The Best of Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2019
What’s Happening: Reuters Institute just released its Digital News Report for 2019, the most comprehensive ongoing comparative study of news consumption in the world, delivering important and timely data about…
Catching up with Facebook Watch’s Accomplishments
What’s Happening: Facebook Watch was launched globally less than a year ago, and in that time has built an audience of more than 720 million people monthly and 140…
The future of voice and what it means for news publishers
What’s Happening: As voice technologies grow in popularity, they are likely to move beyond home and personal use to become embedded in every aspect of consumers’ lives. The Reuters…
How the Yolo app is toppling Snapchat
What’s Happening: The new app, Yolo, has topped the charts as a viral hit. Since its release on May 2, 2019 Yolo has been downloaded approximately five million times and…
A NYTimes Slack bot to check Reddit for real time feedback
What’s Happening: At The New York Times, a bot was built and then re-tuned that allowed writers and editors to monitor Reddit conversations around their content, get real-time feedback from…
The 2019 Podcast Investing Landscape
What’s Happening: Innovations in podcasting are happening at a rapid pace — new technologies such as smart speakers, AirPods and connected cars have made it easier than ever before for…
The impact of GDPR one year later
What’s Happening: One year after the European Union introduced the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) law, how has the impact of it and digital privacy affected news publishers? Why it…
Why We Need Transnational Journalism To Better Understand The World
What’s Happening: More than ever, events that take place across the globe have a major effect on our own countries and immediate communities. The world has become our own backyard,…
Making the Facebook News Feed more personal
What’s Happening: Facebook has announced two rankings updates based on surveys it’s conducted, to make the News Feed more personal and connect people to posts they find most relevant. It’s…
Soundtrap Launches A Podcast Studio In The Cloud
What’s Happening: The Spotify-owned online music studio, Soundtrap, is poised to become a major part of the company’s growing interest in podcasts. Soundtrap for Storytellers was just launched to address…
Storytelling in the New Media Landscape
What’s Happening: Changed context and new dimensions are the hallmark of today’s digital age, and every online storyteller must master them. Ezra Eeman, head of EBU Digital, demonstrated the eight…
Pay Models for Online News in the U.S. and Europe
What’s Happening: As legacy news revenues continue to decline and large technology companies like Google, Facebook and Apple taking the lion’s share of digital advertising revenues, pay models have become…
The Most Memorable Moments From NewFronts Week
What’s Happening: With the 2019 Digital Content NewFronts week recently concluding, many key moments and events stand out as the most memorable. Here is a breakdown of some of those…
The Newscene Helps Publishers Monetize Their Content Through Membership
What’s Happening: Newscene just launched in beta for its new service that makes it simple for publishers to build a revenue-generating membership program without writing a single line of code.…
Global podcast advertising trends
What’s Happening: Marketing information and guidance company WARC released its Global Ad Trends report in April 2019, which focused on podcasts. The report includes key findings on ad spend, market…
Five things Neue Zürcher Zeitung learned building a text-to-speech service
What’s Happening: In March 2019, Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ) launched a new text-to-speech service to the public, as an improved version of its beta audio player released last October. The…
International Journalism Festival brought journalists together for learning, innovation and networking
What’s Happening: The largest media event in Europe, the International Journalism Festival (IJF), took place in early April for the 13th year. Experienced media innovators shared knowledge and practical advice…
The Role Of Trust In Publishing News Across Platforms
What’s Happening: In an era when trust in journalism is down and consumers are getting their news from multiple platforms, publishers are moving into the “show me” instead of…
Designing “news nearby” distribution for smart cities
What’s Happening: An analysis of the probabilities and opportunities for local journalism with smart city devices identifies relationships in the value local news provides to communities. It also provides insight…
Apple News Plus As a Sign of News Curation
What’s Happening: Apple’s new subscription news service, Apple News Plus, was announced in March. But some people in the media publishing industry see that this move is one more indicator…
UK Publishers Join Forces With Podcast Pioneer To Launch Laudable, A New Innovation In Audio
What’s Happening: A major new initiative for local journalism in the United Kingdom was announced on March 21 when two of the country’s largest regional news publishers, Reach PLC and…
How Podcasts Became One Of The Most Popular Mediums — Even Essential
What’s Happening: When podcasts first came out in 2004, when MTV VJ Adam Curry and software developer Dave Winer distributed their shows Daily Source Code and Morning Coffee Notes via…
Medium Grows With New Publications And Content
What’s Happening: The open publishing platform, Medium, has been growing exponentially since its launch in 2012. Millions of people daily read the unique, thought-provoking stories published on Medium, and its…
Push Notification Value Increases With Intensity
What’s Happening: A new metric for evaluating push notification strategies, Subscriber Lifetime Value (SLTV), has been identified through a study done by Marfeel. The firm conducted extensive research to find…
Understanding Loyalty And Reader Retention
Content Insights is the company that created the next-generation analytics solution to one of the biggest problems facing the online publishing industry: how to move past single metrics and find…
Quartz Journalists Report News Story Using Machine Learning
What’s Happening: The news website Quartz created an innovative studio last November that reports on the news using machine learning techniques. Quartz AI Studio’s first story published on March 2,…
Entrepreneurial Journalism At Brooklyn College
What’s Happening: The past decade or so has seen a massive shift in the way journalism is done. Print journalism is in its decline and even journalistic sites that exist…
OneZero Debuts As Medium’s New Tech And Science Publication
What’s Happening: The open publishing platform, Medium, has just launched a new forward-looking tech and science publication called OneZero. The digital journal will be a place to find timely analysis…
What Slowed Progress On Closing The Digital Divide Means
What’s Happening: For the 3.8 billion people around the world who still lack access to fast and reliable Internet service, they are being left behind. And according to the 2019…
Steady Publishers Double Membership Sales In Six Months
What’s Happening: Steady, a platform that allows publishers to earn revenue through paid subscriptions such as memberships, newsletters, podcasts or other content, announced that its media makers have doubled their…
How Chalkbeat used GroundSource to publish the unheard narrative of Detroit schools
What’s Happening: Chalkbeat, a nonprofit news publisher that covers K-12 education, was investigating the public school system in Detroit, Michigan to uncover the reasons why one in three elementary students…
Bloomberg Puts Out Its Annual Jealousy List, With New York Publishers Dominating
What’s Happening: The annual tongue-in-cheek Bloomberg Businessweek Jealousy List for 2018 laid out the articles that Bloomberg editors wish they had thought of first. “Journalism so good it makes us…
Apple Announces Growth With 1.4 Billion Active Devices And Record Revenue Of $10.9 Billion
What’s Happening: Apple’s first-quarter 2019 earnings call revealed strong growth for the company, with its monthly active Apple news user rate hitting 85 million. The roll-out of Apple News to…
Mobile Ad Spend On Course To Overtake TV In 2019
What’s Happening: Mobile is currently the second-largest advertising medium in the world, just behind television. However, if the current growth rates of mobile ads continued, mobile will overtake TV…
10 International Media Tech Startups
What’s Happening: Next Media Accelerator, the premier hub for media innovation in Europe, has announced the ten teams that will take part in its accelerator program over the next six…
Facebook Open-Sources Spectrum For More Efficient Photo Uploading
What’s Happening: The new open source image processing library, Spectrum, was officially launched by Facebook yesterday, after being in beta since November 2018. The company says that Spectrum will help…
Civil To Be A Key Element Integrated Into WordPress As A Toolkit For News Organizations
What’s Happening: Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.com, is poised to launch Newspack, an open-source publishing and revenue-generating platform for news organizations. Newspack is designed to address some of the…
The Rise Of Partnership Journalism In Nonprofit News Organizations
What’s Happening: In the ever-changing news media industry, publishers are constantly trying to stay ahead of the curve on emerging technology, trends and best practices. Nonprofit news outlets, particularly, voice…
After three years, independent Slovakian news site Denník N has grown digital subscribers and long-form journalism
Since its launch in 2015, the newspaper and website Denník N has reached 30,000 digital subscribers — doubling the numbers between 2015 and 2018. Registered readers went from 22,000 in…
Ad-free “unbreaking news” platform The Correspondent hits $2.5 million crowdfunding goal
The Correspondent, a new online media platform for unbreaking news, successfully reached its membership crowdfunding goal of $2.5 million in 29 days. The funding will enable The Correspondent to build…
Blockchain Applications for News
Blockchains are emerging as an embraced solution to problems throughout various industries. The technology has many appeals: it’s easy to set up and can store anything permanently. But the question…
Mobile Video Consumption Tech Trends for 2019
Mobile video consumption continues its upward surge, with no signs of slowing down anytime soon. By 2019, video will make up 80 percent of all internet traffic, according to Cisco.…
Measuring user engagement with RFV scores (a combination of Recency, Frequency and Volume metrics)
What’s happening: One of today’s hottest topics in digital publishing is finding the “holy grail” of subscriptions — and many leading media companies have shown that a key driver…
Beyond 800 Words: How the BBC tested alternative news formats for personalisation
What’s happening: What would online news look like today, if it hadn’t evolved from the traditional 800-word print newspaper article? This is a question that the BBC asked, and then…
Was the “pivot to video” as misguided as everyone says it was?
It would be difficult to pinpoint the exact moment when the infamous “pivot to video” actually began, but a 2016 Facebook earnings call could certainly be cited as having thrown…
The Future Of Journalism On Smart Speakers
What’s happening: The Reuters Institute at Oxford just released a new research report, The Future of Voice and the Implications for News. With smart speakers and audio journalism emerging…
Engaged journalism shows measured benefits and success
What’s happening: A recent report from the Agora Journalism Center suggests that newsrooms practicing public-powered, engaged journalism are finding some measurable success. The questions and debate over engaged…
The Athletic raises $40 million in new funding to challenge legacy sports media companies
What’s happening: The Athletic, a digital sports media company, has raised an additional $40 million in a new round of funding. This capital adds to the previous investment money…
Guardian Voice Lab will experiment with storytelling through smart speakers and interactive audio
What’s happening: Guardian News & Media just announced the launch of Guardian Voice Lab, an small, in-house team that will create and test innovative ways to deliver audio journalism…
In the world of Artificial Intelligence, journalism is more important than ever
What’s happening: Many journalists today are worried about what Artificial Intelligence (AI) means for their job security. With computers generating a vast array of content now — from weather…
News Impact Summit looks at the future of local news
What’s happening: On October 15, a News Impact Summit was held in Cardiff, Wales, to bring local news organisations from around the world together to identify effective ways to…
How Algorithms Form Journalism — Learning at Harvard and MIT
What’s happening: At Harvard and MIT, Nieman Fellows from all over the world are learning about algorithms from each other and those vast university resources. Uli Köppen is a Nieman…
Reddit Publishing for Newsrooms
What is the deal about Reddit? The land of memes, trolls, karma points and a set of rules that seemed to be miles away from the grown-up world and completely…
Po.et, a blockchain media wants to stop IP theft and help content creators get paid
Imagine this scenario: you’re a hobbyist photographer who snaps a breathtaking photo of a sunset. You then upload it to one of Reddit’s many image-based subreddits. And then someone who…
The Dot is a new headline news app attempting to make news reading easier and more understandable
What’s happening: The Dot’s founders, Barry Pace and Fred Rivett, started the company to address the deep disconnect between news providers and readers. Believing that the news was slowly…
Sift aims to give readers a way to stay informed without news fatigue or anxiety
What’s happening: More than two out of three Americans report feeling exhausted by the news. The emotional burden of anxiety leads to learned helplessness, which impacts civic engagement and…
How Neue Zürcher Zeitung is creating a smarter, more personal news experience
What’s happening: The Swiss media group is launching a new experiment with a smart, personalised newsletter called “My NZZ.” Catering to its German-speaking audience, My NZZ automatically curates a…
The Era of Data Privacy: Keys for Understanding GDPR
Through the years, the tech industry has developed disruptive products and services that have forever changed the way we do everyday things. It is often that we find ourselves reading…
Why this week could make — or break — blockchain-powered journalism
What’s happening: The latest experiment in journalism is facing a big test this month. Anything involving blockchain is super volatile and always has been, according to Maria Bustillos, the…
StoryChief raises €1 million for content marketing platform
What’s happening: Belgium-based content marketing start-up StoryChief gained big with €1 million of investment capital from a variety of sources — which will help it reach its goal of…
The nonprofit news sector is robust and has room to grow
What’s happening: The Institute for Nonprofit News (INN) released an in-depth report that shows the nonprofit news industry has been growing rapidly over the past decade, and continues to…
What it takes to shift a news organisation from an advertising-based model to a reader-revenue strategy
What’s happening: A decade after the shift to digital publishing, media companies have still not really figured out how to convert to a reader-revenue model, as opposed to a…
Is the media biased, or the readers? An experiment on trust by Gallup and the Knight Foundation
What’s happening: In a “news without labels” experiment, Gallup and the Knight Foundation partnered to create an experimental news platform to research audience views on the trustworthiness of media content…
Parse.ly Currents: Where human intelligence and machine learning collide
What’s happening: Parse.ly Currents is a new free product for understanding news, information, and attention flows online, at a detailed and quantitative level. This information is openly and instantaneously…
New York Times breaks ground with Voyages
What’s happening: NYT is launching a groundbreaking new feature this weekend in its annual Voyages issue of the Sunday Magazine: a nearly text-free magazine, with words replaced by photographs from…
BBC Experiments with Google AMP Stories
What’s happening: BBC News ran a six-week experiment with the new Google AMP Stories format, announced last February, to determine whether the Instagram/Snapchat-like format would appeal to its global…
Instagram Stories for Publishers: Embracing Immersive Storytelling
One of the golden rules of digital marketing is meeting your audience where they are. With 1 billion monthly active users by June 2018, there is a good chance that…
Publishers are taking a second look at news apps like SmartNews
When Rich Jaroslovsky was hired to work for the news curation app SmartNews a little over four years ago, his new bosses suggested a job title that he found curious:…
Pandora’s and Spotify’s online radio revenue pursuit
Online radio companies have increased in popularity over the past several years, corresponding with the increase in radio streaming devices, such as smartphones. According to “The Infinite Dial” report by Edison…
Gated Content Best Practices: Elements For An Efficient Paywall Model
Once upon a time, when journalism was stepping into the digital world, the main concern on everyone’s mind was about revenue: would readers pay for online news? Was the classic advertising…
Mobile music and video app usage in the United States
Vero Analytics May’s report of the most popular mobile music and video apps in the United States reveals YouTube’s dominance in mobile reach. In response, we’ve seen Facebook take the…
Why Medium Launched A Cryptocurrency Podcast
Aaron Lammer doesn’t consider himself an expert in cryptocurrency, and while he does trade in some of the various digital assets that have taken the financial world by storm, he…
Would a Spotify for news distribution model work?
This article has been inspired by the recent post on Medium and the reaction of our Facebook followers on the following shared update. What people don’t realize is that despite seeing increasing consumption…
Inside the Wall Street Journal’s mobile strategy
The Guardian US has recently concluded their 2 year Mobile Innovation Lab study, which received $2 million in funding from the night foundation. WSJ has been a participant in this…
The type of digital media companies receiving venture capital in 2018 (so far)
Digital media companies that have received venture capital over the past few years have no doubt been new media entities or existing companies incorporating new technologies into their old strategies.…