Things get worse
From Journalism Weekly, a newsletter that explores the world of media. Subscribe here for more.
Bulletin board
HowStuffWorks raises $15 million.
ProPublica and Poynter have redesigned websites.
The Verge set a new traffic record in August with 40.1m unique visitors. Also, Jake Kastrenakes gets promoted to editor of Circuit Breaker.
Raymond Zhong leaves WSJ to cover tech in China for the New York Times.
Industry links
The media has long had a history of feeding the worst prejudicial views of their own reporters into how they cover the news. In 2005, the Associated Press described a black man “looting” a grocery store in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. At the same time, the Agence France Presse described a white couple “finding” supplies at a grocery store.
In almost every case, the best media is supported by those who consume it, whether that’s books or movies or, now, television and music. And traditionally, for magazines and newspapers, an important part of the revenue came from those who consumed it.
The future Ev Williams paints in this interview sounds utopian — user-supported journalism! Higher payouts than advertising can support! — but he doesn’t have the numbers to back it up yet. I don’t see publications buying into this model; not only do they not get total control over subscriptions, they have to buy in fully to generate any meaningful revenue.
New Study Finds Facebook Page Reach Has Declined 20% in 2017
What’s more likely is actually another News Feed update introduced in June 2016, which put increased emphasis on content posted by friends and family over Page posts. Facebook’s always looking to get people sharing more personal updates, and those updates generate more engagement, which keeps people on platform longer, while also providing Facebook with more data to fuel their ad targeting.
All good things come to an end. At least for now, publishers are reaching fewer people on Facebook. That’s undoubtedly caused panic in some newsrooms, but it could also inspire a healthy (and long overdue) shift in focus and strategy.
My take
BuzzFeed gives in to banner ads
This move will make the company a lot of money, guaranteed by the massive scale of their site, but it’s hard not to see this as a failing on BuzzFeed’s part. The company’s been anti-banner ad since the beginning, and part of any new digital media’s mission is innovation. BuzzFeed was supposed to find a new way.
Great reads
On Channel 4, ‘The Great British Bake Off’ Keeps the Dream Alive
After almost a year of catfighting, snubs, and calls to boycott a cultural product so insanely popular that half of the nation’s televisions watched the Season 7 premiere, it was a relatively smooth transition. It’s hard not to imagine Channel 4 executives breathing a colossal sigh of relief, given that the Bake Off poaching was such a PR disaster for the network that its chief creative officer was drafted to repair the damage to its brand.
Here Are a Bunch of Trump Inner Circle Amazon Wish Lists
Whether purposefully made or not, the below seem very likely to be the genuine Wish Lists of several residents of Trump World. Thanks to the help of Amazon’s Wish List search feature, all it takes to pin them down is an email address or a relatively uncommon name.
Julian Assange, a Man Without a Country
Assange is not an easy man to get on the phone, let alone to see in person. He is protected by a group of loyal staffers and a shroud of organizational secrecy. One friend compared him to the central figure in Philip K. Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle” — a recluse trying to reset the course of history.
