3 to read: Twitter’s unlikely comeback | Krauthammer: Inspiration to disabled | When paywalls make decisions
By Matt Carroll <@MattCData>
June 23, 2018: Cool stuff about journalism, once a week. Get notified via email? Subscribe: 3toread (at) gmail. Originally published on 3toread.co
- How Twitter made the tech world’s most unlikely comeback: Twitter is one of journalists’ favorite tools. Which meant I was a sad puppy a couple of years back the company when the RIPs started, as it shed users and was overrun with a troll infestation. But a funny thing happened. The company made an amazing comeback. This is Twitter’s success story. By Alex Kantrowitz of BuzzFeed.
2. ‘Charles Krauthammer inspired journalists with disabilities, including me’: Charles Krauthammer, the great columnist for the WaPo and commentator for Fox, died this past week. What some people may not know is that he was paralyzed from the waist down, as the result of a diving accident. His disability did nothing to slow him down. As a matter of fact, he helped inspire a number of other journalists with disabilities. A touching read by Cal Borchers of the WaPo.
3. When the paywall decides when to ask you to pay: Most paywalls are simple — read five or 10 articles, then a readers get asked to buy a subscription. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t, but it’s a blunt approach. Swiss news publisher NZZ is building a much subtler system and claiming excellent results. They use machine learning that takes in more than a hundred points of information, from how much time is spent on articles to device and time of day. The algorithm calculates the best point to ask an individual to subscribe. I can see a lot of places following this approach. Lucinda Southern for DigiDay.
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Matt Carroll teaches journalism at Northeastern University. Twitter: @MattCData. Instagram: mattcarroll54.
