Evolving Media & News Sources

[PopeBeanieModerator]

#mediaForcesJoin

“It’s just become daily news”: Six Florida newsrooms are teaming up to cover climate change

Story

Hurricane Floyd off coast of Florida

[PopeBeanieModerator]

#paywalledNews

Full story: Newsonomics: CEO Mark Thompson on offering more and more New York Times (and charging more for it)

Excerpt:

4.9 million. That’s the total number of New York Times subscribers overall, between print and digital. That’s already three times its peak in the good old days of print.

4.1 million. That’s roughly how many paying news customers the Times has across digital (3,197,000 subscriptions) and print (869,599 average Sunday circulation).

856,000. That’s the number of subscribers to its non-news products, Crosswords and Cooking.

10 million. That remains the Times’ goal for 2025 for digital subscribers. It’s growth curve, says CEO Mark Thompson, will get it there in time.

500,000: That’s the number of Times subscribers outside the United States. They may pay less for their subscriptions than do U.S. customers, but their importance to the Times is increasing. Today, they make up 16 percent of all Times subscribers; by 2025, the Times forecasts that 20 percent of them — or 2 million in total — will.

(I am a subscriber.)

[PopeBeanieModerator]

#factChecking

Facebook says a pro-Trump media outlet used artificial intelligence to create fake people and push conspiracies

[full story]

Excerpt:

The network of fake pages included 89 pages, 156 groups and 72 Instagram accounts. Epoch Media Group, which runs The Epoch Times, is run by practitioners of Falun Gong, who believe the world is soon headed for a judgment day, where all those labeled as Communists will be sent to hell. One former Epoch Times editor told NBC News in August that practitioners “believe that Trump was sent by heaven to destroy the Communist Party.”

The Epoch Times was the largest buyer of pro-Trump ads on Facebook until August. The company was banned from purchasing ads on Facebook after it repeatedly violated the company’s political advertising rules.

[PopeBeanieModerator]

#mediaForcesJoin

Six months in, here’s how the Florida news outlets’ climate change partnership is going

[excerpts]

What started out last summer as a partnership among six Florida news organizations to cover climate change in the state has now tripled in size, with 18 organizations — usually competitors with one another — now working together.

[…]

Some Georgia news outlets approached the Florida Climate Reporting Network asking if they could join it — the Florida folks recommended instead that they just start their own statewide network. Other efforts have taken place nationally.

[PopeBeanieModerator]

Readers reign supreme, and other takeaways from The New York Times end-of-year earnings report

Excerpt:

On the earnings call, CEO Mark Thompson said “the single biggest reason” behind the paper’s success was the decision to give more autonomy to teams working on the publication’s various digital products. Having multiple cross-disciplinary teams working on converting digital subscribers means the Times is able to “continually optimize” by having “parallel tests running in the background,” he said.

#paywalledNews

I should add, there were other interesting stories that day from the same source (niemanlab.org): https://us1.campaign-archive.com/?e=0f040f20d3&u=dc756b20ebb9521ec3ad95e4a&id=2a11ca9bd4

[PopeBeanieModerator]

Top editors leave HuffPost and BuzzFeed News amid growing doubts about the future of digital news

Excerpts:

[…]

Digital publishers face the same issues that have beset, and decimated, whole swaths of the traditional media, particularly local newspapers. Digital ad rates have fallen steadily for years amid an unending supply of competitors and slow-growing demand from sponsors. Looming over the entire business are the twin colossi, Facebook and Google, which collect about 60 percent of every dollar spent by digital advertisers.

[…]

[…]  he noted that the Times had regained its financial footing at a time when others are struggling.

Smith wrote that the Times has poached “many of the [digital journalists] who once threatened it,” including the former top editors of sites such as Gawker, Recode, Quartz and now BuzzFeed. The newspaper has also stocked its newsroom with star journalists from another digital start-up, Politico, where Smith himself used to work, including White House correspondent Maggie Haberman and political reporter Jonathan Martin.

[…]

[…] “The smaller companies need to find a home with the bigger companies in the digital-media space,” he said. “There could be more consolidation in this industry. We’re fortunate to be at a scale where we can stand alone. We’re able to operate without having to consolidate.”

[full story]

[PopeBeanieModerator]

Local News Outlets Dealt a Crippling Blow by This Biggest of Stories – Layoffs. Canceled print editions. Weekly papers and small dailies across the country face peril as the coronavirus cuts off ads and live events.

[full story (NYT)]

[excerpts]

[…]

“One of the big problems with all of this is you don’t know when this is going to end,” he said in the interview. “Even when people can go out of their houses again, it’s going to take a long time for business to come back to what it was.”

The pandemic is one of the biggest stories most publications will ever cover. But it has left many of them struggling to stay solvent.

Alternative weeklies and daily papers in small and midsize cities across the United States were already suffering because of the recession last decade, the migration of readers from print to online and the decline of the advertising business. Since 2004, roughly one-fourth of American newspapers — more than 2,000 — have been lost to mergers or shutdowns, according to researchers at the University of North Carolina. Most were weeklies.

The arrival of the coronavirus shook the industry’s already weakened economic foundation. As ad revenue and the money generated by events sponsored by small publications started to evaporate, many papers have canceled print editions, laid off workers or asked readers for donations.

[…]

Larger publications have also made adjustments. The most drastic response from a major metropolitan daily has come out of New Orleans and Baton Rouge, La., where The Advocate and The Times-Picayune — now one news organization, after The Advocate bought The Times-Picayune last year — will furlough 10 percent of the work force, the editor, Peter Kovacs, said Monday.

The furlough will focus on journalists who cover sports and social events, and everyone else will be reduced to four-day workweeks, Mr. Kovacs said. He attributed the need to declines in ad revenue, even as web traffic and new digital subscriptions have increased substantially.

Mark Thompson, the chief executive of The New York Times Company, said this month that he anticipated total advertising revenues to drop more than 10 percent in the current quarter amid “uncertainty and anxiety about the virus.”

The losses have been exacerbated by demands by companies that their ads not appear next to articles about death tolls and hospitalizations. […]

 

[_Robert_Participant]

Ready for all the tax payer funded corporate bailouts orchestrated by the very folks who despise socialism? I guess it would be impossible to expect an airline or a bank to have three months of emergency cash on hand.

[DavisModerator]

No their plan always goes like this:

• Expand network and buy planes
• Gudgingly raise staff salary though never in step with inflation
• Dish out dividends and give big bonuses to management
• Put all your loose money into expansion
• Find a crisis
• Lay off a lot of staff, lower their wages and collectively bargain shitty working terms (while not lowering management bonus or salary ever)
• Beg government for aid promising they’ll keep people working
• Get aid
• Dish out part of the aid to bonuses and dividends and the rest to maintain your over expanded fleet of empty planes
• Ignore your promises and still lay off staff
• Raise corporate bonuses
• Start recovery
• Don’t return working conditions or staff salaries back to normal
• Pay out dividends and raise management salary
• Once back to normal ever so slightly improve working conditions and hire back only some of the staff you laid off
• Dividends and bonuses
• Invest all of your money into expansion

If you think this is an exaggeration this is EXACTLY what several Canadian and American airlines are doing this instant. They literally paid out dividends (which even for some share holders was controversial) this week despite laying off staff and asking the government for help.

[PopeBeanieModerator]

_Robert_ wrote:

Ready for all the tax payer funded corporate bailouts orchestrated by the very folks who despise socialism?

I just wish it could have come earlier, in the form of promoting health care. Obama-hate (and Hillary-hate?) helped set the country back on those counts, and (imo) now the worm must turn to repair the economy, more than it otherwise would have had to.

Meanwhile I’m glad Bernie’s on his way out, because even now in the current pandemic, his openly-social agenda would still definitely fail Dems in 2020.

[PopeBeanieModerator]

“Just catch me up, quick”: How The Wall Street Journal is trying to reach non-news junkies – News products that the Journal built to highlight its election coverage to occasional readers are being repurposed for coronavirus coverage.

[full story (NiemanLab)]

[excerpts]

The Wall Street Journal spent months designing, testing, and perfecting a slate of tools and news products around what was sure to be the year’s biggest story: the 2020 elections. Then…coronavirus.

[…]

This week, after a few more head-spinning news cycles, the election catch-up module on the homepage has been converted to coronavirus information. And the live coverage that’s outside the paywall? That’s where you can find highlights and to-the-minute updates […]

[…]

[…] Last month, it announced it had passed 2 million paying subscribers, a number only The New York Times can top among American newspapers. But the fact that its paywall is harder than most of its competitors — not to mention its high sticker price for a digital sub, $39/month — means it has to be more creative than its peers in both attracting and converting new readers.

[…]

The Journal tested the catch-up module at a variety of times (morning, midday, even late Friday afternoons) before settling on weekdays at lunchtime, based on engagement patterns and site traffic. […]

[…]

A Pew study in January found it was one of only three news outlets (along with PBS and the BBC) that both Democrats and Republicans trust more than distrust. An earlier study found that the Journal’s audience is remarkably evenly distributed across the ideological spectrum. (Among conservatives, the Journal’s news reporting benefits from the paper’s hard-right editorial pages.)

“We’ve found that the Journal is in a great place to be a political news source because we’re so highly trusted on the left and the right. It’s a unique position to be in,” Story said. “That’s part of our thinking around the live Q&A and the other things that have to do with being more transparent and open to questions.”

#paywalledNews

• This reply was modified 4 years ago by  PopeBeanie. Reason: moved this post down a bit just to improve the flow of stories and replies a bit

[_Robert_Participant]

@davis,

Yes…

These companies would look at the human body and conclude that having 2 lungs and 2 kidneys was financially inefficient, and probably engage in the organ trade business.

[_Robert_Participant]

Pastor defies coronavirus order, draws over 1K people to services

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/pastor-defies-coronavirus-order-draws-over-1k-people-to-services/ar-BB11HwQ3?ocid=spartanntp

[PopeBeanieModerator]

Wow, Louisiana already has the third highest rate of covid per capita in USA. Sounds like a Darwin Award may be in order, some time around mid-April I’d guess.

[PopeBeanieModerator]

A couple more stories via Nieman, and during our pandemic’s relatively early stages:

Nieman: How a Boston Globe website started connecting those in need because of coronavirus with those who can help

Excerpts [emphasis on a paragraph is mine]:

As local news outlets suffer blow after blow in this pandemic, Boston Helps is a reminder that local news outlets are an invaluable resource in a person’s day-to-day life. While The Washington Post and The Guardian have compiled lists of general ways to help your community, Boston Helps connects you directly to a person that you can help.

[…]

Once someone who needs help or someone who can help submits their information in the Google Form, it gets fed into a conditionally formatted and color-coded Google Sheet. From there, it’s easy for Karolian and others on his team to match people up. He said that because things were moving so fast, they opted to use off-the-shelf Google tools.

[…]

The idea is spreading. After talking with Karolian about Boston Helps, The Dallas Morning News’s marketing and product teams worked with an existing partner and launched a widget that does something similar. At the bottom of every DMN story about the coronavirus, users see two boxes where they can select that they want to help or need help. This feature is available to any United States media company that wants to implement it, chief product officer Mike Orren said.

---

An Australian story [excerpts, paragraph emphasis mine]:

News Corp Australia will stop printing 60 of its local newspapers next week, including the New South Wales title the Manly Daily, which has been in print since 1906.

[…]

The move came days after Rupert Murdoch’s Australian newspapers warned of “inevitable” job cuts and forced staff to take leave.

The executive chairman of News Corp, Michael Miller, said the decision was brought on by the collapse of the real estate and entertainment industries which halted the papers’ main revenue stream.

[…]

The Covid-19 pandemic has seen an unprecedented surge in audiences for news websites and TV news, with the top 10 news websites up by 54% on the previous four weeks.

But the disappearance of advertising revenue as consumer spending sharply contracts is leading to daily layoffs across the industry.

[Author]

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