Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Editor’s note: Hot Pod is a newsletter on the podcasting industry written by Nick Quah; we happily share it with Nieman Lab readers each Tuesday. Welcome to Hot Pod, a newsletter about podcasts. This is issue 168, published July 10, 2018. Into the Woods. The rollout for Crooked Media’s first audio documentary, The Wilderness, began…
Change is coming to HBO, now that it is part of the AT&T corporate family. That much was clear to the 150 employees who attended a recent town hall meeting at the network’s headquarters in Midtown Manhattan. The main speaker was John Stankey, a longtime AT&T executive who now oversees HBO in his new role…
The Washington Post has developed its own internal technology for putting ads into podcasts. Rhapsocord is a dynamic ad insertion tool that can automatically identify pre-roll, midroll, and post-roll spots in a show, then add the spot and update the file. It also stores metadata about each podcast episode, which allows advertisers to target buys…
It’s pretty much an inviolable rule of journalism: Protect your sources. Reporters have gone to jail to keep that covenant. But Marcy Wheeler, who writes a well-regarded national security blog, not only revealed a source — she did so to the FBI, eventually becoming a witness in special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s investigation of…
Three years after former Mediacom CEO Jon Mandel gave a blistering speech alleging widespread media rebates in the U.S. — and the Association of National Advertisers launched a crusade to investigate and stop them — nothing much has changed, according to a report by McKinsey & Co. Sarah Armstrong. The McKinsey effort, which was scheduled…
Ad sellers are also ending the days of having separate programmatic sales teams. Though the evidence is mostly anecdotal, publishers like The New York Times, Dotdash, Meredith and BuzzFeed have taken steps to more fully integrate their programmatic products throughout their entire sales operation. When different buying teams don’t work together, discrepancies arise over planning…
The Times has sacked an award-winning reporter for publishing concert and travel reviews on its website in return for free tickets and travel without the knowledge of his bosses, BuzzFeed News has learned. According to five sources, Peter Yeung was sacked last month after a Times editor on the travel desk discovered that he’d been…
Inserting fresh ads into podcasts is challenging and time-consuming. An online article loads fresh ads every time a page loads. But in the podcasting world, readers download content and ads together, which means the two must be stitched together beforehand. Because of this challenge, many older podcasts run with no ads or stale ones, even…
The cable channel FX announced today that it is launching a weekly documentary series focusing on the inner workings of the New York Times. This is not to be confused with the new Showtime documentary series about the New York Times. Unfortunately for these desperate, gullible TV executives: media is fucking boring. Do you think…
Image: Screenshot Over the past few years, Jesse Singal has become a leading public intellectual and one of the most prominent journalists covering trans issues, including but not limited to adolescent transition. As this has happened, I, like many other trans people who read his work, have become deeply uncomfortable with the narratives he has…