We know you’re busy. You’ve got your head down trying to work on new offerings to seduce new readerships to your media and convince existing customers that you represent value worth paying for. So you haven’t always got time to look around at what’s happening in your own industry. Which is why we do it for you. Here’s the latest.
1. Management by metrics
Long hailed as the solution to modern journalism, a new study looks at the possibility that an overdependence on metrics is killing journalism, one click at a time. The Jacobin explains.
2. News and NFTs
Sacré Blockchain. How this French newspaper is experimenting with Non Fungible Tokens for collectible supplements. Which makes Digiday’s explanation of blockchain for publishers all the more timely (subscription required).
3. Think small; how small town newspapers are coping
It’s a tough time to be a small town newspaper. That’s hardly news. So why are these investors putting their money into small local papers? From the Columbia Journalism Review.
4. Digital ‘Diamonds’
It helps to have 20 percent of a population subscribe to a paper, but keeping subscribers happy in Finland takes finding is done through seeding the content with ‘diamonds in the rough’.
5. Google teams with Unesco for digital journalism in Africa
Google appalls and delights in equal measures but its Global Initiative for Excellence in Journalism Education is good news for the future of digital journalism in Africa.
6. Saving Journalism from GAFA
Just in case you think we’ve gone soft on the risks of Google, here’s a timely reminder of why, and how, we need to be cautious when it comes to the tech giants. If that sounds like a vain hope then here’s a happy note to end on; Facebook forced to pay newspapers in France.