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:
Eugene Wei / Remains of the Day:
Great content isn’t commodified, and is a key differentiator for media companies, and Facebook hosting news won’t change that — Facebook hosting doesn’t change things, the world already changed
Facebook hosting doesn’t change things, the world already changed
http://www.eugenewei.com/blog/2015/3/27/facebook-doesnt-change-things-the-world-already-changed
Like any industry, the media loves a bit of navel-gazing (what is the origin of this phrase, because I don’t enjoy staring at my own navel; maybe mirror-preening instead?). When Facebook announced they were offering to host content from media sites like The New York Times, the media went into a frenzy of apocalyptic prediction, with Mark Zuckerberg in the role of Mephistopheles.
All this sound and fury, signifying nothing. Whether media sites allow Facebook to host their content or not won’t meaningfully change things one way or the other, and much of the FUD being spread would be energy better spent focused on other far larger problems.
Let’s just list all the conditions that exist and won’t change one bit whether or not you let Facebook host your content:
News is getting commodified. The days of being special just for covering a story are over. Beyond millions of citizen journalists that the internet has unleashed, you’re competing with software that can do basic reporting.
…distribution is effectively free. Instead of pulp, our words take the form of bits that are distributed across…oh, you know.
Marketing is cheaper. You can use Twitter or Facebook or other social media to make a name for yourself. Big media companies can take advantage of that, too, but the incremental advantage is greater for the indies.
…competition for attention is at an all-time high and getting worse. Facebook already competes with you, whether you let them host your content or not. So does Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, IM, Yik Yak, television, cable, Netflix, video games, Meerkat/Periscope, movies, concerts, Spotify, podcasts, and soon VR. When it comes to user attention, the one finite resource left in media, most distractions are close substitutes.
Facebook will continue to gain audience. Even if Facebook pauses for a rest after having gained over 1 billion users, they also own Instagram, which is growing, and WhatsApp, which will likely hit 1 billion users in the near future, and Oculus, which is one part of the VR market
Facebook and Twitter and other social media drive a huge % of the discovery of content. Media companies can already see this through their referral logs. This isn’t unique to the text version of media. Facebook drives a huge share of YouTube video streams, which is why they’re building their own video service, because why send all that free ad revenue to a competitor when you can move down the stack and own it yourself.
…media ad experiences are awful. I wonder sometimes if folks at media companies ever try clicking their own links from within social media like Twitter or Facebook, just to experience what a damn travesty of a user experience it is. Pop-ups that hide the content and that can’t be scrolled in an in-app browser so you effectively can’t ever close them to read the article. Hideous banner ads all over the page
…media business models are not great. Monopolies don’t have to have great business models, because as Peter Thiel will tell you, being a monopoly is itself a great business model. For the longest time at media sites, and this probably still happens, the reporters sat on a different floor for the ad sales folks. This meant that the way the company made money was divorced from the product people (to use a more techie term).
…tech companies have better ad platforms than media companies. Facebook’s native ad unit may not be perfect, but it’s leaps and bounds better than the god awful ad experience on almost any media site. It’s better not just for readers, but likely for advertisers, too.
…tech companies have a tech hiring advantage on non-tech companies. This sounds like it’s self-evident, but it’s critical and worth emphasizing.
Design skill is not equally distributed. In an age when software comes to dominate more of the world, the returns to being great at user interface design are still high and will continue to be for some time. It’s no wonder that Apple is the world’s largest company now given their skill at integrated software and hardware design. That’s become the most valuable user experience in the world to dominate.
Tech companies are rich. Take all the factors above, add it up, and it comes down to the fact that we’re living through another gold rush, and this time most of the wealth is flowing into Silicon Valley.
It’s worth repeating: all the things above have been happening, are happening, and will continue to happen whether or not Facebook hosts your content.
By the way, you can still host your own content yourself, even if you let Facebook host yours. Getting yourself set up to host content on Facebook is largely a one-time fixed cost of some time to provide them with some feed. It was the same at Flipboard, though some companies took longer than expected because they couldn’t output an RSS feed of their content out of legacy CMS systems. It was shocking to learn that a random blogger on Squarespace or WordPress or Tumblr could syndicate their content more easily than a famous media company, but that was often the case and speaks to the tech deficit in play here.
This may all sound grim for media companies, but here’s the kicker: it really is that grim. Wait, are kickers supposed to be positive? Maybe I meant kick in the butt.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mic Wright / The Next Web:
Technology writers must tone down hyperbolic coverage of new apps like Periscope or Meerkat
— The more people start to get excited about an app, the more the instinct to push back starts kicking around in my guts.
Periscope won’t change the world – but it appeals to journalists’ vanity
http://thenextweb.com/opinion/2015/03/30/roll-up-roll-up-to-see-the-omnibang/
The more people start to get excited about an app, the more the instinct to push back starts kicking around in my guts. Last week, the arrival of Periscope kicked off a rash of ‘hot takes‘ on how live streaming is about to change news, change our lives, hell, change the whole goddamn world.
But it’s not going to. Certainly not in the hyperbole-drenched way “this will change everything!” people think. It will change the way a small subset of people do their jobs and put even more sources in front of the eyeballs of the world’s newsgatherers but it won’t change news.
It definitely won’t change the world. The world changes more slowly than we like to think. It hops forward in fits and starts.
We need to start making a distinction between “news” and “source material” again. Some tweets aren’t news. They’re potential source material for news. A Vine clip is practically never news. As odd as it may sound, live video of a fire, an explosion or a protest isn’t the story, it’s a catalyst for a story. We need analysis and thought to be introduced before something become news. Just being present is not enough.
Most people still don’t make the most of what their phones can do. The bulk of the world isn’t on Twitter. They don’t jump from service to service with all the loyalty of a toddler presented with a toy box.
The tech press is hyperactive. Most of the analysis around new apps or the latest initiative from Facebook is based on that excitable worldview. The grasshopper minds of the roiling, restless journalist hive mind: “We’re bored of Facebook so everyone must be.” “Teens love some new social app, so everything else must be over.” It’s a zero-sum worldview.
Technology writers shouldn’t be carnival barkers for startups and their VC backers. They shouldn’t be so easily seduced by a nicely designed interface and the opportunity to indulge their narcissism.
Periscope and Meerkat have flooded our social streams with hours of awful new content, just like Snapchat and Vine before them. Very few people stop to think whether their thoughts are worth sharing. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should. Livestreaming is compelling only when the thing you’re pointing the camera at is also compelling. 99 percent of broadcasts on both apps are an exercise in crowdsourced procrastination.
They will create stars, like Twitter and Vine before them, but those users are interesting because they’re unusual. Every new platform that works attracts people who truly get it.
I know there’s great potential in Periscope, but I can’t bear the hype cycle of tech journalism anymore. By the time huge numbers are coming to a new service, writers have already become jaded and sloped to the next fad. They’ll stick around as long as people are paying attention to them.
That’s why Periscope and Meerkat have proved so irresistible to the press
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jasper Jackson / Guardian:
Former BBC presenter and former Cosmopolitan editor create The Pool, an online platform with content aimed at a female audience, launching before Easter
Lauren Laverne launches online platform aimed at women
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/mar/30/lauren-laverne-launches-online-platform-women-the-pool
6 Music presenter Lauren Laverne and former Cosmopolitan and Red magazine editor Sam Baker are launching a new online platform featuring writing, audio and video aimed at women.
The pair have signed up a string of well-known journalists and writers to contribute to the new site called The Pool, which will go live before Easter.
The Pool will operate on what Laverne describes as a “broadcast” model inspired by the success radio has had in remaining part of people’s daily habits, despite the rise of the internet.
“Radio is always the audience of one, where are they, what are they doing. You start with them and work back,” said Laverne.
“A lot of digital media doesn’t do that and a lot of traditional media certainly doesn’t do that. It’s that old fashioned thing of I’m here declaiming what the news is or what this kind of fashion content is, rather than thinking about that person and starting with them.”
Baker said: “Whenever we talk to people, big internet users, people who are on their phones all the time, they felt completely overwhelmed with content, and if you look at how most people are delivering content, they are just producing huge amounts and hoping things will stick, and the quality of that is not always great.
“We want to take a converse view and say ‘what’s the content she wants, where is she and how do we put that into her life?’”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ken Doctor / Nieman Lab:
Facebook partnership offers benefits to both digital startups and legacy companies; BuzzFeed benefits from reach, New York Time benefits from awareness
Newsonomics: BuzzFeed and The New York Times play Facebook’s ubiquity game
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/03/newsonomics-buzzfeed-and-the-new-york-times-play-facebooks-ubiquity-game/
The ubiquity game has different rules for digital startups than for legacy businesses. But for both, figuring out the right relationship with Facebook is key to their audience strategies.
Intellectually, we all knew that the Internet was so big as to be virtually infinite. But it’s hard to know what to do with that squishy concept.
Then BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti outlined his all-in approach in front of a couple thousand nerds at SXSW Interactive last week. He was both surrendering to and embracing that infinity. Or, put a different way, he embraced ubiquity as a business model. If the universe speaks to you, then answer back.
For BuzzFeed, Peretti said, that would mean populating BuzzFeed content in the far reaches of the Internet, on distant social planets. The eight-year-old startup, valued at $850 million on but $125 million of revenues, would no longer sprinkle just links to its content on social platforms and other sites around the web. The company would explode the age-old media model — publish good stuff and bring people to your product, digital, print, or broadcast — and let its content flow freely here and there and there and there.
It all seemed so abstract, given that Peretti skipped over the part about how the strategy would generate money. But last week’s abstraction now suddenly seems concrete. That social planet is Planet Facebook, that new center of the known digital world, drawing a good half-dozen hours a
As The New York Times broke the news that its own company — and BuzzFeed — were close to finalize a new, apparently sweeping, distribution of content on Facebook, we could see what Peretti’s slides only hinted at. The web had taken (OMG) a new turn, shaking once again all we have believed to be true.
Well…not quite. Publishers have been doing distribution deals with high-traffic sources for almost two decades now. Both Yahoo and MSN, since their own infancy, have been given links — and some full content — by publishers, intent on finding new audiences. The business models have matured since then, adding more direct monetization through advertising, but the idea persists.
As publishers hammer out the all-important details of their Facebook partnerships, all are aiming to answer this question: Where do we find sufficient money to pay the content producers? That’s the big question here for BuzzFeed, The New York Times, and any and all other publishers who get faint when they do the math of Facebook’s outsized reach. While the goal of making money is a common one, the potential benefits of a broad Facebook partnership may differ for these two companies. The ubiquity game offers different rules to BuzzFeed than to the Times.
BuzzFeed already plays the ubiquity game. It’s a growth company, with audience growth the number one objective and maximizing so far meager profits on the back burner.
For them, Facebook’s offer of greatly multiplied reach fits well.
The New York Times: Tweaking a Paywalls 2.0 strategy
For legacy publishers, the proposition is dicier, with many considerations laid out by Josh Benton at the Lab (“A wave of distributed content is coming — will publishers sink or swim?”) earlier this week.
But the answer to that question is quite different for a print-legacy, reader-revenue-rich company like The New York Times than it is for BuzzFeed.
More than 60 percent of the Times’ revenue now comes from readers. Its paying digital audience of about 900,000 now outnumbers its daily print paying audience. That’s been a hard-won effort over the first half of this decade. The Times is going profoundly digital, but its prospects for digital ad growth are uncertain, given the hyper-competition.
But the Times knows it needs a next-step strategy. NYT Now and the other Paywalls 2.0 products haven’t yet worked.
Put it altogether, and Facebook is attractive. Facebook measures its average time on site per month in hours; the Times measures it in minutes. That’s the nature of today’s world. To be sure, the Times isn’t as dependent as BuzzFeed is on Facebook referrals; like many news publishers, less than 15 percent of its traffic is driven by social sites, with Facebook the biggest driver among them.
The potential downside is also clear, of course: too many Times digital subscribers find enough free content on Facebook that they drop their subs.
For the Times and all content publishers, including BuzzFeed and the high-growth pack, the key issue is knowledge. We can pitch this broadly as “data,” a now-limp term that tells us too little, or even as “analytics,” which is accurate but way too dry.
The duopoly face-off
Unsurprisingly, the Facebook partnership program has been reported, and on commented on, largely from a publisher’s perspective.
It’s impossible though not to see it through the lens of the titanic digital battle of our time: Facebook vs. Google. The two have formed a duopoly in dominating mobile ad sales, with Facebook growing rapidly in its battle for advertising with Google overall.
Facebook can claim lots of momentum and assets. Google’s search engine fed its ad business, capturing shopper intent. Facebook, with its tentacles into every part of the human condition, knows more — and is using it to better hyper-hyper-target its advertising.
Further, in the news area, social discovery is growing greatly; search discovery still grows, but tepidly. And when we say social discovery, it’s Facebook that dominates greatly, with Twitter and Pinterest far behind.
What Facebook gains in these publisher partnerships is more fuel for furthering its formidable time on site. News remains hugely valuable, a currency that drives repeat visits, especially when presented in the context of Facebook’s other assets.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Times Rolls Out One-Sentence Stories on Apple Watch
http://www.nytco.com/the-times-rolls-out-one-sentence-stories-on-apple-watch/
The New York Times has developed a new form of storytelling to help readers catch up in seconds on Apple Watch. One-sentence stories, crafted specially for small screens, will provide the news at a glance across many Times sections, including Business, Politics, Science, Tech and The Arts.
One-sentence stories are accompanied by The Times’s award-winning photography and short, bulleted summaries. Readers can use Handoff to continue reading any story on iPhone or iPad, or tap “Save for Later” to build a personal reading list.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Twitter Publicly Launches Curator, Its Real-Time Search And Filtering Tool For Media Outlets
http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/31/twitter-curator/#gypjlZ:uM5r
Twitter this morning is launching Curator, its new product that lets media organizations, publishers, and broadcasters identify, filter and display tweets and Vine videos on any screen in real-time. The free service, which is something of a competitor to Storify, is designed to help those in the media industry and, soon, others too, make better sense of the barrage of data on Twitter’s network in order to highlight the best content for their own readers and viewers.
https://curator.twitter.com/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why curation could be at the core of future reporting
https://www.journalism.co.uk/news/why-the-future-of-media-and-news-could-be-curation/s2/a564628/
The whole news industry needs to ‘restructure’ around technology, said video producer and journalist Michael Rosenblum at the Mobile Journalism Conference in Dublin
“When we look at the world of news in particular or journalism, or content creation in general, the trick is not to look at where we are, because where we are is dead already, but the trick is to look at where we are going to be in the next five years.”
So said video producer and journalist Michael Rosenblum, speaking at the Mobile Journalism Conference in Dublin on Friday.
“The biggest journalism business in the future is not going to have one single journalist who works for it”, he claimed, as news organisations move towards curation and editing for foreign and local reporting.
“There are three billion smartphones in circulation around the world now,” he explained at the conference.
“That is three billion people that will have the capacity to shoot video, to livestream if you like Meerkat and stuff like that, to take photographs, to edit, to upload and participate.
“That’s three billion people who have stories to tell. Three billion journalists who live in the countries they report from, who know what they’re talking about, who want to participate.”
The old model of the media, “we make it, you watch it” needs to change to allow for more participation, he said, as new technologies now enable people from all over the world to tell their own stories – and journalists are playing catch-up.
“The job of ‘journalist’ is finished,” he wrote in the Huffington Post yesterday,
The Job of Journalist Is Finished
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-rosenblum/the-job-of-journalist-is-finished_b_6960578.html
As journalists, we can stand by and watch as job after job, career after career is obviated by the exponentially growing power of tech.
This process starts small: Elevator operators (or lift drivers, as we say in the UK) are replaced by do-it-yourself push buttons. Factory workers are replaced by robots. Bank tellers are replaced by ATM machines.
Soon lawyers will be replaced by software that gins up all that boilerplate
And now comes journalism.
There are 3 billion people around the world with iPhones or smart phones in their pockets.
Those phones are not just phones (clearly), but, among other things, remarkably powerful platforms for journalism. You can write on them, shoot photos, record and edit video and even live stream – and upload it all up to the Internet and a waiting world of a few billion viewers, and all for free.
So the job of the professional journalist is as dead as the elevator operator.
Sorry.
That’s technology for you.
We all like the idea of the driverless car. Except it is the end of the careers of truck drivers, taxi drivers, bus drivers and so on.
Today, the world’s biggest taxi company, UBER, (with a valuation of $30B), does not own a single taxi.
The world’s biggest hotelier, Airbnb does not own a single hotel room.
In the not too distant future, the world’s biggest and most powerful news and media company will not employ a single journalist.
The model is already here.
All that is needed is someone who can put this all together.
Tomi Engdahl says:
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.
The results in this report are based on American adults who use the internet.1 Other key findings:
Multi-platform use is on the rise: 52% of online adults now use two or more social media sites, a significant increase from 2013, when it stood at 42% of internet users.
For the first time, more than half of all online adults 65 and older (56%) use Facebook. This represents 31% of all seniors.
For the first time, roughly half of internet-using young adults ages 18-29 (53%) use Instagram. And half 0f all Instagram users (49%) use the site daily.
For the first time, the share of internet users with college educations using LinkedIn reached 50%.
Women dominate Pinterest: 42% of online women now use the platform, compared with 13% of online men.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Paul Sawers / VentureBeat:
Imgur introduces embed option for online publishers to repost and attribute photos on their own site — Image-hosting platform Imgur is making it easier for publishers and bloggers to use its content, with the launch of a new embed feature. — Similar to how you can embed videos hosted on YouTube …
Imgur introduces embed option for online publishers to repost and attribute photos on their own site
http://venturebeat.com/2015/04/07/imgur-introduces-embed-option-for-online-publishers-to-easily-re-post-photos-on-their-own-site/
Similar to how you can embed videos hosted on YouTube, content on Imgur will now have an additional “Embed” option in a little dropdown menu, which gives code for easy reappropriation on other sites.
Founded in 2009, Imgur sees 1.5 million images uploaded every day
Third parties
Thus far, anyone wishing to reuse Imgur content would have to save a photo to their desktop and reupload it to their own site, while remembering to include the proper credit. With this new embed link, however, not only does it remove the hassle of downloading/uploading a picture, but it also automatically includes attribution to ensure the original snapper is given due credit.
“There’s a massive ecosystem of publishers who regularly post content from Imgur to their own sites,” explained Chris Gallello, product manager at Imgur. “That said, it’s been an inconvenient process. With our new embed unit, they can easily do all of this by copying a single line of HTML and pasting it into their own site.”
“Embedding” content has become a popular means of helping companies gain mindshare and increase virality across the web, aside from the obvious example of YouTube. Facebook has let users embed posts for a while
Tomi Engdahl says:
Will Federman / Medium:
Introducing micropayments to online news could limit its consumption and discoverability
Micropayments for news articles are a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea
https://medium.com/@wfederman/micropayments-for-news-articles-are-a-terrible-horrible-no-good-very-bad-idea-267930d95a3a
Why charging people per story is doomed to fail and could actually make things worse.
One of the ideas tossed around a terrified and desperate newsroom is charging readers per article, similar to micropayments found in free iOS or Android apps.
When someone is resistant to the idea (like me), people like to point out that both David Carr and Walter Isaacson wrote extensively in favor of the “iTunes for news” business model. How can anyone disagree with the former managing editor of TIME and the best media writer of his generation?
Nobody likes to mention that Carr and Isaacson floated the idea six years ago.
A tech start-up in the Netherlands, Blendle, is already charging per article through its tablet app — and recently announced content partnerships with The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. The New York Times has sunk considerable money into the company.
But underneath the hoopla is a pile of underwhelming stats: the Dutch venture only managed to entice 1.2 percent of the region’s population to join the service, and only 1 out of 5 users users actually pay for content. Another 5 percent of articles receive a refund request.
So I’m not sure why people are excited about an overseas venture that doesn’t seem to be much more than an inconsequential revenue stream for a handful of papers with established audiences.
Consumers pay for convenience, habits and actions. If you’re Candy Crush, you pull the hat trick and create habits that can be conveniently satisfied by actions. All for a nominal fee, of course.
But there’s nothing habit-forming about articles in the year 2015, nor truly convenient. The convenience of an online article is limited to the scarcity of supply (of which there is none). The only action is passive enlightenment and possible shareability. The chance to transform a news story into anything of consequence is very limited.
Asking consumers to agree to a value proposition for news articles is a no-win scenario, and will expose publishers to the fact that their content is worth far less than current market value. I find it difficult to believe publishers could ever possibly reach consensus on how to uniformly price news content.
And that’s because, regardless of what anyone thinks, micropayments force consumers to determine the value of each story before agreeing to pay for it. The mental gymnastics required to make such a cost-benefit analysis are quite substantial; it simply won’t happen in a world where people consume news on mobile devices in short bursts of time. And I’m not the only one who thinks so
“Individuals who had to pay for news were significantly less likely to select stories from an opinion-challenging source than individuals who did not have to pay for news.” (New Media and Society, April 2015)
Consumers who are forced to pay per story are not going to invest in content they do not want to read. They won’t look at outside sources that challenge their world view, but are more likely to pay for articles that reinforce their opinions. They’ll lean toward the familiar. Publishers will be left with consumers more polarized than ever before.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Fortune Magazine to hire roughly one-third of GigaOm’s editorial staff
http://www.poynter.org/news/mediawire/333597/fortune-magazine-to-hire-roughly-one-third-of-gigaoms-editorial-staff/
Fortune Magazine will announce Wednesday morning that it has hired six reporters from GigaOm
When GigaOm closed its doors last month, some of the most widely-read technology writers in the country found themselves without jobs.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Paul Sawers / VentureBeat:
Imgur introduces embed option for online publishers to repost and attribute photos on their own site
http://venturebeat.com/2015/04/07/imgur-introduces-embed-option-for-online-publishers-to-easily-re-post-photos-on-their-own-site/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kurt Wagner / Re/code:
Pew: 71% of teens use Facebook, down from 77% in 2012, but still the most used social network
What Teen Problem? Facebook Still Dominates Among Teenagers
http://recode.net/2015/04/08/what-teen-problem-facebook-still-dominates-among-teenagers/
In October 2013, now-former Facebook CFO David Ebersman said on an earnings call that the company saw “a decrease in daily users partly among younger teens,” erasing a major stock boost Facebook had generated moments earlier.
It was pegged as the beginning of the end for Facebook — teens were out the door to the other networks while Facebook was left with those teens’ parents and (gasp!) grandparents. It wasn’t a new narrative, just one Facebook had never talked about publicly before.
Concerns over Facebook’s teen users has since diminished, at least partially, and new data released Thursday by Pew Research found that despite a dip in total teen users from a few years back, Facebook is still far and away the most popular social network among teenagers.
Roughly 71% of teens age 13 to 17 use the service, Pew found, and 41 percent say its their “most visited site.” That 71 percent is more than double the number of teens on sites like Google+ or Twitter.
The second most popular network: Instagram at 52 percent, which, you might remember, is owned by Facebook. Snapchat came in third at 41 percent of teens.
Tomi Engdahl says:
WIRED Has an Exciting New Way to Build Multimedia Stories
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/wired-exciting-new-way-build-multimedia-stories/
At WIRED we’re always experimenting with new ways to showcase our long-form journalism on the web. In the past, we spent months hand-coding custom templates to give our important stories unique presentations—with dynamic multimedia elements, vivid photography and graphics, and complex animations and special effects. That’s why we’re excited to debut our Feature Story Builder tool, which lets us build high-impact web features in a fast, modular way, without the need to hand-code everything.
In building the Feature Story Builder tool, we extracted what we learned from all of the custom executions that we produced before it, and then integrated our styles with the open source WordPress Page Builder tool from the Theme Foundry’s “Make” WordPress theme.
Now, the flexible components of a page can be assembled to construct a WordPress post using a simple drag and drop interface with plenty of customization options. The tool is designed to be extensible, so we can add new elements over time, expanding the toolkit of modules, animations, and styles at our disposal.
Make is a free, open-source, and
incredibly powerful WordPress theme.
We think you’ll love it.
https://thethemefoundry.com/wordpress-themes/make/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Major US news organisations to develop ROBOT JOURNALISTS
NYT, Washington Post, AP, Gannett in sinister alliance
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/06/major_us_news_organisations_to_develop_robot_journalists/
In a development whose potential sinister consequences would be difficult to exaggerate, a number of major US new organisations have banded together in an alliance for the purpose of developing news-gathering robots.
Nor is this some sort of HuffPost blogswarm news aggregation scrap-o-matic system: this plan would see actual mobile robots leaving the office and getting out and about finding things out, the way meatsack journalists used to before Twitter.
We learn of the sinister plans – of course – by means of a press release from the crazed professors aiding the cynical publishers in their plan to do away with fleshy employees and their inconvenient need for regular emoluments, coffee machines, lighting and other crippling expenses.
Initially the plans call for the robot journalists to confine themselves to flying about in the skies overhead, in the fashion of US military surveillance drones and providing a similarly complete and unavoidable gaze.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Russian censor warns against meme ‘misuse’
Taking Putin’s piss could result in a take-down order
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/13/russian_censor_warns_against_meme_misuse/
A court case over an insulted singer has led the Russian media regulator Roskomnadzor to issue a big “nyet” on a bunch of nearly-ubiquitous social media habits.
As well as mockery, the regulator’s post on the Facebook-like social network Vkontakte warns citizens against creating parody accounts, or pretending to be a celebrity in posting comments.
As for memes, Internet users in Russia also need to avoid adding phrases to photos that have nothing to do with the celebrity’s personality
Tomi Engdahl says:
In This Digital Age, Book Collecting Is Still Going Strong
Dealers say demand for rare and collectible books has stayed stable despite disruption from digital media
http://www.wsj.com/articles/in-this-digital-age-book-collecting-is-still-going-strong-1428894136?mod=WSJ_article_EditorsPicks_5
Digital disruption notwithstanding, book collecting appears to be alive and well, sustained in part by the very same people who are driving adoption of smartphones, tablets, e-readers and the like.
Last year “was one of the strongest years in Strand history,” says Strand marketing manager Brianne Sperber, 25, who insists it’s “wrong” to think people in their 20s and 30s don’t want to switch back and forth between digital and print. “I know a lot of people my age who read the way I do,” she says.
Ms. Sperber says demand for rare and collectible books has been more or less stable over the past few years, an assessment echoed by Freebird owner Peter Miller
“I don’t think demand for rare books has diminished as a result of digital platforms,”
Darren Sutherland, manager of the rare-book room at Strand, advises collectors to “always buy the best combination of condition and edition that you can afford, and buy what you love, not because you have a suspicion it might go up in value.” First editions can command higher prices, as can books with unusual inscriptions by the author. Original manuscripts are often valuable, too.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Julia Turner / Slate:
In defense of the unfashionable “hot take”: not all opinion journalism is glib and vapid — In Defense of the Take — The most striking thing about this week’s BuzzFeed flap—in which the site was criticized for deleting two published stories, about a Dove ad and the game Monopoly
In Defense of the Take
Not all opinion journalism is glib and vapid.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/culturebox/2015/04/buzzfeed_dove_ad_post_ben_smith_doesn_t_like_hot_takes_but_are_takes_really.single.html
The most striking thing about this week’s BuzzFeed flap—in which the site was criticized for deleting two published stories, about a Dove ad and the game Monopoly, with insufficient explanation—was not that BuzzFeed removed posts (it’s done that before) or that the posts in question were negative commentary about prominent BuzzFeed advertisers (though that was dismaying). It was the excuse that BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith initially used to explain his site’s actions. The problem with the Dove post was not its subject or its slant, he suggested in a tweet Thursday evening, but that it was a “hot take.”
It was a canny defense, because the hot take is currently the most unfashionable thing in journalism. In media circles, the phrase has become a commonplace putdown.
the economic pressures on Internet writers to produce instant “takes”—quick responses, often glib opinions—about any event that occurs. In an online journalism environment where social media drives a lot of traffic, and thus revenue, Herrman explained, these swift, provocative, and socially shareable reaction posts can be good for the bottom line.
the hot take had for several years been a derided form in sports media, usually connoting a blowhard ranting about some personnel decision or play call gone wrong. It quickly became voguish to dismiss various types of writing online as hot takes, and a journalistic slur took on new meaning and currency.
It’s handy to have a vocabulary with which to critique dumb journalism. We journalists are a self-policing guild, so it’s good to identify and discourage work that stinks. And in the early days (here I’m talking about, I think, October), dismissing something as a hot take did carry a certain frisson.
But since then we’ve experienced “take” creep. The definition has expanded. What first meant a moronic gloss of opinion, slapped carelessly on cheap news aggregation to make it more shareable came to mean any opinion writing, argument, or analysis, or really, any piece of journalism I don’t like. I’ve seen straight tech reviews described as takes.
There are two problems with the rise of “take” as the going journalistic smear. The first is that it’s a fundamentally nihilist critique. When you dismiss something as a take, you dismiss it as not worth reading.
The second problem is that dismissing the take sometimes becomes a way to dismiss all opinion, analysis, and commentary. Since I am the editor of a website that specializes in opinion, analysis, and commentary, this is a bummer for me!
Producing commentary that is insightful and valuable and delightful is—as my colleagues here at Slate can attest—both fun and difficult. Slate is not immune to the economic pressures Herrman described
Tomi Engdahl says:
Stuart Dredge / Guardian:
Mobile is now the first screen, and TV industry has to work on mobile-first, not digital-first strategy, French TV exec says
TV industry faces its ‘ketchup’ moment: ‘Mobile is now the first screen’
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/13/tv-industry-ketchup-moment-mobile-first-screen
France Télévisions’ director of future media Eric Scherer on the trends providing headaches and huge opportunities alike for television firms
“The TV industry will have to work on a mobile-first strategy. Not a digital-first strategy, but a mobile-first strategy, because mobile is now the first screen, and it’s taking time away from the TV.”
Eric Scherer is director of future media at French broadcaster France Télévisions, so understanding – surprise! – the future of media is a key part of his job. In a speech at the MIPFormats conference in Cannes this weekend, he outlined the digital trends that he thinks are presenting traditional TV firms with headaches, but also huge opportunities.
“We are in a growing business. We are not in the print business, we are in the video business, and it is a growing business,” said Scherer, before warning his audience of television industry executives that they must adapt fast to changing technology and habits of viewers.
“the new kids on the block” in the form of apps including Instagram, Snapchat and Periscope.
“They are always mobile, they are always social, they are always interactive … and it is more and more live,” he said, before turning his attention to YouTube and the growth of multi-channel networks (MCNs) like Maker Studios, which was bought by Disney in 2014.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Twitter’s New Homepage Doesn’t Fix Its Big Problem
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/twitter-new-homepage/
Today, Twitter introduced a new homepage designed to make the service useful to those who don’t yet have a Twitter account. It’s an attempt to bypass the awkward acclimation period for new users by introducing them to curated content streams. It also manages to obscure what makes Twitter great in the first place.
It’s nice! The layout’s clean and clear, and communicates that you don’t need to actually tweet to enjoy Twitter’s benefits. And the feeds centered around generalized topics, like Celebrity News or Cute Animals, are everything you would want Twitter to be; timely, fast, germane.
The organizing principle for the majority of suggested streams, though, seems to be personality-driven. NBA Players instead of NBA. Country Artists, not Country music. And that’s where the trouble starts.
Tweets from famous people are an effective way to confirm that those famous people (and their PR teams) do, in fact, use the internet. But they don’t make for a particularly enjoyable, or more importantly, cohesive, experience.
Because here’s the thing: going to a stream filled with tweets by celebrity chefs or NBA players doesn’t mean you’re going to read a lot about cooking or basketball, even though that’s why you presumably went there to begin with.
NBA players and chefs—the ones who are enjoyable on Twitter, anyway—tweet about all kinds of things. Likewise journalists, likewise reality TV stars. Any group of individuals will create a scrambled and hard-to-parse streaming experience, precisely because they’re individuals.
And this is what makes Twitter’s learning curve so steep, but worthwhile. That human beings for the most part tweet like they’re human beings, not content-bots, is part of what makes the service great.
The broader categories on Twitter’s new homepage are generally more successful than these personality-driven lists, but fall short in the opposite direction. Video Games and Gamers, for instance, follows mostly brand accounts like Halo and Nintendo of America. It reads more like a marketing survey than a modern day salon.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google drives a tenth of news traffic? That’s bull-doodie, to use the technical term
Veep backtracks on figure – and here’s why
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/04/17/google_news_traffic/
Google has been forced to retract a claim that it only delivers 10 per cent of traffic to news websites after one of those cited – The Guardian – said the figure was “nonsense.”
The 10 per cent figure was supposed to act as a counter-argument to the European Commission’s decision to formally accuse Google of illegally abusing its dominance in the web search market.
In a lengthy blog post titled “The Search for Harm”, Google’s senior veep for Google Search, Amit Singhal argues that although Google is the most-used search engine, it is not abusing its dominant position. He then provides a number of graphs that he claims show competition is actually increasing.
One of those claims was that “when it comes to news, users often go directly to their favourite sites. For example Bild and The Guardian get up to 85 per cent of their traffic directly. Less than 10 per cent comes from Google.”
The reality
The truth is that online news sites need Google for traffic, with Facebook often second. At The Register, looking over the past 30 days, Google brought in about 47 per cent of our readers, with Google News making up a further 12 per cent; more than half, in other words.
The Guardian did not release its figures, but Moran did highlight in a second tweet that traffic from Google is roughly equal to traffic that comes directly to the website.
But how did Google come up with the 10 per cent figure? It used the paper’s guardian.co.uk domain rather than theguardian.com, which is its main site
Why this matters
There are two reasons why this is more than just a stat snafu, however.
Firstly, although news sites were not included in Europe’s investigation into Google’s “abuse of dominance,” the fact that the California giant has so much control over traffic is troubling.
Despite increasing experimentation with paywalls, online news is still largely funded by ads, which are delivered by traffic. That means there is a direct and significant connection between what Google does or does not do, and the immediate financial welfare of journalists.
Second, and more troubling, is Google’s willingness to downplay its impact on news. It is possible, although unlikely, that Singhal doesn’t spend much time looking at the news side of Google’s search, and honestly believed that the online giant only accounts for 10 per cent of traffic.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Replaces A Site’s URL In Search Results & Uses Its Site Name & Breadcrumb Path
After years of testing, Google has replaced the URL with the site name and breadcrumb trail in the mobile search snippets.
http://searchengineland.com/google-replaces-a-sites-url-from-the-search-results-uses-their-site-name-breadcrumb-path-219064
Tomi Engdahl says:
Margaret Sullivan / New York Times:
How the New York Times is adjusting to writing headlines optimized for search engines
Hey, Google! Check Out This Column on Headlines
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/public-editor/hey-google-check-out-this-column-on-headlines.html
On the more general question of how headline writing is changing, Mr. LaForge said that Times editors became frustrated a few years ago when search engines — particularly Google — were not serving up Times journalism prominently because however clever the headlines may have been, a lot of them lacked keywords. The paper has made a strong effort to remedy that, and it’s working, he said.
It hasn’t been an easy adjustment. “We weren’t ready to give up on the lyrical approach,” Mr. LaForge said. “But we’ve come to understand that it didn’t always serve the readers very well if a beautiful headline didn’t tell them clearly what the story was about.”
And what matters more than a story’s “searchable” factor is how “shareable” it is on social media, particularly on Facebook. So headlines need to serve that purpose, too. A headline that works in print when paired with a photograph and placed in the context of a particular section of the paper may be a lot less successful when encountered on Facebook or read on a smartphone. So copy editors are writing different versions of headlines for different platforms, increasing their workload.
If anything, the process will get only more complicated as platforms multiply. “The guiding principle is to match the appropriate style of headline to the platform — print, website, mobile, search engines or social media,” Mr. LaForge said.
“We want readers,” Mr. LaForge said, “and we’re not going to apologize for that.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sarah Jeong / Forbes:
New York Times gets fair-use rules wrong in story about cop-shooting video, and multiple outlets reblog without questioning premise
The News Media’s Use of the Walter Scott Video Is – Surprise! – A Newsworthy Use
http://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahjeong/2015/04/17/the-news-medias-use-of-the-walter-scott-video-is-surprise-a-newsworthy-use/
The New York Times reports that publicity and celebrity management company Markson Sparks is attempting to charge news outlets up to $10,000 for using the video of the Walter Scott shooting.
Already, other outlets (NY Mag, Gawker, Buzzfeed) are reblogging the story without questioning its basic premises. This is not actually how fair use works. It’s not how newsworthiness works. For journalists to miss the boat on this one is deeply troubling.
“The Times has gotten its wires crossed here,” said Christopher Sprigman, a professor at NYU Law who teaches copyright. “The video is newsworthy. The video was newsworthy the day it was shot, and it continues to be newsworthy. That’s why TV stations want to use it. This is a paradigm case for fair use.”
“The distinction between ‘newsworthy’ and ‘commercial’ is like the distinction between ‘red’ and ‘round.’ Of course news agencies make money reporting the news; that’s what we pay them for.”
Fair use isn’t just “clauses in the law,” it’s an entire legal doctrine that predates the current Copyright Act. Fair use isn’t incidental to copyright law.
Indeed, fair use is integral to the freedom of press, so much so that the actual text of 17 U.S.C. § 107, the section on fair use, explicitly mentions “news reporting.”
Notably, the actual creator of the video, Feidin Santana, was fuzzy on the details of the licensing arrangements his lawyers had made.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Michael Cieply / New York Times:
Sony again warns news media against using stolen emails, citing copyright and computer fraud laws
Sony Studio Renews Warning After WikiLeaks Posts Stolen Data
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/18/business/media/sony-studio-renews-warning-after-wikileaks-posts-stolen-data.html
LOS ANGELES — David Boies, a lawyer for Sony Pictures Entertainment, began warning news media outlets on Friday that WikiLeaks’s posting of emails and documents stolen from Sony does not, in the media giant’s view, make them fair game.
“WikiLeaks is incorrect that this Stolen Information belongs in the public domain, and it is, in many jurisdictions, unlawful to place it there or otherwise access or distribute it,” Mr. Boies wrote in a letter that was prepared for distribution to outlets that post or publish the material.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mediagazer introduces ads for media jobs, and Techmeme’s job ads now extend to its mobile site
http://news.techmeme.com/150421/media-hiring
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jay Rosen / Pressthink:
Facebook needs to answer questions about news, including what it’s optimizing for, how it sees its role, and how it will use its power
http://pressthink.org/2015/04/its-not-that-we-control-newsfeed-you-control-newsfeed-facebook-please-stop-with-this/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook profit down but revenues, user base grow
http://www.businessinsider.com/afp-facebook-profit-down-but-revenues-user-base-grow-2015-4?IR=T
Facebook says that profit in the first quarter fell by 20 percent from a year ago to $509 million, but reported healthy growth in revenue and its user base
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/afp-facebook-profit-down-but-revenues-user-base-grow-2015-4#ixzz3Y87ip6OY
Tomi Engdahl says:
Digidave:
Felix Salmon’s report on the death of journalism as a career is greatly exaggerated
http://blog.digidave.org/2015/04/felix-salmons-report-on-the-death-of-the-journalism-career-is-greatly-exaggerated
At Perugia this year Felix Salmon gave a talk: “The end of journalism as a career?”
In typical fashion, anytime a headline ends in a question mark the answer is almost always “no.”
Throughout the video Felix makes references to ‘startups’ and ‘platforms’ as if the two are interchangeable. Most journalism startups are not platforms. Or more precisely – they are closed platforms. Even the NYT is a platform … for NYT writers! And Fusion is a startup – but it’s not a platform for anybody other than Fusion writers. Same for Vox, 538, Circa, Buzzfeed (which is slightly more open with their “community posts,” but not really).
Whenever Felix begins to talk about “platforms” and how the entrepreneurs behind them don’t care about good labor because they only want scale – he is talking about pure-play technology companies like Uber (a platform for drivers) or Twitter (a platform for open communication).
To that I say “meh” or more precisely “bullshit.”
Salmon defines career as something where you become more experienced/skilled over time and therefore become more valuable. While it might be true that the users in a platform (let’s take Facebook) aren’t more valuable over time, the people who build platforms have honed skills that are developed over time. A seasoned programmer is better than a brand new one out of college. Entrepreneurs that screw up while working on a “pure play” platform – eventually go on and learn from those mistakes. They become more valuable in future endeavors as a result. That’s the whole “embrace failure” thing. It’s not that failure is good – it’s that you learn from them. And “learn” implies improvement.
So yea, you won’t have a career as a professional Facebooker or Twitterati. But you can have a career building platforms like Facebook or Twitter and your experience building those will add to your value as an employee at tech platforms.
Even if you leave journalism, the skills you gained will be valuable in your career. The journalists that won a Pulitzer Prize and has since left journalism can still point to their Pulitzer Prize winning work and in any job interview say “I am a valuable employee that can produce fantastic work, see my Pulitzer. I’ve honed skills and [insert plausible argument here about why employer needs these skills] makes me more valuable than somebody without said skills.”
Back to Felix: “Everyone wants to be a platform, remember that.” This still assumes that creating good platforms, user experience, user interface, etc. is not a skill you can develop over time.
Fact: There is more competition. A good media company needs to be a “full stack” company (have good technology) but that doesn’t mean the journalists in a news organization are interchangeable with any 23-year-old that walks into the door.
Fact: I agree with Felix not everyone will be part of the top 1% of superstar journalists.
Building a career in digital journalism still requires old-fashioned subject-matter expertise — Is there any such thing as a career in digital journalism? — One of my obsessions these days is the question of whether there’s any such thing as a career in digital journalism.
http://fusion.net/story/123618/is-there-any-such-thing-as-a-career-in-digital-journalism/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Pulitzer Winner Left Journalism for a PR Job So He Could Pay His Rent
http://gawker.com/pulitzer-winner-left-journalism-for-a-pr-job-so-he-coul-1699127933
One of today’s Pulitzer winners for local reporting isn’t actually a reporter anymore.
The Daily Breeze’s Rob Kuznia won the prize alongside Rebecca Kimitch for a series on corruption in the Torrance, California school district. Now the former reporter, who had more than 15 years’ experience covering local affairs, is celebrating the career high in his new job… as a publicist.
Apparently, as Kuznia co-reported the award-winning series, he was slowly getting squeezed out of the journalism racket.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook Lines Up 7 Branded-Content Video Partners Including Vice, Disney
http://variety.com/2015/digital/news/facebook-lines-up-7-branded-content-video-partners-including-vice-disney-1201478229/
Facebook has teamed with seven media partners — including Vice Media, Disney’s Oh My Disney digital division and Electus Digital’s CollegeHumor — to pitch marketers on developing sponsored video content for the world’s No. 1 social service.
The social giant and the partners presented the initiative, dubbed Anthology, to ad-agency execs at a private presentation Wednesday in New York. The other initial digital-media companies in the program are Funny or Die, Tastemade, the Onion and Vox Media.
The idea behind the Anthology Network: to match-make brands’ marketing goals with content creators who are best suited to deliver the desired message and hit target demos.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mike Shields / Wall Street Journal:
Google launches free tool to help AdSense publishers recommend more articles to their readers
http://blogs.wsj.com/cmo/2015/04/22/google-edges-further-into-hot-content-recommendation-sector/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why the PR industry is sucking up Pulitzer winners
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/04/23/why-the-pr-industry-is-sucking-up-pulitzer-winners/
The number of news reporters in the Washington, D.C., area nearly doubled over the last decade, from 1,450 to 2,760. In Los Angeles it grew by 20 percent. In New York City, it basically stayed flat. Outside of those cities, in that same timeframe, one out of every four reporting jobs vanished – 12,000 jobs in total, according to the Labor Department.
Meanwhile, in the parts of the country that aren’t Washington or New York or L.A., nearly 20,000 new jobs sprung up in public relations, a 13 percent increase.
These are signs of the collapse of the business model for regional news outlets and of the forces pulling on journalists outside a few insulated cities. They are the reasons why, when it came to light this week that two new winners of the Pulitzer Prize had left their medium-sized newspapers for careers in PR, no one should have been surprised.
If you want a reporting job today, your best bet is to move to D.C., L.A. or New York. They were home to almost one in every five reporting jobs in 2014, up from one in eight in 2004. Anywhere else, your journalistic job options are dwindling. If you hold on to one, your wages probably aren’t keeping pace with inflation. But public relations is growing, and the pay there is, too.
Those who still work at regional newspapers are under heavy pressure to write more stories, to post faster to the Web, to try to build up an audience that might help fill in for years of lost print advertising revenue.
Tomi Engdahl says:
‘Clone Zone’ Is an Easy Tool for Building Fake Websites
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/clone-zone-is-an-easy-tool-for-building-fake-websites
My feed is full of stories I don’t believe.
Scrolling through Facebook every day, I come across Onion headlines, clickbait articles, and propaganda with passably authentic mastheads shared by my friends and family, all resonating half-truths within the echo chamber of my filter bubble.
Introduce into this environment of perpetual factual ambiguity Clone Zone, a new tool that makes it easy to edit any web page on the internet. Pick your canvas of choice—it’s as simple as entering a URL. Clone Zone immediately creates an editable copy. Upload your own images, drop in your own text, and share. With Clone Zone, anyone can treat themselves to a New York Times byline or the announcement of a lucrative round of funding on TechCrunch. With this tool, the whole internet is instantly and totally customizable.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Internet Is a Giant Lie Factory
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-internet-is-a-giant-lie-factory?trk_source=recommended
Look through your Facebook feed and chances are you’ll find a bunch of half-truths, conspiracies, and chain letter–quality hoaxes sharing space with links to reputable news stories.
The problem is, you can look at the internet as a collection of random odds and ends that it is your job to curate—some of these things may be “truer” than others, but what’s really important is whether you love or hate them enough to post them to the social website of your choice. Objective truth is a myth anyway, right? There’s no reason to independently verify anything, and you don’t have time for that, since all you’re doing is clicking the “like” button and sending it into the internet. Voila, stuff like that viral fake MLK quote from two years ago is born.
Unwittingly posting some false information is forgivable, but when it happens over and over again on a large scale, it populates the internet with myths and rumors and makes it more difficult to wade through the murk in search of, for instance, what MLK actually said. And people’s inclination toward blindly sharing whatever moves them at the moment has led to viral content being created, packaged, and spread without anyone ever questioning whether that content is full of lies.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kristen Hare / Poynter:25 minutes ago
‘Investigative reporting is obviously alive and well’ and other observations from first-time Pulitzer jurors
http://www.poynter.org/news/mediawire/338641/investigative-reporting-is-obviously-alive-and-well-and-other-observations-from-first-time-pulitzer-jurors/
This year, several first-time Pulitzer Prize jurors came from online news organizations and platforms, including Quartz, Twitter, Trove, The Marshall Project and The Texas Tribune.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Now Expands Its Reach, Integrates 70 More Services
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/google-now-app-integrations/
Google Now lives life a quarter-second at a time. The feature, which comes standard on every Android phone, surfaces information to you based on the time of day and your current location. It always shows you a simple dashboard of cards, each filled with timely notifications, reminders, and real-time data.
With a newly open API, Google is working with its partners to present even more of that information on your mobile screen. And today, Google has announced more than 70 new integrations for Now. You can find new music to listen to, control your smart home, and even track the whereabouts of your food delivery from the restaurant to your door, all within the confines of Google Now. When you say “OK Google” into your watch or phone to activate Google Now, you’re not just searching for stuff—you’re doing stuff.
The Now platform is essentially the entire interface for Android Wear devices, and it’s becoming more and more important on Android phones as well.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Insiders Talk About Why Google+ Failed
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/15/04/26/2341219/google-insiders-talk-about-why-google-failed
Business Insider spoke with a few insiders about what happened to the network that Google believed would change the way people share their lives online. Google+ was really important to Larry Page, too — one person said he was personally involved and wanted to get the whole company behind it. The main problem with Google+, one former Googler says, is the company tried to make it too much like Facebook.
Why Google+ failed, according to Google insiders
http://www.businessinsider.com/what-happened-to-google-plus-2015-4
Last month, Google announced that it’s changing up its strategy with Google+.
In a sense, it’s giving up on pitching Google+ as a social network aimed at competing with Facebook. Instead, Google+ will become two separate pieces: Photos and Streams.
This didn’t come as a surprise — Google+ never really caught on the same way social networks like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn did.
Technically, tons of people use Google+, since logging into it gives you access to Gmail, Google Drive, and all of Google’s other apps.
But people aren’t actively using the social network aspect of it.
The main problem with Google+, one former Googler says, is the company tried to make it too much like Facebook. Another former Googler agrees, saying the company was “late to market” and motivated from “a competitive standpoint.”
Here are some other things we heard from former Google employees:
Google+ was designed to solve the company’s own problems, rather than making a product that made it easy for its users to connect with others.
One person also said Google didn’t move into mobile fast enough with Google+. Facebook, however, realized it was slow to move into mobile and made up for lost time — now most of Facebook’s revenue comes from mobile
Google+ was a “controversial” product inside Google
When Vic Gundotra, who led Google+ and played a big role in creating it, left the company about a year ago, it came as a complete surprise.
Although Google+ didn’t boom into a massively successful social network, that doesn’t mean it completely failed. Google made a solid platform that makes it easy for the millions of people that use its products to seamlessly log in to all of the company’s apps. It made a really useful tool for organizing your photos online.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Turns Out You Can Embed Playable MS-DOS Games in Tweets
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/embed-games-into-tweets/
I don’t know when this became possible, but if you paste the URL to one of the many MS-DOS games that the Internet Archive has preserved on its servers into a tweet, and view said tweet on the web, the embedded game is playable within said tweet
Tomi Engdahl says:
How One Tweet Wiped $8bn Off Twitter’s Value
http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/04/29/1830243/how-one-tweet-wiped-8bn-off-twitters-value
Someone mistakenly published earnings information on a Nasdaq-run investor relations page for Twitter before the company officially released the news and it sent the stock into a tailspin.
How one tweet wiped $8bn off Twitter’s value
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-32511932
By any measure, Twitter hit particularly rough conditions on Tuesday night, which sent its share price into a tailspin.
At one point in the final hours of trading, the stock had lost more than $8bn (£5bn), or 25% of its opening price.
It seems investors were spooked by the early and unintended publication of earnings results that should have been presented after the markets had closed.
So how did that happen, and why did it result in Twitter’s worst day on the markets since its flotation?
somebody thought it would be a good idea to release this information early, on the technology-led Nasdaq-run investor relations page for Twitter.
Initially it seemed no-one really noticed the error, until a well-placed tweet highlighted the mistake and revealed Twitter’s disappointing results.
The markets were still trading, and Twitter had not had the chance to formally present its results in a statement that would have bathed them in a more flattering light.
How come Selerity got the news early, and who are they anyway?
Shares in Twitter lost 6% before trading in the stock was momentarily suspended.
So who is to blame?
Well, it seems that Nasdaq slipped up here after Twitter furnished the exchange with earnings details ahead of time ready for official publication.
It is like someone breaking an embargo on a news story.
The key factor in Tuesday evening’s fiasco was that Selerity’s automatic computer programs, called bots, which scan the web for juicy financial details, were able to find the mistake so quickly.
Selerity then made sure that everyone knew about it through Twitter’s own platform, but it did not break any rules in doing so as the results had already been published and were effectively in the public arena.
Nasdaq blamed the error on a division of its business called Shareholder.com, which provides investor relations services.
Was the tweet the only reason Twitter stock crashed?
No. The results were fairly disappointing
Tomi Engdahl says:
An Easy Way to Pay for Journalism, Music and Everything Else We Like
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/easy-way-pay-journalism-music-and-everything-else-we
Some of us work for money. Some of us work for love. Some of us work for both, or just because we feel compelled or obliged.
As a journalist, I work for all those reasons, except money—meaning I write as much as I ever did, but I rarely get paid for it.
No journalist of any quality (other than bad) thinks what he or she produces is “content”. Nor does any musician, or artist of any kind. We hate the term “content”. It sounds like packing material, or container cargo. But hey, that’s the world we live in now.
So let’s look at business models for free (as in beer) artistic goods as a blank slate.
Let’s start with this thesis: Information wants to be free, but value wants to be paid for.
If that’s true, the trick is to make it as easy as possible for anybody to pay for anything they like, wherever they find it, even if that thing is as small as a like, a tweet, a post, a graffito or a tune heard just one time—and even if all anybody wants to pay for that thing is a penny.
Apple, for example, proved that people were willing to pay 99 cents for a song they could also get for $0 on Napster or Limewire.
I ask how many of those listeners pay for the privilege. About 10% of the hands stay up. Then I ask how many would pay if it was real easy. The number of hands doubles.
Here’s what I suggest for an approach:
1. It needs be free-as-in-freedom as well as free-as-in-beer.
2. It should make it easy for anybody to pay any amount for anything they like. Even if it’s not a thing (a song, for example).
3. It should be programmable. So, for example, one could set things up so it’s as easy to throw a penny (or more) toward anything, anywhere, as it is to like something on Facebook.
4. It should be a capability that can be added to lots of different things, rather than a standalone thing, such as an app.
5. It should make use of APIs. That way, for example, one might be able to throw a penny (or more) at every tune one tags with the Shazam app.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook wants to turn its mobile ad network into an even bigger business by running ‘native’ ads on other apps
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-audience-network-ads-native-ad-tools-2015-5#ixzz3ZRvsJf00
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook Echo Chamber Isn’t Facebook’s Fault, Says Facebook
http://www.wired.com/2015/05/new-facebook-study-says-echo-chamber-fault/
Does the internet help facilitate an echo chamber? In an age where so much of the information that we see online is filtered through opaque algorithms, the fear is that we only get exposed to viewpoints with which we already agree. Behemoths like Facebook and Google show you new stuff based on what you’ve previously liked, the argument goes. And so we get stuck in a polarizing cycle that stifles discourse. We only see what we want to see.
But in a new peer-reviewed study published today in Science, Facebook data scientists have for the first time tried to quantify how much the social network’s formula for its News Feed isolates its users from divergent opinions. According to their findings, Facebook’s own algorithms aren’t to blame. It’s us.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mark Bergen / Re/code:
Google’s strategy for making mobile searches more lucrative: new mobile ad formats, options for ordering food directly from inside mobile search, more
Google’s Mobile Search Strategy: Bake In and Take Out
http://recode.net/2015/05/09/googles-mobile-search-strategy-bake-in-and-take-out/
On Tuesday, Google confirmed what many had long suspected: Mobile searches now outnumber those on desktop.
That must have been worrying news in the Googleplex, because, while the company does not share the figures, evidence suggests mobile search is much less lucrative. That’s why executives spent most of the last earnings call assuring investors that, indeed, they do have a plan for mobile.
It’s important. On desktop, Google built a superior search engine and watched the dollars roll in. But, on mobile, it may have to fight harder. Rivals like Amazon and Pinterest* are beginning to lay the groundwork for search revenue products, which would give advertisers more than one option.
“It’s not going to be the Google show,” one media buyer said about mobile spending.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Michele McLellan / Knight Digital Media Center:
Report: 10 elements present in newsrooms that successfully make digital transformations
Digital Leads: 10 keys to newsroom transformation
http://www.knightdigitalmediacenter.org/news/2015/04/kdmc-report-2015
Given these cultural challenges, the partners made these key decisions upfront:
The work would have a strong consumer/audience focus, and journalists would learn to conduct, analyze and act on market research.
The staff, with research and with guidance from KDMC, would be entrusted with key decisions, while top editors would be asked to help facilitate rather than direct.
The company would impose an overarching strategy and a process for implementing the initiative, but would not dictate specific organizational changes to the newsrooms.
In addition to the expectation of innovation on digital platforms, newsrooms would be given a framework and repeated permission to reduce traditional coverage and print production activity as they saw fit.
Two years plus into the initiative, the newsrooms report significant progress despite many challenges, including ongoing staff downsizing.
Executive Summary
1. Strategy
2. Research
3. Staff ownership
4. Process and planning
5. Leadership and culture
6. Organization-wide buy-in
7. Training and tools
8. Organizational change
9. Priorities
10. Feedback loops
Tomi Engdahl says:
Martin Beck / Marketing Land:
TweetDeck Adds Tweet Confirmation To Help Prevent Social Media Misfires — Optional extra step should help social media professionals avoid accidental tweets to the wrong account. — It’s a social media pro’s worst nightmare: posting a personal tweet on a brand account.
TweetDeck Adds Tweet Confirmation To Help Prevent Social Media Misfires
Optional extra step should help social media professionals avoid accidental tweets to the wrong account.
http://marketingland.com/tweetdeck-installs-a-backstop-128335
http://marketingland.com/tweetdeck-installs-a-backstop-128335
Tomi Engdahl says:
Fortune 100 Firms Challenged by Social Media Compliance Violations: Study
http://www.securityweek.com/fortune-100-firms-challenged-social-media-compliance-violations-study
A new report from Proofpoint’s Nexgate research team found that many Fortune 100 companies are not doing a good job of policing compliance violations tied to their social media accounts.
The report, entitled the ‘State of Social Media Infrastructure, Part II’, outlines how Fortune 100 social media pages are failing to keep up with the pace of social communication while following various federal regulations. The study is based on research conducted over a 12-month period between July 2013 and June 2014 that focused on the social media presence of Fortune 100 companies.
“The average firm suffered from a total of 69 unmoderated compliance incidents during our 12 month research window,” according to the report.
The challenge facing these organizations can be significant. According to the report, the average Fortune 100 firm has more than 320 branded social media accounts as well as thousands of followers and employees potentially interacting in discussions on social media such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
“FINRA [Financial Industry Regulatory Authority] financial service and FDA [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] healthcare regulations are examples of standards with specific provisions covering Commenter postings,” the report explains. “These requirements require much larger scale compliance operations than regulations applied only to Brand posts.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Big Publishers Will Now Post Stories Straight to Facebook
http://www.wired.com/2015/05/big-publishers-will-now-post-stories-straight-facebook/
Facebook has long been a crucial middleman for news. We post, share, read, and discuss stories in our News Feeds every day. But to read an article, you still click or tap on a link in Facebook—and then wait for it to load on its original site. This process can be slow. It can be frustrating. And it’s about to start changing.
Starting on Wednesday, big-name publishers such as The New York Times and BuzzFeed will now be posting articles directly to Facebook. Stories will live inside Facebook’s walls, more like a status update than a posted link. When you click, the story will open more like a friend’s profile page rather than an outside post. Along with the Times and BuzzFeed, inaugural partners for what Facebook is calling Instant Articles include NBC, National Geographic, The Atlantic, The Guardian, BBC News, Spiegel, and Bild.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Verizon to Acquire AOL
Deal Creates Unique and Scaled Digital Media Platforms for Consumers, Advertisers and Partners
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/verizon-to-acquire-aol-300081541.html
Taking another significant step in building digital and video platforms to drive future growth, Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE, Nasdaq: VZ) today announced the signing of an agreement to purchase AOL Inc. (NYSE: AOL) for $50 per share — an estimated total value of approximately $4.4 billion.
Verizon’s acquisition further drives its LTE wireless video and OTT (over-the-top video) strategy. The agreement will also support and connect to Verizon’s IoT (Internet of Things) platforms, creating a growth platform from wireless to IoT for consumers and businesses.
AOL is a leader in the digital content and advertising platforms space, and the combination of Verizon and AOL creates a scaled, mobile-first platform offering directly targeted at what eMarketer estimates is a nearly $600 billion global advertising industry. AOL’s key assets include its subscription business; its premium portfolio of global content brands, including The Huffington Post, TechCrunch, Engadget, MAKERS and AOL.com, as well as its millennial-focused OTT, Emmy-nominated original video content; and its programmatic advertising platforms.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook takes on eBay with a new page showing users’ second-hand goods for sale
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2015/05/11/facebook-takes-on-ebay-with-a-new-page-showing-users-second-hand-goods-for-sale/
Facebook is testing out a new option in news feed that shows a unified view of items on sale across user groups and adds the ability to search public groups.
We reported earlier this year that the company has begun allowing users that are a part of ‘buy and sell’ groups to attach prices, locations, photos and descriptions to posts about items for sale. Now, it’s taking the tool to the next level.