Newsonomics: Is Tronc due for a crash? And a few other questions about this busy week in the news business: The latest from Nieman Lab

[Nieman Lab: The Daily Digest] Friday, March 9, 2018 [Newsonomics: Is Tronc due for a crash? And a few other questions about this busy week in the news business]( Plus: Digital First’s owner gets sued for alleged bad behavior, The Athletic looks to get huge, and Advance newspapers start poking at paywalls. By Ken Doctor. [What do Xi Jinping and Winnie the Pooh have in common? They’re both flagged by Chinese censors]( They’re just a few of countless names, codewords, memes, and phrases that have been blocked. Weiboscope, a project out of the University of Hong Kong, since 2011 has tracked deleted posts on Weibo, collecting a substantial dataset of the types of terms and content that triggers censors. By Shan Wang. [Fear, surprise, disgust: Fake news spreads faster than some real news on Twitter]( Plus: A big overview of all the research that we have so far. By Laura Hazard Owen. What We’re Reading Poynter / Alexios Mantzarlis [We need to get better at covering studies about fake news →]( “We should be drawing many small lessons about misinformation from these new studies. Instead, we are hammering our audiences with an inaccurate generalization — that fakery is rampant and undefeatable.” NewsWhip / Gabriele Boland [NewsWhip’s February 2018 list of top reporters on Facebook includes 2 reporters from fake news sites →]( “Beyond the Onion, the top authors were primarily from hyper-partisan sources like the Daily Wire, Truth Examiner, Breitbart, Washington Press, and several small but politically-charged sites….Horrifyingly enough, two authors from fake news sites featured. An author from the fake news site Your Newswire was towards the top of our list, ranking in at #12. Baxter Dmitry wrote 81 articles in February, driving more than 1.7 million Facebook interactions altogether. Jay Greenberg featured at #38 for fake stories from the site Neon Nettle.” NBC News / Claire Atkinson [ESPN’s new president has a tough digital future ahead →]( The $4.99/month ESPN+ “must be successful, but not so successful that pay-TV customers drop their higher-priced video channel bundles and buy ESPN+ instead. ESPN risks angering its cable partners, who still provide the bulk of the company’s revenue, by moving too fast into the subscription streaming market.” Digiday / Lucia Moses [The New Yorker raised the price of its print–digital bundle to $120/year, and it’s working →]( “It was scary to think about charging three-figure sums. Then, we thought, people in their 20s are paying for Netflix when we were embarking on this increase. And The [New York] Times’ success is encouraging, as well as The Washington Post’s growth. The lesson of the past five years has been not to undervalue ourselves.” Columbia Journalism Review / Josephine Lukito and Chris Wells [Most major outlets have used Russian tweets as sources for partisan opinion →]( “In a new study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, we look at how often, and in what context, Twitter accounts from the Internet Research Agency — a St. Petersburg-based organization directed by individuals with close ties to Vladimir Putin, and subject to Mueller’s scrutiny — successfully made their way from social media into respected journalistic media.” Civil [Cannabis Wire is joining Civil →]( The publication is relaunching on the journalism-focused, Ethereum-based marketplace Civil. It will focus on the policy implications of cannabis legalization, as well as the social and economic complexities that come with legalization. It joins other new ventures launching there, such as Popula, Block Club Chicago, and Hmm Daily. The Verge / Dieter Bohn [Inside Google’s plan to make the whole web as fast as AMP →]( “What [Google is proposing]( is not to turn the entire web into AMP, but rather to take some of the ideas behind the clever hacks that made AMP work, clean them up, and then make them a universal standard that has nothing to do with Google. That way, nearly any webpage could be distributed as easily and loaded as quickly as ones that are supported by AMP.” Poynter / Daniel Funke [This site is trying to teach people about fake news by publishing it →]( “We were brainstorming and thinking about how to reach people who like and share fake news online,” said Maarten Schenk, who runs the Lead Stories debunking site in Belgium. “Fake news sites don’t have any trouble reaching them, because your crazy uncle on Facebook always comes up with new fake news sites that you’ve never heard of. So we thought, ‘What if we try to mimic their tactics and see if we can beat the enemy with their own weapons?’” Digiday / Max Willens [Reddit is trying to tighten its relationship with publishers →]( “Tools were launched in May 2016 to encourage publishers to source and credit Reddit users in their pieces. In February 2017 came an integration with CrowdTangle, which let publishers monitor how their content was being shared inside Reddit. In years past, publishers trying to share their content on Reddit could be warned or banned if they violated the platform’s rule that no more than 10 percent of the content that accounts shared be promotional. That rule was relaxed last spring. Last December, Reddit rolled out profile pages that let publishers post content directly to followers.” [Nieman Lab]( / [Fuego]( / [Encyclo]( [Twitter]( / [Facebook]( [View email in browser]( [Unsubscribe]( You are receiving this daily newsletter because you signed up for for it at www.niemanlab.org. 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