Every week we round up media & tech industry news you may have missed while you were busy sending your mayor into retirement.
“In many ways the eternal debate over what qualifies as journalism is a red herring. The reality is that aggregation and curation are part of the new media ecosystem, and they can add a lot of value whether we like them or not … in [these] cases, information is provided that increases our knowledge about an important topic. Isn’t that a pretty good definition of journalism, not whether someone made a phone call or has a specific degree, or whether they travelled to a war zone or not?” — Mathew Ingram, GigaOM
In that spirit, the information below is being provided to increase your knowledge about important (and some unimportant) topics.
- Ken Doctor on the newsonomics of Patch, Digital First, and hyperlocal’s next round.
- Here’s an ASNE chat on the hyperlocal news model.
- The Chicago Reader‘s Michael Miner on why the non-profit Chicago News Cooperative is closing.
- What non-profit news orgs can learn from Yelp.
- Gannett’s Paywall: Will It Work?
- The L.A. Times also wants in on the paywall fun. Plus, it’s “killing its standalone Food, Health and Home sections in print.”
- You can now resume leaving comments on the New Haven Independent website.
- Facebook will release a new premium ads product.
- 52 percent of local-mobile search clicks turned into calls.
- Time spent in mobile far outpaces ad spending. “By contrast, print gets 29% of ad dollars but only 6% of time spent.”
- Advertisers are spending way too much on print, too little on mobile.
- The ad-spending shift to digital “evaporates” 80 percent of the spend.
- Ryan Dohrn on getting out of the ad sales rut.
- Rawporter is a brilliant, but poorly-executed, idea.
- The future of advertising — and media — in one graph.
- And finally, an excerpt from “We, the Web Kids,” via The Atlantic‘s Alexis Madrigal, “about how the expectations of young people have been conditioned by their experiences of the internet”:
We have learned to accept that instead of one answer we find many different ones, and out of these we can abstract the most likely version, disregarding the ones which do not seem credible. We select, we filter, we remember, and we are ready to swap the learned information for a new, better one, when it comes along.