Your quarterly catchup: Here are the 15 most popular Nieman Lab stories of Q3 2015 | Nieman Journalism Lab

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Your quarterly catchup: Here are the 15 most popular Nieman Lab stories of Q3 2015

From podcasts to push notifications, Slack to The Skimm, and reader comments to rethinking brands.

By Joshua Benton @jbenton Oct. 1, 2015, 9:38 a.m.

It’s understandable if you spent the lazy days of late summer doing something other than refreshing Nieman Lab every 30 seconds. (Never a bad strategy, by the way.) Even our Southern Hemisphere friends probably had a good wintry excuse. But if you want to catch up on some of what you missed, here are the 15 stories we published from July to September that reached the biggest audiences.

(Of course, there’s much more than this: We published 191 articles and 652 What We’re Readings in that span. Explore the archives at your leisure.)

1. Serial meets The X-Files in Limetown, a fictional podcast drawing raves after just one episode (Laura Hazard Owen, August 28)

2. The New York Times built a Slack bot to help decide which stories to post to social media (Shan Wang, August 13)

3. How 7 news organizations are using Slack to work better and differently (Laura, July 30)

4. What happened after 7 news sites got rid of reader comments (Justin Ellis, September 16)

5. As giant platforms rise, local news is getting crushed (Joshua Benton, September 1)

6. Newsonomics: The halving of America’s daily newsrooms (Ken Doctor, July 28)

7. The New York Times liveblogged last night’s GOP debate directly from Slack (Shan, August 7)

8. Newsonomics: Do newspaper companies have a strategy beyond milking papers for profit? (Ken, July 9)

9. How The Skimm’s passionate readership helped its newsletter grow to 1.5 million subscribers (Justin, August 18)

10. The New York Times is publishing on WhatsApp for the first time, covering Pope Francis (Madeline Welsh, July 6)

11. “It’s like seeing your grandpa in a nightclub”: The New York Times’ challenge in building a digital brand (Josh, August 3)

12. There is a solution to the problem of your giant stack of unread New Yorker magazines (Laura, September 14)

13. Push it: A look behind the scenes of a New York Times mobile alert (Joseph Lichterman, August 10)

14. R.I.P. Dan Reimold, a top scholar of how college media is evolving (Josh, August 21)

15. Putting the public into public media membership (Melody Kramer, July 13)

Photo by andresfranco.net used under a Creative Commons license.

POSTED Oct. 1, 2015, 9:38 a.m.

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