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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 …
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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
Journalism's ethics police needlessly worry about expensive New York Times travel packages
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Washington Post

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.

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 »

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

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

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 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

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."

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

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.

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

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.