This week, we talk to the Wall Street Journal’s Newsroom Innovation Chief Robin Kwong. He talks about how his team develops features to help the WSJ’s wider goals, how he helps facilitate innovation across teams in the business, and how his background in reporting and data journalism has helped his approach to this role. He also explains some of the features and tools they have developed for the publication, and how they explore this on their WSJ DXS Medium blog.
In the news roundup the team discusses coverage of Black Lives Matter at the Philadelphia Inquirer and New York Times at length, then rattle through some news in brief. Stay angry, everybody.
Main stories:
- Journalists at the Philadelphia Inquirer have taken a “sick and tired” day after the paper ran a ‘Buildings Matter, Too’ headline
- The New York Times has apologised to its staff after running an op-ed titled ‘Send in the Troops’ after initially defending the piece. Apparently, the article led to the most ever subscription cancellations in an hour.
News in brief:
- The BBC has announced that Tim Davie will replace Tony Hall as director-general. Davie is the current BBC Studios head, and will take over when Hall steps down next February
- Medium launches Newsletters as “a new way to build relationships and share stories with your Medium audience”
- Facebook starts labeling ‘state-controlled media’ pages, and also Zuckerberg defended its hands-off Trump policy to employees after walkouts and resignations last week
- Snap will stop promoting Trump’s account after concluding his tweets incited violence
- COVID-19 has driven more than a million new digital subscriptions for leading news providers in the US and UK, with the average publisher increasing digital subs numbers by at least 15% since the end of 2019
- Layoffs have hit sports site The Athletic, with 8% of staff losing jobs and others taking pay cuts
- A court has dismissed an appeal from several Australian media companies over a 2019 judgement that held them liable for defamatory comments posted by users on their Facebook pages in response to news articles
- The Guardian is rolling out global tests of a registration wall. Although it is an optional one for now and can be dismissed, it wouldn’t surprise us if this became compulsory – although Chief Product Officer Caspar Llewellyn Smith has assured readers the site will always be free
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