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Over the last decade David Carr poured buckets of advice on me. He counseled me through my first and second book. Helped me find a hidden path in The New York Times to become a columnist. But his most salient advice came in the summer of 2011, when my marriage at the time was falling apart.
I had come out to Los Angeles for a month to try and escape New York, where the life I had built there was crumbling. Upon my arrival in Hollywood I had taken over an empty desk in The New York Times L.A. Bureau. While the new environment was a temporary distraction, I often took quick walks downstairs where I burst into tears and felt sorry for myself, overwhelmed by what life was throwing my way....
The 'magic of mobile' session at yesterday's PPA digital conference was a chance for key players in mobile publishing to explain what has made their products a success.Jonny Kaldor, whose Pugpig publishing platform provides mobile apps for Grazia, Which?, The Spectator, Men's Fitness, The Week and more, told Journalism.co.uk what he believes are the key points to remember for publishers looking to go mobile....
BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti just sent a memo to his employees about the company's growth and its plans for the coming year, and it was loaded with some pretty impressive numbers. August was apparently a big month for BuzzFeed, with record traffic of 85 million unique visitors. For contrast, Twitter gets about 91 million U.S. users per month and Amazon gets 77 million U.S. users, according to Quantcast.
Based on U.S. users alone, BuzzFeed has ~41 million users, bigger than Craigslist or AOL.The company saw a record profit as well (no numbers disclosed, but Peretti says that the company went from "zero revenue four years ago to a profitable company with over 300 employees")....
The next time a public-radio station goes into pledge-drive mode and begs listeners to chip in $100 for those snazzy premiums like the Nina Totin'-Bag, it would be wonderful if, in the spirit of balance and fairness, they would read off some salary numbers for NPR stars.
Do people on modest incomes really want to chip in $25 to make sure an anchor can take home $375,000?Instead, pledge-drive announcers often plead that stations need donations to pay for program fees, not anchor salaries. Blogger and news-app developer Andy Boyle pored over a few IRS 990 forms and revealed some of the highest-paid public radio poobahs....
The Online Journalism Review(OJR) has always been a valuable resource for insight into the transition from traditional into digital journalism. It’s ironic their website relaunch suffers some of the same challenges as traditional media moving to digital.... ...I like the new look and several of the new features. What’s baffling is the lack of social media best practices for this “online” journalism review. What’s missing?...
Bill Keller obviously has something of a love/hate relationship with the internet. The former New York Times executive editor has written columns questioning the societal value of Twitter and web news aggregators like the Huffington Post. On the other hand, he’s rather active on Twitter, where he has more than 50,000 followers, and it was under his tenure that the Times became an enthusiastic user of that platform, among a slew of other digital technologies. And now he’s officially a new media guru, having been a speaker at SXSW Interactive in Austin this week. Keller, who’s been writing for the Times’s Op-Ed page since handing over the top job to Jill Abramson in 2011, was a guest on a panel about digital bullying. After that discussion, I caught up with him for coffee and a chat. When I asked if it was okay to record our conversation, he quipped, “That depends what you’re going to ask me.”...
Marketers need to increase their metabolism, but the idea of building a newsroom isn't right for most. ... Any publisher will tell you that operating a newsroom is an expensive, arduous task. It’s also incredibly difficult to do well, especially if it’s not your business. Add in the many constituencies at a brand, and you could have an expensive nightmare on your hands at worst or a yet another fancy buzzword at best. That could leave brands back where they started: relying on their agencies. Deep Focus recently created its Moment Studio, which specifically focuses on helping brands with real-time marketing. Deep Focus CEO Ian Schafer is a strong supporter of the newsroom content model for brands and sees it as agencies’ role to make it happen....
Tech site develops predictive platform to monetize traffic surges In an analytics-obsessed Web climate, everyone is chasing the big story. The problem is, more often than not, big breakout traffic scoops yield attention, eyeballs and notoriety, but very few dollars. Last month, Deadspin broke the story on the Manti Te’o girlfriend hoax, netting the site nearly 4 million pageviews. But as Gawker Media mentioned publicly following the story, the company had no technical solution in place to monetize an unforeseen surge in traffic. Gawker is not alone. Web publishers have struggled across the board with this, which is why Ars Technica has been hard at work with what could be a viable solution. At Ars Technica, Condé Nast’s 15-year-old high-brow tech site, Ken Fisher and his small in-house team were lamenting the traffic conundrum when they decided to build a real-time dashboard geared toward examining pageviews with a predictive eye toward recently posted articles that are poised to trend. "Within two days we found it was working really well," explained Ars editor in chief Fisher. “We were identifying within an hour stories that would go on to do 900,000 views. And these were not pieces you’d hear by title and think, ‘That’s going to be killer.’ One was titled, Quantum Networks May Be More Realistic Than We Thought.”...
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NewsWhip's top social publishers list for August 2013 shows whose content was most shared on Twitter and Facebook compared to 2012.
Of August’s top five most social outlets on Facebook three are online-only publishers – BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post and Upworthy. All three are focused on publishing share-friendly content, and getting it shared. In particular the Huffington Post has shifted most effectively from its SEO (search optimised) roots to the current SMO (social optimised) reality. The BBC performed well, hanging onto fourth spot and doubling total Facebook interactions, while CNN managed a healthy improvement, going from number seven in September 2013 to number three in August 2013. Outside the top five, traditional news outlets including the New York Times, Fox Network, The Daily Mail, NBC Network and the Guardian dominate. These publishers all increased their levels of social interaction substantially since 2012...
This was an offensive and inappropriate tweet. But was shaming this student on the front-page of a college newspaper over the top?
The show's over for TV: Adults set to spend more time using digital media than watching television by end of this year, claims study.
People will soon be spending more time using their smartphones and tablets for surfing the web, checking social networks and playing games than they do watching television, new research has found.The average adult will use a mobile device for five hours a day compared to just four and half hours watching television.A US marketing company has claimed the tipping point when digital devices surpass the popularity of TV will come later this year....
The academic and business publication has quietly grown a digital presence.... Over the last several years, the Harvard Business Review has quietly grown its digital presence, and it points to social as the main reason. HBR is a cross between a magazine and an academic journal. But with the exponential growth in digital, the outlet is trying to be more egalitarian without watering down its heavily researched and often didactic business-management content. The publication, which costs $100 per year or $17 a month, believes social media’s role as a democratization tool can make its content more accessible to a wider audience. “Social has been a key channel for us to increase the impact of these ideas,” said Eric Hellweg, HBR’s digital strategy director. “That’s the heart of what we do. But to unearth these ideas and tell them in the social realm, it becomes an effective way to spread these ideas around the world. It’s a great way to get reach and influence.”...
During the South-by-Southwest session,Sources in the Social Media Age, Joe Ciarallo, senior director of PR at salesforce.com, moderated a lively discussion with an all-star panel that included Greg Galant, CEO of Sawhorse Media (the group that brings us Muck Rack), Mike Isaac, senior editor at All Things D, and Edmund Lee, media reporter, Bloomberg. The result was refreshingly straight talk and a fascinating flood of quotable insights, the highlights of which I’ve broken into categories below...
In the beginning of this year, Andrew Sullivan made the bold decision to part ways with The Daily Beast and turn his popular political blog The Daily Dish into a stand-alone business. As part of that move, Sullivan announced that the blog would forego ads and generate revenue through a metered paywall and an annual subscription fee for those who wished to pay. Some questioned whether Sullivan would be able to make enough money from this model to support the business, which includes a team of writers and editors. On Monday, however, Sullivan revealed that he is already more than two-thirds of the way towards his goal for the year — after less than two months. The Dish has brought in approximately $611,000 to date, the vast majority of which came before the paywall went up on Feb. 1 as many generous readers paid more than the $19.99 annual subscription fee to help Sullivan get the website on firm footing. In the three weeks that the paywall has been up, Sullivan says The Dish has brought in $93,000 in subscriptions thanks to the metered model. Sullivan's goal for the entire year was $900,000 in order to avoid pay cuts or other significant changes to the operation.
While the news divisions at ABC and NBC have made widespread use of Twitter, CBS is lagging far behind... While the news divisions at ABC and NBC have made widespread use of Twitter, CBS is lagging far behind, which may in part explain their poor ratings. Among the morning shows, ABC’s Good Morning America is in the lead with nearly two million Twitter followers, followed by The Today Show with almost 1.6 million, with CBS This Morning trailing badly with just 58,000 followers....
...A survey conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project last July found that more than half of all television viewers use their phones ”for engagement, diversion, or interaction with other people while watching TV” at least once per month. That has dramatic implications for anyone who will ever be interviewed on television, since viewers will inevitably share some of the quotes from your interview on their social networks....
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Nice David Carr story by Nick Bilton.