Post, the latest Twitter alternative, is betting big on micropayments for news
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Monday, November 28, 2022
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Post, the latest Twitter alternative, is betting big on micropayments for news“What I believe consumers want is to be able to get multiple sources of news in their feed.” By Laura Hazard Owen. |
What We’re Reading
Fort Worth NewsGuild / Kaley Johnson
After two years of trying to bargain with McClatchy, journalists at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram are on strike starting today →
“Under existing working conditions, we cannot plan for a future in Fort Worth.”
The Guardian / Jim Waterson
Top global news publishers say the U.S. should drop its charges against Julian Assange →
“Twelve years after the publication of ‘Cablegate,’ it is time for the US government to end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets. Publishing is not a crime.” SIgned by the editors and publishers of The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and El PaÃs.
The New York Times / Lauren Hirsch and Benjamin Mullin
Yahoo (remember them?) has bought a major stake in the chumbox auteur Taboola →
This 1 Weird Trick DESTROYS Revenue Shortfalls!
The Washington Post / Joseph Menn
China’s strategy to distract from dramatic protests: Flood Twitter with porn →
“…a flood of nuisance content in China that researchers said was aimed at reducing the flow of news about stunning widespread protests against coronavirus restrictions. Numerous Chinese-language accounts, some dormant for months or years, came to life early Sunday and started spamming the service with links to escort services and other adult offerings alongside city names.”
The Guardian / Adam Gabbatt
Crime coverage on Fox News halved once the U.S. midterms were over →
“It crescendoed right before election day, and then once the election was over, so was America's crime crisis no longer the subject of maximum concern that it had been in the previous weeks.”
Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism / Federica Cherubini
61% of media leaders embrace hybrid work; 20% want to return to pre-pandemic norms →
“Regardless of what rules organisations have put in place in terms of home versus office work, opinions are divided on whether staff are effectively coming back to the office. At the end of summer 2022, there were reports of other industries also battling with their employees to get them back into the workplace.”
The New Yorker / Jelani Cobb
Why Jelani Cobb quit Elon Musk’s Twitter →
“On November 20th, the Mastodon handle @LauraMartinez posted, ‘I'm here because Elon broke Twitter,’ which was more of a summary of what a great many people felt about the old platform than a zealous endorsement of the buggy, complicated new one.”
The Guardian / Edward Helmore
Layoffs, low ratings and a lurch closer to the right: Is CNN in crisis? →
“‘One of the biggest misconceptions about my vision is that I want to be vanilla, that I want to be centrist. That is bullshit,’ [CEO Chris Licht] said. ‘You have to be compelling. You have to have edge. In many cases you take a side.'”
Financial Times / Hannah Murphy, Alex Barker, and Arjun Neil Alim
Twitter’s ad business is in trouble →
“After several waves of job cuts and departures, Twitter's ads business team has shrunk so much that many agencies no longer have any point of contact at the company and have received little to no communication in recent weeks, according to four industry insiders.”
The Guardian / Rupert Neate
UK minister rejects measure designed to tackle legal harassment of journalists →
“A cross-party coalition of MPs has been calling for the change in the law to ‘prevent the use of court processes to silence investigative journalists’ with the threat of multimillion-pound legal costs, following a rash of Slapps seeking to ‘silence investigative journalists.'”
The Washington Post / Erik Wemple
News outlets stand by their midterm debacle →
“Which is to say: Major media outlets promoted an inaccurate depiction of the national political mood heading into Election Day, and they have no stated regrets about it. And if they're holding discussions on improving the coverage, they don't care to disclose them.”
The Washington Post / Taylor Lorenz
“Opening the gates of hell”: Elon Musk says he will revive banned accounts on Twitter →
“This is the second time in a week that Musk has used a Twitter poll to seemingly make a major decision related to the platform.”
Ars Technica / Ron Amadeo
Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10 billion this year →
“The report says that while Alexa’s Echo line is among the ‘best-selling items on Amazon, most of the devices sold at cost.’ One internal document described the business model by saying, ‘We want to make money when people use our devices, not when they buy our devices.'”
The Present Age / Parker Molloy
“Sorry you didn’t get invited to a wedding, I guess?” →
“This is the story of some DC reporters who got upset that they didn't get invited to a wedding. Nothing more. And naturally, when faced with pushback (such as asking why Cook didn't bother to read the photo caption), these journalists got even more defensive, arguing that people just don't understand how journalism works.”
The Wall Street Journal / Alex Frangos
A major shareholder has signaled its opposition to News Corp and Fox merging back together →
“Independent Franchise Partners, a London-based investment firm and one of the largest non-Murdoch holders of both News Corp and Fox, said it told a special committee of News Corp's board last month that it thought a combination on its own would fail to realize the full value of the company.”
The Verge / James Vincent
A major AI-art generator has made copying artists’ styles harder (on purpose) →
“…many artists, like Rutkowski, are annoyed that Stable Diffusion and other image generating models were trained on their artwork without their consent and can now reproduce their styles. Whether or not this sort of AI-enabled copying is legal is something of an open question.”
Press Gazette / Aisha Majid
Is trust in journalists…going up? (In the U.K., at least) →
“The proportion of Britons who say they trust journalists has increased over the last year and nearly doubled since 2000, according to an annual Ipsos study. Journalists still rank among the least trusted professions in the UK but they are ahead of politicians, estate agents and advertising executives.”
Poynter / Susan Chandler
Contrary to concerns, news organizations are still seeing a rise in subscriptions →
“Among eight large metropolitan dailies surveyed in the top tier of the Index, six showed increases in subscriptions from September 2021 through August 2022. One showed only a small decrease and another showed a significant decrease.”
Adweek / Mark Stenberg
How HBR becomes more valuable in times of economic distress →
“Since launching a tiered subscription offering in 2019, the 116-person outlet has accumulated roughly 116,000 digital subscribers, more than one-third of its total subscriber base of 328,000 paying readers.”
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