seems that a lot of you are about to go on vacation these weeks. If you need something to read or hear while sunbathing, just have a look in our Slack. There are tons of good readings and @kollege will help you out with good podcast recommendations!

Rock on & enjoy your holidays and read you in Slack!
Lina

ROCKS REPORT #12

 #audience-development 

• @frederik_fischer wrote a piece about Thunderclap and why Crowdspeaking could be a game changer for journalism. What do you think about it?

Channel Rockstar: @madalina.ciobanu. Check out the channel for more or contact Madalina for questions.

 #audio 

• For all those who have some spare time at home or at the beach, maybe you want to listen to some Serial-like stuff? I made a list of the follow-ups, most of them are in German. But there is also one in English - and it’s not finished yet. Click here and scroll down a little bit to get the links.

Channel Rockstar: @kollege. Check out the channel for more or contact Marc for questions.

 #facebook 

• Facebook’s new ‘Discover Feed’ was spotted in the wild by @mattnavarra. Also FB on desktop is testing a simpler trending box with topic names and number of people talking about it. And maybe soon we will have colourful Messenger chat windows.

Channel Rockstar: @davidtvrdon. Check out the channel for more or contact David for questions.

 #monetization 

• How the Swiss newspaper NZZ is building products to try and cultivate new paying audiences (link)
• Pay it forward: LaterPay, a German payment infrastructure company, offers micropayments with a twist (link)
• The New York Times reports Q2 loss, print ad revenue falls 14%, but have 200.000 paying crosswords subscibers (link).

Channel Rockstar: @trotzendorff. Who is on a lonely island. With six more people. So it isn't lonely at all. Stand-in-Rockstar: @davidtvrdon, who would have loved to come with @trotzendorff, but he wouldn't let him. Boooh. Check out the channel for more or contact Florian for questions.

 #snapchat 

• This week we talked about brands and publishers on Snapchat. This site has an incomplete list of german brands that joined Snapchat: http://www.koelnkomm.de/vine/marken-aus-deutschland-auf-snapchat/
• The discussion showed once again that as a brand or publisher you definitely need resources to run an account. That’s what @marcbiskup told us about his experience.

Channel Rockstar: @textautomat. Check out the channel for more or contact Anna for questions.

 #startups 

• Martin Hoffmann just launched his startup RESI, a German conversational news app that tells stories like your friends would do. The goal is to help 18-25 year-olds stay informed in a delightful and familiar way. You can give it a try here: http://www.resiapp.io/

Channel Rockstar: @jankoenig. Check out the channel for more or contact Jan for questions.

 #tooltime 

The channel was rather quiet with just two topics this week.

1. David Tvrdon introduced us to an impact tracker by CIR, asking whether people thought it was useful, followed by another example from ProPublica. Since it seems more like a discussion for #audience-development, he crossposted it there as well. Let’s see which channel comes up with an opinion first.

2. I stumbled upon a tool for automated screenshots - something I had been looking for a while back, something we also had talked about in this slack. Well here it is now, WhipperSnapper by the Washington Post.

Channel Rockstar: @tilman. Check out the channel for more or contact Tilman for questions.

 #twitter 

• Twitter got it's new stickers feature which led to a discussion when Twitter had the last new feature that was widely celebrated. @tilman mentioned "Moments" - what do you think?

Channel Rockstar: @simon. Check out the channel for more or contact Simon for questions.

 #vr-ar 

• The Süddeutsche Zeitung launched it’s first 360 video project on Rio and life in the Favelas called “Im Schatten der Spiele” (“In the shadow of the Olympics”).
• We discussed the fact that mobile users need to download an app for that. Will people really download another app (and open it ever again…)? @lknappmann explained why SZ decided in favour of an own app.
• And @linatimm brought up the question again whether 360 video can be called VR.

Channel Rockstar: @flight_1. Check out the channel for more or contact Susanne for questions.

 GIF of the week 

carefully selected by @textautomat.