Mediagazer: Facebook gets accreditation from Media Rating Council for first of three audits it committed to, validating ad impressions on Facebook News Feed and Instagram (Sara Fischer/Axios)

6:50 PM ET, April 5, 2018

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Sara Fischer / Axios:

Facebook gets accreditation from Media Rating Council for first of three audits it committed to, validating ad impressions on Facebook News Feed and Instagram — The Media Ratings Council (MRC,) which has for decades acted as the de facto watchdog for the media and advertising industries …

Discussion: Adweek, Adweek, Ad Age, Media Rating Council and AdExchanger

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Kurt Wagner / Recode:

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Josh Constine / TechCrunch:

Cambridge Analytica denies Facebook's claim that it accessed data on 87M Facebook users, claims it “licensed data for no more than 30M people” — Cambridge Analytica is refuting a report by Facebook today that said Cambridge Analytica improperly attained data on up to 87 million users.

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Eleanor Dickinson / Mumbrella Asia:
Facebook statistics show data from 3.6M+ users in Asia, ~1M in UK, and 700K+ in Mexico may be among the 87M who had information analyzed by Cambridge Analytica

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Todd Spangler / Variety:

MoviePass parent company acquires Moviefone from Oath for $15M; Oath will continue selling Moviefone's digital ad inventory — MoviePass is saying “Hello — and welcome to Moviefone!" — Helios and Matheson Analytics, the majority owner of MoviePass, announced the acquisition of Moviefone from Verizon's Oath subsidiary.

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New York Times:

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Laura Hazard Owen / Nieman Lab:

Knight study of local TV news: revenues and viewership are rising, and in smaller markets, TV news websites are the dominant local news source — In many smaller markets, it's local TV stations' websites — not newspapers' sites! — that are the dominant digital local news source.

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Brian Steinberg / Variety:

NBCU debuts CFlight metric, which adds up exposure via broadcast, cable, and streaming and counts completed views of commercials, as audience metrics multiply — - Jason Chaffetz, Katie Pavlich, Brian Kilmeade and Pete Hegseth to Sub for Laura Ingraham on Fox News

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Charlotte Tobitt / Press Gazette:

Conde Nast has a median pay gap of 23.3% despite a female majority at every pay level; The Economist Group's 29.5% median pay gap is the highest in UK media — Conde Nast has the largest mean gender pay gap favouring men among all UK publishers and broadcasters, but, when the median is taken …

Discussion: Forbes, BuzzFeed, National Union of Journalists, @jamesrbuk, gender-pay-gap.service.gov.uk, Digiday and WIRED UK

Mike Ananny / Columbia Journalism Review:

Report on Facebook's fact-checking partnerships examines the struggles of tech companies teaming up with news orgs, details distrust and lack of transparency — Facebook and five US news and fact-checking organizations—ABC News, the Associated Press, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and Snopes …

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Laura Hazard Owen / Nieman Lab:

Interview with Renée Kaplan, FT head of audience engagement, on appealing to more female subscribers via a newsletter, encouraging potential op-eds, and more — Only 20 percent of the FT's subscribers were women. Renée Kaplan, the paper's head of audience engagement, is doing a lot of things to change that.

Sydney Ember / New York Times:

Sinclair CEO David Smith defends his company's “must-run” segments on media bias, likens them to the late-night shows other networks air on local affiliates — David D. Smith, the chairman of Sinclair Broadcast Group, says the media is getting his company all wrong.