This is the weekend edition of TheMarioBlog and will be updated as needed. The next blog post is Monday, April 8.
Apple News+ and The Wall Street Journal
For The Wall Street Journal: What was the appeal of Apple News Plus, and how big is the concern of diluting the brand?
Highlight:
The opportunity brings us to a broader and qualified audience, those are good filters for someone who is selling advertising against it, so it’s an expansion of inventory and ad capability. We’ve always had different products for tranches of members. It increases the size of the funnel of people coming into the brand where we can upsell them to other areas of membership or C-suite council.
The FT and reporters on stage
The Financial Times to ‘experiment’ with taking its newsroom to the big stage
Highlight:
“It’s a real experiment for us, with some pretty clear objectives in mind. The idea is to try to broaden the audience’s perception of what Financial Times journalism and journalists are about, to get existing readers and people new to the FT to engage with our stories and our people in a way that we hope they will remember – because it will have engaged with them more emotionally, or humorously, or directly, or just differently.”
Disappointment with Apple News Plus
Apple News Plus is a fine way to read magazines, but a disappointment to anyone wishing for a real boost for the news business
Highight:
Apple News Plus is based on Texture, the Hulu-for-magazines app that Apple bought last year. And “based on” is probably an understatement; it’s pretty much Texture squeezed into the Apple News interface. Texture isn’t bad! I’m a happy paying user, and it does some things well. But Texture’s origin story also limits what this important new product can accomplish.
Two community newspapers compare audience metrics
What chasing clicks means for news: A tale of two dailies
Highlight:
A case study comparing two community newspapers finds that the paper more focused on audience metrics published fewer stories about civic issues, used fewer sources and let reader traffic guide news judgment to a greater degree than the paper that viewed analytics as a secondary consideration.
A mobile first WSJ
I paid a visit to the newsroom of The Wall Street Journal this week as part of the research for my book, The Story. It was an opportunity to meet with Che Douglas, creative design director, as well as members of his team of visual storytellers. They loved to hear stories of when we first put color on the pages of the venerable WSJ.
Today the newsroom of the WSJ moves in the direction of a mobile first strategy. And just to remind everyone of that is this gigantic iPhone screen that hangs from the ceiling allowing everyone to see as the news moves on the WSJ app.
Pre-order The Story
The newspaper remains the most powerful source of storytelling on the planet. But technology threatens its very existence. To survive, the Editor must transform, adapt, and manage the newsroom in a new way. Find out how, pre-orderThe Story by Mario Garcia, chief strategist for the redesign of over 700 newspapers around the world.
Order here:
https://thaneandprose.com/shop-the-bookstore?olsPage=products%2Fthe-story
An interview of interest
http://www.itertranslations.com/blog/2019/3/11/fd60ybflpvlqrgrpdp5ida5rq0c3sp
TheMarioBlog post #3024