Posted on

With a big Amazon streaming deal, Berkeley’s journalism program is building a new revenue stream

When it comes to video, it’s a seller’s market for content creators. Streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Video, and Hulu are locked in a race for content, opening up new revenue opportunities and distribution channels not just for big companies but for smaller production outfits as well. It’s a opportunity that the University of California, Berkeley, hopes to take advantage of. In 2015, the Investigative Reporting Program at the University’s Graduate School of Journalism formed Investigative Reporting Productions (IRP), a nonprofit production company to develop original, one-off journalistic documentaries and docuseries. In its latest move, the organization, which was formally recognized by the university earlier this month, inked its first big distribution deal with Amazon, which said it wanted “first look” rights (meaning that it gets to see new ideas before any other company) to the projects coming out of the organization. It was a big first for Amazon, Continue reading "With a big Amazon streaming deal, Berkeley’s journalism program is building a new revenue stream"
Posted on

More European newspapers are charging for content online (but there are differences by country)

“A lot of people in the market are talking about paywalls or free traffic very much from an angle from what is right and what is wrong. Sometimes people think there is only one strategy: theirs,” Christian Röpke, the CEO of German newsweekly Die Zeit’s online presence Zeit Online, recently told my colleague Joseph Lichterman. As Zeit Online tries to attract a younger audience that might ultimately pay for its product, it’s trying a number of different strategies, from live events to new types of editorial content. Die Zeit just launched a new metered paywall in March, and it certainly isn’t alone: Though their strategies vary, European publishers are moving away from offering all of their content online for free, according to a factsheet released Wednesday by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. The factsheet looks at the different kinds of paid content (freemium, metered paywalls, hard paywalls)
Continue reading "More European newspapers are charging for content online (but there are differences by country)"
Posted on

Facebook, still fighting the fake news problem, is making another attempt at reducing News Feed clickbait

Facebook engineers may be spending a lot of time trying to solve the platform’s fake news problem, but it hasn’t forgotten about the site’s other, equally persistent foe: clickbait. Facebook said Wednesday that it’s further tweaked its algorithm to display fewer clickbait headlines in users’ News Feeds. The tweak targets headlines that either “withhold information intentionally leave out crucial details or mislead people” or those that “exaggerate the details of a story with sensational language tend to make the story seem like a bigger deal than it really is.” Facebook is evaluating those criteria as individual signals, which it says will let it better detect different kinds of clickbait headlines. It’s also now targeting clickbait on a post-by-post basis, which it says will help it target clickbait on a more granular level. While clickbait has gotten less attention than fake news lately, both are a natural result of people using Continue reading "Facebook, still fighting the fake news problem, is making another attempt at reducing News Feed clickbait"
Posted on

“There’s almost no journalism in tennis,” but the print quarterly Racquet is trying to change that

Last summer, Canadian tennis player Milos Raonic made it all the way to the men’s singles final at Wimbeldon, beating Roger Federer in the semifinal before succumbing to Andy Murray in the championship match. One of the possible reasons for his success? Additional coaching from American tennis great John McEnroe who started working with Raonic for the grass court season last year. But McEnroe also works as a tennis analyst for the BBC and ESPN, calling Raonic’s matches for both networks. “If F. Scott Fitzgerald were covering tennis, he’d note that the rules for John McEnroe are different than for you and me,” Sports Illustrated media reporter Richard Deitsch wrote last year. Though McEnroe ultimately stopped working with Raonic ahead of the U.S. Open last year, the tight-knit nature of the tennis world has led to numerous complaints of conflicts of interest, along with increased media consolidation. In March, Continue reading "“There’s almost no journalism in tennis,” but the print quarterly Racquet is trying to change that"
Posted on

“The choice of 2 very unhappy headlines”: ASNE will focus on newsroom diversity, not jobs lost

“U.S. newspapers see more bad news, as jobs decline.” “Newspaper newsrooms suffer large staffing decreases.” “Newspaper industry lost 3,800 full-time editorial professionals in 2014.” The halving of America’s daily newsrooms.” Executives at the American Society of News Editors are sick of headlines like these being used to sum up ASNE’s annual newsroom diversity survey. It’s not that newsrooms aren’t losing jobs; they are. But the survey, launched more than 20 years ago, was never really intended to provide a quick snapshot of the general state of health of American newsrooms. It’s supposed to be a reflection of how newsrooms are doing at hiring women and people of color. And they are doing badly. “In many legacy news organizations, moving the needle on staff diversity took a back seat to the survival of the enterprise,” ASNE president Mizell Stewart III wrote this month. “Instead of a Continue reading "“The choice of 2 very unhappy headlines”: ASNE will focus on newsroom diversity, not jobs lost"
Posted on

The Associated Press is adding user-generated social content (verified, of course) into its wire services

A new tool from the Associated Press will now allow users of its service to pull in topical and verified content shared by users on social media such as photos and videos around breaking news. Using the web interface provided by social media platform manager SAM (AP owns a stake in SAM and has been using it since 2015), AP Social Newswire lets AP clients look through social content that is being curated and vetted by AP editors in real-time. From the AP:
View multiple feeds of content — from global to local — and monitor the vetting process in real-time through the notes and tags and that we apply to each asset (such as “authenticated” or “debunked”). All photos and videos are delivered in a digital-friendly format giving you the ability to seamlessly integrate UGC into your stories through embed codes.
In the realm of offering other news organizations
Continue reading "The Associated Press is adding user-generated social content (verified, of course) into its wire services"
Posted on

Making Gay History’s podcast digs into interview archives to let voices “come to life again”

  • Between this project and Mogul, I do find it hard to appropriately plan coverage given their staggered rollouts. Two questions prevail in my mind when making the choice: Where is the real meat concentrated, and when is the better time to drive the momentum of a possible conversation about these projects — during its closed run, or when it’s released to a wider audience, which is probably when more people would likely benefit from a writeup?
    • More summer preview notes. Whip out them board shorts: