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You might have heard: The New York Times acquired product review sites The Wirecutter and The Sweethome in October for $30 million (Recode), and the affiliate revenue-based business models have been praised as being somewhat immune to the whims of the industry (15 Minutes in the Morning)
But did you know: Amazon is cutting affiliate revenue, showing the risk of building a journalism business built on revenue from affiliate links (Nieman Lab)
When The New York Times bought The Wirecutter and The Sweethome last fall, executive editor Dean Baquet said the sites’ business models built on affiliate revenue “represents a strong step toward a further embrace of this approach.” But a clear downside to that model, Laura Hazard Owen writes, is that it gives tech companies a lot of power over their revenue. Last week, Amazon announced that it would be making its affiliate revenue “less generous” in some categories — and notably, eliminating volume pricing advantages as of March 1. “Rather than earning based on the volume of products you sell, now you’ll earn a flat rate across individual products ranges, meaning whether you sell five or 500 you’ll make the same commission on each sale,” affiliate marketing company Skimlinks explains.
+ Noted: Time Inc. asks potential buyers, including Meredith and Edgar Bronfman Jr., to submit their acquisition offers by next week (Bloomberg); After Amazon servers malfunctioned on Tuesday and brought down a host of news organizations’ websites (Poynter), Amazon Web Services says it has fixed the cloud storage problems at its Northern Virginia data centers (GeekWire); Before BuzzFeed published the unverified Trump dossier, the FBI planned to pay the former British spy who wrote it, which shows the FBI “considered him credible and found his information, while unproved, to be worthy of further investigation” (Washington Post); Emmis Communications sells its magazines in Los Angeles, Cincinnati and Orange County, Calif., to Hour Media Group (LA Observed)
‘How building trust with your audience is like dating’ (Poynter)
“Relationships take work. You don’t get intimacy without putting in some time. You don’t ask for favors without offering the equivalent yourself. You earn trust by being there consistently, and by listening,” Joy Mayer writes on how building trust with your readers is similar to dating. Mayer outlines four dating rules that also apply to your relationships with your readers: Talk about things the other person is interested in, don’t ask for more engagement/intimacy than you’ve earned, listen to the answers to the questions you ask, and reflect back on what you’ve heard and learned about the other person.
In the Global South, donors and newsrooms don’t always agree on ‘the difference between acceptable involvement and interference’ (Nieman Lab)
A new report from the Center for International Media Assistance shows that in the Global South, donors and the news organizations they fund sometimes have different ideas of what’s acceptable involvement. The report shows that from 2010 to 2014, 23 percent of private grants given to support “journalism, news, and information” were given to report on topics important to the donors. And while the report suggests that the relationships between donors and newsrooms are “generally positive,” the report also says, “Interviews also suggested that perceptions vary markedly between the donors and media houses, and even within media houses, as to what constitutes the difference between acceptable involvement and interference.” In some cases, donors suggested topics for coverage, while in others they suggested specific story ideas or sources.
+ Earlier: Our report on the ethical terrain of funding nonprofit journalism and guiding principles for how nonprofit news outlets and funders can navigate those relationships
A question to ask when building a new product: What is someone going to stop doing when they start using your product? (Signal v. Noise)
When building a new product, Jason Fried writes that we often think about all the new things people are going to be able to do with it. But Fried says we should be asking ourselves, what is someone going to stop doing when they start using our product? Think about what your product is replacing, what they’re switching from, and how your product is improving that experience for them. “Habit, momentum, familiarity, anxiety of the unknown — these are incredibly hard bonds to break. When you try to sell someone something, you have to overcome those bonds. You have to break the grip of that gravity,” Fried writes.
Margaret Sullivan: President Trump and his aides condemn leaks to journalists — unless the leaks are coming from them (Washington Post)
“President Trump and his aides despise and condemn anonymous leaks to reporters. Except, of course, when they are the ones doing the leaking,” Margaret Sullivan writes. The result for news consumers, Sullivan argues, is confusing. “It’s almost impossible to know whether an unnamed source is someone courageously taking a risk to get information out or a powerful official who is eluding responsibility … You could have both of these kinds of unnamed sources in the same news story — maybe in the same paragraph,” Jay Rosen tells Sullivan.
+ Sean Spicer was the source of a Washington Examiner story about a Politico reporter laughing at the death of a Navy SEAL after the reporter published an unflattering anecdote about Spicer, Erik Wemple reports (Washington Post); CNN reports that Trump signed off on Spicer’s decision to collect and check aides’ phones for evidence of communicating with reporters; Spicer denied that, saying: “(Trump) did not sign off or even know what I did. That is not accurate” (CNN)
+ The New Yorker says it will not attend White House press briefings until the exclusion of some news outlets is ended (New Yorker); At a private lunch, Trump tells news anchors that “he simply wanted to be treated fairly by the press” (Huffington Post)
CNN will attend the 2017 White House Correspondents’ Dinner — and bring journalism students as their ‘celebrity guests’ (Hollywood Reporter)
After journalists have debated the merits of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and President Trump said he would not attend, CNN says they’ll attend the 2017 dinner — but they’ll bring journalism students in place of the usual celebrity guests. While CNN will be attending, organizations including Vanity Fair and The New Yorker have said they’ll skip out on this year’s event. “We feel there is no better way to underscore our commitment to the health and longevity of a free press than to celebrate its future,” CNN said in a statement on the CNN Communications Twitter account Tuesday.
The post Need to Know: Mar. 1, 2017 appeared first on American Press Institute.
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