From surviving to thriving: Star Trib | How ‘Clippy’ changed the world | Google, FB suck up all ad growth

By Matt Carroll <@MattCData>

Nov. 8, 2016: Cool stuff about journalism, once a week. Get notified via email? Subscribe: 3toread (at) gmail.

1. From surviving to thriving — The Star Tribune: The Star Trib in Minneapolis has come a long way from the daily that wobbled through a tumultuous period. It’s gone from hanging in there to an aggressive attitude that has transformed the newsroom. Here’s how they did it, with a number of concrete steps. By Kristen Hare for Poynter.
2. How Microsoft’s ‘Clippy’ changed the world … through AI: Remember Clippy, that much-maligned personal assistant from Microsoft? That stupid animated paperclip you couldn’t wait to turn off? Yeah, me too. But Clippy was on to something — he was the great-grandfather of Siri and a whole new generation of AI assistants who are slowly becoming indispensable to us. A thoughtful ode to one really annoying (but prescient) critter, by Brian Feldman for The Vindicated.
3. Google + Facebook = All digital ad growth: Maybe that ad thing for newsrooms isn’t working out so great, after all. An analysis by Digital Content Next of digital advertising for the first half of the year shows that Google and Facebook saw their advertising shoot up more than 60% and 20%, respectively. Everyone else? Down 3%. That’s not to say individual newsrooms did not make gains — some did quite well — but the overall digital advertising trend is clear: It’s all about Google and Facebook. Better keep diversifying those revenue streams, newsrooms. Story by Peter Kafka for Recode.

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Matt Carroll is a journalism professor at Northeastern University.