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:
Advice for freelance journalists
https://www.journalism.co.uk/search/s396/?qString=freelance%20how%20to
Tomi Engdahl says:
‘Context is king’: How publishers are using cards to tell stories
https://www.journalism.co.uk/podcast/-context-is-king-how-publishers-are-using-cards-to-tell-stories-/s399/a565388/
Providing context to ongoing stories can be complicated for news organisations, so here is how AJ+ and FOLD are doing it
Tomi Engdahl says:
When Tech Giants Deliver the News, They Decide What News Is
http://www.wired.com/2015/06/apples-news-app-gives-power-decide-whats-news/
So Apple’s got its very own newsreader app, aptly called News. It will come natively installed on its iOS 9 mobile operating system this fall. This adds to the list of third parties that publishers have come to rely upon to distribute their stories. Apple says one of the most appealing things about News is stories will look and feel distinctive, as if they’re coming directly from publishers’ own sites, creating a sense of independent control over their own content.
And yet.
As with its Podcasts app, iTunes, and the App Store, News is Apple’s app, which means Apple is the ultimate arbiter of what appears on it.
And this matters at a time when a few prominent tech companies are becoming the stewards of the news millions of people see, read, watch, and experience each day. Social sites like Facebook and Twitter are the entry point for many readers checking the news daily—not to mention Google News. And each has its own standards for what it will and will not allow to appear. Now that Apple has committed to becoming a publisher, another tech giant will be mediating the news that the public consumes. This means the standards Apple chooses to follow will have a direct impact on what millions of readers see—or don’t see.
Still, Apple has for years had guidelines in place for its Podcasts and App Store apps, both of which would not exist without content created by amateur and professional users. These provide a sense of what kinds of content Apple is comfortable allowing through its gateway.
“We will reject Apps for any content or behavior that we believe is over the line. What line, you ask? Well, as a Supreme Court Justice once said, ‘I’ll know it when I see it.’ And we think that you will also know it when you cross it,”
The guidelines for app developers also specifically ban violence, pornography, religious or cultural defamation as well as the more vague “objectionable content.” The company’s Podcast approval guidelines, on the other hand, are less strictly tied to specific content
A Lot of Power
As opposed to Internet service providers or search engines, companies such as Apple and Facebook, which has its own “community standards,” are not content-agnostic bulletin boards but interested parties, says Marjorie Heins, a civil liberties lawyer and founder of the Free Expression Policy Project. “They want to create a certain image,” she says. “They can decide what you can post and what you can’t.”
Facebook, for example, uses algorithms to determine what readers see and will remove content that it says doesn’t follow its guidelines.
Not Exactly Censorship
And yet Facebook and Apple are publicly traded companies whose first obligation is shareholders, not a free marketplace of ideas. Neither company can afford to completely ignore what appears on their platforms.
“The problem with these things is we don’t know the consequences until it happens to us because there’s a lack of transparency around it,”
As news organizations begin publishing on Apple News and directly to Facebook via its Instant Articles tool, these tech giants will likely need to tread carefully. Clear guidelines for what’s allowed and what isn’t are a start.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Farhad Manjoo / New York Times:
Twitter should focus on live news and events, using human editors to create curated feeds — For Twitter, Future Means Here and Now — Here, in 140 characters or less, is some free advice for Twitter’s next chief executive: Focus on live events. … That may sound a bit simplistic.
For Twitter, Future Means Here and Now
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/12/business/for-twitter-future-means-here-and-now.html?_r=0
Here, in 140 characters or fewer, is some free advice for Twitter’s next chief executive: Focus on live events. People never tire of gabbing about what’s going on right now. Twitter could be the best place for that. Do it fast.
That may sound a bit simplistic. The news that Dick Costolo will resign at the end of this month is sure to elicit a raft of doomsaying commentary about the company. Mr. Costolo, who since 2010 has been chief executive of Twitter, the service that lets people post 140-character messages, helped take the company public in 2013 and built it into a Silicon Valley force.
Along the way, however, Twitter’s audience growth stalled, and its advertising business looks to be cooling. From afar, Twitter can sometimes look dysfunctional, especially compared with its robotically disciplined competitors in the social networking business, among them Facebook and Pinterest, whose fortunes all burn brighter.
But because the service offers so many uses, Twitter, as a company, has had trouble focusing on one purpose for which it should aim to excel.
Among the many uses that Twitter fulfills as a social network, there is one it is uniquely suited for: as a global gathering space for live events. When something goes down in the real world — when a plane crashes, an earthquake strikes, a basketball game gets crazy, or Kanye West hijacks an awards show — Twitter should aim to become the first and only app that people load up to comment on the news.
We live in an era dominated by time-shifted media. Just about everything worth watching can be watched later, when it’s more convenient. Even so, many of us find experiencing media communally to be a deeply meaningful experience — much more meaningful than watching it later. The desire for communal experiences explains why the Super Bowl is still a mega TV event, why ESPN has grown to become one of the most valuable media properties on the planet, and why HBO has turned Sunday nights into a marquee time for television.
Twitter is well-positioned to take advantage of this desire. It is already among the best places online for consuming news and commentary about live events.
How should Twitter do that? Tech journalists and tech investors have spilled thousands of tweets over the years in attempts to account for the general unpopularity of Twitter. Though Twitter has brought out an accelerating set of improvements over the last year, it remains a punishingly difficult service to get accustomed to and use. Twitter may be alone among large social networks in turning away more people than it attracts. About 300 million people use it every month, but more than a billion have signed up and quit.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Michael Sebastian / AdAge:
Media companies avoid “advertising” when labeling native ads, favor “sponsored”, “promoted”
Media Brands Shy Away From the A-Word, When It Comes to Labeling Native Ads
An Analysis of Two Dozen Companies Found A Variety of Terms Is Used
http://adage.com/article/media/media-companies-label-native-ads/298944/
Media executives insist their native ads are always clearly labeled to avoid confusing readers over which articles came purely from editorial staff and which content an advertiser paid to produce and run.
But an analysis of two dozen news and lifestyle sites, social media platforms and popular mobile apps shows that none of the companies that rely on this strategy for ad revenue actually refers to them in a way most recognizable to consumers: advertisement.
Instead, they lean on a variety of terms, such as “sponsored,” “promoted” or “presented by.” That’s partly a reflection of the regulatory landscape. The Federal Trade Commission called publishers down to Washington, D.C. in December 2013 to discuss native advertising, but they simply advised media owners to make clear that something is an ad. The organization stopped short of issuing a mandate on exactly how the ads should be labeled.
A native ad is a piece of content — could be text, video or a collection of images — that more or less looks like a site’s editorial work except an advertiser actually paid to create it. A July 2014 survey from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PR firm Edelman found that only 41% of consumers said native ads on a general news sites were clearly identified as paid for by a brand.
Tomi Engdahl says:
DDoS attacks are a growing digital threat to freedom of expression in Latin America
https://knightcenter.utexas.edu/blog/00-16118-ddos-attacks-are-growing-digital-threat-freedom-expression-latin-america
The media and Latin American journalists are starting to experience firsthand what until recently seemed to be the exclusive concern of US, European or Asian media outlets: cyberattacks.
This type of online criminal activity, known as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), is the other side of technological advances that aim to maximize flow of information online.
Cybercrime legislation is backward and broken in Latin America
One of the most recent cases occurred in Mexico, where minutes after publishing an investigation about the alleged responsibility of federal police in extrajudicial executions of several young people in Apatzingan, a town in the state of Michoacan, the Aristegui Noticias site was out of services for hours, a victim of a DDoS attack.
The Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas consulted Robert Guerra, an expert on cyber security and Internet freedom, and Luis Horacio Najera, a Mexican journalist and expert in the field, on the consequences of these attacks for media companies.
“The main consequence of a cyber attack in the context of Latin America is the reduction of critical spaces that encourage debate or the exposure of misconduct and abuse of power, like corruption,” Guerra said.
In the context of countries like Mexico, where media workers are victims of assassinations, kidnappings and threats, this “silent war” on the Internet is presented as a new alarm when speaking about freedom of expression and of the press.
Momentary “blackouts” of online media affect the flow of information, the legitimacy of the company and its journalists, and also cause adverse economics effects for the media companies which base their income in online advertising.
“With the changes in technology and ways of doing journalism, cyber attacks will become more frequent because they attack the legitimacy of the journalist, and also affect the publication of news. Therefore, all attacks and threats should be condemned with the same intensity,” Guerra added.
While in the United States DDoS attacks are considered crimes and are punishable under the penal code, this has not been shown to combat the situation. The question is what can legislation achieve regarding this issue.
Experts agree that international cooperation is key to fighting cybercrime.
“Most regional legislation concerning information security have been poorly, and in many cases have been motivated by local public security crisis,”
Meanwhile, Jara noted that while regulations should establish a legal framework that protects personal information and data, in the case of journalists, these professionals should take measures to protect such data.
“Because of the work, they may be a target of criminal organizations and sometimes governments. If they also have blogs or personal pages, they should ensure the safety of them, as a vulnerable site also becomes the focus of attack, ” Jara said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Creative Commons is building a mobile app to kill stock photos
http://thenextweb.com/apps/2015/06/12/creative-commons-is-building-a-mobile-app-to-kill-stock-photos/
Content sharing nonprofit Creative Commons has been hard at work over a mobile app that lets people and organizations request and use images from users under an open license — ringing the death knell for stock photos.
It’s called The List, because it provides lists of locations, people, objects and events that users need pictures of. Other users can view these requests and publish their own images for public use through the app.
Creative Commons currently allows people to search the Web for images under its open license. Its app will open up an avenue for contributors to share their work directly with those who need it.
https://thelist.creativecommons.org/
No one can be everywhere at once. But everyone can.
NGOs, journalists, government agencies, and cultural institutions all need photographs to tell their story and educate others. But there’s no way for those organizations to be in the right place at the right time, every time. That’s where we come in.
Through The List, organizations will provide lists of locations, people, and events that they need photographs of. And when users are in the right place at the right time, they can claim an item from the list and publish a photograph of it. All photos on The List are openly licensed, meaning that everyone can use them.
Tomi Engdahl says:
New reporting service:
http://falkvinge.net/2015/06/15/launching-new-reporting-service-682-writers-editors-managers-wanted-for-part-time-yes-youll-get-paid-and-paid-well-launch-now-operational-in-q3/
Today, I’m launching a news service in an entirely new format, designed to outcompete oldmedia. The new service publishes all news as shareable images, thereby bypassing a large number of restrictions and limitations, not needing clickbait, and being immune to adblock – but also paying people well, using bitcoin. Meanwhile, oldmedia continues to call people greedy and selfish for not buying their printouts of yesterday’s internet.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jordan Kahn / 9to5Mac:
Apple is hiring editors to curate content for News app and work with publications to quickly surface breaking stories, according to a company job listing — Apple News curation will have human editors and that will raise important questions — Apple hasn’t talked about it publicly …
Apple News curation will have human editors and that will raise important questions
http://9to5mac.com/2015/06/15/apple-news-curation-editors/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Catherine Shu / TechCrunch:
Mobli launches EyeIn, an image search engine that crawls social networks for the best pictures for breaking news, trending topics, and live events
After Three Years In Development, Mobli Unveils Real-Time Image Search Engine EyeIn
http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/15/mobli-eyein/
Mobli, the photo- and video-based social network, launched in 2010, but it has just uncovered its flagship product, a real-time image search engine called EyeIn. Now available on the web and as a mobile app, EyeIn’s algorithms filter out content like selfies to return the most relevant results to users almost as soon as they are posted on social networks.
An embeddable plugin of EyeIn has also been piloted by six sites, including the Huffington Post and News Cult, and will use a revenue share model similar to Outbrain and Taboola.
“We have eyes all over the world. Everything worth seeing is being capture by someone with a smartphone. What we lack is a mechanism to collect those eyes, to enable us to look around,” says Sadeh.
“The other challenge is user-generated content that is not always relevant. For example, at a Lady Gaga concert, 70 percent of images are selfies, which are not the most relevant or interesting content that comes to mind. Our set of algorithms allows us to tune down the noise.”
EyeIn For Publishers
While EyeIn’s target user base is consumers, its program for partner sites is designed to help online companies increase user engagement and partake in ad revenue.
For ongoing event like a sport game, EyeIn’s plugin may get readers to return to the same site by providing ongoing live coverage with very little work required by the publisher.
“We are able to provide in real-time a social album with a very wide perspective as things happen. That is from a content perspective,” says Sadeh.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Worrying development?
European Court: Websites Are Responsible For Users’ Comments
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/15/06/17/0220211/european-court-websites-are-responsible-for-users-comments
A new ruling from the European Court of Human Rights found it perfectly acceptable to hold websites responsible for comments left by users. Experts are worried the ruling will encourage websites to censor content posted by users out of concern that they’re opening themselves up to legal liability. The judgment also seems to support the claim that “proactive monitoring” can be required of website owners.
Shock European court decision: Websites are liable for users’ comments
The ruling is likely to be influential on EU courts’ thinking in future.
http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2015/06/shock-european-court-decision-websites-are-liable-for-users-comments/
In a surprise decision, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg has ruled that the Estonian news site Delfi may be held responsible for anonymous and allegedly defamatory comments from its readers. As the digital rights organisation Access notes, this goes against the European Union’s e-commerce directive, which “guarantees liability protection for intermediaries that implement notice-and-takedown mechanisms on third-party comments.” As such, Peter Micek, Senior Policy Counsel at Access, says the ECHR judgment has “dramatically shifted the internet away from the free expression and privacy protections that created the internet as we know it.”
A post from the Media Legal Defence Initiative summarises the reasons why the court came to this unexpected decision. The ECHR cited “the ‘extreme’ nature of the comments which the court considered to amount to hate speech, the fact that they were published on a professionally-run and commercial news website,” as well as the “insufficient measures taken by Delfi to weed out the comments in question and the low likelihood of a prosecution of the users who posted the comments,” and the moderate sanction imposed on Delfi.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sunday Times Issues DMCA Takedown Notice To the Intercept Over Snowden Article
http://news.slashdot.org/story/15/06/16/228209/sunday-times-issues-dmca-takedown-notice-to-the-intercept-over-snowden-article
On Sunday, British newspaper The Sunday Times published an article citing anonymous UK government sources claiming that the cache of documents taken by Edward Snowden was successfully decrypted by the Russians and Chinese. Shortly thereafter, Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept published scathing criticism of the article. In Greenwald’s article, he included a photograph of the newspaper’s front page, where the story was featured.
U.K. newspaper tries to silence Glenn Greenwald criticism with copyright claim
http://www.dailydot.com/politics/snowden-sunday-times-dmca-takedown/
Accused of publishing government propaganda against NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the Sunday Times is using copyright to hit back at its strongest critic.
In a paywalled feature published Sunday, titled “British spies betrayed to Russians and Chinese,” three authors, citing anonymous government sources, claim that “Russia and China have cracked the top-secret cache of files stolen by the fugitive U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden.” In turn, the Times’s sources say, the U.K. had to relocate special agents around the world who were allegedly in harm’s way.
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In an extremely critical takedown post, The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald, the journalist Snowden first met with after fleeing the U.S., denied many of the details in the Times story.
Greenwald’s post also includes a screengrab of the Times’s layout—and that’s what the Times used to pounce on their high-profile critic. In a legal notice sent Monday, the paper cites the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and claims the Intercept is violating the Times’s copyright of “the typographical arrangement of the front page.”
“If Greenwald were selling a book of Great Covers of the Sunday Times, they’d have a case,” Parker Higgins, an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who specializes in intellectual property, told the Daily Dot. “But this is grasping at straws and attempting to use the strictest takedown law available—copyright—just to silence criticism.”
There’s a long history of people accused of using online copyright law to censor critics
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mike Masnick / Techdirt:
Huge Loss For Free Speech In Europe: Human Rights Court Says Sites Liable For User Comments — Last year we wrote about a very dangerous case going to the European Court of Human Rights: Delfi AS v. Estonia, which threatened free expression across Europe. Today, the ruling came out and it’s a disaster.
Huge Loss For Free Speech In Europe: Human Rights Court Says Sites Liable For User Comments
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150616/11252831361/huge-loss-free-speech-europe-human-rights-court-says-sites-liable-user-comments.shtml
Tomi Engdahl says:
Julia Greenberg / Wired:
LinkedIn’s new Pulse app uses human editors and algorithms to deliver personalized news; Pulse to list reason for showing specific content above stories — LinkedIn Brings Back Human Editors to Tailor News to You — At some point soon after you wake up, you probably check the news.
LinkedIn Brings Back Human Editors to Tailor News to You
http://www.wired.com/2015/06/linkedin-brings-back-human-editors-tailor-news/
Tomi Engdahl says:
A new window into our world with real-time trends
http://googleblog.blogspot.fi/2015/06/a-new-window-into-our-world-with-real.html
Every journey we take on the web is unique. Yet looked at together, the questions and topics we search for can tell us a great deal about who we are and what we care about. That’s why today we’re announcing the biggest expansion of Google Trends since 2012. You can now find real-time data on everything from the FIFA scandal to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign kick-off, and get a sense of what stories people are searching for. Many of these changes are based on feedback we’ve collected through conversations with hundreds of journalists and others around the world—so whether you’re a reporter, a researcher, or an armchair trend-tracker, the new site gives you a faster, deeper and more comprehensive view of our world through the lens of Google Search.
You can now explore minute-by-minute, real-time data behind the more than 100 billion searches that take place on Google every month, getting deeper into the topics you care about.
On the new google.com/trends, you’ll find a ranked, real-time list of trending stories that are gaining traction across Google
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mark Sweney / Guardian:
The Sun to make selected content available outside of paywall to capitalize on social sharing beginning in early July
Sun to relax paywall as part of drive to exploit social media
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jun/19/sun-relax-paywall-social-media-facebook-twitter
Growth of news sharing on sites such as Facebook and Twitter prompts tabloid to make selected digital content available for free
The Sun is to start to make content available outside its digital paywall for the first time as the tabloid aims to capitalise on the explosion of news sharing on social media such as Facebook and Twitter.
Mike Darcey, the chief executive of News UK, said that from early July “select digital content” will be made available for free.
“Since last summer, we have been working on a cross-departmental project to re-imagine the Sun and evolve its business model to take account of rapid changes in technology and the way readers are accessing and sharing news,” he said in an internal memo to staff on Friday.
Tomi Engdahl says:
David Pierce / Wired:
Project Lightning demotes the timeline to get to the core of Twitter: curated news and information
Twitter Is Killing Twitter to Save Twitter
http://www.wired.com/2015/06/twitter-project-lightning-timeline/
Twitter isn’t about a 140-character limit. It’s not about a timeline. It’s not about your joke going viral, or getting Justin Bieber to follow you by any means necessary. It’s about a single question, the one you see when you first load twitter.com: “What’s happening?”
Yet Twitter, as it has existed until now, has done a terrible job of both asking and answering that most central question. And so the company is, effectively, trying again. Its newly-revealed Project Lightning, BuzzFeed reports, will be the core feature of Twitter going forward: a button in the living center of its mobile app’s menu bar, dedicated to providing useful information in real time. Twitter’s editorial team (made of real, live humans) will define the big stories of the day, and will package tweets, images, and video to explain what’s going on. Those packages will be the primary unit of Twitter, and will be embeddable all over the Internet.
If Twitter does this right, Lightning will make Twitter more accessible, simpler, and friendlier. And it’ll work precisely because it dispenses with everything we currently know about Twitter.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Paul Linford / HoldTheFrontPage:
Regional UK publisher Local World to create Android app-based evening editions
Local World in bid to reinvent evening editions
http://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/2015/news/local-world-in-bid-to-reinvent-evening-editions/
Regional publisher Local World has launched an ambitious bid to reinvent late final editions by publishing them in mobile and tablet format.
Ten of the group’s regional daily titles are to take part in the first wave of a project designed to restore “the spirit of the evening edition newspaper.”
Free downloadable apps will deliver a news digest of the days biggest stories to Android mobile and tablet handsets each workday at 5pm.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Times is first paper forced by Ipso to highlight correction on front page
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jun/19/times-is-first-paper-forced-by-ipso-to-highlight-correction-on-front-page
Press regulator orders newspaper. which had published apology for Labour tax story, to refer to inaccuracy in a more prominent position
The Times has become the first newspaper to be forced to publish a reference to a correction on its front page by press regulator Ipso.
The regulator found that the Times article from 24 April “Labour’s £1,000 tax on families” had a misleading headline and first sentence: “Ed Miliband would saddle every working family with extra taxes equivalent to more than £1,000.”
Ipso chief executive Matt Tee said: “Today’s decision is the first time Ipso has invoked its new rules to compel a national publication to reference a correction on its front page. In assessing the requirement for “due prominence,” the committee took into account both the prominence of the original article and the seriousness of the breach, and ruled that prominence of the correction was not sufficient.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dave Maass / Electronic Frontier Foundation:
Facebook fails EFF’s censorship test because it doesn’t disclose US government content-restrictions requests; records show it has suspended inmate accounts
Why Facebook Failed Our Censorship Test
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/06/why-facebook-failed-our-censorship-test
If you click around Facebook’s “Government Request Report,” you’ll notice that, for many countries, Facebook enumerates the number of “content restrictions” the company has fulfilled. This is a sanitized term for censorship.
But if you click over to the United States, Facebook’s home country, you’ll find that the “content restrictions” category is conspicuously missing.
This is odd, considering that Facebook has been suspending the accounts of inmates in the U.S. for at least four years at the behest of prison officials.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Luke O’Brien / Politico:
Inside the tension between being a financial data company or a media company at Bloomberg
The Mayor vs. the Mogul
Michael Bloomberg’s $9 billion identity crisis.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/mike-bloomberg-mayor-vs-mogul-119111.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jonah Weiner / New York Times:
Behind Comedy Central’s experimental programming and digital business model challenges
Comedy Central in the Post-TV Era
The network is in the middle of a creative renaissance — and a business-model crisis.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/magazine/comedy-central-in-the-post-tv-era.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Peter Wayner / The Atlantic:
Amazon to pay authors of self-published Kindle Unlimited and Kindle Owners’ Lending Library e-books based on pages read, not downloads, from July 1st
What If Authors Were Paid Every Time Someone Turned a Page?
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/06/amazon-publishing-authors-payment-writing/396269/
When I recently learned of Amazon’s new plan to pay some authors for each page that a Kindle user reads, I remembered an editor who looked at my one of my book proposals and said something along the lines of, “It feels like you’ve only got 20,000 words of material. You need at least 80,000 words for a book. Can you pad it?”
This was when books were printed on paper and sold in stores.
Tablets, such as the Kindle, have started to change that system. Not only did they make it possible to read 50 Shades of Grey on the subway with no one the wiser, but the same is true of reading something thick and important, such as War and Peace.
Soon, the maker of the Kindle is going to flip the formula used for reimbursing some of the authors who depend on it for sales. Instead of paying these authors by the book, Amazon will soon start paying authors based on how many pages are read—not how many pages are downloaded, but how many pages are displayed on the screen long enough to be parsed. So much for the old publishing-industry cliche that it doesn’t matter how many people read your book, only how many buy it.
For the many authors who publish directly through Amazon, the new model could warp the priorities of writing: A system with per-page payouts is a system that rewards cliffhangers and mysteries across all genres. It rewards anything that keeps people hooked, even if that means putting less of an emphasis on nuance and complexity.
Starting in July, Amazon will divvy up the pool based on how many pages are read.
While many larger publishers’ offerings are included in these programs, the details of those deals have not been made public. Their authors may or may not be paid by the page.
Amazon is being clever: While the authors of big, long, and important books felt that they were shortchanged by a pay-by-the-borrow formula, they probably didn’t expect that Amazon would take their proposal a step further. Instead of paying the most ambitious, long-winded authors for each page written, Amazon will pay them for each page read.
Can the system be gamed? Authors won’t be able to rely on that old high-school trick of using a bigger font, because there’s a new standardized metric, the Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count (KENPC)
Short books have different economics in the digital era. Delivering data is so cheap that there’s no threshold that must be met to cover the costs of shipping and stocking. Paying someone to walk down a warehouse aisle or unpack a book and put it on the shelf—a big reason why the rule of thumb of an 80,000-word minimum evolved—is no longer a concern.
There are some advantages for authors. For one thing, short books are quicker to write. My book about cheating on the SAT took me only about two months to research, write, and edit. So, if I sold it for 99 cents to lure the impulse buyers, I could still break even on my time.
The new funding mechanism introduces some important new motivations for writers. Suddenly, there’s no reward for producing a big book that no one reads.
For writers who play Amazon’s game, these big, kitchen-sink projects will become even less sustainable unless people start truly reading every page.
But there may not be many rewards for the people who are writing short either. If I work hard to be pithy and crisp in order to keep the reader’s skittish attention, there will be fewer pages to read, and less money to be earned. Writing concisely is an art that takes a lot of time and careful editing.
Writers have always had to follow the whims of the market. Amazon’s move is exciting in many ways, especially for those who can deliver the page-turners that the new formula honors. But it will also push aside some writing styles that don’t fit into this modern, ultra-metered system. It’s easy for writers to feel powerless as the one dominant company shifts gears on short notice
Tomi Engdahl says:
Journalism’s Biggest Problem Is Not What You’d Expect—And It’s Entirely Fixable
When journalists trust but don’t verify their sources, the news business suffers. This was true back when–but it goes double online. Here’s why.
Read more at http://observer.com/2015/04/did-the-creators-of-a-1m-kickstarter-botch-production-or-blow-the-cash-on-mojitos/#ixzz3dsdjjQGO
Tomi Engdahl says:
Graphic News: Comics journalism is going mobile-first in Italy
https://www.journalism.co.uk/news/graphic-news-comics-journalism-is-going-mobile-first-in-italy/s2/a565583/
With illustrated news articles designed to be read on mobile devices, the new site has launched an English-language version with nine new stories to reach a wider audience
Tomi Engdahl says:
Madeline Welsh / Nieman Lab:
Vox’s 2015 hackathon culminated in 24 projects including back-end organizational tools, more engaging push notifications, and experiments with virtual reality — Here are some of the best projects from Vox Media’s annual hackfest
Here are some of the best projects from Vox Media’s annual hackfest
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/06/the-best-new-projects-from-vax-2015-vox-medias-annual-hackfest/
Four hackathons in, Vax (Vox + Hack = Vax) has become an annual tradition for Vox Media. Vox prides itself on two things: being a media organization that makes new and interesting tools, and being a kind place to work. The company sees the hackathon, which grew out of two employees’ idea for how to better use professional development days, as a way to meld the two.
Tomi Engdahl says:
One thing we can learn from Circa: A broader way to think about structured news
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/06/one-thing-we-can-learn-from-circa-a-broader-way-to-think-about-structured-news/
Circa’s backend placed every news event into a broader, branched network of stories — providing a structured vision of the larger narratives that other news organizations might not identify from day-to-day copy.
The collective response to the mobile news app Circa’s shutdown on Wednesday has largely cast it as a noble news experiment that failed — a company that tested an interesting idea for mobile news delivery but ultimately fell victim to overhype, lack of use, and neglect of a business model.
Quite a bit of commentary has addressed the ‘failure’ half of that perception.
But we haven’t talked as much about the other half: What exactly were Circa’s new ideas about how to deliver news, and how might they contribute to the development of the news industry? The ready answer is “atomized” news — the idea that news should be thought of in smaller units than the traditional article, and that it can be broken down into smaller, more granular chunks that can eliminate the unnecessary and repeated background information for users who already know a lot about a story. That’s the idea that Circa has always emphasized as the foundation underlying its system of “following” stories and, as former Circa editor David Cohn noted, the idea that seems to have caught on more broadly within the industry since their founding.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mathew Ingram / Fortune:
Human editors can work at Apple, Twitter, and Snapchat with emotional content, but scale of content at Google, Facebook requires algorithmic automation
http://fortune.com/2015/06/25/apple-facebook-editors/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Making partnerships work: How a team of 50+ international reporters investigated and exposed the World Bank
http://www.poynter.org/news/mediawire/352621/making-partnerships-work-how-a-team-of-50-international-reporters-investigated-and-exposed-the-world-bank/
Over the course of a decade, projects financed by the World Bank physically or economically displaced an estimated 3.4 million people, the reporting team found. These vulnerable people, often among the poorest in their societies, were forced from their homes, lost land or other assets or saw their livelihoods damaged. During this period, the investigation found, the bank regularly failed to follow its own rules for protecting the people living in the path of development.
To show the human consequences of the bank’s investments, reporters from ICIJ, The Huffington Post and more than 20 other ICIJ media partners reported on the ground in 14 countries. They traveled to isolated villages and urban slums in the Balkans, Asia, Africa and Latin America. They entered areas bloodied by civil conflicts. And they asked tough questions in places where journalists are often watched, questioned and, in some instances, targeted for violence or arrest.
Tomi Engdahl says:
List of BBC web pages which have been removed from Google’s search results
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/1d765aa8-600b-4f32-b110-d02fbf7fd379
Since a European Court of Justice ruling last year, individuals have the right to request that search engines remove certain web pages from their search results. Those pages usually contain personal information about individuals.
Following the ruling, Google removed a large number of links from its search results, including some to BBC web pages, and continues to delist pages from BBC Online.
Update 29/06/15: Google has asked us to point out that links to the BBC articles below are only delisted from results for queries on certain names. They are not removed from the Google index entirely. We’re happy to make that clear.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mathew Ingram / Fortune:
Apple’s mistake was hooking up with the book-publishing cartel — Apple may be trying to keep the spotlight on its latest foray into the streaming-music business, but it is also still trying to clean up the mess caused by its ham-handed entry into an earlier market: book publishing.
Apple’s mistake was hooking up with the book-publishing cartel
http://fortune.com/2015/06/30/apple-court-books/
An appeal court’s decision finding Apple guilty of collusion with publishers reinforces just how cozy a cartel the industry was.
federal court on Tuesday rejected the company’s appeal of an earlier ruling that found it guilty of orchestrating a conspiracy with the major book publishers, in what the court said was a successful attempt to artificially inflate the price of e-books.
As Fortune‘s Jeff Roberts reports, the court found Apple AAPL 0.67% engaged in collusion with what amounted to an oligopoly—namely, Harper Collins, Penguin, Simon & Schuster, Hachette and Macmillan—and that its actions were a clear breach of antitrust law. Apple argued that the deal it cut with the publishers was necessary to blunt Amazon’s dominance in the e-book market, but the appeals court didn’t buy that argument.
One reason the court failed to buy this argument is that the major publishers clearly had zero interest in actually competing on price—in fact, they wanted to do exactly the opposite.
The fact that the book industry was a cozy cartel is reinforced by the court’s description of how the publishers behaved even before Apple came along: They “operated in a close‐knit industry and had no qualms communicating about the need to act together,” the ruling says, quoting from the lower-court decision: “On a fairly regular basis… the CEOs of the [Big Six] held dinners in the private dining rooms of New York restaurants, without counsel or assistants present, in order to discuss the common challenges they faced.”
It says a lot about the book-publishing business that doing this actually caused book sales to drop fairly dramatically across the board: research done by another expert using data from Random House showed that publishers who switched to the agency model sold close to 15% fewer books than they would have otherwise. So the industry was effectively willing to trade a short-term decline in sales for the increase in power that they got over pricing as a result of the deal with Apple.
Joe Palazzolo / Wall Street Journal:
Apple loses federal appeal in e-books case and is expected to pay $450M, mostly to e-book buyers
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/apple-loses-federal-appeal-in-e-books-case-1435673945-lMyQjAxMTA1MjM3MDUzNjA3Wj
A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld a 2013 decision finding Apple Inc. liable for conspiring with publishers to raise the price of e-books.
The iPhone maker is expected to pay $450 million, most of it to e-book consumers, as part of a November agreement with private plaintiffs and 33 states that joined the Justice Department’s 2012 lawsuit accusing Apple of violating civil antitrust law. The deal hinged on the outcome of the appeal. The penalty amounts to less than 3% of the Cupertino, Calif., company’s profit in the quarter that ended in December.
“We conclude that the district court correctly decided that Apple orchestrated a conspiracy among the publishers to raise e-book prices,” wrote Second Circuit Judge Debra Ann Livingston. The conspiracy “unreasonably restrained trade” in violation of the Sherman Act, the federal antitrust law, the judge wrote.
At the time, publishers were dissatisfied with Amazon’s aggressive discounts. Apple’s agreements ceded the power to set prices to the publishers, in what’s known as an agency model. But there was an exception: If another retailer was selling an e-book at a lower price, the publisher would have to match that price in Apple’s bookstore.
With a new outlet for their e-books, the publishers had the leverage they needed to reclaim some pricing power from Amazon, Justice Department lawyers said. Change was inevitable: The publishers couldn’t afford to sell their e-books in Apple’s store at Amazon’s discounted prices of $9.99 for most best sellers.
“The decision confirms that it is unlawful for a company to knowingly participate in a price-fixing conspiracy, whatever its specific role in the conspiracy or reason for joining it,” said Bill Baer, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Laura Hazard Owen / Nieman Lab:
In Q&A, Zuckerberg emphasizes load speed of Instant Articles, predicts more news video, mentions need for small bits of news in fast, frequent pieces
Mark Zuckerberg has thoughts on the future of news on Facebook
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/06/mark-zuckerberg-has-thoughts-on-the-future-of-news-on-facebook/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Michael Sebastian / Ad Age:
Huffington Post’s lack of profit with $146M in revenue and 200M unique visitors/month should worry other publishers
Huffington Post Said To Break Even on $146 Million in Revenue Last Year
http://adage.com/article/media/huffington-post-broke-146-million-revenue/299293/
The Huffington Post generated $146 million in revenue last year, according to a report in The New York Times Magazine. And yet the site failed to turn a profit, according to the story’s author David Segal, who reports that it broke even.
That’s a worrisome sign for digital-media startups, which, like The Huffington Post, rely almost entirely on digital advertising for revenue. The amount brands are willing to pay for digital display ads face constant downward pressure because there’s a near limitless amount of supply.
So if The Huffington Post — which is 10-years-old, hauls in more than 200 million unique visitors a month and cranks out roughly 1,200 posts daily on the backs of reportedly poorly paid or unpaid writers — can’t turn a profit on $146 million in revenue, then how are the other, venture-capital fueled sites with smaller audiences and fewer relationships with advertisers supposed to achieve profitability?
Video? Native advertising? E-commerce? Tech? Events? Downsizing? Some combination of all them? Or maybe their goal is simply to show revenue in the hope of attracting a deep-pocketed buyer.
We’ll see.
According to Mr. Segal, The Huffington Post’s answer to the profitability question is scale:
“Any difficulty turning a profit … is considered a temporary problem that will eventually be fixed by the sheer size of the readership.”
Mr. Narisetti said of digital-only publishers:
“The entire business model is based on advertising — just because you’re born in the digital era and you don’t have legacy print costs doesn’t mean you’re going to go against the larger ad trends: CPMs continue to fall because supply is infinite and becoming more and more infinite. So I worry about models that are simply following legacy media and saying we’re nimbler and cost less but we’ll make money in the same way you guys make money, when it seems like the ad model is constantly going away from us.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
What’s the view from Europe on where news is headed? Check out these videos from Newsgeist
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/06/whats-the-view-from-europe-on-where-news-is-headed-check-out-these-videos-from-newsgeist/
From digital security to metrics, algorithms to wearables, here’s some of what a bunch of journalists and technologists were thinking about at their recent Helsinki conference.
Newsgeist — formerly known, just as idiosyncratically, as Newsfoo — is an annual-or-so unconference/gathering of journalists, technologists, media execs, and other future-of-news types for discussion, mingling, and pretty good food.
one window into Newsgeist is the videos — for only a subset of sessions — that get posted a little later.
Nicolas Kayser-Bril of Journalism++, on why pan-European media has flopped:
Wilfried Runde of Deutsche Welle, “In Praise of Robots and Humans”
Peter Hogenkamp of Newscron on why your mother is better than an algorithm
Jack Riley of The Huffington Post UK on wearables for news
Chris Moran of The Guardian on the hunt for the “God metric”
Beniamino Pagliaro of Good Morning Italia on the scarcity of time
Valtteri Halla of Leia Media on “killing the application”
Justin Kosslyn of Google Ideas, on thinking about how your work gets used
C.J. Adams of Google on digital security for journalists
Tomi Engdahl says:
One thing we can learn from Circa: A broader way to think about structured news
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/06/one-thing-we-can-learn-from-circa-a-broader-way-to-think-about-structured-news/
Circa’s backend placed every news event into a broader, branched network of stories — providing a structured vision of the larger narratives that other news organizations might not identify from day-to-day copy.
Tomi Engdahl says:
A blow for mobile advertising: The next version of Safari will let users block ads on iPhones and iPads
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/06/a-blow-for-mobile-advertising-the-next-version-of-safari-will-let-users-block-ads-on-iphones-and-ipads/
Think making money on mobile advertising is hard now? Think how much more difficult it will be with a significant share of your audience is blocking all your ads — all with a simple download from the App Store.
Adblocking is coming to the iPhone with iOS 9.
Adblocking — running a piece of software in your web browser that prevents ads on most web pages from loading — has moved from a niche behavior for the nerdy few to something mainstream. A report from 2014 found that adblock usage was up 70 percent year-over-year, with over 140 million people blocking ads worldwide, including 41 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds. You can understand why that would be troubling to the publishers who sell those ads. But until now, adblocking has been limited almost entirely to desktop — mobile browsers haven’t allowed it.
What this means is, when iOS 9 launches in the fall, you’ll be able to go to the App Store and download an extension that will block ads on most news sites.
Is there any chance that won’t be incredibly popular? The desktop version of Safari currently allows a variety of custom extensions, and what’s the most popular? Hint: It’s called AdBlock.
For me, the arguments for using ad blockers range from the unconvincing (dude, information wants to be free) to the reasonable (I don’t need dozens of tracking beacons on every webpage) to the downright understandable (poorly built ads slow my browser to a crawl). I don’t use an ad blocker, but I do block all Flash by default for performance reasons, which accomplishes some of the same ends. The best arguments for adblocking are even stronger on mobile than they are on desktop — bandwidth and performance and battery life are all at a premium.
This is worrisome. Publishers already make tiny dollars on mobile, even as their readers have shifted there in huge numbers. To take one example, The New York Times has more than 50 percent of its digital audience on mobile, but generates only 10 percent of its digital advertising revenue there. Most news outlets aren’t even at that low level.
If iOS users — the majority of mobile web users in the U.S., and disproportionately appealing demographically — can suddenly block all your ads with a simple free download, where is the growth going to come from? (By the way, a version of Adblock Plus for Android just came out a couple weeks ago, though it appears to be more limited than what Apple is allowing.)
Maybe I’m exaggerating the potential impact here. (Talk me down!) Maybe people won’t download the free app at the top of the Most Downloaded list that promises to make their websites load more quickly, more beautifully, and using less data. But use of ad blockers has done nothing but rise, particularly among young users, and people are about to be given an easy way to do on the devices they use most. For the many news companies who are counting on mobile advertising for their future business model, I don’t see a way that this change won’t shave off a real slice of mobile advertising revenue.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Laura Hazard Owen / Nieman Lab:
Scribd found that paying publishers based on how much readers read is too expensive in genres like romance — What Scribd’s growing pains mean for the future of digital content subscription models
What Scribd’s growing pains mean for the future of digital content subscription models
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/07/what-scribds-growing-pains-mean-for-the-future-of-digital-content-subscription-models/
It turns out that ebook subscription models don’t work very well when people read too much. So what happens next?
Netflix earned more than $5 billion in 2014. No wonder companies want to be “the Netflix of” other kinds of digital media — ebooks, magazines, music.
That’s not easy to pull off when you don’t have Netflix’s deep pockets or 62 million subscribers — oh, and when you’re trying to sell something to read rather than watch. We saw new cracks in the subscription model for text Tuesday, when it became clear that subscription site Scribd is pulling thousands of romance titles from its site.
What’s the problem? Well, Scribd (and rival service Oyster) pay publishers by the read. (When a user downloads and reads a certain percentage of a book, the publisher gets something like what it would make for a sale.) That was the main way it was able to get them to agree to make their books available to it; the publishers didn’t really have anything to lose.
And romance readers are famously voracious when it comes to ebooks. It turns out they are reading so much that they are becoming too expensive to Scribd.
“We’re working hard to establish more mutually beneficial terms with our publishing partners, so that we can continue to grow our catalog,” Scribd CEO Trip Adler wrote in a blog post. “Mutually beneficial” is a nice way of saying “less generous for publishers.”
Scribd can’t afford to keep paying publishers the retail price of a book when so many people are actually, well, reading the books. If the hope was that ebook subscription services would be more like gym memberships — where people pay but then don’t go — romance readers have turned the model on its head by using the “gym” too much. That means Scribd might need to find a new business model, or enact a tiered system where users who read more pay more.
What’s the demand for a library of text?
Reading about Scribd’s troubles, I kept thinking of another streaming media service — not Spotify but Next Issue Media, which offers unlimited access to more than 100 digital magazines. It’s $9.99 per month for monthly magazines and $14.99 per month if you want to add weekly magazines like The New Yorker.
Next Issue is a joint venture between major magazine publishers — Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, Time, and News Corp are all owners/investors (along with Canadian publisher Rogers). Without a third party involved, the publishers share the risk and reward. In some ways, it’s surprising that Next Issue is still around: The company won’t share how many subscribers it has, and its CEO left this year.
When it comes to text-based content, though — ebooks, magazines, newspapers — that statement is far from proven. Scribd has showed us that certain types of very active readers do, indeed, demand mobile access to large catalogs of content and want to pay a flat fee for it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Joseph Lichterman / Nieman Lab:
Harvard Business Review hopes to grow subscriptions by offering new products at a higher price of of $109/year — Added value: How Harvard Business Review thinks it can add subscribers while getting more expensive
Added value: How Harvard Business Review thinks it can add subscribers while getting more expensive
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/07/added-value-how-harvard-business-review-thinks-it-can-add-subscribers-while-getting-more-expensive/
By creating new products and taking advantage of its extensive archives, HBR’s plan is to both offer more to and ask more of subscribers.
Harvard Business Review is trying to walk a fine line: The magazine thinks it can raise the price for a subscription and still attract close to 100,000 new subscribers.
“Basic economics says you lower prices and get more customers; you raise prices you get fewer,” Harvard Business Review Group publisher Joshua Macht told me. “And our board members point this out to me. But there’s this defying gravity idea, and the reason why I think it’s possible…is for the last five years, at least, we’ve been in this conversation with subscribers.”
HBR thinks readers will be willing to pay more for a subscription because the magazine is adding new products it hopes will offer readers additional value for the added cost.
Last month, HBR launched its Visual Library, a collection of the magazine’s charts, graphs, and slide decks accessible only to subscribers. It’s also in the early stages of testing out a concierge service that will allow users to request personalized collections of stories from the HBR archive.
“What we found is that, as we’ve rolled these things out, we’ve been able to move the price up,” Macht said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dick Costolo / Guardian:
Twitter helped open access to information, people, and power, and that access should be used responsibly and with empathy — why tech firms are set to face complex ethical issues — After nearly five years the Twitter CEO is standing down.
Dick Costolo: why tech firms are set to face complex ethical issues
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/01/twitter-dick-costolo-jun-granada
After nearly five years the Twitter CEO is standing down. He explains why it wants to champion the underserved and make the world’s smallest voices heard
Thanks to the increasing pervasiveness of the internet and the growth of platforms like Twitter, access has become available at a larger scale than ever before. The United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights states that “everyone has the freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and share information regardless of frontiers”.
Dictators decided what people should and shouldn’t know. They used propaganda to influence the population – withholding facts or selectively sharing an altered version of events.
Today, people can access information from its original source, instantly. This makes it much more difficult to use information as a tool for wielding power because information is equally, immediately available. It means there are more perspectives on a news story – from mainstream media, eyewitnesses or the newsmakers themselves. It means the record can be set straight when something is reported inaccurately. And that what constitutes a news story is not just decided by a select few, but by individuals all over the world.
It means that a country can hold its government to account and that it’s harder to cover up the true version of events. It won’t end the use of propaganda
Because of the free flow of information, the people that we have access to has changed as well. If you rewind even a few years, only an elite group had direct access to world leaders or subject matter experts. The knowledge they had was shared almost exclusively with those in their immediate circles or students in their classrooms.
Today, I can hear directly from people like the Prime Minister of India, most of the astronauts currently in space, or literary legends like Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood.
For most of history we have lived in a world with artificial barriers. Barriers to communication and the flow of information. Barriers based on status – political, racial, socioeconomic status. These artificial walls built between people limited our ability to truly see each other. They made it hard to have compassion for people living lives very different to our own. But these barriers are coming down. Access – to information, to people, to institutions – is becoming a reality for more and more people around the world.
And what we ask of you is that you use this access responsibly and with empathy.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Reddit’s popular ‘ask me anything’ feature is down after a key employee is gone
Read more: http://uk.businessinsider.com/reddits-ama-subreddit-down-after-victoria-taylor-depature-2015-7?op=1?r=US#ixzz3eoP0B4R0
Tomi Engdahl says:
One example what magazine did when circulation dropped:
William Turvill / Press Gazette:
After 80 per cent circulation drop in ten years, NME print edition to go free — NME is to be made into a free weekly magazine from 18 September, publisher Time Inc. has announced. — According to ABC, the music magazine – which current costs £2.60 – recorded an average weekly circulation of 15,384 in the second half of 2014.
After 80 per cent circulation drop in ten years, NME print edition to go free
http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/after-80-cent-circulation-drop-ten-years-nme-print-edition-go-free
NME is to be made into a free weekly magazine from 18 September, publisher Time Inc. has announced.
According to ABC, the music magazine – which current costs £2.60 – recorded an average weekly circulation of 15,384 in the second half of 2014. This is down from more than 75,000 ten years ago.
According to a press release sent out this morning, more than 300,000 free copies of the title will be distributed nationally in stations, universities and “retail partners”.
Time Inc.said: “NME will dramatically increase its content output and range, with new original as well as curated content appearing across all platforms, including print.
“Every media brand is on a journey into a digital future.”
“That doesn’t mean leaving print behind, but it does mean that print has to change,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Paul Bradshaw / Online Journalism Blog:
News organizations need to do a better job of creating dashboards to analyze data visually, highlighting potential stories — Dashboards and journalism: why we need to do better — Confused? Knobs and dials image by anataman
Dashboards and journalism: why we need to do better
http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2015/07/01/dashboards-and-journalism-why-we-need-to-do-better/
First, however, it’s worth taking stock of just how big a part dashboards play in our lives, and how little a role journalists play in their creation:
Publishers create content management systems to allow reporters and other staff to navigate between stories, media, metrics and other tools and information
Social media services create dashboards as a way of navigating our networks
Analytics companies create dashboards to help users monitor the performance of their content
Metrics dashboards are a big part of all three, including HuffPo’s analytics and Bleacher Report’s gamification of writer performance. But what about finding stories?
Story sourcing dashboards: social and RSS
Tweetdeck and Netvibes are good examples of dashboards that save us time as journalists: specifically search time.
In fact, we can set up more than one dashboard depending on when or where we might be using them: one for when we are covering health, for example; or another one for a specific event.
argues that creating a visual interface to the information the journalist needs (in this case oil prices and contract agreements) is essential:
“You cannot achieve any real understanding of the many interlocking parts of the contract and revenue flows without a model of their relationships with each other. I would not trust any financial comment or analysis of oil economics done blind to a model.
“It is a bit of a challenge to get journalists to accept this – since many of them are not familiar with or comfortable with financial models.”
One result of financial illiteracy, he argues, is an inclination towards simple but meaningless comparisons: one royalty rate being higher than another; or how much an income tax rate was raised by.
The dashboard supports the journalist in reporting something richer despite the pressure to deliver something on deadline. And it’s not just for journalists:
“We know there are many governments which do not have models like this one for contracts they themselves negotiated and signed”
At a broader level there are also dashboards designed by journalists to help make their colleagues’ work easier.
make better use of the data we already have
Online spreadsheet tools like Google Sheets allow us to pull in live information, using built-in functions that fetch stock prices, or scrape web tables or feeds (which themselves might be generated by scrapers).
Once we have that live information it can be connected to historical information, and display those relationships visually.
Imagine a dashboard that pulls in the latest crime reports and tells us whether they’re going up or down – and where.
Turning archives into journalistic goldmines
http://jplusplus.se/turning-archives-into-journalistic-goldmines/
What if there was a tool that could tell you everything that was said and promised about this day – the previous future – a month, a year or a decade ago?
Tomi Engdahl says:
Making magazine awards more user-friendly
http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2010/11/19/making-magazine-awards-more-user-friendly/
In the first post Tony complained after seeing Computer Weekly’s shortlist:
“Why, oh why, don’t publishers of blog award nomination lists see them as potentially useful collections on a particular subject that can be put to work for the benefit of that community?
I’d suggest something even more simple: an aggregator widget pulling together the RSS feeds for each category, or a new Twitter account, or a Google Reader bundle.
Tony’s approach demonstrates the difference between story-centred and data-centred approaches to journalism. Computer Weekly are approaching the awards as a story (largely because of limitations of platform and skills – see comments), with the ultimate ending ‘Blog publisher wins award’. Tony, however, is looking at the resources being gathered along the way: a list of blogs, each of which has an RSS feed, and each of which will be useful to readers and journalists. Both are valid, but ignoring either is to miss something valuable in your journalism.
Tomi Engdahl says:
5 principles of data management – for both analytics and data journalism
http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2012/10/09/5-principles-of-data-management-for-both-analytics-and-data-journalism/
1. Data is only as good as the person asking the questions
A scraped dataset tells you little on its own. Likewise, the default dashboard of an analytics package rarely provides any particularly deep insights.
In data journalism, those questions might be ‘Is the data reliable?‘ or ‘Is a passage of text appearing more than once?‘ or ‘Does this match up to promises made or the story being spun?‘
2. Data can save time and money
I’ve written before about the myth that data journalism is resource-intensive. Done well, using data can save time on tasks that have previously been done manually, and it does not have to cost money or rely on having a team of developers.
It can also be used to turn around reporting more quickly: you might prepare for a big event by having spreadsheet formulae already set up, for example, or feeds set up or triggers.
3. Data is about people
Stories – whether that’s a story about defence spending or website traffic – are told about people and to people. The data is just a means to an end.
4. Good data is social, sticky and useful
Journalism is pointless if it doesn’t reach anyone, and both data journalism and analytics have particular strengths on that front, when done well.
Is your data social?
Is your data sticky?
Is your data useful?
5. You can be driven by the data or driven by the story
The final principle is really about how proactive you want to be in your involvement with data. You might prefer to lie back and let the data come to you – from a dashboard, analytics reports, or statistical releases – but the really interesting data comes when you seek it out, because you’re driven by a question.
A/B testing of headlines, for example, allows you to create your own data around which headlines work best (there’s even a WordPress plugin for that).
Nothing new under the sun
All of these principles are merely journalistic principles renamed. So:
Journalism is only as good as the person asking the questions
Journalism can save time and money
Journalism is about people
Good journalism is social, stick and useful
You can be driven by the source or the story
Tomi Engdahl says:
Fred Wilson / AVC:
A media platform based on blockchain will arrive soon, which unlike Reddit or Twitter can’t be policed — The Decentral Authority — We’ve been big fans of Reddit since it was part of the first Y Combinator class ten years ago this summer. We’ve watched closely as it emerged as a community powered mostly by its users.
The Decentral Authority
http://avc.com/2015/07/the-decentral-authority/
The growing pains that Reddit is going through as it evolves into something more are particularly interesting to us. We’ve always wondered if a people powered community that is owned as much by its users as anyone can work as a traditional corporate entity.
I am particularly sympathetic to the need to manage the trolling activity. Twitter also struggles with this issue. Free speech has an ugly underbelly and when you stare at it up close and personally, it makes you want to puke. And yet where do you stop on the slippery slope of deciding what is acceptable and what is not?
We have also wondered what the first killer app of the blockchain is going to be. Is it going to be personal finance (bitcoin), is it going to be peer to peer connectivity (mesh networking), or is it going to be something else?
The interesting thing about an entirely decentralized media platform is that you can have clients that choose to curate, police, and censor and clients that choose not to. Twitter, as originally architected, could have headed down this path. But for many reasons, reasons I supported to be clear, it chose not to.
But someone is going to go there. And I think it will happen soon. And I think it most likely will be built on the blockchain. There have been plenty of attempts to do this before. And none have succeeded. So why now?
Well for one, the blockchain is here and waiting for its killer app. And there are no shortage of entrepreneurs who want to build it.
The demand is there. The supply (technology) is there. And we’ve seen a bunch of teams working on this. I think one or more will get it right. And I think that will happen soon.
To be clear, this does not mean the end of Reddit or Twitter or any other of the current media platforms that are out there. They will likely move more and more into a centrally controlled media platform.
But there is also a very interesting opportunity to build a truly decentralized media platform. I am not sure it will be a good business. I am not sure it will even be a business. But it can be a very powerful community and platform. And there is a market for that. A big one I think.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Severin Carrell / Guardian:
Scottish investigative site The Ferret to launch Indiegogo campaign for £3.8K for first investigation, plans to generate revenue via subs, crowdfunding
Crowd-funded investigative journalism site the Ferret to launch in Scotland
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jul/06/crowd-funded-investigative-journalism-site-the-ferret-to-launch-in-scotland
Site needs 2,000 backers to begin tacklingdecline of investigative resources in Scottish media
A group of freelance journalists is launching a new subscription-based, crowd-funded investigations unit to make up for a sharp fall in investigative reporting by traditional news media in Scotland.
Called the Ferret, the web-based project said it plans to draw on successful investigative journalism collectives, including De Correspondent in the Netherlands and the Belfast-based outfit The Detail, to produce independent investigations and also stories it can sell on to mainstream outlets such as the Scottish and national press, Channel 4 News or the BBC.
It launches formally on Tuesday with a crowd-funding appeal on the Indiegogo website to raise £3,800 to fund its first investigation into Scotland’s fracking industry.
The unit is being led by three established investigative reporters
Based around digitally-led, multimedia reporting, the Ferret is also considering a paywall system, offering non-subscribers access to a limited number of free stories before charging for greater and more in-depth access.
A similar model is used by De Correspondent; its 34,000 subscribers pay €60 (£42.50) a year, after it launched a remarkable crowd-funding exercise when 15,000 donors gave €1m in eight days to raise its start-up capital. The Detail in Belfast, which sells its stories to media such as Irish broadcaster RTE, won core funding of £157,000 from the Atlantic Philanthropies trust in 2013.
“Investigative journalism is not only in decline, but it comes at a cost. What we want to find out is whether people are willing to pay for that. Obviously we’re hopeful the answer is yes,” Edwards explained. “It is clearly not the case that investigative journalism is dead; it’s just faltering.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Reddit is in utter chaos as hundreds of its most popular communities go dark
http://uk.businessinsider.com/reddit-in-chaos-hundreds-subreddits-go-private-after-victoria-leaves-iama-2015-7?
Reddit has been thrust into chaos on Friday as hundreds of the biggest communities on the social news site went dark following the sudden departure of a popular employee.
Victoria Taylor, a staff member responsible for the well-known “Ask Me Anything” Q&A community — often a platform for celebrities to communicate with the public — was allegedly dismissed.”
Reddit’s unconventional community management structure
To understand what’s going on, you need to know how Reddit polices its communities. The site acts as a social network, news aggregate, and niche interest messageboard, all rolled into one.
Anyone can start a community, or subreddit, on almost any subject. The subreddits are given a unique URL. For instance, r/AskScience is dedicated to questions about science and r/GameOfThrones is a discussion board about the popular HBO fantasy show.
Subreddits are managed by community moderators, with almost zero input from Reddit’s paid admin staff, provided that they don’t violate a few global rules or post illegal content.
While Reddit admins have no formal business relationship with the moderators, they rely on them to maintain the site’s communities, some of which have many millions of members. Moderators have a huge amount of power as they are not accountable to users, cannot be voted out, and can alter or delete their communities at any time.
Reddit staff respond to the fury
Immediately after news of Taylor’s dismissal broke, around a dozen of the site’s most popular communities, including r/history, r/gaming, and r/movies, went private in solidarity.
This revolt didn’t come out of nowhere. There have been long-simmering tensions between Reddit’s moderators and Reddit’s staff
This may seem like an overreaction until you remember just how hands-off Reddit’s admin staff have traditionally been.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Desperate For Ad Data, Twitter Offers Animated Balloons For Your Birthdate
http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/06/what-advertising-demographic-are-you/
Twitter’s ads would work a lot better if it knew how old you are. So in an obvious data grab, Twitter will show animated balloons on your profile when it’s your birthday if you’re willing to give it your birthdate. You can see what the balloons looks like on comedian Kevin Hart’s profile.
Twitter’s minimalist sign-up flow seems to be coming back to bite it. All it asks is for a name, username, and email or phone number. That made it super quick to register an account, which is helpful on mobile. But without gender, age, and other demographic info, it’s difficult to accurately target its ads to the people businesses want to reach.
You’ll soon be able to go to Twitter.com and edit your profile to add your birthdate.
Way back in 2010, Facebook made one of its smartest moves ever by pushing people’s biographical information to the top of their profile where everyone would see it. This strongly encouraged users to fill theirs in, keep it current, and remind friends if their data was missing or out of date. That fueled the rapid ascent of its ad targeting engine and its ongoing financial success.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Aaron Zamost / Backchannel:
Square’s head of communications describes the cyclical nature of media coverage of tech companies
What’s Your Hour in ‘Silicon Valley Time’?
https://medium.com/backchannel/how-the-tech-press-forces-a-narrative-on-companies-it-covers-5f89fdb7793e
A company’s narrative moves like a clock: it starts at midnight, ticking off the hours. The tone and sentiment about how a business is doing move from positive (sunrise, midday) to negative (dusk, darkness). And often the story returns to midnight, rebirth and a new day.
It was a passing remark, and hardly revolutionary — it closely followed the hero’s journey and other theories of storytelling. But it made a ton of sense.
Over the years, I developed the idea by filling in the times on the clock. It has helped to be in tech; startups in particular, always begin with a “founding story,” and follow a typical path through Silicon Valley Time (SVT). It’s not perfect, of course. Companies can skip an hour — or in some cases several. Others get stuck along the way, and with a stalled narrative (and broken clock) cease to be relevant.
Knowing the general time of a company has made it easier for me to see around corners and better do my job.
The tech press moves like clockwork, fitting company narratives into a predictable arc. Here’s how pros deal with it.
Birth. (No one cares.)
If you’re already making news at 12:00, you’ve probably been successful before, since the mere founding of your company is of little interest.
Shiny new toy.
It’s around 1:00 that the first real article is written about your company. With the right connections, anyone can make it to 1:00. You’ve launched your product, raised money from a few prominent investors, and your app makes for a good headline. People don’t feel strongly about you, one way or the other, but now they have heard of you, and that matters.
Up-and-comer.
Rounding 2:00 is a real accomplishment — many startups never make it this far. At 2:00, you are seeing real traction.
Industry disrupter.
Not every company spends time at 3:00. Some burn out after takeoff. Others skip to a later hour. But things get interesting at 3:00. Most importantly, mainstream business press (New York Times, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal) start to pay attention.
Hottest company in the Valley.
At 4:00, business (and media) momentum drives your recruiting. Everyone wants to work for the next big thing, which makes your company the hottest in the Valley.
Rapid expansion and growth.
At 5:00, everything is gravy. You’re growing fast and your valuation is skyrocketing. Reports that you’re losing money? If you’re at 5:00, those reports are irrelevant.
Greatest company in the world!
Greatest company in the world?
Their product kind of sucks.
They’re never going to make any money.
FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt).
The company is a mess.
What are they doing with your data?
And here come the privacy issues. It’s very dark at 11:00.
Worst company in the world.
At 11:59, criticism becomes personal. You see a lot of “Boycott [your company]” stories.
12:00 SVT:
Rebirth.
Everyone loves a comeback.
“You’re never as good as everyone tells you when you win, and you’re never as bad as they say when you lose.” — Lou Holtz
Part Two: How I learned to stop worrying and love the clock
Don’t get angry.
Don’t force anything.
Be humble.
Focus on your customers and your team.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Will Oremus / Slate:
Many viral Facebook videos are ripped from YouTube and re-uploaded to Facebook without consent, and some end up with more views than originals — Facebook’s Piracy Problem — Are plagiarized YouTube videos helping fuel the social network’s astonishing video growth?
Facebook’s Piracy Problem
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2015/07/freebooting_stolen_youtube_videos_going_viral_on_facebook.single.html
Are plagiarized YouTube videos helping fuel the social network’s astonishing video growth?
The result, titled “TATTOOING Close Up (in Slow Motion),” has racked up more than 20 million views in nine months.
So far it sounds like a classic YouTube success story. But it’s actually a story about a form of online piracy called “freebooting” that has grown rampant on Facebook in just the past year. Sandlin and other YouTube personalities are convinced Facebook is profiting from it—at their expense.
It’s also a story about a seismic shake-up in the online video industry. For the first time in its history, YouTube has a real rival. And Facebook isn’t playing by the same rules.
Two days after he published his tattoo video on YouTube, Sandlin got a message from one of his subscribers who had seen it on Facebook. It turned out his video was a viral smash there, too. In fact, it was spreading even faster on Facebook than it was on YouTube, with more than 18 million views in the first two days alone.
The problem was that Sandlin had never posted it to Facebook, and the version of it that appeared in millions of users’ News Feeds overnight wasn’t his. Rather, a British lads’ magazine called Zoo had apparently downloaded (or “ripped”) his video from YouTube, edited it to strip out references to Sandlin and his SmarterEveryDay channel, and posted the edited version on its own page, using Facebook’s native video player. It was an instant sensation, garnering millions of views and a raft of new followers for Zoo’s page. Sandlin, who puts some of the revenue from his YouTube videos toward his kids’ college fund, got nothing.
Sandlin’s story is one you hear a lot these days from people who make online videos professionally.
YouTube video on how to make gummy candies in the shape of Legos, and it garnered about 600,000 views in the first 24 hours. Meanwhile, on Facebook, someone else’s ripped version of his video was approaching 10 million views. “The worst thing is just the shock of how viral they go on Facebook compared to the ones I post on YouTube,”
Last year on his podcast Hello Internet, the Australian filmmaker Brady Haran coined the term freebooting to describe the act of taking someone’s YouTube video and re-uploading it on a different platform for your own benefit.
Unlike sea pirates, Facebook freebooters don’t directly profit from their plundering. That’s because, unlike YouTube, Facebook doesn’t run commercials before its native videos—not yet, at least. That’s part of why they spread like wildfire.
What the freebooter gains is attention, whether in the form of likes, shares, or new followers for its Facebook page. That can be valuable, sure, especially for brands and media outlets.
Regardless, it’s clear that YouTube is being squeezed out. In February 2014, just 1 in 4 videos posted on Facebook were uploaded natively, with the rest shared from other hosts such as YouTube, according to a SocialBakers report cited by Fortune. By February, 70 percent were hosted on Facebook.
Facebook’s News Feed algorithms appear to dovetail suspiciously with the company’s strategic goals
“But without a doubt they’ve tailored their algorithm to make them the most money.”
Both Sandlin and Thompson told me they contact Facebook whenever they see a particularly egregious instance of freebooting and ask the company to take the video down. Facebook typically complies, they said—but often not until a day or two later, by which time the video’s virality has run much of its course. Two days, Sandlin told me, is “basically forever in Internet time.”
n contrast, YouTube—which in its early days was nearly sued into oblivion for its own copyright infringement foibles—now has sophisticated software to identify copyrighted content almost as soon as it’s posted. Depending on the type of content, YouTube’s Content ID system gives the copyright holders the option to automatically block the infringing video, monetize it, or allow it to remain and track its performance. The system isn’t perfect: Some critics say it gives copyright holders too much power to block videos that might have a legitimate fair-use case for legality. But Sandlin and Thompson say it helps makes original video operations like theirs possible.
If that’s true, perhaps the era of rampant freebooting on Facebook will prove fleeting. Maybe this is just a stage of development for online video platforms: grow first, then cover your legal bases.
Sandlin also doesn’t buy the notion that copyright enforcement presents a “technical challenge” for Facebook. “You’re talking about the people who created facial recognition technology on a large-scale social platform,” he said.