Guardian breaks even with supporter strategy; More than half of social media users mobile in 2019 - Wed, May 1 2019

The Guardian and the Observer have broken even for the first time in recent history aided by record online traffic, reduced costs and increased financial contributions from readers. Guardian News & Media recorded an £800,000 operating profit…

Mr Anderson RT @KathViner: The Guardian has made a small operating profit! It's been a brilliant team effort and it's mostly thanks to Guardian readers - we are out of danger and the new business model is working

Photographer: Gino Domenico/Bloomberg Billionaire investor Warren Buffett is pessimistic on the newspaper industry at a time when public relations specialists are increasingly outnumbering journalists. Public relations jobs exceeded those of…

Mr Anderson For every reporter there are six PR workers, US Census reports

Today I'm launching a new project, Missing Numbers. Missing Numbers is a blog about the data that the government should collect and measure in the UK, but doesn't. I'm a data analyst and programmer who cares about social justice. Over the years…

Mr Anderson In many different policy areas, 'it was impossible for governments to make good decisions because of a basic lack of data. There was always critical data that the state either didn’t collect at all, or collected so badly that it made change impossible.'

Electronic Frontier Foundation – Jillian C. York – Apr 29, 8:10 AM

Social media platforms regularly engage in “content moderation”—the depublication, downranking, and sometimes outright censorship of information and/or user accounts from social media and other digital platforms, usually based…

Mr Anderson 'Built piecemeal over the years by a number of different actors passing through Silicon Valley’s revolving doors, content moderation was never meant to operate at the scale of billions of users.' The rules have been ad hoc, inconsistent but influential.

As part of a major restructuring effort that could affect 25 staffers. Two of the top editorial employees at the company formerly known as Gizmodo Media Group are departing amid restructuring that will result in at least 25 staffers exiting the…

Mr Anderson RT @Mediagazer Sources: editorial director Susie Banikarim and executive managing editor Alex Dickinson are out at G/O Media amid a restructuring that may affect 25+ staffers (@maxwelltani / The Daily Beast)

This week New Zealand's largest newspaper, the NZ Herald, launched digital subscriptions for its online content, making history at the same time. Its paywall is the first for a general newspaper in New Zealand. Back in 2011, the NZ Herald's parent…

Digiday – Max Willens – Apr 29, 5:01 PM

The Times, which has been participating in the NewFronts since 2014, has historically used the platform to plug shiny new formats including virtual reality, or its storytelling prowess. But with advertisers still leery of news as a category and…

Mr Anderson 'The subscribers-first New York Times cares about its readers’ privacy and is developing its ad strategy accordingly.'

Twitter is unveiling a number of new content deals and renewals tonight at its NewFronts event for digital advertisers. It's only been two years since Twitter first joined the NewFronts. At the time, coverage suggested that executives saw the…

Mr Anderson Live sports, American soccer and football. News from Univision, the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg (their TicToc, not to be confused with TikTok, the viral video platform).

SportsBusiness Daily – Apr 29

ESPN is ending the print version of ESPN the Magazine in September, more than 21 years after its launch. The news of the print magazine's demise was announced to staff this morning as part of a reorganization of Senior VP/Original Content Rob King…

Mr Anderson Live sports is working pretty well for ESPN, print magazines, not so much. Fortunately, there won't be too many job losses involved.

Fewer people in the US are accessing social networking sites via computers, with the majority of users now exclusively on mobile devices. We forecast that 51.7% of US social network users will be mobile-only in 2019. As smartphone use grows, fewer…

Mr Anderson '...Facebook has begun internally testing a prototype that would shift its marquee News Feed to a more mobile-friendly swipe interface, suggesting that its future ad placements will take the form of vertical images that are fit for mobile screens.'