When I began overhauling the Financial Times’ editorial email newsletters a couple of years ago, I was soon faced with positive reinforcement, technical frustrations, and sources of deep satisfaction.
The good news was that we were on the cusp of a renewed surge in interest in email by many media organizations that has only grown since, suggesting we were on the right track. From legacy print organizations like The New York Times to digital native groups such as BuzzFeed, almost everyone sees the value of the medium.
One way to think of the job journalism does is telling a community about itself, and on those terms the American media failed spectacularly this election cycle. That Donald Trump’s victory came as such a surprise — a systemic shock, really — to both journalists and so many who read or watch them is a marker of just how bad a job we did. American political discourse in 2016 seemed to be running on two self-contained, never-overlapping sets of information. It took the Venn diagram finally meeting at the ballot box to make it clear how separate the two solitudes really are.
Slate and Vice want to shake up the way that news organizations report on election results. So far, no one is quite sure whether that’s a good thing.
Apple News may finally be starting to live up to its promise, at least when it comes to traffic.
Alongside the launch of iOS 10 in September, Apple announced a handful of updates to Apple News, which it launched last fall. Along with some cosmetic changes like a new logo and typeface, the new version of the app brought some much-needed features for publishers, including breaking news notifications and support for paid subscriptions. But for many publishers, the most welcome change was to the traffic it gives publishers, which has grown in a big way.
Election Day has arrived. The final stage of the contest has featured two unique presidential candidates: a former first lady who might become the first female president of the United States, and a billionaire-turned-reality TV star who defied conventional logic time and again on the campaign trail. The news media have deployed abundant resources to cover an electoral process like no other in recent American history. But how influential has this coverage been?
At 2:54 p.m. last Monday, Houston Chronicle investigative reporter Matt Dempsey received a tip: Voters in Southeast Houston were being told they couldn’t vote, even though they had identification that complied with Texas’s voter ID law.
The report came from Electionland, the collaborative reporting project, led by ProPublica and six other organizations that is covering voting access across the country. Electionland is publishing the reporting on its own website and sharing leads with other outlets to cover on their own platforms.
Rumours, hoaxes and misinformation have been flooding newsfeeds across every social media platform since the election cycle began. When America goes to the polls to choose their 45th president it will be no different.
But genuine reports of newsworthy events often first surface on social media as well. So how can you find them? How can you check whether they’re real? And how can you effectively tell others when you’ve found a fake? Here at First Draft, we’ve got you covered.
The aim was simple in its premise. “Track and cover voting problems during the 2016 election, across the country and in real-time.”
Claims of voting problems have frequently been raised in previous US elections. Often these claims are only highlighted once polling is over. This election cycle, Electionland sought to change that. By monitoring activity on social networks across all 50 states – in real-time – could journalists report the issues before the polls closed?
On Election Day, Quartz created a Slack team to help its readers — particularly those outside the U.S. — gather and talk about the results.
Within 24 hours of Quartz posting its call to sign up, 1,554 people requested an invitation. At the channel’s peak, 1,012 people were participating.
We’ve got pretty great Slack conversations going with Quartz readers around the world, in English and Spanish. https://t.co/zINyEKQQ5n
— Zach Seward (@zseward) November 8, 2016
Gawker-Killer Peter Thiel Gets Softballs From the National Press Club
Peter Thiel bankrolled the lawsuit that destroyed Gawker Media earlier this year, putting him in the vanguard of the wave of press intimidation that his chosen presidential candidate, Donald Trump, is also riding.
So Thiel’s appearance at the National Press Club on Monday was highly anticipated.
Facebook last week launched a series of online courses for journalists via its Blueprint global training program.
Manager of journalism partnerships Áine Kerr wrote in a blog post that the e-learning courses will focus on the “three core pillars” of the news cycle—discovering content, creating stories and building an audience—adding that best practices and guidelines from Facebook are meshed with case studies from journalists.
Discover more from Erkan's Field Diary
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.