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You might have heard: The New York Times is eliminating the role of public editor: Liz Spayd, whose contract would have run through summer 2018, will exit the paper on Friday (Politico)
But did you know: NYT publisher Arthur Sulzberger says the paper’s social media followers and other digital readers ‘have come together to collectively serve as a modern watchdog’ (HuffPost)
In the announcement that NYT will eliminate the role of public editor, publisher Arthur Sulzberger emphasized “several new reader-focused efforts” that could serve as accountability for the paper. Among those efforts is the “Reader Center,” which NYT says is an effort to “capitalize on our readers’ knowledge and experience, using their voices to make our journalism even better.” Sulzberger also emphasized NYT’s social media following as a form of accountability: “Today, our followers on social media and our readers across the internet have come together to collectively serve as a modern watchdog, more vigilant and forceful than one person could ever be. Our responsibility is to empower all of those watchdogs, and to listen to them, rather than to channel their voice through a single office.”
+ Liz Spayd on the decision: “The Times is reimagining itself in all sorts of ways, and the decision to eliminate the public editor’s role is just one part of that” (CJR)
+ “When everyone on Twitter is a Times watchdog, then no one is,” Will Oremus writes. “There will still be a firehose of complaints directed at the paper, but there will be no one to harness it, no one whose job and right it is to stand in front of the paper’s leaders and say, ‘This. This is a valid criticism, and you can ignore the rest if you wish, but this one you need to answer to’” (Slate); Kelly McBride: “When the role is structured well, with a foot in the newsroom and a foot rooted on an independent contract that can’t be cancelled, it sends a message to the audience. It’s the editor and publisher both saying: ‘We so believe in what we do, we will make sure a qualified person is scrutinizing our work, in public’” (Poynter); “The public editors were a flagellating instrument, meant to sting the paper on its surface, never to cut to the bone,” Tom Scocca writes on why it was time to eliminate the position (Politico Magazine)
+ More changes at NYT: The paper is offering buyouts to editors, “aiming to reduce layers of editing and requiring more of the editors who remain” (New York Times); Those buyouts may mean that NYT’s traditional copy desk may be restructured: “As the news business changes, most of us have come to believe there are too many layers in our process, too many editors touching the same stories, particularly on routine news coverage. This system is a vestige of an assembly-line structure held over from a newspaper-only newsroom built around multiple print deadlines. It is costly and slows us down,” the memo to staff says (Washington Post)
+ Noted: The Lenfest Institute for Journalism has doubled its endowment since it was created in January 2016, raising $26.5 million from “a mix of local philanthropists and national journalism foundations” (Wall Street Journal); The U.S. Department of Justice extends the deadline for bids to acquire the Chicago Sun-Times until Monday (Chicago Tribune); Facebook shareholders are expected to confront Mark Zuckerberg over the platform’s role in “fake news” at the company’s annual meeting on Thursday (Financial Times)
New AP Stylebook guidelines address requesting data, reporting on data, and publishing data (Nieman Lab)
In this year’s updates to the AP Stylebook, the AP is adding a chapter on data journalism, with guidelines on requesting, reporting on and publishing data. Some of the AP’s new recommendations: Get the data in searchable form when possible, scraping data should be a “last resort,” make sure someone else can reproduce your findings, and let your readers see the source data.
+ Earlier: Our report on the best strategies for getting started or going deeper with data journalism
+ More changes in the 2017 Stylebook: There’s now an entry on “fact checks” and “fake news,” the singular “they” can be used as a non-gendered pronoun, and Walmart no longer requires a hyphen (Poynter)
Johnston Press weeklies remove content from their websites in an attempt to drive traffic to their Facebook pages (HoldTheFrontPage)
Six U.K. weeklies owned by Johnston Press removed all editorial content from their websites this week, trying to drive traffic to their social media channels. Now, visitors to the weeklies’ homepages are presented with links to the organization’s Facebook page, info on subscribing to the print edition, advertising info, and contacting the staff. “We’re making some changes next week, which we hope will provide you with a better paper and a chance to engage with us more on our social media platforms,” Johnston Press said in an announcement on the weeklies’ Facebook pages. “It will mean our websites won’t exist in their current format, but will provide readers with the chance to visit this dedicated Facebook page, find out more about subscriptions, purchase images and much more.”
Companies are turning to ‘internal crowdsourcing’ as a way to develop innovative ideas (MIT Sloan Management Review)
As companies like Google and AT&T look for innovative solutions to problems ranging from what new products to offer or how to improve hiring processes, these companies are turning to what’s called “internal crowdsourcing.” The kind of crowdsourcing most people are familiar with involves soliciting ideas from the public; “internal crowdsourcing” means seeking ideas from a company’s own employees. Researchers from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of Southern California and supply chain manager Li & Fung conducted a four-year study of how companies manage these practices, examining the benefits, potential roadblocks and how internal crowdsourcing can be designed to avoid those challenges.
The relationship between The Ringer and Vox Media could be a model for what publishers look like in the future (Stratechery)
In the deal for The Ringer to be published on Vox Media’s platform, Ben Thompson writes there’s some clear benefits for The Ringer: “Instead of building duplicative technology and ad sales infrastructure, The Ringer can simply use Vox Media’s. This is less important with regards to the technology … but hugely important when it comes to advertising.” Thompson argues that this kind of relationship could be what publishers look like in the future. “In this model the most effective and scalable publisher is faceless: atomized content creators, fueled by social media, build their own brands and develop their own audiences; the publisher, meanwhile, builds scale on the backside, across infrastructure, monetization, and even human-resource type functions. This last point makes a faceless publisher more than an ad network, and crucially, I suspect the greatest impact will not be (just) about ads,” Thompson writes on the idea.
+ Mike Shields reports that at least part of the reason why The Ringer is moving to Vox Media is that its traffic was declining at Medium: comScore data shows that the site had just 357,000 in April, down from 1.2 million in July 2016 (Business Insider)
+ “Instead of courting Millennials, should news media skip this generation?” Maria Terrell asks in an article for INMA (INMA); Chris Sutcliffe responds: “The implication throughout the article is that the generation so coveted by publishers desperate for new audiences need to change and mature, to become fully paid-up members of society with an interest in the sort of content publishers put out. The problem with that — other than the broad generalizations — is that Millennials are already interested in quality news” (TheMediaBriefing); Earlier: Research from API finds that Millennials are often heavy news consumers, though they do it a lot of it in platforms and nearly 4 in 10 adults under the age of 35 are paying for news
The Boston Globe has almost 20,000 more digital subscribers than it did just one year ago (Nieman Lab)
Looking at The Boston Globe’s digital subscriber numbers, the paper has made some big strides in the last year: The Globe now has 84,000 digital subscribers — up nearly 20,000 from the 65,000 it had just a year ago. The Globe has made a series of changes to its paywall that lead to that increase. Loopholes readers frequently used to read for free (such as using incognito mode in their browser) were closed up, and the Globe cut the number of articles readers can access for free from five to two. These changes were about trying to “strike the right balance between giving users the opportunity to sample content and getting them to subscribe,” Boston Globe Media’s chief consumer revenue officer Peter Doucette explains.
+ Bob Woodward’s advice on covering Trump: “We need to calm it down, listen more. Be on the surface respectful, but as reporters, be as aggressive as possible and never stop the inquiry” (The Atlantic)
The post Need to Know: June 1, 2017 appeared first on American Press Institute.
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