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Inside CNET’s AI-powered SEO money machine - The Verge

Red Ventures’ business model is straightforward and explicit: it publishes content designed to rank highly in Google search for “high-intent” queries and then monetizes that traffic with lucrative affiliate links. Specifically, Red Ventures has found a major niche in credit cards and other finance products. In addition to CNET, Red Ventures owns The Points Guy, Bankrate, and CreditCards.com, all of which monetize through credit card affiliate fees. The CNET AI stories at the center of the controversy are straightforward examples of this strategy: “Can You Buy a Gift Card With a Credit Card?” and “What Is Zelle and How Does It Work?” are obviously designed to rank highly in searches for those topics.

How the Horrific 1918 Flu Spread Across America | History | Smithsonian Magazine

For an example of the press’s failure, consider Arkansas. Over a four-day period in October, the hospital at Camp Pike admitted 8,000 soldiers. Francis Blake, a member of the Army’s special pneumonia unit, described the scene: “Every corridor and there are miles of them with double rows of cots ...with influenza patients...There is only death and destruction.” Yet seven miles away in Little Rock, a headline in the Gazette pretended yawns: “Spanish influenza is plain la grippe—same old fever and chills.” People knew this was not the same old thing, though. They knew because the numbers were staggering—in San Antonio, 53 percent of the population got sick with influenza. They knew because victims could die within hours of the first symptoms—horrific symptoms, not just aches and cyanosis but also a foamy blood coughed up from the lungs, and bleeding from the nose, ears and even eyes. And people knew because towns and cities ran out of coffins. People could believe nothing they were being told, so they feared everything, particularly the unknown. How long would it last? How many would it kill? Who would it kill? With the truth buried, morale collapsed. Society itself began to disintegrate.

Britain secretly funded Reuters in 1960s and 1970s - documents - Reuters

The secret government financing of Reuters - as set out in the documents - amounted to 245,000 pounds ($317,838 at current exchange rates) per year before 1969 but then reduced to 100,000 pounds per year in 1969-1970 and nothing in 1972-1973. “The new relationship established with Reuters in the Middle East and Latin America can lead to valuable goodwill and cooperation with the Agency on a global scale,” John Peck, former head of the IRD, said in the documents.

An effective TV interview | Adam LeBor | The Critic Magazine

There are four key points to ensure a successful interview. The first is preparation: know your interviewee, their history, strengths, weaknesses and motivation. The second is mental agility: anticipate different potential answers to key questions and have multiple responses prepared, adjusting each reply according to new information gleaned and be tenacious. Rule three is keep the questions simple: don’t overload them. The fourth, more often neglected, is good manners. Don’t be obsequious, but remember that rudeness does not make good television.

The Art of Dying | The New Yorker

I acquired the most useful writing discipline of my life from fat, cigar-chewing Jersey Journal copy editors—burned-out reporters—at desks in a half circle facing the city editor. With No. 1 pencils, like black crayons, they’d eviscerate my copy. I’d rewrite, and they’d do it again. Finally, they sent it down to the Linotype—the old racketing, reeking contraption for setting type from molten lead. Those men still sit by as I write, pencils in their itching paws.

The Media Must Learn From the Covington Catholic Story - The Atlantic

How could the elite media—The New York Times, let’s say—have protected themselves from this event, which has served to reinforce millions of Americans’ belief that traditional journalistic outlets are purveyors of “fake news”? They might have hewed to a concept that once went by the quaint term “journalistic ethics.” Among other things, journalistic ethics held that if you didn’t have the reporting to support a story, and if that story had the potential to hurt its subjects, and if those subjects were private citizens, and if they were moreover minors, you didn’t run the story. You kept reporting it; you let yourself get scooped; and you accepted that speed is not the highest value. Otherwise, you were the trash press.

Why people talk with journalists

Lately I’ve been reflecting on how it’s a curious privilege being a journalist: part-investigator, part father-confessor, part channel to the wider world, never more than in a conflict or war zone, where everything is accelerated, more vivid, the colors painted bright by danger. Most people would not talk to a  random stranger asking all sorts of questions, sometimes quite personal, even intimate. Yet they talked to me because they wanted their stories to be told. And that is one of the oldest human instincts, something deep and primeval: that the world must know what is happening to us.

Civil, the blockchain-based journalism marketplace, is building its first batch of publications » Nieman Journalism Lab

Built on top of blockchain (the same technology that underpins bitcoin), Civil promises to use the technology to build decentralized marketplaces for readers and journalists to work together to fund coverage of topics that interest them, or for those in the public interest. Readers will support reporters using “CVL” tokens, Civil’s cryptocurrency, giving them a speculative stake in the currency that will — hopefully — increase in value as more people buy in over time. This, Civil, hopes will encourage more people to invest in the marketplaces, creating a self-sustaining system that will help fund more reporting.

Fire Writers, Make Videos Latest Web Recipe for Publishers | Digital - AdAge

Mic, a website aimed at millennials, used to employ 40 writers and editors producing articles on topics like "celebrating beauty" and "strong women." Ten were let go this month, with most in the revamped newsroom of 63 now focused on making videos for places like Facebook. Critics have called such moves "100 percent cynical" and out of sync with audience demand. Yet Americans are watching more video snippets online, either because they secretly like them or because they're getting harder to avoid. The growing audience for video, more valuable to advertisers than the space next to words, is causing websites to shift resources in what's become known across the industry as the pivot to video.

Gawker and the Rage of the Creative Underclass

“New York is a city for the rich by the rich, and all of us work at the mercy of rich people and their projects,” says Choire Sicha, Gawker’s top editor (he currently employs a staff of five full-time writers). “If you work at any publication in this town, you work for a millionaire or billionaire. In some ways, that’s functional, and it works as a feudal society. But what’s happened now, related to that, is that culture has dried up and blown away: The Weimar-resurgence baloney is hideous; the rock-band scene is completely unexciting; the young artists have a little more juice, but they’re just bleak intellectual kids; and I am really dissatisfied with young fiction writers.” Sicha, a handsome ex-gallerist who spends his downtime gardening on Fire Island, is generally warm and even-tempered, but on this last point, he looks truly disgusted. “Not a week goes by I don’t want to quit this job,” he says, “because staring at New York this way makes me sick.”

Gawker Founder Suspects a Common Financer Behind Lawsuits - The New York Times

Several legal experts said that it was particularly unusual for a plaintiff using a lawyer being paid on a contingency basis not only to turn down settlement offers (several sizable settlements were proffered by Gawker) but also to pursue a strategy that prevented an insurance company from being able to contribute to a settlement. “It’s a very unusual thing to do, because the insurance company would have deeper pockets than Gawker,” said Larry Geneen, a risk management consultant who has long dealt with lawsuits involving insurance companies. “I’ve never had a situation where the plaintiff intentionally took out the claim involving the insurance company.” And given that Mr. Hogan has had financial ups and downs, the cost of the hundreds of motions his lawyers made is significant, and the chances the award is significantly reduced based on previous cases he lost making the same claims in federal court, it’s hard to completely understand the motivations at play. Additionally, Mr. Harder has brought two new cases against Gawker that seem puzzling. One is a defamation case on behalf of Shiva Ayyadurai, who claimed to have invented email. Gawker had written an article challenging his argument, similar to an article from The Washington Post and others on the same topic.

New York Times closes editing and press operations in Paris, cuts up to 70 jobs

the proposal we announced today would result in the closing of the editing and pre-press print production operation in Paris, with those responsibilities moving to Hong Kong and New York. France remains a vital market for us and we will maintain a robust news bureau in Paris as well as a core international advertising office there.

The Problem With Journalism Is You Need an Audience

In fact, this imaginary Universal Law of Writing—“Make something great and the readers will come”—is false. It has always been false, though that does not prevent it from being harbored deep in the heart of every ambitious writer and prestige-starved press baron. The history of journalism is littered with the corpses of good publications. The “new media” world is no different. The “long tail” and “audience segmentation” and every other buzzword term does not change the nature of the business. The audience for quality prestige content is small. Even smaller than the actual output of quality prestige content, which itself is smaller than most media outlets like to imagine.

The media doesn't see its own pampered blindness.

Despite claiming to “know” Mr. Jobs after “scores of hours in private conversations,” Mr. Mossberg of ReCode said in his column: “I know very little about his relationship with his daughter Lisa.”

Requested anonymity 'to avoid betraying' or 'because betraying' ?

Two people interviewed, who are in direct communication with the elder Mr. Bush but requested anonymity to avoid betraying a confidence, said Mr. Trump had revived painful memories among the Bushes of another blunt populist: H. Ross Perot.

What The New York Times Didn’t Tell You — Amazon strikes back

While we were talking, I also realized that you were envisioning a story that is basically a stack of negative anecdotes from ex-Amazonians. But if we were using that story form, we’d just come to you for responses and be done.

Building a Small Sailboat

And for a decade and a half TPM has been both my work, my hobby, my living, in a word, my everything. As work, it is all words and symbols. I love it. In some ways I am it. But there’s nothing physical or tactile or concrete about it. Woodworking was filling some void in me that I hadn’t known existed.

Tommy Craggs and Max Read Are Resigning from Gawker

represented an indefensible breach of the notoriously strong firewall between Gawker’s business interests and the independence of its editorial staff.

Gawker's editor celebrates The Writers

The essence of Gawker has always been what happens when we get out of those meetings and go back to writing and editing the stories you do that no one else can do. You writers are this company. You are funny. You are smart. You are vital. You are honest and righteous and pissed-off and stupid, so galactically stupid, and you commit hilarious blunders and you perform great, honking prodigies of journalism that make me proud to have sat in a room with you. Often you do all these things in the same day. You are this company. Nick forgot that, and I hope he one day remembers it. You are, you will always be, the best argument for a company that no longer deserves you.

Wishing (again) that Carr2n was around to write about this one

Today’s unprecedented breach of the firewall, in which business executives deleted an editorial post over the objections of the entire executive editorial staff, demonstrated exactly why we seek greater protection.

Good tips for a reporter... or an entreprenuer, from WaPo's Dan Zak

Always put your name and contact information on the cover of your notebooks. Stay a little longer. Even just a minute. If you can go, go. Always go. Life doesn't usually conform to narrative, or, at least, a single narrative. Rigorous reporting can reveal arcs and themes and twists and denouements and literary-like symbolism, but in the end life is mostly open-ended, unsatisfying and incomplete. Honor that incompleteness. Respect it. "It's the reporting, stupid." (Someone said this, I don't know who, but Ann Gerhart had it on a Post-It note on her computer at one point.) Don't lose your way. Start to cheat a little, and soon you'll be cheating a lot. Every story, no matter how small, is somehow about the meaning of life (this is the Weingarten Corollary). Say "I don't understand this; help me understand this" early and often. Close interviews with "Who else should I talk to?" and/or "What else should I know?" and/or "Is there a question you wish I'd asked that you've been waiting to answer?" Answer every reader e-mail; return their calls, especially.

When Seymour Hersh first pitched Bin Laden story to David Remnick

I tell him about the story, and his initial approach was to say do a blog item. Go fuck yourself! A blog? I have done a couple blogs when it is 1,000 words but this is worth more.

My Year Ripping Off the Web With the Daily Mail Online

As part of my initial training session, I was told that any link or attribution in an aggregated piece should be placed no higher than the first set of images in the post—which were typically three or four paragraphs in, where a reader might overlook the fact that the information provided in the preceding paragraphs had no attribution. If the original report was an article in the New York Daily News, a direct competitor of the Mail's, I was sometimes instructed to not give attribution at all. (The Mail, contacted for comment, maintains that its standards for attribution are high: "We often link above the first three photos and we link to the NYDN on a daily basis," it says. "We always strive to attribute." After this article was first published, a spokesperson followed up: "We always strive to make the story better, whether through a new angle, new photographs, or additional information and quotes.")

Journalists have to decide what to do about candidates who are climate change denialists » Pressthink

Claims that climate science is a hoax, or that human action is not a factor are not just positions in a political debate. They are ways of saying: hey, the evidence doesn’t matter. # Honest journalists have to look that statement in the face and decide what to do about it.

Time Editors Are "Happier" Without Wall Between Church and State

“They are more excited about it because no longer are we asking ourselves the question are we violating church and state, whatever that was. We are now asking ourselves the question are we violating our trust with our consumers?  We’re never going to do that,” Mr. Ripp said in a video interview with Bloomberg’s Stephanie Ruhle. The interview comes less than two weeks after Time Inc. separated from Time Warner and became its own publicly traded company. Instead of worrying about upholding the divide between church and state, Time editors can worry about maintaining consumer’s trust in Time brands while simultaneously using it to work with advertisers. “They’re not stupid. They are running a business. They know that. They’ve been firing hundreds of people over the last couple of years, following a different path,” Mr. Ripp said, of his editors.

Journalists give, Twitter takes

In the last month, I've created nearly 2 million impressions for Twitter. Whether that is good for my Twitter persona and my pride is a qualitative question whose answer resides outside the bounds of an analytics dashboard. But it is quantitatively not a good deal for The Atlantic. Something I already suspected has now been made crystal clear: 99 percent of my work on Twitter belongs to Twitter.