Digital publishing news for September 23, 2013
Ad Week is reporting that The Washington Post has launched a new visual news project called Topicly. Lucia Moses writes, “Topicly provides a visual presentation of the day’s biggest topics. When you click on one of the topics, which are arranged checkerboard-fashion, you’re taken to a collection of all the content produced by the paper on that topic, updated every 15 minutes.”
Topicly is proprietary technology to the post and uses an algorithm to determine what stories will appear. In the future the algorithm will also use social signals. Moses adds, “Topicly has its own ad format, and, as with many new ad products coming out of the Washington Post and other publishers these days, this one is native to the editorial environment. The unit lets advertisers appear in the same format as the news topics and use the same layout to share stories, images and social content. The official launch sponsor is Land Rover.” Could this be the type of experimentation that Bezos is looking for?
Pinterest Promoting Pins
Mashable is reporting that Pinterest has started experimenting with promoting pins. Lauren Indvik writes, “The product is called “promoted pins,” and it borrows from Twitter’s and Facebook’s ad products of the same name. Essentially, businesses will be able to pay to show certain pins at the top of search results and category feeds.” Pinterest is testing this ad product with a select number of sponsors. This could be a great advertising channel for publishers once it goes public.
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WME Taps Into The Atlantic
William Morris Endeavor, the worlds largest talent agency has signed a deal with The Atlantic to tap into and search their archives for TV and movie opportunities. The Deadline reports that “it’s the latest move for a Hollywood player to seize on journalism as source material. Among recent such deals is 20th Century’s Fox’s two-year first-look pact with Epic, a fledgling online platform designed to be a catalyst for film-centric investigative longform journalism.” This is a continuing trend where publishers are dealing out article rights to be developed.
AllThingsD Team Is On The Move
AllThingsD and The Dow Jones company have decided to end their partnership. Dan Primack from CNN Fortune Money reports, “Not only does that mean the AllThingsD team will no longer share content and certain advertising functions with Dow Jones, but also that Mossberg will leave his Wall Street Journal column after 20 years (he has been with the paper for a total of four decades). Dow Jones also will retain the AllThingsD brand. All of this becomes effective at year-end.” It should be very interesting to see what the team does next.
