Every Saturday morning, we invite a publishing pro to put together their top media links. This week's guest editor is Corinne Podger.

Corinne is the founder and director of the Digital Skills Agency, a global consultancy providing training and coaching for newsrooms and reporters on digital skills and revenue diversification. She is a respected thought leader on mobile journalism, and co-organises the annual Mobile Journalism Conference for Asia.

You can reach out to Corinne on Twitter and Linkedin.

Corinne says:

"My work supports newsrooms at the nexus of supporting digital innovation and identifying investment returns from new initiatives. My interest in mobile journalism was initially driven by the potential it offers radio stations and newspapers to expand into affordable video.

More recently, given that the audience and journalists share the means of content production, I now regard mobile journalism as a powerful tool in responding to more of our industry’s core challenges: reducing operating costs, covering under-reported communities, and building authentic and richly diverse audience voices into our journalism."

Explore the 2020 Reuters Digital News Report — www.digitalnewsreport.org

The Reuters Institute’s latest annual survey of how online audiences consume news was published this week. It covers 40 markets including, for the first time, Kenya and the Philippines. You could read potted summaries on NiemanLab or the BBC, but for a deep-dive understanding of national and regional threats and opportunities, I recommend reading the report in full. 

News by the ton: 75 years of US advertising — www.ben-evans.com

In this superb long read, media analyst Benedict Evans takes a fresh look at newspapers; not as a fourth estate tasked with holding power to account, but as a ‘specialised light manufacturing industry that aggregated attention to sell advertising’. As efforts rumble on in numerous countries to make big tech pay for news, this is a timely explainer of how the advertising industry has diversified over nearly eight decades, and is experiencing its own seismic disruption.

Facebook says it doesn’t need news stories for its business and won’t pay to share them in Australia — www.theguardian.com

One of the countries where there is a robust effort to force big tech to pay for journalism content is Australia. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is creating a mandatory code of conduct on news revenue sharing. This week, Facebook issued its response to the Commission, saying its business would not be significantly impacted if it stopped sharing news content altogether.

How The Local’s nine news sites tweaked their way to 11,000 new paying members during the pandemic — www.poynter.org

The Local is a Europe-wide network of English language sites, which has successfully leveraged the ‘pandemic bump’ to drive new revenue, using reader surveys, membership messaging, high quality COVID-19 coverage, and by creating new pathways for audience support, including a donations button at the bottom of every story. This strategic approach has led to a double-digit fall in The Local’s reliance on paid advertising.

How TikTok recommends videos #ForYou — newsroom.tiktok.com

Earlier this year I wrote a long Medium post about how to use TikTok, and how newsrooms were starting to experiment with it. A question that wasn’t easy to answer at the time was the likelihood of your target audience seeing your content. This week TikTok’s newsroom issued an explainer that may help publishers take a more informed decision about whether to join this phenomenally popular new platform.

The Mobile Journalism Conference for Asia — mojoconference.asia

This year Mojo Asia is 100 per cent online – a combination of live and virtual resources that will serve as a permanent repository about mobile journalism, and how it can help address some of our industry’s core challenges. Register now to network with more than 500 registrants from 54 countries.

Local Radio Stations in Africa: Sustainability or Pragmatic Viability? — www.cima.ned.org

This study from the Centre for International Media Assistance looks at how the pandemic-related collapse in advertising is hitting regions where analogue media like radio are still enormously popular – as is the case across much of the African continent. The study analyses radio in Uganda and Zambia, and asks what sustainable public broadcasting in developing country contexts might look like.

If you would like to guest edit a future edition of My Media Roundup, simply reply to this email.