This week, Chris Stone, the Executive Producer of Video & Audio at the Evening Standard, talks to us about the role video plays in their journalism, why they decided to launch two podcasts late last year, and what they’re doing to capture the attention of the commuter audience. He also discusses his work leading a partnership with Google to create interactive audio news content for smart speakers.
In the news this week, the team looks at the death knell for the third party cookie, The Telegraph pulling out of an independent measurement scheme, and examines if WeChat is a roadmap for platforms’ future. The team can’t decide if we’re too cynical or not cynical enough.
News in brief:
- Fortune magazine is going behind a paywall next month, as well as having a major design of the magazine and website. Print issues will be cut back to 10 times a year, and will stop putting photos of business leaders on the covers. Instead, the covers will be ‘artistic concepts’
- The New York Times has just passed its $800 million goal for annual digital revenue…a year ahead of schedule. The publisher now has more than 5 million total subscriptions, including 3.4 million core news, 600,000 to the crossword and 900,000 in print
- WeChat is planning to put up paywalls for officially verified accounts on its platform to allow users to monetise their content. WeChat’s done some really cool stuff with enabling ‘tipping’ creators in the past so this is one to watch
- Facebook has backed off from efforts to sell ads in WhatsApp (which was what made the creators resign around 18 months ago), and has disbanded a team set up to find the best ways to integrate ads into the service
- Turkey has restored access to Wikipedia after 2 years. It blocked the site in 2017 when Wikipedia refused to remove unflattering references to Turkey’s relationship with Syrian militants and terrorists
- The Atlantic has launched a fiction section dedicated to ‘publishing original fiction regularly on the site, in addition to several times each year in the magazine’
- Dennis Publishing is launching its weekly news magazine for children – The Week Junior – in the US, in what is the first weekly news print magazine to launch in the US since parent publication The Week in 2001
- Guardian Media Group has appointed Annette Thomas, a neuroscientist and academic publisher, as its new chief executive. She’ll be focused on helping the publisher develop a ‘financially stable future’ after they finally broke even
