ICYMI: Digiday goes analog and social platforms duke it out

We had a good week here at Digiday. And next week promises to be even better.

Five days ago we launched Pulse, a new quarterly magazine. That’s right: Digiday is embracing print. Devoted to the future of media, the first issue of Pulse takes a look at what the rise of platforms, from Facebook to Snapchat, means for publishers. To keep users lingering longer and coming back more often, platforms need content. Facebook, Snapchat and the like have been a lot more attentive to their requests lately. But for all that, publishers still are making a lot of content for platforms with uncertain payoff. Facebook still doesn’t have a business model by which publishers can monetize their video there. 

Publishers, for their part, are staffing up in response. Like many of them, Vox Media has decided that its future depends on buddying up to the big platforms. So earlier this year when it looked for someone to handle its platform relationships, it hired Choire Sicha, co-founder of The Awl Network. Click here to read our profile of Sicha, who has made a career out of being the media insider’s outsider. 

To download the 60-page magazine, please visit the Pulse page. 

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Elsewhere in platform land, Twitter is no longer billing itself as a social network in the Apple App Store. It now sits atop the news category, where it is not competing with (or losing in the rankings to) Facebook and Snapchat. Seems like everyone was taking potshots at each other this week, though: Twitter and Facebook have both urged brands and influential users to stop using them to promote their Snapchat accounts. 

Facebook is also doubling down on its war against clickbait:  The social giant is putting an emphasis on articles that are important to people and recognizing that clicks, shares and comments aren’t necessarily the best indicators of that. Garett Sloane has an analysis of which publishers will come out winners — and which will lose out — as a result of the latest algorithm tweak. 

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In a lighter note, our breaking news reporter Jordan Valinsky scored a viral hit for us this week when he noticed that Reebok was selling shoes modeled after the ones worn by Sigourney Weaver in “Alien.” The problem? The shoe maker only made them available in men’s sizes — even though the character who wore them in the 1979 classic film was anything but. 

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Stick around next week. We’ve got some exciting things coming: For starters, we’re launching a new site. Glossy is a new publication from Digiday Media that will chart the seismic activity tearing through fashion and luxury space. Look for it here. 

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