Fresh useful insights for people advancing quality, innovative and sustainable journalism
You might have heard: In the last quarter of 2016, The New York Times added a net of 276,000 subscriptions, with CEO Mark Thompson saying, “There has been an uptick in people’s willingness to pay. [While some would expect a lull post-election], this hasn’t been a quiet period” (Poynter)
But did you know: The ‘Trump bump’ is turning into a subscription surge for news organizations (The Street)
While The New York Times has attributed its recent subscription growth to Trump, Ken Doctor reports that other news organizations are seeing increased readership and subscription growth, too: The Atlantic, for example, had a record-breaking traffic month in both January and February, reaching 33.6 million unique visitors in February. But, as Doctor explains, engaging the most loyal readers has been key to subscription growth for these news organizations, rather than simply reaching huge numbers: “We’ve really shifted our focus to loyalty, in-depth engagement,” says Slate editor in chief Jacob Weisberg.
+ Noted: NPR is changing its financial disclosure rules after conflict-of-interest questions were raised about NPR’s coverage of the Iran deal (Poynter); A new report from the Pew Research Center finds that 76 percent of Democrats and 49 percent of Republicans say that “the freedom of the press to criticize politicians is very important to maintaining a strong democracy” (Pew Research Center); WordPress adds the ability to import posts from Medium after Medium shifts its business model (WordPress.com); Snap Inc. closes its first day of trading at $24.51 per share, valuing the company at $34 billion (Wall Street Journal); OpenNews’ latest News Nerd Survey “sets a baseline for what we can do to broaden [the news community]” (Nieman Lab)
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 how to use the term “fake news” correctly, what it’s like to live in an “non-truth” country, and whether readers see a difference between “fake” news and reporting errors.
A question to refine how you think about your metrics: Are you in the entertainment business or the work business? (MediaShift)
News organizations often haven’t clarified what sort of business they’re in, Kevin Mireles writes, and often pay attention to the wrong metrics as a result. Mireles argues that news organizations should ask themselves: Are we in the entertainment business, or the work business? Then, use the answer to that question to consider your metrics and your relationship with your audience: If the answer is entertainment, you want to have people spend their downtime with you, and your goal is to maximize the amount of time they spend with your brand; if the answer is work, you’re helping people solve problems and take action, but you want to do that as efficiently as possible and actually help people spend less time with your brand.
Lessons for US journalists on covering Trump from the Israeli press (Nieman Reports)
“For both Trump and [Israeli prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, the media are an unnecessary and often harmful middleman, which can be cut off completely since they are so good on social media,” says Shaul Amsterdamski, head of the economics desk at the Israeli Broadcasting Corporation. Naomi Darom asks Israeli journalists for their advice for U.S. journalists on covering an unfriendly administration. Their advice : Don’t rely on press briefings and seek out information from sources outside the usual channels. “Work hard, do a good job and do not be afraid. Try not to become belligerent or go for the jugular because this is not personal, and we will have to continue doing the work even when those people are gone,” says Raviv Drucker, an investigative journalist and commentator for Channel 10 news.
+ A spokesman for the Cambodian government cited Trump in his threat to close foreign news outlets, including Voice of America and Radio Free Asia (New York Times)
Getting more scientists on social media could help correct misinformation (Fast Company)
“[Scientists communicating online] is an important part of pushing back against misinformation,” says University of Alberta health policy professor Tim Caulfield. He argues that scientists can provide meaningful contributions to conversations on social media, pushing back against pseudoscience and other forms of false information. But there’s reasons why scientists are hesitant to spend time on social media: Caulfield says he’s been criticized for spending a lot of time tweeting, and not everyone in the scientific community agrees on the value of social media for science. “I tell academics that social media is now the top source of science information for people, and they are a trusted voice for people that don’t have that background and literacy,” says Louisiana State University science communication specialist Paige Jarreau.
‘Free’ is not a business model, and that could create a divide between high-quality news for those who can pay and lower-quality information for those who can’t (CJR)
“We can now bury for good any hope that giving away content and paying the bills solely through online advertising is a sustainable media strategy,” CJR’s Kyle Pope writes. “The digital-ad revenue simply isn’t there to support real journalism. As a result, digital-only shops like Mashable and Medium are sharply scaling back. On the flip side, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are proving that paywalls can work, even on a massive scale, while niche sites like The Information, in tech, and Politico and Axios, in politics, are insisting that readers pay for detailed scoops about their respective industries. The message from readers is they’re willing to pay for information that tracks closely with their interests and worldviews, while more generic content is falling off. This threatens to create a new kind of content divide: higher-quality and more accurate journalism for those who can pay, less accurate and more trivial reporting (not to mention fake news, which has no subscription future) for those who can’t.”
Even in the Internet age, big stories still break at night because of print deadlines (The Atlantic)
In the past couple months, you might have noticed a trend: Many nights around 8 p.m., push notifications start rolling in as big news stories break. “This dynamic is, in a strange way, a throwback,” Adrienne LaFrance writes. “As it turns out, social platforms … have become a new kind of evening edition, one that’s an amalgam of breaking news and people’s reaction to it, driven by good ole-fashioned print newspaper deadlines. … Instead of individual news organizations putting out their own evening editions, print deadlines across the industry mean different newspapers all put out their big stories for the next day’s print paper around the same time the night before.”
+ The New York Times redesigned its A2 and A3 pages with elements of the web: The pages highlight the most shared stories from their website and are intended to be “a quick and engaging roundup” (Nieman Lab)
FOR THE WEEKEND
+ A Q&A with Pacific Standard editor Nicholas Jackson: “This magazine operates from the belief that good storytelling is at the root of making change, and that an informed public is essential to a functioning democracy. That’s always been the case at Pacific Standard, and so, while we continue to have editorial discussions about what it means to be a publisher under a new administration, we’re mostly just doubling down on what we know we’re good at and what we’ve been successful at” (Sinkhole); While pundits praised Trump’s Tuesday night speech, reporters at NYT and Washington Post broke two big stories: “It showed once again that the journalistic basics at their best — digging, developing sources and connecting the dots — will always beat glib pontificating,” Margaret Sullivan writes (Washington Post)
+ “If content remains the fuel that drives the engine of digital advertising and subscription revenue, then questions about new media vs. old media or traditional and technological distinctions are little more than semantics,” Michelle Manafy argues. “Rather than get bogged down in further discussion of what defines a media company, it’s better to ask how we’re moving the content and advertising experience forward for consumers and marketers with trust and transparency at the core” (MediaShift)
+ “Say what you will about how soft the press was on Donald Trump; the press is infinitely more gentle with Silicon Valley power players,” Leah Finnegan writes. “Perhaps this is because Silicon Valley functions, in many ways, above any long-established ideal of decorum — it is a place where perceived threats to such decorum are seen as strengths and interpersonal ethics are a weakness” (The Outline)
+ Mashable executive editor Jessica Coen explains why she’s making a point of “deciding what not to cover”: “If you really want to cover it, you need to give me an angle that feels Mashable to me. … In terms of editorial strategy, it makes sense to just focus. You can’t be everything to everyone. You’re not going to win that game. If you try to cover everything, you own nothing. My mission is to decide what we own and how we own it.” (Recode)
The post Need to Know: Mar. 3, 2017 appeared first on American Press Institute.
from American Press Institute http://ift.tt/2lBRPJ2
0 التعليقات:
Post a Comment