I write about issues going on in transition from traditional print media to on-line digital media in my posting Old media and digital media – part 1. This post is a continuation to it. The situation does not look too good for traditional media. Traditional media has been able to solve it’s challenges with aggregation or pay-wall. The future seems to be quite bad for traditional print media that can’t adapt to changed situation.
Despite two decades of trying, no one has found a way to make traditional news-gathering sufficiently profitable to assure its future survival. Only about a third of Americans under 35 look at a newspaper even once a week, and the percentage declines every year. A large portion of today’s readers of the few remaining good newspapers are much closer to the grave than to high school. Today’s young people skitter around the Internet. Audience taste seems to be changing, with the result that among young people particularly there is a declining appetite for the sort of information packages the great newspapers provided.
What is the future of media? There is an interesting article on future of media written in Finnish on this: Median tulevaisuus ja 13 trendiä – mitä media on vuonna 2030? It shows 13 trends that I have here translated to English, re-arranged, added my comments and links to more information to them. In 2030, the media will look very different than today.
The new gerations no longer want to pay for the media: Since the same information, benefits, entertainment provided free of charge, they are not prepared to pay. Older generations support the traditional media for some time, but they are smaller each year. Media consumption continues to rapidly change, and advertisers will follow suit digital and mobile channels, which will affect the media sales because advertisers no longer need the intermediary role of the media companies to communicate with their customers.
This does not look good for media companies, but situation even worse than that: When media personnel, production and distribution costs are rising every year and so the order than the ad revenue will be reduced year by year, deprivation twist to push media companies to the rest of the best authors, owners become impatient and expected returns are reduced. Companies are moving their marketing investment priorities for the purchased media.Corporate communications professionals continues to grow and the number of suppliers will continue to fall.
Technological developments enhance the above trends: Technology eliminates the barriers to entry to the traditional media sector and at the same time create new sectors. Technological media competition winner takes all because new scalable technology to create competitive advantages. Very many news writing tasks can be automated with near real-time and reliable enough translation technology The media world is undergoing a wholesale shift from manual processes to automated systems that strip out waste and inefficiency (The Future of Programmatic: Automation + Creativity + Scale).
Strong continuous technological change and automation mean that media consumption will continue to change for the next decade at least as strong as the previous ten years, whether we like it or not. Critical journalism makes searching for new alternative ways to do their work and to fund its work.
Media’s direction is sure to bring, and an ever increasing rate - in an increasingly digital, more mobile, more and more tailor-made … The newspapers will be read mostly on mobile devices. Information is obtained much earlier, in an increasingly digital and real-time. A lot has changed now already.
871 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ben Thompson / stratechery:
News publications can retain value online by differentiating, like Taylor Swift — Differentiation and Value Capture in the Internet Age — It’s hard to have a conversation with anyone in tech without the word “scale” entering the conversation; “Internet scale” is a particularly popular variation of the term.
Differentiation and Value Capture in the Internet Age
http://stratechery.com/2014/differentiation-value-creation-internet-age/
It’s hard to have a conversation with anyone in tech without the word “scale” entering the conversation; “Internet scale” is a particularly popular variation of the term. Scale is a concept that is at the root of most venture investing: because software has zero marginal cost – one copy costs just as much as 100, or one million – there are massive profits to be gained from reaching huge numbers of customers on a uniform product or service.
The idea of scale, though, isn’t something unique to the 21st century; in fact, it was the key driver of the 20th, and it all started with Henry Ford and the assembly line.
Tomi Engdahl says:
News organizations can rebuild by working with Facebook and Twitter, while creating their own distribution systems — How to rebuild journalism — I read Emily Bell’s speech and her piece in the Guardian over the weekend. They fairly well reflect what you hear from journalism pundits these days.
Monday, November 24, 2014 at 9:55 AM
How to rebuild journalism
http://scripting.com/2014/11/24/howToRebuildJournalism.html
What’s the right relationship between technology companies and journalism?
Facebook and other social media are huge deliverers of content and they are also hosting news discussion
http://www.theguardian.com/media/media-blog/2014/nov/23/silicon-valley-companies-journalism-news
What I actually said was “at news organisations the central organising principle is usually to produce something with social impact first ahead of utility or profit”. That’s not to say that news organisations always execute particularly well on that promise or that the cultural impact is always beneficial. But the fact is that doing the job well usually means that journalists end up being ostracised or imprisoned rather than ringing the opening bell at the New York stock exchange.
This critical point of transition in the communications world has arrived at a speed we can barely comprehend. In 2011 research from the Pew Center in the US reported that only 11% of US news consumers on any kind of digital device described themselves as getting their news through “Facebook or Twitter”. In the 2014 report of the same metrics 30% reported getting their news primarily from Facebook alone. That is a very rapid rate of migration in just two years.
Even where news apps are keeping audiences within one news brand, the apps themselves often rely on being compliant with the app distributors to get to your phone in the first place. And it is not just the consumption of news but also the discussion of events which is now almost exclusively owned by social media companies. Last week technology news site Re:Code announced that it would stop hosting comments on its own sites as the conversation around stories was already happening on social media.
Tomi Engdahl says:
European MP urging breakup of Google counsels law firm that represented German Magazine Publishers association, earns $15-75K annually from it — European Legislator Urging the Breakup of Google Has Ties to a Law Firm
European Legislator Urging the Breakup of Google Has Ties to a Law Firm
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/26/european-legislator-urging-the-breakup-of-google-has-ties-to-a-law-firm/?_r=0
Andreas Schwab, a German member of the European Parliament, has been making headlines in the last week after drafting a resolution that calls for the breakup of Google.
But Mr. Schwab is not just a legislator, he is also “of counsel” at the German law firm CMS Hasche Sigle, which has represented some of the German publishing interests that have been most eager to declaw Google. He earns roughly $15,000 to $75,000 annually from the firm, according to a disclosure filing. The firm’s website lists his expertise as competition policy.
Potential conflicts like working at a law firm are barred by the United States Congress, though permitted in some American state legislatures. European law has no prohibition on holding a second job at a law firm, though it does require disclosure of the relationship.
US expresses ‘concern’ over EU proposal to break up Google
The United States Mission to the European Union says antitrust issues should not be “politicized.”
http://www.cnet.com/news/us-expresses-concern-over-eu-proposal-to-break-up-google/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hard Comparison: Legacy Media vs. Digital Native | Monday Note
http://www.mondaynote.com/2014/11/24/hard-comparison-legacy-media-vs-digital-native/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Reports from Inside First Look Media Suggest That Maybe Silicon Valley Shouldn’t Manage Journalists
http://inthesetimes.com/article/17403/reports_from_inside_first_look_media_suggest_that_maybe_silicon_valley_shou
Feverish speculation surrounds First Look’s recent troubles. But perhaps the most obvious culprit is its reliance on truckloads of tech money.
Journalists on the Left have always had problems with institutions. I’m not referring here to these scribes’ honorable muckraking pedigrees, or their principled distrust of the national security state and the corporate boardroom. Rather, they have trouble building and sustaining viable media institutions of their own in the broader marketplace of ideas.
It’s hard, however, to top the recent travails of First Look Media, the fervidly hyped web publishing empire funded by Silicon Valley billionaire Pierre Omidyar, as a case study in how not to launch a progressive media enterprise.
A potential suitor to purchase the Washington Post, Omidyar instead decided to spend $250 million to launch his own ring of websites and aggressively sought top reporting, blogging and editing talent, all of it decidedly left of center. Chief among his early recruits were Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, the team that had collaborated with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden to reveal the true extent of the surveillance state’s spread.
However, for all the feverish speculation surrounding First Look‘s troubles, the most obvious culprit is hiding in plain sight: the reliance on truckloads of money from Silicon Valley.
There’s a reason that the term “burn rate” was coined to describe the brief half-lives of tech start-ups—these frenetically overmanaged operations function more as monuments to the hubris of the innovation economy than as proven models of productivity. Compounding this, the First Look fiasco clearly shows that a tech industry conditioned for so long to scorn the outmoded folkways of “print culture” and “legacy media” (as the argot of Silicon Valley has it) is largely clueless about supervising the basic work of journalism.
As any veteran of the terminally self-infatuated tech world can testify, a start-up ethos usually means a very long string of conference calls and navel-gazing managerial monologues. And a number of First Lookers told me that the media side of things endured a sustained bout of neglect as management talk metastasized.
Tomi Engdahl says:
NAPA boss says BBC should buy news from agencies rather than ‘call centre’ local newspapers
http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/napa-boss-says-bbc-should-buy-news-agencies-rather-call-centre-local-newspapers
The National Association of Press Agencies has urged the BBC to start buying in local content from its members.
The suggestion follows news from BBC head of news James Harding earlier this month that the corporation is investigating ways to buy content from local newspapers.
NAPA chairman Jon Harris, also MD of Manchester-based Cavendish Press, said: “I’m not sure why the BBC would turn to local papers for their news content when sadly quality journalism is being affected by the culling of jobs and the closure of publications in the interests of furthering a web based agenda.
“The reality is quality journalism is better achieved if journalists are out there in the field meeting people and making contacts.
“Unfortunately some regionals appear to be heading towards a call centre business model where staff never leave the office. But you cannot rely on the phone, the internet and social media to get stories.”
“Our media partners on the UK national papers or magazines know that if they want a reporter on the ground anywhere in the country, they simply need to find the agency that covers that patch.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
EU Parliament calls on Commission to consider Google break-up
https://gigaom.com/2014/11/27/eu-parliament-calls-on-commission-to-consider-google-break-up/
As expected, the European Parliament has passed a resolution that calls on the European Commission to consider a break-up of Google as a potential solution to its dominance in the European search market.
Google is currently embroiled in a long-running antitrust case with the European Commission over the way it uses its search dominance – it has more than 90 percent of the European market — to push its own services (among other things). The Commission is also looking into complaints about Google’s bundling of its services with Android.
Digital economy commissioner Günther Oettinger – who it should be noted is not in charge of this affair – has already come out against any break-up plan. His colleague Margrethe Vestager, the competition commissioner, is currently considering what she should do, and digital single market chief Andrus Ansip is coordinating them both.
Tomi Engdahl says:
EU digital economy commissioner comes out against Google breakup
https://gigaom.com/2014/11/25/eu-digital-economy-commissioner-comes-out-against-google-break-up/
Günther Oettinger, the European commissioner in charge of the digital economy, has said that he opposes any plan to separate Google’s various businesses in order to combat the company’s dominance in Europe.
He was responding to reports that the European Parliament is planning to urge the Commission to put a breakup on the table as it considers how to resolve a major ongoing antitrust case regarding Google pushing its own services in its search results, and various other complaints about its bundling of Google services with its Android operating system, and its use of copyrighted text in search results.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Oh No They Didn’t: European Parliament Calls For Break Up Of Google
Body passes resolution calling for “unbundling” of search from rest of company.
http://searchengineland.com/oh-didnt-european-call-unbundling-search-rest-google-209813
The widely anticipated, non-binding vote calls upon the European Commission, the EU’s antitrust regulator, to “enforce EU competition rules [and] to consider proposals with the aim of unbundling search engines from other commercial services.”
The vote happened earlier today and was approved 384 to 174 with 56 abstentions. Beyond the “break up Google” angle (Google was not identified by name), the European Parliament called for the creation of a single digital market in Europe for the purpose of:
Increasing tax revenues
Promoting “non-discriminatory online search”
Preventing the “secondary exploitation” of search data
Developing uniform rules for cloud computing
Promoting net neutrality
The resolution essentially has no legal force. It’s a “political statement.” It’s also an aspirational statement of policy goals. However it indicates the political climate and mood throughout Europe, which is increasingly hostile to Google (except of course for consumers).
The European Commission is the body that has the real teeth and power in this matter.
It’s clear there’s a lot of frustration — even exasperation — behind this vote and Europe’s seeming inability to date to “do anything about Google.” Europe has been unable to produce home-grown competitors that can challenge the online hegemony of internet companies such as Google and Facebook. The company’s PC market share is much higher in Europe than in the US and Android is the dominant smartphone operating system there by far.
Tomi Engdahl says:
There’s something of an irony here in that the European Parliament is calling for punitive action against Google’s PC search business just as many users are shifting their time and focus to mobile devices and away from traditional search.
Source: http://searchengineland.com/oh-didnt-european-call-unbundling-search-rest-google-209813
Tomi Engdahl says:
E.U. Parliament Passes Measure to Break Up Google in Symbolic Vote
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/28/business/international/google-european-union.html?_r=0
Tomi Engdahl says:
The strange world of computer-generated novels
Welcome to National Novel Generation Month, where the algorithm is the author
http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/25/7276157/nanogenmo-robot-author-novel
It’s November and aspiring writers are plugging away at their novels for National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, an annual event that encourages people to churn out a 50,000-word book on deadline. But a hundred or so people are taking a very different approach to the challenge, writing computer programs that will write their texts for them. It’s called NaNoGenMo, for National Novel Generation Month, and the results are a strange, often funny look at what automatic text generation can do.
Nick Montfort’s World Clock was the breakout hit of last year. A poet and professor of digital media at MIT, Montfort used 165 lines of Python code to arrange a new sequence of characters, locations, and actions for each minute in a day. He gave readings, and the book was later printed by the Harvard Book Store’s press. Still, Kazemi says reading an entire generated novel is more a feat of endurance than a testament to the quality of the story, which tends to be choppy, flat, or incoherent by the standards of human writing.
Narrative is one of the great challenges of artificial intelligence. Companies and researchers are working to create programs that can generate intelligible narratives, but most of them are restricted to short snippets of text. The company Narrative Science, for example, makes programs that take data from sporting events or financial reports, highlight the most significant information, and arrange it using templates pre-written by humans. It’s not the loveliest prose, but it’s fairly accurate and very fast.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Narrative Science Raises $10 Million More for Its Automated Writing Software
http://recode.net/2014/11/28/narrative-science-raises-10-million-more-for-its-automated-writing-software/
Most funding stories are more or less the same, which is why Re/code tries to avoid most of them: Company raises X amount of money, from Y companies, to do Z thing. Repeat.
And that’s precisely the kind of thing that Narrative Science can now do without any humans at all: The Chicago-based company’s software can sift through big piles of data and automatically create stories on its own.
Some of them you might encounter on the Web: Forbes, for instance, uses Narrative Science to create earnings previews and reports.
Partner
Narrative Science
http://www.forbes.com/sites/narrativescience/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Brits to teach Norks hacks about ‘multimedia websites’. 5% of DPRK is in for a TREAT
Kim Jong-un, elites, academics only ones with ‘net access
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/01/knowledgeable_norks_brits_tutoring_north_koreans_in_the_ways_of_multimedia_websites/
A group of North Korean journalists will visit the UK next year to “observe how multimedia websites work at British media companies”.
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office-funded project Inside Out: Working in North Korea to connect its journalists to the internet world aims to give North Korean journalists a greater understanding of freedom of expression and information via the internet.
According to a report, over the last decade the regime has undergone a “digital revolution”, with around one million users now signed up to its mobile phone network, Koryolink.
Internet access is still restricted to a limited few
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nature Makes All Articles Free To View
http://science.slashdot.org/story/14/12/02/0643256/nature-makes-all-articles-free-to-view
Scientific journal publishers have been under pressure recently by both scientists and the public to relax their restrictive rules on the sharing of information. Now, Macmillan has announced that its Nature Publishing Group will make all research papers free to read. This will require the use of proprietary viewing software, but it’s a step in the right direction.
Nature makes all articles free to view
Publisher permits subscribers and media to share read-only versions of its papers.
http://www.nature.com/news/nature-makes-all-articles-free-to-view-1.16460
All research papers from Nature will be made free to read in a proprietary screen-view format that can be annotated but not copied, printed or downloaded, the journal’s publisher Macmillan announced on 2 December.
The content-sharing policy, which also applies to 48 other journals in Macmillan’s Nature Publishing Group (NPG) division, including Nature Genetics, Nature Medicine and Nature Physics, marks an attempt to let scientists freely read and share articles while preserving NPG’s primary source of income — the subscription fees libraries and individuals pay to gain access to articles.
ReadCube, a software platform similar to Apple’s iTunes, will be used to host and display read-only versions of the articles’ PDFs. If the initiative becomes popular, it may also boost the prospects of the ReadCube platform, in which Macmillan has a majority investment.
Annette Thomas, chief executive of Macmillan’s Science and Education division, says that under the policy, subscribers can share any paper they have access to through a link to a read-only version of the paper’s PDF that can be viewed through a web browser. For institutional subscribers, that means every paper dating back to the journal’s foundation in 1869, while personal subscribers get access from 1997 on.
Anyone can subsequently repost and share this link. Around 100 media outlets and blogs will also be able to share links to read-only PDFs. Although the screen-view PDF cannot be printed, it can be annotated — which the publisher says will provide a way for scientists to collaborate by sharing their comments on manuscripts. PDF articles can also be saved to a free desktop version of ReadCube, similarly to how music files can be saved in iTunes.
Thomas says that the publisher intends the policy as a pilot and will be evaluating it over the coming year. She says that she expects libraries and personal users to continue to subscribe to the journal, but also that scientists would embrace the new sharing model. Other science publishers, such as Wiley, use ReadCube to display preview versions of their papers, so it is possible that the same idea might spread to others, Thomas adds.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook, iPhone 6 and Kim Kardashian top Bing’s 2014 search lists
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2853704/facebook-iphone-6-and-kim-kardashian-top-bings-2014-search-lists.html
Microsoft culled through billions of searches to find out what we were curious about
With 2014 almost over, Microsoft has released its lists of the top searches on Bing and, so far, Apple’s iPhone 6, Facebook and Kim Kardashian are the year’s big winners.
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“We’re taking a look back at the people, moments, and events that shaped 2014,” wrote the Bing Team in a blog post. “Trends in Bing searches give us a unique view into what mattered most to us throughout the year.”
As for the most-searched people, only one male broke into the top five. Last year’s most-searched person — singer Beyonce — was bumped into second place by reality star Kim Kardashian. Singers Miley Cyrus and Katy Perry came in third and fourth, with Justin Bieber filling in the fifth spot.
Tomi Engdahl says:
A Mismatch Between Wikimedia’s Pledge Drive and Its Cash On Hand?
http://news.slashdot.org/story/14/12/02/1528227/a-mismatch-between-wikimedias-pledge-drive-and-its-cash-on-hand
Wikipedia may be forced to run commercial advertising to survive.
Unlike the suggestion made by the fundraising banners, most of these budget increases have nothing to do with keeping Wikipedia online and ad-free, and nothing to do with generating and curating Wikipedia content, a task that is handled entirely by the unpaid volunteer base.
The skyrocketing budget increases are instead the result of a massive expansion of paid software engineering staff at the Foundation – whose work in recent years has been heavily criticised by the unpaid volunteer base.
Comments:
Big software projects need developers. Full time, accountable ones with a paycheck and an office. Mozilla feeds theirs with ad revenue, Linux has some corporate supporters who pay the bills.
MediaWiki, that drives Wikipedia, is really complex. And they need new features to support the site better, especially admin tools and backend tech.
But, at the same time, screaming in desperation when you’re doing okay and just need support for your functionality means that when you are in trouble, no one can tell.
There is nothing “circular” about higher expenses leading to a need for higher reserves.
Wikipedia is still a very usable web site. By comparison slashdot went commercial some time ago and has become less usable with each passing year. Similarly while the content on wikipedia has continued to improve, the content here has continued to get worse.
An example of what they’ve done would be the recent Monuments project. They built a back end, complete with a Google maps API interface, to tell you exactly where they needed photos of which historic monuments, in relation to a given ZIP code. Based on that, I learned there was 200 year old farm house about a half a mile from my office, and I spent a productive lunch break driving over there and photographing it. Their website handled the upload, licensing, and then distributed the new photo to the Commons as well as the Monuments project. There were no errors during this entire process which means the entire thing was rigorously tested and properly coded. It was a painless user experience, if a bit dry because of the spartan aesthetics of Wikimedia, but my “generated content” was incorporated seamlessly into their project in about five minutes. That’s good website engineering.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Live from everywhere: ABC News journalists will stream video to your screen
http://mashable.com/2014/12/02/abc-news-gostream/
ABC News is giving its journalists the ability to live stream video to viewers, embracing a popular tool among citizen journalists.
The project, called GoStream, will allow any of ABC’s field journalists to fire up an app and begin sending raw video to ABC News, which will then disseminate the streams. Viewers will be able to choose from any number of feeds during major events, which will not air with a delay. The program could be broadened to include civilians that live stream as well.
Live streaming has been embraced as a platform to give first-person accounts of major events. The recent Ferguson protests featured a variety of live streams, like that of citizen journalist Bassem Masri. Vice News has also used live streaming to provide unfiltered looks from the scenes unfolding on the ground in conflict areas, including in Ferguson, Missouri.
ABC News has been working to compete with cable news networks and other major broadcasts as consumers turn to the Internet for news.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Longform overload
New narrative journalism startups, like Latterly Magazine, launch as quickly as others fail in a crowded marketplace
- See more at: http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/longform_overload.php#sthash.Vj9RowIw.dpuf
Tomi Engdahl says:
Finance media’s hottest club is Ello
Business reporters flocking to the platform won’t radically change journalism, but it’s worth asking why users gather where they do.
http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/12/finance-medias-hottest-club-is-ello/
With its retro-trendy, whitespace-heavy design, Ello has been popular among designers, artists, photographers, filmmakers, and other professionals whose brands are heavy on visuals. But as the network has grown, so has the diversity among subgroups. Journalism professor Jay Rosen, for example, has been blogging on the platform with regularity.
But the first journalistic subgroup for whom Ello really hit home is finance journalists — at least a little ironic, given the site’s origins. Earlier this fall, journalists like Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal started jokingly referring to the growing community of business writers on the site as “Finance Ello.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
When it comes to free speech, journalists should be activists
https://medium.com/backchannel/when-journalists-must-not-be-objective-fad5aadd8cb3
No major news organization has done a better job of covering China lately than the New York Times, as attested by its Pulitzer Prize for an investigation into the wealth acquired by leaders’ relatives. China’s response has been, in part, to make life difficult for Times journalists and to avidly censor the journalism — part of the regime’s ongoing and, it appears, escalating blockade of websites and other digital information services.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Is a “Wikipedia For News” Feasible?
http://news.slashdot.org/story/14/12/02/214206/is-a-wikipedia-for-news-feasible
Online news has become ridiculously confusing. Interesting bits are scattered among repetitive articles, clickbait, and other noise. Besides, there’s so much interesting news, but we just don’t have time for it all. Automated tools help a little, but give us only an unreliable selection; we still feel like we’re missing out. Y’know, back in the 1990s, we used to have a similar problem about general knowledge. Locating answers to basic questions through the noise of the Internet was hit-and-miss and took time. So we organized knowledge with Wikipedia
INFOBITT NEWS
A movement to do for the news what
Wikipedia did for encyclopedias.
http://www.infobitt.com/
Tomi Engdahl says:
New narrative journalism startups, like Latterly Magazine, launch as quickly as others fail in a crowded marketplace — New narrative journalism startups, like Latterly Magazine, launch as quickly as others fail in a crowded marketplace — Jill Abramson and Steven Brill’s upcoming longform outfit …
Longform overload
http://www.cjr.org/behind_the_news/longform_overload.php
Tomi Engdahl says:
The World Cracks Down on the Internet
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/world-cracks-internet
In September of last year, Chinese authorities announced an unorthodox standard to help them decide whether to punish people for posting online comments that are false, defamatory, or otherwise harmful
Chinese government has become, in recent years, in restricting Internet communication—going well beyond crude measures like restricting access to particular Web sites or censoring online comments that use certain keywords.
the approach: “strategic, timely censorship.” She told me, “It’s about allowing a surprising amount of open discussion, as long as you’re not the kind of person who can really use that discussion to organize people.”
On Thursday, Freedom House published its fifth annual report on Internet freedom around the world. As in years past, China is again near the bottom of the rankings, which include sixty-five countries. Only Syria and Iran got worse scores, while Iceland and Estonia fared the best.
China’s place in the rankings won’t come as a surprise to many people. The notable part is that the report suggests that, when it comes to Internet freedom, the rest of the world is gradually becoming more like China and less like Iceland.
The researchers found that Internet freedom declined in thirty-six of the sixty-five countries they studied, continuing a trajectory they have noticed since they began publishing the reports in 2010.
China, the U.S., and their copycats aren’t the only offenders, of course.
What’s behind the decline in Internet freedom throughout the world?
governments that restrict freedom offline—particularly authoritarian regimes—are only beginning to do the same online, too.
“There is definitely a sense that the Internet offered this real alternative to traditional media—and then government started playing catch-up a little bit,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Aliens in the Valley
The complete history of Reddit, the Internet’s front page
http://mashable.com/2014/12/03/history-of-reddit/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Harvard University says it can’t afford journal publishers’ prices
University wants scientists to make their research open access and resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/apr/24/harvard-university-journal-publishers-prices
Exasperated by rising subscription costs charged by academic publishers, Harvard University has encouraged its faculty members to make their research freely available through open access journals and to resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls.
A memo from Harvard Library to the university’s 2,100 teaching and research staff called for action after warning it could no longer afford the price hikes imposed by many large journal publishers, which bill the library around $3.5m a year.
The extraordinary move thrusts one of the world’s wealthiest and most prestigious institutions into the centre of an increasingly fraught debate over access to the results of academic research, much of which is funded by the taxpayer.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How to Survive a Journalistic Disaster 101
http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/12/08/how-to-survive-a-journalistic-disaster-101/?_r=0
How does a journalistic institution respond to a soul-shaking crisis? Rolling Stone magazine is dealing with that question at the moment, after its article about a gang rape at the University of Virginia went south late last week.
The article, published last month, had been criticized by various media outlets for its reliance on a single anonymous source and for the writer’s failure to interview the men accused of rape. And on Friday, the magazine issued a misdirected correction
Certainly, there’s plenty of experience out there for the magazine’s editors to take advantage of.
In each case, the news organizations — though they may have stumbled along the way — did the right thing: They laid out in great detail for their readers exactly what went wrong.
The reputations of both papers endured, and tremendous amounts of great journalism have been done at each place since the two crises.
Self-examination and transparency were the keys.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Caroline O’Donovan / Nieman Lab:
Study: Americans don’t worry about information overload and think the Internet has made them smarter — Recent media news headlines have briefly sucked the digital discourse around new and legacy media back into the reductive binary of pro- and anti-Internet.
Study: Americans don’t worry about information overload and think the Internet has made them smarter
http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/12/study-americans-dont-worry-about-information-overload-and-think-the-internet-has-made-them-smarter/
While asking whether the Internet helps or hurts journalism is about as useful as asking if technology is good or bad, the Pew Research Internet Project does have a study out today that comes down pretty clearly on one side.
The survey of 1,066 internet users shows that 87% of online adults say the internet and cell phones have improved their ability to learn new things, including 53% who say it has improved this “a lot.” Internet users under age 50, those in higher income households, and those with higher educational attainment are especially likely to say the internet and cell phones help them “a lot” when it comes to learning new things.
Asked if they enjoy having so much information at their fingertips or if they feel overloaded, 72% of internet users report they like having so much information, while just 26% say they feel overloaded.
[…]
News: Substantial majorities also feel better informed about national news (75%), international news (74%), and pop culture (72%) because of these tools.
Not only do individual Americans feel more personally informed because of the Internet, but a majority also believe that society at large is better informed. Interestingly, survey respondents generally felt that the Internet improved their knowledge of distant topics — pop stars and international news — more than it increased their understanding of things like local news or civic issues.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Strict New “Copyright Law” Forces End Of Google News In Spain
Law to take effect on January 1, Google move essentially preempts it.
http://searchengineland.com/responding-strict-new-copyright-law-google-shutter-news-site-spain-210648
Google has decided to shut down Google News in Spain. This drastic step will occur next week and is the result of a recently passed Spanish law that would have compelled Google to pay licensing revenues to Spanish publishers if their content appeared in Google News — even headlines.
Some Spanish publishers, including newspaper group AEDE, had tried to turn Google into a source of mandatory licensing revenue through an ill-conceived copyright and anti-piracy law that would have required fees for even the smallest bits of content in Google News.
The law is slated to go into effect on January 1, 2015. Google’s preemptive move will not affect traditional search results where news content will still appear.
The Spanish law followed in the wake of a similar failed attempt in Germany to extract licensing revenues from Google. In Germany Google had asked news publishers to sign liability waivers in order to have their “snippets” included in Google News. However the Spanish law goes further and makes it effectively impossible for individual publishers to waive their copyright licensing “rights” under the new statute — even if they disagree with the law.
Google’s decision means that not only will there be no more News in Spain but there will be no Spanish news publisher content in any other Google News edition, including other Spanish speaking countries.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The New York Times open-sources its Hive crowdsourcing platform
https://gigaom.com/2014/12/09/the-new-york-times-open-sources-its-hive-crowdsourcing-platform/
A couple of months ago, the New York Times rolled out an interesting project called Madison, in which the newspaper asked readers to help the paper identify old print ads by going to a website and answering questions — and even in some cases transcribing the actual text in the ads. Now, the company is open-sourcing the platform it built for that project, known as Hive, so that others can use it for their own experiments in crowdsourcing.
Hive: Open-Source Crowdsourcing Framework
http://blog.nytlabs.com/2014/12/09/hive-open-source-crowdsourcing-framework/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Andrew Wallenstein / Variety:
Why Publishing Stolen Sony Data is Problematic but Necessary — The more Sony Pictures data keeps leaking, the more my moral compass spins like a weather vane in a hurricane. — What just a week ago seemed such a clear-cut case of doing what my instincts have told me do to every other moment …
Why Publishing Stolen Sony Data Is Problematic but Necessary
http://variety.com/2014/biz/opinion/why-publishing-stolen-sony-data-is-problematic-but-necessary-1201377166/
The more Sony Pictures data keeps leaking, the more my moral compass spins like a weather vane in a hurricane.
What just a week ago seemed such a clear-cut case of doing what my instincts have told me to do at every other moment of my career is now making me increasingly queasy. It’s getting harder for me to report on the contents of Sony’s leak without wondering whether I’m somehow complicit with these nefarious hackers by relaying the details of seemingly every pilfered terabyte.
Salaries. Budgets. Scripts. Aliases. On the one hand, I’m drawn to discovering what I’m not supposed to ever know, like the warm conviviality Scott Rudin and Amy Pascal enjoy. On the other hand, I’m repelled by the circumstances by which this opportunity has come to pass.
Let’s get real: The hackers are playing the press as pawns. Journalists are essentially doing their bidding by taking the choicest data excerpts and waving them around for the world to see, maximizing their visibility.
No doubt Sony sees the press right now like a zombie mob from “The Walking Dead,” mindlessly staggering from one carcass to another to consume parts of what the hackers already killed.
When ethical boundaries get murky, it’s only natural to grab for some sense of precedent. The one that comes to mind for me is a relatively recent example: the celebrity nude photo leak in October that besmirched the good names of everyone from Jennifer Lawrence to Ariana Grande.
The difference between nude celebrity photos and the leaked Sony data, respectable media outlets will argue, is only the latter is “newsworthy.” But what does that really mean?
Perhaps “newsworthy” is as simple for some publications as “if readers are interested in it, then it is newsworthy.” For others, “newsworthy” conveys some vague sense of the material being important.
Edward Snowden surely qualified for the latter notion: He shared with the press information he stole because he felt it was vital for a democracy to get a fuller understanding of how its government operated. The ends justified the means, some would argue.
But Sony is not a government; conflating the imperatives behind covering a government and a corporation feels like a false equivalence to me.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Twitter suspends journalist’s account after he publishes public document — A troubling story out of Berkeley tonight. Local journalist Darwin BondGraham has had his Twitter account suspended after tweeting a document obtained under California’s Public Records Act.
Twitter suspends journalist’s account after he publishes public document
http://pando.com/2014/12/11/journalist-has-twitter-account-suspended-after-publishing-public-document/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hold the front page: Spain’s anti-Google lobbyists lobby for Google News return
‘Scrapped scraper puts rights under threat,’ mumbles AEDE
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/14/spain_google_news_aede_volte_face/
Tomi Engdahl says:
On visual web, a photo is worth more than a 1000 words
http://om.co/2014/12/10/weaving-a-very-visual-web/
Photos, photos and more photos! Photos are the atomic unit of social platforms. Photos and visuals are the common language of the Internet. It is hardly a surprise then, that we are going to upload nearly 900 billion photos to the Internet this year. Or that, Snapchat is worth tens-of-billions of dollars. What is more amazing is that we have only, barely scratched the surface when it comes to the potential of turning on the cameras. Here is a personal essay on why I am excited about photos, the visual web, computer vision and the far reaching impact of visual sensors.
Tomi Engdahl says:
This does not look good for newspapers:
File:Naa newspaper ad revenue.svg
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Naa_newspaper_ad_revenue.svg
Tomi Engdahl says:
Spanish Newspapers Want Google News Back
http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/14/spanish-newspapers-want-google-news-back/
The Internet is like a delicate rainforest ecosystem. You remove one player and the rest suffer and die. That happened in Spain this week when the government there began cracking down on Google. The Spanish government is requiring the company to pay Spanish news providers every time their content appears on the site. The search giant will shut down Google News there in response and no content will be available from the country’s major newspapers including El Pais and La Vanguardia.
As you can imagine, this is bad news. While newspapers have long claimed they can survive in the Internet Age without outside support, this is dead wrong. Given that the vast majority of news traffic comes from search – everything from “new laser printer” to “is betty white married” returns information from news sources – I can only imagine how much Spanish newspapers depend on Google for their reach and visitor count.
n short, the Spanish media lobby bit off more than it could chew, something that will happen again and again until media companies realize that there are far more efficient ways of separating visitors from their pocket change via micropayments and bitcoin. Until then, it will be amusing to watch well-meaning lawyers throw levers and switches in the media locomotive until the whole thing runs off the tracks.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Erin Griffith / Fortune:
Evan Williams: Medium’s key advertising sales metric is not page views, but time spent on page
Evan Williams: On billionaire-backed journalism, Shanley Kane, and the problem with vanity ad metrics
http://fortune.com/2014/12/15/qa-evan-williams-medium/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mathew Ingram / Gigaom:
After Google News shutdown, external traffic to Spanish media sites plummets, according to Chartbeat
External traffic to Spanish news sites plummets after Google move
https://gigaom.com/2014/12/16/traffic-to-spanish-news-publishers-plummets-after-google-move/
As expected, Google removed all Spanish publishers from its Google News index on Tuesday, which the company said it was forced to do as a result of a new law — a law that publishers themselves lobbied for — which requires anyone using even a short snippet of copyrighted content to pay a fee. According to the web-analytics service Chartbeat, within hours of their removal from the Google service, Spanish media sites saw their external traffic fall by double digits.
Josh Schwartz, the chief data scientist at Chartbeat, said the company doesn’t track every Spanish news site or publisher, but it has enough data on them as a group to indicate just how dramatic the traffic decline was.
The company said it could not pay Spanish news sites for snippets of content because Google News itself doesn’t make any money, but that it was still “committed to helping the news industry meet challenges” in other ways.
Spain is only the latest country to get into a content fight with Google over news: German publishers helped lobby for a similar law to the one in Spain — although it doesn’t require that publishers charge for excerpts, as the Spanish law does, by setting up what’s called an “inalienable right.” German publishers forced Google to remove their content, but after seeing the dramatic decline in traffic, which was also in the double digits, they rescinded that request.
Spanish publishers are now asking for help from the government because of the impact of the law, even though Google warned that it would have to remove their links if the law was passed
According to Chartbeat’s data, overall traffic to Spanish publishers hasn’t fallen by as much, but the amount of external traffic has declined sharply, while the amount of internal traffic — coming from other Spanish publishers — has risen.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Automation is not only replacing manufacturing jobs, it is displacing knowledge and service workers too
As Robots Grow Smarter, American Workers Struggle to Keep Up
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/16/upshot/as-robots-grow-smarter-american-workers-struggle-to-keep-up.html?_r=0&abt=0002&abg=1
A machine that administers sedatives recently began treating patients at a Seattle hospital. At a Silicon Valley hotel, a bellhop robot delivers items to people’s rooms. Last spring, a software algorithm wrote a breaking news article about an earthquake that The Los Angeles Times published.
Although fears that technology will displace jobs are at least as old as the Luddites, there are signs that this time may really be different. The technological breakthroughs of recent years — allowing machines to mimic the human mind — are enabling machines to do knowledge jobs and service jobs, in addition to factory and clerical work.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dr. Dobb’s 38-Year Run Comes To an End
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/14/12/16/2048216/dr-dobbs-38-year-run-comes-to-an-end
Dr. Dobb’s — long time icon of programming magazines — “sunsets” at the end of the year. Editor Andrew Binstock says despite growing traffic numbers, the decline in revenue from ads means there will be no new content posted after 2014 ends. (The site will stay up for at least a year, hopefully longer.)
Tomi Engdahl says:
Purch Acquires AnandTech, Dominates Tech Expert and Enthusiast Market
http://purch.com/purch-acquires-anandtech-dominates-tech-expert-and-enthusiast-market/
Leading content and commerce company adds respected mobile, computing, and IT reviews site to its brand portfolio
NEW YORK, NY (December 17, 2014) – Purch today announced the acquisition of Anandtech.com, a leader in mobile, computing and IT analysis and reviews.
AnandTech has been at the forefront of the technological evolution, providing groundbreaking reviews and trend coverage of cutting-edge mobile and computing products since Anand Shimpi, one of the tech industry’s most authoritative and respected figures, founded it in 1997 at age 14.
“The addition of AnandTech to a brand portfolio that includes Tom’s Hardware, Tom’s Guide, and Top Ten Reviews unquestionably establishes Purch as the dominant provider of in-depth, quality technology content, serving technology buyers who want to ensure the value of their potential investments,” said Greg Mason, CEO, Purch. “Technology manufacturers, too, can be assured that their messages will reach any serious buyer. The two editorial teams represent the finest, most expert group of content talent in the technology space. ”
“AnandTech represents much of my life’s work over the past 18 years,” said Anand Shimpi, founder, AnandTech. “I am happy to see it end up with a partner committed to taking good care of the brand and its readers. I wouldn’t have had it any other way.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Smartest Book About Our Digital Age Was Published in 1929
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/01/05/the-smartest-book-about-our-digital-age-was-published-in-1929.html
How José Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses helps us understand everything from YouTube to Duck Dynasty.
I’d read other works by Ortega (1883-1955), and been impressed by the Spanish philosopher’s intelligence and insight. But this 1929 study of the modern world, his most famous book, struck me as hopelessly nostalgic and elitist.
Yet I recently read The Revolt of the Masses again, and with a completely different response. The same ideas I dismissed as old-fashioned and out-of-date back in the 20th century now reveal an uncanny ability to explain the most peculiar happenings of the digital age.
Are you, like me, puzzled to learn that Popular Science magazine recently shut down comments on its website, declaring that they were bad for science? Are you amazed, like me, that Duck Dynasty is the most-watched nonfiction cable show in TV history? Are you dismayed, like me, that crappy Hollywood films about comic book heroes and defunct TV shows have taken over every movie theater? Are you depressed, like me, that symphony orchestras are declaring bankruptcy, but Justin Bieber earned $58 million last year?
If so, you need to read The Revolt of the Masses. You’ve got questions. Ortega’s got answers.
Strange to say, not all kinds of expertise are ignored nowadays. The same people who denounce expert opinion about movies or music will praise a skilled plumber or car mechanic.
Ortega also predicted the close connection between advancing technologies and these new rude attitudes. He devotes an entire chapter to the co-existence of “primitivism and technology.” He understands that the rise of new technological tools gives a global scope to the unformed opinions of people who, in a previous era, would have only focused on what was nearby and familiar. Above all, he marvels at the fact that the “disdain for science as such is displayed with greatest impunity by the technicians themselves.” Or put differently, skill in manipulating a technology (say, Instagram or the iPhone, in our day) has nothing in common with a zeal for facts and empirical evidence. That shocked Ortega, but we encounter it daily on in the web.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Eugene Kim / Business Insider:
Washington Post hopes to generate more revenue by licensing its content management system to other news organizations
Here’s A New, Inventive Way Jeff Bezos Plans To Make Money From The Washington Post
http://www.businessinsider.com/washington-post-cms-license-2014-12?op=1
When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post for $250 million in 2013, many saw it as a move to inject new life into the century-old news organization.
According to the Financial Times, The Post plans to sell its back-end content-management system (CMS) to local and regional newspapers.
If the deal goes through, it could open up a whole new revenue channel for The Post. Traditional print newspapers and magazines, like The Post, saw their businesses decline in recent years as they’ve struggled to keep up with digital. But with a new CMS-licensing business, The Post can broaden its footprint and find new growth from the technology side of its business.
The internet has radically disrupted traditional newspapers, so there’s a lot of invention and experimentation to be done …
Tomi Engdahl says:
That Spiegel NSA story is activist nonsense
http://blog.erratasec.com/2014/12/that-spiegel-nsa-story-is-nonsense.html#.VKaEe3t3B-s
Yet again activists demonstrate they are less honest than the NSA. Today, Der Spiegel has released more documents about the NSA. They largely confirm that the NSA is actually doing, in real-world situations, what we’ved suspected they can do.
The Spiegel article correctly says that the “agency is actively looking for ways to break the very standard it recommends”, and it’s obvious from context that that the Spiegel is implying this is a bad thing. But it’s a good thing, as part of the effort in improving encryption. You secure things by trying to break them. That’s why this student project was funded by the IAD side of the NSA — the side dedicated to improving cryptography. Most of us in the cybersecurity industry are trying to break things — we only trust things that we’ve tried to break but couldn’t.
Journalism is supposed to be different from activism. Journalists are supposed to be accurate and fair, to communicate rather than convince. The activist has the oppose goal, to convince the reader, even if that means exploiting misinformation.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Troll Hunters
http://www.technologyreview.com/photoessay/533426/the-troll-hunters/
A group of journalists and researchers wade into ugly corners of the Internet to expose racists, creeps, and hypocrites. Have they gone too far?
Tomi Engdahl says:
Microsoft’s latest Windows Phone app lets users publish news
http://www.neowin.net/news/microsofts-latest-windows-phone-app-lets-users-publish-news
The beta version of Microsoft’s Social News app is now available for Windows Phone users to create and publish news right from their smartphone.
According to the Windows Phone store description of the app, Social News allows users to create, edit and publish news items among friends and nearby people. It also mentions that professional media partners can pick up these articles and help the user reach a wider audience.
Last year, Microsoft launched a social news app for iOS users, however, it was mainly focused on discovering news about celebrities and didn’t offer the ability to publish anything.
Social News Beta
https://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/social-news-beta/1d276d61-9678-4daa-b60b-27b6b9036fd8
Unleash the mobile journalist in you! Social News is a service designed to help you to create and share interesting stories. Report interesting local events or cool new things to your friends, people around you and beyond together with our professional media partners.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Emily Yoshida / The Verge:
In a future fueled by hacks and leaks, will we be sedated by our own transparency?
Nothing to see here
http://www.theverge.com/2014/12/31/7475193/hack-leak-transparency-outrage-thinkpiece-hot-take-economy-2014
In a future fueled by hacks and leaks, will we be sedated by our own transparency?
The word “unprecedented” was used a lot, whether to describe the case of surveillance footage of Ray Rice knocking out his then-fiancée, or this summer’s celebrity nude photo leak, or the hydra-headed nightmare of the Sony debacle. That continually acknowledged unknown territory should be a signal to us that we are in the middle of a period of rapid growth — or decay, depending on your point of view. The things we weren’t supposed to see grossly violated our commonly accepted standards for individual privacy; they also galvanized us and fueled conversations that may have otherwise been swept under the rug.
Increasingly the story is not that a hack or leak happened, but rather what information was leaked and who stands to be hurt / ridiculed / financially affected by it. The Sony hacks happened in the middle of a veritable wave of cybersecurity fails — the US Postal Service, the Sands Casino, and Madonna were all subject to some kind of breach in 2014. Some of these stories were drowned out by the total news cycle domination of the Sony leak, but we have also become increasingly comfortable with the idea that these things happen. In the popular narrative, security breaches are being talked about less and less as crimes and more and more like inevitable glitches in our infinite series of tubes. Hacks are now just one of the many ways we get information: sometimes a tube breaks and candy starts falling out for a few seconds for whoever happens to be nearby. We’re starting to expect this as a natural part of life on Earth; like thunderstorms or earthquakes.
On some level, we suspect we are moving towards a future where we can see inside every window all the time; a future where everyone’s medical records are publicly available, where we know what everyone looks like naked, whether they’re famous or not. But how will we expect ourselves and others to behave in that future, especially once we get used to it? Our actions and words, in tandem with the way we monitor them, are being held to a rapidly evolving standard. We’ll know more about what our neighbors do in private — sexual proclivities, how we choose to entertain ourselves — but it will take a lot more to shock us. There is a potentially utopian bent to all this: once everything is known, maybe everything will be accepted. The erosion of the individual’s private life could be a symptom of a more tolerant, open-minded society.
But what about situations where we should get mad? In 2014 we got mad on the internet about a lot of things we saw, many of which we saw on the internet, many of which we wouldn’t have been able to see without the internet, many of which we were very justified in our anger over.
To grow weary of the outrage cycle is totally understandable — I am, emphatically, and I think more and more people will be in the coming year.
At my most pessimistic, it’s hard not to hear each successive internet outrage as a dying tone ringing in our ears for the last time after yet another deafening blow to our trust in the essential goodness of the world.
The logic goes that transparency makes everyone accountable. That the distribution of as much information as possible naturally leads to a society-wide system of checks and balances. This was an argument for the public airing of some of the more vitriolic emails from the Sony leak
The anticlimactic answer is probably that we wait. The internet and its transparency and outrage are both younger and faster than the people currently in charge of our movie studios and police departments.
An inevitable side effect of seeing more things, it seems, is finding more things boring.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The virtues of Vice: how punk magazine was transformed into media giant
It’s a hit with the millennial generation and predicts revenue of $1bn this year, so what can young company teach its rivals?
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jan/01/virtues-of-vice-magazine-transformed-into-global-giant
In a break from making millions as the world’s richest ad man, Sir Martin Sorrell was asked how best to understand the new media landscape. Visit the headquarters of Vice Media, said the head of WPP. Later he said: “They understand how millennials think, what content millennials want.”
The enthusiasm of 69-year-old Sorrell, whose company owns a 10% stake in Vice, is shared by many of his media mogul friends.
But how? Vice, with its gonzo-style journalism and access-all-areas attitude (typical headline: I Went Undercover in America’s Toughest Prison), is not easy to define. Yet it has somehow come to define a new media age of shareable video content, mostly because of its success – real or perceived – among young people. For these so-called “millennials” – roughly born between 1980 and 2000 – offer a sort of fountain of youth for a media industry faced with ageing readers and viewers, and distribution models still being disrupted by the internet.
Many of the 7.8 million British television viewers who tuned in to the Queen’s Christmas Day message may not have heard of Vice Media, but almost twice that number have viewed the 43-minute Vice documentary about Islamic State (Isis)
total of 15.5m views on YouTube when viewed as a whole and in parts.
With 11 digital channels ranging from Vice News to Motherboard (“covering cultural happenings in technology”), Noisey (“a music discovery channel”), a food channel called Munchies, a TV studio and film division, and a record label, as well as the tie-ups with YouTube, HBO and China Daily, Vice has a more diverse business model compared with, say, Channel 4, which offers advertisers slots around specific content at specific times. And that’s before we even start discussing the work produced by the in-house creative services agency, Virtue, which provides advertorial content. Yet a very conspicuous buzz, so hard to quantify, attached itself to Vice in 2014 and it shows no sign of abating in 2015.
Vice, which bills itself as “the coolest magazine in the world”, launched a UK edition in 2002 and now operates in 35 countries, becoming a multimedia company in the early part of the century
Vice’s journalism has plenty of critics.
Lately that criticism has become more muted as searing reports from Ukraine and Syria, among others, have won plaudits. Its news magazine show on HBO, Vice, won an Emmy last August.
At the same time, criticism of how Vice does business has increased.
So how exactly does this global business operating out of many time zones work? Go to see them, urged Sorrell. “The working conditions are different [from traditional media], the approach is different…They are more modern, much less bureaucratic and much more visceral.”
It is true that the atmosphere in the Shoreditch headquarters of Vice in London owes more to the aesthetic of Silicon Valley than to more traditional TV companies.
Launched in March 2014, Vice News is one of the fastest growing news channels on YouTube with more than a million subscribers to date. It’s easy to see the growing appeal of online video, for advertisers at least. Three-quarters of adults watch an average of 115 hours of TV news a year compared with just 27 hours a year among 16- to 24-year-olds, according to the latest Ofcom research.
Vice’s audience figure of 181 million, across all platforms, conflicts with the industry standard measurement gathered by Comscore
Enders said the Vice business model – producing “alternative” content without the huge overheads of the older media companies and using the global, cheap distribution network of the web – had created “enviable financial success”. Yet it raises concerns about the very modern blurring of the distinction between editorial and advertorial content before noting that “traditional media regularly navigates similar hazards”.
Brown has no problem with this, as long as it’s “clearly labelled”. “The best place for us is to make content we want to make and find someone to sponsor it.”
“Young people are real bullshit detectors.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
The 60-second interview: Tim Carmody, independent technology journalist
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2015/01/8559440/60-second-interview-tim-carmody-independent-technology-journalist
Tomi Engdahl says:
Terrorism against magazine:
Paris: 12 people dead after Prophet Mohammed satirists Charlie Hebdo rocked by shooting
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/paris-10-people-dead-after-prophet-mohammed-satirists-charlie-hebdo-rocked-by-shooting-1482309
Police have confirmed 11 people are dead. Witnesses said two black-clad gunmen armed with automatic weapons stormed the premises and later escaped aboard a getaway vehicle.
In 2012 anti-riot police were sent to patrol Charlie Hebdo’s offices, after the building was firebombed and its website hacked following the publication of cartoons caricaturing the Prophet Mohammed.
Charlie Hebdo attack: 12 dead at Paris offices of satirical magazine
http://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2015/jan/07/shooting-paris-satirical-magazine-charlie-hebdo
Author Salman Rushdie – who was threatened with a fatwa for writing The Satanic Verses – has tweeted in solidarity with those killed today:
Rushdie’s statement reads:
Religion, a medieval form of unreason, when combined with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms. This religious totalitarianism has caused a deadly mutation in the heart of Islam and we see the tragic consequences in Paris today.
I stand with Charlie Hebdo, as we all must, to defend the art of satire, which has always been a force for liberty and against tyranny, dishonesty and stupidity.
‘Respect for religion’ has become a code phrase meaning ‘fear of religion’. Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and, yes, our fearless disrespect.
–
There are reports in the French press that one of the attackers told an eyewitness to “tell the media that we are from Al-Qaida in the Yemen”. Guardian correspondent and an expert on Al-Qaida, Jason Burke, says this raises the possibility of an operation by an Al-Qaida affiliate that has long worried western intelligence service