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From Journalism Weekly, a newsletter that explores the world of media. Subscribe here for more.
Bulletin board
David Perlman, 98, retires from the San Francisco Chronicle.
Buyouts abound at the New York Times.
Book critic Michiko Kakutani steps down from the New York Times.
Susie Armitage departs from BuzzFeed as managing editor.
Laurene Powell Jobs’ organization takes control of The Atlantic.
Katie Couric ends her news show on Yahoo.
Industry links
What the experts wrote
The Agony and the Anxiety of The New York Times
Unlike past buyouts, though, the human toll is now only part of the sinking mood. A major newsroom reorganization is upending a time-honored method of producing the Times’s signature journalism while simultaneously making an entire class of employees feel obsolete. Additionally, the Times’s midtown Manhattan headquarters is itself being upended, shrinking by eight floors and leaving all but the highest of editors without private offices.
Even the Times is not invincible to the buyout-inducing, open floor-planned, video-first wave crashing through media. On one hand, the Times’ success depends on its quality, something its journalists argue is at stake with these changes. On the other, good business pays for great scoops, and there’s no better time to make adjustments than when you’re on top.
First Facebook TV Episodes Are Said to Be Ready for Mid-August
The new video section will offer the social network’s more than 2 billion users a mix of scripted and user-generated content. Facebook aims to make something higher-end than Google’s YouTube, but it’s not competing with video producers such as Netflix, HBO and Showtime.
Good for online video: Facebook is joining every other major tech company, pouring money into original content. They get more places to put advertising — something that’s been in short supply recently — and users get free video. If Facebook produces work that’s higher-quality or more narrative-focused than the usual video on their platform, will that send a signal to other creators? Will they tweak their algorithm to favor shows they paid for?
Online TV Is Growing Too Slowly to Stop the Bleeding in Cable
For all their success, these skinny bundles of live channels delivered over the internet are looking more like a patch than a panacea for what ails pay TV. About 6 million subscribers have shut off their cable or satellite service since 2010, dropping their $80- or $90-a-month packages. New subscribers aren’t fully replacing the old ones and they’re paying less, meaning media companies will lose $13 billion in revenue over the next decade, according to Barclays.
Bad for online video: Young people don’t want to pay for TV bundles, period. So much money gets wasted paying for television channels we’ll never watch, and slimming down the bundle still doesn’t fix that problem. Nobody wants to offer a la carte television, so $13 billion will disappear.
Slate uses podcasts to drive paid memberships
Last week, listeners to the popular Slate podcast “Trumpcast” found themselves caught in a pledge drive. Starting last Tuesday and extending through Saturday, each episode of “Trumpcast” featured at least one interruption calling on listeners to subscribe to Slate Plus, its long-standing premium membership tier. In some cases, the interruptions took up as much as 15 percent of every “Trumpcast” episode.
Slate says this tactic worked — hundreds of people signed up! — but making your free product less enticing to drive revenue is never a good look. Speaking as someone who will grit my teeth through Spotify ads until the day I die, people can be very determined to not spend money. I’m still waiting on a viable podcast that doesn’t rely on the pledge drive model.
My take
What I wrote on Medium
Vox Media shifts from scale to focus
Vox Media — and many other digital publishers — are starting to see the value in owning a niche. It’ll be a while before any of these new efforts pay off (or get shut down), but the hope is that focusing on serving one high-value audience well will be a more viable business strategy than trying to be everything to everyone.
Great reads
The Emoji Movie is so bad, it made us yell at strangers on the street
“Words aren’t cool,” his friend says, in a perfect bit of dialogue that effortlessly captures how teens really feel. Words aren’t cool echoes into the back of the theater and reverberates off the skulls of adults, now terrified, unsure their mindless spawn can even speak a verbal language.
A Year of “Chewbacca Mom” News Alerts
As a journalist who covers the odd cultural implications of social media, I lazily decided to follow the story by setting a Google alert for Payne back in May of last year. Since then, I’ve received 61 “Candace Payne” alerts.
I Quit Halfway Through Training at a Debt Collection Agency, and I Don’t Regret It
I felt the weight of what I was doing in that single phone call. People don’t want to be in debt, and if they could pay it off, they would. Meanwhile, I’m calling to interrupt their lives and ask them for money they don’t have while they are just trying to get through the day.
The Surprising Things Statistics Tell Us About Fiction
As the figures pile up, claustrophobia sets in. I caught myself wishing I worked in a less quantifiable medium. Ceramicists, for instance, never seem to answer to the Blatts of the world.
Donald Trump Has Your Full Attention. Can Anyone Else Be Heard?
Some are shouting louder. American politicians curse more now. Global aid groups say they are relying on increasingly unorthodox stunts such as the “Famine Food Truck” the aid group Oxfam has been driving around Washington, DC, in an attempt to call attention to what it describes as the worst humanitarian disaster since the end of World War II.
