Fresh useful insights for people advancing quality, innovative and sustainable journalism
You might have heard: Guardian Media Group is trying to break even within three years and aggressively cutting costs to do so
But did you know: Guardian US CEO David Pemsel says that there’s ‘nothing strategic’ about the company’s cuts (Politico Media)
In a meeting with Guardian US staff, CEO David Pemsel said that the company’s cuts were purely about cutting costs, not about restructuring the business. “There was nothing strategic about that,” Pemsel said to staff. Pemsel said the goal was to keep Guardian Media Group’s total losses under $38 million for the fiscal year ending in March 2016, and earlier projections calling for Guardian US to break even by spring 2017 were “unrealistic.” That meant, Pemsel said, the only way for Guardian US to break even was to cut costs by at least 30 percent.
+ Noted: Quartz launches its first non-English product, a Spanish-language version of its Daily Brief newsletter (Nieman Lab); Twitter is testing not showing usernames in replies and not counting usernames against the 140-character limit (TechCrunch); Snap Inc., Snapchat’s parent company, is reportedly looking to raise as much as $4 billion in its planned IPO, which would value the company between $25 billion and $35 billion (Bloomberg); Pocket’s strategy for dealing with the Internet’s clickbait problem: It’s using users’ saved stories to recommend stories to other users and putting them in topic lists, such as technology or fitness (Fast Company); Ad and marketing advising firm BIA/Kelsey predicts that digital advertising will take over traditional advertising formats in local markets by 2018 (Advertising Age)
Bustle is releasing an open-source tool for news organizations to push their content to Instant Articles and Google AMP (Nieman Lab)
Women’s interest site Bustle is releasing an open-source article format called Mobiledoc, which is designed to make it easier for news organizations to push their content to different formats and platforms. Bustle’s CTO Tyler Love explains that Mobiledoc works because it stores only the content of posts, not their design, which keeps the format “light and versatile.” “It seemed like right way to approach it was to share it as an open project so the whole industry can move forward building on something like this rather than people halfway solving the problem individually,” Love explains. “We wanted something that will continue to get better over time.”
Why the UK’s ‘bro’ media organizations are setting their sights on expanding to the US (Wall Street Journal)
In the United States, we might soon be seeing an influx of “bro” media from the United Kingdom, Jack Marshall and Steven Perlberg write. Unilad plans to open an office in New York by March 2017, while Lad Bible is also looking toward an international expansion in 2017, particularly in the U.S. Those two publishers are already huge in online video, attracting about 3.6 billion views in September, according to data from Tubular Labs. But some more traditional publishers targeting young male audiences don’t see these video-focused publishers as competition: “A bro is not an adult voice. I don’t see them as competition, even though it’s the men’s space,” says Hearst Magazines Digital Media’s director of content for the men’s group Michael Mraz, while Hearst Magazines Digital Media’s president Troy Young described these sites as “kittens for dudes.”
Why AT&T wants Time Warner: There’s little room left for growth in the cell phone and Internet business and a Time Warner acquisition would let AT&T get into advertising (New Yorker)
“The media and communications industries are converging, and, when it comes down to it, premium content always wins,” says AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson in a YouTube video announcing AT&T’s plans to acquire Time Warner, the owner of HBO and Warner Bros. Nearly everyone in the U.S. is already online and already owns a cell phone, Vauhini Vara explains, limiting AT&T’s room for growth in its core business. Acquiring Time Warner would change that: AT&T would be able to expand into using user data for advertising: “Imagine, for example, that you’ve been making frequent business trips to the Bay Area. If you’re an AT&T subscriber and use your smartphone to watch an episode of ‘Game of Thrones,’ on HBO — which is owned by Time Warner — you might start seeing ads for a hotel in downtown San Francisco near where your meetings have been taking place,” Vara writes.
+ The deal is still a shot in the dark, Farhad Manjoo writes: “It does not make sense for Time Warner to offer most of its content exclusively to AT&T’s customers. Not only would that destroy its profitability (Comcast’s customers pay a lot for CNN and HBO, so why would Time Warner want to kill that business?), but it would also be out of step with the future. The notion of content tied to specific distribution lines is exactly what consumers are moving away from when they choose services like Netflix over cable bundles.” (New York Times)
Facebook will start showing us ‘gorier’ images, and that’s a good thing for understanding the significance of events (Pacific Standard)
Facebook’s announcement that it would censor fewer images on the platform “is a good thing, and not just because censorship is diametrically opposed to the freedom of expression on which democracies are built; Facebook’s retreat represents a victory for historical testimony,” Jared Keller writes. “First-person testimony is the essential vehicle through which we understand the heaviness and significance of human events. Official documents that are the lifeblood of modern bureaucracies may offer a clinical objectivity to historical events, but it’s testimony that gives us our sense of why these events matter.”
6 reasons why Gannett’s plan to buy Tronc still makes sense (Poynter)
It’s been almost six months since Gannett made its initial bid to buy then-Tribune Publishing, but Rick Edmonds writes that there’s still some clear reasons why an acquisition makes sense for both Gannett and Tronc. Among those reasons: Gannett has significantly raised its offer in the passing months and Tronc’s properties like the LA Times and Chicago Tribune would be “crown jewels” for Gannett’s announced plan to scale through acquisitions. Plus, Edmonds writes that at least two shareholders have sued Michael Ferro over the lack of a deal — if the acquisition goes through, those shareholders won’t have anything to complain about.
+ Frontline is publishing a series of posts on its experiments with virtual reality: The first post covers how virtual reality can push the limits of documentary journalism (Medium)
The post Need to Know: Oct. 27, 2016 appeared first on American Press Institute.
from American Press Institute http://ift.tt/2e03h0q
0 التعليقات:
Post a Comment