Insights, tools and research to advance journalism
This subsection of the Need to Know newsletter offers points of debate and discussion about what’s happening in journalism.
The way we’re measuring video views right now is essentially useless, Gawker’s Kevin Draper writes. If you were to measure BuzzFeed’s exploding watermelon live stream like Nielsen measures TV viewing with its “average minute audience” metric, its viewership would be closer to zero, Draper says. Facebook’s metrics also inflate audience numbers: It counts a user […]
The New York Times wrote this weekend about the surge in podcasting and Apple’s relationship to that surge, but Marco Arment argues that podcasts still work more like an “old-school blog,” rather than the App Store. Podcasters have control over monetization and analytics, and podcasts can be hosted anywhere, with podcasters retaining control and ownership. […]
The newspaper industry struggles with getting readers to pay for digital news, but former NYT executive Denise Warren says readers will pay when news organizations are offering them value. And, rather than trying to convert all readers into subscribers, Warren says publishers should focus on the readers who bring them the most value: The small […]
Many bigger publishers have had the opportunity to work directly with platforms such as Facebook on Instant Articles or Google on Accelerated Mobile Pages, but smaller publishers are often left out of these conversations. There’s an incentive for platforms to work with big publishers because of their audience numbers, but small publishers still need to […]
When newsroom leaders implement story quotas, John Robinson says they’re measuring the wrong thing: Simply providing a lot of stories isn’t the same thing as providing value and service to readers. Robinson writes: “It is true that every marketing survey of news content I’ve seen says that readers want ‘more.’ But it’s not more ‘stuff.’ […]
U.S. tech companies are rushing to mimic Chinese messaging platforms and their success, but WeChat product manager Dan Grover suggests that China’s experience shows that chatbots aren’t always desirable. U.S. chat bots are mostly being designed to perform tasks, such as searching for flights, via a conversation between the user and the bot. But that […]
“The truth is that the best and most important things the media (let’s say specifically the news media) has ever made were not made to reach the most people — they were made to reach the right people,” The Verge’s Josh Topolsky writes. “Because human beings exist, and we are not content consumption machines. What […]
The online advertising and publishing landscape is shifting toward platforms, Paul Bradshaw writes, forcing publishers to justify why they need to have a website at all going forward. Bradshaw writes: “The Facebook/Google/Medium takeover is not the end of the open web, but rather the beginning of journalism which is genuinely of the internet and not […]
Digital-only organizations are facing some of the same problems as legacy organizations, Ken Doctor writes. Digital-only publications are still trying to find sustainable business models, but it’s not really a “cratering” of the digital news business. Doctor writes: “[What we’re seeing is] a significant recalibration. If people expect these companies to have figured out how […]
The New York Times is continuing to struggle with a story written by freelancer Sridhar Pappu about the Twitter backlash to comments made by Gay Talese about female journalists, and executive editor Dean Baquet met with the Style department about the story on Tuesday. Baquet said in a note last week that the story failed […]