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.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
A billion dollar gift for Twitter
https://medium.com/startup-grind/a-billion-dollar-gift-for-twitter-8b3d541b9e1e
Jack asked us for ideas on how to fix Twitter. A coherent plan for fixing Twitter would make millions of people happier, and pick up a billion dollars in market cap along the way. C’mon, it’ll be great!
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kate Sheppard / The Huffington Post:
WSJ EIC Gerard Baker says his publication likely won’t call a Trump falsehood a “lie” because the word implies intent to mislead, will let readers decide — “I’d be careful about using the word ‘lie,’” says Gerard Baker. — WASHINGTON Wall Street Journal Editor-in-Chief Gerard Baker …
Wall Street Journal Editor Says His Newspaper Won’t Call Donald Trump’s Lies ‘Lies’
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/wall-street-journal-lies-donald-trump_us_586934b8e4b0eb586489df43
Wall Street Journal Editor-in-Chief Gerard Baker said his newspaper would not refer to false statements from the Trump administration as “lies,” because doing so would ascribe a “moral intent” to the statements.
Baker appeared on NBC’s “Meet The Press” Sunday, where he described some of President-elect Donald Trump’s falsehoods as “questionable” and “challengeable.” But, he said, “I’d be careful about using the word ‘lie.’ ‘Lie’ implies much more than just saying something that’s false. It implies a deliberate intent to mislead.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Oliver Darcy / Business Insider:
In staff memo, BuzzFeed EIC Ben Smith predicts that in 2017 fake news will become more sophisticated, hoaxes will have higher production value, more
BuzzFeed editor-in-chief in year-end memo: ‘Fake news will become more sophisticated’ than ever in 2017
http://nordic.businessinsider.com/buzzfeed-ben-smith-2017-fake-news-2016-12?op=1&r=US&IR=T
BuzzFeed’s editor-in-chief, Ben Smith, predicted in a year-end memo to his staff Thursday that so-called fake news would thrive more than ever in 2017.
“Fake news will become more sophisticated, and fake, ambiguous, and spun-up stories will spread widely,” Smith said in the memo, which was obtained by Business Insider.
Smith continued: “Hoaxes will have higher production value. It is, for instance, getting easier and easier to create video of someone saying something he or she never said – a tool both for fake news and false denials.”
Smith warned that “powerful filter bubbles will drive competing narratives from parallel universes of facts.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Simon Van Zuylen-Wood / Politico:
In a fake news experiment, a reporter recreated Pizzagate believer Michael Flynn Jr.’s Twitter feed by creating a dummy user and following the same accounts
This Is What It’s Like to Read Fake News For Two Weeks
I lived Michael Flynn Jr.’s media diet so you wouldn’t have to.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/01/this-is-what-its-like-to-read-fake-news-for-two-weeks-214591
A few weeks ago, perplexed by the persistence of fake news, I attempted to think like someone I wasn’t. On December 13, I created a dummy Twitter account. More of a clone, actually.
I chose to emulate Michael Flynn Jr., the 33-year-old son of President-elect Trump’s choice to be national security adviser. Flynn Jr. was also one of the most prominent believers in the invented “Pizzagate” scandal that had prompted an armed man to fire shots inside a D.C. pizzeria in hopes of breaking up a child sex ring that didn’t exist.
In the days after the election, fake news—the vast majority of which demonized Hillary Clinton or manufactured good press for her opponent—had become the fixation of the mainstream media. Watchdogs published lists of websites to disbelieve. Facebook pledged to vet bogus information; gullible readers would be educated by cigarette pack-style warnings. And yet there was no perceptible decrease in the quantity of fact-free fare being peddled by enterprising young internet trolls, from California to the Balkan states
Fake News Is Real News and Real News Is Fake News
Overall, I found plenty of evidence that, yeah, fake news is a poisonous influence on the supporters of Donald Trump.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ev Williams / Medium:
Medium says it’s laying off 50 employees, about a third of its staff, and closing its NY and DC offices, as it refocuses on a “less proven” means to pay writers — We’ve decided to make some major changes at Medium. — I’ll start with the hard part: As of today …
Renewing Medium’s focus
We’ve decided to make some major changes at Medium.
https://blog.medium.com/renewing-mediums-focus-98f374a960be
Tomi Engdahl says:
Leonid Bershidsky / Bloomberg:
Medium may find there are few workable ideas to provide enough revenue to reward quality content
Why Medium Failed to Disrupt the Media
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-05/why-medium-failed-to-disrupt-the-media
v Williams, the co-founder of Twitter, spent five years building Medium into one of the slickest publishing platforms on the web. Yet he found himself in traditional-publishing purgatory on Wednesday, cutting 50 employees and searching for a new business model. There could be no better proof that delivery methods matter little and content is king.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook Pins a Scarlet Letter to Fake News
New tools and policies take on the News Feed’s worst offenders. But our truth problems are bigger than Facebook.
https://backchannel.com/facebook-is-outsourcing-its-fake-news-problem-9999f01bdfd6#.1i5d2xcx6
“We believe in giving people a voice — that’s part of our vision of the company and why we do what we do. But also that we have a responsibility to reduce the threat of fake news on Facebook and our platform.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook is going to start showing ads in the middle of its videos and sharing the money with publishers
Mark Zuckerberg has been building a video empire. Time to turn it into a business.
http://www.recode.net/2017/1/9/14211466/facebook-video-advertising-midroll
Facebook wants to show more ads to people who watch its videos and start making money for the people who supply it with those videos.
Industry sources say the social network is going to start testing a new “mid-roll” ad format, which will give video publishers the chance to insert ads into their clips after people have watched them for at least 20 seconds.
For now, Facebook will sell the ads and share the revenue with publishers, giving them 55 percent of all sales. That’s the same split offered by YouTube, which dominates the online video ad business.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amanda Taub / New York Times:
Research says Americans’ bias against the political party they oppose is so strong that it acts as a partisan prism for facts, which fuels the rise of fake news — In his farewell address as president Tuesday, Barack Obama warned of the dangers of uncontrolled partisanship.
The Real Story About Fake News Is Partisanship
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/11/upshot/the-real-story-about-fake-news-is-partisanship.html
In his farewell address as president Tuesday, Barack Obama warned of the dangers of uncontrolled partisanship. American democracy, he said, is weakened “when we allow our political dialogue to become so corrosive that people of good character are turned off from public service, so coarse with rancor that Americans with whom we disagree are not just misguided, but somehow malevolent.”
That seems a well-founded worry. Partisan bias now operates more like racism than mere political disagreement, academic research on the subject shows. And this widespread prejudice could have serious consequences for American democracy.
The partisan divide is easy to detect if you know where to look.
But the fake-news phenomenon is not the result of personal failings. And it is not limited to one end of the political spectrum. Rather, Americans’ deep bias against the political party they oppose is so strong that it acts as a kind of partisan prism for facts, refracting a different reality to Republicans than to Democrats.
Partisan refraction has fueled the rise of fake news, according to researchers who study the phenomenon.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Max Willens / Digiday:
The Atlantic generates more than 25% of its traffic by capitalizing on older content, while Refinery29 generates 35% and Thrillist generates 40%
How publishers squeeze new traffic out of their old content
http://digiday.com/publishers/publishers-wring-new-traffic-old-content/
A couple years ago, publishers decided they had to start wringing more money out of their old content. Today, some of them are practically selling the photos that hang on their office walls, but the fruits of these labors are sprouting: The Atlantic, which uses archival material on both the print and digital sides of its business, now generates more than a quarter of its traffic every month from older content. At publications like Business Insider, the figure is even higher, and for lifestyle-focused publications like Refinery29 it’s higher still: 35 percent, and growing, the company said.
“We’re not looking to build our business on single pieces of celebrity news,” said Neha Gandhi, Refinery29’s svp of content strategy and innovation. “Betting exclusively on the news cycle is far too volatile a game to play, if you’re looking to drive sustained growth and loyalty.”
Older, evergreen content has always been a source of traffic for publishers; for some, it’s core to their business models. But recently, publishers big and small have embraced a wide array of tactics to get more value out of their stories: republishing the same stories with different headlines; targeting likely subscribers with promoted posts on Facebook; syndicating old content with advertisers hungry for high-quality stories; and many more.
Focusing heavily on updating older content has driven big gains.
But updating content isn’t the only move publishers are making.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Pranav Dixit / BuzzFeed:
How WhatsApp’s intimacy and immediacy have greatly increased the spread of misinformation in India, its largest market
Viral WhatsApp Hoaxes Are India’s Own Fake News Crisis
https://www.buzzfeed.com/pranavdixit/viral-whatsapp-hoaxes-are-indias-own-fake-news-crisis?utm_term=.paBlvr5Qj#.abnpWaoV0
Misinformation and political propaganda in the world’s largest democracy often go undetected — until they have brutal real-world impact.
At 8 p.m. on Nov. 8, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi unexpectedly banned 86% of the country’s legal tender from circulation. The goal was to wipe out “black money” — a term used in India for cash that’s stashed outside the banking system to evade taxes.
Hours after the prime ministerial bombshell, the rumors started flying fast and thick over WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned instant messaging app used by more than 160 million Indians: The new notes would include an embedded GPS chip that would allow the government to track down hoarders.
Soon a video purporting to show one of these GPS notes being tracked on Google Maps went viral on WhatsApp, and then Facebook. And less than 24 hours after the rumor started , Zee News, a leading Hindi television news channel, ran a 90-second report about the high-tech note, leading the country’s reserve bank to finally debunk it.
The United States is currently experiencing a fake news crisis — bogus news articles disguised to look like real ones to mislead people, influence public opinion, and/or to simply use their massive reach to reap advertising profits. These operations are sophisticated, data-driven, and highly targeted.
Twitter is a fertile ground for all kinds of rumormongering
The primary vector for the spread of misinformation in India is WhatApp. The instant messenger is fast, free, and runs on nearly all of India’s 300 million smartphones. It’s also encrypted end-to-end
“Our problem is WhatsApp, because it’s fast, simple, and much more intimate compared to Facebook.”
A Different Kind of Fake News
India’s misinformation problem predates the internet.
cassette recordings full of fake gunfire, screams, and chants
And once the internet and social media came to the country, hoaxes took on a life of their own.
“I think it’s unfair to draw a direct parallel between the kind of organized fake news industry we saw in the lead up to the US elections and what happens in India,”
What is also a disincentive is how little average revenue each Indian user generates for Facebook annually, despite the fact that the country is Facebook’s largest market outside the United States. According to the company’s own numbers, each user in the Asia-Pacific region generates less than $8 annually, compared to a US user who generates $62.
Last year, India’s Press Information Bureau, an agency that manages government communication with the media, was left red-faced after it published a photoshopped picture of the prime minister
WhatsApp groups are the connective tissue that bind most Indians.
“We need to ask tough questions of Facebook, Twitter and Google in an Indian context.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Michael Massing / The Nation:
To understand what’s driving Trump’s supporters, editors need to create a series of new beats focusing on religion, blue-collar workers, poverty, and more —
How to Do Journalism in Trump’s America
To understand what’s driving his supporters, editors need to create a series of new beats.
https://www.thenation.com/article/how-to-do-journalism-in-trumps-america/
After Donald Trump’s victory, a debate broke out among journalists about where they should focus their attention during his presidency: on the Trump administration itself, with its mogul-rich cabinet, gross conflicts of interest, and swamp of ethical questions? Or on the American heartland, which was so overlooked during the campaign and whose decisive support for Trump caught so many news organizations by surprise?
Tomi Engdahl says:
Columbia Journalism Review:
How newsrooms are gearing up to cover the Trump presidency and why media is entering one of its most challenging periods of the past century — Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Columbus, Ohio, on March 1, 2016. (Ty Wright / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The coming storm for journalism under Trump
http://www.cjr.org/special_report/trump_media_journalism_washington_press.php
For a president who became synonymous with the abuse of executive power, Richard Nixon’s public exchanges with adversarial reporters seem quaint by today’s standards. Take Nixon’s March 1974 news conference in Houston, hosted before a convention for the National Association of Broadcasters.
“With Nixon, lying was very much with the intent to deceive—he lied through his teeth that he didn’t lead a criminal conspiracy from the White House,” says David Greenberg, a Rutgers University professor who chronicled presidential PR machines in Republic of Spin. “Trump is not quite the biggest liar [to be president], but he is, in a way, the most open and nonchalant about it. He’ll comfortably lie about something that’s so obviously false. It’s almost like, is it a lie if there isn’t the intent to deceive or expectation to deceive?”
Whereas all modern presidents have spun information—even lied—the reality TV star actively obstructs a fact-based public debate like no other before him.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Brian Stelter / CNNMoney:
White House press secretary Sean Spicer attacks media for accurately reporting inauguration crowds, warning “we’re going to hold the press accountable”
White House press secretary attacks media for accurately reporting inauguration crowds
http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/21/media/sean-spicer-press-secretary-statement/index.html?sr=twCNN012117ean-spicer-press-secretary-statement/
the comment came after a long digression about how many people had shown up to watch Trump be sworn in as president.
“This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period,” Spicer said, contradicting all available data.
Aerial photos have indicated that former president Barack Obama’s first inauguration attracted a much larger crowd. Nielsen ratings show that Obama also had a bigger television audience.
His statement included several specific misstatements of fact
Karen Tumulty of the Washington Post said Spicer’s assertion about “what you guys should be writing” was “chilling.”
Reactions were overwhelmingly negative, and not just from journalists.
Spicer’s statement came two hours after Trump spoke at CIA headquarters and described his “running war with the media.” Trump spent several minutes of that speech complaining about news coverage.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Will Cathcart / Facebook:
Facebook’s Trending topics will show regional, not personalized, stories moving forward, publisher headline and name under each topic, more — Today we’re announcing three updates to Trending, a feature that shows people popular topics being discussed on Facebook that they might not see in their News Feed:
Continuing Our Updates to Trending
http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2017/01/continuing-our-updates-to-trending/
Publisher Headlines
In order to provide people with more context on what is trending on Facebook, we will now display a headline from a publisher’s article about that topic. This was the most requested feature addition since the last update we made to Trending in August.
Everyone in the same region sees the same topics
Lastly, the list of which topics are trending on Facebook will no longer be personalized based on someone’s interests. Everyone in the same region will see the same topics. This is designed to help make sure people don’t miss important topics being discussed on Facebook that might not show up in their News Feed.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Fake News Is About to Get Even Scarier than You Ever Dreamed
What we saw in the 2016 election is nothing compared to what we need to prepare for in 2020.
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/01/fake-news-technology
Less than a month after Donald Trump was improbably elected the 45th president of the United States, a strange story began to make its way across social media.
At corporations and universities across the country, incipient technologies appear likely to soon obliterate the line between real and fake. Or, in the simplest of terms, advancements in audio and video technology are becoming so sophisticated that they will be able to replicate real news—real TV broadcasts, for instance, or radio interviews—in unprecedented, and truly indecipherable, ways. One research paper published last year by professors at Stanford University and the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg demonstrated how technologists can record video of someone talking and then change their facial expressions in real time. The professors’ technology could take a news clip of, say, Vladimir Putin, and alter his facial expressions in real time in hard-to-detect ways. In fact, in this video demonstrating the technology, the researchers show how they did manipulate Putin’s facial expressions and responses, among those of other people, too.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Ev Williams: our goal is to launch Medium consumer subscription product this quarter
Medium plans to launch a consumer subscription product this quarter
https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/02/medium-subscriptions/
Medium CEO Ev Williams announced today at Upfront Summit that his company will launch a consumer subscription product, with the first version coming this quarter. This could help develop an additional revenue stream apart from advertisements. Finding a strong revenue source is critical, since Medium decided to lay off 50 staff, close its New York office, and announce a new direction last month.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Germany struggles to fight anti-migrant fake news amid fears it could influence its election
https://news.vice.com/story/germany-fake-news-election-migrants
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jack Shafer / Politico:
Study: 88.5% of the total time UK readers devote to 11 national newspaper brands is spent on the print edition, while 7.49% goes to mobile and 4% to PCs
Print Still Refuses to Surrender
The readers have spoken: You can pry their newspapers from their cold, dead hands.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/02/print-still-refuses-to-surrender-214732
Hawi Moore says:
Great
maryjane says:
great information.