digital news

President Donald Trump will give his first State of the Union address Tuesday at 9 p.m. ET. Broadcast, cable and streaming networks will give it plenty of coverage.

Since Snapchat launched Shows in August of 2016, a growing number of young journalists have amassed a dedicated legion of followers on the platform. Snapchat users are probably acutely aware of an NBC anchor named Savannah — not the one who hosts the Today show, but Savannah Sellers, a co-host of Stay Tuned..

Facebook is changing its news feed preferences to show more posts from family and friends. “News is going to be kind of buried at the bottom,” says Larry Watzman, creative services and marketing director at WBNS, the Dispatch-owned CBS affiliate in Columbus, Ohio. “We need to do something.” What WBNS did was create a promo that walked Facebook users through the process of changing their setting.

The future of video at NBC News isn’t at 30 Rockefeller Plaza — it’s at a co-working space off Union Square. NBC Left Field, a 12-person experimental video unit, launched last July with a simple but strategically vital mandate: to experiment with new ways of reporting, producing, and delivering video news, with a special focus on the habits and preferences of younger news consumers. It’s one part digital video unit, one part emerging technology incubator.

The news release from Sinclair Broadcast Group’s Circa website speaks of “moving forward,” launching an app and securing news feeds from the company’s national news desk in D.C. What it doesn’t mention: Seven staffers at the company have lost their jobs, well-placed sources have told the Erik Wemple blog.

The national digital platform will roll out a video-driven, live news app next week in conjunction with its national news desk in Washington.

Two-thirds of the profits at Hearst Magazines are still coming from print. And unlike other magazine publishers, David Carey says he’s in no rush to change that. “We reject this notion of ‘digital first,’ because we think that denigrates the core business,” said Carey, the president of Hearst Magazines. “We think there’s a lot of money to be made in the print business.” And he questioned the durability of digital media companies that have historically been reliant on advertising.

After closing its second year of profits, the 140-year-old Washington Post is poised to expand its newsroom and business operations. Digital subscriptions have tripled since 2016, and the newspaper now has more than 1 million paid digital subscribers.

Disney-ABC Television Group has hired Martin Keely to be its top digital exec, serving as executive vice president, product and technology. Reporting to president of business operations Bruce Rosenblum, Keely will oversee all aspects of the TV group’s digital media strategy and products across non-linear and emerging platforms.

Virtual reality. Podcasts. Snapchat Discover. Notifications. Sam Dolnick, an assistant managing editor at The New York Times who oversees digital initiatives, discusses the digital future of storytelling.

Publishers have a lot to gripe about when it comes to Facebook, from the platform choking off their referral traffic, dominating digital advertising and giving them whiplash with its constantly changing video strategy. But what if it got even worse? In 2018, Facebook could take a step further and separate news from the news feed. It’s not a crazy idea.

Before the 2016 election, those most likely to read “fake news” online were older and conservative, a new study finds. But even they relied most often on mainstream media.

Publishers have been enthusiastic about voice assistants like Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant this year, often undaunted by the fact that these platforms require bespoke content, and the route to monetization is still unclear. After promising levels of its audience returned each week to use its Alexa skill, CNBC’s global ad sales team will start selling audio sponsorship packages to advertisers in the next few months.

 A media company built on subversion and outlandishness was unable to create “a safe and inclusive workplace” for women, two of its founders acknowledge.

CNN has ended its daily newscast designed for Snapchat users just four months after launching it. CNN and Los Angeles-based Snap Inc. said the program, called The Update, failed to generate enough advertising revenue to sustain itself.

The new agreements with cable operators means Newsy’s national news programming lineup is on track to be available in about 40 million U.S. homes by the end of 2018, according to owner E.W. Scripps.

He transformed The Times into an international media company, and built one of the most successful digital pay models in news. Succeeding him is his son, current deputy publisher, A.G. Sulzberger (right), a principal architect of the company’s digital transformation.

Micah Gelman, the paper’s director of video: “YouTube is a place that people come to watch video specifically. People are much more accepting of a pre-roll experience there….We can sell [YouTube] in a way that we cannot sell Facebook.” (Photo: Jack Pagano, Ariana Television Network)

One of the biggest challenges for news operations is stopping young consumers’ thumbs from moving from a new story to other distractions on mobile devices. Techniques that news organizations are testing to attract and retain millennials include fresh presentations, voice interfaces, automation, augmented reality and creating chat-like apps.

The needs of both digital and legacy news teams are progressively being aggregated into one system at many stations. But there still plenty of pain points to go around.

Mashable plans to downsize its video team as it moves away from developing and making shows for digital content buyers.

The addition of Calkins Digital’s over-the-top video technology lets TownNews.com partners deliver content directly to Apple TV, Roku, Amazon Fire TV and iOS and Android devices.

For some of the publishers chasin the broadest scale, maybe. A new study from the Reuters Institute examines the strengths and weaknesses of seven globally ambitious news companies — Brut, Business Insider, De Correspondent, HuffPost, Mashable, Quartz, and Vice.

Twelve years after founding Mashable as a humble tech blog, Pete Cashmore announced to his employees in a memo on Tuesday morning that he sold the company to trade publisher Ziff Davis. He confirmed that there will be layoffs as a result of the transaction. Recode reported that 50 employees will be laid off. The company is not commenting on that number.

Webcasters promise transparency, but not all views deserve equal time.