Search Google

12/1/16

Need to Know: Dec. 1, 2016

Fresh useful insights for people advancing quality, innovative and sustainable journalism

OFF THE TOP

You might have heard: Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen left Politico earlier this year to start a new media outlet targeted to “corporate executives and other professionals with a mix of business and political news” (Wall Street Journal)

But did you know: Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen’s revealed the mission statement of their new startup Axios: ‘Media is broken—and too often a scam’ (Vanity Fair)
Few details have been available about Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen’s new media startup after their departures from Politico earlier this year, but the duo revealed the company’s name and mission statement on Wednesday: Called Axios, the company’s mission statement is, “Media is broken—and too often a scam.” That mission statement is telling, Sarah Ellison writes: “As recent polling has shown the public’s trust in journalists to be at rock bottom, VandeHei and company certainly see opportunity there. Axios stands for ‘worthy’ in Greek. As such, the new company promises to deliver content deserving of its readers’ attention. And that starts with the articulation of a seemingly new approach to media strategy.”

+ VandeHei says Axios will be free to readers at launch and supported by advertising, but will begin adding subscriptions after two to three years (Recode)

+ Earlier: Research from the Media Insight Project found a strong correlation between trust and how much people interact with news: People who place a higher importance on a variety of specific factors related to trust are more likely to pay for their favorite news sources (28 percent vs. 20 percent), to share content (55 percent vs. 32 percent), and follow favorite news sources on social media (40 percent vs. 26 percent)

+ Noted: Investigative news site Tulsa Frontier is getting rid of its $30/month subscription and becoming a nonprofit after failing to meet its goal of reaching 1,000 subscribers in one year (Nieman Lab); Politico national editor Kristin Roberts is leaving the company to do something “that reminds me that journalism is a public service” (Poynter); Reuters built an algorithmic prediction tool to uncover and verify breaking news on Twitter (Nieman Lab); Twitter Moments can now be created on mobile (@twitter, Twitter)

API UPDATE

How to engage readers with digital longform journalism
Major enterprise stories require considerable resources and have limited audiences, but are the kinds of stories that encourage readers to move beyond binary and dogmatic thinking about local, national and world events. API’s summer 2016 fellow Kasia Kovacs examined what elements in longform stories online engage readers, and what newsrooms can do to best engage their readers with enterprise journalism.

+ Applications for API’s paid summer 2017 fellowship are due by Jan. 16

TRY THIS AT HOME

Some early numbers from the Boston Globe on Instagram Stories links: Lighter news drove more engagement, and click-through rates were higher than Facebook posts (Matt Karolian, Medium)
Instagram recently began allowing verified accounts to include links in their Stories, which The Boston Globe’s Matt Karolian says “has the potential to dramatically change Instagram’s value for publishers.” Karolian shares some of the Globe’s early numbers from eight days of experimentation with sharing links in Instagram Stories. There’s a lot of variation in how the links performed (some got as many as 2,000 clicks, while other got closer to 200), but Karolian says the click-through rates were higher on Instagram Stories than on the average Facebook post. Plus, Karolian says lighter news seemed to drive higher engagement: One of the most popular stories was about Nova Scotia buying Boston a Christmas tree every year, while one of the stories with the lowest engagement was a report from the Spotlight team.

+ Tips for headline writers when dealing with “fact-light” tweets: Adding words that indicate that the claim is not based in fact only requires a couple extra words, uncertainty and gray areas are OK, and remember that headlines really matter in how people interpret stories (Poynter)

OFFSHORE

BBC is now including vertical video in its News app (BBC)
The BBC has launched a new product centered around vertical video within its News app. Users can swipe through a curated list of “videos of the day” with a summary of the day’s news events. The BBC says that the videos are curated with smartphone users in mind, and tend to be shorter and include subtitles. This new product is part of Project Newstream, which is an initiative that began over a year ago to adapt the BBC’s video journalism for mobile audiences.

OFFBEAT

‘While We Weren’t Looking, Snapchat Revolutionized Social Networks’ (New York Times)
Snapchat has overtaken Twitter in terms of daily users and quietly become a popular source of news and information for young people, but Farhad Manjoo writes that Snapchat doesn’t get the same media attention as Twitter “perhaps because journalists and presidential candidates don’t use it very much.” But Manjoo argues that “if you secretly harbor the idea that Snapchat is frivolous or somehow a fad, it’s time to re-examine your certainties,” because while some people were looking the other way, Snapchat has revolutionized social networks: “It is pioneering a model of social networking that feels more intimate and authentic than the Facebook-led ideas that now dominate the online world. Snap’s software and hardware designs, as well as its marketing strategies, are more daring than much of what we’ve seen from tech giants, including Apple.”

UP FOR DEBATE

Trump has revealed flaws in the media ecosystem, and journalists need to figure out how to handle his manipulation (Washington Post)
“If we’re going to maintain our democracy, we have to figure out how to deal with the way Trump successfully manipulates the media,” writes Paul Waldman. “Trump has revealed that the entire journalistic system is based on the assumption that political actors will stay within certain parameters of truth and sanity. Some are more dishonest than others, but there’s a limit. ‘The President said this today’ coverage can be problematic, but much of the time it’s perfectly reasonable, since he’s the most important person in the political world … Trump realizes that when you step outside those limits, you can manipulate the media at will because their normal ways of doing things are inadequate to the task. You can take any idea, no matter how preposterous, and make half the country believe it. And when journalists push back, it’ll only make your supporters more firm in their loyalty.”

SHAREABLE

The guy who started @SavedYouAClick is now taking on fake news with @SavedYouATrick (Daily Dot)
Jake Beckman, the person who started the Twitter account @SavedYouAClick, is now fighting against fake news with a new Twitter account, @SavedYouATrick. @SavedYouAClick tweets short summaries to articles with “clickbait” headlines, and Beckman says @SavedYouATrick is a “natural extension” of the first account: “Fake news is the next evolved form of clickbait,” Beckman tweeted.

+ Pittsburgh Tribune-Review editor Luis Fabregas in the paper’s last print edition: “[We’re] very much aware that journalism is in the midst of an evolution and, contrary to naysayers, journalism isn’t dead” (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review)

 

The post Need to Know: Dec. 1, 2016 appeared first on American Press Institute.



from American Press Institute http://ift.tt/2fVdKLT

0 التعليقات:

Post a Comment

Search Google

Blog Archive