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:
Japan is getting an anonymous whistleblowing platform, but will journalists use it?
https://www.techinasia.com/masayuki-hatta-whistleblowing-platform-japan/
A Japanese university professor is building Japan’s first anonymous web platform for whistleblowers.
Whistleblowing.jp will provide an untraceable way for journalists to receive leaked information without fear of compromising a source – of paramount importance since the passage of Japan’s so-called State Secrets Law in December 2013.
The law, which went into effect about two months ago, carries penalties of up to 10 years in prison for government leakers and five years behind bars for journalists who “encourage” them.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Digital Wildfires in a Hyperconnected World
http://reports.weforum.org/global-risks-2013/risk-case-1/digital-wildfires-in-a-hyperconnected-world/
The global risk of massive digital misinformation sits at the centre of a constellation of technological and geopolitical risks ranging from terrorism to cyber attacks and the failure of global governance. This risk case examines how hyperconnectivity could enable “digital wildfires” to wreak havoc in the real world. It considers the challenge presented by the misuse of an open and easily accessible system and the greater danger of misguided attempts to prevent such outcomes.
In 1938, when radio had become widespread, thousands of Americans confused an adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel The War of the Worlds with a news broadcast and jammed police station telephone lines in the panicked belief that the United States had been invaded by Martians.
It is difficult to imagine a radio broadcast causing comparably widespread misunderstanding today
The Internet remains an uncharted, fast-evolving territory. Current generations are able to communicate and share information instantaneously and at a scale larger than ever before. Social media increasingly allows information to spread around the world at breakneck speed. While the benefits of this are obvious and well documented, our hyperconnected world could also enable the rapid viral spread of information that is either intentionally or unintentionally misleading or provocative, with serious consequences. The chances of this happening are exponentially greater today than when the radio was introduced as a disruptive technology, despite our media sophistication. Radio was a communication channel of “one to many” while the Internet is that of “many to many”.
The Internet does have self-correcting mechanisms, as Wikipedia demonstrates. While anyone can upload false information, a community of Wikipedia volunteers usually finds and corrects errors speedily. The short-lived existence of false information on its site is generally unlikely to result in severe real-world consequences; however, it is conceivable that a false rumour spreading virally through social networks could have a devastating impact before being effectively corrected.
How might digital wildfires be prevented? Legal restrictions on online anonymity and freedom of speech are a possible route, but one which may also have undesirable consequences.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The experience of legacy media organizations is instructive. Over the last two decades, record labels, newspapers, Hollywood, and other traditional content producers have poured millions of dollars into trying to build internet-based platforms for their content. Yet the market is increasingly dominated by outsiders — YouTube, Netflix, and Amazon Prime for video, iTunes and Pandora for music, startups like Buzzfeed and the Huffington Post for news, and so forth.
Source: http://www.vox.com/2015/2/23/8092141/silicon-valley-dominate-cars
Tomi Engdahl says:
Roland de Courson / Agence France-Presse:
Authenticating photographs, acceptable image manipulations, and the gray areas of touchups — Photography: telling art from fraud
Photography: telling art from fraud
http://blogs.afp.com/correspondent/?post/Photojournalism:-where-art-meets-fraud#.VPQaPuFLZ4A
PARIS, February 25, 2015 – This year’s World Press Photo awards saw an unprecedented number of entrants thrown out for tampering with their images – reopening an old debate on what can be a fine line, in photojournalism, between artistry and fraud.
Twenty percent of images that made it to the penultimate stage of the photojournalism contest were disqualified for excessive manipulation – three times as many as last year. Candidates whose photographs made it to the final stages were asked to provide RAW files along with their final submissions. Comparing the RAW image – the picture as recorded by the camera – with the final photo makes it possible to detect alterations made with Photoshop or other software tools: adding or deleting elements, cropping, modifying the tone, texture and colour.
“For us it was a shock,”
According to the award organisers, all those disqualified were found to have made “a material addition or subtraction in the content of the image.”
Code of conduct
The World Press Photo laid out its standards for manipulating images in a study published last year. Give or take, they are the same as the rules followed by the main international news agencies, including AFP. Absolutely no adding or subtracting elements from an image, with the exception of marks caused by dust on camera sensors which can be cleaned off with Photoshop. Minor adjustments to tone, contrast and colour are permissible provided they do not alter the information content of the image. Slight rotations – to straighten out a horizon line for instance – are allowed. But no shrinking, stretching or flipping. Cropping is generally permitted.
The first rule is universally accepted in the profession: adding or deleting a character or any other element, slimming down or fattening a famous actress, are all inadmissible.
Artistic vision, not manipulation
When it comes to modifying tone, colour or contrast, however, the rules are much more open to interpretation – and controversy.
A black and white image, taken with a flash or a long-focus lens, is obviously not an accurate reflection of reality. But that doesn’t mean it’s a fraud.
“No one is born with a 400 mm telephoto lens for eyes,” sums up Eric Baradat. The same applies to the use of zooms, multiple exposures, slow shutter speeds or panning – a technique used to follow and shoot a moving subject, in sports for instance. Good practice is usually to indicate the techniques used in the photo caption.
“We always want to feel something from an image,” says Patrick Baz. “The red line is when art starts to take precedence over journalism.”
Judging exactly where that line lies can be fiendishly difficult
“In any event, unlike a traditional photograph which is a scene physically printed on a film through a chemical process, a digital photo is already the result of a computer process,” says Thuillier. “Digital cameras don’t capture images, they gather data which is then processed with a series of algorithms to produce a picture.
“That is why a same picture will look different depending on what camera is used to take it. Each uses different algorithms, devised by different engineers. Human skin tones, for example, look different depending on the brand of camera.”
“A software tool like Tungstene can only detect technical manipulations,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Foo Yun Chee / Reuters:
EU court rules ebooks are electronically provided services and not eligible for lower VAT rate
France, Luxembourg lose lower VAT rate battle on ebooks
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/05/us-europe-ebooks-tax-idUSKBN0M11A120150305
(Reuters) – France and Luxembourg lost their battle to apply reduced VAT rates to ebooks on Thursday when a top European court agreed with EU regulators that only paper books qualified for lower taxes.
The vast majority of the EU’s 28 countries levy VAT rates ranging from 18 to 25 percent, according to Commission data.
VAT on paper books in contrast ranges from 0 to 10 percent, with the exception of three member states.
“The court finds that the VAT Directive excludes any possibility of a reduced VAT rate being applied to ‘electronically supplied services’,” they said.
“The court holds that the supply of electronic books is such a service,” the ECJ ruled.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Buy to one great tech blog:
Gigaom:
Gigaom, unable to pay creditors in full, ceases all operations, does not currently intend to file for bankruptcy
https://gigaom.com/2015/03/09/about-gigaom/
Gigaom recently became unable to pay its creditors in full at this time. As a result, the company is working with its creditors that have rights to all of the company’s assets as their collateral. All operations have ceased.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dave Pell / Medium:
Apple Watch is yet another platform on which incumbent publishers got access ahead of indies
http://medium.com/@davepell/the-internet-is-rigged-d74b342505f0
The Internet is Rigged — This isn’t the Internet we signed up for… It was the inherent beauty of the web. I had access to the same tools and the same publish button as any big time brand.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tom Kludt / CNNMoney:
Coming soon to The Huffington Post: documentaries and scripted shows — Expect to see more videos when you visit The Huffington Post. A lot more. — The popular news web site, which already has a live streaming channel called HuffPost Live, now says it also wants to make documentaries …
http://money.cnn.com/2015/03/09/media/huffington-post-video/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Om Malik:
Om Malik confirms Gigaom, the pioneering tech news site he founded, is shutting down — A statement about Gigaom — Gigaom is winding down and its assets are now controlled by the company’s lenders. It is not how you want the story of a company you founded to end.
A statement about Gigaom
http://om.co/2015/03/09/a-statement-about-gigaom/
Gigaom is winding down and its assets are now controlled by the company’s lenders. It is not how you want the story of a company you founded to end.
Every founder starts on a path — hopeful and optimistic, full of desire to build something that helps change the world for the better, reshape an industry and hopefully become independent, both metaphorically and financially. Business, much like life, is not a movie and not everyone gets to have a story book ending.
There will be time for postmortems, but not today.
Gigaom:
Gigaom, unable to pay creditors in full, ceases all operations, does not currently intend to file for bankruptcy — About Gigaom — Gigaom recently became unable to pay its creditors in full at this time. As a result, the company is working with its creditors that have rights to all of the company’s assets as their collateral.
http://gigaom.com/2015/03/09/about-gigaom/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why I am not sad. Because I have no reason to be!
http://om.co/2010/02/08/why-i-am-not-sad/
Earlier this weekend, someone used the Alexa web stats service and compared the daily reach of GigaOM with that of my friends at Techcrunch and that on Mashable, and wondered if I was sad.
Now I could have easily answered this question over on GigaOM, but instead I am leaving that for what it is for — news, analysis and the unfolding story about business of technology. For everything else, I have this blog and that includes questions about my perceived sadness.
For now I wouldn’t bother to point out that we are actually a network of seven blogs and are syndicated to mainstream publications such as The New York Times, BusinessWeek, CNN Money and Salon. Instead, I will just focus on our philosophy and business strategy which doesn’t revolve around mere page views.
When we relaunched the brand new GigaOM design in November 2009, I wrote that “we’ve tried to do is strike a fine balance between what is a blog and what would be an online magazine.” It was so because we wanted to focus on more analysis and in-depth posts. It was not to just compete with other technology publications, but was also standout amongst what has become a very crowded market.
That is why I have admiration for Michael Arrington and his team at Techcrunch and what they have been able to do to dominate the technology news market. Everyone from Techcrunch to Business Insider to Venturebeat to Readwriteweb and not to mention technology blogs from mainstream publications such as AllThingsD and Bits have their own unique playbook to covering technology industry.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Danny Sullivan / Medium:
Gigaom’s closure isn’t a harbinger for all niche media companies, but it is a warning for firms taking venture capital
After GigaOm, The Non-VC “SimCity” Approach To Growing A Media Business — I can’t speak with any authority about why GigaOm suddenly ran out of money.
After GigaOm, The Non-VC “SimCity” Approach To Growing A Media Business
https://medium.com/@dannysullivan/after-gigaom-the-non-vc-simcity-approach-to-growing-a-media-business-b10297a4f2d5
I can’t speak with any authority about why GigaOm suddenly ran out of money. But I’ve already seen the rumblings about what it may mean for other tech and vertical publications. Are they also likely in trouble? I’d submit if they’ve taken lots of VC money, yes. But if they’re bootstrapped or following what I call the “SimCity” model of growing, probably not.
Third Door Media started in late 2006. It never took investment. We grew our staff as our revenue grew, according to our business plans. In 2008, when the world economy crashed, we hunkered down and came through without losing people. In part, this was because we’d been careful not to over-extend, not to build a large operation beyond what it could support with native revenue.
It’s what I once called the “SimCity” model of growing. I used to often play the game years ago. I would take two approaches. One was to use the “FUNDS” cheat to get all the money I needed to build everything at once. But in doing this, I often found my cities built that way didn’t thrive. Instead, naturally growing my city slowly over time allowed it to stablize and do well.
Third Door Media has taken this SimCity natural approach, over the years. Our growth has continued. Two years ago, we were even able to take money out to return to some of our early employees, who have shares in the company.
There have been any number of articles written about the growth of BuzzFeed, Fusion, Vox and other new media darlings. There are good reasons for writing about them, too. But all this gives the impression that the entire publishing world is up-for-grabs by the few publications that get a lot of VC now and capture the eyeballs.
The publishing world is broad, incredibly broad. I read these articles about the giants and the wanna-be giants, and I have an inner sigh that they’re not capturing the whole story about the publishing and journalism revolution that’s continuing.
Sometimes, it’s not an inner sigh. Sometimes, it’s public, as happened ironically last month after GigaOm published a story suggesting that even “niche” media wants to be mass. I countered that no, we didn’t — and others chimed in.
Over at The Information, Jessica Lessin’s kick-ass crew has been producing some of the most outstanding tech coverage you’ve ever seen. That’s not for a mass audience, since most of the masses aren’t going to shell-out $400 per year for it. But it doesn’t matter to Jessica, because as long as she’s got the audience she needs paying the bills and producing profits for her company to do great journalism, she’s good.
That leads to me back to the big miss that I suspect is going on when it comes to publishers like Third Door Media, The Information, Skift and others (or past self-funded publications like Ars Technica and TechCrunch). If your company is working fine internally to generate the revenues you’re after, no one notices. Instead, all the attention (and thus role-models, good or bad) goes to the VC-funded.
Folks, someone getting a lot of VC investment isn’t a sign they’re successful at anything other than getting VC funding. I’ve been covering the search and tech space for nearly 20 years now. VCs make bad investments.
GigaOm’s collapse, while incredibly sad — especially for so many of those great journalists— isn’t necessarily indicative of the future for media publications.
Instead, it’s perhaps a warning to anyone taking VC. You’d better expect if you’re taking all that money, you have a plan so the VCs get a pay-off. Are you going to generate those millions invested and more so?
Let me conclude by saying again how sad I am to see GigaOm end so suddenly. I hope the journalists there quickly find new places to write, as I’m sure they will.
Tomi Engdahl says:
David Gilbert / International Business Times:
Anonymous launches boycott of Daily Dot after it published a review by a hacker who worked with FBI — Anonymous launches Destroy Daily Dot campaign over Sabu reporting role — The online hacktivist group Anonymous has announced a plan to destroy the Daily Dot website as a result of its work with FBI snitch Hector “Sabu” Monsegur.
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/anonymous-launches-destroy-daily-dot-campaign-over-sabu-reporting-role-1491340
Tomi Engdahl says:
Creative Commons logo acquired for MoMA exhibition
http://www.cnet.com/news/creative-commons-logo-acquired-for-moma-exhibition/
“This is for Everyone” showcases how the internet has grown into a place of sharing, learning and discovering.
Following its acquisition of the symbol @ in 2010, the Museum of Modern Art in New York has now also acquired the Creative Commons logo for its permanent collections, and has put it on display as part of its exhibition, This is for Everyone: Design Experiments for the Common Good.
This doesn’t mean the museum now owns the logo — or @ for that matter — rather, it now has permission to reproduce it. It would be difficult to keep the logo in its permanent collection without that permission and this serves as a perfect example of what the exhibition is all about.
Creative Commons was created in 2001 by Lawrence Lessig, Hal Abelson and Eric Eldred as a solution to retaining copyright on something as enormous as the internet. The licenses provided by Creative Commons allow creators to retain copyright over and receive attribution for their work, while allowing others to make use of it.
In addition to the main logo, the museum also acquired the Creative Commons logos for Attribution, ShareAlike, Noncommercial and NoDerivatives
Tomi Engdahl says:
Michael Wolf / Medium:
Gigaom’s former VP of Research on how venture capital and the growth expectations that come with it contributed to Gigaom’s demise — Gigaom: The Life and Death of a Venture Funded Media Startup — As most know, we lost Gigaom last week. It was a sudden passing of a widely beloved tech media company …
http://medium.com/@michaelwolf/gigaom-the-life-and-death-of-a-venture-funded-media-startup-eb3fbdc4e732
Tomi Engdahl says:
John Pavlus / Medium:
While apps and search made URLs less important, URLs will remain the best way to uniquely label places on the web
Why urls won’t die
https://medium.com/re-form/why-won-t-urls-die-8d38f86e3ef3
They’re confusing, ugly & unsafe – and here forever.
The Uniform Resource Locator has been the user-interface lingua franca of the internet for decades. A browser window just wouldn’t look right without it up there at the top. But as the web has matured into a GUI-driven, mobile-first, app-serving consumer operating system in its own right, the URL stubbornly persists as an arcane, command-line-esque relic of the internet’s ultra-geeky origins. Why?
Apple and Google seem to be wondering the same thing. A quick glance at their browsing apps seems to imply that the URL is being slowly but surely shown the door. The latest version of Apple’s Safari web browser only shows the domain name (i.e., apple.com) in the address bar. Google Chrome has encouraged users to treat the address bar like a search box (or “omnibox,” in Google parlance) for years. Google’s mobile search app currently buries full URLs in a tiny submenu-of-a-submenu.
Meanwhile, hackers can still use ill-designed URL addresses as hidden-in-plain-sight invitations for committing fraud and identity theft. Seriously: it’s 2015. Why can’t we design a better way to get around on the web?
“Back in the day, you wanted to see exactly where you were on this crazy thing called the internet. But now, nobody is typing different directory structures [into the address bar] to see what happens. We’re not relying on SEO as much, and on mobile they’re just not relevant in the same way.”
Everything after the .com in a URL is “very truck-level stuff,” Bell says, which is why Apple and Google have been de-emphasizing it as much as possible.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Have advanced camera phones stunted our abilities to recognize professional photography?
http://thenextweb.com/creativity/2015/03/16/have-advanced-camera-phones-stunted-our-abilities-to-recognize-professional-photography/
In the wake of mass layoffs of photographers from major news organizations like the Chicago Sun Times and Sports Illustrated, the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) wanted to find out whether or not typical newspaper readers preferred — or could even tell the difference between — photos shot by professional photographers and those contributed by amateur shutterbugs.
The results, contained in the newly released scientific Eyetracking Photojournalism Study and commissioned by the NPPA, were the topic of a SXSW panel, “Who’s Driving the Extinction of Pro Photographers?” They should surprise no one.
The study found, among other things, that the public is fluent in the quality of photojournalism and they trust professional images more than user contributions. The study also found users spent the most time looking at faces and people and reading photo captions.
Furthermore, the conclusion states that the public is distrustful of manipulated images, preferring real-life interactions to posed photos and associates professional images with better quality.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Rex Sorgatz / Medium:
How The Daily Show triumphed: by enabling disruptive technology and embracing media inventions
How The Daily Show Triumphed
http://medium.com/message/how-the-daily-show-triumphed-1438a60a8718
(By Enabling Disruptive Technology and Embracing Media Inventions, But Only When It Made Sense, Which Was Less Often Than One Might Think; Also: Some Luck)
I would argue that The Daily Show rode the disruptive waves as masterfully as one could. It adopted a sound strategy: experiment with new platforms and technology, iterate on success, and, perhaps most importantly, shrug and move on from what fails.
But it also got lucky. While certain new technologies posed a corporeal threat, other media inventions fit perfectly into the show’s DNA. Technology both imperiled and propelled the show. Much of the The Daily Show’s success can be attributed to shrewd decisions; some of it, sublime coincidence.
The Daily Show instantly became the poster child of the time-shifted, on-demand future. Chunked into discrete pieces, the DVR-friendly format created a new viewing experience.
Television is, by nature, a derivative craft. It copies and refines more than it invents.
But it would not be a stretch to say that The Daily Show invented a specific genre of story, which has since become a staple of television. This particular narrative technique did not exist in the past, because the technology that enables it did not exist. For it to flourish, we needed advances in deep tech: data archiving and search indexing and speech-to-text.
Of course, the invention was the montage segment — those stories that splice together snippets of video, sometimes culled from across decades, to expose moments of political hypocrisy or media duplicity.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kelly Weill / Capital New York:
Twitter bot based on open-source code will track Wikipedia edits made from NY police department IP addresses
Twitter account to track NYPD’s Wikipedia edits in real time
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/city-hall/2015/03/8564038/twitter-account-track-nypds-wikipedia-edits-real-time
A new Twitter account will automatically track the NYPD’s anonymous edits to Wikipedia.
“Simply put, I hope it will continue to shine a light on NYPD edits in real time – particularly anonymous edits,” Emerson told Capital.
The account was created Friday morning, after a Capital New York report detailed extensive Wikipedia edits by NYPD IP addresses to Wikipedia articles. Capital found multiple instances of users on the NYPD network editing and attempting to delete entries on victims of NYPD altercations
“The NYPD certainly has a right to tell its interpretation of events, but editing Wikipedia anonymously is misleading,” Emerson said. “To put it politely.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook revamps its takedown guidelines
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-31890521
Facebook is providing the public with more information about what material is banned on the social network.
Its revamped community standards now include a separate section on “dangerous organisations” and give more details about what types of nudity it allows to be posted.
The US firm said it hoped the new guidelines would provide “clarity”.
One of its safety advisers praised the move but said that it was “frustrating” other steps had not been taken.
The new version of the guidelines runs to nearly 2,500 words, nearly three times as long as before.
The section on nudity, in particular, is much more detailed than the vague talk of “limitations” that featured previously.
Facebook now states that images “focusing in on fully exposed buttocks” are banned, as are “images of female breasts if they include the nipple”.
Other sections with new details include:
Bullying – images altered to “degrade” an individual and videos of physical bullying posted to shame the victim are now expressly forbidden
Hate speech – while the site maintains the same list of banned topics, it now adds that people are allowed to share examples of others’ hate speech in order to raise awareness of the issue, but they must “clearly indicate” that this is their purpose
Criminal activity – the network now states that users are prohibited from celebrating any crimes they have committed, but adds that they are allowed to propose that an illegal activity should be legalised
Self-injury – the site says that it will remove content that identifies victims and targets them for attack, even if done humorously. But it says that it does not consider “body modification” to be a type of self-injury
The changes have been welcomed by the Family Online Safety Institute (Fosi), one of five independent organisations that make up Facebook’s safety advisory board.
https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards
Tomi Engdahl says:
What are your links worth to Pinterest? $11 BEEELLION!
Social network valued by investors at more than three Nests
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/17/pinterest_valued_at_11bn/
Social link-sharing site Pinterest has taken in a new round of funding that gives the firm at a hefty US$11bn valuation.
Based on sharing links to pages through “Pins” on user pages, Pinterest only recently found itself generating money as it began selling ad space to retailers who liked the idea of appearing alongside the user-shared content.
The sky-high valuation would place the company at around one-fourth the value assigned to car service Uber ($41bn) or three times more than the $3.2bn Google shelled out acquire thermostat maker Nest last year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Joseph Lichterman / Nieman Lab:
BuzzFeed UK hit 18.8M unique visitors in February and is expanding editorial staff from 35 to 50 in 2015
http://mediagazer.com/#a150317p1
London calling: A look at BuzzFeed’s British invasion
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/03/london-calling-a-look-at-buzzfeeds-british-invasion/
The viral masters aren’t just interested in pushing its U.S. model overseas: “The idea is that we want international offices to start being not just satellite offices, but being centers of gravity themselves.”
Launched two years ago this month, BuzzFeed U.K. was BuzzFeed’s first international site, and its growth is indicative of the model it plans to use to build out other international sites.
“The idea is that we want international offices to start being not just satellite offices, but being centers of gravity themselves,”
BuzzFeed U.K. had just three staffers when it debuted in 2013. Later that year, BuzzFeed expanded to Australia, and it has since added or announced editions in Brazil, France, Germany, India, Mexico, and Japan.
The staff for the U.K. site now totals about 50 across all departments. It has an editorial staff of 35, though Lewis said he plans to grow the editorial staff alone to about 50 this year. Throughout 2013, Buzzfeed U.K. focused on what it calls Buzz, the lists and quizzes most identifiable with the site. But last year it began to scale up its reporting teams, including a five-person political staff led by deputy editor Jim Waterson, who interviewed Cameron on Monday. BuzzFeed U.K. also last year hired noted investigative reporter Heidi Blake to lead a three-person investigative team.
BuzzFeed attracted more than 18.8 million unique visitors in the U.K. in February, up from 13.4 million unique visitors in February 2014, according to Quantcast data.
BuzzFeed began building its U.K. sales team in September 2013 to work with British and European clients. But many brands in the U.K. are more conservative than their American counterparts, and advertisers see BuzzFeed U.K.’s growth on the news side as an appealing prospect, Digiday reported earlier this month.
“BuzzFeed initially went after the brands that felt right for the platform, Liam Brennan, digital strategy director at advertising agency Starcom Mediavest, told Digiday. “To grow that, they’re going to have to create more serious stuff to get more people on board.”
Beyond just the content, BuzzFeed U.K. has worked to adopt the office culture that’s originated in BuzzFeed’s U.S. offices. Staffers in London are constantly communicating with their American counterparts through Slack
“We sort of swap staff for short periods of time,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jeremy Barr / Capital New York:
Politico Europe to launch April 21, with weekly print edition starting April 23; joint venture with Axel Springer includes main newsroom in Brussels — Staffed-up POLITICO Europe to launch April 21 — POLITICO Europe, the Arlington-based company’s foray into the European media market
Staffed-up POLITICO Europe to launch April 21
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2015/03/8564208/staffed-politico-europe-launch-april-21
POLITICO Europe, the Arlington-based company’s foray into the European media market, has a launch date—April 21—and a roster of new journalists to add to its ranks.
“As of next month, POLITICO will have more reporters in the two main political and regulatory centers of the world—Washington and Brussels—than any other publication,” POLITICO Europe editor Matthew Kaminski, POLITICO editor in chief John Harris and POLITICO Europe managing director Shéhérazade Semsar-de Boisséson said in a note to staff sent early Tuesday morning.
POLITICO Europe will also have two notable contributing editors in New Republic managing editor Linda Kinstler and former Newsweek Global editor Tunku Varadarajan.
POLITICO Europe’s Pro initial subscription offerings will focus on energy, health care and technology, according to the memo.
Here in Europe, where POLITICO is being built as a joint venture with the respected German publishing house of Axel Springer
Tomi Engdahl says:
Farhad Manjoo / New York Times:
Gigaom’s challenges: poor leadership, spending beyond means, inattention to longterm problems
Digital Media Darlings Unfazed by the Fall of the News Site Gigaom
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/19/technology/personaltech/digital-media-darlings-unfazed-by-the-fall-of-the-news-site-gigaom.html
In the week and a half since the technology news site Gigaom stopped publishing, it has been held up as a cautionary tale for media in a go-go era. Here was a news organization that once looked promising, but had collapsed so unexpectedly that its reporters were working on stories right up to the moment they were told they were out of jobs.
Could the same fate befall other apparent darlings of media’s new gilded age — companies like Business Insider, Recode, Vice, Politico, Vox and BuzzFeed? Many of them, like Gigaom, have raised boatloads of financing and have tried to create a mix of businesses, including advertising, conferences and subscriptions, to turn a profit.
But Gigaom’s downfall does not offer easy lessons for media start-ups. Gigaom, pronounced Giga-ohm, was special, and not in a good way, according to more than half a dozen staffers and executives, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing nondisclosure agreements with the company. It was a company troubled by poor leadership, a history of spending beyond its means and an inattention to major problems that had dogged its businesses for years.
Chief among those problems was a bet on a division that sold specialized market research reports to corporate customers. That division grew to become Gigaom’s largest business, but it became less clear over time that it could deliver on those big expectations.
Some say that Gigaom was a business that, in retrospect, could never have worked as it was structured. Others say that it may have paid off one day, if only its investors and creditors had given it a bit more patience and a lot more money.
Gigaom’s troubles were not obvious to readers. Founded in 2006 by the technology journalist Om Malik, the site covered technology news with unusual depth. It eschewed slide shows, hype-ridden headlines and other sensationalist tricks known in the trade as “clickbait.”
Though Gigaom claimed a relatively small readership of about 6.5 million visitors per month, its audience was coveted by advertisers. The company also ran several conferences each year. And then there was the research division, which executives often described as the company’s golden goose.
Gigaom, it seemed, had found a business model that could fund serious journalism. Investors poured more than $30 million into the company in several rounds of financing.
Gigaom, which owed $5 million to $10 million in bank loans and short-term financing, could no longer meet its financial obligations, Mr. Rolnick told employees. It would halt publication immediately, and most of the company’s 68 employees would be laid off.
Workers were gobsmacked. “It came totally out of the blue,”
But Gigaom’s assets have not been seized. Instead, executives and the board decided that even with a cash infusion, the business could not be fixed.
For many years, the company believed that the research business was highly profitable.
But the business had fundamental problems. First, research required a lot of time. After Gigaom sold its reports, its analysts — all contractors — had to produce them. That could take as long as four months, and the company was not paid until those reports were delivered.
To the analysts doing the reports, it appeared as though the number of sales and marketing people in the research group — a peak of 20, while the rest of Gigaom had four — did not justify the work they were bringing in.
It is an odd story, and probably not the best example from which to draw grand conclusions about the future of the media business.
Tomi Engdahl says:
What Reporters Need to Know About Covering Net Neutrality
With news audiences moving online, journalists have a vested interest in coverage of this complicated topic
http://niemanreports.org/articles/what-reporters-need-to-know-about-covering-net-neutrality/
The media doesn’t cover “slow flow” particularly often or particularly well, despite the obvious public interest. Water pressure makes for a difficult story. Most people don’t understand how it works; it uses specialized and complex technology; and it involves arcane rules. Plus, some of the private water companies also happen to own some of the biggest news outlets.
Replace water flows with Internet speeds, and you capture some of the challenges journalists face in covering “net neutrality,” the idea that Internet service providers (ISPs) should not be allowed to limit the speed at which data flows through their networks or be permitted to charge more to heavy users.
The points of contention are many and complex.
Publishers of video and animated content, from Netflix to video game makers, are concerned since they use a high level of bandwidth. Media companies worry because the Internet is increasingly where the audience is, and some have said they support net neutrality. TV news outlets face an additional conflict. NBC is owned by Comcast, a corporation that also owns an ISP. CBS and ABC, along with its corporate partner ESPN, are also delivering live programming, especially sports, via the Internet.
These concerns are not just theoretical
Net neutrality is a fascinating story “masked with acronyms and bone-crushing technicalities,” says Susan Crawford, a Harvard Law School professor and net neutrality advocate. Juggling these angles and competing interests creates challenges for reporters, including, given the potential free speech issues, whether to advocate for a particular outcome.
Journalists who are not activists when it comes to free expression, including preserving the open Internet, “can’t really call themselves journalists,” according to Dan Gillmor, a professor at Arizona State’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Internet Under Fire Gets New Manifesto
“Personal is Human. Personalized isn’t.”
New Clues
https://medium.com/backchannel/internet-under-fire-gets-new-manifests-207a922b459e
From two Cluetrain authors, Doc Searls and David Weinberger
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mark Sweney / Guardian:
Guardian, FT, CNN, Reuters, and Economist launch new programmatic advertising alliance Pangaea to take on Facebook and Google
Guardian, FT, CNN and Reuters in ad deal to take on Facebook and Google
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/mar/18/guardian-ft-cnn-reuters-ad-deal-facebook-google-pangaea-alliance
Pangaea Alliance initiative will give brands access to more than 110 million online readers using programmatic advertising system
The Guardian, the Financial Times, CNN International, Reuters and the Economist have teamed up to pool their digital advertising space, to fight back against the drain of ad spend to tech giants such as Microsoft, Google and Facebook.
The initiative, called the Pangaea Alliance, will give brands access to more than 110 million online readers using a computerised, or programmatic, advertising system.
The global online display advertising market, worth an estimated $60bn (£41bn) according to WPP’s Group M, is increasingly becoming dominated by media owners that can offer giant scale to advertisers.
In the UK, Google and Facebook will this year take half of the total digital display advertising market, well over £1bn, according to eMarketer.
Meanwhile, more traditional rivals such as Mail Online, the largest English-language newspaper website in the world, continue to focus heavily on audience growth.
Pangaea will be launched in beta in April,
Tomi Engdahl says:
4chan’s Overlord Christopher Poole Reveals Why He Walked Away
His website made him an unlikely teenage celebrity — then it spun out of control
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/4chans-overlord-christopher-poole-reveals-why-he-walked-away-20150313#ixzz3UpOwprLj
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Times’ Attack on Wearables Is Really an Attack on Science
http://www.wired.com/2015/03/times-attack-wearables-really-attack-science/
Nick Bilton writes about technology for the Style section of the New York Times. He’s not a reporter; he does commentary, and as such nobody expects him to be right all the time. But his latest piece—which purports to outline scientific evidence that wearables like Apple’s recently announced Watch could cause diseases as serious as cancer—isn’t just wrong. Nor is it merely over-cautious, underreported, and purposefully provocative. It is dangerous.
This article is not about Nick Bilton. This article is about science, and how conspiracy-miners like Bilton misrepresent science to manufacture support for controversial ideas. The problem is not that Bilton believes that technology can cause diseases like cancer. That’s an old hypothesis, and one that science should (and does) examine. The problem is that he delivered his argument by targeting the most admirable hallmark of the scientific method: uncertainty in the face of incomplete evidence. And that makes his essay a pernicious attack on science itself.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Margaret Sullivan / New York Times:
Power of NYT print subscribers: provide more than 70% of revenue, very engaged in digital offerings too
The Curious (and Vital) Power of Print
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/public-editor/the-curious-and-vital-power-of-print.html
WHO buys the print edition of the newspaper? Just a few Luddites who wouldn’t know a smartphone if their horse-drawn buggy crushed it on the cobblestones? Octogenarians and their older brothers?
That seems to be the conventional wisdom. On Twitter, Chris Boutet had a funny line recently. “The following is a list of people who still subscribe to newspapers: Journalists, their parents.”
There’s no doubt about the downward trajectory of print. But where, exactly, are we on that path?
But for those who might say “who cares?” about the printed newspaper, there’s reason to pause. Try these tidbits:
More than 70 percent of all revenue at The Times came from print last year. The biggest share of that is “consumer revenue” from print — almost exclusively, that’s from people who buy the newspaper either with a home-delivery subscription or on the newsstand. But print advertising revenue is very important, too.
More than a million people still buy the Sunday paper each week. The number has declined to about 1.1 million from 1.8 million at its height in 1993. And about 645,000 people still pay for the daily paper, which has taken the biggest hit. (The daily numbers fell by about 6 percent last year; on Sunday, the number fell by about 3.5 percent.)
A lot of younger people buy and read the paper in print. Of all subscribers, 23 percent are in their 20s, 30s and 40s — that’s hundreds of thousands each week. They can’t all be journalists.
And on the opposite side of the spectrum, the typical digital Times subscriber is decidedly not a millennial, wielding her selfie stick and heading off to Coachella. No, the median age of the digital subscriber is a graying (but no doubt Pilates-practicing) 54, not much younger than the median age of the print subscriber, which is 60.
What’s more, this substantial print crowd, young and old, loves its Times passionately.
“That sentiment won’t change,” Mr. Caputo said, “and we have print readers of all ages.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
New York Times:
Facebook to test new format for hosting publisher content within months, initial partners include NYT, BuzzFeed, NatGeo
Facebook May Host News Sites’ Content
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/24/business/media/facebook-may-host-news-sites-content.html?_r=0
Nothing attracts news organizations like Facebook. And nothing makes them more nervous.
With 1.4 billion users, the social media site has become a vital source of traffic for publishers looking to reach an increasingly fragmented audience glued to smartphones. In recent months, Facebook has been quietly holding talks with at least half a dozen media companies about hosting their content inside Facebook rather than making users tap a link to go to an external site.
Such a plan would represent a leap of faith for news organizations accustomed to keeping their readers within their own ecosystems, as well as accumulating valuable data on them. Facebook has been trying to allay their fears, according to several of the people briefed on the talks, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were bound by nondisclosure agreements.
Facebook intends to begin testing the new format in the next several months, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions.
To make the proposal more appealing to publishers, Facebook has discussed ways for publishers to make money from advertising that would run alongside the content.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google reportedly blackmailed websites into giving it content for free
A new Wall Street Journal report details anti-competitive practices by the company
http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/19/8260073/google-ftc-leaked-anti-trust-report
In 2012, the Federal Trade Commission investigated Google to determine whether the company’s monopoly on the search market violated anti-trust laws. The Commission ultimately accepted a settlement with the search giant, but a confidential FTC report obtained by The Wall Street Journal reveals how deeply divided the Commission was over whether to sue.
As part of the settlement, Google agreed to make minor changes to its business practices and argued that the report did not show wrongdoing. But key FTC officials, after collecting nine million documents in the course of the investigation, wanted to take direct legal action against the company. The report reveals why.
Google “adopted a strategy of demoting, or refusing to display, links to certain vertical websites in highly commercial categories.”
Inside the U.S. Antitrust Probe of Google
Key FTC staff wanted to sue Internet giant after finding ‘real harm to consumers and to innovation’
http://www.wsj.com/articles/inside-the-u-s-antitrust-probe-of-google-1426793274
Tomi Engdahl says:
Emma Watson nude photo threats were apparently a plot to kill 4chan
Site was a hoax orchestrated by viral marketing company
http://www.theverge.com/2014/9/24/6837585/emma-watson-nude-photo-threats-were-hoax-anti-4chan-campaign
Thanks to 4chan’s inherently anonymous comment structure, it’s not clear whether the marketing company behind the campaign was responsible for the post indicating it was in possession of Emma Watson’s private photos, or if its representatives simply capitalized on the rumors, building the site in a few days. If the campaign’s organizers are indeed linked to Swenzy, then they have experience putting together similar hoaxes. A similar countdown page appeared in October last year that teased a massive NASA announcement. The announcement was fake, and led instead to a YouTube music video.
But despite the campaign’s murky background and questionable methods, something good may come from the hoax. The threat of another young woman’s private photos being leaked has spurred a strong reaction from the media, and helped provide a point of coalescence around which people could discuss the representation of women in society.
The company behind the campaign is crowing about its viral success
Tomi Engdahl says:
Justin Ellis / Nieman Lab:
To stand out from the tech crowd, The Verge broadens coverage to pop culture, science, and even cars
This is my next step: How The Verge wants to grow beyond tech blogging
“We want to use technology as a way to define pop culture, in the way Rolling Stone used music and Wired used the early Internet.”
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/03/this-is-my-next-step-how-the-verge-wants-to-grow-beyond-tech-blogging/
Tomi Engdahl says:
BBC News switches PC users to responsive site
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-31966686
The desktop version of the BBC News website has been switched off, and all visitors are now being directed to a newer, responsive design.
The new site adapts its layout depending on what type of device it is being used on, be it a desktop PC, tablet or mobile.
The BBC said the move reflected the change in how the majority of visitors were consuming their news.
However, some users said the design felt “empty” and “too bright”.
Desktop visitors to the BBC News site have been prompted to try out the new responsive design for the past few weeks – but now the desktop-only site has been switched off for good.
Users are being automatically taken to the new-look site.
“We now see 65% of our visitors to the website are on mobile or tablet devices,” said Robin Pembrooke, the BBC’s head of product for the News and Weather sites.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Chris Thorman / Vox Media Marketing:
Case study of Vox’s distribution on Facebook, which accounts for up to 40% of the site’s monthly traffic — How Vox.com approaches publishing on Facebook — From day one, Vox.com has had a simple editorial mission: explain the news.
How Vox.com approaches publishing on Facebook
http://marketing.voxmedia.com/2015/3/23/8208013/vox-dot-com-facebook-case-study-2015
From day one, Vox.com has had a simple editorial mission: explain the news.
In less than a year of existence, the site has grown to over 23 million monthly unique visitors and has cultivated a hyper-engaged fan base both on and off their platforms. This rapid ascent made Vox.com one of the most successful publisher launches of 2014 and can be largely attributed to their approach to publishing and audience on Facebook.
Here’s how how the Vox.com team makes that happen.
Senior editors, working with a company-wide audience development team, continuously train and empower the newsroom with best practices for developing smart headlines, choosing the most compelling images, optimizing content for mobile consumption, as well as maximizing the built in social distribution features of Vox Media’s Chorus publishing platform.
“In addition to the strong growth of the Vox.com Facebook page itself, we continue to see a high rate of sharing outside of our page, which can be attributed to this holistic approach to social distribution,” Vox.com’s Engagement Editor Allison Rockey says.
By making social packaging second nature to its journalists, Vox.com has seen Facebook referrals increase nearly 200% over a six-month period and at times Facebook has accounted for up to 40% of the site’s overall monthly traffic.
Understand the Ecosystem
“We want to give our fans a complete experience wherever they are.”
When Vox.com interviewed President Obama in February 2015, the staff released in-depth excerpts – not short teasers – of their full interview natively through the Facebook video player ahead of the interview’s launch on Vox.com. The clips were viewed 250K times in the first two hours and over 1 million times total, proving the value of going where the audience is, packaging content in formats that are conducive to the platform, and appealing to audiences in a way that feels natural in that environment.
Understanding that there is inherent brand-building value in getting in front of audiences even if they aren’t always directed back to a website has been a key element of Vox.com’s Facebook growth. By employing this strategy, Vox.com has been able to attract fans quickly and grow a strong base on Facebook, which in turn results in more web site referrals over the long run.
By leveraging the pages of the site’s founders and staff members, Vox.com’s Facebook page organically reached over 1 million weekly users by the end of its first month.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Information:
Facebook is in talks with several media firms, including Vice, The Onion, and Vox Media, to produce high quality short-form sponsored videos
http://www.theinformation.com/articles/Facebook-Strikes-Deals-With-Vice-Other-Producers-For-New-Video-Offering
Tomi Engdahl says:
Reddit Now Lets Other Sites Embed User Comments
http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/23/reddit-embeddable-comments/
After a few months of beta testing, Reddit has officially launched embeddable comments. Like Twitter’s embedded tweets feature, embeddable comments makes it easy for other sites to feature comments from Reddit users. Instead of cutting-and-pasting a comment or linking back to it, writers just have to click on its permalink and select “embed” for its code.
The feature is only available for comments on public subreddits, which will come as a relief to users on private subreddits who don’t want their thoughts potentially plastered all over the Internet.
There are several drawbacks, however, to embedding Reddit comments, like questionable usernames
Tomi Engdahl says:
Felix Salmon / Fusion:
How Facebook could kill the news brand — It seems my prediction is coming true: Facebook wants news stories to live within its own app. That’s better for Facebook’s readers, who don’t need to click on links and wait for clunky external websites, and it’s better for Facebook …
How Facebook could kill the news brand
http://fusion.net/story/108799/how-facebook-could-kill-the-news-brand/
It seems my prediction is coming true: Facebook wants news stories to live within its own app. That’s better for Facebook’s readers, who don’t need to click on links and wait for clunky external websites, and it’s better for Facebook, which gets to keep those readers within its own ecosystem and collect more data on exactly what kind of stories they like to read. It’s also good for companies like BuzzFeed, whose CEO, Jonah Peretti, says that “it increasingly doesn’t matter where our content lives.”
Peretti told Peter Kafka that so long as he can get data back from someone else’s platform — whether that platform is Pinterest or Snapchat or Facebook or YouTube or anything else — then he can use BuzzFeed’s technology team to help optimize content for that platform, including the content he’s being paid to create on behalf of brands.
As I said last year, the best way to think of BuzzFeed’s various products is as a proof of concept: it’s a way to show advertisers that the company is able to reach a large, young, mobile, social audience in a multitude of different ways. The ability to reach those people is something of a holy grail for advertisers, who are therefore very willing to pay top dollar to anybody who can help them achieve their goal. The idea is that if BuzzFeed can reach a broad audience with its various editorial products, it can then sell that secret sauce to advertisers, and help them reach the same audience, using the same tools. The key here is reach — which, in an app-based world, is a very different animal from traffic.
But maybe the NYT has seen the writing on the wall. The era of the self-contained news package — all the news that’s fit to print, delivered neatly in a bundle on your front doorstep in the morning — is coming to an end. News has become disaggregated, and the thing that people share is not the newspaper, but the news story. Which can come from anywhere. A couple of decades ago, readers would read a story and remember which newspaper or magazine they read it in, while paying almost no attention to the byline. Today, readers read a story and while they might remember that they found it on Facebook, or Twitter, they pay almost no attention either to the byline or to the publication. The important thing is the information itself, rather than the place it came from.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Joshua Benton / Nieman Lab:
Instead of building bespoke platforms, publishers are turning to others, like Facebook — A wave of distributed content is coming — will publishers sink or swim? — Last August, when BuzzFeed announced a new $50 million round of venture capital investment, a lot of journalists heard …
A wave of distributed content is coming — will publishers sink or swim?
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/03/a-wave-of-distributed-content-is-coming-will-publishers-sink-or-swim/
Instead of just publishing to their own websites, news organizations are being asked to publish directly to platforms they don’t control. Is the hunt for readers enough to justify losing some independence?
Last August, when BuzzFeed announced a new $50 million round of venture capital investment, a lot of journalists heard a new phrase for the first time: distributed content. The company announced it would be spending some of that new money to start a new division, BuzzFeed Distributed, which it described as a team of 20 staffers who would “make original content solely for platforms like Tumblr, Imgur, Instagram, Snapchat, Vine and messaging apps.” In other words, a team of people producing content that will never even appear on buzzfeed.com.
Being on social platforms isn’t new to publishers, of course, but most news sites use Twitter and Facebook as marketing tools to drive traffic back to the mothership. BuzzFeed Distributed lives only in social streams, self-contained and freestanding.
Why would BuzzFeed spend millions on producing content for other people’s platforms, with no obvious financial benefit? Well, VC firms do keep handing them money — they have to spend it somewhere. But more importantly, BuzzFeed wants to follow its users’ attention. And those users are increasingly moving to social platforms where publishers’ old tricks don’t work any more.
Building on other people’s property
If you’ve watched for it, you might have seen a few other steps in a similar direction in recent months:
— Reported.ly, the new startup from Pierre Omidyar’s First Look Media, was born in December without a website of its own.
— In January, Snapchat, the visual chat app mega-popular among teens, debuted Snapchat Discover, a new space where around a dozen publishers publish stories directly into the app, specially designed and formatted to look Snapchatty.
— NowThis, a touted startup that creates short videos designed for social platforms, abandoned efforts to build a website audience in February in a rather direct way: It killed its homepage.
— Facebook, arguing that linking out to news stories provides a bad experience for users, is currently trying to convince news organizations to publish their stories directly to Facebook rather than on a separate website. The lure: Facebook will use its advanced data and technology to make more money selling ads against their content than publishers could on their own — and they’ll each share in the take.
You can see the common line through all these: The triumph of the social platform. In one sense, nothing new — Facebook colonized the world’s eyeballs some time ago. But the pitch to publishers has changed. It used to be: Spend some time cultivating a following of our network — we’ll send you a ton of traffic. That’s now evolving into: Give up some of your independence and step inside our walls — we promise we’ll make it worth your while.
This shift is a predictable result of the rise of mobile devices. When I started using the web in the 1990s, every website — whether NYTimes.com or someone’s food blog — lived, in a technical sense, on the same level. Each had a URL I could enter into any web browser. The largest megacorp and the smallest site could live in browser tabs side by side, and the link — the humble blue underline that defined the medium — connected them all as equal citizens of an open platform.
But the iPhone and the rise of smartphones that followed it repackaged the Internet into apps. The open web became just another app, living alongside all the others. Of every hour an average American spends on his or her smartphone, only about 7 minutes are spent in the web browser.
And an increasing share of teens and young readers aren’t just digital natives but smartphone natives. Social platforms are their centers of attention. And later iterations of these platforms are — intentionally — not designed to be friendly to news or anything else that wants a share of that attention.
What’s a smart publisher to do? There are no easy solutions, but here are a few ideas.
— Bet on native advertising. This is BuzzFeed’s edge; its argument to advertisers is: We know how to make content for social better than anyone else. Not relying on banner advertising means not relying on pageviews in the same way as most
— Focus more energy on the platforms that are still open. Why have we seen a boomlet in email newsletters? One reason: Email is still an open platform, and no one controls access to your inbox. Podcasts? An open standard that anyone can publish to. In both cases, the customer gets to decide the relationship with the publisher, not a middleman.
— Consider going premium. Competing for attention (and ad dollars) on the open web will keep getting harder.
— Go for scale. The reason so much venture capital is pouring into the BuzzFeeds and Vox Medias and Business Insiders of the world is that investors believe they have the chance to achieve truly giant scale — to be the next-generation Time Inc. or NBC or Reuters. Navigating the world created by these social platforms is a task made easier when you’re big enough to get noticed.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why Free Is Not the Future of Digital Content in Education
http://www.wired.com/2015/03/free-not-future-digital-content-education/
As Chief Content Officer of a learning company, people frequently ask me: “Won’t all of your content eventually be free? After all, when technology enters the market, free is right behind it.”
Then they’ll point to something like the music industry, where annual revenues have declined more than $20 billion from their peak over a decade ago and album sales recently hit their lowest point on record.
For $9.99 a month — less than the price of a single CD a decade ago — listeners can stream as much ad-free music as they want on Spotify
The downward price pressure exerted on the music industry (or the news business, or movies) by the digital revolution is unmistakable. But going digital will affect different industries in different ways based on market dynamics and other factors.
For starters, the use of technology does not make me like the song itself more. It doesn’t improve songs in a way that would lead me to assign additional value to them.
Contrast that with gaming: The video game industry has thrived in recent years. That’s partly because video games provide a social experience – a service – that cannot be pirated. And technology has catalyzed this shift.
Primary and secondary education presents another case where technology fundamentally changes the way content is experienced. Just imagine: I am a teacher. I am responsible for ensuring that my students succeed in an educational process that will equip them with the knowledge and skills that are critical for their future success.
There are 30 different learning styles in my classroom and I have to reach them all.
Technology helps me do this. As students engage with the content, the content learns more about the students and it also becomes “smarter”.
In doing so, technology helps solves a big problem that has always confronted teachers: students learn at different paces.
You get the picture. In this case, technology is making educational content better. It is increasing its value. It is now able to solve a long-existing challenge. It is enabling content to do things that it could not do before. And the stakes could not be higher.
The quality of educational content has a marked impact on student achievement.
Digital-age technology is showing up in classrooms across the United States. But that doesn’t mean that “free is right behind it.” High-quality content, delivered through smart digital platforms, makes it possible for teachers to work with their students in ways they never could have imagined before. And given what’s at stake, that’s something worth investing in.
Tomi Engdahl says:
NY Times: “All the News That Mark Zuckerberg Sees Fit To Print”?
http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/03/26/1422231/ny-times-all-the-news-that-mark-zuckerberg-sees-fit-to-print
Two years ago, Politico caught Mark Zuckerberg’s soon-to-be launched FWD.us PAC boasting how its wealthy tech exec backers would use their companies to ‘control the avenues of distribution’ for a political message in support of their efforts. Now, the NY Times is reporting that Facebook has been quietly holding talks with at least half a dozen media companies about hosting their content inside Facebook, citing a source who said the Times and Facebook are moving closer to a firm deal.
Facebook May Host News Sites’ Content
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/24/business/media/facebook-may-host-news-sites-content.html?_r=0
Nothing attracts news organizations like Facebook. And nothing makes them more nervous.
With 1.4 billion users, the social media site has become a vital source of traffic for publishers looking to reach an increasingly fragmented audience glued to smartphones. In recent months, Facebook has been quietly holding talks with at least half a dozen media companies about hosting their content inside Facebook rather than making users tap a link to go to an external site.
Such a plan would represent a leap of faith for news organizations accustomed to keeping their readers within their own ecosystems, as well as accumulating valuable data on them. Facebook has been trying to allay their fears, according to several of the people briefed on the talks, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were bound by nondisclosure agreements.
Facebook intends to begin testing the new format in the next several months, according to two people with knowledge of the discussions. The initial partners are expected to be The New York Times, BuzzFeed and National Geographic, although others may be added since discussions are continuing. The Times and Facebook are moving closer to a firm deal, one person said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mark Zuckerberg immigration group’s status: Looking for footing
http://www.politico.com/story/2013/04/mark-zuckerberg-immigration-groups-status-stumbling-89652.html
Under a section called “our tactical assets,” the prospectus lists three reasons why “people in tech” can be organized into “one of the most powerful political forces.”
“1: We control massive distribution channels, both as companies and individuals. We saw the tip of the iceberg with SOPA/PIPA.
“2: “Our voice carries a lot of weight because we are broadly popular with Americans.
“3. We have individuals with a lot of money. If deployed properly this can have huge influence in the current campaign finance environment.”
“Several prominent leaders in the tech community, operating solely as individuals, continue to work on forming an issues advocacy organization that would seek to promote issues such as comprehensive immigration reform and education reform,”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/04/mark-zuckerberg-immigration-groups-status-stumbling-89652.html#ixzz3VVEnojO5
Tomi Engdahl says:
Owen Williams / The Next Web:
New York City explosion shows the potential for mobile live streaming via Periscope to change news, offering mass access to live video seconds after an event
Periscope and live video are changing the internet forever
http://thenextweb.com/opinion/2015/03/26/periscope-and-live-video-are-changing-the-internet-forever/
Today, I saw the future and it is Periscope. The app, which only launched earlier today, had its first moment in the spotlight as an explosion rocked New York City.
Within seconds, feeds started popping up on Periscope with first-person views of the scene. I watched it unfold from afar. Then I jumped into another stream, which was a block away. Then, another stream from right in front of the explosion.
It’s unprecedented to get this kind of footage seconds after an event occurs, even before first responders arrived. As I watched the drama unfold in New York, streamers were replying to questions about what they could see and were experiencing.
It’s almost like next-level Twitter. Information starts flowing in and you can experience it as it happens, in real time. With Periscope, you get a whole new level of access to the events unfolding on the ground.
Periscope has begun to transform the way that news can be accessed and consumed overnight. Meerkat, which came before it, started the change but Periscope has fulfilled instant live video’s purpose, by offering a huge critical mass of users as it launched to great fanfare.
Meerkat isn’t all that different from Periscope but Twitter’s massive user graph is already helping the latter grow even more rapidly than expected. In a way, Meerkat almost guaranteed Periscope’s success by generating hype for the company’s launch.
Don’t get me wrong, Periscope won’t replace the TV news. Watching these streams can be overwhelming and confusing. There is unfettered access to information and scenes that might be cut from live TV, which could be dangerous and those filming don’t have the facts. It’s a whole new level of the unfiltered world.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Adrienne LaFrance / The Atlantic Online:
Jonah Peretti says NYT should make print edition more expensive before going online only — One Way to Phase Out Newspapers: Make Them a Luxury Good — There will eventually come a day when The New York Times ceases to publish stories on newsprint. Exactly when that day will be is a matter of debate.
One Way to Phase Out Newspapers: Make Them a Luxury Good
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/03/print-newspapers-are-for-rich-people/388757/
The New York Times should make the print edition more expensive before switching to online only, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti says.
There will eventually come a day when The New York Times ceases to publish stories on newsprint. Exactly when that day will be is a matter of debate. “Sometime in the future, date TBD,” the paper’s publisher said back in 2010.
Nostalgia for ink on paper and the rustle of pages aside, there’s plenty of incentive to ditch print. The infrastructure required to make a physical newspaper—printing presses, delivery trucks—isn’t just expensive, it’s exorbitant at a time when online-only competitors don’t have the same set of financial constraints. Readers are migrating away from print anyway. And though print ad sales continue to dwarf their online and mobile counterparts, revenue from print is still declining.
A quick look at some key numbers for context: The Times’ weekday circulation had fallen to about 649,000 at last count, according to SEC filings, while Sunday circulation was down to 1.2 million people.
Overhead may be high and circulation may be lower, but rushing to eliminate the print edition of The New York Times would be a mistake, says BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti.
BuzzFeed is one of the fastest growing media companies in the United States; it is digitally nimble and massively popular. And it’s smart enough, strategically, to have gotten the attention of leaders at the Times. They identified BuzzFeed as a competitor last year in a lengthy innovation report—originally meant as an internal document at the Times, but leaked to, yes, BuzzFeed.
Peretti says the Times shouldn’t waste time getting out of the print business, but only if they go about doing it the right way. “Figuring out a way to accelerate that transition would make sense for them,” he told me, “but if you discontinue it, you’re going to have your most loyal customers really upset with you.”
Sometimes that’s worth making a change anyway. Peretti gives the example of Netflix discontinuing its DVD-mailing service to focus on streaming. “It was seen as a blunder,” he said. The move turned out to be prescient. And if Peretti were in charge at The New York Times? “I don’t think I would pick a year [to end print],” he said. “I would raise prices and make it into more of a legacy product.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Josh Stearns / Medium:
Apps like Periscope and Meerkat could help people understand their right to record — Periscope, Meerkat and the Right to Record — I’ve been playing with Periscope this morning and thinking a lot about how it has simplified the the process of livestreaming but also how it has perfected …
Periscope, Meerkat and Your Right to Record
https://medium.com/@jcstearns/periscope-meerkat-and-the-right-to-record-9a9e4cc0baac
During those Occupy protests livestreams and journalists — both mainstream and indie — were being arrested in alarming numbers when they pointed their cameras and cell phones at police. In the years since the power of cell phone cameras and livestreaming apps has only expanded and more and more people are taking up these tools.
As such, there is a real opportunity for apps like Periscope and Meerkat to help people understand their right to record. I would love to see a partnership between these apps and an organization like WITNESS to create in app notifications, guides and best practices for safe and secure citizen journalism and eye witness recording.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Martin Moore / Policy Wonkers:
Phone hacking report finds 2/3 of victims not celebrities or public figures, hacked politicians seven times more likely to be Labour than Conservative
Who was hacked? A New Report Investigates
http://blogs.kcl.ac.uk/policywonkers/who-was-hacked/
Read coverage of the various hacking trials (News of the World in 2013/14 and now Mirror Group Newspapers) and you could be forgiven for thinking phone hacking was all about celebrities. Celebrities attract attention, attract news interest, and sell papers. This is perhaps why many of the news reports of phone hacking have concentrated on celebrities and are illustrated with photographs of celebrities.
Yet, if you actually sit down and add up the numbers, it becomes clear that though many celebrities were targets of the News of the World they were not the main victims of phone hacking. Over two thirds of the News of the World phone hacking victims that we know about were not public figures. They were beauticians, receptionists, lawyers, estate agents, nannies, policemen, journalists, priests, sports agents and hairdressers.
Almost one in ten of those targeted by the paper’s hackers were people coping with dreadful tragedies, for example the families of murder victims. A striking number of targets were people in positions important to national security.
And it turns out that the News of the World was seven times more likely to hack a Labour politician than a Conservative one.
Yet the context also shows that phone hacking was just one of a toolbox of methods the News of the World used to find out personal information about its targets. Others included blagging, pinging, paying informants and tailing. Through a combination of these they could find out everything from medical history through to past relationships, to driving records and personal diaries.
Up till now, no-one has systematically tried to analyse who was hacked and the context of that hacking. A new report – ‘Who was hacked? An investigation into phone hacking and its victims’ – gathers together all the victims of News of the World phone hacking that we know about
Tomi Engdahl says:
Matthew S Carroll / Medium:
MediaShift’s Mark Glaser talks innovation, news apps, and the future of investigative reporting
https://medium.com/@matthewscarroll/mediashift-s-mark-glaser-talks-innovation-news-apps-and-the-future-of-investigative-reporting-b5a6991a5c82
The Future of News initiative at the MIT Media Lab spoke with Mark Glaser, who started MediaShift in 2006 as a small, one-person blog, with a focus on the changes revolutionizing media and media technology. He quickly realized what a massive topic it was and now his organization gets about 150,000 unique visitors per month at MediaShift and IdeaLab, the two main sites, while about 15,000 users download podcasts and another 15,000 get five newsletters. “We go where the subject takes us,” says Glaser. Its audience is a mix of people in the media industry, freelancers, people who run their own web sites or create podcasts, and journalism educators and students. MediaShift is an independent producer for PBS.org.
His organization has grown thanks to grants from organizations such as Knight, sponsorships, and running networking events, workshops, and hackathons, and they are developing online training modules. This is an edited transcript of an interview with him.
Q: Mark, you focus on innovation a lot. Where would you like to see more innovation?
A: Some of the legacy organizations are kind of stuck, especially in leadership roles. If there’s one area where news organizations could change, it’s first, to bring in more diversity, more women, more people of color. And number two, bring in people with a lot more experience in the digital realm. A lot of people come in and lead these organizations and talk a lot about digital and how it’s so important, but when their background is very much legacy, the changes don’t really come. I think there needs to be more change within the leadership before some of these organizations will change. It’s the same situation in journalism education. Some schools are really pushing for innovation. But 90–95 percent are doing the same things they always did, teaching people to write for newspapers, teaching people to broadcast. They are not really understanding that we must train people for the real world now, which is multi-skilled, multi-platform skilled, understanding web, SEO, promoting themselves, entrepreneurial skills. All the things that journalists need now, they need to start training them for. If they don’t, they are not going to survive. Innovations really needs to be from the beginning, with training all the way up to leadership. That’s where I’d like to see more innovation.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Simon Owens / Nieman Lab:
How World Politics Review went from a side project to a paywalled news destination — How a hobby foreign affairs blog became a paywalled news destination — and a business — Like many journalism startups to emerge in recent years, the World Politics Review got its start because the kind …
How a hobby foreign affairs blog became a paywalled news destination — and a business
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/03/how-a-hobby-foreign-affairs-blog-became-a-paywalled-news-destination-and-a-business/
World Politics Review has grown from one man’s side project to a small news operation supported by a niche paywall.
Like many journalism startups to emerge in recent years, the World Politics Review got its start because the kind of reporting its founder was interested in didn’t really exist at most traditional media outlets. “I was trying to publish op-eds in various newspapers,” Hampton Stephens told me in a phone interview. “And I was struck that there weren’t many outlets for the kind of analytical writing about international affairs I wanted to do.”
He launched the site in 2006 when he was earning a graduate degree in international affairs, and though he had no initial business model, he also wasn’t a newcomer to professional journalism
But the limitless supply of content on the Internet drove down ad rates to such an extent that only websites with massive scale were able to sustain themselves. Though the World Politics Review audience was growing, it quickly became clear that Stephens would never see the level of traffic needed to break even, much less turn a profit. He realized he would need to erect some kind of paywall — but he also knew that such a measure would inhibit his ability to market the site’s content.
So, several years before The New York Times introduced its “leaky paywall” — one since widely emulated by other news companies — Stephens began to roll out his own porous subscription service. “A lot of our traffic is coming from search engines, and we want people to get a taste of the first article,” said Stephens. “So for that first click [from Google] they get the whole article, and if they click to another article then they hit the paywall.” The same goes for any inbound referrals from Twitter or Facebook.
“We do know people who abuse that. We know there are people who are following us on Twitter on a daily basis and probably clicking through to every article we publish and reading it for free,” he said. “But basically we decided that’s the tradeoff you have to make.”
Though WPR does offer individual subscriptions, at about $60 a year, more than 60 percent of the site’s subscription revenue comes from these institutions. In late 2010, Stephens signed a partnership deal with EBSCO, an information services company that sells bundled digital subscriptions for scholarly journals and other publications to universities, companies, government agencies, and nonprofits. “They have a sales force that’s calling on [these organizations], so our partnership allows us to focus on the content while they have the sales force, and we have a joint venture where we share the revenue.”
This partnership has allowed WPR to vastly expand its subscription base
Stephens has also focused significant effort toward securing more individual subscribers; his goal is that they eventually make up at least 50 percent of his subscription base.
WPR, Stephens argued, fits somewhere between mainstream publications like The Economist, which are writing for a more general audience, and international affairs journals that are only published quarterly and might not run a longform article until two years after it was originally submitted. “There are mainstream readers who can get something out of what we publish,”
The site has four full-time editorial employees, most of whom are based in New York
The vast majority of their workday is spent commissioning and editing content from a network of contributors with a wide range of subject matter expertise and who live all over the world.
“We pay them per piece — they’re contractors,” said Stephens. “We don’t have long-term contracts with any of them.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Millennials say keeping up with the news is important to them — but good luck getting them to pay for it
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/03/millennials-say-keeping-up-with-the-news-is-important-to-them-but-good-luck-getting-them-to-pay-for-it/
The new report from the Media Insight Project looks at millennials’ habits and attitudes toward news consumption: “I really wouldn’t pay for any type of news because as a citizen it’s my right to know the news.”
Most millennials don’t seek out news on social media, but the vast majority of them get news from social networks once they see it there, according to a report released today by the Media Insight Project, a collaboration between the American Press Institute and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Only 47 percent of the millennials surveyed said consuming news is a major reason they visit Facebook, but 88 percent of the respondents said they get news from Facebook at least occasionally. 83 percent said they get news from YouTube on occasion, and 50 percent found news on Instagram. Next in line: Pinterest at 36 percent, Twitter at 33 percent, Reddit at 23 percent, and Tumblr at 21 percent.
“Simply put, social media is no longer simply social,” the report says. “It long ago stopped being just a way to stay in touch with friends. It has become a way of being connected to the world generally — to send messages, follow channels of interest, get news, share news, talk about it, be entertained, stay in touch, and to check in and see what’s new in the world.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
I Don’t Know if Je Suis Charlie
But in Paris, the lines between freedom, anger, and extremism are messier than we can admit.
https://medium.com/matter/i-dont-know-if-je-suis-charlie-c23149eb8f1c
Depending on how one counts, the Charlie Hebdo killings were the 16th or 17th terrorist attack of 2015, and the year was barely a week old.
But the extremism isn’t optional. The violence always comes with extremism.
The stigmatizing is starting. The usual suspects of conservative politics, in both America and Europe, are making the usual cries that we must protect free speech and cultural freedom by destroying it, but only for Muslims. Besides the obvious self-contradiction of this idea, there is another notion embedded in it: that Islam has some magical quality that generates extremism. But extremism isn’t really an Islamic affliction if you look at the question historically and in depth. Like all forms of violence, as well as addiction and property crime, extremism seems to follow poverty around, like little hell ducklings that have imprinted upon the most vulnerable among us.
It was true before Charlie, and it still remains true, that the majority of contemporary victims of terrorism are Muslims, and the main capturers and killers of journalists are governments and their political groups.
Antiterrorism measures the world round seem to be doing little to stop terrorism, but the tools and laws get used against activists and journalists disproportionately. Even in America, courtesies extended to journalists are suspended if something is considered “national security” — a fuzzy phrase with no technical definition, but nonetheless used against journalists like James Risen.
“The problem with Charlie Hebdo, they were stigmatizing. They were provocative in every single way… Charlie Hebdo was mocking absolutely every single thing in France: Jews, Christians, Muslims, Republicans, the Right,”
For Abdelhamid, what the magazine published often crossed the line from satire to bigotry. They hurt people, and didn’t seem to care. “I am not Charlie,” Abdelhamid said. “[But] I want to insist on a point — I was defending the right of Charlie Hebdo to express, to use their pen. [I wanted] to prove that I can answer in a better way than them.”
He wanted to make it clear it wasn’t the satire that put him off.
“In France, [if] we are around 7 million Muslims, then there’s around 7 million kinds of Islam… Charlie Hebdo tried to make out one kind of Islam, one kind of Christianity,”
Extremism is a kind of insanity made of anger. Most people, white, black, Christian, Muslim, man or woman, never live with that kind of anger — the kind that makes you want to throw your life away just to hurt someone or something.
Extremism doesn’t emerge from a vacuum. It’s not the territory of a particular religion or ideology. It isn’t some easy path. It doesn’t happen overnight.
Some of my French friends have said Charlie Hebdo is more anti-racist than racist, but it’s complicated. They could be right
I am sure of this: If, as a society, we want to starve extremism, to save cartoonists in France and prevent the strange fruit of the American South, to stop suicide bombers in the Middle East and the violence of the Nigerian countryside, we do that by not starving children. We do it by feeding their bodies and minds and hopes.