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News, information and much more for independent online news publishers. 
A local news site steps back: Is Facebook to blame?

The Watershed Post, a celebrated local independent online news site in New York, beloved by an engaged local audience, announced last week that it was stepping back from day-to-day local news coverage.

In a note to readers, Publisher Lissa Harris explained the challenge of supporting a local news site with advertising when platforms such as Facebook and Google dominate the promotional budgets of local businesses.

"I see more and more small businesses taking money they would once have spent with local news outlets, and spending it on digital ads — not on local websites, but on promoted Facebook posts and Google keyword advertising," Harris wrote. "As a business person, I can’t argue with that. It works. The titans of the web have huge and increasing reach, even in our rural communities. They have sophisticated tools for targeting likely customers by geography and demographics. They have products that a business owner can buy for $5 with a few clicks of a mouse, products that require no human time investment on the other end for design or sales or customer support."

"What they don’t have is reporters," she continued. "Facebook is a powerful marketing tool. It’s a powerful community information tool — something we saw first-hand during the Irene floods in 2011, when social media played a vital role in keeping people informed in a crisis. But Facebook is not going to cover a government meeting, or dig into data buried in paper records, or call an official to check up on a fishy-sounding rumor, or ask pesky questions about matters of controversy. For that, you need reporters — and they need to be independent, they need to be paid."


Related: The Farmington Voice in Michigan shuts down after two and a half years.


Local doesn't scale: A case for local independent online news

Dylan Smith, chairman of the LION Publishers board of directors and publisher of the Tucson Sentinel in Arizona, talks about the way forward as legacy newspaper companies continue to cut back on local journalism in this talk at the Newsgeist conference in December. Local does not scale, he said, which is why the answer for local journalism is going to have to come from a grassroots resurgence of independent news publishers.


News About Local Independent Online News Sites

DC REPORT: With DC Report, David Cay Johnston wants to give readers a way to act on the stories they read.

NICHE SITES: Readers seem willing to pay for news sites centered around a place. What about sites built on an issue?

PRO PUBLICA: Pro Publica launches health care API with data from major investigations.

SPIRITED MEDIA: Denverite and Billy Penn get acquainted after Spirited Media merger.

VOICE OF SAN DIEGO: Voice of San Diego’s “What We Stand For” is straightforward — and a bold stance against “objectivity.”


Tools and Tips: Advertising and Revenue

AD BLOCKING: Business Insider fights ad blocking in the UK with whitelists, micropayments and subscriptions.

AD FRAUD: How the fragmented ad ecosystem is enabling fraud. Ad fraud could be more than twice as big as first thought — advertisers stand to lose $16.4 billion in 2017. ‘Everybody’s making money on invalid traffic’: Confessions of a media auditor.

AD SPENDING: U.S. digital advertising will make $83 billion this year. Facebook and Google are still dominating. Fewer but bigger ad deals challenge smaller publishers.

CROWDFUNDING: Citizen journalism network Bellingcat launches Kickstarter campaign to expand open source investigation platform.

EMAIL NEWSLETTERS: Email newsletter raised $300,000 from its (affluent, largely Silicon Valley–based) readers in 55 hours.

INSTANT ARTICLES: Facebook’s Instant Articles now lets sites show more ads.

MOBILE: How publishers are improving the mobile reading experience. Standing out on mobile starts with CMS tweaks. Google’s AMP pages speed mobile, but publisher control remains a big issue.

NATIVE ADVERTISING: Why publishers and advertisers need to get native advertising right. How commerce content sits uneasily alongside newsrooms. Instagram testing out partner tags to improve influencer marketing transparency. The 2017 native advertising technology landscape.

NICHE: Remember, niche audiences add big value for advertisers.

NONPROFIT FUNDING: Four questions nonprofit newsrooms and funders have about their evolving relationships.

PROGRAMMATIC: The Guardian’s sales chief: The digital ad system rewards fake news. Guardian pulls ads from Google after they were placed next to extremist material.

PROTOTYPE FUND: The Knight Foundation has announced a revamped Prototype Fund focused on misinformation and trust in media.

SUBSCRIPTIONS: The fatal flaw in subscription models - A response. Discors wants people to pay for news via a low-priced subscription that crosses multiple publishers.


Tools and Tips: Journalism and Technology

BREAKING NEWS: Globe and Mail Public Editor: Why being right beats being first.

BURNOUT: Tips for avoiding local news burnout.

DATA: Connecting open data to residents’ lives. Five rules that make a “simple” Big Data request complicated.

DESIGN: Can service design become media’s secret weapon?

ENGAGEMENT: Are you an engaged journalist? How do you measure a relationship in journalism? Radical ethics in a time of Trump: How to practice democratically engaged journalism. What influences people's decisions about trusting and engaging with news? In defense of bias in news. Dealing a deck to explore media impact and engagement. Show your work: Helping reporters be more transparent, earn trust and build audience with Open Notebook.

FACEBOOK: How one viral publisher uses Facebook groups to grow big numbers. Facebook offers local media tips for covering the weather ... on Facebook. Why The Boston Globe embraced Facebook for notifications. Facebook to release advanced measurement tool.

FOIA: Let the sunshine in: Usable data, open government, and more Freedom of Information successes. Who uses FOIA? – An analysis of 229,000 requests to 85 government agencies. Obtaining government records has become more difficult in the last four years at both the state and national level. When governments sue public-records requesters. Why Freedom of Information faces problems, and how experts say those can be solved. Report: Access to government information will probably worsen in the Trump administration. Local Washington paper balks at bill for interview with city attorney.

HEALTH CARE: Reporters are caught between Obamacare and Trumpcare. How should they proceed?

METRICS: Should publishers be more focused on conversions? Why we click on news stories.

PLATFORMS: April 6-8 conference at Reynolds Journalism Institute: Google, Facebook: New tools to enhance storytelling, reach and engage local audiences.

PODCASTING: The future of podcasting is strong, but the present needs to catch up. How three services for recording remote audio interviews stack up.

RELIGION: Four ways to dig deeper in stories of faith and religion.

SEO: How an obscure news site began dominating your Google search results. (In part: Speed, journalistic principles.)

STORY COMMENTS: 55% of Americans have left an online comment and 77.9% have read the comments at some point. Coral Project study seeks people who are under-represented in news, aren't part of conversations about it.

VIDEO: No budget for big video cameras? Just use your phone (and this app). We're watching more video, just not on TV. How publishers can measure Facebook Live videos. Not sure what to publish on Facebook Live? Just push the red button! Twitter goes after Facebook and YouTube with streaming video move.

VIRTUAL REALITY: Facebook debuts its first dedicated virtual reality app, Facebook 360.

WORDPRESS: WordPress.com now lets you import your Medium blog.

WRITING: Learn the art of "x-ray reading" to better your own writing.


Industry News

ABUSE: Google launches new effort to flag upsetting or offensive content in search.

CANADA: Postmedia cuts non-unionized staff benefits. And it's laying off 54 employees at the Vancouver Sun and Province.

COLLABORATION: National newsrooms say size, bureaucracy and ‘do-it-ourselves’ mentality are biggest obstacles to collaboration.

FACT CHECKING: Seven newsrooms have closed their Politifact chapters since the presidential campaign.

FAKE NEWS: Three steps news organizations can take to fight misinformation. To fight fake news, journalists must build news literacy efforts into their work. Scammers have become a scapegoat for the ailing press. What we really need is a deeper fix. 100 ideas from around the world on how news organizations can get involved in news literacy initiatives for kids. “It had gotten so big I thought I better pull the plug”: Updates from the fake-news world. Fake news site gains more than 1 million views in less than 2 weeks. How a liberal troll became spammers’ favorite fake news source. Now even high school journalists are getting smeared with ‘fake news’ claim.

FILTER BUBBLE: A news app aims to burst filter bubbles by nudging readers toward a more “balanced” media diet.

NEW YORK TIMES: Over 15,000 contributions — including anonymous $1M — have helped New York Times sponsor 1.3 million student subscriptions.

NEWS READER: How Papyral combines a news reader and social media platform.

OGDEN: Randall Family LLC to sell The Frederick News-Post to Ogden Newspapers.

OPINION PAGES: Are daily opinion pages headed to the morgue?

OWNERSHIP: FCC Chairman Ajit Pai interview: Media ownership rules ‘quite antiquated.’

PLATFORMS: Facebook and Google need to be regulated, says British news industry.

PRESS FREEDOM: Good news for the First Amendment: High school students recognize its value more than 10 years ago.

PRINT: After punishing layoffs, New Jersey journalists start up their own local newspaper. Two Gannett papers in Louisiana, one in Mississippi, cut print editions down to three days.

PUBLIC BROADCASTING: Facing loss of state funding, West Virginia Public Broadcasting plans for layoffs. This is what could happen if Donald Trump’s plan to eliminate funding for public broadcasting is enacted.

STUDENT JOURNALISM: Arizona House committee passes bill protecting student journalists. Student journalists deserve more protection.

TRUMP: A major new study shows that political polarization is mainly a right-wing phenomenon. The Huffington Post’s new editor wants to reach Trump voters. Jay Rosen on the hazards of journalism-as-usual under the Trump administration. Multiple polls find most Americans still trust the media more than Trump. Voters skeptical of anonymous sourcing, but still trust political reporting. There really was a liberal media bubble. Journalism’s biggest challenge: Objectivity really is subjective. The New York Times and The Washington Post are at war, and everyone’s winning.

TWITTER: A Twitter tool was hacked, which means now is a good time to double-check your Twitter permissions. Study reveals whopping 48 million Twitter accounts are actually bots.


Is Your LION Publishers Membership Up for Renewal?
 
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Plus, being a member gives you access to a members-only rate to the LION Summit – a savings of up to $175 compared to the non-member rate. If your membership is due for renewal, please go to http://www.lionpublishers.com/members/dues/renew to submit your payment. Those who opt for multi-year membership save, and easy, secure payment options are available via credit card or through Paypal. (Not sure when your membership expires? You can look it up easily on LIONPublishers.com.)
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