4 Newsrooms Trends, Mag Sales, Facebook’s Credibility Ratings and New CMO, Goop Magazine Dropping Condé Nast, Chartbeat’s AMP Study, TFP’s August Book Picks, TFP’s Infographic Pick

Welcome to Technology for Publishing’s roundup of news, stories of interest, and tips for media industry pros! It’s turning out to be a very busy week as we include posts on major newsroom trends, magazine sales, Facebook’s trustworthiness scale AND a new CMO, Goop magazine’s decision to drop Condé Nast and publish independently, Chartbeat’s new study of Google AMP results, and more.

  • Channel7SydneyNewsroomWith change a fact of life in today’s newsrooms, journalists are having to continually adapt. And as Adweek reports, that will be primarily on four fronts for the foreseeable future: new business models, new technology, new players, and new demands for greater efficiencies. Tech, particularly, will be key, the article says: “Journalists that barely managed the transition from print to digital are going to use technology in ways they never imagined pretty soon.”
  • Vanity Fair’s article by Joe Pompeo accentuates the shaky ground in the magazine industry as New York Magazine becomes the next to hang out a For Sale sign. His in-depth assessment sheds insider light on how dramatically the industry is shifting.
  • According to the Washington Post, Facebook is now rating users’ trustworthiness on a scale of zero to 1 in efforts to combat the spread of misinformation and identify “malicious actors.” It says the scale is just one tool among “thousands of new behavioral clues” Facebook will be using to determine users’ credibility. The platform also is watching those who have a record of flagging other users’ content as “problematic” and tracking publishers that users deem trustworthy. Also see Facebook’s news about their new CMO, Antonio Lucio, an industry veteran most recently from HP, with history at Pepsi and Visa as well.
  • Goop magazine has decided to leave the Condé Nast fold and publish independently for its third issue, a WWD post says, citing lack of data as the primary reason. “There was no transparency around where [Goop magazine] was being distributed and how it was selling and in various markets, in various pockets, from a distribution standpoint, we really need to know that,” says Elise Loehnen, Goop’s chief content officer. Other issues included the brand’s push into Canada and Europe—which would require more distribution insight than Condé Nast was providing—and two dispersed teams with “presumably different views on strategy,” the article says.
  • While Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) has overtaken Facebook’s Instant Articles as a driver of traffic to publishers’ sites, Digiday says a new Chartbeat study found that just a third of participating publishers are seeing a traffic boost from the program. “It’s really good for users in providing a consistent experience in terms of page-load time,” Chartbeat’s Chris Breaux says. “The real question is, do you see more traffic than you would have if you didn’t do the implementation? The answer for two-thirds of publishers is no.” The report says shortfalls include publishers’ inability to generate any significant revenue, promote a range of products, incorporate different editorial formats, and track audience data. It concludes, however, that success with AMP appears to be based on how well it’s implemented by publishers.

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Adweek photo: 4×6/iStock


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Posted by: Monica Sambataro

Monica Sambataro is a contributing editor and copyeditor for Technology for Publishing. Her publishing background includes work for leading technology- and business-related magazines and websites.