In college, women fill journalism classes, while men remain a minority. But a few years later, when those students enter the workforce, the situation shifts. Men dominate newsrooms, outnumbering women on almost all occasions. Although the gap has decreased in recent years, women still lag in journalism—they represent only 41.7% of newsroom employees, according to […]
Luminary dreams of becoming the Netflix of podcasting
On a slow morning in the New York subway, you can read through the handful of billboards that decorate the wagon. This past month, we could only see the podcast startup Luminary’s advertising, covering New York City’s subways. With its bright yellow banners and its enticing slogan (“Original podcasts with original ideas for original people,”) […]
What the almost 3,000 journalism job cuts tell us about the media industry
The US economy is growing, companies are hiring, and the unemployment rate is the lowest since 1969—a meager 3.6%. It’s a party for almost everyone, except for journalists. In the first half of 2019, nearly 3,000 people were let go from newsrooms all over the country, traditional and digital media alike. The scarcity of revenues, […]
The Spanish-language podcast Radio Ambulante shows us a path to success
In 2012, the podcast industry was taking off in the United States, although mainly in English. It was hard to find long-form podcasts in what already was the second most spoken language in the country—Spanish— until Radio Ambulante came along. Radio Ambulante, a weekly 30-60 minute podcast in Spanish covering Latin American stories, has garnered […]
No more subscriptions, please
In 2019, subscriptions are everywhere. If you want to read the news, you may subscribe to a couple of outlets, like The New York Times and The New Yorker. If you are watching a show, you’ll get one or two streaming platforms like Netflix and Hulu. And if you listen to music, you’ll probably have […]
The most critical success of the one-year-old GDPR is awareness
More than a year ago, the EU approved the most stringent online privacy regulation yet—the GDPR or General Data Protection Regulation. The GDPR seeks to protect the data of EU citizens and restrict how businesses can access information. However, as other EU regulations, the GDPR is still slowly been adopted by member states and thus […]
How The Guardian capitalized its membership model
For most digital news outlets, advertisements are the business’ bedrock and for some others, paywalls (and thus, subscriptions) have become a significant revenue source. Yet for a few, donations through membership models, fuel the newsrooms. The Guardian belongs to this last group of outlets and has recently proved that memberships can be profitable—members donate whatever […]
Second-screen usage, the perfect sales opportunity
Today, more than 77% of the US population owns smartphones, and 70.1% of the adults scroll online when they are watch television It’s called second screen usage. The rise of two-screen usage may undermine the attention paid to quality content, as viewers divide their capacity to focus between their cellphones and the TV. But it […]
Watching Video Games—one of the most profitable, popular and effective forms of entertainment
In less than ten years, video gaming has become without doubt one of the most effective forms of entertainment in the world. Not only by the sales of the games but by the incredible number of hours of user-generated content showing individuals playing a whole universe of different games. It is not a surprise, then, […]
Facebook’s ban on extremist figures is not enough to stop fake news, we need more
Last week, Facebook and Instagram finally banned some of the leading far-right extremists in the United States, many of whom have contributed forcefully to the spread of fake news online. Among them were Alex Jones, the founder of Infowars, Milo Yiannopoulos, former editor of Breitbart News, and Paul Joseph Watson, conspiracy theorist. Infowars, an American […]
