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You might have heard: Gannett dropped its bid to buy Tronc after the banks reportedly no longer wanted to finance the deal (Bloomberg)
But did you know: Now that Gannett is no longer buying Tronc, it could now try to buy smaller metro papers and larger mid-sized papers (Poynter)
“The announcement … that Gannett has withdrawn its bid for Tronc prompts a big question,” Rick Edmonds writes “What it will do with the big kitty it had set aside for acquisitions?” Gannett’s CEO Bob Dickey has made it clear that the company wants national scale, and that it plans to do so through acquisitions. The likely next step for Gannett, Edmonds predicts, is buying up smaller metro papers and larger mid-sized papers: North Jersey Media Group and its Bergen Record, which was acquired by Gannett in July, is a good example.
+ Tronc’s Q3 earnings were down 6.9 percent from 2015 (The Wrap) and Tronc CEO Justin Dearborn acknowledges that the six-month acquisition fight was costly for the company and says it’s now “three to six months behind” on some of its initiatives, specifically in artificial intelligence and machine learning (Poynter)
+ Noted: Questions are rising at The Wall Street Journal around “how much blood will News Corp. have to spill at the Journal to achieve numbers that will keep the place afloat and satisfy shareholders?” (Politico); ProPublica adopts Politwoops and four other Sunlight Foundation projects using open government data (TechCrunch); Thomson Reuters will cut 2,000 jobs worldwide as it tries to “simplify and streamline” its business (Guardian); New York Times is partnering with Samsung to launch The Daily 360, a daily 360 video produced by NYT journalists with Samsung Gear 360 cameras (VentureBeat); A new study from StatCounter finds that mobile Internet usage has passed desktop usage for the first time (TechCrunch)
How lessons from email newsletters can apply to distribution on other platforms (Journalism.co.uk)
A new report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism shows that lessons news organizations learn from email newsletters can be applied to news distribution on other platforms, like Facebook. In the report, RISJ visiting fellow and Financial Times head of curated content Andrew Jack explains that email newsletters are a niche platform for consuming news, but email newsletters have proved to be an important platform for experimentation. Some ways that can be done: Outlets such as The Economist have made newsletters standalone products to experiment with new ways of monetization, and newsletters are a good platform for trying out a conversational voice that a news outlet may not have used elsewhere.
+ New York Times product director for email Nicole Breskin: “[Newsletters are] an essential way we can nimbly and effectively test new product ideas and inform our efforts. Historically, we conceived of newsletters as an extension to our main site and sections. But now we’re flipping that to really think of a newsletter as a primary experience in and of itself and a powerful way to distribute news and reach and engage with readers where they are” (Digiday)
Venezuela is stopping journalists from entering the country by getting stricter about work visas (Washington Post)
As political and economic turmoil builds in Venezuela, the government is stopping foreign correspondents from entering the country by getting stricter about work visas. The Washington Post says one of its reporters, Joshua Partlow, was stopped at the Caracas airport and denied entry to Venezuela, and was told he would need a work visa to enter. Partlow and other foreign correspondents had previously entered Venezuela without work visas in the past. The Committee to Protect Journalists’ program director for the Americas Carlos Lauria said, “They are enforcing this selectively now, I think, because they don’t want coverage of the protests,” adding that journalists from countries including Spain and Peru have also been stopped from entering the country at the Caracas airport.
‘Clippy Didn’t Just Annoy You — He Changed the World’ (Select All)
Artificial intelligence is a hot topic in tech right now, but Brian Feldman writes that our AI overload started somewhere unusual: Microsoft Office’s Clippy. “Clippy was ostensibly designed to make writing easier,” Feldman writes. “The Big Idea behind Clippy was to move away from the strict, regimented flow of computer tasks. In Clippy’s heyday, if you wanted to do something in Word — like, say, add footnotes — you had to know where the ‘Footnotes’ menu item was, and how to navigate the preference window that popped up. But with a digital assistant, you could theoretically just dictate what you wanted — ‘add footnotes to this document’ — and get a result.” Though Clippy was declared annoying and obsolete by the early 2000s, similar technology has been adopted in intervening years for features such as Apple’s Siri and Microsoft’s Cortana.
+ How the White House is planning for a presidential transition in the age of social media: The @POTUS and @WhiteHouse Twitter accounts will be turned over fresh to the new administration and tweets will be archived by the National Archives and Records Administration and moved to new Twitter accounts (White House)
CNN needs to examine its relationship with political commentators on both sides (Washington Post)
“[CNN] still needs to account for its addiction to political types crowding its payroll and crowding out honesty and journalism on its unwieldy panel discussions in its campaign 2016 coverage,” Erik Wemple writes. “The problem is bipartisan. On one side, there are Lewandowski and Trump surrogates, who are paid to weigh down broadcasts with dumb and sometimes inaccurate commentary; on the other side are Clintonites. … It needs to audit its relationship with contributors and commentators, or at the very least answer questions directly about this whole affair, as opposed to merely releasing statements. At stake is not only its relationship with viewers, but also with political candidates and debate partners, who’ll want to be sure that these situations won’t recur.”
+ Donna Brazile resigned from CNN after leaked emails showed that she shared questions with the Clinton campaign before a debate and town hall during the primaries (Politico); Jeff Zucker reportedly called Brazile’s actions “unethical” and “disgusting” during an editorial meeting (Huffington Post)
+ “The moment will be wasted if it does not prompt the networks to reset the boundaries between their newsrooms and their paid political operatives, if not end these arrangements altogether,” Jim Rutenberg writes (New York Times)
Jonah Peretti: If comScore measured distributed content, BuzzFeed would ‘be much, much bigger’ (Adweek)
“If comScore could fully measure our distributed content, we would be much, much bigger,” BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti said in an interview with Adweek. “We’ve already really reached this massive audience of 18- to 34-year-olds where we’re bigger than CNN, The New York Times or The Washington Post in that demographic.” Peretti says that BuzzFeed is reaching half of 18- to 34-year-olds in the U.S., and now that it’s achieved that scale, its focus is now on “deepening our connections with the audience.” And as evidence that its distributed content approach is working, Peretti also said that BuzzFeed’s food social media vertical Tasty reaches more people than BuzzFeed’s website does every month.
The post Need to Know: Nov. 2, 2016 appeared first on American Press Institute.
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