck’s solution to that problem: “I think journalists could learn a lot from hanging around with successful librarians.” There’s some clear similarities between journalists and librarians: They both navigate a wealth of information and help people get the information they need, and they’ve both faced technological disruptions. Among the things journalists could learn from librarians: Librarians have developed a set of principles called “information literacy” to help people assess the credibility of information and how to use ethically.
The post Need to Know: Oct. 25, 2016 appeared first on American Press Institute.
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