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:
Andrew Watts / Medium:
A 19-year-old college student describes how and why his demographic uses the various social media platforms
A Teenager’s View on Social Media
Written by an actual teen
https://medium.com/backchannel/a-teenagers-view-on-social-media-1df945c09ac6
Facebook
In short, many have nailed this on the head. It’s dead to us. Facebook is something we all got in middle school because it was cool but now is seen as an awkward family dinner party we can’t really leave.
Instagram
Instagram is by far the most used social media outlet for my age group. Please note the verbiage there—it is the most used social media outlet. Meaning, although the most people are on Facebook, we actually post stuff on Instagram.
Twitter
To be honest, a lot of us simply do not understand the point of Twitter. There is always a core group at every school that uses it very religiously to tweet and another group that uses it to simply watch or retweet, but besides that many don’t use it.
Snapchat
Snapchat is quickly becoming the most used social media network, especially with the advent of My Story.
Tumblr
Tumblr is a place to follow/be followed by a bunch of random strangers, yet not have your identity be attached to it. Tumblr is like a secret society that everyone is in, but no one talks about. Tumblr is where you are your true self and surround yourself (through who you follow) with people who have similar interests. It’s often seen as a “judgment-free zone”
Yik Yak
Yik Yak is a rather new contender, however, a ton of friends in college have the application. It has gotten to be so addicting because it focuses solely on the content of your posts—there are no followers, no profiles, nothing.
Medium
Many of my peers look for platforms to begin a writing blog that they can share with their friends and family. When I hear my friends say this, they automatically think of creating a WordPress site. For some reason, WordPress seems like the more “sophisticated” website to begin a blog. Others who have had experience with Tumblr will choose to open up a separate blog on there, one that is not connected to their “personal” blog on the platform.
However, once I have introduced Medium to those my age, I have never seen them turn back in terms of a platform to publish a blog.
The Others
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Layman’s Guide to Hiring the Right Copywriter
http://www.snappycopywriting.com/the-laymans-guide-to-hiring-the-right-copywriter/
The Hunt to Hire the Right Copywriter
I hear you. You’re frustrated. You’ve wandered from website to website trying to find the mecca of all writers, and found they were either kooky, too expensive, or too complicated.
The reason you are confused is because nobody told you there are different types of freelance copywriters out there and they speak very different copywriting “languages.”
Among freelance copywriters, you will find a broad range of specialties which makes hiring the right copywriter somewhat of a challenge.
This concept goes beyond having a copywriting niche. There are business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-client (B2C) copywriters. There are copywriters that focus on SEO or long copy, and others that write only press releases or brochures. Some focus on an industry. And many of them are ex-agency copywriters looking to branch out on their own after a frantic life of working at an ad agency.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Writers living in ‘free’ democracies are self-censoring
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-01/08/pen-survey-government-censorship
The chilling effects of government mass surveillance that Tim Berners-Lee predicted would follow in the wake of the Snowden leaks, appear to have materialised. At least among the writers of the world.
An opinion survey of 772 writers living in 50 countries, including those across Western Europe, was carried out by literary association the PEN American Centre between August 18 and October 15, 2014. It found that writers living in democratic countries classed as “Free” — in terms of self-expression and related liberties — are self-censoring public and private language at levels nearing those of repressed nations.
As you might expect, the team behind the study calls for government reforms around mass surveillance.
The PEN survey, which asked the writers to think about a series of questions specifically in context of government surveillance, used a measure developed by a non-governmental US democracy watchdog to class countries as “Free”, “Partly Free”, or “Not Free”. The results are fairly staggering, with 42 percent of respondents in “Free” countries admitting they have “curtailed or avoided activities on social media, or seriously considered it, due to fear of government surveillance”, versus 53 percent in those countries deemed “Not Free”.
Twenty-six percent of writers in “Free” nations admitted to refraining from conducting internet searches or visiting sites on controversial topics, or seriously considering such behaviour, while the figure is exactly the same for those living in “Not Free” countries.
“Free” nation stats that are just as worrying, though still around 30 percent below the levels of “Not Free” nations, include the admission that 34 percent have avoided writing or speaking on a particular topic, or have seriously considered it, while 31 percent have avoided conversations on phone or email, or seriously considered it.
At a time where journalists are being killed in Europe by extremists, for their ideas, and writers are self-censoring for fear of government intrusion, the future of free speech in the apparently “free” world, looks to be a murky one if left unchallenged.
Tomi Engdahl says:
John Herrman / The Awl:
Facebook’s latest post on video growth shows intent to demote publishers to producers, with uncertain benefits
Territory Annexed
http://www.theawl.com/2015/01/everything-ends
Here is an update from Facebook about what “the shift to video”—that is, the sudden prevalence of auto-playing clips posted directly to the site—means to “creators.” (These updates are the closest thing to direct guidance from Facebook that many media companies, large and small, have ever received).
It is a straightforward post about how to get your videos noticed, and shared, on Facebook. One thing to keep in mind, for example, is that your video will probably be viewed primarily on phones, where it will play automatically but without sound.
“What the Shift to Video Means,” then, is that one major type of media is being pulled in-house by Facebook; it means that Facebook is not satisfied merely facilitating the spread of other publishers’ products. It’s not that such an arrangement is unprofitable—Facebook has made a great deal of money selling ads against links to media originally published elsewhere—it’s that the new vision, in which Facebook is not just theoretically but practically constitutes the entire internet, is potentially more profitable. Publishers, in Facebook’s view, are middlemen.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Pew Internet:
Pew Report: Facebook growth slows, but user engagement increases; while Twitter and others grow userbase, not engagement
Social Media Update 2014
http://www.pewinternet.org/2015/01/09/social-media-update-2014/
In a new survey conducted in September 2014, the Pew Research Center finds that Facebook remains by far the most popular social media site. While its growth has slowed, the level of user engagement with the platform has increased.
Other platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn saw significant increases over the past year in the proportion of online adults who now use their sites.
Tomi Engdahl says:
One year in, The Information sticks to subscription model
http://digiday.com/publishers/information-subscription-model/
In late 2013, former Wall Street Journal reporter Jessica Lessin turned heads with the launch of The Information, a tech site that ditched ads for a $399 per year subscription.
The move was risky: Most publishers on the Web are chasing pageviews and ad revenue, two natural parts of the media ecosystem things that The Information deliberately shuns. The Information, along with sites like The Daily Dish, were betting that they could build a digital media model based solely on direct revenue from subscribers, even if that inevitably meant smaller audiences.
A little over a year later, The Information has a subscriber base “in the low thousands” according to Lessin, with executives in finance, technology and media. It has recruited top journalists like former Wall Street Journal editor Martin Peers and Amir Efrati. And it has broken stories such as Google’s Dropcam acquisition, Amazon’s deal to buy Twitch and an inside look at Disney’s move to buy Maker Studios.
Now, the question is less about sustainability but whether such a model can support an ambitious, sizable journalistic operation. In comparison, The Information has a five-person newsroom while Business Insider boasts 90. In all, The Information has nine employee
“Audience obviously matters in the media business. You write stories to make an impact,”
While The Information is growing, its success is far from guaranteed. Starting a new media company is difficult even when its content is freely available. Putting it all behind a paywall makes growing that much harder.
“To grow, they need to create awareness, and people need to see what they are about,” said media analyst Thomas Baekdal. “A closed-subscription model makes that very difficult, because they are basically asking people to pay a huge subscription price up front, before people have any idea if it’s worth it.”
Lessin said that The Information’s re-subscription rate is “incredibly high.” The advantage of subscription models is the magic of auto-renewal, which provides a more predictable revenue base than the fickle ad market.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Heidi Moore / Nieman Lab:
Reaching readers who don’t use apps, alerts, social media, but do want to get news presents a challenge
The readers we can’t friend
http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/12/the-readers-we-cant-friend/
“There’s a vast segment of America that wants to consume news, but isn’t as savvy and app-happy as journalists.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Andy Carvin / The Reported.ly Team:
Lessons from First Look’s Reported.ly during the Charlie Hebdo story: needed more Facebook engagement, maybe a reddit live blog, and more recaps
Baptism By Fire: What We Learned Covering #CharlieHebdo On Our 3rd Day
https://medium.com/reportedly/baptism-by-fire-what-we-learned-covering-charliehebdo-on-our-3rd-day-fc6f479c6235
Tomi Engdahl says:
Eric Blattberg / Digiday:
Medium launches Foreword, a weekly original video conversation series featuring authors and writers — Medium goes highbrow with its first original video series — Like most of the publishing world, platform-publisher hybrid Medium has started to produce original video.
http://digiday.com/publishers/medium-goes-highbrow-first-original-video-series/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Parade in no rush to add papers in wake of USA Weekend’s end
http://nypost.com/2015/01/09/parade-in-no-rush-to-add-papers-in-wake-of-usa-weekends-end/
Big changes are afoot in the Sunday magazine market, but the lone survivor, Nashville-based Athlon Media Group, the new owner of Parade, is in no rush to add papers to its roster now that USA Weekend has gone kaput.
That stands in sharp contrast to the bidding wars that erupted in the 1990s between Parade and the now-defunct USA Weekend when both slugged it out to try to gain market share with lucrative payments to the big daily papers to carry the Sunday magazine.
That strategy backfired when ad markets collapsed in recent years.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Teju Cole / New Yorker:
Free speech and liberty were already in crisis before the assault on France’s Charlie Hebdo
http://mediagazer.com/#a150110p2
Tomi Engdahl says:
Susie Cagle / Pacific Standard:
Tech companies support free speech only when it doesn’t endanger their ability to make a profit
Do Tech Companies Really Support Free Speech?
http://www.psmag.com/navigation/nature-and-technology/tech-companies-really-support-free-speech-98116/
Tech companies are companies first, and their politics shift to best serve their business. For platforms like Facebook and Google, “free speech” protection is only a central principle when and where it is convenient. And even when it does serve their profit models, it is arguably doing so at the expense of the modern press, the work of cartoonists and other image-makers, and the actual making of “free” speech online.
Tech’s dedication to “free speech” is apparently a quite serendipitous phenomenon.
EVEN WHEN THEY ARE not implicitly supporting assaults on free political speech, tech companies are “democratizing” speech in a way that builds wealth for themselves and strips it from creators. By its nature, the network dilutes authorship.
Tech platforms seeking as much “free” and high-quality content as possible are now in some cases actually preventing the actual making of it. One magazine editor said he doesn’t publish many cartoons because “comics tend to get thrown on Imgur or another source and circulated without credit.”
Modern technology is both useful and dangerous for visual artists.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Michael Sebastian / AdAge:
By refusing to compete with sites like Business Insider for ad dollars, Quartz hopes to build a profitable news business — Quartz’s Digital Media Strategy Begins to Crystallize — When Atlantic Media introduced business-news publication Quartz in September 2012, it spent about $10 million on the launch …
Quartz’s Digital Media Strategy Begins to Crystallize
Growth Has So Far Been Rock Solid, But Can It Become Profitable?
http://adage.com/article/media/quartz-s-digital-media-strategy-begins-crystallize/296516/
When Atlantic Media introduced business-news publication Quartz in September 2012, it spent about $10 million on the launch, according to people familiar with the matter. That’s a far cry from the more than $100 million Condé Nast dropped in 2007 rolling out its glossy business magazine, Portfolio. After just two years, amid stiff economic headwinds, Portfolio folded.
Unlike Portfolio, Quartz is digital only — existing purely as a web and mobile site. Two years after its introduction, Quartz has surpassed 10 million monthly readers in the U.S., reached eight figures in revenue and moved into a larger office in New York City to accommodate its growing staff.
“Quartz is a breath of fresh air, especially compared with the legacy publishers,”
But the question looming over Quartz is whether it can continue to grow its audience, add revenue streams and start throwing money to its owner Atlantic Media.
The site is relatively small. In November, Quartz attracted 7 million unique visitors in the U.S. across desktop and mobile devices, according to ComScore.
During the same period, Business Insider had 37 million U.S. unique visitors; The Wall Street Journal racked up 19 million; and Fortune attracted 8 million, according to ComScore.
Quartz is unprofitable, though its executives say that’s by design. “The prudent thing to do in this stage is to invest in more sales staff, more journalists,”
“There’s still a lot of headroom in growth in terms of basic ad revenue and traffic, but I don’t think you have to have 100 million or 60 million in audience to be a successful business,”
Quartz is gathering momentum by appealing to a very specific audience: the high-earning business elites jetting between New York, London and Hong Kong. Advertisers will pay more to reach this audience because they’re seen as big spenders.
In 2015, Quartz plans to tackle video, an area with intense demand from advertisers. It will also look to grow its revenue streams beyond advertising. “We have a very aggressive growth plan for our events business,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dylan Byers / Politico:
If media avoids offending one religious group, it should avoid offending all religious groups — Does free media have an obligation to Islam? — In the wake of the Paris terrorist attacks, both America’s paper of record (The New York Times) and its network of record (CNN) …
http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2015/01/does-free-media-have-an-obligation-to-islam-201064.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Anthony Ha / TechCrunch:
Timeline news app launches to give the historical context behind the day’s headlines — Timeline Launches News App To Give You The Context Behind The Day’s Headlines — One big complaint about current news coverage is that there’s not enough context — an article or TV report might tell …
Timeline Launches News App To Give You The Context Behind The Day’s Headlines
http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/15/timeline-launches-news-app-to-give-you-the-context-behind-the-days-headlines/
One big complaint about current news coverage is that there’s not enough context — an article or TV report might tell you what happened today, but it gives you no understanding about the history that led up to today’s news. Now a startup called Timeline is aiming to change that.
When you open the Timeline app, it might look at first like just another news aggregator.
But while Timeline summarizes and links to the Risen news, its focus is broader than that — as the headline indicates, the real story it presents is about the often tense relationship between US presidents and the press. So underneath a brief news summary, you get to the meat of what Timeline does — which is, yes, a timeline, starting with President Grover Cleveland complaining about journalists at his wedding way back in 1886, then jumping through things like the Monica Lewinsky scandal and how the press covered the Bush administration’s claims about Iraq, then finally ending on Risen and, more generally, Obama’s not-particularly-open relationship with the press.
The app was developed by Axiom Zen, an incubator and consulting firm. Axiom Zen’s Head of Marketing and Growth Spencer Chen
It’s a cool idea and a good-looking app. My initial quibble is that Timeline doesn’t actually do a great job of presenting stories from elsewhere
(The initial release is for iOS and mobile web.)
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ricardo Bilton / Digiday:
Techmeme’s Gabe Rivera on tech media: ‘A lot of intellectual dishonesty’
http://digiday.com/publishers/techmemes-gabe-rivera-tech-media-lot-intellectual-dishonesty/
Gabe Rivera has a love-hate relationship with the tech media world. Known both for helming curation site Techmeme and for his often sarcastic Twitter personality, Rivera is knee-deep in the cut-throat Silicon Valley media echo chamber, which is becoming more crowded by the day. That love-hate relationship is shared by tech reporters, bloggers and pundits, who jostle daily for the attention, and Rivera and Techmeme’s team of editors.
Rivera spoke to Digiday about the state of tech media, Techmeme’s crusade to crush clickbait, and why he’s not optimistic about the Dan Lyons’ era at Valleywag.
The list of tech sites gets longer each day, but a lot of them seem to be doing the same thing. Are you optimistic about the industry?
There’s a lot to be optimistic about. There’s never been a better time for readers wanting to keep up with what’s happening in the industry. A big reason for that is, of course, all the new news organizations that now have resources to report. But another factor is all the writing outside the confines of “journalism”: commentary on blogs, Twitter, Facebook, etc., from analysts and participants in the industry. You actually need to take that into account in addition to the “journalism” to get the most complete pictures of what’s happening (which is precisely why it’s Techmeme’s job to summarize all that in one page).
But there also lots of reasons to be pessimistic as well.
On the down side are a lot of things you’ve heard already. Like the pervasiveness of churnalism, and how writers at news publications aren’t nearly as knowledgeable as they should be to cover their beat. These are real problems, but hard to counter given the tight supply of good writers. Another problem: lying by omission, hyperbole and other forms of intellectual dishonesty are creeping into more tech reporting.
Is that a digital media problem or a tech reporting problem?
Intellectual dishonesty has plagued media even in the decades and centuries before digital, but I think it’s seen a big increase in tech reporting in just the last couple of years. As more reporters and commentators turn their attention to the flourishing tech industry, an increasing number are relying on bogus arguments to cut through the din.
Another big issue these days is clickbait.
Headlines on most new sites are intended to get you to click and, therefore, omit key details that could easily have been included. Our headlines are designed to save you a click, unless you’re interested in reading the full story.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Magzter Gold offers unlimited digital copies of 2,000 magazines
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-magzter-unlimited-subscription-20150120-story.html
For $9.99 a month, readers can access unlimited digital copies of 2,000 magazine titles through Magzter Gold
Magazines face the same problem as newspapers: Readers have grown used to receiving articles for free online
“Digital magazines are growing, but not the way publishers expected. It’s growing slowly and the engagement level of magazines is not that great.”
As magazine publishers struggle to get a declining number of print subscribers to switch to digital magazines delivered to tablets and phones, they’re experimenting with different delivery formats and subscription models, trying to hit on something that works. Magzter Gold, which went online Monday, is the latest attempt.
Worldwide magazine industry revenue — about $100 billion — has been in decline since 2010, according to report released in June by the business consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. Meantime, data from the Alliance for Audited Media show that digital consumption of magazines remains under 4% of total U.S. circulation.
“Digital magazines are growing, but not the way publishers expected,” said Vijay Radhakrishnan, a Magzter co-founder. “It’s growing slowly and the engagement level of magazines is not that great.”
Part of the problem is the same as that faced by the newspaper business: Readers have grown used to receiving news, stories and photos for free. As they experiment with ideas like Magzter, some magazines are likely to cut back on what they offer free online.
“You’re trying to change consumer habits of having so much great content available for free,” said Craig Huber, an independent media industry analyst at Huber Research. “That’s been very tough for the past 20 years.”
Switching readers from free-of-charge websites to paid-for digital experiences is crucial to sustaining any increases in the Internet economy, Huber said. Magazines rely on subscribers for about $1 in every $3 of revenue, he said.
Magzter Gold isn’t the first company to offer magazine subscription bundles online.
One of Magzter’s competitors, digital newsstand Zinio, offers access to six magazines out of its lineup of 250 titles for $5 a month through its Z-Pass package.
Another competitor, Next Issue, charges up to $14.99 a month for subscriptions to dozens of magazines.
After the release of the iPad in 2010, magazine publishers thought they could build their own apps, draw tons of digital subscribers and coast into the Internet economy without the troubles that the newspaper, music, film and TV industries have endured. But it hasn’t been so.
Consumers have found the experience of discovering new magazines to be poor. The steep print subscription discounts they had been used to aren’t as widely available; barely 10% of readers traditionally have paid the full newsstand price, Huber said.
When readers did subscribe, they forgot to check for new issues on their tablets or smartphones, Radhakrishnan said.
To ease readers in, Magzter is also selling a $4.99-a-month plan that limits reading to five magazines of a customer’s choosing.
Both of Magzter’s plans include access to back issues. The company’s revenue split with publishers is based on how many pages are read, the price of a magazine and the time spent on pages.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook:
Facebook to reduce distribution of deliberately false or misleading posts in News Feed, characterized by hoax-busting comments and high removal rate by sharers — News Feed FYI: Showing Fewer Hoaxes — The goal of News Feed is to catch up with your friends and find the things that matter to you.
News Feed FYI: Showing Fewer Hoaxes
http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2015/01/news-feed-fyi-showing-fewer-hoaxes/
What are hoaxes?
Hoaxes are a form of News Feed spam that includes scams (“Click here to win a lifetime supply of coffee”), or deliberately false or misleading news stories (“Man sees dinosaur on hike in Utah”). People often share these hoaxes and later decide to delete their original posts after they realize they have been tricked. These types of posts also tend to receive lots of comments from friends letting people know this is a hoax, and comments containing links to hoax-busting websites. In fact, our testing found people are two times more likely to delete these types of posts after receiving such a comment from a friend.
Tomi Engdahl says:
White House breaks own State of the Union embargo for online audience
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jan/20/white-house-breaks-state-of-the-union-embargo-medium
Obama administration posts full text of president’s speech before its own media embargo in unprecedented decision targeting internet-savvy readers
The White House posted the entire text of President Obama’s 2015 State of the Union address on the internet on Tuesday, breaking its own media embargo in an unprecedented decision that put the entire speech online before the president even began.
The Obama administration used the website Medium to publish a copy of the text, climaxing weeks of media previews and a growing use of social media by the White House that circumvents reporters and the filter of the press.
President Obama’s State of the Union Address — Remarks As Prepared for Delivery
https://medium.com/@WhiteHouse/president-obamas-state-of-the-union-address-remarks-as-prepared-for-delivery-55f9825449b2
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nobody Is Using Google+
http://uk.businessinsider.com/google-active-users-2015-1?r=US
Nobody is using Google+. At least, far fewer than you might imagine. Analytics and visualisation blogger Kevin Anderson charted information about Google’s social networking platform and found that despite billions of sign-ups, hardly anyone actually does anything on it.
Anderson studied data compiled by Edward Morbius, who says that just 9% of its 2.2 billion users actively post public content.
https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/nAya9WqdemIoVuVWVOYQUQ
Summary of findings:
There are about 2.2 billion G+ profiles total.
Of these, about 9% have any publicly-posted content.
Of those, about 37% have as their most recent activity a YouTube comment, another 8% profile photo changes (45% of all “active” profiles).
Only 6% of profiles which have ever been publicly active have any post activity in 2015 (18 days so far).
Only around half of those, 3% of active profiles, are not YouTube comments.
That is, 0.3% of all G+ profiles, about 6.6 million users, have made public G+ post in 2015. That’s ~367,000 users posting daily if each posts only once (the actual post frequency will vary somewhat).
This doesn’t include non-public posts or comments, or lurkers, but it’s a pretty clear indication of the level of publicly visible activity on G+.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook worth more than Portugal? Hell, it’s worth a LOT more than THAT
Zuck should have hired ME
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/21/worstall_weds_facebook/
Facebook has commissioned a report showing what vast amounts of wonderful, beneficial economic activity it is responsible for indicates that the company in fact contributes nothing.
Not that the Wall Street Journal uses quite that language but the message is clear:
“The results are meaningless,” Stanford economist Roger Noll said in an email. “Facebook is an effect, not a cause, of the growth of Internet access and use.” … “The value of smartphones is that they help you read Facebook – in addition to other benefits – not vice versa,” Cowen said, calling the study’s calculations “bad reasoning.”
However, having dismissed this calculation of the economic impact of Facebitch as nothing but a hot, soapy hand job to the corporate ego we do rather face the problem of working out what the hell the contribution of Facebitch to the economy is. And that’s problematic, as a conversation I’ve been having around and about recently reveals. Because in conventional economic statistics that contribution by Facebook is only $12bn globally. And that’s just insane.
So, in the GDP statistics Facebook’s value is the advertising that it sells. That’s the production. T
This led to Marc Andreessen musing on where the heck all the economic growth is. We can see technology roaring ahead but can’t seem to see the results in GDP. Nor in productivity for that matter. So where is the effect of all that roaring technology? Larry Summers then said yup, it’s all a bit of a puzzle but it’s not because this new tech is deflationary, as Andreessen had mused.
A reasonable value to start with is the US average (mean) wage of $24 an hour. We obviously prefer to be on Facebook to working. At the margin that is. Another more reasonable answer is at the minimum wage.
es, yes, I know there’re holes in this reasoning. No, we don’t think that anyone would willingly pay $7.25 an hour to play on social media. But it’s also true that people do this a lot, this social media, and thus they must assign a value to the doing of it.
And thus we can reach an “economic value in consumption” for Facebook, for the US, of $232bn to $769bn. Which is, I agree, a bit mad.
Another way of putting this is that something that Americans spend 32 billion hours a year on, voluntarily, can’t really have an economic value of only $12bn. It’s just nonsense to value people’s time at under 40 cents an hour.
We’ve thus got a vast range of economic values that we can ascribe to the adslinging network. It could be nothing [or indeed less than nothing -Ed] as that editor proposes. It could be $12bn as conventional accounts would have it. It could be $100bn to the US economy and globally,
Tomi Engdahl says:
Rusbridger: Journalism in UK will be changed forever if Government approves draft RIPA code
http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/rusbridger-journalism-uk-will-be-changed-forever-if-government-approves-draft-ripa-code
Journalism will be changed forever in the UK if a draft code on state use of surveillance is adopted, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger has warned.
Today is the final day of a six-week consultation on a draft Home Office code on use of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. It states that journalists’ telecoms records are not privileged and can be accessed by police without need for external approval.
This week around 100 editors, including every UK national newspaper editor, signed a joint protest letter against the code organised by Press Gazette and the Society of Editors.
“If sources feel they can quite easily be identified by the electronic trail involved in talking on the phone, or sending an email, or meeting someone at a traceable location there won’t be many sources in future.
“Journalism – which relies on unauthorised sources for much that is good and valuable – would be changed forever in this country.
“That’s not something to sneak in a few paragraphs of an obscure Home Office consultation document. It’s the subject of the utmost importance to society.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Brian Veseling / WAN-IFRA:
Europe’s free dailies face drastic decline due to reliance on ads and rise of mobile phones
Twenty years on, are Europe’s free dailies in a free fall? A Q&A with Piet Bakker
http://blog.wan-ifra.org/2015/01/19/twenty-years-on-are-europes-free-dailies-in-a-free-fall-a-qa-with-piet-bakker
Once seen as a path to quick success with advertisers and a sure-fire winner with public-transport commuters, free daily newspapers in Europe have taken a hard hit in the past several years.
In a blog post earlier this month, Piet Bakker, a journalism professor in the Netherlands who has chronicled the ups and downs of free dailies on his Newspaper Innovation website since 2004, noted that recent years have seen a drastic decline of free daily newspapers throughout Europe.
At their peak in 2007, there were some 140 free daily papers in 31 European countries with a circulation of approximately 27 million, according to Bakker’s post.
However, by the end of 2013, there were just 65 free dailies in 23 European countries, with an estimated circulation of 14 million.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Newspaper Innovation
Daily blogging on free daily newspapers
http://www.newspaperinnovation.com/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Quinn Norton / Medium:
Barrett Brown sentence shows increasing dangers of security journalism, and why reporters should step back until laws are fixed — We Should All Step Back from Security Journalism — I’ll Go First — I started studying the computer underground back when I worked in tech, as an early web developer, in the mid 1990s.
We Should All Step Back from Security Journalism
I’ll Go First
https://medium.com/message/we-should-all-step-back-from-security-journalism-e474cd67e2fa
Barrett Brown’s Case
Part of Barrett Brown’s 63 month sentence, issued yesterday, is a 12 month sentence for a count of Accessory After the Fact, of the crime of hacking Stratfor. This sentence was enhanced by Brown’s posting a link in chat and possessing credit card data. This, and a broad pattern of misunderstanding and criminalizing normal behavior online, has lead me to feel that the situation for journalists and security researchers is murky and dangerous.
I am stepping back from reporting on hacking/databreach stories, and restricting my assistance to other journalists to advice.
I can’t look at the specific data another journalist has, and I can’t pass it along to a security expert, without feeling like there’s risk to the journalists I work with, the security experts, and myself.
I know some of my activist hacker contacts will find this cowardly of me. Many of them risk much more than this in the course of their lives, but I have two replies to this. One is that I have a family to care for including a child, and I can’t ask them to enter this murky legal territory. The other is that my causes are often not the same as the causes I write about, and I feel I best serve my causes by stepping back and highlighting this problem of law to the public.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Trevor Timm / Guardian:
The war on leaks has gone way too far when journalists’ emails are under surveillance
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/25/war-on-leaks-gone-way-too-far-journalist-emails-are-under-surveillance
The US government’s demands for the private emails of WikiLeaks staffers is outrageous. Disliking Julian Assange is a disgraceful reason for anyone to stay silent
The outrageous legal attack on WikiLeaks and its staffers, who are exercising their First Amendment rights to publish classified information in the public interest—just like virtually every other major news organization in this country—is an attack on freedom of the press itself, and it’s shocking that more people aren’t raising their voices (and pens, and keyboards) in protest.
In the past four years, WikiLeaks has had their Twitter accounts secretly spied on, been forced to forfeit most of their funding after credit card companies unilaterally cut them off, had the FBI place an informant inside their news organization, watched their supporters hauled before a grand jury, and been the victim of the UK spy agency GCHQ hacking of their website and spying on their readers.
Now we’ve learned that, as The Guardian reported on Sunday, the Justice Department got a warrant in 2012 to seize the contents – plus the metadata on emails received, sent, drafted and deleted – of three WikiLeaks’ staffers personal Gmail accounts, which was inexplicably kept secret from them for almost two and a half years.
Most journalists and press freedom groups have been inexplicably quiet about the Justice Department’s treatment of WikiLeaks and its staffers ever since, despite the fact that there has been a (justified) backlash against the rest of the Justice Department’s attempt to subpoena reporters’ phone call records and spy on their emails. But almost all of the tactics used against WikiLeaks by the Justice Department in their war on leaks were also used against mainstream news organizations.
Unfortunately the news world has never rallied around WikiLeaks’ First Amendment rights they way they should – sometimes even refusing to acknowledge they are a journalism organization, perhaps because they dare to do things a little differently than the mainstream media, or because WikiLeaks tweets provocative political opinions, or because they think its founder, Julian Assange, is an unsympathetic figure.
Those are all disgraceful excuses to ignore the government’s overreach: the rights of news organizations everywhere are under just as much threat whether the government reads the private emails of staffers at WikiLeaks, Fox News or the Associated Press. In the eyes of the law, the organizations are virtually indistinguishable, as legal scholars from across the political spectrum have documented for years.
It shouldn’t be the government’s job to decide who is enough of a journalist in their minds to qualify for the constitutional and legal protections that can and should be afforded to all of them – since it’s clear that, when they do, almost nobody qualifies, whether it’s James Risen, James Rosen or Julian Assange.
Tomi Engdahl says:
C.I.A. Officer Is Found Guilty in Leak Tied to Times Reporter
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/27/us/politics/cia-officer-in-leak-case-jeffrey-sterling-is-convicted-of-espionage.html?_r=0
WASHINGTON — Jeffrey A. Sterling, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer, was convicted of espionage Monday on charges that he told a reporter for The New York Times about a secret operation to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program.
The conviction is a significant victory for the Obama administration, which has conducted an unprecedented crackdown on officials who speak to journalists about security matters without the administration’s approval. Prosecutors prevailed after a yearslong fight in which the reporter, James Risen, refused to identify his sources.
Bruce D. Brown, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, an advocacy organization for journalists, said the Sterling conviction showed that forcing reporters to identify their confidential sources was unnecessary and ill advised.
“The speed with which the jury reached its verdict shows that reporter’s testimony was not needed for the government to make its case,” Mr. Brown said. “I think going forward this is going to be a powerful precedent.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tom LoBianco / Indianapolis Star:
Governor of Indiana plans to launch state-run, taxpayer-funded news service to compete with other media
http://www.indystar.com/story/news/2015/01/26/pence-starts-state-run-news-outlet-to-compete-with-media/22370005/
Pence is planning in late February to launch “Just IN,” a website and news outlet that will feature stories and news releases written by state press secretaries and is being overseen by a former Indianapolis Star reporter, Bill McCleery.
The Pence news outlet will take stories written by state communications directors and publish them on its website. Stories will “range from straightforward news to lighter features, including personality profiles.”
The endeavor will come at some taxpayer cost, but precisely how much is unclear. The news service has two dedicated employees, whose combined salary is nearly $100,000, according to a search of state employee salary data.
“I think it’s a ludicrous idea,” said Jack Ronald, publisher of one such newspaper, the Portland Commercial Review. “I have no problem with public information services — the Purdue University agriculture extension service does a great job. But the notion of elected officials presenting material that will inevitably have a pro-administration point of view is antithetical to the idea of an independent press.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Snapchat launches ad-supported Discover feature to show off videos and stories
http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/27/7919809/snapchat-launches-discover-feature-ad-support
Snapchat has launched “Discover,” a new feature that highlights stories and videos provided both by outside publishers, and by Snapchat’s in-house team of journalists and videographers. The new service is ad-supported, with Snapchat selling ads against media provided by networks such as ESPN, Vice, and CNN, as well as its own content.
Discover features videos, articles, and photos cherry-picked from these networks to appeal to Snapchat’s young-skewing userbase.
The app made its name with self-deleting selfies, but Snapchat has been experimenting with the kind of media it provides for a while now. The company piloted its “Stories” feature last year
Although Snapchat has had huge success with its brand — the company is valued at up to $10 billion and has the third-most popular social media app behind Facebook and Instagram for 18 to 34-year olds — it has struggled to make the kind of money it’s said to be worth.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ross Miller / The Verge:
Associated Press now writes 3K stories per quarter on US earning reports after teaming with Automated Insights, plans to expand globally — AP’s ‘robot journalists’ are writing their own stories now — Minutes after Apple released its record-breaking quarterly earnings this week …
AP’s ‘robot journalists’ are writing their own stories now
http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/29/7939067/ap-journalism-automation-robots-financial-reporting
Minutes after Apple released its record-breaking quarterly earnings this week, the Associated Press published (by way of CNBC, Yahoo, and others) “Apple tops Street 1Q forecasts.” It’s a story without a byline, or rather, without a human byline — a financial story written and published by an automated system well-versed in the AP Style Guide. The AP implemented the system six months ago and now publishes 3,000 such stories every quarter — and that number is poised to grow.
Quarterly earnings are a necessity for business reporting — and it can be both monotonous and stressful, demanding a combination of accuracy and speed. That’s one of the reasons why last summer the AP partnered with Automated Insights to begin automating quarterly earnings reports using their Wordsmith platform.
You wouldn’t necessarily know it at first blush. Sure, maybe reading it in the context of this story it’s apparent, but otherwise it feels like a pretty standard, if a tad dry, AP news item. The obvious tell doesn’t come until the end of an article: “This story was generated by Automated Insights.”
“I wouldn’t expect a good journalist to not be skeptical,” she said. Patterson tells us that when the program first began in July, every automated story had a human touch, with errors logged and sent to Automated Insights to make the necessary tweaks. Full automation began in October, when stories “went out to the wire without human intervention.” Both the AP and Automated Insights tell us that no jobs have been lost due to the new service. We’re also told the automated system is now logging in fewer errors than the human-produced equivalents from years past.
Before this program was implemented, the AP estimates it was doing quarterly earnings coverage for about 300 companies. Now it automates 3,000 such reports each quarter. Of those, 120 will have an added human touch
The next step is expansion — more than 1,000 Canadian companies plus a few elsewhere around the world.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Super Bowl Commercials With Hashtags Slipped To 50% In 2015
Facebook was the most mentioned social network with four; Snapchat made its debut.
http://marketingland.com/super-bowl-commercials-hashtags-slips-50-2015-116658
Fifty percent of 2015 Super Bowl ads carried hashtags, a bit of a slip from the record 57% during the 2014 game. Facebook was the social network most mentioned, though mentions of specific social networks were again very sparse.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How I Learned to Start Worrying and Fear the Commoditization of Threat Intelligence
http://www.securityweek.com/how-i-learned-start-worrying-and-fear-commoditization-threat-intelligence
Specifically, I kept thinking about the trend lately around so much cyber threat intelligence from so many solutions providers delivering feeds from so many similar sources. And, altogether more bothersome, how so many of the providers lately are partnering up with one another to offer access to so many of each others’ threat intelligence feeds inside their own platforms.
Suddenly the movie started making more sense to me than the threat intelligence market. Then it hit me.
Information theory is actually a branch of mathematics that attempts to explain the nature of communications data as it is transmitted, stored or received, as well as the variables that affect its transfer such as noise, the amount of data transmitted, number of distinct and different message sources, the type and size of channel it’s transmitted on, reliability and intelligibility.
Seen this way, information can essentially be treated as mathematically-defined.
Related to this, entropy is a measure of the information contained in a given message.
let’s just say that entropy = boring, noisy, redundant old news.
Again, you may be wondering how this relates to cyber threat intelligence specifically?
To put it in plain terms, there are so many similar pieces of threat intelligence being transmitted so often (i.e. redundant) from so many similar sources at such an alarming rate as to make deriving any real, worthwhile meaning by the receiver of all these threat messages, well, highly unlikely. In other words, there’s so much of the same data being sent from so many of the same sources as to render it essentially useless for the consumer.
“The larger the amounts of information processed or diffused, the more likely it is that information will degrade toward meaningless variety, like noise or information overload, or sterile uniformity…The more information is repeated and duplicated, the larger the scale of diffusion, the greater the speed of processing, the more opinion leaders and gatekeepers and networks, the more filtering of messages, the more kinds of media through which information is passed, the more decoding and encoding, and so on– the more degraded information might be.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Brian Ries / Mashable:
Obama administration publishes 2016 fiscal budget proposal on Github and Medium
How the White House found a publishing ally in Medium
http://mashable.com/2015/02/02/white-house-medium/
The White House published President Obama’s 2016 fiscal budget on Monday using a medium that’s become increasingly popular among its advisors: Medium, the three-year old self-publishing platform.
In the past three months, Medium has played host to an ever-increasing tide of editorials, speeches and documents from Obama and his advisors. They’ve included presidential op-eds — such as one that tackled both net neutrality and the economic impact of millennials — as well as an update on the Ebola crisis that briefly gripped America last year.
Then there was the entirety of the State of the Union, published on Medium before reporters were given the green light to break an embargo on the remarks. White House senior advisor Dan Pfeiffer called the concept of the embargo “kinda ridiculous.” Pfeiffer said the Medium publication was “changing a SOTU tradition forever.”
Obama seems to be setting a trend here
It’s part of an effort to “make the document more accessible and shareable than ever before,” a White House official familiar with the decision told Mashable, adding that “it’s important for the White House to provide a range of ways for people to consume information.”
In its totality, Medium predicts it will take you all of 3 hours and 51 minutes to read the whole budget. But it was published in a distributed manner for a reason: the White House wants it to be sliced and diced in whatever manner its readers see fit.
They continue: “By making the budget available on Medium … we’re continuing our efforts to reach a broader online audience, and giving Americans a range of ways to consume the data and details housed in the budget.”
And the company, for its part, says the White House gets them.
“They are very adept at using the platform in exactly how it was intended,”
“They decide what and when to publish,” said Lee. “They do it themselves.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ravi Somaiya / New York Times:
New York Times operating profit down to $92M from $156M in 2013, digital ad revenue up 12%
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/04/business/new-york-times-company-q4-earnings.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
William Turvill / Press Gazette:
UK magazine Press Gazette barred by London police from asking questions about use of RIPA against reporters under the FOI Act
‘Vexatious’, ‘annoying’ and ‘disruptive’ Press Gazette barred by Met from asking more RIPA questions
http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/vexatious-annoying-and-disruptive-press-gazette-barred-met-asking-more-ripa-questions
The Metropolitan Police has barred Press Gazette from requesting information about its use of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act to spy on journalists.
Last night, the force rejected a Freedom of Information Act request on the grounds that it was the sixth question submitted since September.
Explaining its decision to reject further FoI requests from Press Gazette, the Met said in an email that it has the right to refuse “vexatious requests… which are intended to be annoying or disruptive or which have a disproportionate impact on a public authority”.
“The Information Commissioner recognises that dealing with unreasonable requests can place a strain on resources and get in the way of delivering mainstream services or answering legitimate requests. Furthermore, these requests can also damage the reputation of the legislation itself.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Darrell Etherington / TechCrunch:
Amazon launches Kindle Convert in the US, a $19 Windows app for scanning, turning paper books into e-books
Amazon’s Kindle Convert Can Turn Your Paper Library Into E-Books
http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/03/amazon-kindle-convert/
If you’ve been hanging on to those paper books because the idea of having to repurchase them all as Kindle titles is daunting, Amazon has a new option for you: Kindle Convert, a program for Windows that turns print books into digital versions fully compatible with Amazon’s Kindle software, including adjustable font, Whispersync for making sure you’ll be able to go to the furthest read position on any device, and backup in Amazon’s cloud for free, providing access across devices.
There’s a price to pay, however, beyond even the initial $19 that the software download costs (it’s also listed as being $49 at full price): In order to get your books into digital format, you’ll have to actually scan them using a standard flatbed or other type of computer scanner, which means doing things two pages at a time at most. As The Ebook Reader notes, it’s also limited to U.S. customers for now.
Luckily the hardware requirements aren’t that steep, as Kindle Convert should work with any scanner than can produce a .jpeg, .tiff or .pdf target file with 300-600 DPI, and either 24-bit depth for color or 8-bit for grayscale or black and white. That covers basically any scanner included in modern all-in-one printers at virtually every price point.
Kindle Convert is still probably useful for a lot of people, because it can help convert special out-of-print books that may not be generally available, as well as documents and books with personal value that may not exist anywhere else.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Paid test – fair or unfair
Free impartiality and paid ad?
AudioVideo.fi tests have been charged for the start of 2015. The test, which costs? Does not that make them all biased …
larification: Charges means that when we go an average of two days to make the article so we charge the device from the importer / manufacturer. It allows us to keep AudioVideo.fi:n continue to readers free of charge.
Although often talk about foreign publications paid-sighted articles then yes domestic publications accused of the fact that advertising is purchased content, results and ways of thinking.
“The premise is that the
online publication is really
hard to be a reader
free of charge. ”
Web publication is very difficult to be other than ad-funded consumer using the web when it is not willing to pay for information. Paid content instead he is looking for information on the same subject, the source of which do not have to pay. Or, alternatively, to circumvent the payment of any other way.
They importers and manufacturers who advertise, feel it unfair that their money is maintained in the publication, which praised the competitors’ products. And those who do not advertise, feel unfair that their products are not tested once competed in some of the products on display.
I decided that I made this a fair game. Each product test cost and each importer or manufacturer can not get them on the same terms.
Our articles are positive (I admit, sometimes perhaps too, but fun equipment are feeling good and therefore also the “pen” to fly) because we enjoy doing,. About Us hi-fi is a lot of fun even though we know that no device is perfect.
“The tests have been paid, but
tests have not been purchased. ”
Source: http://audiovideo.fi/artikkeli/maksullinen-testi-reilu-vai-eparehellinen
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sarah Frier / Bloomberg Business:
Twitter Reaches Deal for Tweets in Google Search Results — Don’t Miss Out — (Bloomberg) — Twitter Inc. has struck a deal with Google Inc. to make its 140-character updates more searchable online. — In the first half of this year, tweets will start to be visible in Google’s search results …
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-02-05/twitter-said-to-reach-deal-for-tweets-in-google-search-results
Tomi Engdahl says:
Broadcast journalism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadcast_journalism
Broadcast journalism is the field of news and journals which are “broadcast”, that is, published by electrical methods, instead of the older methods, such as printed newspapers and posters. Broadcast methods include radio (via air, cable, and Internet), television (via air, cable, and Internet), and, especially recently, the world wide web. Such media disperse pictures (static and moving), visual text and/or sounds.
On-line convergence
Convergence is the sharing and cross-promoting of content from a variety of media, which in theory might all converge and become one medium eventually. In broadcast news, the Internet is key part of convergence. Frequently, broadcast journalists also write text stories for the Web, usually accompanied by the graphics and sound of the original story. Websites offer the audience an interactive form where they can learn more about a story, can be referred to related articles, can offer comments for publication and can print stories at home, etc. Technological convergence also lets newsrooms collaborate with other media. Broadcast outlets sometimes have partnerships with their print counterparts.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Gregory Ferenstein / VentureBeat:
Wearable World incubator acquires tech blog ReadWrite
Wearable World incubator acquires tech blog ReadWrite
http://venturebeat.com/2015/02/05/wearable-world-incubator-acquires-tech-blog-readwrite/
VentureBeat has learned that Say Media has sold the technology blog ReadWrite to Silicon Valley-based incubator Wearable World for an undisclosed amount.
ReadWriteWeb, as it was originally called, is a developer-focused tech blog, and has been a staple of the tech blogosphere since its launch in 2003. But parent company Say Media has run into trouble lately
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadWrite
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Poem That Passed the Turing Test
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/02/05/2030201/the-poem-that-passed-the-turing-tes
In 2011, the editors of one of the nation’s oldest student-run literary journals selected a short poem called “For the Bristlecone Snag” for publication in its Fall issue.
It’s unremarkable, mostly, except for one other thing: It was written by a computer algorithm, and nobody could tell.
The Poem That Passed the Turing Test
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-poem-that-passed-the-turing-test
Zackary Scholl, then an undergrad at Duke University, had modified a program that utilized a context-free grammar system to spit out full-length, auto-generated poems. “It works by having the poem dissected into smaller components: stanzas, lines, phrases, then verbs, adjectives, and nouns,” Scholl explained. “When a call to create a poem is made, then it randomly selects components of the poem and recursively generates each of those.”
Scholl’s work forms part of a small but burgeoning canon of algorithmically abetted poetry and prose—from bots that mine Twitter to build sonnets in iambic pentameter to poem drones that scrawl lines on sidewalks to automated novel-generators, the gap between man and machine-made art has, ever so slightly, begun to close.
In 2010, Scholl began submitting the output to online poetry websites, in order to gauge reader reaction, which he says was “overwhelmingly positive.” The year after that, he sent his auto-generated poems to literary magazines, where they were rejected from the likes of Memoir Journal and First Writer Poetry. Scholl then submitted a battery of poems written by his algorithm to the Duke literary journal, The Archive. One was accepted.
He never told the editors that the poem was ‘written’ by what he considers to be an artificial intelligence. “I didn’t want to embarrass anybody,” Scholl told me.
Four years later, Scholl, now a PhD candidate in computational biology, published a blog post revealing his stunt, ”Turing Test: Passed, Using Computer-Generated Poetry.”
“This AI can create poetry indistinguishable from real poets”
Scholl contends his poetry generator satisfies some version of the test. “This AI can create poetry indistinguishable from real poets,” he wrote. “The real Turing Test of this AI was to get it accepted to a literary journal, which was accomplished—this poetry was successfully accepted into a literary journal at a prestigious university.”
Of course, AI scholars would likely be skeptical—after all, last year, when the much more sophisticated chatbot Eugene Goostman “passed” the Turing Test by posing as a Russian teenager who tapped out answers to human questions in in broken English, many in the AI community cried foul. Sneaking a robot-generated poem into an undergraduate literary journal is a similarly insufficient standard for proving the creep of artificial intelligence; poetry is often ambiguous and bizarre
“I think that’s why we published this poem—because it was intriguing. It was not trite. And this was the most coherent one.”
Scholl had sent in 26 poems, one for each letter of the alphabet, and “Bristlecone” was the only one that was published.
So, if this is to be considered a milestone—a marker on the road to autonomous robot artistry—it’s a vanishingly little one. Still, it’s an interesting little milestone; none of the poets or coders I’ve spoken to knew of another machine-generated poem that was accepted for publication and published as if authored by a human.
But Scholl isn’t as interested in the novelty alone. “I do consider it just another way of doing poetry,”
“This program works on the basis that every word in the English language is either ‘positive’ or ‘negative,’”
A ‘poem’ is a group of sentences that are structured in a way to have +1, -1 or 0 in terms of the positivity/negativity. A ‘mushy poem’ is strictly positive.”
Scholl acknowledges that the program is very basic: “The only thing it does is store information about poetic words. The reasoning is very simple.”
“Maybe it is an AI,” he added, “but a simpler one than speech recognition.”
Turing Test: Passed, using computer-generated poetry
https://rpiai.wordpress.com/2015/01/24/turing-test-passed-using-computer-generated-poetry/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amber, a new tool to prevent linkrot on websites, is out in beta
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/02/amber-a-new-tool-to-prevent-linkrot-on-websites-is-out-in-beta/
Ever seen a news story from a few years back — or maybe even just a few weeks back — and gotten frustrated when an old link doesn’t work any more? It’s a problem for anyone who publishes on the web, but particularly for news organizations — both because that network of links is an important part of the historical record and because so many news site redesigns and CMS changes have killed a disproportionate share of the web’s URLs.
Whether links fail because of DDoS attacks, censorship, or just plain old link rot, dead links are a problem for Internetusers everywhere.
This isn’t a new problem. Some centralized initiatives, such as the Internet Archive and Perma.cc, are attempting to snapshot and preserve the Internet.
Tomi Engdahl says:
John Herrman / The Awl:
For distribution, media companies turn to apps and services, whose ad-driven, mediated businesses mirror broadcast TV — The Next Internet Is TV — I was talking to someone who works on one of those half-dozen or so apps that we tend to associate with teenagers: the ones that were built around …
The Next Internet Is TV
Websites are unnecessary vestiges of a time before there were better ways to find things to look at on your computer or your phone.
http://www.theawl.com/2015/02/the-next-internet-is-tv
This is a stray observation from an app bubble within an investment bubble. But if you listen to what the internet’s best-capitalized and savviest media companies—which themselves exist in a (separate) set of Matryoshka bubbles—are saying, and watch what they are doing, you can tell that they don’t think it’s crazy.
Here is a question worth asking of any large media company, as well as an answer:
Disney has given Fusion a lot of money to launch. What does the company see as a successful return on that investment? Traffic goals? TV audience? Influence?
I think it’s all of the above. Part of our overall mission is to be a lab for experimentation and innovation for our parent company. Univision and ABC want Fusion’s help in figuring out how to reach this incredibly dynamic, diverse, and digitally connected audience, so we’ll be investing heavily in audience development and technology and transferring knowledge to the parent company about what we learn.
This might sound a little deflating to Fusion’s newly launched site, which surely doesn’t think of itself as a market-research arm for an entertainment conglomerate, but it’s not, really. This is a journalist and manager speaking the language of her business, acknowledging Fusion’s particular relationship with the capital that keeps it running. If anything it should be read as comforting.
What does it want? To build “a new kind of newsroom to greet the changing demographics of America” that is also “a little bit outside of the media bubble.” When does it want it? As soon as possible, but, whatever.
Meanwhile, some of the most visible companies in internet media are converging on a nearby point. Vox is now publishing directly to social networks and apps; BuzzFeed has a growing team of people dedicated to figuring out what BuzzFeed might look like without a website at the middle. Vice, already distributing a large portion of its video on Google’s YouTube, has a channel in Snapchat’s app, along with CNN, Comedy Central, ESPN, Cosmo and the Daily Mail.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Felix Salmon / Fusion:
Advice for young journalists: Find another more lucrative, lasting career
Words of wisdom
To all the young journalists asking for advice….
by Felix Salmon
http://fusion.net/story/45832/to-all-the-young-journalists-asking-for-advice/
Dear budding journalist,
Thanks very much for your email! I’m always happy to meet just about anybody, and would love to find some time to have that coffee with you.
Of course I’m also very flattered by the lovely things you said about me, and about how you’d love to have a career in journalism where you might be able to do the kind of thing that I do.
But you won’t. The job I’m doing now was inconceivable when I was your age, and, similarly, if you’re lucky enough to have done well in this industry by the time you’re my age (I’m 42), then you’ll almost certainly be doing something which almost nobody today could foresee.
What’s more, the obstacles facing you are much greater than anything I managed to overcome. I’m not saying that now is a bad time for journalism — in fact, I’m a “golden ager”. I’m constantly astonished by the quantity and quality of the material being produced today, in some of the most unlikely places, and I think this is probably the greatest era for journalism that the world has ever seen. I also think that some of today’s fast-growing digital companies are going to become the media behemoths of tomorrow, making their owners extremely rich in the process.
But that doesn’t mean that life is good for journalists. In fact, life is not good for journalists. And while a couple of years ago I harbored hopes that things might improve, those hopes have now pretty much evaporated. Things are not only bad; they’re going to get worse.
I’m sure that many people have told you this already, but take it from me as well: journalism is a dumb career move. If there’s something else you also love, something else you’re good at, something else which makes the world a better place — then maybe you should think about doing that instead. Even successful journalists rarely do much of the kind of high-minded stuff you probably aspire to. And enormous numbers of incredibly talented journalists find it almost impossible to make a decent living at this game.
Indeed, the exact same forces which are good for journalism and good for owners are the forces which are bad for journalists themselves.
All of which is exacerbated by the second huge change wrought by digital media: the Platform Revolution. Almost everybody with a significant stake in a digital media company loves to talk about their “platform” (or, more commonly these days, their “platforms”). “Platform” is one of those words which means pretty much what you want it to mean, or means pretty much nothing, depending on how you look at it. But at heart the idea is that the real value, in a media company, lies not in the human talent, but rather in some vague confluence of Product and Brand and Constantly Iterating Scalable Technology. The workers — the journalists — become easily replaceable cogs in the machine, one byline morphing seamlessly into the next.
What explains a world where the economics of publishing have been brutal for many years, but where digital media companies are raising money at eye-popping valuations? The answer is simple: Capital has realized that it has an advantage over Labor, and that its advantage is here to stay. The trick is to build a formula which works.
But still! You want to be a journalist, and you want my advice! Beyond, that is, a simple “don’t do it”. Ideally, you’d like me to just give you a job, but I can’t do that. I’ve spent my entire career trying to avoid the kind of positions where I can give people jobs.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mathew Ingram / Gigaom:
Flipboard launches on web, signs ad revenue sharing deals with publishers including National Geographic and Fast Company — Flipboard swims against the tide by launching a website — If there’s one word that sums up where most media entities are focused for the future, it’s “mobile” …
Flipboard swims against the tide by launching a website
https://gigaom.com/2015/02/10/flipboard-swims-against-the-tide-by-launching-a-website/
If there’s one word that sums up where most media entities are focused for the future, it’s “mobile” — almost every news service and website is looking to mobile because that’s where the younger users are, and therefore that’s where the growth is. In fact, NowThis just finished getting rid of its website altogether because it said there was no purpose in having one.
Flipboard, however, is doing the exact opposite: On Tuesday, the company said it is finally embracing the web by launching a full-featured site that not only reproduces what the app offers, but builds on top of it.
So why is Flipboard going in the opposite direction to everyone else? Co-founder and CEO Mike McCue said there’s a simple answer, which is that Flipboard was mobile before almost anyone else — in fact, the app was one of the first to show the real possibilities of the iPad when it launched in 2010. But what Flipboard has been missing, he said, was a way to tie together the web and mobile easily.
Flipboard’s new web version solves that problem, McCue said: it allows users to not only read but to create curated magazines and add to them, to dive into specific topics based on items others have shared, and to reproduce all of the behavior they have gotten used to within the app. And in a sense, says the Flipboard CEO, the web version has been in the works for almost as long as the company itself has been
Tomi Engdahl says:
Medium, known for going long, wants to go shorter
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/02/medium-known-for-going-long-wants-to-go-shorter/
Medium announced some new updates to its publishing platform today. They include a tagging system (which means more structured data), a redesign of post presentation called The Stream, and an inline editor that’s supposed to make it easier to start writing. This last feature has received the most attention so far, with the general consensus being that Medium is getting “bloggier” (or is it Bloggerier?) and “more like Twitter.”
Venture-backed sites like Medium need lots of content and lots of users. While being known for free, elegant, digital publishing has worked for Medium so far, it hasn’t brought the hockey-stick user base growth that early investors typically seek. It’s also worth noting that Matter, the digital science magazine that Medium bought and turned into a sort of flagship for what it’s possible to build on Medium
Tomi Engdahl says:
Maria Rodale / Mediashift:
Maria Rodale, CEO of magazine publisher Rodale, suggests 10 ideas to help magazines increase readership and revenue — Maria Rodale’s 10 Ideas That Could Rock the Magazine World
Maria Rodale’s 10 Ideas That Could Rock the Magazine World
http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2015/02/maria-rodales-10-ideas-that-could-rock-the-magazine-world/
Well, what the magazine industry really needs is fresh ideas on how to increase readership and revenue — for free! And here are mine (but next time, I’m charging for them):
1. People love personalization. Personalization in the magazine industry is not a new idea.
2. Magazines should learn to apply frictionless customer service for print products. Why does my 8-year-old STILL have to wait six to eight weeks for the first issue of her magazine to arrive? Seriously? Where’s the immediate gratification of a welcome packet with a thank you and some stickers?
3. People want high-quality products and great service. And they will most likely pay for it.
4. People want experiences. I still find it amusing that people will pay a lot more money to run a race and get really tired and sore and sweaty than they will to get a yearlong subscription to a magazine that they can enjoy from the comfort of their couch. There’s a lesson here for us: People want to feel connected, inspired and challenged. A print product is just one tool in the toolbox to help make that happen.
5. People want to learn. Yes, education is the next big thing in digital … but for a reason. There is a lot of very superficial and not-that-easy-to-navigate stuff out there online. But if someone really wants to learn something and learn it well, there’s no substitute for a real class
6. It’s not the love of print that’s gone — it’s the business model that’s broken. Plenty of people still love print. Take books, for example: E-books have leveled off at about 30 percent of all sales. After the initial thrill, people remember what they love about the real thing
7. Real people will rule the road … and that’s a good thing (#nofilter). For decades, readers have been asking to see real people in our magazines. But we still insist on creating overly airbrushed images that just make our customers feel poorly about themselves
8. Trust is priceless — and easily lost. It’s not just “native advertising” — it’s about the whole relationship with the readers and what we are pushing toward them. If they detect that the soul of an editor is for sale, they can smell it a mile away.
9. Publishers need to believe in themselves again. The role that an independent and honest media play in society — especially a democratic society — is essential and precious.
10. We also need to start having fun! I have a theory that the reason people love animal videos online is that they’re just plain happy — genuinely loving and positive.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Vint Cerf: Everything we do will be ERASED! You can’t even find last 2 times I said this
‘Digital vellum’ – the key to eternal life
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/13/vint_cerf_warns_well_be_erased_from_history_again/
Webpioneer Vint Cerf has warned – once again – that our digital lives are in danger of being wiped from human history.
Cerf, who was speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting, reiterated calls for a “digital vellum” – referring to the ancient parchment made from calf skin and known for its resilience.
“If we want people in the future to be able to recreate what we are doing now, we are going to have to build the concept of preservation into the internet,” he said.
He said: “If we don’t do something about preserving the meaning of the ‘bits’, we may become something of a dark century.”
“The problem is how to correctly interpret the ‘bits’,” he said. “What I want to emphasis is [we will need] software that knows what the bits mean.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Netflix forces Academy to talk about what a ‘film’ really is
http://nypost.com/2015/02/22/netflix-forces-academy-to-talk-about-what-a-film-really-is/
And the Oscar goes to … Netflix?
One Academy voter tells On the Money there’s a new struggle in Tinseltown: What does it mean to be a film?
Should the Oscars be about celebrating only theatrical releases in an age when Netflix and Amazon are spending millions to fund high-end content?
This person said, “Film doesn’t even exist anymore,” and movies are more likely to be seen via digital delivery.
movie industry insiders feel it’s only a matter of time until, indeed, the Oscar will go to Netflix.
It will produce a sequel to “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” in tandem with IMAX and Netflix that will be shown in select theaters and streamed.
And that will further blur the lines between movies and TV shows.
IFC Films’ Best Picture nominee “Boyhood” isn’t headed to its sister cable channel of the same name — it’s going to air on CBS-owned Showtime, the studio confirmed to The Post last week.
The old and the young
The roughly 7,000 members of the Academy who are eligible to vote for Best Picture couldn’t be more different from the moviegoing public, according to data compiled by fan-driven entertainment site Moviepilot.
The majority of Academy members are older than 60 — while the majority of moviegoers are under 39, reports The Post’s Richard Morgan, who waded through the Moviepilot info.
“Picking Oscar winners is not a popularity contest,” Paul Dergarabedian, a senior media analyst at Rentrak, told Morgan. “Movies that win are chosen for their artistic merit.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
The dress is white and gold. Or, why BuzzFeed won
http://digiday.com/publishers/its-white-and-gold-dummy/
We are all BuzzFeed now. That’s the only conclusion to draw from yesterday’s twin viral sensations: the runaway llamas in Arizona and the (gold and white) dress. Both phenomena proved, among other things, that the lines between viral click merchants like BuzzFeed and stalwart publishing brands are erasing — and BuzzFeed is likely to win.
Viral publishing is a lot like pregnancy: You can’t do it halfway. For years stalwart publishers have leaned on their brands — on their sensibilities — in order to paper over the fact that Internet wunderkind like BuzzFeed were wiping the floor with them when it comes to building giant Internet audiences. They sniffed at BuzzFeed’s silly listicles, and they gleefully pounced on its propensity to pander to the basest of viral urges.
The bet they made was simple: We can learn the dark arts of viral well before BuzzFeed and its crowd can build the sterling brands of magazines like Esquire and Time. What they found, however, is that going viral is easier said than done.
BuzzFeed posted a very BuzzFeed post that aggregated a Tumblr post of a dress in which the color of the dress was in dispute. Basically, some people saw white and gold (it’s white and gold) and other saw black and blue (it’s not). It was the apotheosis of viral content. To use a technical term, the Internet lost its collective shit. The post was shared 16 million times just five-odd hours after it was posted, and BuzzFeed said a record 670,000 people were on the site at the same time.
BuzzFeed’s post was a litmus test for publishers.
And chasing BuzzFeed was probably the right decision. After all, this is what a lot of people were talking about, briefly. But the long-term effect of this is a growing sameness of digital media. It’s hard to differentiate any sites from each other. Designs are mimicked, viral content is regurgitated. The result: viral sameness.
The digital media world is about pageviews. They pull in advertising. That means you need to produce a huge amount of pageviews — it’s why the digital media execs can’t go an hour without talking about “scale” — and keep costs low enough to make up for low ad rates. That’s a tough set of circumstances, and they don’t leave ad-dependent publishers with a ton of options.
In this game, BuzzFeed is winning. It must boggle the mind at traditional publishers that seemingly the entire Internet is talking about content that was created not by a seasoned reporter but a “community growth manager.”