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You might have heard: HD Media is purchasing the Charleston Gazette-Mail (Charleston Gazette-Mail) after the company filed for bankruptcy earlier this year (Washington Post)
But did you know: After making employees reapply for their jobs, the majority of Gazette-Mail employees will keep their jobs as HD Media buys the newspaper (Charleston Gazette-Mail)
Employees of the Charleston Gazette-Mail in West Virginia learned earlier this week that most of the newsroom’s employees will keep their jobs as HD Media completes its purchase of the newspaper. Employees were required to reapply for their jobs, and 168 people received employment offers from HD Media this week; 11 people who filled out applications did not receive offers, and 29 positions that were either vacant or for which an employee did not apply will not be filled. That’s significantly fewer job losses than what was expected when the Gazette-Mail filed for bankruptcy in January, when more than 50 layoffs were expected.
+ Noted: The Palm Beach Post and the Palm Beach Daily News are sold to GateHouse for $49.3 million (Palm Beach Post): Render Media, the owner of recipe video publisher Cooking Panda and politics sites Opposing Views, is shutting down and says Facebook’s news feed changes are partly to blame (Wall Street Journal); Facebook starts training of 13 metro newsrooms this week, focusing on improving their digital subscription businesses (Nieman Lab); A new report from Zenith says ad tech companies grew five times faster than the digital advertising market between 2010 and 2016, forcing “more advertiser budgets into the hands of vendors rather than toward buying actual media” (Adexchanger); The Hewlett Foundation is pledging $10 million over two years to fund research into the spread of disinformation on social media platforms (Nieman Lab)
It’s time for engagement metrics that account for the fact we’re interacting with real people (MediaShift)
“Community and engagement teams now find themselves managing and scaling relationships with individual users,” Jason Alcorn writes. “Rather than an aggregate audience and reach on social media, publishers have print subscribers, members of Facebook group, sources and email newsletter readers.” Instead of just measuring volume and reach, a better way to measure the engagement of such strategies is to focus on the quality of engagement and the direct work of the journalists. That might look like measuring a subscriber’s loyalty by analyzing a Facebook group’s most active members, attendance at events, or mentions of a journalist in the local community.
Data privacy scandals such as Cambridge Analytica will make it more challenging for ad tech companies to get user consent under GDPR regulations (Digiday)
When the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation goes into effect in May, ad tech companies will have to get permission from users for their data to be used for retargeting. But scandals such as Facebook’s with Cambridge Analytica will likely make it harder for these companies to get permission, Lucia Moses reports. “Ad tech companies have had a couple historical problems communicating what they are and how they do it because it’s really complex and, if you’re a layman, really boring,” tech consultant Matt Rosenberg tells Moses. Getting permission from users will be even more challenging, Moses explains, if people don’t know what the opt-in messages mean, and what they do know about ad tech is linked to scandals.
+ Most of Facebook’s new privacy measures are going into effect in preparation for GDPR, but marketing it as a decision on their part to protect users’ privacy (Bloomberg); Facebook said it will stop using data from third-party aggregators such as Experian and Acxiom to supplement is ad targeting (Recode); Facebook is also pausing its app review process, which means developers can no longer launch new apps or chatbots in Facebook’s ecosystem (Mashable)
+ Financial Times and The Economist say they worked with Cambridge Analytica to help them get more subscribers in the United States: A spokesperson for The Economist said they didn’t know if Facebook data was used during the project (BuzzFeed News)
Influencers on YouTube and Pinterest rarely disclose marketing relationships, violating FTC guidelines (Wired)
A new analysis from Princeton University suggests that YouTube and Pinterest influencers rarely disclose affiliate marketing relationships in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s guidelines. Researchers analyzed a representative sample of 500,000 YouTube videos and 2.1 million unique Pinterest pins; out of that sample, 3,472 videos and 18,237 pins had affiliate links. Of the subset with affiliate links, just 10 percent of YouTube videos and 7 percent of Pinterest pins contained any sort of written disclosure. And the majority of those disclosures didn’t even meet FTC guidelines, researchers found: The current version of the guidelines require bloggers to use more than just the phrase “affiliate link” given that many readers don’t know what that means, and recommends an explanation that the blogger will make a commission. Most disclosures the researchers found simply said, “affiliate links may be present above.”
Conservatives are well-represented in the opinion pages of the ‘mainstream’ media, but few conservative outlets bring in left-leaning perspectives (Slate)
“If institutional bias is a problem for American society, then why haven’t conservatives tried to solve it by building alternative unbiased institutions? The obvious societal corrective for bias at the [New York] Times and the [Washington] Post and other outlets would be starting publications with a real claim to neutrality. Instead, conservatives have founded a constellation of explicitly partisan outlets ranging from National Review to the Gateway Pundit,” Slate’s Osita Nwanevu argues. “If we really ought to be troubled that there aren’t enough neutral purveyors of information in American society, the conservative efforts to address the issue amount, plainly, to moral failure. … Until the Daily Caller hires a full-time writer who regularly makes the case for taking Marx and microaggressions seriously, the right’s complaints on this subject should be dismissed out of hand and without regret.”
+ Nwanevu is writing in response to The Atlantic’s hiring of Kevin Williamson (Talking Points Memo), who has previously worked at National Review and argued that women who get abortions should be hanged (The Cut)
Local newsrooms have always had trouble keeping local journalists, given the demands of the job and the unpredictability (Poynter)
For local journalists, there’s a lot of places they can work besides just their town’s local newspaper. But local newspapers have always had trouble keeping local journalists, Tegna’s vice president of news and executive director of recruiting Patti Dennis says. The job is unpredictable, and it “doesn’t fold into a family life as easy as some other careers.” Dennis suggests some ways to retain local journalists: Get them involved in the organization’s transformation process, listen to what younger people and people with different skills have to say, and give the staff chances to try new things and pick up new skills.
+ The New York Times published its first diversity report on Wednesday: The report shows that the representation of women and people of color in the newsroom is improving, but at a very slow pace (New York Times); ProPublica published its own report on Tuesday, and outlined what it’s doing to improve: Its newsroom is 76 percent white and 52 percent female, and it’s implementing the “Rooney rule” in its hiring practices (ProPublica)
The post Need to Know: March 29, 2018 appeared first on American Press Institute.
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