Street Fight Daily: Alexa Enables Voice-Ordered Meals, Boston Globe’s Digital Revamp

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A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal publishing, marketing, commerce, and technology…

Amazon Prime Members Can Now Voice-Order Meals Through Alexa-Enabled Devices (VentureBeat)
Amazon is now pushing to make it even easier to order food. To activate the new skill, those with an Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, or other Alexa-powered device can say “Alexa, order from Amazon Restaurants” to have a meal that they’ve ordered previously automatically dispatched.

USA Technologies Links With Apple Pay to Offer Rewards on the Go (Street Fight)
USA Technologies, which serves cashless and mobile transactions in self-serve retail, announced this morning that it has integrated its rewards program with Apple Pay. Now when consumers use Apple Pay at a self-serve vending machine, they will be able to instantly enroll in USAT’s MORE loyalty program.

Boston Globe Undergoes Major Overhaul to Compete in Digital Age (Poynter)
10 big changes are coming to The Globe in the coming months. Among them: a complete overhaul of the newsroom’s beat structure, the creation of a breaking news “express desk,” the debut of a print-focused desk and the launch of a new audience development team.

Lyft More Than Doubles Fourth Quarter Ridership Year Over Year (Wall Street Journal)
Ride-hailing service Lyft Inc. more than doubled its quarterly ridership from a year before, a welcome boost as it seeks to keep apace with larger rival Uber Technologies Inc. Lyft logged 52.6 million rides in the U.S. in the fourth quarter, up from 21.1 million a year earlier.

Jersey’s New Brunswick Today Punches Its Way to a New Model for Local News (Street Fight)
Does Central New Jersey’s New Brunswick Today represent the future of local news? The local site has made inroads in its community, supporting itself with a “three-legged stool” combining reader memberships, foundation support and site advertising.

Elite SEM Builds Data Analysis for Brands in 2017 (MediaPost)
Ben Kirshner, Elite SEM founder and CEO, points to the lack of qualified data scientists as one of the biggest challenges brands will face in 2017. Many digital agencies built data teams in 2016 simply to hold onto the client, only to find themselves stuck in the middle of a who-owns-the-data war, he said.

How Journalists at The Memo Create Content for Brands (Digiday)
The Memo is a digital publisher with a twist: The tech news and analysis website offers its editorial services to brand clients looking to up the quality of their own content.

The Great Paradox of ‘Precision at Scale’ (AdExchanger)
Kim Brown: How can a campaign be precise and have scale? There isn’t a clear definition for what makes a campaign precise or scaled. As a result, the definition is set by whomever best sells and rationalizes the plan, not whether it’s actually precise with maximum scale.

Medium CEO Condemns Ad Revenue Model for Publishers as Company Lays Off 50 Employees (AdWeek)
Medium founder and CEO Ev Williams disclosed that his company is eliminating 50 jobs and shutting down offices in New York and Washington, D.C. In a letter to the public, he recounted how his team’s ultimate goals had gotten off course thanks to the monetization model of advertising. 

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Joe Zappa is the Managing Editor of Street Fight. He has spearheaded the newsroom's editorial operations since 2018. Joe is an ad/martech veteran who has covered the space since 2015. You can contact him at [email protected]