Thursday 13th October: TikTok moves into product fulfilment

October 13, 2022

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TikTok is planning to build its own product fulfillment centers in the U.S., creating an e-commerce supply chain system that could directly challenge Amazon, according to more than a dozen new job openings posted in the past two weeks to LinkedIn.

"By providing warehousing, delivery, and customer service returns, our mission is to help sellers improve their operational capability and efficiency, provide buyers a satisfying shopping experience and ensure fast and sustainable growth of TikTok Shop," the company wrote in one job listing.

This is a huge move for such a new company. There's a reason Meta/Instagram have never bothered to get into logistics themselves - it's expensive and the margins are tight. Still, if anyone could give Amazon a kick up the butt, it's TikTok.

From using geolocation to verify content from open sources to using Google Earth for visual enrichment of stories, here is a list of free courses complied by The Fix to help journalists in their work.

The Financial Times has reported a strong “rebound” from Covid-19 in 2021, returning to profitability and growing revenues by almost a fifth. Its advertising business in particular saw its strongest performance since 2015, growing by 34%.

Tortoise Media and Sky Studios today announce an exclusive multi-year first look deal to adapt Tortoise Media’s original podcasts into high-end series and features, across scripted and documentary. Katie Vanneck-Smith hinted at this during her interview at the Publisher Podcast Summit so it's exciting to see their success.

New episode:

For this next season of the Media Voices Podcast, kindly sponsored by Poool, we’ll be publishing ten episodes exploring the biggest trends of 2022 and how they affect publishers. For this episode, we're joined by by Chris Jansen, Head of Local News, Global Partnerships at Google to talk about the state of local news in 2022 and beyond.

We're approaching our 6th birthday, would you believe! But this year has been our make or break year, and we're pleased to say it's looking really good thanks to your support and some much-needed advice. If you'd like to support us on a monthly basis or just buy us a virtual coffee, every donation is very much apprecitaed.