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.
871 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ask Slashdot: Which Expert Bloggers Do You Read?
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/15/07/08/1445215/ask-slashdot-which-expert-bloggers-do-you-read
The crush of news sites today is almost overwhelming. For true bits of news — bare facts and alerts that something has happened — it doesn’t really matter which site you read it on. Some tiny, no-name website can tell me $company1 bought $company2 just as well as Reuters, CNN, or the NY Times. When it comes to opinion pieces and analysis, though, it’s a different story.
Tomi Engdahl says:
MEPs gear up to vote on Europe’s copyright ‘black spot’ report
Political infighting ahead of NON-BINDING report augurs ill for legislative proposals
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/08/europarl_copyright_report/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Running a Town Over Twitter
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/15/07/07/1910227/running-a-town-over-twitter
You may call Jun an ancient town — it was founded by Romans 2,200 years ago. But Jun’s mayor is known worldwide for using the latest technology to run the city. Back in 1999, when he was deputy mayor, the town declared internet a basic universal right for its citizens. And now political parties run “virtual” campaigns without printing posters. But the most impressive accomplishment of Jun’s mayor is running the entire town administration and public services using Twitter.
2,200-year-old Andalusian town runs on Twitter
http://www.citiesofthefuture.eu/2200-year-old-andalusian-town-runs-on-twitter/
Jun, a small Andalusian town founded by the Romans 2,200 years ago, is using Twitter to reduce bureaucracy, serve its citizens, and run a more efficient administration.
Mayor José Antonio Rodríguez Salas (@JoseantonioJun) has encouraged all Jun residents to get a Twitter account to communicate easily with the town government. That way they can report issues about public services and infrastructure, send suggestions, participate in the town decisions and “talk” to the mayor and council members directly.
Jun [pronounced “Hoon”] is one of several commuter towns around the provincial capital of Granada and has a population of 3,800. Its local economy depends heavily on Granada but also has a long tradition of pottery.
The town prides itself on making use of the latest technology to streamline the administration and provide efficient public services. But this isn’t its first foray. It had already made history in December 1999 when it declared internet access a basic public service and universal right for its citizens.
Twitter is used for all town services, including the street sweeper, who can be called by residents if they see something that needs cleaning. In order to use the services residents are required to have a Twitter account in their name (a third of them now have one) and register it at the town hall, so town employees know they’re dealing with actual residents. The town also provides free training courses to any residents who are not confident about using the technology.
All public employees have a Twitter account, including the town’s police officer (@PoliciaJun), the town electrician, and the street sweeper (@BarredoraJun).
With such high citizen participation the mayor was able to reduce the police force from four officers down to just one. He is very proud of reducing bureaucracy to the minimum and doing all the paperwork on Twitter.
The town’s success using Twitter has not gone unnoticed by the social media giant and, earlier this year, it sent its chief data scientist MIT professor Deb Roy to investigate how Twitter can be used to run the entire town. Jun was also visited by Twitter’s former CEO Dick Costolo last April.
Professor Roy was impressed with the town’s commitment to use the best available tools to serve its residents and with how Twitter has become a suitable platform for small towns and communities.
“Jun is the exception rather than the rule, with a very committed and technologically confident mayor who has pursued this project for 16 years,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kavya Sukumar / Vox Product Blog:
Vox open sources Autotune, a centralized management system for interactive elements like charts and graphics, and provides a reusable blueprint
Introducing Autotune
http://product.voxmedia.com/2015/7/8/8907841/introducing-autotune
Today we’re announcing a new project we’ve been working on at Vox Media: Autotune. We built this application to address the problem of reusability in our work. This project is open source and available to everyone.
As any news hacker knows, one of the most challenging requests we get is for “more of those things.” We’ll make a neat chart, visualization or map, which sees some success: our readers or reporters like it or maybe it helps tell a better story. You better believe other folks will come around asking for “one of those charts like on that one story.”
One of the most difficult messages to communicate to our non-developer colleagues is how tricky “reusability” is. The common misconception is that once software is built, it can be reused. In reality, software is almost always built to accomplish a specific task in a specific context with no thought to how it might be reused.
It may sound as if this is a problem, a lack of foresight or a rookie mistake, but it is not. It is almost always a mistake to attempt to build reusable software from the start without taking the time to understand how it will be used and why. Working under deadline, building something for a specific story, is the worst time to try to anticipate how the code will be used in the future.
The goal of Autotune is to shorten the gap between building a one-off website or interactive graphic and building a reusable tool for generating many things.
What is Autotune?
In simple tech jargon, Autotune is a web interface for static site generators.
At Vox Media, we use the Middleman static site generator as the basis for all of our editorial projects: maps, charts, quizzes, story packages, brackets, etc.
Autotune allows us to keep Middleman as a core piece of our technology stack. We can build projects the same way that we always have, only we now have a very well-defined path to take a project from a simple one-off production to a reusable project blueprint.
How do you use it?
For an editor or reporter, Autotune works like this:
1. You log in to create a project.
2. Choose which blueprint you want to use (e.g. a chart, a quiz, an image slider, or whatever else you can dream up).
3. You plug in the relevant data required by the blueprint. (e.g. a title, a data source, a theme, an image).
4. Publish and grab your responsive embed code.
How does it work?
Autotune is built with Ruby on Rails and distributed as an engine.
How do I implement it in my newsroom?
You can start using this in your newsroom today. The instructions are in the wiki.
We’ve made a few example blueprints that you can use now, and we’ll be open sourcing more as we go:https://github.com/voxmedia/autotune/wiki/Example-blueprints.
voxmedia/autotune
https://github.com/voxmedia/autotune/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Joseph Lichterman / Nieman Lab:
Upworthy focuses on story creation by reviewing metrics to find where stories lose readers, switching roles to writers not curators, and trying new formats — How Upworthy is using data to move beyond clickbait and curation —
How Upworthy is using data to move beyond clickbait and curation
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/07/how-upworthy-is-using-data-to-move-beyond-clickbait-and-curation/
After hiring Amy O’Leary from The New York Times, the site has started using user data to inform its original content production.
Upworthy has been shifting away from its origins as a master of Facebook-maximizing aggregated clickbait to begin producing more original articles and videos. O’Leary joined Upworthy from The New York Times in February to lead the transition.
Today, the company is releasing a report outlining its data-centric approach to storytelling while also highlighting original pieces — such as March’s fast food take — that Upworthy says epitomize its new strategy.
Using the user data it’s collected, Upworthy found that elements like humor and a story structure that built in suspense would draw in readers and keep them on the page and better engaged.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Josh Dzieza / The Verge:
Inside quirky, self-funded and profitable The Awl: annual revenue in low seven figures, relative freedom for writers, and a cautious growth strategy
Josh Dzieza / The Verge:
Inside quirky, self-funded and profitable The Awl: annual revenue in low seven figures, relative freedom for writers, and a cautious growth strategy — Why are the most important people in media reading The Awl?
Website, Profiled
Why are the most important people in media reading The Awl?
http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/9/8908279/the-awl-profile-choire-sicha-john-herrman-matt-buchanan
In February, at the Code/Media* conference in Dana Point, California, some of the most powerful people in media found themselves discussing an unsettling story published two weeks prior.
The piece predicted that the future of the internet looked a lot like the television industry: websites would atrophy, and publications would become disembodied producers of content for large social networks like Facebook.
The piece hit a nerve in an industry trying to figure out where it sits in an internet centralizing around gigantic platforms. It was written by John Herrman, a journalist who established his name as a tech blogger, but it wasn’t published in The New York Times or Columbia Journalism Review, publications with long histories of media criticism, or by any of the big new media companies at the heart of these changes. It appeared on The Awl, an offbeat site with a small readership and a wry sensibility.
Founded in 2009 by Choire Sicha, Alex Balk, and David Cho, The Awl stands counter to the prevailing trends in the media industry, commenting skeptically on the conventions of the wider web while running a mix of stories that are both wide-ranging and unabashedly specific: writerly reviews of the previous day’s weather, deconstructions of minion memes, tirades against negronis and the Moon, personal essays, deadpan lists, poetry. The site’s tone, knowingly smart and aloof from the news cycle, is especially popular among people who work in media, and it has become a farm team for larger publications.
The Awl’s unique position is partly the result of its business practices and goals. The site has expanded into a network
The Awl has found a way to make being small work in an industry that favors scale and mass appeal, and it’s become the sort of place where writers like Herrman and Buchanan can stand back and watch the content dynamo churn. But the company is subject to the same forces they’ve been warning about, and the people who built it are thinking about how to navigate the weird new internet taking shape.
“Our entire economy is just a giant science fiction writing prompt.”
“I think things are probably much, much worse industry-wise than people acknowledge. It is, to the web, what the web was to what came before it,” Herrman later says of the shift to platforms. “If in the process of adapting to it you also lost track of what you were intending to do, then you are just an instrument attached to someone else’s machine, this little weirdly adapted thing that will be disposed of once someone gets around to fixing it.”
“I’m ready for a big storm,” Herrman says, putting down his beer and launching into an exaggerated vision of the future. “Everyone wakes up, and it’s just sand. And most people die, but a few survive, and they all walk in different directions. And I’m ready for this to happen every three months. That’s the cool cyberpunk outcome of all this. Everything remakes itself all the time, and then nothing is sustainable, and the idea that you could do any of these things we’re doing now as jobs will be some ridiculous anachronism.” The Awl, he says, laughing, is “the counterexample to entropy that proves the rule. Just wait.”
http://www.theawl.com/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Michael Wolff / MIT Technology Review:
Publishers should feel existentially threatened by Facebook Instant Articles ad revenue split, not be embracing it
Facebook Instant Articles Just Don’t Add Up for Publishers
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/539066/facebook-instant-articles-just-dont-add-up-for-publishers/
Publishers like the New York Times should be having an existential crisis over Facebook’s instant articles. Instead they’re embracing them.
Here are some key numbers for content licensors in digital media: Netflix will pay approximately $3 billion in licensing and production fees this year to the television and film industry; Hulu is paying $192 million to license South Park; Spotify pays out 70 percent of its gross revenues to the music labels that hold the underlying rights to Spotify’s catalogue.
Now here’s what Facebook is guaranteeing a variety of publishers, including the New York Times, Buzzfeed, and the Atlantic, who are posting articles in its new “instant articles” feature: $0. That’s pretty much the deal being offered in other similar digital distribution agreements by Apple News, Snapchat Discover, and an anticipated similar offering at Google. Nothing.
In effect, digital content is being divided between a lucrative high-end entertainment world, where licensors receive a negotiated fee for allowing the distribution of their property, and a low-end publishing world where content is expected to be “free,” supporting itself on often elusive advertising sales and ad-splits. In this particular deal, publishers can sell ads on their articles and keep all of the revenue, or have Facebook sell ads in exchange for 30 percent.
An important and grievous question is how this anomalous division in the media business came to pass. The more immediate question is about whether Facebook’s “instant articles” and other republishing initiatives are digging a deeper hole for publishers or helping them get out of the one they are already in.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ken Doctor / Nieman Lab:
Scrutinizing Digital First Media’s strategy ahead of Paton’s retirement June 30: difficult to discern larger plan beyond cutbacks to boost profits
Newsonomics: Do newspaper companies have a strategy beyond milking papers for profit?
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/07/newsonomics-do-newspaper-companies-have-a-strategy-beyond-milking-papers-for-profit/
At Digital First Media, America’s second-largest newspaper chain, it’s hard to discern a larger plan — beyond painful cutbacks to boost profits.
Here we have a cautionary tale: What happens when newspaper owners try to get out of the business, but can’t find a suitable buyer? Digital First is unlikely to be the last company in that situation.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Lucia Moses / Digiday:
Clicks, impressions, audience, and views still more important to ad buyers than attention-based metrics
http://digiday.com/publishers/ad-buyers-slow-embrace-attention-metrics/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Joe Pompeo / Capital New York:
Staff changes in the video department at The New York Times signal ambitions of higher digital ad revenue
Long road ahead for the Times’ video ambitions
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2015/07/8571735/long-road-ahead-emtimesem-video-ambitions
The New York Times has come a long way since it created a video department 10 years ago, but it still has a long way to go before video becomes a significant part of its business.
The changes come as the Times is eager to carve out a bigger piece of the U.S. advertising market for digital video, which is expected to hit $12.82 billion by 2018, up from $5.81 billion last year, according to eMarketer. Newspaper companies and web publishers alike are racing to make more money in this space, which is attractive because it is appealing to users and can be sold at much higher rates than digital display ads.
Video is considered a ripe growth area within the Times, which has seen its core print advertising revenues contract sharply over the past 10 years. Still, in 2014 it came in at under 10 percent of digital advertising revenues, or less than $18.2 million out of $444.7 million in total company revenues.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Frédéric Filloux / Monday Note:
News sites are getting slower: the New York Times takes 4 mins and 2MB of data download to view one story — News Sites Are Fatter and Slower Than Ever — An analysis of download times highlights how poorly designed news sites are. That’s more evidence of poor implementation of ads… and a strong case for ad blockers.
News Sites Are Fatter and Slower Than Ever
http://www.mondaynote.com/2015/07/13/news-sites-are-fatter-and-slower-than-ever/
An analysis of download times highlights how poorly designed news sites are. That’s more evidence of poor implementation of ads… and a strong case for ad blockers.
Websites designers live in a bubble, they’re increasingly disconnected from users. Their work requirements include design (fonts, layouts elements), advertising (multiple ad serving and analytics), data collection (even though most sites collects way more data that they are able to process), a/b testings, and other marketing voodoo.
Then, when a third party vendor shows up with the tool-everyone-else-uses, the pitch stresses simplicity: ‘Just insert a couple of lines of code’, or ‘A super-light javascript’. Most often, corporate sales and marketing drones kick in: ‘We need this tool’, or ‘Media-buying agencies demand it’. The pressure can even come from the newsroom struggling to improve its SEO scores, asking for new gadgets “To better pilot editorial production”, or “To rank higher in Google News”.
Quite often, these are contraptions are used to conceal professional shortcomings that range from an inability to devise good ads formats that won’t be rejected by users (and better, clicked on), to a failure to provide good journalism that will naturally finds its way to users without needing titillating stimuli.
In the process, publishers end up sacrificing a precious commodity: SPEED.
Today, a news site web page of a consists of a pile of scripts, of requests to multiple hosts in which relevant content only makes up an insignificant proportion of the freight
Consider the following observations: When I click on a New York Times article page, it takes about 4 minutes to download 2 megabytes of data through… 192 requests, some to Times’ hosts, most to a flurry of others servers hosting scores of scripts. Granted: the most useful part — 1700 words / 10,300 characters article + pictures — will load in less that five seconds.
But when I go to Wikipedia, a 1900 words story will load in 983 milliseconds, requiring only 168 kilobytes of data through 28 requests.
To put it another way: a Wikipedia web page carrying the same volume of text will be:
— twelve times lighter in kilobytes
— five times faster to load relevant items
— about 250 times faster to fully load all elements contained in the page because it will send 7 times fewer requests.
And the New York Times is definitely not the worse in its league.
Two major industry trends should force us to reconsider the way we build our digital properties. The first one is the rise of ad blockers that pride themselves at providing faster navigation and at putting less strain on computers. Users made publishers pay the hard price for giving up browsing comfort and speed: in some markets, more than 50% of visitors use ad-blocking extensions.
The second trend is the rise of mobile surfing that account for half of pageviews in mature markets. And, in emerging countries, users leapfrog desktops and access the web en masse through mobile.
Overall, depending on the advertising load of the site’s home page, an ad blocker cuts data transfers by half to three quarters,.
No surprise, the page takes six times more times on a regular 2G network that on 4G. Based on these observations, most mobile news sites would need to be redesigned to deal with the harsh realities of many cellular networks in Africa or Asia.
there is room for serious improvement.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dean Takahashi / VentureBeat:20 minutes ago
How 98-year-old Forbes Media generates 70% of its revenues from digital — Five years ago, Forbes Media’s total traffic amounted to 12 million visitors a month. Now it gets close to 36 million visitors, with 18 million on mobile.
How 98-year-old Forbes Media generates 70% of its revenues from digital
http://venturebeat.com/2015/07/13/how-98-year-old-forbes-media-generates-70-of-its-revenues-from-digital/
Five years ago, Forbes Media’s total traffic amounted to 12 million visitors a month. Now it gets close to 36 million visitors, with 18 million on mobile.
“We came out of the global recession wondering how to survive,” Howard said. “One thing that was clear is that the economics of journalism were broken.”
Reporters, copy editors, and fact checkers were expensive, and their work was time-intensive. But Forbes bought a startup, True/Slant, which allowed it to recruit an army of freelance contributors. The freelancers used the platform to easily create their own WordPress-based accounts and publish their own stories, getting paid small amounts based on metrics that Forbes wanted to reinforce. Rather than paying for page views from readers who never returned to the site, Forbes incentivized writers to get the same reader back five times or ten times. The writers could reach out on social platforms and help spread the word.
Now, Forbes has 1,500 freelance contributors, and they publish 300 to 400 original stories a day. That has created tremendous search-engine-optimization (SEO) results for the Forbes content, which gives it great standing in Google search results. In fact, 60 percent of the traffic from the stories comes from search. And the platform works well on mobile, and is generating loyal readers because the freelancers are incentivized to produce quality articles, rather than “click bait.”
The strategy was focused on Google, Howard said.
“In terms of traffic acquisition, it turned out that way,” he explained. “Many publishers try to milk Facebook and others. For us, it is not the primary source of traffic. We recognize the search algorithms change all of the time, but this is on brand for us.”
Now, about 70 percent of Forbes’ revenue comes from digital sources, and 10 percent of the digital revenue comes from mobile. While mobile is 50 percent of overall traffic, the mobile revenue is only about 10 percent.
Mobile revenue is only about 20 percent of the monetizable inventory. Web-based ads on the desktop allow for deeper engagement, and Forbes can also put more ads per page on a desktop page. Still, the company isn’t panicking about this situation. It believes that it is making progress in closing the gap between mobile traffic and mobile revenue. Howard said the company is working with mobile monetization companies to try to accomplish this.
Forbes has no pay wall, and most readers never log in or register. But they come back.
“It’s very much on point for us and it lets us leverage a new type of platform,” Howard said.
That’s not bad for a 98-year-old company.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Joseph Lichterman / Nieman Lab:
New Pew data: More Americans are getting news on Facebook and Twitter — Facebook and Twitter users across all demographics are increasingly using the social networks as news sources, though they are seeking out different types of news content on each platform, according to a study out Tuesday
New Pew data: More Americans are getting news on Facebook and Twitter
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/07/new-pew-data-more-americans-are-getting-news-on-facebook-and-twitter/
A new study from the Pew Research Center and Knight Foundation finds that more Americans of all ages, races, genders, education levels, and incomes are using Twitter and Facebook to consume news.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Washington Post:
Why the Islamic State leaves tech companies torn between free speech and security — The Islamic State and its supporters use social media to post propaganda and recruit followers. The Washington Post takes a closer look at how several groups in the United States monitor this activity.
Why the Islamic State leaves tech companies torn between free speech and security
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/islamic-states-embrace-of-social-media-puts-tech-companies-in-a-bind/2015/07/15/0e5624c4-169c-11e5-89f3-61410da94eb1_story.html
“We also have to acknowledge that ISIL has been particularly effective at reaching out to and recruiting vulnerable people around the world, including here in the United States ,” President Obama said July 6 at the Pentagon. “So the United States will continue to do our part, by working with partners to counter ISIL’s hateful propaganda, especially online.”
The social-media savvy of the militant group is raising difficult questions for many U.S. firms: how to preserve global platforms that offer forums for expression while preventing groups such as the Islamic State from exploiting those free-speech principles to advance their terrorist campaign.
“ISIS has been confronting us with these really inhumane and atrocious images, and there are some people who believe if you type ‘jihad’ or ‘ISIS’ on YouTube, you should get no results,” Victoria Grand, Google’s director of policy strategy, told The Washington Post in a recent interview. “We don’t believe that should be the case. Actually, a lot of the results you see on YouTube are educational about the origins of the group, educating people about the dangers and violence. But the goal here is how do you strike a balance between enabling people to discuss and access information about ISIS, but also not become the distribution channel for their propaganda?”
Some lawmakers and government officials say the companies are not going far enough.
“They are being exploited by terrorists,” Assistant Attorney General for National Security John P. Carlin said in a recent interview.
“It’s not a problem just here in the United States. I think they’re hearing it from governments and customers from throughout the world.”
A field analysis in May by the Department of Homeland Security warns that the Islamic State’s use of social media is broadening the terrorist group’s reach.
“ISIL leverages social media to propagate its message and benefits from thousands of organized supporters globally online, primarily on Twitter, who seek to legitimize its actions while burnishing an image of strength and power,” according to the analysis. “The influence is underscored by the large number of reports stemming from social media postings.”
In Europe, some governments are requiring social-media companies to block or remove terror-related posts.
In the United States, government regulation of speech, regardless of how offensive or hateful, is generally held to be unconstitutional under the First Amendment. The social-media companies — each with its own culture, mission and philosophy — have been governing how and when to block or remove terror-related content.
The revelations of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden about U.S. government surveillance have also made the tech companies wary of cooperating with Washington.
Facebook has been the most aggressive of the large social-media companies when it comes to taking down terror-related content. The company has adopted a zero tolerance policy and, unlike other social-media companies, proactively removes posts related to terrorist organizations.
Of all the large social-media companies, Twitter has been the most outspoken about protecting freedom of speech on its platform. Still, the company recently updated its abuse policy, stating that users may not threaten or promote terrorism.
Another challenge for the companies: It is often difficult to distinguish between communiques from terrorist groups and posts by news organizations and legitimate users. Internet freedom advocates also note that much of what groups such as the Islamic State are posting can be seen as part of the historical record — even though many of the photographs and videos are horrific.
“You want to live in a world where people have access to news — in other words, documentary evidence of what is actually happening,”
‘Pure evil’
Before the rise of social media, many of the three dozen video and audio messages Osama bin Laden issued before his death were recorded in remote locations, smuggled out by couriers, and aired on what was then a largely unknown television station based in Qatar called Al Jazeera. Weeks could pass between the time when bin Laden spoke and when he was heard.
Al-Qaeda operatives communicated through password-protected forums and message boards on the Internet.
“The wide-scale spread of jihadist ideology, especially on the Internet, and the tremendous number of young people who frequent the Jihadist Web sites [are] a major achievement for jihad,”
“Twitter is providing a communication device, a loudspeaker for ISIS,” said Mark Wallace, a former U.S. ambassador who now runs the Counter Extremism Project, a nonprofit group that tracks terrorists and attempts to disrupt their online activities. “If you are promoting violence and a call to violence, you are providing material support. Twitter should be part of the solution. If not, they are part of the problem.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Zach Schonfeld / Newsweek:
How to Rage-Quit Your Prestigious Media Job on Principle
http://www.newsweek.com/how-rage-quit-your-prestigious-media-job-out-principle-355815
Zach Schonfeld / Newsweek:
How to Rage-Quit Your Prestigious Media Job on Principle — There’s a new trend in media, and it’s publicly resigning prestigious editing gigs on principle. — You’ve fantasized about it. We all have. The best reason to take a top media job at this point is so you can one day make a big show of quitting it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ezra Klein / Vox:
In 3 years, media will become wire services that operate across many platforms, gaining audience, but losing ability to create custom designs
Is the media becoming a wire service?
http://www.vox.com/2015/7/22/9013911/is-the-media-becoming-a-wire-service
I’m going to make some predictions about the future of the media in this piece, and they come with the disclaimer that predictions always come with: They could be entirely wrong. The media is moving fast, and what looks like an unstoppable trend today might seem like a hilarious detour a year from now. (Remember, for instance, when the iPad launched, and apps were going to save journalism? Lol.)
But my guess is that within three years, it will be normal for news organizations of even modest scale to be publishing to some combination of their own websites, a separate mobile app, Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News, Snapchat, RSS, Facebook Video, Twitter Video, YouTube, Flipboard, and at least one or two major players yet to be named. The biggest publishers will be publishing to all of these simultaneously.
This sounds stranger than it will feel: Publishing to these other platforms will be automated. Reporters will write their articles, and their content management system will smoothly hand them to Facebook, Snapchat, or Apple News. There’s nothing new here, really — this is already how RSS feeds work.
But there will be more of them, and they will matter much more. The RSS audience is small. The off-platform audience will be huge. The publishers of tomorrow will become like the wire services of today, pushing their content across a large number of platforms they don’t control and didn’t design.
The upside of being a wire service is the potential audience: It is vast, and it is diverse. The possible downside is innovation. Wire services have to provide a product all of their subscribers can use — no matter how they publish or design their paper. So wire copy needs to be simple. Stories the Associated Press sends to its customers can’t be as innovative in their form as stories the New York Times or the Washington Post lovingly design for their front pages.
There’s a huge benefit to all this, and it’s the obvious one: audience! And not just the old audience fractured across more sites. These platforms offer new audiences
The downside of becoming a wire service
My biggest frustration with the new media — including, on some days, Vox — is how much we’re like the old media. Most outlets — even the digitally native ones — still publish pieces that could, with few exceptions, be printed out, stapled together, and dropped on someone’s doorstep. So long as that’s happening, it’s a pretty safe bet we’re not fully realizing the potential of this new technology.
But there is so much potential! Length no longer matters — it’s as cheap to publish 100,000 words as 100. Digital text can be continually updated, so it’s no longer necessary to write a new article every time there’s a small change to a story. Digital stories can be interactive — readers can enter their information, and the story can change to reflect their circumstances. It’s really exciting stuff, and we are just beginning to figure out how to take advantage of it.
There are lots of these little quirks hidden in the distribution system, and they quietly, but surely, enforce a status quo bias across the industry. That isn’t because Facebook, Google, or anyone else is trying to staunch innovation — it’s just because these services can’t possibly be built to support every new idea.
So fast-forward three years. Imagine it’s not just distribution. Now every article has to work in the publishing systems built by Facebook, Apple, Snapchat, Flipboard, mobile app developers, and so on. Even if these systems are great — and, in many cases, they will be — they’re not all going to be the same. A lowest common denominator effect will set in quickly: The pieces with the highest possible audience will be the pieces that work across the most platforms. So it won’t make much sense to pump endless energy into innovative, custom articles. Why spend so much of your time on a piece or a format that will only be available to a fraction of your audience?
Tomi Engdahl says:
One of the best things a news startup can do for its financial health: Hire a professional ad person
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/07/one-of-the-best-things-a-news-startup-can-do-for-its-financial-health-hire-a-professional-ad-person/
A new report from the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, out Thursday, interviewed 22 digital publishers, most of which launched in the last 10 years, to determine best practices for “building ad revenue at local news and niche topic media organizations.”
Advertising is “the primary or only source of revenue for most” of the publishers surveyed. According to the report:
We found little evidence that organizations are responding to recommendations by experts that they develop multiple revenue streams, including sources other than advertising. On average, ad sales accounted for nearly 80 percent of total 2014 revenue. Six sites reported that 100 percent of their revenue came from advertising; six others said it accounted for 90 percent or more of their revenue.
It’s easy to launch a news startup, but hard to sustain it. For most of the companies surveyed, the founders were “journalists with no experience in sales or running a business.” Little guys suffer in other ways too: They “may be less equipped than their larger, better financed counterparts to tap into surging revenue from mobile advertising,” and it’s harder for them to “develop a range of ad products or to diversify their revenue streams with non-advertising sources such as events, social media or web marketing services, or membership.”
Some of the findings and ideas from the report:
— These companies need “professional advertising operations,” and well-paid “experienced sales professionals.” The payment part is hard: “Smaller sites have more difficulty paying a salary; a high commission is an alternative.”
— Paying these people is worth it. The report offers a case study of Long Island’s Riverhead Local, whose founders “debated whether to add a reporter or a sales assistant. They hired a sales assistant, and more than doubled revenue.”
— Local news sites rely primarily on advertising from local businesses; niche sites can target other advertisers. One way they can do that is by identifying “potential advertisers from companies that send news for editorial consideration and by checking competitive sites for leads,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nikkei to buy FT Group for £844m from Pearson
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0%2Fd7e95338-3127-11e5-8873-775ba7c2ea3d.html#axzz3ggprL5bx
Nikkei, Japan’s largest media company, is to buy the FT Group from Pearson
The deal marks the end of an era, bringing the curtain down on Pearson’s 58-year ownership of the Financial Times
The deal comes at a time of dramatic change in the global media industry. Traditional newspapers are seeing print circulation and advertising revenues decline while digital upstarts and big technology companies like Google are increasingly moving into the business of generating and delivering news.
The FT has an editorial team of 500 journalists in more than 50 locations around the world. It was first published as a four-page newspaper in 1888
Tomi Engdahl says:
Twitter is deleting stolen jokes on copyright grounds
http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/25/9039127/twitter-deletes-stolen-joke-dmca-takedown
Let’s face it: coming up with a grade-A tweet isn’t easy. That’s why some people just copy good tweets from other people and act like they came up with the 140-character witticism on their own. This has been going on since the beginning of Twitter.
It now appears Twitter is using its legal authority to crack down on these tweet-stealers. A number of tweets have been deleted on copyright grounds for apparently stealing a bad joke.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Shan Wang / Nieman Lab:
A look at the Washington Post’s Knowledge Map, which provides context within articles, and how it could work in the future — How The Washington Post built — and will be building on — its “Knowledge Map” feature — Say you’re reading a long story — one that picks up on a lot …
How The Washington Post built — and will be building on — its “Knowledge Map” feature
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/07/how-the-washington-post-built-and-will-be-building-on-its-knowledge-map-feature/
The Post is looking to create a database of “supplements” — categorized pieces of text and graphics that help give context around complicated news topics — and add it as a contextual layer across lots of different Post stories.
Say you’re reading a long story — one that picks up on a lot of other fast-moving threads in the news, some of which you haven’t been following. It makes repeated mention of people whose significance you’ve forgotten. You could open up another tab, throw their names into Google, and scan through the results. But who wants to find other articles just to help you understand the one you’re already reading?
The Washington Post’s Knowledge Map aims to diminish that frustration by embedding context and background directly in a story.
Highlighted links and buttons within the story, allowing readers to click on and then read brief overviews — called “supplements” — on the right hand side of the same page, without having to leave the page
Solving the problem of context — the fact that different readers bring different amount of knowledge to a story — has been one of the primary quests of the past half decade. Vox’s Card Stacks, Circa’s atomized stories, “9 questions about Syria you were too embarrassed to ask” — all are attempts to build background knowledge into daily news production. And in-story footnotes are hardly new; those with slightly longer memories may recall Apture, which aimed to automate a similar result.
Knowledge Map debuted on a story from the Post’s “Confronting the Caliphate” series. In its announcement, the Post had hinted that down the line, it could automatically mine “big data” to “surface highly personalized and contextual data for both journalistic and native content.”
Knowledge Map sprouted a few months ago out of a design sprint (based on a five-day brainstorming method outlined by Google Ventures) that included the Post’s New York-based design and development team WPNYC and members of the data science team in the D.C. office, as well as engineers, designers, and other product people. After narrowing down a list of other promising projects, the team presented to the Post newsroom and to its engineering team an idea for providing readers with better summaries and context for the most complicated, long-evolving stories.
That idea of having context built into a story “really resonated” with colleagues, Sampsel said, so her team quickly created a proof-of-concept using an existing Post story, recruiting their first round of testers for the prototype via Craigslist.
The key part of this sort of added context is that it’s reusable; Vox doesn’t have to rebuild its fracking card stack from scratch for every fracking story. When more and more stories in the future get the Knowledge Map treatment, Han says, “we’ll have a database of all these supplements, who has clicked on them, and how many times. So when a reporter has written the story, an engine will analyze the sentence and make a recommendation to say, ‘these are the supplements available,’ and let the reporter and editor decide whether or not to use them.”
Reporters, he envisions, will see the suggested supplement and use it as is, or tweak the background information described to better fit their own article, adding their edited version into the database. He hopes eventually the supplement database will be integrated with the Post’s content management system.
Tomi Engdahl says:
“Modern” homepage design increases pageviews and reader comprehension, study finds
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/07/modern-homepage-design-increases-pageviews-and-reader-comprehension-study-finds/
A new report from the Engaging News Project shows that users prefer modular, image-heavy homepage designs.
News sites with modular, image-heavy designs receive more pageviews and have stronger user engagement than sites with more staid, newspaper-inspired designs, according to a report released Tuesday by the Engaging News Project.
Modern, modular homepages received at least 90 percent more unique pageviews than traditional sites did, the study found.
Users viewing the modular homepage recalled details of the articles at least 50 percent more often than did those who viewed the classic homepage, according to the report.
“The way in which you design your homepage can have a big effect,” said Talia Stroud, the director of the Engaging News Project and a professor at the University of Texas.
User reaction to the sites was similar across the surveyed demographics of age, education level, political knowledge, and familiarity with the design of the sites. In two out of the three studies, users found that the modern-looking site was more “enjoyable, informative, credible, trustworthy, interesting, clear, and easy to navigate.”
“There are engaging pictures, and it’s a little bit more of an engaging layout,” Stroud said to explain why the contemporary site was better trafficked. “People aren’t as familiar with it, they find it interesting, they want to see how it works.”
Users also retained more information from stories presented on the contemporary homepage. T
“It had the technical features of the contemporary site, but the look of the classic site to see if it was the technical features or the look and the layout [that made a difference],” Stroud said. “The result of that study showed it’s the look and the layout. It’s not the technical features.”
Despite the report’s findings, Stroud was quick to point out that the results were from mock news sites in a lab setting, not actual sites.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Lukas I. Alpert / Wall Street Journal:
NYT Now, recently made free, only had 20,000 paying subscribers at $8/month, far short of the internal 200,000 subscriber target — For New York Times, a Gamble on Giveaways — Trial and error on free digital platforms aims to win paying subscribers down the road
For New York Times, a Gamble on Giveaways
Trial and error on free digital platforms aims to win paying subscribers down the road
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/for-new-york-times-a-gamble-on-giveaways-1438556347-lMyQjAxMTA1NjA1MzEwNzM0Wj
When New York Times Co. launched its NYT Now mobile app last year, hopes were high internally that it would appeal to younger readers and ease them into the habit of paying for quality news.
But after a few months, it was clear that the subscription service, a cheaper and slimmed-down version of the main Times app, wasn’t meeting expectations. In the end, only about 20,000 people agreed to pay $8 a month for it, well short of the newspaper’s target of 200,000, said two people familiar with the matter. In May, 13 months after its launch, the Times made NYT Now free.
The change signaled a shift in digital strategy at the Times toward courting young readers with free content rather than trying to turn them into subscribers right away. That approach has the Times experimenting, to varying degrees, with making its content available across a multitude of platforms, from Facebook Inc. ’s Instant Articles program to Apple Inc. ’s coming News app to messaging platform WhatsApp and even on Starbucks Corp.’s mobile app.
“We need to be wherever readers are, regardless of the platform,” said Kinsey Wilson, the Times’ editor for innovation and strategy, echoing sentiments often heard from executives at digital startups like BuzzFeed and Vox Media Inc. “We consider this to be a series of experiments to figure out what our audience wants and how best to make them paying customers.”
The Times’ digital approach has been more aggressive than many other large traditional publishers, like the Washington Post and Gannett Co.’s USA Today, which have so far stayed on the sidelines of Facebook’s and Apple’s news initiatives. The Wall Street Journal, owned by News Corp, said it has engaged in talks with Facebook and Apple but has yet to sign on to either program.
The new way of thinking has taken hold in the 16 months since the Times published an in-house study, the Innovation Report, detailing where the paper was failing to adjust to the fast-changing media landscape. Findings included the declining value of the home page, the publication’s need to experiment more, a lack of digital talent, and a need for more collaboration between the newsroom and business side.
The Times is trying to address a problem faced by all traditional publishers, including The Wall Street Journal: Younger readers now get their news from a wider variety of nontraditional sources—and it is usually free. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that six out of 10 people between the ages of 18 and 34 said they got some political news on Facebook, compared with just 17% from the Times.
“We need to build habits to get people to come back to us every day,”
In recent years, the Times, like other newspapers, has come to rely more heavily on circulation and subscription revenue to offset steady declines in print ad revenue. The Times’ biggest move was erecting an online paywall in 2011 that generated $169 million last year. Thanks to online subscriptions and print edition rate increases, circulation overtook advertising as the biggest driver of revenue in 2012.
While print and digital circulation sales rose 22% from 2010 to 2014, ad revenue fell 15% to $662.3 million. Digital ad sales, while growing, totaled a modest $182 million in 2014 and haven’t come close to offsetting the decline in print advertising.
The shift away from print has meant falling ad revenue industrywide. Ad revenue at the Journal fell 11% in the quarter ended March 31, although its emphasis is increasingly on growing digital subscriptions.
“The problem the Times has is that they have no more revenue streams to mine,” said one former New York Times executive. “The real risk is that if you start making your content free elsewhere, it may end up giving no incentive to new readers to start paying, and that could cause a dangerous spiral as time goes on.”
For example, Facebook’s Instant Articles allows publishers to publish free content directly on the social-media site rather than have it link back to the publication’s site, something Facebook says will greatly speed load times on mobile. Apple’s news app, meanwhile, will bundle free content from several outlets into a customizable stream.
“This is very different from going only after eyeballs and clicks. You have to deliver value and you have to help people navigate in a world where they are overwhelmed with information,” Mr. Wilson said. “With that, we believe the economics will follow.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Inside the failure of Google+, a very expensive attempt to unseat Facebook
http://mashable.com/2015/08/02/google-plus-history/
“Vic was just this constant bug in Larry’s ear: ‘Facebook is going to kill us. Facebook is going to kill us,’” says a former Google executive.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hank Green / Medium:
YouTube vlogger Hank Green accuses Facebook of distorting video viewing figures, hosting and encouraging stolen content
— Theft, Lies, and Facebook Video — Facebook says it’s now streaming more video than YouTube. To be able to make that claim, all they had to do was cheat, lie, and steal.
Theft, Lies, and Facebook Video
https://medium.com/@hankgreen/theft-lies-and-facebook-video-656b0ffed369
Facebook says it’s now streaming more video than YouTube. To be able to make that claim, all they had to do was cheat, lie, and steal.
Facebook is an interesting, emerging platform for us. Reaching an audience is valuable, even if there’s no way to turn that value into money. So I’m excited about the potential future of Facebook as a video platform.
But there are a few things that make me wary, not of their ability to grow my business, but of whether they give a shit about creators, which is actually pretty important to me. Let’s go through them one by one.
They Cheat
This is the least important, but it does bug me.
If I embed a YouTube video or Vine on Facebook, only a tiny fraction of my audience will actually see it. But if I post the same video natively on Facebook, suddenly it’s in everyone’s feed everywhere! This data is pretty easy to come by for us, and Facebook is happy to admit the strategy. A SciShow YouTube video embedded on Facebook will reach between 20,000 and 50,000 people and be viewed by hundreds of people. The same video uploaded natively will get a reach of between 60,000 and 150,000 and be “viewed” by tens of thousands (more on what those “views” actually mean later).
Facebook is pushing Facebook video.
What is a view? It’s when someone watches the video. And Facebook counts views significantly before people could be said to be watching the video.
Facebook counts the “view” at the three second mark (whether or not the viewer has even turned on the sound) in the midst of a precipitous decline in retention. At that moment, 90% of people scrolling the page are still ‘watching’ this silent animated GIF. But by 30 seconds, when viewership actually could be claimed, only 20% are watching. 90% of people are being counted, but only 20% of people are actually “viewing” the video.
YouTube, on the other hand, counts views in a logical way…the view is counted at the point at which people seem to actually be engaging with the video and not just immediately clicking away. This is usually around 30 seconds, but of course is different for videos of different lengths.
This might seem a little like this is a victimless crime, but it fundamentally devalues the #1 metric of online video.
When Facebook says it has roughly the same number of views as YouTube, what they really mean is that they have roughly 1/5th of YouTube’s views, since they’re intentionally and blatantly over-counting to the detriment of everyone except them.
They Steal
Welcome to the bit that really pisses me off
According to a recent report from Ogilvy and Tubular Labs, of the 1000 most popular Facebook videos of Q1 2015, 725 were stolen re-uploads. Just these 725 “freebooted” videos were responsible for around 17 BILLION views last quarter. This is not insignificant, it’s the vast majority of Facebook’s high volume traffic. And no wonder, when embedding a YouTube video on your company’s Facebook page is a sure way to see it die a sudden death, we shouldn’t be surprised when they rip it off YouTube and upload it natively. Facebook’s algorithms encourage this theft.
What is Facebook doing about it?
They’ll take the video down a couple days after you let them know. Y’know, once it’s received 99.9% of the views it will ever receive.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Gurman Bhatia / Poynter:
How a 17-year-old Daily Dot reporter, William Turton, broke the New York Magazine cyber attack story — Meet the 17-year-old who breaks cybersecurity news — William Turton was transcribing interviews at The Daily Dot office when he got the information that Planned Parenthood’s website had been hacked.
Meet the 17-year-old who breaks cybersecurity news
http://www.poynter.org/news/mediawire/362325/meet-the-17-year-old-who-breaks-cybersecurity-news/
William Turton was transcribing interviews at The Daily Dot office when he got information that Planned Parenthood’s website had been hacked. It was 8:22 p.m. on a Sunday evening. He started reporting. Around six hours later, he got another tip that New York Magazine’s website was facing a cyber attack. He jumped on that as well. Sitting in an empty workspace, Turton had kept the lights off so that he could manage his headache. He went on to report on both the stories into the night and published them at 8 a.m. that morning. He was the first one to get the news out. Turton covers politics and hacking for The Daily Dot. He is also a 17-year-old high school student.
IMG_20150731_160457
Based in a suburb in Virginia, Turton got into journalism at the age of 14 when he started writing about gaming.
“I had always wanted to write about politics and hacking. But the only way anyone would really take me seriously, I figured, is if I wrote about video games,” said Turton.
How do you cover hacking? It’s just like any other beat, Turton said, and a lot of it means building relationships with hackers and speaking to them regularly. According to Andrew Couts, one of his editors, that is Turton’s strength.
“He maintains relationships with sources constantly to find out what they are doing. I think that a lot of reporters can take a lesson from him just in terms of cultivating sources,” said Couts.
Turton also understands the technicalities behind the methods of attacks. Since he was always into computers, that came to him naturally. Many of his sources use advanced forms of communication and encryption to hide their real identity, so being accessible with those technologies also helps.
What is tricky about covering a beat such as cybersecurity is the verification process.
“William’s sources are definitely people who you want to be skeptical of no matter now cooperative they are,” said Couts. “In some cases, be more skeptical when they are cooperative.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Justin Ellis / Nieman Lab:NEW!
How AJ+ embraces Facebook, autoplay, and comments to make its videos stand out — It’s been a year since AJ+, Al Jazeera’s bet on a mobile-centric future, debuted. AJ+ eschews a news website in favor of an app and focuses heavily on video, and its strategy for audience growth is dependent on social media.
How AJ+ embraces Facebook, autoplay, and comments to make its videos stand out
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/08/how-aj-embraces-facebook-autoplay-and-comments-to-make-its-videos-stand-out/
“We think a lot about whether a video works with the sound off. Do we have to subtitle it to keep the audience retention high? Do we need to use big fonts?”
Our original videos used to have a three-second AJ+ branding bumper. We still have that on YouTube because YouTube is a completely different ecosystem to design for, [but we took it off Facebook videos] and that buys us three seconds. We saw a bump when we [took that off.] And then we said, ‘OK, now we have a new three to five seconds to grab their attention, let’s really think about that moment.’
Now, when you walk around the newsroom, you hear people asking, how are the first five seconds, do you think this is going to work on Facebook? That took time; it wasn’t just that all of a sudden, everyone got it. It’s part of the evolution of AJ+.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The agency view on Vox Media: ‘The modern-day Condé Nast’
http://digiday.com/publishers/agency-view-vox-media-modern-day-conde-nast/
Vox Media is poised to get another investment from NBC Universal, a deal that would value the publisher at $850 million, according to Recode. That lofty valuation is clearly a future projection: Vox Media brought in some $50 million in 2014, according to a Washington Post calculation. That’s half what that other VC-backed digital publisher, BuzzFeed, claimed to have pulled in that year.
But if you’re looking for doubters, don’t look among the ad-buying community, which sees in Vox truly premium content, reach with millennials and a state-of-the-art publishing platform. “The modern-day Condé Nast,” said Gian LaVecchia, managing partner, digital content strategy at MEC.
That’s particularly impressive considering how early Vox is in building a sales infrastructure. For all the talk of automation, sales remains a long slog, powered by deep relationships and a fleet of sales people. Vox, which has 450 employees, counts just 75 sales people among them. (That’s in line with two other digital publishers, The Huffington Post and Business Insider, which have about 75 and 63 salespeople, respectively.)
“They’re still gaining traction for some of their brands and continue to grow but have built a modern-day publishing business with unique voices, perspective and modes of distribution which set them apart from many other legacy competitors,” said Adam Shlachter, chief investment officer at Digitas LBi.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mark Scott / New York Times:
PageFair study claims ad-blocking, regularly used by 200M people worldwide, will lead to $22B of lost ad revenue this year
Study of Ad-Blocking Software Suggests Wide Use
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/10/study-of-ad-blocking-software-suggests-wide-use/?_r=0
Guillermo Beltrà spends a lot of time surfing the web.
Yet like many avid Internet users, Mr. Beltrà hates the annoying pop-up advertisements that litter many websites. “It’s just very cumbersome,” he said.
So like a growing number of people, Mr. Beltrà, a Spaniard who works for a consumer protection organization in Brussels, decided to block them by downloading software for his desktop browser that removed any online advertising from his daily Internet activity.
While he acknowledged that advertising was often the primary source of income for many websites, Mr. Beltrà said he remained wary of how much data companies were collecting on his online activities.
“If I don’t know what data is being collected on me, I’d rather block it,” he added.
Mr. Beltrà is just one of an increasing number of Internet users who are taking sophisticated measures to sidestep efforts by broadcasters, publishers and advertisers to sell their wares online.
Ad-blocking will lead to almost $22 billion of lost advertising revenue this year, according to the report, put together by Adobe and PageFair, a Dublin-based start-up that helps companies and advertisers recoup some of this lost revenue. That represents a 41 percent rise compared to the previous 12 months, and the levels of ad-blocking activity now top more than a third of all Internet users in some countries, particularly in Europe, the report said.
Gaming, social network and other tech-related websites were most affected by ad-blocking software, the report added.
The numbers come as tech companies, publishers and advertisers grow anxious that their efforts to reach users through increasingly sophisticated online advertisements are having little effect. While companies spend billions of dollars each year on these Internet marketing efforts, analysts say people often overlook them while looking at online content — and many are now turning to ad-blocking software to remove online ads once and for all.
“What’s causing grave concern for broadcasters and advertisers is video advertising, which is some of their most valuable content, is starting to be blocked,” said Campbell Foster, director of product marketing at Adobe. “That’s a really scary prospect.”
Almost 200 million people worldwide now regularly use ad-blocking software, the report said. About 45 million of them are in the United States
Companies like Eyeo, a tech company based in Cologne, Germany, that is behind the popular Adblock Plus browser plug-in, have garnered global followings. The start-up says it now has roughly 60 million active users worldwide, but has courted controversy by allowing some advertisers to bypass the blocking software and regain access to users — for a fee.
Currently, only a small fraction of ad-blocking comes from mobile devices, according to the Adobe/PageFair report. But analysts say developers are working on plug-ins for smartphone Web browsers
The 2015 Ad Blocking Report
http://blog.pagefair.com/2015/ad-blocking-report/
We find that not only has ad blocking continued its fast growth on desktop, but it has also leaped onto mobile in Asia, and will soon go mobile in the West with the upcoming launch of content blocking on iOS.
Ad blocking estimated to cost publishers nearly $22 billion during 2015.
There are now 198 million active adblock users around the world.
Ad blocking grew by 41% globally in the last 12 months.
US ad blocking grew by 48% to reach 45 million active users in 12 months up to June 2015.
UK ad blocking grew by 82% to reach 12 million active users in 12 months up to June 2015.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cuban internet delivered weekly by hand
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33816655
Cuba is a land in many ways cut off from the rest of the world. For one thing, general public use of the internet is restricted and most people don’t have access to a connection.
But many have found a surprising way to get their favourite web content in spite of restrictions.
Much of the largely offline nation simply receives internet “deliveries” – by hand.
Fifty-six years of communist rule and the US trade embargo have inspired some novel solutions to everyday frustrations and “El Paquete Semanal”, the Weekly Package, is just one.
The Paquete is an alternative to the web in a country where, according to some estimates, fewer than 5% of homes are connected.
It consists of a terabyte of data bringing together the latest music, Hollywood movies, TV series, mobile phone apps, magazines and even a classifieds section similar to Gumtree or Craigslist.
Every week, unidentified curators compile a selection of content and deliver it via a complex network of hundreds of distributors who, much like old-fashioned newspaper delivery boys, bring the Paquete to the door of its subscribers.
It’s all carried out outside any legal framework in Cuba – and with seemingly little regard for international copyright law.
The Paquete has satiated the desires of young people in particular
“The Paquete Semanal is the accessible form to get videos, music, soap-operas, everything. You can get whatever you want in El Paquete,”
“Every Monday a young man comes here to my house with a portable hard drive and copies the Paquete to my computer,” Ana says as she explains how users choose what bits of the Paquete to keep.
“I can copy whatever I want. If I don’t want to copy music this week I don’t have to. I only copy the things and shows that I want to use this week.”
She adds that she pays between one and two US dollars for the Paquete each week, depending on how much she chooses to copy to her computer.
The Paquete is so popular in Cuba that it has paved the way for the creation and expansion of new media ventures that exist solely for use by its subscribers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Many Scientists Does It Take to Write a Paper? Apparently, Thousands
Scientific journals see a spike in number of contributors; 24 pages of alphabetized co-authors
http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-many-scientists-does-it-take-to-write-a-paper-apparently-thousands-1439169200
A Frenchman named Georges Aad may have the most prominent name in particle physics.
In less than a decade, Dr. Aad, who lives in Marseilles, France, has appeared as the lead author on 458 scientific papers. Nobody knows just how many scientists it may take to screw in a light bulb, but it took 5,154 researchers to write one physics paper earlier this year—likely a record—and Dr. Aad led the list.
Almost every paper by “G. Aad et al.” involves so many researchers that they decided to always list themselves in alphabetical order. Their recent paper, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, features 24 pages of alphabetized co-authors led by Dr. Aad. There is no way to tell how important each contributor might be.
“Basically, this guy has won the academic lottery,”
In fact, there has been a notable spike since 2009 in the number of technical reports whose author counts exceeded 1,000 people, according to the Thomson Reuters Web of Science, which analyzed citation data. In the ever-expanding universe of credit where credit is apparently due, the practice has become so widespread that some scientists now joke that they measure their collaborators in bulk—by the “kilo-author.”
The exponential growth has a number of causes, one of which is that experiments have gotten more complicated. But scientists say that mass authorship makes it harder to tell who did what and who deserves the real credit for a breakthrough—or blame for misconduct.
More than vanity is at stake. Credit on a peer-reviewed research article weighs heavily in hiring, promotion and tenure decisions. “Authorship has become such a big issue because evaluations are performed based on the number of papers people have authored,” said Dr. Larivière.
Usually, the position of first author confers the most prestige, identifying the person who contributes the most to a research enterprise. The last author is usually the senior scientist who oversees the experiment.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Joe Pompeo / Politico Media:
With the rise of podcasts and digital listening, NPR is at a crossroads
Can NPR seize its moment?
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2015/08/8572429/can-npr-seize-its-moment
In December, about half a year after he became president and chief executive of NPR, Jarl Mohn was visiting the public radio institution’s New York bureau.
The bureau’s couple-dozen employees, including the staff of “Planet Money,” a multimedia team that produces a podcast, blog and radio segments about the global economy, gathered in a conference room for an informal, open-ended meeting with their new boss.
It was suddenly an exhilarating time for people who ply their trade in the type of content that you listen to.
Chace invoked a shift in the music industry in which more young people started becoming exposed to new music digitally than over the air. Mohn asked Chace if she knew how many young people had listened to radio the previous week. No, she didn’t, she said, but that wasn’t the point she was trying to make and—well, that’s pretty much when things went south.
NPR, as the gatekeeper of radio’s billion-dollar public trust and a syndicator of journalism to more than 1,000 local stations around the country, has arrived at the most confounding crossroads in its 45-year history, confronted with a boom in podcasts and on-demand digital listening that is both an opportunity and a force to be reckoned with.
“This has been a long time coming,” said Sarah Lumbard, who was NPR’s vice president of content strategy until last October. “Now it’s a matter of whether or not NPR will rise to the challenge and really take advantage of this new era.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mike Shields / Wall Street Journal:
YouTube Is a Viable TV Alternative For Advertisers, But Some Are Wary of Commitment — Last week was one to forget for the TV industry, which got hammered by mounting fears of cord-cutting and the realization that TV is losing some of its grip on marketers.
YouTube Is a Viable TV Alternative For Advertisers, But Some Are Wary of Commitment
http://blogs.wsj.com/cmo/2015/08/09/youtube-is-a-viable-tv-alternative-for-advertisers-but-some-are-wary-of-commitment/
Last week was one to forget for the TV industry, which got hammered by mounting fears of cord-cutting and the realization that TV is losing some of its grip on marketers.
So if TV advertising is currently the biggest loser, does that mean YouTube, the king of Web video, could be the clear winner?
Several advertisers and analysts say that YouTube has become a viable alternative to TV in the minds of top brands, whose ad budgets have typically been focused on TV.
That doesn’t mean that everyone is sold on the idea of Web video warranting a sales market centered on long-term ad commitments like the TV upfront.
Google GOOGL +3.98%, and 3o-plus other Web video outlets have hosted “NewFronts” sales events each spring for the past couple of years, just prior to the TV upfront sales season–as they all aspire to snatch away a portion of the $70 billion that is spent annually on TV advertising. (Web video advertising, while expected to grow at a 30% clip this year, is just a $7.7 billion market, says eMarketer).
With Google Preferred, YouTube has perhaps been the most aggressive in trying to create an urgent, TV-like ad market designed to sell a finite amount of ad space. Essentially, YouTube sets aside its most desirable video content, makes it available for marketers to sponsor, and if they don’t buy in quickly, they’ll get shut out–or at least, that’s the dynamic YouTube is looking to create.
Tomi Engdahl says:
StumbleUpon lays off dozens after failing to raise new round, source says
http://venturebeat.com/2015/08/10/stumbleupon-lays-off-dozens-after-failing-to-raise-new-round-source-says/
Content discovery company StumbleUpon was unable to secure additional venture capital funding and is now letting go of dozens of employees in a new round of layoffs, VentureBeat has learned.
The company had just under 100 employees and will only have around 30 by the end of this week, a source familiar with the matter told VentureBeat.
StumbleUpon claims that 120,000 brands and publishers, including HBO, Levi’s, and Nike, use its advertising system.
But Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, among others, have become popular avenues for advertising, especially as mobile advertising has taken hold. StumbleUpon offers mobile apps, but news discovery apps such as Flipboard have gained traction in the past few years.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Marco Arment / Marco.org:
The profusion of privacy-violating web trackers invalidates the already-shaky theory that ad-blocking violates an implied contract — The ethics of modern web ad-blocking — More than fifteen years ago, in response to decreasing ad rates and banner blindness, web advertisers and publishers adopted pop-up ads.
The ethics of modern web ad-blocking
http://www.marco.org/2015/08/11/ad-blocking-ethics
More than fifteen years ago, in response to decreasing ad rates and banner blindness, web advertisers and publishers adopted pop-up ads.
People hated pop-up ads. We tolerated in-page banners as an acceptable cost of browsing free websites, but pop-ups were over the line: they were too annoying and intrusive. Many website publishers claimed helplessness in serving them — the ads came from somewhere else that they had little control over, they said. They really needed the money from pop-ups to stay afloat, they said.
The future didn’t work out well for pop-ups. Pop-up-blocking software boomed, and within a few years, every modern web browser blocked almost all pop-ups by default.
A line had been crossed, and people fought back.
People often argue that running ad-blocking software is violating an implied contract between the reader and the publisher: the publisher offers the page content to the reader for free, in exchange for the reader seeing the publisher’s ads. And that’s a nice, simple theory, but it’s a blurry line in reality.
By that implied-contract theory, readers should not only permit their browsers to load the ads, but they should actually read each one, giving themselves a chance to develop an interest for the advertised product or service and maybe even click on it and make a purchase. That’s also a nice theory, but of course, it’s ridiculous to expect anyone to actually do that. Publishers are lucky if people even read the content with any real attention today, let alone the ads around it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Gnip Launches Full-Archive Search API To Provide Instant Access To Nine Years Worth Of Tweets
http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/11/gnip-launches-full-archive-search-api-to-provide-instant-access-to-nine-years-worth-of-tweets/
Social data company Gnip, acquired by Twitter last year, has become an indispensable tool for all types of companies. Data, especially social data, is necessary to make decisions on things like timing a product launch or putting together a new marketing campaign.
Until now, companies have been able to pull instant reports using up to 30 days’ worth of historical tweets. Today, through Gnip, Twitter is turning that instant access on for its treasure trove — the full archive. All nine years’ worth of tweets.
Tornes also told me that to do these types of historical data pulls in the past it used to take days, and today’s launch addresses that with instant access through the search API. Now that Twitter offers consumers the full archive through search, Tornes says that Gnip can leverage that full indexing and technology for its data partners.
This is going to be really helpful for political candidates who can go back to campaigns run both in 2012 and 2008 to gauge sentiment, learn some forgotten tricks or remind themselves of what not to do.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Peter Kafka / Re/code:
NBCU invests $200M in Vox Media, pre-money valuation of $850M; will invest $200M in BuzzFeed — NBCUniversal Buys Big Chunks of Vox Media and BuzzFeed — Last week Re/code reported that NBCUniversal was investing in BuzzFeed and Vox Media. — Now those deals are done, and NBCU and Vox Media are announcing their deal today.
NBCUniversal Buys Big Chunks of Vox Media and BuzzFeed
http://recode.net/2015/08/12/nbcuniversal-buys-big-chunks-of-vox-media-and-buzzfeed/
The headline for now: The media giant is investing $200 million in Vox Media, at a pre-money valuation of $850 million, according to several sources. Which is another way of saying Vox Media is now worth more than $1 billion, after raising around $300 million altogether.
BuzzFeed, meanwhile, is expected to be worth $1.5 billion after its NBCU investment, which multiple sources say is also $200 million
The BuzzFeed-NBCU deal will be announced later this week, said several sources.
As my old boss Henry Blodget once said, we are conflicted up the wazoo on this one, first and foremost because Re/code is owned by Vox Media*. And there are things that are more uncomfortable than writing about your employer, but this is right up there
Vox Media CEO Jim Bankoff — again, my boss — says that in addition to the NBCUniversal investment, the two companies now have a commercial partnership.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Beginning of the End of the TV Industrial Complex
http://recode.net/2015/08/10/the-beginning-of-the-end-of-the-tv-industrial-complex/
After years of insisting otherwise, investors seem to have decided that the pay TV business is in decline. Last week, triggered by an admission of weakness from Disney and ESPN, Wall Street pounded all of the big media companies, wiping out more than $50 billion in value.
You can debate whether the selloff was an overreaction, or if certain companies are in better shape than others. But here’s a convincing argument for the overall thesis, delivered via a chart from researchers MoffettNathanson
To spell it out: Pay TV subscriber growth has been tailing off for years, and now it has vanished altogether — the number of people who pay for cable TV, satellite TV or telco TV is shrinking.
Per analysts Craig Moffett and Michael Nathanson: “A year ago, the Pay TV sector was shrinking at an annual rate of 0.1 percent. A year later, the rate at which the Pay TV sector is declining has quickened to 0.7 percent year-over-year. That may not seem like a mass exodus, but it is a big change in a short period of time. And the rate of decline is still accelerating.”
Again: There are plenty of reasons to argue why the TV business is not the newspaper business, or the music business. For starters, many people consume an enormous amount of TV every week, and something like 100 million people pay (a lot) of money for TV every month.
They’re probably going to keep doing that, in one form or another, for a long time.
Next question: What do the TV guys do now?
Cord-Cutting Contagion! Wall Street Bails on Big Media Stocks.
http://recode.net/2015/08/05/cord-cutting-contagion-wall-street-bails-on-big-media-stocks/
Big media companies used to insist that cord-cutters — people dropping pay TV for Internet video — were a myth. Then they said cord-cutting might exist, but only in edge cases. Then they said they were more interested in cord-nevers — people who had yet to sign up for pay TV.
And all along, investors bought the argument: Even if the number of pay TV subscribers had stalled, the big media companies seemed as though they were going to wring more money out of the customers they did have — and could sell more stuff to Web TV entrants like Netflix and Amazon.
But look what is happening today: Share prices for the biggest TV programmers are all nose-diving. Disney is down 9 percent. Time Warner is down 8 percent. Viacom and 21st Century Fox are down 7 percent.
In the old days — basically, up until a month ago — most people in the video world assumed ESPN was untouchable. It commanded the biggest subscriber fees from traditional pay TV providers, and even if you imagined that one day people would start buying TV over the Internet from people like Apple, it seemed as though it would do just fine in that scenario, too.
But today, investors seem to be looking at any media company that makes most of its money — or at least a lot of money, in Comcast’s case — selling TV shows and TV advertising and saying Screw it! You’re all in trouble.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jeff Jarvis / The New York Observer:
While newsrooms shrink, journalists continue to parrot each others’ coverage when they should focus on unique value to communities
Amid Constant Layoffs, Journalists Should Stop Parroting Each Other
Ever dwindling numbers of journalism professionals must provide unique value, not the 101st take
http://observer.com/2015/08/amid-constant-layoff-journalists-should-stop-parroting-each-other/
“How do they manufacture volume of content and traffic? Cats are one answer. The other is cheap rewrites of others’ stories about blue moons, oddly hued dresses, and political horse races.”
We do need to shift news from a news business based on volume to one based on value: unique value to the people and communities it serves. The salvation of this profession that I hold dear and necessary can come only from a flight to quality: doing the reporting that no one else is doing; serving people’s needs with substance rather than momentary distraction; helping to improve our lives and communities; surprising, engaging, enlightening, and educating the public. We will measure our worth not with old, mass-media metrics that count pageviews, unique users, and eyeballs by the ton. It will come with measurements of impact and value.
Read more at http://observer.com/2015/08/amid-constant-layoff-journalists-should-stop-parroting-each-other/#ixzz3ifo51VaO
Tomi Engdahl says:
Paul Mason / Guardian:
Digital devices have shortened readers attention spans, increased skim-reading, and authors are now struggling to create immersive content
Ebooks are changing the way we read, and the way novelists write
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/10/ebooks-are-changing-the-way-we-read-and-the-way-novelists-write
Our attention spans have shortened, we’re distracted, and authors have changed their style to suit, but these changes are part of the wider digital transformation
The attention span has shortened not just because ebooks consist of a continuous, searchable digital text, but because they are being read on devices we use for other things. Baron reports that a large percentage of young people read ebooks on their cellphones – dipping into them in the coffee queue or on public transport, but then checking their work email or their online love life, a thumbswipe away.
In turn, in so far as form and business models has reacted to such behaviour, fiction has become shorter. Every major publisher has experimented with short stories, serialised fiction, anthologies and mid-range “e-only” books. By contrast, experiments with fictional forms that only work for ebooks and hypertext have failed to make the big time.
Predictably there is a literary backlash – not just against the ebook, and the short attention span, but against writing styles that authors have evolved in the post-Kindle world. The American novelist Joanna Scott last month bemoaned the tendency, even in award-winning serious fiction, to produce a “good read” with a gripping plot and unfussy writing, “instead of a work of art”.
I think such complaints are missing the point. The addition of an “information layer” to everyday life is transforming the way we react to stories: both for the creators and the mass audience.
Our lives are already impossible without summarisation. Just as the first encyclopaedias were written in response to the problem of too many books, so we, too, have evolved new, instant reference tools.
Any word in an ebook can invoke its own dictionary definition, simply by selecting it.
And while the academic study guides to major novels are usually worthless, the Wikipedia pages devoted to them can be invaluable. That is because study guides are often the work of a single, low-paid hack and the Wikipedia page contains the real-time wisdom of crowds: often wrong, but rarely worthless.
What I think the literary academics are worried about is the loss of immersiveness. If I list the books I would save from a burning house – or an exploding Kindle
In the 20th century, we came to value this quality of immersion as literary and to see clear narratives, with characters observed only through their actions, as sub-literary. But a novel such as Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer-winning The Goldfinch, subtly derided by the literary world for its readability, is not the product of the Kindle – but of a new relationship between writer and reader.
Pre-digital people had a single “self” and they hauled its sorry ass through the pages of the literary canon in the hope that it would come out better. Digital people have multiple selves, and so what they are doing with an immersive story is more provisional and temporary.
So writers are having to do different things. But what?
It’s probably too soon to generalise but my guess is, if you scooped up every book – digital and analogue – being read on a typical Mediterranean beach, and cut out the absolute crap, you’d be left with three kinds of writing: first, “literary” novels with clearer plots and than their 20th century predecessors, less complex prose, fewer experiments with fragmented perception; second, popular novels with a high degree of writerly craft (making the edges of the first two categories hard to define); third, literary writing about reality – the confessional autobiography, the diary of a journalist, highly embroidered reportage about a legendary event.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Zack Guzman / CNBC:
News Corp beats Q4 expectations with earnings of $0.07/share, misses on revenue with $2.14B — News Corp earnings: 7 cents per share, vs expected EPS of 5 cents — This is breaking news. Please check back for updates. — News Corp. delivered quarterly earnings that topped analysts’ expectations …
News Corp earnings: 7 cents per share, vs expected 5 cents
http://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/12/news-corp-earnings-q4-2015.html
News Corp. delivered quarterly earnings that topped analysts’ expectations but fell short of revenue projections Wednesday, citing foreign currency fluctuations and lower advertising revenues.
“Despite an uneven global economy, very tough currency headwinds and the ongoing transformation of the media landscape, for fiscal 2015 we posted stable revenues, robust EBITDA growth and healthy free cash flow,” CEO Robert Thomas said in a statement.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tribune Publishing doing ‘top to bottom’ digital review
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2015/08/8573946/tribune-publishing-doing-top-bottom-digital-review
Tribune Publishing has initiated a “top to bottom” review of its digital business as it continues to struggle with revenue declines one year after it was spun off into its own publicly traded company.
“I’m examining every aspect,”
Warren, who was one of the forces behind the Times’ successful paid digital strategy, said some developments are already underway at Tribune, publisher of The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun and numerous other newspapers. These include a “mobile-first approach to product development,” the creation of an audience development team and the enhancement of video capabilities.
As print-based revenues continue to fall throughout the industry, newspapers are scrambling to grow their digital audiences and make more money from people reading on desktop computers and mobile devices, whether through new advertising initiatives or paid subscription models.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Steven Johnson / New York Times:
How creative work in music, TV, movies, and books persists and often thrives in the post-Napster era, contrary to initial fears by some
The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t — In the digital economy, it was supposed to be impossible to make money by making art.
The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/23/magazine/the-creative-apocalypse-that-wasnt.html
In the digital economy, it was supposed to be impossible to make money by making art. Instead, creative careers are thriving — but in complicated and unexpected ways.
Against all odds, the
voices of the artists seem
to be louder than ever.
How can this be? The record industry’s collapse is real and well documented. Even after Napster shut down in 2002, music piracy continued to grow: According to the Recording Industry Association of America, 30 billion songs were illegally downloaded from 2004 to 2009. American consumers paid for only 37 percent of the music they acquired in 2009. Artists report that royalties from streaming services like Spotify or Pandora are a tiny fraction of what they used to see from traditional album sales. The global music industry peaked just before Napster’s debut, during the heyday of CD sales, when it reaped what would amount today to almost $60 billion in revenue. Now the industry worldwide reports roughly $15 billion in revenue from recorded music, a financial Armageddon even if you consider that CDs are much more expensive to produce and distribute than digital tracks.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ravi Somaiya / New York Times:
Post-UVA scandal and amidst falling newsstand sales, Rolling Stone tries to expand further into digital — Rolling Stone Moves Beyond the Fray — Gus Wenner is 25, not much older than his father, Jann S. Wenner, was when he started Rolling Stone in 1967.
Rolling Stone Moves Beyond the Fray
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/24/business/media/rolling-stone-moves-beyond-the-fray.html?_r=0
Gus Wenner is 25, not much older than his father, Jann S. Wenner, was when he started Rolling Stone in 1967.
illustrations accompanied the work of one of the magazine’s most famous writers, Hunter S. Thompson
But the publishing world has undergone another revolution, this time technological. And the magazine finds itself at a precipitous moment. Jann Wenner, 69, who has overseen, to some extent, every issue since its founding, is gradually handing over the operation to his son.
Rolling Stone also faces the same dystopian landscape that many other magazines do, as newsstand sales and advertising revenue are eroded by the web. But, say current and former staff members, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to safeguard their jobs or to speak candidly about confidential matters, it has followed the path set out by its founder so ceaselessly that it has never adapted.
The elder Mr. Wenner, these people said, has declined to pursue lines of business, including festivals and conferences, that might have provided new revenue streams. He was skeptical about the web as others were embracing it. And he has been reluctant to shift the magazine’s focus away from baby boomer rockers — U2, Bruce Springsteen, the Rolling Stones — some of whom he considers friends. (One of the best-selling recent covers featured the band Rush, which came to fame in the ’70s and ’80s.)
Jann Wenner said that he had listened to the business suggestions but decided they were not the wisest path. He feels that others leapt for the web too quickly, and that now was the correct time for an Internet push.
The company, which says it has a total staff of about 350, has just gone through another round of job cuts, though both father and son point out that it is also hiring people for web and video positions.
“I think first of all that making mistakes is key to doing anything right,” Gus Wenner said in response. Bringing on great people, he said, is paramount. “Given my youth or inexperience, that is probably more important than it would be otherwise.”
He feels his father’s focus is easily adaptable to a more current vision. “Our mission is to tell great stories, and the lens of what we do just becomes much broader,” he said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Shannon Bond / Financial Times:
European media giant investments in online video networks are growing fast — European media join push to support online video groups — Online video networks are receiving an influx of capital from European investors as the companies behind some of the most popular content on YouTube seek to reach bigger global audiences.
European media join push to support online video groups
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0%2F282d7f2c-3182-11e5-91ac-a5e17d9b4cff.html#axzz3jkEfEMyO
Online video networks are receiving an influx of capital from European investors as the companies behind some of the most popular content on YouTube seek to reach bigger global audiences.
“Traditional media companies who are seeing very low growth in their domestic markets are looking for opportunities to diversify their revenue streams away from domestic, advertising-funded broadcast TV,” said Richard Broughton, analyst at Ampere Analysis, a media research firm that values the total MCN business at $20bn.
The European interest follows a spate of US deals in recent years
Traditional media groups “are all paranoid about the decline and losses of key audience segments, and YouTube is key to their strategy to go recapture audience share, particularly for younger users,” Mr Broughton said. “And MCNs are effectively global businesses.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Steven Johnson / New York Times:
How creative work in music, TV, movies, and books persists and often thrives in the post-Napster era, contrary to initial fears by some — The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t — In the digital economy, it was supposed to be impossible to make money by making art.
The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/23/magazine/the-creative-apocalypse-that-wasnt.html
In the digital economy, it was supposed to be impossible to make money by making art. Instead, creative careers are thriving — but in complicated and unexpected ways.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Michael Blanding / Nieman Reports:
The Value of Slow Journalism in the Age of Instant Information
The Value of Slow Journalism in the Age of Instant Information
http://niemanreports.org/articles/the-value-of-slow-journalism-in-the-age-of-instant-information/
As news cycles speed up, ‘slow’ journalists take months—even years—to report and tell in-depth stories
“Everyone is going faster and faster and getting shallower and shallower,” says Salopek. “I said, ‘How about we slow down a bit to grab a little mindshare by going in the opposite direction.’ The rewards have been far in excess of my expectations, both professionally and personally. It’s a sense of narrative direction I never had before when I was flying around the world and telling stories of the crisis of the day that seemed disconnected.”
More and more journalists are catching up with slowing down, espousing a new form of “slow journalism” that takes its time to tell stories, even as social media’s nanosecond news cycle increases pressure to be fast and first.
Slow journalists measure reporting time in months or years, rather than days, and see the form as something more than just a reboot of long-form narrative nonfiction. Like the “slow food” movement from which it gets its name, slow journalism stresses openness and transparency, laying bare to audiences its sourcing and methods and inviting participation in the final product. It also provides a complement and corrective to breaking news, where amid the pressures of ever-present deadlines, conjecture can often replace reporting. “We are at an age of overload; we have too much information coming at us too fast,” says Megan Le Masurier, a media and communications professor at the University of Sydney who wrote a scholarly article on the topic for Journalism Practice. “If you tune into the news on a daily basis, you get the updates, but you lose sight of why things are happening.”
The term “slow journalism” first appeared in a February 2007 article in the British politics and culture magazine Prospect, written by Susan Greenberg, a senior lecturer in English and creative writing at the University of Roehampton. In contrast to daily news, she contended that journalism driven by craft, voice, and care was increasingly becoming a “luxury” product. “What I mean is the luxury to take time,” she says. “It takes time to discover things, it takes time to figure things out, it takes time to do something new, and it takes time to communicate it in a way that does justice to it.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jack Marshall / Wall Street Journal:NEW!
Despite upsurge in mobile traffic, publishers say mobile ad dollars are lagging — Mobile Readers Abound; the Ads, Not So Much — Traditional and online publishers are struggling to cash in on their surging mobile traffic, raising questions about their
Mobile Readers Abound; the Ads, Not So Much
http://blogs.wsj.com/cmo/2015/08/24/for-publishers-mobile-readers-abound-the-ads-not-so-much/
Traditional and online publishers are struggling to cash in on their surging mobile traffic, raising questions about their future growth as consumers increasingly turn to smartphones and tablets for media.
News and information outlets ranging from the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal to Business Insider and About.com all can point to rapid growth in mobile usage. Time spent on publishers’ mobile offerings jumped 40% in the 12 months through July and now accounts for 55% of total time spent on their properties, up from 42% two years ago, according to estimates by measurement specialist comScore.
The problem is that for many publishers mobile revenue isn’t keeping pace—by a long shot—creating what industry executives are calling a “mobile gap.”
Selling advertising on mobile devices is proving difficult: It is hard to show mobile users enough ads, traditional ad formats like “banners” perform miserably, and publishers can’t easily do sophisticated tracking and targeting of ads. These issues extend from publishers’ mobile websites to their apps.
Meanwhile, online giants Facebook Inc., Google Inc. and Twitter Inc.—who sidestep many of those issues—are mopping up the mobile dollars marketers are spending. Facebook alone accounted for 37% of all U.S. mobile display advertising revenue in 2014, according to eMarketer.
At New York Times Co., more than half of visits to the company’s digital properties now come from smartphones and tablets, according to the chief revenue officer, Meredith Kopit Levien. Those devices accounted for just 15% of the company’s digital ad revenue in the second quarter.
“[Mobile revenues] are definitely lagging audience. No question,” Ms. Levien said.
It is a similar story at News Corp’s Dow Jones & Co., publisher of The Wall Street Journal.
Mark Howard, chief revenue officer at Forbes, said around half of visits to its properties now come from non-desktop devices, and the company is able to sell mobile ads for approximately the same price as desktop ones. But because phones have smaller screens, squeezing in as many ads for mobile users as desktop users is hard.
“The desktop is still creating 70% of our inventory,” Mr. Howard said.
The mobile gap issue is most pressing for “traditional” media companies like newspapers, which need to boost digital revenue fast enough to offset steep declines in their print advertising businesses.
But many digital-native publishers are also confronting the problem. Neil Vogel, chief executive of IAC/InterActiveCorp.’s About.com, said even after improvements over the last 18 months a mobile visit is worth about half to two-thirds as much to the company as a desktop visit.
The boom in desktop Web advertising over the past two decades was helped along by advanced tracking and targeting mechanisms that don’t work anywhere near as well on smartphones and tablets. That means it is often hard for publishers to convince marketers that mobile advertising actually benefits their businesses.
“We need to be able to help advertisers differentiate between people interested in buying mid-priced cars or expensive cars,” Mr. Blau said.
Facebook, Google and Twitter excel in this area. Facebook doesn’t just have abundant data on its users—their gender and age and interests—but also knows which desktop or mobile devices people use. The Facebook login is essentially a replacement for “cookies,” the bite-sized files that have traditionally allowed websites to track users’ activity on desktops.
“They’re sitting on a trove of consumer data that’s connected across devices and channels,” said Jennifer Wise, an analyst at Forrester Research.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Julia Smirnova / Washington Post:
Russia orders ISPs to block Wikipedia after site editors refuse to delete article; Wikimedia expects site to be blocked for most users within days
Russia’s war with Wikipedia
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/08/24/russias-war-with-wikipedia/?postshare=3741440456063397
The recent battle between Russian authorities and Wikipedia started in a village called Chyorny Yar (population: less than 8,000) in southern Russia.
A prosecutor in the village was concerned about a Wikipedia entry on charas, a form of cannabis, though the reasons are unclear. Chyorny Yar appears to have no major problems with drug abuse — and apparently no cannabis fields. According to Wikipedia, charas is a “hashish form of cannabis which is handmade in India, Lebanon, Pakistan, Nepal and Jamaica” — places far from Chyorny Yar.
The prosecutor demanded that the Russian-language Wikipedia entry be deleted. A court in the village endorsed his position in June.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Twitter shuts down 30 sites dedicated to saving politicians’ deleted tweets
http://www.theverge.com/2015/8/24/9196969/twitter-shuts-down-politwoops-diplotwoops
Twitter has shut down a network of sites dedicated to archiving deleted tweets from politicians around the world. The sites — collectively known as Politwoops — were overseen by the Open State Foundation (OSF), which reported that Twitter suspended their API access on Friday, August 21st. Twitter reportedly told the OSF that its decision was the result of “thoughtful internal deliberation and close consideration of a number of factors,” and that the social media site didn’t distinguish between politicians and regular users.
“Imagine how nerve-racking — terrifying, even — tweeting would be if it was immutable and irrevocable?” Twitter reportedly told the OSF. “No one user is more deserving of that ability than another. Indeed, deleting a tweet is an expression of the user’s voice.”
The US arm of Politwoops was shut down in June this year, but this new decision affects countries all over the world including Canada, Egypt, India, Ireland, South Korea, Tunisia, Turkey, Norway, and the UK.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The decline of Flash is well and truly underway. Media publishers now have no choice but to start changing the way they bring content to the web. Many of them are not thrilled about the proposition (change is scary), but it will almost certainly be better for all of us in the long run. “By switching their platform to HTML5, companies can improve supportability, development time will decrease and the duplicative efforts of supporting two code bases will be eliminated.
Farewell To Flash: What It Means For Digital Video Publishers
http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/23/farewell-to-flash-what-it-means-for-digital-video-publishers/#.ojwuxm:hzaa
It’s been more than five years since Steve Jobs wrote his infamous “Thoughts on Flash” letter citing the high level of energy consumption, lack of performance on mobile and poor security as the reasons his company’s products would not support Adobe Flash technology. Finally, it appears we’re getting closer to the curtain closing on Flash.
Not too long ago, Flash powered a high percentage of the Internet’s vast array of video content. Today, that number is lower. But make no mistake, there are still many Flash-powered multimedia items on the web, including graphics, videos, games and animations, like GIFs, a preferred method of expression for millennials and adults alike.
We’ve been watching HTML5 impede on Flash for a while, and it’s now taking center stage, establishing itself as a predominant creative format, validated by the recent moves by Google and Mozilla that are only helping to accelerate that transition.
What Does The Change Mean For Publishers?
In spite of all this, for digital-video publishers, excitement may not be the initial emotion evoked by Flash‘s funeral. With the goal of increasing browsing speed and reducing power consumption for users, Google’s Chrome desktop browser announced their formerly opt-in setting that pauses plug-in content that isn’t considered essential to the webpage will become a default setting by early September.
This means that if publishers don’t upgrade their format specification, some or all of their video content may no longer be available for people to view; this will certainly affect viewer loyalty and monetization efforts.
For example, Flash video ads served in a desktop Chrome browser will load in a paused state, then the user will have to click the ad for it to play. These ads will still register as impressions. However, it won’t take long for programmatic buyers to scale back their bids on video ad inventory garnering a high number of impressions with no quartiles.
Publishers need to urge their buyers to prepare for the upcoming Flash-pocalypse because, despite the publishers‘ level of preparation, if their buyers don’t have the proper HTML5 creative assets, it will impact their ability to transact, having an impact on publisher revenue and the ability to successfully implement advertiser campaigns.
How Publishers Can Prepare
The most crucial thing for publishers is going to be ensuring that their advertisers and demand partners (ad networks, ad exchanges and advertisers) are providing and hosting HTML5 ad creatives moving forward.
The Impact
For publishers, one of the biggest wins of Flash‘s depreciation comes in the form of engineering resources saved. Historically, video publishers have always wanted to pick a standard, but the reality is, they haven’t been able to because of the aforementioned VPAID issue.
They’ve essentially been forced to use Flash to keep their ads business running — but also support an HTML5 code base. This means that any software management, maintenance and updates they make, like bug fixes, must be addressed in both code bases, which is very time-consuming from an engineering standpoint.
A major concern for publishers today is the amount of media consumption that’s occurring in mobile environments. They need to prioritize providing the best possible experience on mobile, and the decline of Flash and movement to HTML5 will do just that, as Flash has never worked well on mobile.
Time spent on mobile devices is still climbing steadily; according to eMarketer, U.S. adults will spend more than 5.5 hours per day with digital media in 2015, the majority (2:51) of which will be spent on a mobile device.
Popular desktop browsers, like Chrome, revoking their support for Flash, is a catalyst for HTML5 becoming digital-video advertising’s format for the future.
A Win-Win-Win
I believe that a Flash-free world will be better for everyone. HTML5 is conducive to the direction media consumption is heading and will positively affect people’s digital-video viewing (a primary concern for today’s digital publishers), creating a better overall Internet experience. It also takes less bandwidth than Flash to run, making it much more efficient for battery life on consumer’s devices.