Ugh millennials
From Journalism Weekly, a newsletter that explores the world of media. Subscribe here for more.
Bulletin board
Former NYT public editor Liz Spayd joins Facebook as a transparency consultant.
Ken Rosenthal joins The Athletic from Fox.
The A.V. Club moves to Kinja.
The Village Voice ends its weekly print edition.
New York Times editor Jennifer Kingson joins BuzzFeed as a business editor.
Tommy Craggs joins HuffPost as a senior enterprise editor.
John Haskins is named the director of The New York Times Student Journalism Institute.
Industry links
But after laying off 25 staffers last week, Mic has a new mandate: pivoting to video. According to a memo that was sent to staff, the site’s new mission is “to make Mic the leader in visual journalism.”
Regardless of mission statement, beat or audience preference, the pivot to video comes for us all.
The Washington Post brings artificial intelligence to its native ads
The Washington Post is trying to solve the problem with artificial intelligence. It built an ad product called Own that lets brands use their own content but promises to improve its chances of being seen and read (or watched) with the aid of Heliograf, a news-writing bot the Post built for the editorial side.
Jeff Bezos’ influence has turned the Washington Post into a credible tech company. If it continues building out Arc Publishing — the suite of content tools it licenses to other newsrooms — it will have a great source of revenue that doesn’t depend on advertising or reader subscriptions.
New Report: Millennials Hate Apps With Uncool Design
According to Comscore’s annual mobile app report, logos matter and apps will be deleted if millennials don’t like how it looks on their screen. About 21% of these millennials eliminated apps from their phones this year while Generation X was more forgiving, with only 2% removing apps that had a design that didn’t appeal to them.
This article twists an intuitive finding into making millennials look as shallow and dumb as possible, but the core of the idea still holds: If your product looks bad, people won’t spend time with it. Most local news sites, if they’re optimized for mobile at all, don’t look that great, and that’ll be more of a problem going forward.
Fort Wayne’s News-Sentinel to cease afternoon newspaper
The News-Sentinel has been Fort Wayne’s afternoon newspaper under a business partnership with the Journal Gazette morning newspaper. The News-Sentinel says it will have designated pages produced by its staffers that will be included within the Journal Gazette’s printed editions while focusing more on its digital content. A date for the change wasn’t announced.
Speaking of local news, I have to include this announcement from one of my hometown papers. It’s exciting to see an established local outlet take this step, but the News-Sentinel suffers from the same problem I described above: its website will not be enough of a draw to grow readership.
My take
In this system, my pay as a writer depends on everyone else doing a worse job than me at attracting one specific kind of attention. Is 5,000 claps a lot? Not if they’re all from one person who goes and gives the next story she reads 50,000. It’s in my best interest to monopolize an audience, making the entire process less and less worthwhile for everyone else.
Great reads
Turn on, tune in, drop by the office
San Francisco appears to be at the epicentre of the new trend, just as it was during the original craze five decades ago. Tim Ferriss, an angel investor and author, claimed in 2015 in an interview with CNN that “the billionaires I know, almost without exception, use hallucinogens on a regular basis.”
Why are there so many knobs in GarageBand?
But no area of computing has so thoroughly gone for it more than audio software. The first Billboard #1 single that was recorded to a hard drive instead of tape was “Livin’ La Vida Loca” in 1999; 18 years later, in 2017, most audio software still looks like the designers attempted to replicate physical equipment piece for piece on a computer screen.
The Total Solar Eclipse Comes to “Eclipseville,” Kentucky
The Voodoo Bone Lady (she doesn’t go by any other name) waited in her S.U.V. and fussed over her snakes. “They’re not feeling well,” she said, shaking her head, causing the tiger teeth on her dress to rattle. She planned to conduct a ceremony during totality that would harness the eclipse’s energy and use it to promote peace.
Meet The Aristocrats Renting Out Their Castles on Airbnb
“The thing is it costs about 120 grand (£120,00 or $154,000) a year just to run the house,” he said. “It’s a huge problem for all these big houses. I was complaining about the cost of maintaining the roof to the Duke Of Marlborough the other day and he said, ‘I’ve got six acres of roof to look after.’”
