I write about issues going on in transition from traditional print media to on-line digital media in my posting Old media and digital media – part 1. This post is a continuation to it. The situation does not look too good for traditional media. Traditional media has been able to solve it’s challenges with aggregation or pay-wall. The future seems to be quite bad for traditional print media that can’t adapt to changed situation.
Despite two decades of trying, no one has found a way to make traditional news-gathering sufficiently profitable to assure its future survival. Only about a third of Americans under 35 look at a newspaper even once a week, and the percentage declines every year. A large portion of today’s readers of the few remaining good newspapers are much closer to the grave than to high school. Today’s young people skitter around the Internet. Audience taste seems to be changing, with the result that among young people particularly there is a declining appetite for the sort of information packages the great newspapers provided.
What is the future of media? There is an interesting article on future of media written in Finnish on this: Median tulevaisuus ja 13 trendiä – mitä media on vuonna 2030? It shows 13 trends that I have here translated to English, re-arranged, added my comments and links to more information to them. In 2030, the media will look very different than today.
The new gerations no longer want to pay for the media: Since the same information, benefits, entertainment provided free of charge, they are not prepared to pay. Older generations support the traditional media for some time, but they are smaller each year. Media consumption continues to rapidly change, and advertisers will follow suit digital and mobile channels, which will affect the media sales because advertisers no longer need the intermediary role of the media companies to communicate with their customers.
This does not look good for media companies, but situation even worse than that: When media personnel, production and distribution costs are rising every year and so the order than the ad revenue will be reduced year by year, deprivation twist to push media companies to the rest of the best authors, owners become impatient and expected returns are reduced. Companies are moving their marketing investment priorities for the purchased media.Corporate communications professionals continues to grow and the number of suppliers will continue to fall.
Technological developments enhance the above trends: Technology eliminates the barriers to entry to the traditional media sector and at the same time create new sectors. Technological media competition winner takes all because new scalable technology to create competitive advantages. Very many news writing tasks can be automated with near real-time and reliable enough translation technology The media world is undergoing a wholesale shift from manual processes to automated systems that strip out waste and inefficiency (The Future of Programmatic: Automation + Creativity + Scale).
Strong continuous technological change and automation mean that media consumption will continue to change for the next decade at least as strong as the previous ten years, whether we like it or not. Critical journalism makes searching for new alternative ways to do their work and to fund its work.
Media’s direction is sure to bring, and an ever increasing rate - in an increasingly digital, more mobile, more and more tailor-made … The newspapers will be read mostly on mobile devices. Information is obtained much earlier, in an increasingly digital and real-time. A lot has changed now already.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Engineer’s Newspaper Turns 123
http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1327997&
Denmark is home to one of the little known treasures of engineering, a newspaper for engineers that dates back to July 2, 1892.
Ingeniøren covers all branches of engineering, backed by a lively team that puts out a newspaper, multiple Web site and occasional events, all in Danish. The 123 year-old weekly newspaper still keeps its finger on the tech pulse of the country.
The 30-person editorial team still does investigative work, too.
Like the U.S., Denmark has seen a trend among young people to avoid the STEM fields. But this year university enrollments in engineering in Denmark hit a record high, filling almost all available slots for the first time in many years.
Classified ads still make up a significant portion of the newspaper. However the team now runs a Web site dedicated to engineering employment and management issues in addition to a Web site on general technology and science and another focused on information technology.
The team also has dabbled with events.
Editors are now digitizing the newspaper archives with everything up to 1940 now available as .pdf files. It’s a rich past, and the future is looking pretty good, too.
Tomi Engdahl says:
German police warn parents to stop posting photos of kids on Facebook
https://thestack.com/world/2015/10/14/german-police-warn-parents-to-stop-posting-photos-of-kids-on-facebook/
today’s practice of using social media has been cautioned against by Western German police. In a post earlier this week (ironically on Facebook), the statement urged parents to not post photos of their children on social media websites for everyone to see.
In today’s advanced day and age, it’s common practice on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram – whether parents announce the birth of their first child, their child’s first birthday or their child’s first day at school with an accompanying photo.
But the appeal from Hagen Police issued the caution on a number of levels – on a more light hearted note, the message said that while parents may consider the photos to be cute, in the near future, that son or daughter may not see it that way, instead finding them “endlessly embarrassing”.
But on a more serious note, Hagen Police warned that such photos were open to use by bullies or paedophiles.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Introducing On This Day: A New Way to Look Back at Photos and Memories on Facebook
http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2015/03/introducing-on-this-day-a-new-way-to-look-back-at-photos-and-memories-on-facebook/
People often look back at old photos and other memories they’ve shared on Facebook, and many have told us that they enjoy products and features that make this easier.
Today we’re announcing On This Day, a new way to look back at things you have shared and posts you’ve been tagged in on Facebook. Only you can see your On This Day page.
Once on the page, you can choose to subscribe to notifications so you’ll be alerted when you have memories to look back on. You can also edit and delete old posts, or decide to share your memories with friends.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Alex Spence / Politico:
Sources: Guardian prepares for editorial cuts after advertising sales slow — Guardian braces for cutbacks after ‘difficult’ year — An era of lavish spending is over, says a newspaper insider. “We have to be realistic.” — LONDON — The Guardian is preparing for steep editorial cuts after a slowdown in advertising sales.
Guardian faces cutbacks after ‘difficult’ year
An era of lavish spending is over, says a newspaper insider. “We have to be realistic.”
http://www.politico.eu/article/guardian-faces-cutbacks-after-difficult-year-media-newspaper-viner/
The Guardian is preparing for steep editorial cuts after a slowdown in advertising sales. Job losses are highly likely, insiders at the media company said.
“This is shaping up to be one of the most difficult … periods we’ve faced in many years,” David Pemsel, Guardian Media Group’s chief executive, said in an internal memo obtained by POLITICO.
This year has been “incredibly challenging” for all the major players on Fleet Street, Pemsel said, with print advertising falling at an alarming rate in the first half of the year. Across the whole market, print advertising will be down by about 20 percent, he said. Circulations are also falling.
The Guardian, which has expanded more ambitiously online than many of its rivals and now generates about 40 percent of its income from digital, was less exposed to a slump in print. But online advertising has also slowed, as “spending migrates to the likes of Facebook and Google at a far faster rate than previously seen,” Pemsel said.
Pemsel and Viner have launched a strategic review of the business, known internally as “Project 2021,” the chief executive said in the memo.
“We must … do everything we can to balance the books,” Pemsel said. “By doing so, we will create some financial room to maneuver, which will — in turn — enable us to continue investing in areas of growth.”
Scott Trust, the non-profit body that governs the Guardian, is determined that it won’t keep burning through money at the rate that it did under Rusbridger. “Those days are over,” an insider said. “We have to be realistic.”
While other newspapers contracted through waves of job cuts, the Guardian’s workforce increased by more than 300 in the last few years.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Shira Orbach / IAB:
IAB launches program to address ad blocking with light, encrypted, ad-choice supported, and non-invasive ads — Getting LEAN with Digital Ad UX — We messed up. As technologists, tasked with delivering content and services to users, we lost track of the user experience.
Getting LEAN with Digital Ad UX
http://www.iab.com/news/lean/
We messed up. As technologists, tasked with delivering content and services to users, we lost track of the user experience.
Twenty years ago we saw an explosion of websites, built by developers around the world, providing all forms of content. This was the beginning of an age of enlightenment, the intersection of content and technology. Many of us in the technical field felt compelled, and even empowered, to produce information as the distribution means for mass communication were no longer restricted by a high barrier to entry.
In 2000, the dark ages came when the dot-com bubble burst.
We engineered not just the technical, but also the social and economic foundation that users around the world came to lean on for access to real time information. And users came to expect this information whenever and wherever they needed it. And more often than not, for anybody with a connected device, it was free.
This was choice—powered by digital advertising—and premised on user experience.
But we messed up.
Through our pursuit of further automation and maximization of margins during the industrial age of media technology, we built advertising technology to optimize publishers’ yield of marketing budgets that had eroded after the last recession. Looking back now, our scraping of dimes may have cost us dollars in consumer loyalty. The fast, scalable systems of targeting users with ever-heftier advertisements have slowed down the public internet and drained more than a few batteries. We were so clever and so good at it that we over-engineered the capabilities of the plumbing laid down by, well, ourselves. This steamrolled the users, depleted their devices, and tried their patience.
The rise of ad blocking poses a threat to the internet and could potentially drive users to an enclosed platform world dominated by a few companies. We have let the fine equilibrium of content, commerce, and technology get out of balance in the open web.
Today, the IAB Tech Lab is launching the L.E.A.N. Ads program. Supported by the Executive Committee of the IAB Tech Lab Board, IABs around the world, and hundreds of member companies, L.E.A.N. stands for Light, Encrypted, Ad choice supported, Non-invasive ads. These are principles that will help guide the next phases of advertising technical standards for the global digital advertising supply chain.
As with any other industry, standards should be created by non-profit standards-setting bodies, with many diverse voices providing input.
L.E.A.N. Ads do not replace the current advertising standards many consumers still enjoy and engage with while consuming content on our sites across all IP enabled devices. Rather, these principles will guide an alternative set of standards that provide choice for marketers, content providers, and consumers.
The consumer is demanding these actions, challenging us to do better, and we must respond.
That is user experience.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Deepa Seetharaman / Wall Street Journal:
Survey: 33% of teens say Instagram is their most important social network, 20% Twitter, 19% Snapchat, 15% Facebook
Survey Finds Teens Prefer Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat for Social Networks
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/10/16/survey-finds-teens-prefer-instagram-snapchat-among-social-networks/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Adrienne Lafrance / The Atlantic:
Inside efforts to resurrect a Pulitzer-nominated 34-part story eight years after it disappeared from the web
Raiders of the Lost Web
If a Pulitzer-finalist 34-part series of investigative journalism can vanish from the web, anything can.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/10/raiders-of-the-lost-web/409210/
The web, as it appears at any one moment, is a phantasmagoria. It’s not a place in any reliable sense of the word. It is not a repository. It is not a library. It is a constantly changing patchwork of perpetual nowness.
You can’t count on the web, okay? It’s unstable. You have to know this.
Digital information itself has all kinds of advantages. It can be read by machines, sorted and analyzed in massive quantities, and disseminated instantaneously. “Except when it goes, it really goes,” said Jason Scott, an archivist and historian for the Internet Archive. “It’s gone gone. A piece of paper can burn and you can still kind of get something from it. With a hard drive or a URL, when it’s gone, there is just zero recourse.”
There are exceptions. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has a trove of cached web pages going back to 1996.
It is not just access to knowledge, but the knowledge itself that’s at stake. Thousands of years ago, the Library of Alexandria was, as the astrophysicist Carl Sagan wrote, “the brain and heart of the ancient world.”
The promise of the web is that Alexandria’s library might be resurrected for the modern world. But today’s great library is being destroyed even as it is being built. Until you lose something big on the Internet, something truly valuable, this paradox can be difficult to understand.
Before the Internet, if you wanted to look up an old newspaper article, you usually had to find it in an archive.
Vaughan’s story about the 1961 crash, a 34-part series that spanned more than a month in early 2007, was a sensation.
In 2008, Vaughan was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature writing for the series. The next year, the Rocky folded. And in the months that followed, the website slowly broke apart. One day, without warning, “The Crossing” evaporated from the Internet.
What happened to the people of Greeley, Colorado, on December 14, 1961, was twice lost to time.
“It seems weird to think about something that killed 20 people having a very short period of time in the public consciousness,” Vaughan said. There were newspaper accounts of the crash from 1961, but they raised as many questions as they answered.
Many of the never-before-published documents and photographs Vaughan unearthed became key components of the web series, appearing only online and not in printed versions of the series.
If a sprawling Pulitzer Prize-nominated feature in one of the nation’s oldest newspapers can disappear from the web, anything can. “There are now no passive means of preserving digital information,” said Abby Rumsey, a writer and digital historian. In other words if you want to save something online, you have to decide to save it. Ephemerality is built into the very architecture of the web, which was intended to be a messaging system, not a library.
In other formats, entire eras of meaningful work have been destroyed. Most of the films made in the United States between 1912 and 1929 have been lost. “And it’s not because we didn’t know how to preserve them, it’s that we didn’t think they were valuable,” Rumsey said. “The first 50 or 100 years of print after the printing press, most of what was produced was lost… People looked down on books as having less value in part because they were able to print things so rapidly and distribute them so much more rapidly that they seemed ephemeral.”
The life cycle of most web pages runs its course in a matter of months. In 1997, the average lifespan of a web page was 44 days; in 2003, it was 100 days. Links go bad even faster. A 2008 analysis of links in 2,700 digital resources—the majority of which had no print counterpart—found that about 8 percent of links stopped working after one year. By 2011, when three years had passed, 30 percent of links in the collection were dead.
The Internet Archive is getting more efficient. It can haul terabytes of data faster than ever—so fast, Scott says, that some servers end up shutting down early to avoid preservation.
Yet today’s web is more at-risk than the iterations that preceded it. The serving environments are now more complex, and the volume of data involved is astonishing. In 1994, there were fewer than 3,000 websites online. By 2014, there were more than 1 billion.
Scholars believe that around 300 B.C., the Library of Alexandria may have housed three-quarters of humanity’s texts. Today, three-quarters of humanity’s books are abandoned, out of print and housed only in libraries—if at all.
So in 2009, the year the paper went under, Vaughan began asking for permission—from the library and from E.W. Scripps, the company that owned the Rocky—to resurrect the series. After four years of back and forth, in 2013, the institutions agreed to let Vaughan bring it back to the web.
For Sawyer, most of the work involved combing through old code and adapting it for a today’s web. In a pre-iPhone 2007, “The Crossing” had been designed as a desktop experience. It also relied heavily on Flash, once-ubiquitous software that is now all but dead.
This is, after all, the great promise of the Internet: All of the knowledge, for all of humanity. A mix of legend and history tells us that the Library of Alexandria almost got there in its time. “We needed a technology change to be able to see this idea through again,” Kahle said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Matt Rosoff / Business Insider:
Some VCs, appearing defensive, dismiss WSJ’s reporting on Theranos, but should actually welcome investigative journalism — Some tech investors sure seem to be getting defensive lately … Nobody likes to be questioned. — But lately, some of Silicon Valley’s big tech investors seem …
Some tech investors sure seem to be getting defensive lately …
http://uk.businessinsider.com/big-tech-investors-sure-seem-to-be-getting-defensive-lately-2015-9?op=1?r=US&IR=T
Nobody likes to be questioned.
But lately, some of Silicon Valley’s big tech investors seem to be particularly upset that journalists are questioning some of the valley’s hottest startups.
There’s a fundamental difference in point of view here. The funders see first-hand how hard it is to build something and sympathize with the struggle. The journalists are supposed to be as objective and careful as possible and report what they find — even if some people don’t like it.
But some VCs also seemed genuinely upset. Not at the substance of the allegations, but for not giving founders the benefit of the doubt when it comes to building something.
This disconnect between the worldview of journalists and VCs has been showing up more and more recently.
A lot of tech founders are trying to do something new and drive society forward. But some of them are not.
People have all kinds of motivations for founding a company — any kind of company. Some want to get rich. Some hate working for other people. Some have what they think is a great business idea and want to see if they can make it real, and don’t particularly care if it’s good for society.
Journalists don’t set out to write takedowns of companies. But when a journalist begins investigating a company and finds something is amiss, and the story is well vetted and fairly reported, the venture community should welcome that reporting.
Because every faker, every charlatan, and every company whose product just isn’t good enough to win is taking money that could have been invested in other companies that have a better chance.
A lot of VCs themselves have been sounding nervous recently
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amazon targets 1,114 ‘fake reviewers’ in Seattle lawsuit
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34565631
Amazon is taking legal action against more than 1,000 people it says have posted fake reviews on its website.
The US online retail giant has filed a lawsuit in Seattle, Washington.
It says its brand reputation is being damaged by “false, misleading and inauthentic” reviews paid for by sellers seeking to improve the appeal of their products.
It comes after Amazon sued a number of websites in April for selling fake reviews.
Amazon said it had conducted an investigation, which included purchasing fake customer reviews on Fiverr from people who promised five-star ratings and offered to allow purchasers to write reviews.
It said it had observed fake review sellers attempting to avoid detection by using multiple accounts from unique IP addresses.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Shan Wang / Nieman Lab:
What it means to be a mobile editor, as told by mobile editors themselves — “Many debates these days about mobile news platforms and technologies are already dated. In not too long, the disruptors will be disrupted. And then the real fun begins.” — “Mobile editor” is a role
What it means to be a mobile editor, as told by mobile editors themselves
http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/10/do-you-use-a-phone-to-look-at-the-internet-mobile-majority-editors/
“Many debates these days about mobile news platforms and technologies are already dated. In not too long, the disruptors will be disrupted. And then the real fun begins.”
“Mobile editor” is a role that didn’t even exist at most news organizations just a few years ago — at least not the multifaceted, multi-team, multi-platform, multi-everything roles that we sometimes see today. “The role of the mobile editor is defined by motion,” The Wall Street Journal’s executive mobile editor David Ho said it describing the position. “Motion and change — not just in the news, but in the technology, the tools, the tasks, the roles, and the workflows. It’s a job of constant evolution, of daily disruption.”
“I really struggle to come up with a succinct description of what I do, partly because I do have a regular job description, but I also spend a lot of time currently immersed in certain big projects,” Nathalie Malinarich, BBC News Online’s editor of mobile, told me.
I checked in with a few of these people who have “mobile” in their job titles — to understand how they steer their newsrooms to think mobile, and to hear how things have changed since their jobs first came into existenc
Tomi Engdahl says:
Casey Newton / The Verge:
Facebook rolls out instant articles to all iOS users and announces an Android beta — Five months after introducing its fast-loading instant articles into the News Feed, Facebook is now rolling out the format to all iPhone users, the company said today. Speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s …
Facebook rolls out instant articles to all iOS users and announces an Android beta
Plus new publishers including Vox, Slate, and TIME
http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/20/9574045/facebook-instant-articles-ios-android
Five months after introducing its fast-loading instant articles into the News Feed, Facebook is now rolling out the format to all iPhone users, the company said today. Speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s WSJD Conference in Laguna Beach, California, Facebook’s Chris Cox said thousands of articles a day will now be published as instant articles. Facebook will also test the format in a public beta for Android users that launches today, said Cox, Facebook’s chief product officer. Instant articles for Android will become widely available later this year.
Facebook is also adding new partners to the instant article program, including Vox Media (parent of The Verge), Slate, The Huffington Post, and The Daily Mail. They join the company’s original nine partners, which include The New York Times, BuzzFeed, and The Atlantic.
Facebook says readers are more likely to share instant articles, and that they load 10 times faster than normal links. Articles that are shared more often typically rank higher in the News Feed, which helps explain why publishers are scrambling to rewrite their content management systems to support the format. Meanwhile, rival quick-loading formats have been introduced by Apple, through Apple News, and Google, with Amplified Mobile Pages.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google’s growing problem: 50% of people do zero searches per day on mobile
https://theoverspill.wordpress.com/2015/10/19/searches-average-mobile-google-problem/
Amit Singhal, Google’s head of search, let slip a couple of interesting statistics at the Re/Code conference – none more so than that more than half of all searches incoming to Google each month are from mobile. (That excludes tablets.)
This averages out to less than one search per smartphone per day. We’ll see why in a bit.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
YouTube confirms any partner creator who earns cut of ad revenue but does not agree to YouTube Red revenue share deal will have videos hidden — YouTube Will Completely Remove Videos Of Creators Who Don’t Sign Its Red Subscription Deal — YouTube made its top video creators an offer …
YouTube Will Completely Remove Videos Of Creators Who Don’t Sign Its Red Subscription Deal
http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/21/an-offer-creators-cant-refuse/#.ojwuxm:WeqH
YouTube made its top video creators an offer they literally couldn’t refuse, or they’d have their content disappear. Today YouTube confirmed that any “partner” creator who earns a cut of ad revenue but doesn’t agree to sign its revenue share deal for its new YouTube Red $9.99 ad-free subscription will have their videos hidden from public view on both the ad-supported and ad-free tiers. That includes videos by popular comedians, musicians, game commentators, and DIY instructors, though not the average person that uploads clips.
It’s a tough pill to swallow that makes YouTube look like a bully. Though turning existing fans into paid subscribers instead of free viewers could earn creators more than the ad revenue, forcing them into the deal seems heavy-handed.
Tomi Engdahl says:
So, Tsu Me: Why Facebook Is Terrified of This Virtually Unknown Competitor and What It Could Mean For the Future of the Internet
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-fagin/so-tsu-me-why-facebook-is_b_8328524.html
Let’s ‘Face’ it. In today’s tech landscape, there’s no bigger dog on the block than Facebook. “King Mark” has built an empire so rich and so vast that if he thinks your little startup is going to cause him problems, he simply buys you out for more money than you, or your grandkids, or their grandkids, will ever need. Problem solved.
But, what if you’re not for sale? What in the world does King Mark do if you have something really great, that has millions of users around the globe buzzing about its potential as being a “game-changer,” and he can’t have it? Simple. He blocks you.
Being blocked from Facebook in this day and age is the equivalent of being kicked off AT&T in the mid 70s. Which, if it happened, could create some problems.
What would you do if Facebook banished you tomorrow? How would you let the world know you were being blocked? You can’t post it on Facebook. You can’t do it on Instagram, either, as Facebook owns that, too. Forget about tweeting it. You’re attempt at alerting the world to your plight will be buried in a second by 38,000 Kardashian retweets.
Facebook is the primary source of communication for over 1.5 billion people. So, the simple act of preventing its users from linking to anything having to do with your site will all but ensure your continuing anonymity.
However, if you’re the founder of a startup site that currently ranks 11,372nd in popularity in the U.S., you’d think you’re good, right? Wrong.
That’s exactly what’s happening to over 4.5 million users of Tsu.co – a Facebook with a conscience , whose founders believe users should be compensated for the content they create. That’s so important, it’s worth mentioning twice. Users should be compensated for the content they create.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Investigating the Complexity of Academic Writing
http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/10/28/160250/investigating-the-complexity-of-academic-writing
While the general public might expect that researchers should want to maximize comprehension of their work, academic writing tends to follow an opaque style permeated with professional jargon and complex syntax.
The Needless Complexity of Academic Writing
A new movement strives for simplicity.
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/10/complex-academic-writing/412255/
“Persistence is one of the great characteristics of a pitbull, and I guess owners take after their dogs,” says Annetta Cheek, the co-founder of the D.C.-based nonprofit Center for Plain Language.
The idea that writing should be clear, concise, and low-jargon isn’t a new one—and it isn’t limited to government agencies, of course. The problem of needlessly complex writing—sometimes referred to as an “opaque writing style”—has been explored in fields ranging from law to science. Yet in academia, unwieldy writing has become something of a protected tradition.
A disconnect between researchers and their audiences fuels the problem, according to Deborah S. Bosley, a clear-writing consultant and former University of North Carolina English professor. “Academics, in general, don’t think about the public; they don’t think about the average person, and they don’t even think about their students when they write,” she says. “Their intended audience is always their peers. That’s who they have to impress to get tenure.” But Bosley, who has a doctorate in rhetoric and writing, says that academic prose is often so riddled with professional jargon and needlessly complex syntax that even someone with a Ph.D. can’t understand a fellow Ph.D.’s work unless he or she comes from the very same discipline.
Academics play an elitist game with their words: They want to exclude interlopers.
A nonacademic might think the campaign against opaque writing is a no-brainer; of course, researchers should want to maximize comprehension of their work. Cynics charge, however, that academics play an elitist game with their words: They want to exclude interlopers. Others say that academics have traditionally been forced to write in an opaque style to be taken seriously by the gatekeepers—academic journal editors, for example. The main reason, though, may not be as sinister or calculated. Pinker, a cognitive scientist, says it boils down to “brain training”: the years of deep study required of academics to become specialists in their chosen fields actually work against them being able to unpack their complicated ideas in a coherent, concrete manner suitable for average folks. Translation: Experts find it really hard to be simple and straightforward when writing about their expertise. He calls this the “curse of knowledge” and says academics aren’t aware they’re doing it or properly trained to identify their blindspots—when they know too much and struggle to ascertain what others don’t know.
Some research funders, such as National Institutes of Health and The Wellcome Trust, have mandated in recent years that studies they finance be published in open-access journals, but they’ve given little attention to ensuring those studies include accessible writing. “NIH has no policies for grantees that dictate the style of writing they use in their research publications,”
Indeed, there are an increasing number of academics taking it upon themselves to blog, tweet or try other means to convey their research to wider audiences. The news site TheConversation.com, for example, sources authors and stories from the academic and research communities. Academics get the byline but are edited by journalists adept at making complex research clear and writing palatable, according to the outlet’s managing editor, Maria Balinska. “We see a real interest among academics across the board in what we’re doing,” Balinska says. “Our editing process is rigorous, but they still want to learn how to communicate their research and reach more people.”
Will this kind of interest in communicating about research by some academics help change status-quo academic writing? “Believe it or not,” when compared to their peers in other parts of the world, “U.S. academics are probably the most open to the idea of accessible language,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ken M Is The Most Epic Troll On The Internet
http://gizmodo.com/ken-m-is-the-most-epic-troll-on-the-internet-1739028329
Ken M has lurked since 2011, masterfully trolling comment sections across digital media.
Ken M has achieved what few trolls can dare to dream of. He has his own dedicated subreddit, with 58k subscribers, /r/KenM. The subreddit’s been around for years
His official Facebook page, which lists him as a “professional dirtpig,” has 20k Likes, and he is also on Twitter and Tumblr. His notoriety was such that College Humor paid him to run a column, The Troll, which made him, in truth, a professional dirtpig.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Get ‘em out for the… readers: The Sun scraps its online paywall
96 per cent collapse in traffic prompts rethink from the Murdoch empire
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/30/the_sun_drops_paywall/
Rupert Murdoch’s flagship British tabloid, The Sun, is to abandon its paywall in search of greater web traffic as it seeks to compete with big online news hitters such as the Daily Mail.
According to the Guardian, the move was set to be officially announced on Friday and implemented by the end of November.
Back in July 2013, the last time the Sun’s web traffic was publicly audited, it had about 30 million unique users per month.
The Guardian claims that the Sun website now reaches about a million readers per day – a collapse of 96 per cent from two years ago – and has already relaxed the paywall on selected stories. Trade news title Press Gazette reports that the News UK-owned website now has about 200,000 paying subscribers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
7 Reasons You Should Create a Mailing List for Your Blog
https://www.zoho.com/forms/blog/7-reasons-you-should-create-a-mailing-list-for-your-blog.html
Though people consider it outdated, email has only evolved and grown stronger. The reason? People read emails that promise good reads for the future.
If your site has content worth reading, you should consider a mailing list. Here’s why.
Discover your audience.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Alex Kantrowitz / BuzzFeed:
Facebook tweaks real name policy: starting in December, users will be allowed to provide context when Facebook requires their name be “confirmed”
Facebook Responds To Open Letter Criticizing ‘Real Names’ Policy
The changes come after activists criticized the company in an open letter.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/facebook-is-making-enforcement-changes-to-its-real-names-pol#.vj6mZ55Jx
Facebook today announced a couple of process improvements meant to smooth the road for those unfairly removed from its service due to its ‘real names’ policy. The changes are designed to give people caught up in the policy more room to provide context, and will also now require more information from anyone reporting violations.
The policy, which requires people to go by their “authentic name” on Facebook, has been heavily criticized, largely by members of the trans community as well as advocates who find it dangerous to use their real names in their work.
“We want to reduce the number of people who are asked to verify their name on Facebook, when they are already using the name people know them by,” wrote Facebook VP of Growth Alex Schultz in a letter the company released today. “We want to make it easier for people to confirm their name if necessary,” he added.
To that end, those required to “confirm” their name to Facebook will now have the ability to add context and details to the cases they make to the company. They were previously unable to do so. “This should help our Community Operations team better understand the situation,”
Once someone gets shut out of Facebook for violating the real-names policy, the process of “confirming” an authentic name can be arduous and frustrating.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Leslie Picker / New York Times:
When asked if Netflix would create a live evening newscast, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings says he doesn’t “invest in things that are dying”
Netflix’s Reed Hastings Sees Need for More Content
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/04/business/dealbook/netflixs-reed-hastings-sees-need-for-more-content.html?_r=0
Attention cable cord-cutters: Do not expect to see live sports or evening newscasts on Netflix anytime soon.
When asked whether Netflix would ever create a live evening newscast, Reed Hastings, the company’s chief executive and one of its founders, responded: “You don’t want to invest in things that are dying.” He also said that he did not see a day when the site would offer live sporting events.
He did concede that making high-quality shows was “very challenging.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Lucia Moses / Digiday:
How the New York Times is approaching notifications: increasing personalization, including storytelling, and more effective tracking — Inside The New York Times’ new push notifications team — This is the first article in a series on “The Mobile Publisher,” a look at how publishers …
Inside The New York Times’ new push notifications team
http://digiday.com/publishers/inside-new-york-times-new-push-notifications-team/
This is the first article in a series on “The Mobile Publisher,” a look at how publishers are tackling challenges in the shift to mobile, from design to content to monetization.
For publishers that have spent big money on mobile apps, the challenge now is not just getting people to download it but getting them to use it — and that’s where the push notification comes in.
The New York Times in September created an 11-person team, some of which are shared, to focus on messaging and push alerts. It is led by Andrew Phelps, who was formerly the Times’ iOS lead and now has the title of product director of messaging and push. Phelps, who oversees a lot of experiments in this area and works with news editors to push out alerts, sees 2016 as a big year for push.
“We used to be standing on a hill and shouting messages at people,” he said. Now, by comparison, he said, “There’s a growing number of users who only engage with us when we send a push.”
Growing that number is a battle, though. People may spend most of their mobile screen time on apps, but the vast majority of that time is spent on just five apps. Meantime, publishers that haven’t invested in mobile apps stand to be disaggregated by the big social platforms,
The push notification has great potential for personalization and, in this way, the Times is joining other publishers in thinking beyond the breaking-news alert to how it can customize notifications to people’s interests. At the Times, personalization can take a couple of forms. One is customizing pushes to people based on reading history. If you read a lot of politics stories on the Times, for example, the Times can be reasonably sure its recent magazine profile of Donald Trump might appeal to you.
The Times is also testing pushes based on time of day and language.
Personalization has other applications. Now, desktop users can choose to get alerts when their favorite writer or columnist is published (it’s in beta, so only available to a portion of desktop users); the Times plans to extend that feature to mobile devices as well.
Push goes beyond breaking news
Once, the push notification sent only the top or breaking stories; that approach seems simplistic and dated now. The Times is well aware that when news breaks, people may see the same headline in multiple places. So along with customizing its pushes, it’s trying to make them stand out by adopting the more informal writing style it created for the Apple Watch. “We’re sort of treating push as a new form of storytelling,” Phelps said.
Measuring effectiveness
Speaking of opting out, the “tap-through” rate is a good indicator of whether a publisher’s pushes are effective in getting people back to their apps.
Tomi Engdahl says:
New York Times to re-tool video operation, with buyouts and new hire
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2015/11/8581695/new-york-times-re-tool-video-operation-buyouts-and-new-hires
The New York Times is offering buyouts to employees in its video department while also recruiting new video talent.
Effective Tuesday, all members of the video staff will be eligible to apply for a buyout, and the Times will consider the offers on a case by case basis. Some layoffs could be possible, executive editor Dean Baquet told staff on Tuesday in a memo.
At the same time, Baquet said the Times “will do some targeted hiring to add the kinds of deep experience, news judgment and creativity we believe essential to take our video to a higher level.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Essena O’Neill quits Instagram claiming social media ‘is not real life’
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/nov/03/instagram-star-essena-oneill-quits-2d-life-to-reveal-true-story-behind-images
Australian teenager with more than 612,000 Instagram followers radically rewrites her ‘self-promoting’ history on social media (and launches new website)
An Australian teenager with more than half a million followers on Instagram has quit the platform, describing it as “contrived perfection made to get attention”, and called for others to quit social media – perhaps with help from her new website.
Essena O’Neill, 18, said she was able to make an income from marketing products to her 612,000 followers on Instagram – “$2000AUD a post EASY”. But her dramatic rejection of social media celebrity has won her praise.
On 27 October she deleted more than 2,000 pictures “that served no real purpose other than self-promotion”, and dramatically edited the captions to the remaining 96 posts in a bid to to reveal the manipulation, mundanity, and even insecurity behind them.
“Why would you tell your followers that you’re paid a lot to promote what you promote? Why would you tell your followers that you literally just do shoots every day to take pictures for Instagram?” she said in a 22-minute vlog posted to YouTube, titled “HOW PEOPLE MAKE 1000’s ON SOCIAL MEDIA”. “Like, it’s not cool. No one thinks that’s radical, or revolutionary.
Tomi Engdahl says:
So, Tsu Me: Why Facebook Is Terrified of This Virtually Unknown Competitor and What It Could Mean For the Future of the Internet
http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/8328524
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hipster Barbie Is So Much Better at Instagram Than You
http://www.wired.com/2015/09/hipster-barbie-much-better-instagram/
Socality Barbie is a fantastic Instagram account satirizing the great millennial adventurer trend in photography. It’s an endless barrage of pensive selfies in exotic locales, arty snapshots of coffee, and just the right filter on everything. Anyone who’s flipped through an issue of Kinfolk gets the aesthetic. And it’s everywhere on Instagram.
The woman behind the account is a wedding photographer in Portland, Oregon, who wishes to remain anonymous so to preserve Socality Barbie’s authenticity.
Her fashionably disheveled wardrobe is often handmade—a hipster backpack made from an iron-on patch and leather, a beanie cut from the finger of a glove.
Captions like Always gram your coffee or it didn’t happen and Great things never came from comfort zones are pitch-perfect platitudes.
The creator of Socality Barbie understands why such feeds are popular. Everyone likes breathtaking photos of mountains and beaches, and everyone longs for a day when they can just get away from it all. But in the end, this sort of endless visual snacking feels hollow. “I get it, it’s pretty to look at,” she says. “But it’s so dishonest. Nobody actually lives like this. And it’s so overdone that it’s becoming boring.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kristen Hare / Poynter:
Student journalists at University of Missouri talk about covering a local story that has become national — How student journalists at Mizzou are telling a local story that’s become national — Missourian newsroom. Photo by David Rees/Missouri School of Journalism
How student journalists at Mizzou are telling a local story that’s become national
http://www.poynter.org/news/mediawire/383631/how-student-journalists-at-mizzou-are-telling-a-local-story-thats-become-national/
For Daniela Sirtori-Cortina, the story didn’t start when football players protested, or when a student went on a hunger strike, or with any one of the documented racist incidents making news lately. For her, the story began way before it spread to the University of Missouri Columbia with Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, last year.
For a lot of students, she said, that was an awakening.
“I felt like it was an awakening for myself,” said Sirtori-Cortina, a senior and an assistant city editor at the Columbia Missourian, the daily paper that students report for as part of their coursework at Mizzou.
Sirtori-Cortina is Colombian and didn’t experience being a minority until coming to the U.S. for school.
But she is now.
Since the fall semester began, journalists at the Missourian have covered the building tension on their campus that led to Monday’s resignation of the University of Missouri system’s president and MU’s chancellor. Staffers at the Missourian are students, new and advanced, working with student and professional editors at a daily newspaper that covers the community. (Note: I graduated from MU and wrote for the Missourian for a semester.) Now, they’re dealing with the national spotlight, clashes with protesters and the challenges of covering not just the larger community but their own campus.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jack Marshall / Wall Street Journal:
Sources: publishers struggle to extract as much ad revenue from Facebook’s Instant Articles as they do from their own sites; Facebook mulls changes to ad rules — Facebook Mulls Ad Changes for Instant Articles After Publisher Pushback — Publishers encountered challenges because of restrictions imposed by the social network
Facebook Mulls Ad Changes for Instant Articles After Publisher Pushback
Publishers encountered challenges because of restrictions imposed by the social network
http://www.wsj.com/article_email/facebook-mulls-ad-changes-for-instant-articles-after-publisher-pushback-1447281399-lMyQjAxMTE1NDExMTMxNzEwWj
Facebook is experimenting with new advertising approaches for its Instant Articles platform after publishers encountered challenges generating ad revenue because of restrictions imposed by the social network.
Instant Articles, which Facebook rolled out to all iPhone users last month, allows media companies to publish content directly to Facebook feeds instead of posting links to draw users back to their own websites. Twenty publishers are currently enrolled in the program.
The product is still in its infancy, but publishers including The Washington Post, New York Times and LittleThings.com are finding it difficult to extract as much revenue per article from Instant Articles as they do from pages on their own websites, according to people familiar with the situation.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kurt Wagner / Re/code:
Facebook launches Notify, an iOS app that sends notifications for news and other timely content, with 70 media partners, including CNN, NYT, Hulu, and Techmeme — Here’s Notify, Facebook’s New Twitter-Like App for Following Publishers — Facebook is already dominating peoples’ phone time …
Here’s Notify, Facebook’s New Twitter-Like App for Following Publishers
http://recode.net/2015/11/11/facebooks-new-app-notify-pushes-content-to-your-lock-screen/
Facebook is already dominating peoples’ phone time, and now it wants a crack at your lock screen, too.
The social network rolled out a new app called “Notify” on Wednesday specifically to send you mobile notifications from publishers you care about, like BuzzFeed or CNN or The Weather Channel. Details about Notify have been leaking to the press for months, and as with other news apps (or Twitter!), users are asked to follow publishers or “stations” which will then push content throughout the day to their phone’s lock screens.
facebook-notify-pairing
Facebook
The push notifications only include a snippet of information, like a headline, but a link within the notification will send you to the publisher’s mobile webpage, which surfaces inside the app. If you don’t have time to read something right away, you can save content to read later or share it with others through platforms like — you guessed it — Facebook.
The million-dollar question, then, is why Facebook is building an app for this at all. The company already has News Feed for content discovery and 1.5 billion people who use Facebook every month. Why send people more notifications for the things that, in theory, they could get by following these publishers on Facebook anyway?
The thinking, according to Michael Cerda, product director at Facebook, is that mobile notifications are their own medium, separate from Facebook or any other news consumption platform.
“People have different ways they want to consume information,” Cerda told Re/code. “Search is one way. Social is another way. And we think push notifications might be yet another. We see that as an evolving medium and want to be a part of that.”
Facebook has more than 70 media partners for Notify, from Comedy Central to Harper’s Bazaar, all of which control the content they push out to their followers. The benefit to these partners is obvious: It’s an easy new way to get content in front of people without the same competition that comes with posting in a person’s Facebook or Twitter feed. When users click on a link, they are brought to the publisher’s mobile webpage, not to Facebook, meaning publishers still get the clicks and ad impressions they cherish.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google Makes it Easier to Read Comics on Android Phones
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2495040,00.asp
Smartphones might not be the best place to read digital comics, but Google is doing what it can to improve the experience for comic-book-loving Android users.
The company has made some tweaks to Google Play Books to make it easier for people to read comic books on their smartphones. As is typical for Google, however, these updates aren’t officially live for everyone yet. The company notes that it will begin rolling out its comic-themed upgrades over the next few days for Android users, and those using Google’s apps on iOS will receive them at a later date.
“Reading a comic book is all about following the story and enjoying the art, dialogue and pace the way you want. But navigating a comic can be tricky on a small phone or tablet screen,” Google said in a blog post. “So, we’re introducing a new vertical scrolling experience for comics in landscape mode. Flip your device on its side and you can easily scroll through the story with quick vertical swipes.”
Of course, all the enhancements in the world don’t matter very much if you can’t even find a good comic book to read. To that end, Google is also adjusting the Google Play Store itself to make it easier to shop for comics.
Solving the age-old question: Batman or Superman?
http://officialandroid.blogspot.fi/2015/11/solving-age-old-question-batman-or.html
It’s a multi-generational debate—are you team Batman or team Superman? While we can’t personally help you make this very difficult decision, we can tell you it’s never been a better time to be a comic book fan. With a smartphone in your pocket, you have a sharp color screen at your fingertips and instant access to read any comic whenever and wherever you are. Holy Android!
Google Play offers binge-worthy comics from all the major publishers, including DC Comics, Marvel, Image, IDW and Dark Horse.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Lucia Moses / Digiday:
Some publishers complain about underwhelming traffic from Apple News, no real-time data on posts and users, delayed comScore integration — Publishers are underwhelmed with Apple News app — When Time Inc. CEO Joe Ripp expressed frustration with his company’s performance on Apple News last week …
Publishers are underwhelmed with Apple News app
http://digiday.com/publishers/publishers-underwhelmed-apple-news-app/
When Time Inc. CEO Joe Ripp expressed frustration with his company’s performance on Apple News last week, his complaints apparently were just the tip of the iceberg. Other publishing execs are unhappy about everything from the traffic they’re getting from the two-month-old news aggregation app to the user experience to the data Apple’s giving them.
It’s hard to really know how much traffic to expect from a new platform. But when Apple launched the mobile app Sept. 16, it was baked into the home screen for iOS 9, which reportedly has had the fastest adoption rate ever for Apple, with 66 percent of iPhone users having upgraded to it, as of Nov. 2. So given the adoption rate and Apple News’ coveted real estate, publishers pumped a lot of their content into the app, seeing strong potential to reach new audiences. (Apple said last month that the app has 40 million users.)
But as one publisher, who like others wouldn’t talk on the record for fear of jeopardizing their relationship with Apple, said, “The traffic is underwhelming.”
For that publisher, that means under 1 million views a month — not terrible, but not worth it considering
“They’re not generating a ton of views or traffic, and the data they provide is basically nonexistent,” another publisher said. “They claim they’re working out kinks, and they probably will. I’m disappointed, but I’m not giving up on it.”
It may not be an issue for publishers that aren’t getting much traffic from Apple News now, but if the app becomes a significant source of traffic, not having comScore’s independent tracking makes advertising a hard sell. An Apple spokeswoman wouldn’t say how much traffic the app was sending publishers but that it planned to integrate comScore into the app and a data dashboard “very soon.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Brendan Klinkenberg / BuzzFeed:
How tech firms responded to Paris attacks: Facebook’s Safety Check used in first man-made disaster, emergency response tools activated by Airbnb, Uber, others — How Tech Learned From Past Crises And Reacted To The Paris Attacks — What Facebook, Airbnb, and Uber did when terrorists attacked Paris.
How Tech Learned From Past Crises And Reacted To The Paris Attacks
What Facebook, Airbnb, and Uber did when terrorists attacked Paris.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/brendanklinkenberg/startsups-rise-to-the-occasion#.wmQA0oO2p
There are a growing number of technology platforms that people around the world depend on each day — a dependency that often becomes much starker in times of crisis.
Following Friday’s terrorist attacks across Paris, which left at least 129 dead, many of the websites and apps we use on a regular basis made an effort to help those caught in the disaster.
But the process can also be fraught with sensitive considerations, with companies not wanting to be seen to be capitalizing on tragedy.
In the midst of the attacks on Friday, Facebook deployed “Safety Check,” a tool the company built for “disasters.” Safety Check uses geolocation to let those close to a crisis zone check in and let their Facebook friends know that they’re safe.
In the past 24 hours, 4.1 million people notified 360 million people that they were safe using Facebook’s Safety Check.
With over one billion people checking into the service every day, Facebook is uniquely situated when it comes to trying to communicate with the outside world in one simple step.
Safety Check was first developed in October, 2014, and has been used five times since then, most notably after the earthquake in Nepal earlier this year.
“We chose to activate Safety Check in Paris because we observed a lot of activity on Facebook as the events were unfolding,” Alex Schultz, Facebook’s Vice President of Growth, said in a statement. “In the middle of a complex, uncertain situation affecting many people, Facebook became a place where people were sharing information and looking to understand the condition of their loved ones.”
“This activation will change our policy around Safety Check and when we activate it for other serious and tragic incidents in the future.”
Uber did, however, disable all dynamic pricing
The company has learned from past crises
Airbnb also urged all its hosts in Paris to open their homes (or listings) to those affected by the attacks or left stranded in the city in the aftermath.
Twitter was also instrumental in finding safe places for those caught in Paris to stay.
Twitter was also instrumental in finding safe places for those caught in Paris to stay. The service saw two major hashtags go viral on Friday night, one of which — #PorteOuverte — was used to signal that its sender either needed a place to go, or had a place to offer. #PorteOuverte had 1 million tweets in 10 hours, averaging 7,000 tweets a second at its peak.
Twitter also utilized its new summarization feature, Moments, to curate the news into an easier-to-digest format culled from the platform. Its livestreaming service Periscope also gave an on-the-ground perspective to the events.
While Reddit’s enormous, international, and web-native user base is well-suited to dig up information, its unstructured and unregulated investigations have previously led to incorrect assumptions and unfounded accusations
Tomi Engdahl says:
Andy Greenberg / Wired:
How The Intercept used anonymous Tor whistleblower tool SecureDrop for its prison phone call story — SecureDrop Leak Tool Produces a Massive Trove of Prison Docs — It’s been more than two years since the debut of SecureDrop, a piece of software designed to help whistleblowers easily …
SecureDrop Leak Tool Produces a Massive Trove of Prison Docs
http://www.wired.com/2015/11/securedrop-leak-tool-produces-a-massive-trove-of-prison-docs/
It’s been more than two years since the debut of SecureDrop, a piece of software designed to help whistleblowers easily and anonymously leak secrets to media outlets over the Tor anonymity network. Now, that system is finally bearing fruit, in the form of a massive dump of files from one of the country’s largest prison phone companies.
On Wednesday, the investigative news site the Intercept published a story based on a collection of 70 million call records taken from a database of Securus, a Dallas, Texas-based company that provides phone service to more than 2,200 prisons around the United States. The database, which the Intercept says was stolen from Securus by a hacker, shows that the company keeps records of every phone call made by the more than 1.2 million inmates who use the service in 37 states, including the time, phone numbers called, inmate names, and even the audio recordings of every call. Those records are routinely sold to law enforcement customers, according to the Intercept’s reporting, and most damningly, include inmate conversations with lawyers that are meant to be protected by the privacy of attorney-client privilege. “This reveals exactly how much surveillance is going on in the criminal justice system,” Jordan Smith, a co-author of the story, tells WIRED. “Many of these calls should never have been recorded in the first place.”
Despite SecureDrop’s proven usefulness to the Intercept’s operation, it’s still far from a perfect system. It only allows for a maximum upload of 500 megabytes. In the case of the prison phone leak, that meant that after receiving a sample of the database, Lee and the source had to work out another Tor-based method
Tomi Engdahl says:
Claire Wardle / Tow Center for Digital Journalism:
Frontline virtual reality case study: narrative remains central, production quality requires long-turnaround time, various journalistic uses should be explored — New Report: Virtual Reality Journalism — After decades of research and development, virtual reality appears to be on the cusp of mainstream adoption.
New Report: Virtual Reality Journalism
http://towcenter.org/new-report-virtual-reality-journalism/
After decades of research and development, virtual reality appears to be on the cusp of mainstream adoption. For journalists, the combination of immersive video capture and dissemination via mobile VR players is particularly exciting. It promises to bring audiences closer to a story than any previous platform.
Two technological advances have enabled this opportunity: cameras that can record a scene in 360-degree, stereoscopic video and a new generation of headsets. This new phase of VR places the medium squarely into the tradition of documentary—a path defined by the emergence of still photography and advanced by better picture quality, color, film, and higher-definition video. Each of these innovations allowed audiences to more richly experience the lives of others. The authors of this report wish to explore whether virtual reality can take us farther still.
To answer this question, we assembled a team of VR experts, documentary journalists, and media scholars to conduct research-based experimentation.
Finally, we make the following recommendations for journalists seeking to work in virtual reality:
Journalists must choose a place on the spectrum of VR technology. Given current technology constraints, a piece of VR journalism can be of amazing quality, but with that comes the need for a team with extensive expertise and an expectation of long-turnaround—demands that require a large budget, as well as timeline flexibility.
Draw on narrative technique. Journalists making VR pieces should expect that storytelling techniques will remain powerful in this medium. The temptation when faced with a new medium, especially a highly technical one, is to concentrate on mastering the technology—often at the expense of conveying a compelling story.
The whole production team needs to understand the form, and what raw material the finished work will need, before production starts.
More research, development, and theoretical work are necessary, specifically around how best to conceive of the roles of journalists and users—and how to communicate that relationship to users. Virtual reality allows the user to feel present in the scene. Although that is a constructed experience, it is not yet clear how journalists should portray the relationship between themselves, the user, and the subjects of their work.
Journalists should aim to use production equipment that simplifies the workflow. Simpler equipment is likely to reduce production and post-production efforts, bringing down costs and widening the swath for the number of people who can produce VR. This will often include tradeoffs: In some cases simpler equipment will have reduced capability, for example cameras which shoot basic 360-degree video instead of 360-degree, stereoscopic video.
As VR production, authoring, and distribution technology is developed, the journalism industry must understand and articulate its requirements, and be prepared to act should it appear those needs aren’t being met. The virtual reality industry is quickly developing new technology, which is likely to rapidly reduce costs, give authors new capabilities, and reach users in new ways.
The industry should explore (and share knowledge about) many different journalistic applications of VR, beyond highly produced documentaries.
Choose teams that can work collaboratively. This is a complex medium, with few standards or shared assumptions about how to produce good work. In its current environment, most projects will involve a number of people with disparate backgrounds who need to share knowledge, exchange ideas, make missteps and correct them. Without good communication and collaboration abilities, that will be difficult.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tow Center for Digital Journalism:
Study: chat apps can be effective for engaging new and hard to reach audiences, are good sources during breaking news, and can speed up verification process — Guide to Chat Apps — PROJECT LEADER: —
Guide to Chat Apps
http://towcenter.org/research/guide-to-chat-apps/
Messaging apps now have more global users than traditional social networks—which means they will play an increasingly important role in the distribution of digital journalism in the future. While chat platforms initially rose to prominence by offering a low-cost, web-based alternative to SMS, over time they evolved into multimedia hubs that support photos, videos, games, payments, and more.
While many news organizations don’t yet use messaging apps, digitally savvy outlets like BuzzFeed, Mashable, The Huffington Post, and VICE have accompanied a more traditional player in BBC News by establishing a presence on a number of these platforms.
Drawing upon our interviews and case studies, we identify a number of opportunities and challenges for organizations using—or hoping to use—messaging apps for news. We argue that to devise a successful messaging app strategy, publishers must understand regional strongholds, user demographics, and popular features of each app. Advantages to the chat ecosystem include huge, untapped audiences; high engagement through push notifications; unique products like stickers and “chatbots” (see glossary for definitions); and the opportunity to build community through chat rooms and crowdsourced storytelling. Meanwhile, challenges include limited analytics tools and a fragmented social landscape boasting roughly a dozen messaging apps, each with over 50 million registered users.
Our case studies illustrate a number of ways in which major news outlets have utilized various messaging apps, each with its own niche characteristics. In the past two years, many platforms—including Snapchat, Viber, Kik, LINE, WeChat, and Telegram—introduced official channels that publishers like CNN, The New York Times, The Huffington Post, and Cliff Central now leverage for content distribution and user engagement. Other players, like WhatsApp, have no official offering for media owners, but this has not deterred organizations—most notably the BBC—from launching experimental campaigns.
Our research indicates that one of the greatest benefits of chat apps is the opportunity to use these platforms as live, sandbox environments. The chance to play and iterate has helped several news organizations develop mobile-first content and experiential offerings that would have proved difficult in other digital environments.
As happened after the early days of social media, before which a proliferation of services (some with regional strengths) led to intense competition for user attention, we expect to see some eventual consolidation among chat apps.
Elsewhere, we conclude that issues around information, privacy, personal security, and mobile data penetration will unfold in different ways around the world
The key findings of this report can be summarized as follows:
Messaging apps offer strong opportunities to engage new or difficult-to-reach demographics.
Innovations such as bespoke (or customized) stickers and emojis can help news outlets quickly build significant audiences via messaging apps.
Messaging apps enable news outlets to gather (potentially exclusive) user-generated content and can become a major source during breaking news situations
News outlets may need to experiment with a variety of chat apps to decipher which content type best suits the audiences of each app.
Messaging apps can provide unique opportunities for giving audiences direct access to content and publishers
Messaging apps provide a space for news outlets to engage their audiences with different—possibly lighter—types of content (e.g., The Washington Post has used Kik to distribute games, quizzes, and chat adventures).
Even apps that are not as geared toward publishing as some of their competitors, such as WhatsApp, hold great potential for news outlets if used strategically.
Messaging apps not only facilitate communication with eyewitnesses in areas where other forms of communication aren’t functioning (e.g., during extreme weather conditions), they can also provide a platform for people who don’t feel safe speaking on the telephone.
Messaging apps are not used solely to drive traffic to websites
When sourcing user-generated content, apps like WhatsApp, which are tied to a user’s phone number, can significantly speed up the verification process as they provide a direct line to the content creator/eyewitness.
Messaging apps are relatively new and evolving at a rapid pace. Consequently, many news outlets are still in the process of establishing strategies to best utilize these platforms.
There is emerging evidence that messaging apps may drive traffic back to outlets’ other, more traditional platforms
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kyle Chayka / New York Magazine:
For some, Instagram captions have become a new blogging tool, because of simple, direct communication with an audience — Why Instagram Captions Are the New Blogging — As Facebook gets even more corporate, Instagram is growing as a space for authentic blogging. — Pin It
Why Instagram Captions Are the New Blogging
http://nymag.com/following/2015/11/why-instagram-captions-are-the-new-blogging.html#
Instagram, a minimalist, mobile-focused app for sharing photos, might seem like a strange place to keep a public diary. Facebook, which aggressively positions itself as an ongoing digital record of your life, comes across as a more natural place to share updates and idle musings. But the Rock’s not alone: People are increasingly turning toward Instagram not just as a place to post filtered photos, but to spill their lives and thoughts into the captions as well.
Why is this happening? For one thing, if you’re already posting pretentious, evocative images, you’re more likely to be in an artsy-musings state of mind. But it’s more than that: Facebook, at 1.5 billion users, has felt cacophonous and impersonal for a while. Many of us use it as an address book more than a means of communication; with its sheer density of information, writing a sincere post there feels a little like shouting on the streets of Manhattan. Instagram might eventually grow as large as Facebook, but its uncomplicated design and tightly curated feed make it more than just a photo app — it’s also one of the more potent blogging spaces around.
Instagram limits each caption to 2,200 characters. The potential length becomes extremely annoying as a marketing tool, and brands often abuse it to post contests or elaborate copy (see this explainer from Crowdfire). But in the hands of an average user, it provides plenty of space for a few observations of “the enormous and simple beauty of ordinary life,” as @keishua_ writes in one post, a snapshot of her cat gazing out the window.
Tomi Engdahl says:
No, the EU is not going to make hyperlinks illegal
But its copyright changes will have a big impact on the web
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/16/eu_wont_make_hyperlinks_illegal_copyright/
You may have read that the European Commission intends to prevent hyperlinks to copyrighted material. The good news is that this isn’t true.
The bad news is that there is a real proposal to change copyright law that could change how we use hyperlinks – the bedrock of the World Wide Web.
Practically everything is someone’s copyright unless otherwise excluded, which means that under the strictest interpretation, linking to any website containing any text or imagery would be a copyright infringement.
Some creators have gone to court making the case for this interpretation, but thankfully the courts have tended to take a much narrower view – recognising quite rightly that any restriction on hyperlinking would seriously undermine how the World Wide Web works.
Repackaging content
However, following the leak of a European Commission draft proposal, some have raised the alarm that things are about to change for the worst.
According to the leaked draft, copyright holders are concerned about their content being monetised by others, without licensing, through content aggregation. This is where a rights holder or creator releases their own content online, which is then aggregated by a third party, re-packaged and re-sold.
Under the existing interpretation of the right of communication to the public, if a work has been made available online, linking to it does not expose it to new audiences, so the right remains intact and linking is not an infringement. But the commission proposes to overhaul these rules in order to harmonise them across the EU now that some member states have tried to solve this issue on their own.
The web must be protected
So I’m happy to report that hyperlinking without permission is not about to be made illegal
Tomi Engdahl says:
Chris Dixon / Medium:
What media firms can learn from the PC video game industry’s embrace of freemium models, remixes, mods, and crowdsourcing
Lessons from the PC video game industry
The future of media is here — it’s just not evenly distributed
https://medium.com/@cdixon/lessons-from-the-pc-video-game-industry-3350bb7713de
The success or failure of tech and media products depends on complicated interactions between products, economics, technology, and culture. It’s very hard to predict what will work and what won’t. Today, billions of people carry internet-connected supercomputers in their pockets, the largest knowledge repository in the world is a massive crowdsourced encyclopedia, and a social network is one of the 10 most valuable companies in the world. Ten years ago, someone who predicted these things would have seemed crazy.
The subtitle to this post is a variation of William Gibson’s famous remark: “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” An obvious follow up question is: if the future is already here, where can I find it? There is no easy answer, but history shows there are characteristic patterns. For example, it’s often useful to look at what the smartest people work on in their free time, or things that are growing rapidly but widely dismissed as toys.
Another clue to the future is to look for communities that embrace rapid, Darwinian experimentation. Entrepreneurs are in the business of running experiments (and VCs are in the business of funding experiments). Experiments are how we collectively navigate through the startup idea maze to discover products and business models that work.
Even if you have no interest in video games, if you are interested in media, you should be interested in PC gaming. Over the past decade, PC gaming has, for a variety of reasons, become a hotbed of experimentation. These experiments have resulted in a new practices and business models — some of them surprising and counterintuitive — that provide valuable lessons for the rest of the media industry.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Wall Street Journal:
Facebook allows Google to crawl and index public profiles, Pages, Groups, and Events from its mobile app — Google Gets Surprise Ally in Mobile-App Search Push: Facebook — Google’s effort to keep its search engine relevant in a world of mobile apps just got a boost from a big rival.
Google Gets Surprise Ally in Mobile-App Search Push: Facebook
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/11/16/google-gets-surprise-ally-in-mobile-app-search-push-facebook/
Google’s effort to keep its search engine relevant in a world of mobile apps just got a boost from a big rival.
Facebook Inc., operator of the world’s largest social network, on Friday began allowing Google to crawl and index its mobile app, a spokeswoman for Google parent Alphabet Inc.GOOGL +1.40% said.
The agreement means that results from Google searches on smartphones will display some content from Facebook’s app, including public profile information. The listings will appear as “deep links” that will take users to the relevant part of the Facebook app, the spokeswoman said.
That largely mirrors how Google indexes information from public Facebook profiles on the Web. It also has access to content such as business listings called Pages, Groups and Events.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Margaret Sullivan / New York Times:
The need to restage scenes for filming virtual reality means the tool may not be appropriate for some journalistic purposes — The Tricky Terrain of Virtual Reality — The arrival of a small cardboard box with last Sunday’s Times represented, in its unobtrusive way, a collision of cultures.
The Tricky Terrain of Virtual Reality
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/15/public-editor/new-york-times-virtual-reality-margaret-sullivan-public-editor.html
The arrival of a small cardboard box with last Sunday’s Times represented, in its unobtrusive way, a collision of cultures.
Here was a piece of cutting-edge journalism — promising virtual reality, no less — arriving the old-fashioned way, hand delivered with the print newspaper. The box itself (when assembled, it looked like a Fresh Direct container for three jumbo eggs) struck me as an almost instant anachronism: ready for its place on a historical timeline of the digital age’s evolution. This is what happened in 2015.
But at the moment, this is new. The Times has leapt into this technology with fanfare and has gathered acclaim. The goggles contained within the cardboard, when combined with a downloaded app on a smartphone, gives viewers a 360-degree immersion into an 11-minute film called “The Displaced,” the stories of three children — from Lebanon, Ukraine and South Sudan — torn from their homes by war.
Writing in Fortune, Rick Broida described his reaction: “Five seconds into the film, I was struck by the immediacy — and the intimacy — of the images. These aren’t computer-generated faces and landscapes; they’re real people in real places, and I felt like I was standing there myself, not just observing from afar.”
Well before The Times’s experiment, Tom Kent, the standards editor at The Associated Press, wrote on Medium that the nexus of journalism and V.R. technology means working through the challenges: “Common understandings of what techniques are ethically acceptable and what needs to be disclosed to viewers can go a long way toward guarding the future of V.R. as a legitimate journalistic tool.”
“There is a whole host of ethical considerations and standards issues that have to be grappled with,”
“Since V.R. films a scene in 360 degrees, in every direction at the same time, there is no place for the photographer or filmmaker to stand unless they become a constant character in the scene. In traditional photo or video, they stand behind their camera and craft scenes so they do not appear to be present.” So, he said, “we had to hide.”
Mr. Corbett told me that “it would be crazy to think that all the implications, questions and issues have been settled and determined, or that we have a fully formed set of rules.” After all, he said, “It took decades to develop a body of best practices in news photography.”
An ethical reality check for virtual reality journalism
https://medium.com/@tjrkent/an-ethical-reality-check-for-virtual-reality-journalism-8e5230673507
Virtual reality journalism is with us to stay, and will become even more realistic and immersive as technology improves. Already, virtual reality headsets and vivid sound tracks can put a viewer into stunning, 360-degree scenes of a bombed-out town in Syria. They can drop him onto a dark street in Sanford, Florida, as George Zimmerman surveils Trayvon Martin.
It’s only a matter of time until VR simulation looks more and more like the actual event. The slightly chubby, Lego-like characters that populate some of today’s VR will likely begin to look much more like the actual newsmakers — perhaps indistinguishably so.
The power of VR transforms the news viewer’s experience from just learning about events to being in them. It has the potential to attract young viewers to the news as never before.
Viewers need to know how VR producers expect their work to be perceived, what’s been done to guarantee authenticity and what part of a production may be, frankly, supposition.
Here are some building blocks to consider for these disclosures and codes:
● What’s real? At the Associated Press, our interactive team painstakingly mapped a series of luxury locales in high-resolution imagery for a VR piece on high-end hotels, cruise liners and air travel. Everything in a project like that can be photographed precisely.
But things can become more complicated if a VR modeler wants to re-create a moving, active news event in 3-D on the basis of 2-D photos or video taken at the time.
● Image integrity. How much modification of images should be allowed?
● Are there competing views of what happened? Often there’s controversy over how a newsworthy event unfolded.
● What’s the goal of the presentation? VR technology has a powerful ability to inspire empathy for those depicted in their productions. TechCrunch called VR “the empathy machine.”
In traditional media, too, the desire to paint a cause or a person in sympathetic tones can conflict with impartial, hard-headed reporting. But the potential for empathy is even greater in the VR world, since viewers can bond far more easily with a 3-D character they’re practically touching. Music can also be used to evoke specific emotions among VR viewers. VR producers would do well to make clear to their audiences what the fundamental goal of their journalism is.
● What’s happening beyond the VR scene? A VR world is a controlled environment. When a viewer straps on a VR headset and starts walking, there’s a powerful impression of roaming freely through the virtual world.
But they’re not. The limits of the VR world are circumscribed by the imagery the producer chooses to include, just as 2-D photography depends on the angles photographers select.
● And more. Many other ethical issues arise with VR. Must the VR rendition of an event cover the same amount of time as the original?
VR is becoming a powerful technique to hold and influence news audiences. But if producers focus solely on optimizing the technology or creating empathy for their characters, VR’s journalistic credibility will be threatened. Common understandings of what techniques are ethically acceptable and what needs to be disclosed to viewers can go a long way toward guarding the future of VR as a legitimate journalistic tool.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jack Marshall / Wall Street Journal:
Companies Target Journalists With Ads on Facebook — Messages are targeted to people who work at specific media outlets — The next time you see an article about a company or product, consider this: it’s possible the author heard about it through a Facebook ad.
Companies Target Journalists With Ads on Facebook
Messages are targeted to people who work at specific media outlets
http://www.wsj.com/articles/companies-target-journalists-with-ads-on-facebook-1447664403
The next time you see an article about a company or product, consider this: it’s possible the author heard about it through a Facebook ad.
Marketers, public relations companies and advertising agencies are increasingly using social media to carefully place messages in front of journalists and media professionals, in the hope that doing so will “earn” them or their clients coverage, or at least keep them top-of-mind for a mention.
This concept of targeting ads to “influencers” in certain fields is not a new one, but marketers say the increasingly granular targeting tools being offered by companies such as Facebook and Twitter are allowing them to get more sophisticated with their efforts.
It’s not uncommon for companies to target tailored messages to journalists at specific outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times or USA Today, experts say.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Think those points when setting up paywalls and similar solutions to media sites:
Pushbullet’s new paywall is a perfect example of how not to monetize an app
http://thenextweb.com/dd/2015/11/17/pushbullets-new-paywall-is-a-perfect-example-of-how-not-to-monetize-an-app/
In the ongoing struggle between users wanting free services and developers trying to eat, Pushbullet has emerged as the heel.
Today’s addition by subtraction — introducing a Pro tier that has features sniped from the free version — is in poor taste. Not only did Pushbullet throttle existing users, but it’s asking for $5 per month or $40 per year.
Judging by the feedback on Pushbullet’s announcement and on Reddit, most users are simply dropping the service cold. The crux of their discontent seems to be core features like universal copy and paste now being hidden behind the paywall.
Even if Pushbullet walked this back and admitted defeat, the damage is done.
I’ll point to other recent monetization strategies as more fan-friendly.
Patronage and Pedometer++’s tip jar are the same thing. You give what you can, and the world keeps spinning. In some ways, it’s better than paying for an app
Arment said only 20 percent of Overcast users were paying for the original app outright.
That meant 80 percent were using an “inferior” app with less features.
Patronage isn’t popular because it’s out-of-pocket spending. It works because it’s not mandatory. By offering the ability to let users donate rather than force them to, patronage strikes a happy medium.
Pushbullet went full-throttle, though. It seems as though it expected users to pay for features they relied on rather than offering more value. More to the point, Pushbullet expected users to pay what it expected of them to continue using it as they normally do.
Android Central’s Phil Nickinson calls it a shakedown. He’s not wrong. Where Pushbullet erred wasn’t with monetizing the service; it was in demanding ransom. Users are often glib about their love of a platform or app, and Pushbullet seemed to think it had won the hearts and minds of its fans.
Pining through the comments, it seems the price point was a bit out of reach.
Pushbullet pushed many users away. Likely for good. Even if it chose to rethink their strategy, some users won’t care.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kara Swisher / Re/code:
Sources: Yahoo media executive Rob Barrett, who was in charge of media strategy and operations, departs the company
Yet Another Top Yahoo Media Exec Departs
http://recode.net/2015/11/20/yet-another-top-yahoo-media-exec-departs/
Yahoo’s Rob Barrett, who has most recently been its head of media strategy and operations, has left the company, according to multiple sources.
Formerly the head of Yahoo’s powerful news and finance unit, Barrett has been in charge of content strategy and development over all of Yahoo media properties.
Another top media exec, Ken Fuchs, also departed recently, as well as media head and CMO Kathy Savitt.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Margaret Sullivan / New York Times:
New York Times commenting system criticized for favoring verified users, plans to include more automated moderation, faster posting for frequent commenters
Change Needed for Commenting That Favors the ‘Verified’
http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/11/20/change-needed-for-commenting-that-favors-the-verified/
In emails, in online comments and even in that wonder of our time called face-to-face conversation, I hear a lot about Times readers’ frustration with the existence of “verified commenters.”
These few hundred people whose comments are posted without moderation can end up dominating the reader commenting system. And that causes quite understandable resentment among thousands of others.
several changes are in the works that should ease this frustration.
Most important is that, within a few months, a more automated system of commenting should be in place. No longer will human beings need to moderate every comment that is not “verified.” Many comments – especially those written by longtime, proven commenters – will be posted without the wait for a moderator to approve them. The change also means that up to twice the number of articles — currently 23 per day — will be open for comments.
“We will be much less dependent on moderation,” Mr. Etim said. “If you have a history of a lot of good comments that have been approved,” your comments will go through immediately. “We’ve already built the algorithm.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Washington Post:
How the media division of ISIS creates a dual image as a benevolent destination and a menacing, violent domain — Inside the surreal world of the Islamic State’s propaganda machine — CONFRONTING THE ‘CALIPHATE’ | This is part of an occasional series about the rise of the Islamic State militant group …
Inside the surreal world of the Islamic State’s propaganda machine
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/inside-the-islamic-states-propaganda-machine/2015/11/20/051e997a-8ce6-11e5-acff-673ae92ddd2b_story.html
What they described resembles a medieval reality show. Camera crews fan out across the caliphate every day, their ubiquitous presence distorting the events they purportedly document. Battle scenes and public beheadings are so scripted and staged that fighters and executioners often perform multiple takes and read their lines from cue cards.
Cameras, computers and other video equipment arrive in regular shipments from Turkey. They are delivered to a media division dominated by foreigners — including at least one American, according to those interviewed — whose production skills often stem from previous jobs they held at news channels or technology companies.
“It is a whole army of media personnel,”
“The media people are more important than the soldiers,” he said. “Their monthly income is higher. They have better cars. They have the power to encourage those inside to fight and the power to bring more recruits to the Islamic State.”
The United States and its allies have found no meaningful answer to this propaganda avalanche.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sneha Johari / MediaNama:
Sources: Times of India requires journalists to file three WhatsApp alerts, three online-first stories per week and three tweets per day, or face reduced pay
Times of India Group links journo salaries with breaking news on WhatsApp groups
http://www.medianama.com/2015/11/223-times-of-india-group-links-journo-salaries-with-breaking-news-on-whatsapp-groups/
The Times of India* group has created a new policy where its journalists’ paychecks will be dependent on whether or not they join specialised WhatsApp groups to share breaking news updates. The emails, of which MediaNama has copies, detail that all journalists must file, every week, at least three WhatsApp alerts, three “online-first” stories and minimum three tweets per working day. Not complying with the policy will result in journalists getting a reduced target variable pay (TVP).
Alerts will go to the online desk: The email adds that the Whatsapp alerts will be factored into the TVP (target variable pay) computation, while another email states that the group’s efforts, which were entirely focused on the print edition previously, have now been directed to its online edition
MediaNama’s take: What journalists do on social media and WhatsApp is their prerogative. Media organisations cannot dictate their employees to send a minimum number of tweets or WhatsApp messages. If the company wants more traffic to its online properties, it should hire a social media or SEO team.
Previous attempts:
– This is not the first time that the Times Group has linked employee salaries with their ability to use social media professionally.
– In 2014, the company wanted to create separate social media accounts for journalists where the company could post on their behalf
Tomi Engdahl says:
Hacking Chinese State Media
http://hackaday.com/2015/11/18/hacking-chinese-state-media/
A while ago, a few journalists from China visited the Metalab hackerspace in Vienna. They wanted to do a story on ‘fablabs’ and ‘makerspaces’, despite the objections to the residents of the Metalab hackerspace. Apparently, mentioning ‘hacking’ on China Central Television (yes, it’s called CCTV) is a big no-no.
Wanting to send a message to at least a few people in China, the members of the hackerspace had to think laterally. Metalab member [amir] came up with a way to encode data that could be printed on t-shirts. These bright, colorful squares featured in all of the interviews with Metalab members carried messages like, “free tibet!”, “remember tian’anmen 1989” and “question the government. dont trust the propaganda”
Tomi Engdahl says:
David Uberti / Columbia Journalism Review:
The Paris-Beirut debate: Why news organizations paid more attention to the attacks in France — The Friday attacks in Paris that killed more than 120 left many American news organizations racing to get pieces in place for wall-to-wall coverage over the weekend.
The Paris-Beirut debate: Why news organizations paid more attention to the attacks in France
http://www.cjr.org/analysis/media_coverage_paris_beirut_attacks.php
The Friday attacks in Paris that killed more than 120 left many American news organizations racing to get pieces in place for wall-to-wall coverage over the weekend.
The story still dominated The New York Times’ front page on Monday, with four stories exploring various angles of the ISIS-planned strikes, their aftermath in France, and global ramifications. But it was a piece on an ISIS attack Thursday in Lebanon, tucked on page A6, that garnered more than 210,000 shares on social media by Tuesday, five times more than the four Paris-related stories combined.
The latter story focused on the aftermath of bombings that killed 43 people last week in Beirut, particularly residents’ “anguish over the fact that just one of the stricken cities—Paris—received a global outpouring of sympathy.”
Indeed, the Times story on a “forgotten” Beirut highlighted a mounting critique of how news organizations and the public alike divvy up precious resources and attention in a time of concurrent acts of violence.
Journalists, the commentary goes, assign different value to different lives. That’s hard to dispute, given spotty coverage of regions such as the Middle East and Africa when American interests aren’t at stake
“I do think Paris was more newsworthy than Beirut for a host of reasons, including the death toll, the scale of the attack, and the challenge to intelligence agencies in the US and abroad that tend to work closely together,” Kahn says. “It is also true that coverage of terrorist attacks does vary according to other, more subtle factors, such as how surprising the attack is, how likely it is to impact policy among the Western powers, and how likely it is to resonate with large numbers of our readers.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
WIRED Magazine To Debut Show On Netflix Next Year
http://www.buzzfeed.com/brendanklinkenberg/wired-magazine-to-debut-show-on-netflix-next-year#.fk3kQvvym
“Think ‘Chef’s Table’ — for designers.”
BuzzFeed News has obtained an internal email from WIRED Publisher Kim Kelleher announcing that the publication’s Editor-in-Chief Scott Dadich is slated to produce a new show for Netflix positioned as a “‘Chef’s Table’ — for designers.” Netflix did not respond to a request for comment. WIRED declined comment.
The series is to be based on Wired By Design, a conference held by WIRED last year at Skywalker Sound in Marin County, California.
This series marks new territory for Netflix; it’s the company’s first partnership with a magazine. The effort is not, however, completely new territory for WIRED, which collaborated with PBS on a 10-episode television series called Wired Science in 2007.
Tomi Engdahl says:
After Twitter falls for a URL trick, Gannett fixes a company-wide glitch
http://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/obligatory_joke_url_here.php
How long does it take a major newspaper chain to fix a very public glitch in its CMS?
About a day and a half, apparently—at least, based on what we saw from the Gannett websites this week.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Joe Pompeo / Politico:
Piano Media plans to launch biannual ad-supported print magazine in 2016 to cover the media business
Piano Media to launch print magazine covering the media business
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2015/11/8583724/piano-media-launch-print-magazine-covering-media-business
Even as some publishers continue to contract, 2016 will undoubtedly bring a new wave of journalism startups keen on making a splash in the market.
One such publication being planned is a new print magazine covering the business of media.
The as-yet-untitled magazine is being created by Piano Media, a company known for developing paid digital technologies for publishers including Time Inc. and News Corp. Its editor in chief will be Patrick Appel, who announced his new gig in a farewell email to employees of POLITICO, where he served as digital editor of POLITICO Magazine until Friday.
“For the next six months we’ll be building a publication that seeks to answer the most pressing questions facing media executives,” Appel wrote. “There’s no shortage of websites and newsletters dedicated to the art of publishing and monetization in media, but there are few truly premium products directed at the decision-makers in this industry. That’s a void we aim to fill.”