By Matt Carroll <@MattCData>

June 30, 2018: Cool stuff about journalism, once a week. Get notified via email? Subscribe: 3toread (at) gmail. Originally published on 3toread.co

1. Solutions journalism at its best: News outlets join forces to track down children separated from their parents: There’s a lot of talk about solutions journalism. This is a great example. A bunch of very different news sites — BuzzFeed, ProPub, The Intercept, Univision, and others — are joining together to get information about children separated from their parents by the US. They are doing this by asking for tips from readers. It’s a great idea. Let’s hope we see more of this outside the box thinking.

NPR’s guide to building immersive storytelling projects: Storytelling is getting more complicated — more newsroom players, more tools, greater impact. Yet the process for building the stories is different at every news organization, and sometimes from story to story, as people struggle to create new storytelling systems. NPR is working to create a replicable system for storytelling. Here’s how they do it. Good stuff by Wesley Lindamood of NPR’s Digital Content Team.

3. Life after tronc: Norman Pearlstine’s plans for the LA Times: Pearlstine has cred. And the 75-year-old veteran of Time and the WSJ, among other newsrooms, will need every crumb of it as he takes over a newsroom that was shaken to the roots by the awful management of tronc (which gets my vote for dumbest news name ever). Pearlstine comes across as the right guy for the next few years, careful about what he is promising but stressing quality journalism. Hopefully he, and the LA Times, do well. An interesting interview by Shaya Tayefe Mohajer for CJR.

• Get notified via email: Sign up by sending a note: 3toread (at) gmail.com
• Check out the web site.

Matt Carroll, a former member of the Boston Globe Spotlight team, teaches journalism at Northeastern University. Twitter: @MattCData. Instagram: mattcarroll54.

By Matt Carroll <@MattCData>

June 23, 2018: Cool stuff about journalism, once a week. Get notified via email? Subscribe: 3toread (at) gmail. Originally published on 3toread.co

1. How Twitter made the tech world’s most unlikely comeback: Twitter is one of journalists’ favorite tools. Which meant I was a sad puppy a couple of years back the company when the RIPs started, as it shed users and was overrun with a troll infestation. But a funny thing happened. The company made an amazing comeback. This is Twitter’s success story. By Alex Kantrowitz of BuzzFeed.

2. ‘Charles Krauthammer inspired journalists with disabilities, including me’: Charles Krauthammer, the great columnist for the WaPo and commentator for Fox, died this past week. What some people may not know is that he was paralyzed from the waist down, as the result of a diving accident. His disability did nothing to slow him down. As a matter of fact, he helped inspire a number of other journalists with disabilities. A touching read by Cal Borchers of the WaPo.

3. When the paywall decides when to ask you to pay: Most paywalls are simple — read five or 10 articles, then a readers get asked to buy a subscription. Maybe they will, maybe they won’t, but it’s a blunt approach. Swiss news publisher NZZ is building a much subtler system and claiming excellent results. They use machine learning that takes in more than a hundred points of information, from how much time is spent on articles to device and time of day. The algorithm calculates the best point to ask an individual to subscribe. I can see a lot of places following this approach. Lucinda Southern for DigiDay.

• Get notified via email: Sign up by sending a note: 3toread (at) gmail.com
• Check out the web site.

Matt Carroll teaches journalism at Northeastern University. Twitter: @MattCData. Instagram: mattcarroll54.

By Matt Carroll <@MattCData>

June 8, 2018: Cool stuff about journalism, once a week. Get notified via email? Subscribe: 3toread (at) gmail. Originally published on 3toread.co

1. What to do when the corporation is flat-out lying about its product: An over-hyped product. Nasty corporate villains. A dogged reporter. It’s all here, in this great read about how WSJ reporter John Carreyrou who took down the fraud firm Theranos (nice touch: constant surveillance). It’s definitely worth a few minutes of your time.

2. How three very different wealthy newspaper owners got three very different results: Jeff Bezos, John Henry, Aaron Kushner. These are the three men who bought the Washington Post, Boston Globe, and Orange County Register (all on the cheap) and sought to change the fortunes of journalism. Dan Kennedy, a professor at Northeastern University in Boston, has written a book called “The Return of the Moguls” that chronicles the very different paths and results each owner has encountered. A good read. (Conflict alert: Dan and I are colleagues at Northeastern.)

3. HuffPo reporter exposes racist Islamophobe troll on Twitter: Twitter, oh Twitter. When are you going to get it right? HuffPo reporter Luke O’Brien wrote a great story exposing an Islamophobe troll, whose racist tweets made her an alt-right star. So what happens? O’Brien gets death threats, he gets doxxed, his colleagues get threatened. And Twitter suspended his account — but not those of the people who were ripping into him on the platform. (His account has since been restored.) Twitter makes noises about cleaning up the acts of its users, but still has a long way to go.

• Get notified via email: Send a note to 3toread (at) gmail.com
• Logo by Leigh Carroll (Instagram: @Leighzaaah)
• Check out the web site.

Matt Carroll teaches journalism at Northeastern University. Twitter: @MattCData. Instagram: mattcarroll54.