Thursday, August 10, 2023 |
| Blendle has been selling news by the article for nearly a decade, but “very limited” demand and the rise of digital subscriptions have done the idea in. By Joshua Benton. |
What We’re ReadingThe Washington Post / Paul Farhi
An architect of Fox’s success picks a new target: Fox →“[Preston] Padden’s latest project comes freighted with irony: He hopes to persuade federal regulators to pull Fox Corp.’s licenses to operate its TV stations — the very ones he helped Murdoch maintain nearly 30 years ago.”The New York Times / Katie Robertson
Wired names Katie Drummond as its next leader →“When I think about the moment we’re in now,” Ms. Drummond said, “with this very real human toll that we’re feeling and seeing around climate change, with the development of generative A.I., with the sort of unfathomable wealth and power and scope of major technology companies and big tech and the people that leads them, it feels like another sort of inflection moment in technology, in society.”Gizmodo / Thomas Germain
CNET deletes thousands of old articles to game Google Search →“Google says deleting old pages to bamboozle Search is ‘not a thing!’ as CNET erases its history.”Reuters / Yuvraj Malik
News firms seek transparency, collective negotiation over content use by AI makers (letter) →“A group of the world’s biggest news media organizations called for revised regulations on the use of copyrighted material by makers of artificial intelligence technology, according to an open letter published on Wednesday. The note, signed by industry bodies like the News Media Alliance – which includes nearly 2,000 publications in the United States – and the European Publishers’ Council, batted for a framework enabling media companies to ‘collectively negotiate’ with AI model operators regarding the operators’ use of their intellectual property.”Poynter / Omar Gallaga
Doing internal work to improve newsrooms in ways readers may never hear about →“As part of the Poynter-Koch Media and Journalism Fellowship’s mission to focus on local journalism, those three journalists – Megan Cardona at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Rose Monique Valera Henriquez at El Nuevo Herald and Michael Butler at the Miami Herald – decided to dedicate their innovation projects for the fellowship to to improving their newsrooms’ internal workings. Cardona’s efforts were to advance the work of a just-formed newsroom diversity committee. Henriquez and Butler separately worked on guides for future reporters new to their beats: One is a guide to being a reporter in Miami, the other focuses specifically on covering Cuban immigration.”Tech Policy Press / Courtney Radsch
The value of news content to Google is way more than you think →“The study, conducted by FehrAdvice & Partners AG on behalf of the SWISS MEDIA publishers’ association with oversight by leading academics, assessed the value of journalistic content on the Google search engine in Switzerland and its impact on user behavior and satisfaction, concluding that the market share of Google searches that use media content results in an estimated revenue of about $440 million per year. It suggests that if Google did not have a dominant monopoly position in web search and faced serious competition, fair compensation for the value that media content provides to Google search would amount to about 40% of total revenue, or approximately $176 million per year in Switzerland alone.”Reynolds Journalism Institute / Stacy Feldman
How a pop-up community newsroom shed light on wildfire health impacts in Boulder, Colorado →“As fellow RJI fellow Ariel Zych described it when we all met last month, BRL is spearheading a ‘locally focused capacity surge’ — or a ‘capacity sprint’ — to deeply inform communities when it feels impossible to do so due to smaller staff sizes. And it can be done anywhere.”Columbia Journalism Review / Feven Merid
Big business: The disarray and discontent at Forbes →Also check out our colleague Joshua Benton’s
previous reporting about Forbes.Medill Local News Initiative / Mark Caro
Restart the presses? The consequences of print plant closures and consolidations →“There’s still an audience for print newspapers, even though that’s decreasing,” said Anna Brugmann, policy director for the nonprofit coalition Rebuild Local News. “To just cut off the runway by decreasing print for certain communities, that’s not smart.”The New York Times / Sam Roberts
Rhoda Karpatkin, who led Consumer Reports for decades, dies at 93 →“It’s also important to recognize that Rhoda was one of the first modern-day publishers who believed that people would pay for content they considered valuable — you didn’t have to give it away, or undervalue it,” said Kimberly Kleman, a former editor of Consumer Reports.The Guardian / Ope Adetayo
“Our history is rotting away”: the newspaper archivists preserving Nigeria’s past →“’Nigerian history is inaccessible online, and the greatest repository of that history is old newspapers,’ says Fu’ad Lawal, the founder of Archivi.ng. ‘The newspapers from our history are rotting away in libraries and private archives, and our mission is to stop the erasure and recapture all the history before we lose them for ever.’”
Nieman Lab / Fuego
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