Top News:
Jim Rutenberg / New York Times:
News Media Alliance, with members including NYT, WaPo, and News Corp, seeks antitrust exemption from Congress to negotiate collectively with Google and Facebook — Google and Facebook continue to gobble up the digital advertising market, siphoning away revenue that once paid for the quality journalism …
Discussion:
Axios, Recode, @lmoses, Fast Company, Talking New Media, @nxthompson, @rafat, @pt, @pt, @pt, @jason_kint, @mathewi and @rafat, more at Techmeme »
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Michael Kinsley / Slate:
Journalism's ethics police needlessly worry about expensive New York Times travel packages
Discussion:
Washington Post
Lucia Moses / Digiday:
Source: The NYT is undecided on whether to participate in Facebook's Instant Articles subscriptions, with the paper seeing no “great upside” to being involved — Facebook is moving ahead on plans to let people subscribe to publications through Instant Articles.
Adam K. Raymond / Vulture:
How spammers, ripoff artists, and even superstars juice their numbers on Spotify with covers, tricky song titles, silent tracks, and large albums — A few weeks after the release of Kendrick Lamar's “Humble,” the hard-charging lead single on his fourth album Damn., the song landed at No. 1 on Billboard's streaming chart.
Discussion:
BetaNews, The Guardian, @adamkraymond and The FADER, more at Techmeme »
Joshua Green / New York Magazine:
How Bannon became Trump's key henchman: arranging for Ann Coulter to pen a policy paper and weaponizing Breitbart against Megyn Kelly, before he joined campaign — Why does Trump double-down every time it seems like he should retreat? Because Steve Bannon is back in his boss's good graces.
Discussion:
@joshuagreen, The Daily Caller, @joshuagreen, @gabrielsherman, @tedhartii, @sopandeb, @lpdonovan, @cherijacobus, @davidfolkenflik and @lpdonovan
Chris O'Brien / VentureBeat:
USC study suggests there may be a black market of bots used to spread misinformation across Twitter during elections — As if Twitter's reputation hasn't been battered enough, a new study sheds light on how the social media platform can be hijacked by bots to spread political disinformation during election campaigns.
Discussion:
@manjusrii and @moorehn
Sarah Ellison / Vanity Fair:
Q&A with Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer, two of Politico Playbook's authors, on their forthcoming book, expansion of the Playbook franchise, more — Inside the transfer of power at Playbook, the most influential newsletter in politics. — It's been a year since Anna Palmer, Jake Sherman …
The Guardian:
The BBC is to propose cutting employee pay perks, including paid overtime and certain travel expenses, as it attempts to cut £80M from its news budget — Proposals include abolishing unpredictable hours allowance and cutting overtime as corporation prepares to reveal top salaries
Discussion:
@hirider750 and @sarahschijen
Ricardo Bilton / Nieman Lab:
Podcast database and discovery site Podchaser focuses on episodes rather than entire shows, with user-generated tagging and episode-level reviews — “One of our big advantages is we're trying to build this bottom-up, feature-wise, and talking to a hundred different podcasts and tons of listeners and asking exactly what they want."
April Glaser / Recode:
Google's Digital News Initiative awards $805K to Radar, a project building software to automate the writing of 30K local stories a month — Journalists, beware! — Google is awarding the Press Association, a large British news agency, $805,000 to build software to automate the writing of 30,000 local stories a month.
Discussion:
TechCrunch, @kylepope, The Hill, Mashable, Press Association and Sputnik International
Ken Doctor / Nieman Lab:
Interview with Mark Aldam, president of Hearst Newspaper Group, which now seeks acquisitions and is focusing on local news, marketing, and events — Because it's privately held, Hearst isn't as big a part of industry conversations around the future of newspapers as its publicly traded peers.
Hunter Walk:
Interview with The Verge's Casey Newton on managing friendships and sources in the industry he covers — My friendship with The Verge's Casey Newton started where 90% of his relationships do: on Twitter. Casey's coverage of tech is opinionated, but not cavalier, and even empathetic when appropriate.
Discussion:
@dannygroner, @caseynewton, @willstick, @hunterwalk and @btrpkc
Patrick Hipes / Deadline:
WGAW 2017 report: total number of writers and total salaries down YoY; TV writers earnings down 1.7% YoY to $860.9M, film writers earnings down 6.45% to $359.8M — The WGA West has unveiled its annual report, which shows the total number of member writers working in the industry fell compared with a year ago as did total salaries.
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