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You might have heard: The Daily Mail bought viral Facebook publisher Elite Daily in January 2015 (Elite Daily) in a deal that at the time was thought to be valued at $40 million to $50 million (Business Insider), and as recently as January of the year, The Daily Mail was touting Elite Daily’s performance (Advertising Age)
But did you know: Two years after buying Elite Daily, The Daily Mail has written down its entire investment in the company, essentially declaring the viral publisher worthless (Recode)
Two years ago, Elite Daily might have looked like a digital publishing success story, Peter Kafka writes: Founded in 2012, it was sold two years later for millions of dollars. But now, The Daily Mail has written down its entire investment in Elite Daily, citing “poor performance” and taking a $31 million loss in the process. The Daily Mail’s parent company, Daily Mail and General Trust, says that while Elite Daily continues to grow in terms of revenue, “audience retention and revenue growth have been disappointing and losses have exceeded expectations.”
+ Noted: ProPublica refutes Donald Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud after monitoring voting problems across the country through its Electionland project (Nieman Lab); Self magazine, owned by Condé Nast, is ending its print edition in February (The Cut); INN, LION and IRE receive a total of $455,000 in new funding from the Knight Foundation for projects in training for journalists and new conference programming (Nieman Lab); Google News Lab announces the creation of the Google News Lab University Network, “a new initiative to provide journalism educators with the same level of training and support that we’ve provided to journalists in newsrooms for years” (Google News Lab, Medium)
API UPDATE
The week in fact-checking
As part of our fact-checking journalism project, Jane Elizabeth and Poynter’s Alexios Mantzarlis highlight stories worth noting related to truth in politics and on the Internet. This week’s round-up includes fact-checking whether Black Friday is a good deal, thinking about government regulation of fake news, and whether the “good old days” were actually that good.
Ideas from Facebook on how local publishers can use Instant Articles: Billy Penn is selling local ads and seeing click-through rates that are 4x higher (Facebook Media)
Beth Lloyd and Jason White from Facebook’s News Partnerships team highlight a few ways that local news publishers are using Instant Articles to increase engagement and drive revenue. Among the ideas presented: TEGNA’s 9News in Denver uses Instant Articles in conjunction with video to increase likes, comments, and shares; within six months of launching on Instant Articles, Gray Television generated $250,000 in revenue entirely through Facebook’s Audience Network; and after selling ads to local advertisers on Instant Articles, Billy Penn is seeing click-through rates that are 4x higher than the mobile web.
The Economist is relaunching its Medium publication with longform journalism and behind-the-scenes looks at its journalism (The Economist, Medium)
The Economist is refreshing its Medium publication with a renewed focus on longform journalism, multimedia journalism and “some behind-the-scenes glimpses into the process of how our correspondents work.” Deputy community editor Adam Smith explains that some of what will be published on Medium will be exclusive to The Economist’s Medium publication and might be a bit different than what readers are used to seeing from The Economist: “The Economist may be known for thoughtful, punchy analysis about politics and business. But we also like to report on everything else, from nature to history and from music to typefaces — and to take our time to do it. … It is from this strand that we’ll be feeding our Medium publication over the next two months. That’s a mixture of pieces from our recent archive … but also photo essays created exclusively for Medium to accompany some of the stories in this year’s final print issue. And because we know that Medium readers are even more inquisitive than average, we’ve also convinced some of our correspondents to tell us the stories of why and how they reported what they did.”
‘Reddit Is Tearing Itself Apart’ (Gizmodo)
High-ranking Reddit moderators say they’re losing faith in the site’s future as users from pro-Trump subreddits are seemingly taking over the platform, without much done to stop it by Reddit’s leadership. One specific pro-Trump subreddit, The_Donald, “has effectively been holding the rest of the site hostage,” Bryan Menegus writes. “I know there’s always been a ‘dark side’ to Reddit. But the dark side used to be confined to the corners. It was manageable. What The_Donald has become, and what it’s doing to the site isn’t,” one Reddit moderator said.
Facebook is trying to use artificial intelligence to weed out fake news, but the company says it needs a policy on how to responsibly apply such technology first (Wall Street Journal)
Executives at Facebook say that its artificial intelligence technology could be applied to weed out fake news. But those executives also say that before Facebook can use AI to deal with fake news on the platform, it needs to create a policies to guide the use of the technology. Facebook’s director of Yann LeCun explains that Facebook does have the technology to eliminate fake news and detect violence in live videos, but they haven’t figured out how to responsibly use that technology: “What’s the trade-off between filtering and censorship? Freedom of experience and decency? The technology either exists or can be developed. But then the question is how does it make sense to deploy it?”
+ Snapchat has kept fake news from being a problem on its platform by being a “control freak,” Nitasha Tiku: “It’s impossible for somebody to go rogue in Discover because everything in there is seen and vetted by Snapchat” (BuzzFeed News); Fake news is an “an insidious trend that’s fast becoming a global problem” and distorting politics worldwide (Guardian)
The premise behind Jim VandeHei’s new site: People who care about real news are now a niche audience (Nieman Lab)
“There’s a huge audience that wants smart content,” Jim VandeHei said in a conversation with Recode’s Kara Swisher about what to expect from his new media startup Axios. But as Laura Hazard Owen explains, the paradox is that while that audience is “huge,” it’s not necessarily general: “It is niche in the sense that not everyone cares about getting real news,” Owen writes. “For those that [care about real news], we can make the experience of getting smarter, in what should be nirvana — this should be the golden age of us getting smarter faster, because there’s more good information, we can get it easily, we can do what we want with it,” VandeHei said. “We can help solve that part of it. That audience might be only 20 percent of the population. It might be 30 [percent]. We can argue all day about how big it is. It’s still pretty substantial.”
FOR THE WEEKEND
+ For those who’ve watched “Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life”: Rory Gilmore is depicted as a terrible journalist in the show (Atlantic), and we deserve better fictional journalism because people base their opinions of journalism on these fictional accounts (Vulture); How the show’s reboot ended up with a David Carr cameo: “I just loved David Carr for his columns and his weird life story and his honesty and just thought that if there was a picture Rory Gilmore would have on hand to keep her focused on high standards in journalism, the picture would be of David Carr,” said executive producer Daniel Palladino. (Politico Media)
+ A college journalist interviewed the Ohio State attacker on the first day of classes, finding a “thoughtful, engaged guy, a Muslim immigrant who wanted to spread understanding and awareness while expressing muted fears that U.S. society was becoming insular and fostering unfair stereotypes of his people” (Washington Post)
+ Gregory Ferenstein on why he’s going to write for Breitbart after voting for Hillary Clinton: “I believe we are living in a new political order, where populism is a permanent fixture in our democracy. I might vehemently disagree with some of the anti-immigration and militaristic beliefs that Trump used to excite his supporters. But if I want to persuade those supporters — and I do — I have to reach them on the platform where they are getting their ideas. In the meantime, I just might be persuaded a bit myself.” (Politico Magazine)
+ “Without an informed and independent lens on the work of large technology companies, news organizations could easily surrender to the idea that they no longer belong in the business of shaping their own formats and production tools,” Emily Bell argues. “But independent and creative advocacy for its own technologies is one of the most powerful ways journalism can retain its relevance” (CJR)
The post Need to Know: Dec. 2, 2016 appeared first on American Press Institute.
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