What We’re Reading

We keep an eye out for the most interesting stories about Labby subjects: digital media, startups, the web, journalism, strategy, and more.

Digiday / Tim Peterson

How Bleacher Report is using Instagram Stories for app downloads →

“When people share a post from Bleacher Report’s app to Instagram Stories, a thumbnail of the post will appear in the story, including its title, main image, how long ago it was published, how many comments it has received and how many people have liked the post in the app. Atop the post will appear the caption ‘Open in Bleacher Report’ that people can tap on to install or open the app.”

What else we were reading on May 8

The Open Notebook / Kendra Pierre-Louis

Navigating newsrooms as a minority →

“I have experienced racism in the newsroom. This hasn’t surprised me. I have been black my whole life, so racism has been a fixture of my whole life. What has surprised me, as someone who transitioned to journalism from other work, is that I’ve encountered racism more frequently in journalism than I did in previous professions.”

BuzzFeed News / Craig Silverman and Jane Lytvynenko

Disinformation and harassment is disproportionately impacting Latino, Muslim, and Jewish communities to silence them →

“Researchers found that online messages and images on platforms such as Twitter that originate in the Latino, Muslim, and Jewish communities are co-opted by extremists to spread division and disinformation, often resulting in more social media engagement for the extremists. This causes members of social groups to pull away from online conversations and platforms, and to stop using them to engage and organize, further ceding ground to trolls and extremists.”

The Atlantic / Jonathan Rauch

How live, automated fact-checking worked during the State of the Union →

“I grew uneasy as the first minutes of Trump’s speech ticked by and no fact-checks appeared on the screen. Finally, about five minutes in, the first one popped up. It was laughably off-target, bearing no relationship to what the president was saying. Several more misses followed. But then came several that were in the ballpark. And then, after about half an hour: bull’s-eye.”

Poynter / Rick Edmonds

Curious what the CEOs of newspaper companies make? Here’s a list →

The New York Times’ Mark Thompson received $6.1 million; Tribune Publishing’s Justin Dearborn, who was let go at the end of 2018, only received his salary of $611,000 (after a $5.2 million payment in February 2016).

CJR / Lyz Lenz

The leadership of the NewsGuild — representing 20,000 journalists — is facing a combative election →

“Lunzer, who has refused to be on conference calls with Schleuss, told Labor Notes that the LA journalists are a ‘very demanding group.'”

TechCrunch / Anthony Ha

US digital advertising exceeded $100 billion in 2018 →

“Total domestic spending reached $107.5 billion, a 22% increase from 2017. Mobile advertising has become increasingly dominant, growing 40% year-over-year, to $69.9 billion. And video ad spending grew 37% to $16.3 billion.”

The Salt Lake Tribune / Tony Semerad

The legacy newspaper Salt Lake Tribune is seeking nonprofit status →

“News of the shift emerges less than a year after Huntsman laid off a third of The Tribune’s staff, citing an unexpectedly steep dip in ad revenues. Newsroom staffing now stands at about 60 employees, down from 148 in 2011. It also comes a little more than a year after The Tribune put up a paywall to charge readers for accessing its content online.”

The Wall Street Journal / Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg

Advance Publications is investing $10 billion to rely on more than media — into theater, esports, and more →

Advance, the owner of outlets including the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the Oregonian, and the Star-Ledger, also holds a substantial stake in Reddit. Now it’s diversifying further with acquisitions of “a group of European theaters, a maker of plagiarism-detection software, a majority stake in an esports analytics firm and a stake in a rocket operator specializing in low-Earth-orbit satellite launches.”