Kristen Hare
Nov. 6, 2014
2:06 pm
The Economist | The Guardian
The Economist launched a new product on Thursday, The Economist Espresso, that’s a daily weekday mobile edition of the magazine. The Economist, which is a weekly, announced the new product on Thursday.
“It distills what’s important from the news, giving you a concentrated shot of global analysis that can be consumed quickly as part of your morning routine.” Here’s the full video:
Mark Sweney wrote about Espresso for The Guardian on Thursday, noting in the subhead that it “will be 171-year-old weekly magazine’s first daily edition.” It’s free to digital subscriber and $3.99 a month otherwise, he reported.
Chris Stibbs, chief executive of the Economist, said the new product opens up a market of potentially 200 million online readers.
“There is a huge market out there we couldn’t get to in print that we can potentially reach now,” he said.
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Kristen Hare
Nov. 5, 2014
3:50 pm
Billy Penn’s pop-up newsroom. This photo is courtesy of Billy Penn.
On Tuesday night, about 20 journalists in Philadelphia got together over beer and pizza to watch and report election results. They weren’t waiting together at election night parties or forced together outside the polls. It was a pop-up newsroom.
Fittingly, the get-together took place at an incubator at the University City Science Center, which donated the space and some beer (from Philly’s Victory Brewing Company, some Yuengling and a few Miller Lights.) Billy Penn, which organized the pop-up, paid for the pizza, about $200, said Chris Krewson, Billy Penn’s editor, in a phone interview.
The evening started around 7:30, pizza came at 7:45 and the Pennsylvania governor’s race was called by 8:02, Krewson said, “so the pizza was still warm.”
Billy Penn launched on Oct. 22. The idea for the pop-up came from Billy Penn’s Shannon McDonald, who got the idea from Montclair State University’s NJ News Commons, which also had an open newsroom Tuesday night. Read more
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Sam Kirkland
Nov. 2, 2014
9:09 pm
It seems like everybody’s starting an email newsletter these days. The web offers an endless stream of information, David Carr wrote in June, so “having something finite and recognizable show up in your inbox can impose order on all that chaos.”
But the newsletter business is getting crowded now, too. The Financial Times and Vox have recently launched new newsletters, and Quartz’s has been widely celebrated. The New York Times recently made its “What We’re Reading” newsletter free for everyone.
(Ahem, you can sign up for Poynter’s new morning and afternoon newsletters here, by the way.)
Time’s newsletter strategy is different. While it’s trendy to offer links to stories your organization didn’t create itself, Time’s goal is to provide the best of what it has to offer every morning — “a snapshot in Time, as it were,” said Edward Felsenthal, Time.com’s managing editor.
When Callie Schweitzer was hired to be Time’s direct of digital innovation last year, the magazine offered RSS-generated emails for 10 different verticals, with open rates averaging about 17 percent. Read more
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Sam Kirkland
Oct. 29, 2014
3:44 pm
You’ve probably heard rumors of “the death of the homepage,” but The Guardian isn’t having it.
During a demo of the newly redesigned U.S. website in New York this week, Wolfgang Blau, The Guardian’s director of digital strategy, said the homepage was The Guardian’s “single strongest lever to direct attention.” He and other digital leaders at The Guardian surprised me by focusing so much on the homepage when talking about the new site, which went live today.
The homepage consists of new responsive “containers” of content. Anyone who has edited a newspaper site’s homepage with a CMS constraining presentation to one or two above-the-fold templates will be jealous of The Guardian’s seemingly infinite array of options for arranging content in a four-column grid. Stories can go as wide as necessary — with an image or without! — and can include various combinations of headlines, kickers, and byline photos.
The result: a modular design that translates well to mobile but doesn’t resort to the sameness plaguing other news site redesigns. Read more
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Sam Kirkland
Oct. 27, 2014
9:40 am
At 6 a.m. on Oct. 21, print subscribers to the Montreal Gazette received a new-look newspaper focused on news analysis. At 6 p.m., they read the first edition of a magazine-style iPad app. In-between, they were able to access a smartphone app geared toward millennials with short snippets of local news, as well as a new responsive website.
The four relaunched products constitute an effort by Canadian newspaper chain Postmedia to reach audiences it sees as distinct based on audience research:
- Smartphone users, age 18-34
- Tablet users, age 35-49
- Print readers, age 50-64
- Web users, age 18 and up
The old Montreal Gazette in print, left, and its new look, right.
Postmedia used a research firm to survey 17,000 people across Canada, with more than 2,000 of them located in Montreal, to determine what readers wanted from the four platforms. It rolled out its first big newspaper transformation at the Ottawa Citizen in May, launching smartphone and iPad apps and differentiating content based on audience profiles developed from the research. Read more
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Sam Kirkland
Oct. 22, 2014
10:23 am
Pew Research Center
Women are more likely to experience severe forms of harassment online, according to a Pew survey, and 65 percent of both men and women between ages 18 and 29 have experienced some form of online harassment.
Overall, 4 in 10 Internet users have experienced online harassment, while 73 percent have seen it happen to others.
Online harassment is especially pronounced at the intersection of gender and youth: women ages 18-24 are more likely than others to experience some of the more severe forms of harassment. They are particularly likely to report being stalking online (26% said so) and sexually harassed (25%). In addition, they are also the targets of other forms of severe harassment like physical threats (23%) and sustained harassment (18%) at rates similar to their male peers (26% of whom have been physically threatened and 16% of whom have been the victim of sustained harassment).
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Sam Kirkland
Oct. 17, 2014
8:56 am
Friday. Good morning (or good evening, if you’re reading this at night). Andrew Beaujon is back next week.
- Let’s freak out about Twitter changes: Sayeth Twitter: “in many cases, the best Tweets come from people you already know, or know of. But there are times when you might miss out on Tweets we think you’d enjoy.” Noooooooo! (Twitter) | Stuart Dredge weighs in: “The difference between the two social networks is that Facebook is taking stories out of its news feed – it prioritises around 300 a day out of a possible 1,500 for the average user – while Twitter is only adding tweets in. For now, at least.” (The Guardian) | Previously: I wrote about the Facebookification of Twitter and the Twitterfication of Facebook. (Poynter)
- More Twitter changes: Now with audio! “Notably, Twitter is teaming up with Apple to let users listen to certain tracks and buy the music directly from the iTunes store,” Yoree Koh reports.
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Sam Kirkland
Oct. 16, 2014
8:57 am
It’s Thursday. Here’s a pop quiz: How many media stories do you think you’re about to get?
- UK newspaper distributor will do same-day Amazon deliveries: “Connect Group will make early morning deliveries at the same time as it delivers daily newspapers and use contractors to fulfill a second delivery in the afternoon.” Connect distributes The Guardian and The Mirror, Rory Gallivan reports. (Wall Street Journal)
- Longtime S.F. Chronicle editor William German dies at 95: “Mr. German began his career at the paper as a copy boy. When he retired 62 years later, he was the dean of West Coast editors. He had helped transform The Chronicle from the No.3 newspaper in a four-newspaper city to the largest paper in Northern California.” (San Francisco Chronicle)
- BBC battles Ebola in Africa with WhatsApp: “The service will deliver information on preventative care, health tips and breaking news bulletins specific to the region about the virus in French and English, and often in audio formats,” writes Alastair Reid.
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Benjamin Mullin
Oct. 15, 2014
3:43 pm
About three years ago, The Washington Post embarked on a complete overhaul of the way it creates and publishes content online.
The project was ambitious. The Post — which then relied primarily on a legacy content management system called Méthode — wanted a platform that could handle articles, video, mobile apps and analytics, something that gave designers and producers the ability to quickly create and edit page templates.
So, the paper brought together a group of engineers, some handpicked from within the paper and others hired externally, and embedded them within the newsroom to see what reporters and producers needed, said Gregory Franczyk, chief architect at The Washington Post. They started with a temporary fix, gradually transitioning sections of the site to WordPress beginning with Wonkblog, which was then run by Ezra Klein.
Then, early last year, Post engineers were faced with a seemingly trivial task: make author pages for staff members without using the paper’s cumbersome CMS. Read more
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Sam Kirkland
Oct. 15, 2014
8:58 am
It’s Wednesday. That means you get 10 media stories.
- Freed Simmons: ESPN’s Bill Simmons returns to the network today after his three-week suspension “for calling N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell a ‘liar’ during a podcast, and then effectively daring ESPN to punish him.” His contract expires next fall, Jonathan Mahler and Richard Sandomir report. Will he leave? (New York Times) | Deadspin would take him. (Deadspin) | Previously: At the time of the suspension, Kelly McBride wrote, “when your biggest star declares himself above his newsroom’s standards, the boss has to respond.” (Poynter)
- Oops — ABC News didn’t beat NBC after all: Two weeks ago, Nielsen reported that ABC’s “World News Tonight” topped “NBC Nightly News” for the first time in 260 weeks. But it turns out NBC actually kept its streak alive thanks to revised ratings after Nielsen discovered inaccuracies, Bill Carter reports. (New York Times)
- How Time is getting all that traffic: “Time, together with sister site Money, published at least five different pieces” on the day the cable channel FXX began its marathon of “The Simpsons.” Joseph Lichterman takes a deep look at how Time is engaging its audience — and how it has more than doubled its unique visitors in a year.
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