I have written on journalism and media trends eariler few years ago. So it is time for update. What is the state of journalism and news publishing in 2017? NiemanLab’s predictions for 2017 are a good place to start thinking about what lies ahead for journalism. There, Matt Waite puts us in our place straight away by telling us that the people running the media are the problem.
There has been changes on tech publishing. In January 2017 International Data Group, the owner of PCWorld magazine and market researcher IDC, on Thursday said it was being acquired by China Oceanwide Holdings Group and IDG Capital, the investment management firm run by IDG China executive Hugo Shong. In 2016 Arrow bought EE Times, EDN, TechOnline and lots more from UBM.
Here are some article links and information bits on journalist and media in 2017:
Soothsayers’ guides to journalism in 2017 article take a look at journalism predictions and the value of this year’s predictions.
What Journalism Needs To Do Post-Election article tells that faced with the growing recognition that the electorate was uniformed or, at minimum, deeply in the thrall of fake news, far too many journalists are responding not with calls for change but by digging in deeper to exactly the kinds of practices that got us here in the first place.
Fake News Is About to Get Even Scarier than You Ever Dreamed article says that what we saw in the 2016 election is nothing compared to what we need to prepare for in 2020 as incipient technologies appear likely to soon obliterate the line between real and fake.
Headlines matter article tells that in 2017, headlines will matter more than ever and journalists will need to wrest control of headline writing from social-optimization teams. People get their news from headlines now in a way they never did in the past.
Why new journalism grads are optimistic about 2017 article tells that since today’s college journalism students have been in school, the forecasts for their futures has been filled with words like “layoffs,” “cutbacks,” “buyouts” and “freelance.” Still many people are optimistic about the future because the main motivation for being a journalist is often “to make a difference.”
Updating social media account can be a serious job. Zuckerberg has 12+ Facebook employees helping him with posts and comments on his Facebook page and professional photographers to snap personal moments.
Wikipedia Is Being Ripped Apart By a Witch Hunt For Secretly Paid Editors article tells that with undisclosed paid editing on the rise, Wikipedians and the Wikimedia Foundation are working together to stop the practice without discouraging user participation. Paid editing is permissible under Wikimedia Foundation’s terms of use as long as they disclose these conflicts of interest on their user pages, but not all paid editors make these disclosures.
Big Internet giants are working on how to make content better for mobile devices. Instant Articles is a new way for any publisher to create fast, interactive articles on Facebook. Google’s AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a project that it aims to accelerate content on mobile devices. Both of those systems have their advantages and problems.
Clearing Out the App Stores: Government Censorship Made Easier article tells that there’s a new form of digital censorship sweeping the globe, and it could be the start of something devastating. The centralization of the internet via app stores has made government censorship easier. If the app isn’t in a country’s app store, it effectively doesn’t exist. For more than a decade, we users of digital devices have actively championed an online infrastructure that now looks uniquely vulnerable to the sanctions of despots and others who seek to control information.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Drew Harwell / Washington Post:
Facebook says its facial recognition technology, the company’s solution to spot fake accounts, looks for impostors only within a user’s limited social circle
When a stranger takes your face: Facebook’s failed crackdown on fake accounts
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/when-a-stranger-takes-your-face-facebooks-failed-crackdown-on-fake-accounts/2018/05/04/d3318838-4f1a-11e8-af46-b1d6dc0d9bfe_story.html?utm_term=.6067d0c0aa93
Katie Greenman’s Facebook profile mirrors all the things the 21-year-old Texas college student loves: cute animals, exotic travel and left-leaning political issues such as immigration reform and gun control.
But there is another Katie Greenman on Facebook — created by strangers and copying her full name, photos, home town and old workplace — that shares only ideas celebrated by President Trump, including an image showing Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama in federal prison. The fake account’s profile picture: a selfie of the real Greenman, sunbathing.
“My gosh, what the heck? That’s scary,” Greenman said when a Washington Post reporter showed her the fake account. “That’s me, but I never posted any of this stuff.”
Facebook in December offered a bold solution for its worsening scourge of fake accounts: new facial-recognition technology to spot when a phony profile tries to use someone else’s photos.
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Sahil Patel / Digiday:
Sources: Snap has ended its licensing fee agreement with publishers who chose it in 2016; all publishers will rely on ad revenue from Snapchat Discover
Snap cuts off licensing fees for Snapchat Discover publishers
https://digiday.com/media/snap-cuts-off-licensing-fees-for-snapchat-discover/
Snap is no longer paying licensing fees to publishers for their Snapchat Discover channels, leaving those publishers instead to live off advertising.
Over the past several months, Snap has been notifying Snapchat Discover publishing partners that it will stop paying an upfront licensing fee for them to produce daily and weekly editions for the media section. Instead, Snap has been reverting the deals back to focus entirely on sharing ad revenue generated from Snapchat Discover, according to three sources with direct knowledge of Snap’s plans. Snap typically does an even split with publishers on ad revenue generated by their channels.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Elizabeth Flock / PBS NewsHour:
Inside the DC offices of Sputnik, a Russian-government funded media outlet that is “more pernicious” than RT, which operates in 34 countries in 30+ languages
After a week of Russian propaganda, I was questioning everything
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/after-a-week-of-russian-propaganda-i-was-questioning-everything
One day this past fall on my morning commute from D.C. to Virginia, I tuned the radio to 105.5 FM, expecting to hear my usual bluegrass. But instead of fiddles and guitar, I heard a voice in Russian-accented English announce: “This is Radio Sputnik.”
I had no idea then what Radio Sputnik was.
Enter Radio Sputnik. Like its sister outlet RT, Sputnik is a Russian government-funded media outlet, widely seen by Russia experts as a vehicle to disseminate disinformation for the Kremlin, and, like its space-dwelling namesake, to make the West look bad. While RT is television, Sputnik lives on the radio, a wire service and website. Both RT and Sputnik are under the banner of the news agency “Rossiya Segodnya,” which means “Russia Today,” and which was created in December 2013 by presidential decree by Vladimir Putin.
Both outlets, according to Ben Nimmo, an information defense fellow with the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank, put out propaganda intended to polarize and confuse, and “attack the facts rather than report them.”
For a recent example, see Sputnik’s coverage since the April 7 chemical attack in Douma, Syria. While Western powers say Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s government forces were behind the attack, Sputnik has pushed a narrative that the attack was faked, orchestrated by the humanitarian search-and-rescue group the White Helmets.
According to Sputnik, the White Helmets, which was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017, is a Western-funded construct, and had turned an ordinary instance of dust and smoke inhalation into a chemical attack.
(Snopes, the fact-checking site, said that images being used to discredit the White Helmets are stills from a movie set.
Today, Sputnik operates in 34 countries in more than 30 languages, including, as of this past summer, on an FM station (and now an AM) in Washington, D.C
through all the criticism, Sputnik has quietly continued to put out the same information — or disinformation — as it had before.
It is this mix of legitimate news — often including topics undercovered by the mainstream media — along with conspiracy theories and disinformation that makes propaganda so effective, said Peter Pomerantsev, a Soviet-born British journalist who spent years working for Russian channels and specializes in studying Russian propaganda.
Sputnik claims that it is “telling the untold” stories the Western and mainstream media ignores.
“Russia has turned into a fake adversary,” he said. “I’m 100 percent happy to be working here.”
“We’re getting squeezed,” she said. “There’s a saying in Persian, ‘Don’t get between two elephants. We’re between two angry elephants.’”
“They mix real with unreal, use dubious sources,” Stanton said. But trying to pin down what he really found problematic, he said, “was like pushing a wet noodle.” What he meant is that proving disinformation can be impossibly slippery.
‘If you can persuade a person, you don’t need to kill him’
The roots of the word “disinformation,” defined as false or misleading information intended to deceive, go back to the Russian word, “dezinformatsiya,” which in the 1920s was the title of an entire department of the precursor of the KGB. The head of that unit, Colonel Rolf Wagenbreth, is quoted as having said: “Our friends in Moscow call it ‘dezinformatsiya.’ Our enemies in America call it ‘active measures,’ and I, dear friends, call it ‘my favorite pastime.’”
The Soviet Union’s disinformation strategy relied in part on media manipulation, including via radio, though also on covert operations, even assassinations, according to a CIA history of the time.
For years, the U.S. ignored or did not know how to respond to Soviet disinformation campaigns.
Russia excelled at disinformation during the Cold War, and it has continued to under Putin, who has cracked down on the country’s independent media and harnessed technology to make the Russian perspective available around the world.
Days after Stanton was fired, and after we met, he published a long document of his observations of working at Sputnik on Cryptome, an online publication that’s been the source of major leaks and controversy (such as in revealing the supposed identity of the CIA analyst who tracked down Osama bin Laden).
“I did so because I wanted a relatively safe place on the [World Wide Web] to store the document in case my home computers get nailed,”
How Radio Sputnik made me doubt the truth
As one last attempt to better understand Sputnik, I put myself on a weeklong Sputnik media diet.
According to Russia watchers like Pomerantsev, Sputnik dominates the news in countries with weaker independent media.
“Radio Sputnik [Germany] heavily criticized [Angela] Merkel and repeated anti-migration themes throughout the campaign, including a public poll that showed that ‘lands with more migration are more prone to terrorism,’” the study wrote. “The channel also provided a platform for AfD party quotations such as, ‘rape is increasing due to Merkel’s policy.’”
Coverage on Sputnik’s English language site and D.C. radio program seemed intended to polarize, but also, as Nimmo had described, to distract and confuse.
Sputnik led with a story about Google’s supposed search manipulation, claiming it had favored Hillary Clinton in the election.
Stranahan called the Skripal poisoning a “false flag” attack by Western government
On Day 2, I turned on breaking news alerts on my phone from Sputnik. I was alerted that the U.S. was “using ‘fabrications and lies’ as excuse to target Syria,”
Nixon and Stranahan were starting to cast their doubts on the validity of the chemical weapons attack in Syria.
It didn’t matter that later I would see how the facts had been twisted. It was in moments like these, listening to Sputnik, that I could see how you’d begin to believe that everything was possible.
The great irony
The ultimate goal of media outlets like RT and Sputnik, Russia experts told me, was to get one of their stories to spread widely and gain acceptance, first to a site like Breitbart, then Fox, and even to the mouth of the president, or to a mainstream media outlet like the Washington Post. Or, more efficiently, to move directly to a member of the president’s staff, as in a false Sputnik story about a NATO base terror attack in August 2016, which was quoted by Trump’s campaign chair Paul Manafort.
In today’s era of so-called “fake news” and distrust of the mainstream media, propaganda spreads much faster, Rid said.
“It’s not that Russian disinformation has changed fundamentally. It’s that we have changed fundamentally,” Rid said. “Today we as a society are practically asking for these disinformation operations.”
Years ago, Russian anthropologist Alexei Yurchak coined the term “hypernormalization” to talk about how the Soviets were such masters of propaganda and disinformation that eventually it became impossible for its own people to see beyond it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Subscription hell
How not to do paywalls
Danny Crichton
@dannycrichton / 13 hours ago
https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/06/subscription-hell/?utm_source=tcfbpage&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&utm_content=FaceBook&sr_share=facebook
AdChoices
Subscription hell
How not to do paywalls
Danny Crichton
@dannycrichton / 13 hours ago
40144693214_70bd39d920_k
Another week, another paywall. This time, it’s Bloomberg, which announced that it would be adding a comprehensive paywall to its news service and television channel (except TicToc, its media partnership with Twitter). A paywall was hardly a surprise, but what was surprising was the price: the standard subscription is $35 a month (up from $0 a month), or $40 a month including access to online and print editions of Businessweek.
And people say avocado toast is expensive.
That’s not the only subscription coming up though. Now Facebook is considering adding an ad-free subscription option.
Tomi Engdahl says:
This Chart Reveals Google’s True Dominance Over the Web
http://www.visualcapitalist.com/this-chart-reveals-googles-true-dominance-over-the-web/
Yes, we all know that Google is dominant in the realm of search.
But at the same time, the internet is also a huge place – and building a decent searching algorithm can’t be that hard, right?
This week’s chart is a bit mind-boggling, because it makes the case that Google is even more dominant than you may have guessed. Between all Google features and the search giant’s YouTube subsidiary, more than 90% of all internet searches are taking place through the company.
Tomi Engdahl says:
IAB says online advertising grew to $88B last year — more spending than TV
https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/10/iab-2017-report/?sr_share=facebook&utm_source=tcfbpage
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cory Nealon / University at Buffalo:
Study: less than 10% of users who retweeted false info during disasters removed their RT later, less than 20% of them clarified false RT with a new tweet
During disasters, active Twitter users likely to spread falsehoods
http://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2018/05/020.html
Study examines Boston Marathon bombing, Hurricane Sandy; also finds most users fail to correct misinformation
We know that Twitter is littered with misinformation. But how good are the social media platform’s most active users at detecting these falsehoods, especially during public emergencies?
Not good, according to new University at Buffalo research that examined more than 20,000 tweets during Hurricane Sandy and the Boston Marathon bombing.
Twitter users could either spread the false news, seek to confirm it, or cast doubt upon it. Researchers found:
86 to 91 percent of the users spread false news, either by retweeting or “liking” the original post.
5 to 9 percent sought to confirm the false news, typically by retweeting and asking if the information was correct.
1 to 9 percent expressed doubt, often by saying the original tweet was not accurate.
Even after the false news had been debunked on Twitter and traditional news media outlets, the study found that:
Less than 10 percent of the users who spread the false news deleted their erroneous retweet.
Less than 20 percent of the same users clarified the false tweet with a new tweet.
“These findings are important because they show how easily people are deceived during times when they are most vulnerable and the role social media platforms play in these deceptions,” says Zhuang, who is conducting similar research concerning Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Subscriptions for the 1%
https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/13/subscriptions-for-the-1-percent/?utm_source=tcfbpage&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&sr_share=facebook
We are in a subscription hell. Paywalls are going up across the internet, at aggregated prices few but Jeff Bezos can afford. The software I used to pay for once now requires an annual tax, because … “updates.” We are getting less every day, and paying more for it, all the while the core openness that made the world wide web such a dynamic and interesting place is rapidly disappearing.
Regular, recurring income helps make the business of creation more predictable, ensuring that creators can do what they do best — create — rather than stress about whether the next book or app is going to generate their yearly earnings.
Greed, though, has managed to make subscriptions deeply unpalatable. Sustainability has become usurious, with news subscriptions jumping in price and app developers suddenly demanding a fee where none existed before.
It’s us.
And by us, I mean the proverbial 99% consuming public who refuses to pay for any content or software — except for Netflix or Amazon Prime, of course.
Just take a look at the abysmal conversion rates for online content. The New York Times gets 89 million uniques per month, but only has 2.2 million subscribers
The implied conversion rates here are in the very low single digits, if not lower. And that’s no surprise given the extreme lengths people go to get content for free.
Engineers who make hundreds of thousands of dollars are suddenly tantalized by the challenge of trying to break through a porous paywall.
The problem with these minuscule conversion rates is that it dramatically raises the cost of acquiring a customer (CAC). When only 1% of people convert, it concentrates all of that sales and marketing spend on a very small sliver of customers. That forces subscription prices to rise so that the CAC:LTV ratios make rational sense.
What we get then is a classic case of economic unraveling. A company could offer an affordably priced subscription, but users hesitate, and so the company tries to do more marketing initiatives, which raises the cost of the subscription. That makes the vast majority of users even less willing to purchase it, so marketing gets more budget to go after the highest spending consumers.
what once might have been $1 a month by 20% of a site’s audience is now $20 a month for the 1%.
That’s basically the math of the New York Times.
The entire subscription economy is ultimately a 1% economy — it’s focused on a very small subset of users who have demonstrated that they are willing to pay dollars for content.
Yes, we are living in a subscription hell, but it is also heavily a product of our own decision-making as consumers. We want content and software for free, and in fact, we will go to ridiculous lengths to avoid paying for it. We will protest ads and privacy-invasive tracking, but we will never support the business model that would make that technology obsolete.
Put together an annual content budget, and spend it liberally across the publications and creators that you enjoy. Advocate for pricing that makes sense
Tomi Engdahl says:
Betteridge’s law of headlines
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines
Betteridge’s law of headlines is an adage that states: “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Vindu Goel / New York Times:
How WhatsApp is being used to spread misinformation, share fake polls, and exacerbate religious divides ahead of national elections in India
In India, Facebook’s WhatsApp Plays Central Role in Elections
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/14/technology/whatsapp-india-elections.html
Yet the most intense political campaigning was not taking place on the streets. Instead, the action was happening on WhatsApp, a messaging service owned by Facebook that has about 250 million users in India.
Mr. Bhat, a B.J.P. youth leader, said he used WhatsApp to stay in constant touch with the 60 voters he was assigned to track for the party.
“Every minute, I’m getting a message,” said Mr. Bhat, a college student.
Facebook’s WhatsApp is taking an increasingly central role in elections, especially in developing countries. More than any other social media or messaging app, WhatsApp was used in recent months by India’s political parties, religious activists and others to send messages and distribute news to Karnataka’s 49 million voters. While many messages were ordinary campaign missives, some were intended to inflame sectarian tensions and others were downright false, with no way to trace where they originated.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook Deleted 583 Million Fake Accounts in the First Three Months of 2018
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/18/05/15/1954227/facebook-deleted-583-million-fake-accounts-in-the-first-three-months-of-2018?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29
Facebook said Tuesday that it had removed more than half a billion fake accounts and millions of pieces of other violent, hateful or obscene content over the first three months of 2018.
Facebook deleted 583 million fake accounts in the first three months of 2018
That’s more than a quarter of Facebook’s 2.2 billion monthly active users.
https://www.cnet.com/news/facebook-deleted-583-million-fake-accounts-in-the-first-three-months-of-2018/
Facebook is in a state of constant deletion.
The social network released its Community Standards Enforcement Report for the first time on Tuesday, detailing how many spam posts it’s deleted and how many fake accounts it’s taken down in the first quarter of 2018. In a blog post on Facebook, Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president of product management, said the social network disabled about 583 million fake accounts during the first three months of this year — the majority of which, it said, were blocked within minutes of registration.
That’s an average of over 6.5 million attempts to create a fake account every day from Jan. 1 to March 31. Facebook boasts 2.2 billion monthly active users, and if Facebook’s AI tools didn’t catch these fake accounts flooding the social network, its population would have swelled immensely in just 89 days.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mathew Ingram / Columbia Journalism Review:
Accepting funding from Google and Facebook raises tough questions for media and researchers about influence, conflict of interest, and working with competitors
The platform patrons: How Facebook and Google became two of the biggest funders of journalism in the world
https://www.cjr.org/special_report/google-facebook-journalism.php/
In March, Google announced with much fanfare the launch of the Google News Initiative, a $300 million program aimed at “building a strong future for journalism,” as the company put it. That came on top of the previous Digital News Initiative, which was set up by Google in 2015 and included a $170 million innovation fund aimed at the European media industry.
Facebook, too, has been funneling money into journalism projects, including the News Integrity Initiative—a $14 million investment in a project run by City University of New York—and the Facebook Journalism Project, a wide-ranging venture the company says is designed to help media companies develop new storytelling tools and ways of promoting news literacy.
Taken together, Facebook and Google have now committed more than half a billion dollars to various journalistic programs and media partnerships over the past three years, not including the money spent internally on developing media-focused products like Facebook’s Instant Articles and Google’s competing AMP mobile project. The result: These mega-platforms are now two of the largest funders of journalism in the world.
The irony is hard to miss. The dismantling of the traditional advertising model—largely at the hands of the social networks, which have siphoned away the majority of industry ad revenue—has left many media companies and journalistic institutions in desperate need of a lifeline. Google and Facebook, meanwhile, are happy to oblige, flush with cash from their ongoing dominance of the digital ad market.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Josh Constine / TechCrunch:
Leaked screenshots show Facebook’s influencer search engine for connecting marketers and creators to make branded content; Facebook confirms it is testing it
A leaked look at Facebook’s search engine for influencer marketing
Creators making content for brands could unlock ad dollars
https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/18/facebook-creator-search/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Taiwan-born stylist Eugene Tong discusses how social media democratised fashion
http://m.scmp.com/magazines/style/fashion-beauty/article/2145974/taiwan-born-stylist-eugene-tong-discusses-how-social
Tong believes that, thanks to the internet, consumers now have a louder voice and more control over the ways in which the fashion business develops
Before you can even digest the trend, you’re already on to the next
Before you can even digest the trend, you’re already on to the next
The scene he painted about the industry, before it became intertwined with the internet and social media, was far different from what it is now. High fashion labels and editors/writers were the gatekeepers that created and dictated the trends that would arrive at the masses through a trickle-down effect. And at the time, they were the style mavens who would use physical magazines to spread their ideology. For many, these bound periodicals became an introduction and the aesthetic bibles that would indoctrinate readers into the community.
There was anticipation built in, pre-internet that is. You waited for months to see the next collection and then from those you’d derive some trends. And as a magazine, you put those out either through fashion, written news, or POV stories. But then you had time to kind of digest and see the collections.
However, Tong would note that as the web and social media became more ingrained in the culture, there was a discernable shift. The most significant being the industry’s democratisation. Consumers, opposed to “producers”, found themselves more in control than the latter
You see it now, designers are having like six collections a year. And so now the output creativity is just super fast.
“creativity in general just flourishes under any circumstance”. The times being felt now are just that, different.
As the internet allowed for niche groups to find havens online, social media became the web that interconnected them across continents.
“There’s a real focus on inclusion and trying to be as diverse as possible.
“You know where your inspiration comes from; whether or not you want to recognise it. It’s just f***** up if you try to steal someone else’s idea and play it off as your own. And I think also being ‘inspired by’ is a very loose term these days. You should always give credit where credit’s due.”
Fashion week shows are lined with a myriad of folks raising their phones to the sky while influencers and bloggers have taken over as style authorities.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Katrin Bennhold / New York Times:
Inside Facebook’s deletion center in Berlin, where 1,200 people review posts violating firm’s rules or German law and decide what is free speech or hate speech — A country taps its past as it leads the way on one of the most pressing issues facing modern democracies: how to regulate the world’s biggest social network.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/19/technology/facebook-deletion-center-germany.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Linda Kinstler / The Atlantic:
German law requiring social media companies to take down hate speech within 24 hours prompts far right claims of lack of clarity, chilled speech, and censorship
Germany’s Attempt to Fix Facebook Is Backfiring
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/05/germany-facebook-afd/560435/
Right-wing politicians are pouncing on an ambitious law seeking to curb hate speech online.
Tomi Engdahl says:
New York Times:
More than two dozen editors and writers who worked at Time Inc. reflect on the company’s rise to prominence and its slow decline that began about a decade ago
The Last Days of Time Inc.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/05/19/business/media/time-inc-oral-history.html
An oral history of how the pre-eminent media organization of the 20th century ended up on the scrap heap.
Tomi Engdahl says:
UK to introduce internet safety laws within ‘next couple of years’
Social networks may be on the hook for exposing kids to online bullying.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/20/uk-plans-internet-safety-laws/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nicholas Thompson / Wired:
Facebook outlines new steps to combat false news: request for academic proposals to study it on Facebook, release of a 12-minute film, and news literacy program — NEWS FEED, THE algorithm that powers the core of Facebook, resembles a giant irrigation system for the world’s information.
https://www.wired.com/story/exclusive-facebook-opens-up-about-false-news/
Tomi Engdahl says:
“if Donald Trump Jr agrees with you, it’s safe to say you’re probably doing something wrong”
Elon Musk Is Getting Destroyed On Twitter For This Bizarre Rant
http://www.iflscience.com/brain/elon-musk-is-getting-destroyed-on-twitter-for-this-bizarre-rant-/
Last night on Twitter, Musk had a bit of a meltdown. He was seemingly annoyed by a report from Reveal
“The holier-than-thou hypocrisy of big media companies who lay claim to the truth, but publish only enough to sugarcoat the lie, is why the public no longer respects them,” Musk first tweeted. And then the fall of Elon began.
What followed was a bizarre Twitter tirade against the media and fake news, with Musk calling out journalists for being “sanctimonious” and “above criticism.” He continuously talked about the media needing to be truthful, which yes sounds a lot like Trump.
Then things went a bit further, as Musk said he was going to create a site where the public could rank articles and track credibility scores, called Pravda.
Pravda, if you didn’t know, means “truth” in Russian and was the name of the official paper
And he might not be joking.
Musk had actually set up “Pravda Corp” back in October 2017
Understandably, Musk’s ramblings did not go down too well. People were quick to point out that going after the free press was probably not a great way for a CEO to be acting. And he couldn’t just hide from criticism of his companies if he didn’t agree with it.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Reuters:
In a final ruling, Egypt’s court orders regulators to block YouTube for one month over the 2012 “Innocence of Muslims” video that denigrates Prophet Mohammad
Top Egypt court orders temporary YouTube ban over Prophet Mohammad video
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-egypt-youtube/top-egypt-court-orders-temporary-youtube-ban-over-prophet-mohammad-video-idUSKCN1IR0FD
Egypt’s top administrative court ruled on Saturday that regulators must block the video file-sharing site YouTube for one month over a video that denigrates the Prophet Mohammad, a lawyer who filed the case told Reuters.
A lower administrative court had ordered that the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology block YouTube, owned by Google, in 2013 over the video, but the case was appealed and its ruling stayed during the appeal process.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jessica Davies / Digiday:
With the arrival of GDPR, ad platform vendors like DoubleClick warn publishers about steep EU ad volume declines, at least for the short term — The arrival of the General Data Protection Regulation’s enforcement May 25 has hurled the digital media and advertising industries into a tailspin.
GDPR mayhem: Programmatic ad buying plummets in Europe
https://digiday.com/media/gdpr-mayhem-programmatic-ad-buying-plummets-europe/
The arrival of the General Data Protection Regulation’s enforcement May 25 has hurled the digital media and advertising industries into a tailspin.
Since the early hours of May 25, ad exchanges have seen European ad demand volumes plummet between 25 and 40 percent in some cases, according to sources. Ad tech vendors scrambled to inform clients that they predict steep drops in demand coming through their platforms from Google. Some U.S. publishers have halted all programmatic ads on their European sites.
Google contacted DoubleClick Bid Manager clients over the last few days to warn them that until it has completed its integration into the Interactive Advertising Bureau Europe and IAB Tech Lab’s GDPR Transparency & Consent Framework that publishers, ad tech vendor partners and advertisers should expect a “short-term disruption” in the delivery of their DoubleClick Bid Manager campaigns on third-party European inventory, starting May 25.
“Revenues and [ad demand] volumes [are] expected to fall dramatically across the board,” said one publishing executive, under condition of anonymity.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Julia Reda:
EU governments agree on copyright reform, that needs EU parliament approval, to let news sites charge aggregators for snippets, force upload filters on websites
EU censorship machines and link tax laws are nearing the finish line
https://juliareda.eu/2018/05/censorship-machines-link-tax-finish-line/
Update from May 25th 2018, 13:37: Member State governments have today adopted their position on the copyright reform, with no significant changes to the upload filters and link tax provisions. It is now up to Parliament to stop them.
This week, people across the world are learning what they need to do to comply with the EU General Data Protection Regulation, which will become applicable on Friday – and many are finding themselves wishing they had involved themselves in the debate when the law was decided more than two years ago.
On the topic of copyright, you NOW have the chance to have an influence – a chance that will be long lost in two years, when we’ll all be “suddenly” faced with the challenge of having to implement upload filters and the “link tax” – or running into new limits on what we can do using the web services we rely on.
In stark contrast to the GDPR, experts near-unanimously agree that the copyright reform law, as it stands now, is really bad.
Parliament and Council have had over a year and a half to fix the glaring flaws of the Commission proposal – but despite their growing complexity, the latest drafts of both institutions fail to meet basic standards of workability and proportionality.
Their latest proposal would still force internet platforms to implement censorship machines – and makes a total mess out of the planned extra copyright for news sites by allowing each member state to implement it differently.
The German government is standing in the way of an agreement over which kinds of snippets of news content should fall under the “link tax” and thus become subject to a fee when shared: They insist that whether a snippet constitutes an original intellectual creation by its author or not should not be a criteria.
To appease them, the Presidency is proposing that every country should just decide for themselves. Sharing “insubstantial” parts of an article should remain free, but member states get to choose whether that means snippets that lack creativity, or snippets that have “no independent economic significance”, whatever length that may be – or both (Recital 34a).
You don’t need to filter, but we’ll sue you if you don’t
The Bulgarian Presidency agrees with the Commission’s goal to force internet platforms to monitor all user uploads to try and detect copyright infringement, even though that will necessarily lead to takedowns of totally legal acts of expression. But they realise that putting that in plain writing violates existing EU law and the Charter of Fundamental Rights.
Their “solution”: Make platforms directly liable for all copyright infringements by their users, and then offer that they can avoid that unreasonable liability if they can show they’ve done everything in their power to prevent copyrighted content from appearing online – namely, by deploying upload filters (Article 13, paragraph 4). Which remain totally optional, of course! Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Reuters:
In final ruling, Egypt’s court orders regulators to block YouTube for a month over 2012 “Innocence of Muslims” video that allegedly denigrated Prophet Mohammad
Top Egypt court orders temporary YouTube ban over Prophet Mohammad video
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-egypt-youtube/top-egypt-court-orders-temporary-youtube-ban-over-prophet-mohammad-video-idUSKCN1IR0FD
Tomi Engdahl says:
Julia Reda:
EU governments agree on copyright reform, that needs EU parliament approval, to let news sites charge aggregators for snippets, force upload filters on websites — Update from May 25th 2018, 13:37: Member State governments have today adopted their position on the copyright reform …
EU censorship machines and link tax laws are nearing the finish line
https://juliareda.eu/2018/05/censorship-machines-link-tax-finish-line/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Lani Seelinger / Bustle:
Trump’s criticism of media is hardly news, but calling one of his own staff a phony nonexistent source after the staffer briefed about 300 people is a new move
Trump Called A ‘New York Times’ Source “Phony,” But The Official Is Actually Very Real
https://www.bustle.com/p/trump-called-a-new-york-times-source-phony-but-the-official-is-actually-very-real-9216727
President Trump’s ongoing feud with the media is hardly news, but over the weekend it turned out that there were still new ways for him to criticize the journalists who cover his administration. In order to berate the New York Times over a story about North Korea, Trump called his own White House official fake — even though that official had given a briefing to dozens of reporters, The Times reported.
According to the Times, the White House held the briefing off the record, which meant that the official giving it could not be named in the article. For this reason, the Times only quoted “a senior White House official” rather than giving the official’s name. The Times also stated that over 50 people were present at the briefing, and a Buzzfeed reporter who signed onto the simultaneous conference called said in a tweet that over 240 people were on the call line when she joined.
This meant that Trump’s lie was easily caught, with numerous reporters who had been present at the briefing quickly jumping in to call out the falsehood.
“I was there. This was a background briefing given by a senior administration official in the briefing room!” reporter Brian Karem wrote on Twitter.
“I mean, every reporter on the call knows who this official was, and this official exists. And we all heard the official say it,”
According to the Huffington Post, the White House itself even took down and then provided a transcript of the briefing
This false claim of the president’s falls into a pattern of his when it comes to taking issue with anonymous or unnamed sources.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jared Schroeder / Columbia Journalism Review:
Courts may soon have to decide if AI communicators are entitled to journalistic protections, e.g. in cases when programmer wants to protect sources his bot used — We need to talk about bots. How will the courts address free-expression rights for artificially intelligent communicators?
Are bots entitled to free speech?
https://www.cjr.org/innovations/are-bots-entitled-to-free-speech.php
We need to talk about bots. How will the courts address free-expression rights for artificially intelligent communicators? This conversation is coming, and it may push the Supreme Court to do something it has avoided: define who is and is not a journalist.
For nearly half a century, the US legal system has lived a double life. On the one hand, the Supreme Court has held that journalists do not have greater or lesser rights than other citizens (see Branzburg v. Hayes). On the other, the lower courts have generally ignored or let stand numerous laws or privileges that provide journalists special protections.
Most of these laws and privileges were devised before the Web was publicly available, and the case law is inconsistent in who it applies these protections to online. These journo-specific measures have sometimes been useful tools for citizen publishers—bloggers, message-board posters, social-media commenters—who have faced the same legal difficulties that traditional journalists have for many years: defamation and privacy claims, efforts to compel disclosure of their sources, and so on.
So where do bots come in? Networked technologies have already challenged journalists to distinguish their work from the countless other types of information that flood virtual spaces. Now, non-human entities have the potential to muddy the waters even more. Courts will soon have to explore whether AI communicators have rights as publishers—and whether a bot can be entitled to journalistic protections.
If a bot files FOIA requests, should it be exempt from fees?
While giving free speech to bots sounds shocking, a court decision in favor of an AI entity could benefit news organizations, some of which (the AP and Reuters, among them) have published AI-constructed stories for years. An example is the daily stock-market roundup. Many such stories could be understood as a public good (think news alerts) and thus receive journalistic legal protections—again, if the courts focused on what was published rather than how it was published.
These issues become more complex in the context of fake news and clickbait.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Frederic Filloux / Monday Note:
Unlike Netflix and Amazon, many news outlets offer paying subscribers poor customer service, products with technical faults, and ads — A growing number of publications are switching to the subscription model. But most of them are lagging behind, with a poor user experience.
Dear Publishers, if you want my subscription dollars (or euros), here is what I expect…
https://mondaynote.com/dear-publishers-if-you-want-my-subscription-dollars-or-euros-here-is-what-i-expect-db0080b1cc44
A growing number of publications are switching to the subscription model. But most of them are lagging behind, with a poor user experience. Lousy execution will eventually translate into casualties.
Would you expect Netflix to charge you $13.99 a month for the first year and then jack up the price to $35 a month? No, you wouldn’t.
Would you see the same Netflix trying to lock in customers, in one-year increments, with no way out
Would you see Amazon refusing a return?
Quite the contrary: they give you all the means to print the return label yourself. Even the customer service of my US-based email router has a chat line available 24/7 that I never saw in the publishing sector.
These are practices of digital native companies that are client-focused. Sadly, most of digital publishers — especially legacy brands — are lagging behind.
The cost of news production is a justification for the price of the service; in-depth, value-added journalism is hugely expensive.
Since quality news costs a bundle, let’s charge the end users, i.e., the reader and the advertiser, as we are in a two-sided market.
The biggest concern in news economics is that, over the recent years, the quality of the service — I’m talking about execution — hasn’t improved significantly.
— Subscription vs. advertising. I will take a radical stance, here. Publishers can’t have both ways; people paying for content should be spared advertising, period. OK, some super-premium or branded content ads could be tolerated
But the essential argument for excluding ads for subscribers lies in the “replacement value” of ads, based on the actual ad revenue per user.
the ad revenue per user, we are talking about a few dollars per year.
— Metered paywalls. This was long the system of choice for publishers. You are allowed to read a certain number of articles per month, then you hit the paywall. One thing is sure, a one-size-fits-all system doesn’t work well.
— Subscription funnel and trial periods
— Locked-in subscriptions. As I described above, if you miss the right window to terminate your subscription, you’re in for another year. Publishers don’t realize that things work differently today: like it or not, consumers expect flexibility in their expense allocations.
— Always, unbearable technical flaws. Fact is, the most robust growth in subscription segments are from news outlets that invest the most in technology.
Unfortunately, most of the digital publications lag behind. Issues include speed, browser and device compatibility, terrible video players, signup issues (passwords asked for constantly), and all sorts of bugs. Search engines are often so terrible that it is often better to search a website using Google!
Subscription fatigue is looming.
Then publishers that offer poor service and little value added will be the first to lose customers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Joseph Otterson / Variety:
ABC cancels hit sitcom Roseanne after racist tweet from star Roseanne Barr; ABC says tweet was “abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values” — ABC has pulled the plug on “Roseanne.” — “Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values …
‘Roseanne’ Canceled at ABC
http://variety.com/2018/tv/news/roseanne-canceled-abc-1202824211/
ABC has pulled the plug on the revival “Roseanne.”
The move comes after series star and creator Roseanne Barr made a comment on Twitter Tuesday morning referring to former Obama aide Valerie Jarrett as looking like the offspring of the “Muslim Brotherhood & Planet of the Apes.” Jarrett, an African-American, was born in Iran to American parents.
“Roseanne’s Twitter statement is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values, and we have decided to cancel her show,” ABC Entertainment president Channing Dungey said in a statement.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ava DuVernay, Shonda Rhimes, More React to ABC Canceling ‘Roseanne’
http://variety.com/2018/tv/news/stars-react-to-roseanne-cancellation-1202824140/
Tomi Engdahl says:
This article describes the future of “free” media.
UK sensoring demand made Breitbart to censor.
[Redacted] Arrested for [Redacted] Outside [Redacted]: Leeds Crown Court Issues Media Ban
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2018/05/26/redacted-arrested-for-redacted-outside-redacted-leeds-crown-court-issues-media-ban/
The Leeds Crown Court has issued a UK media ban following the arrest of well-known activist and citizen journalist [redacted] outside [redacted].
The reporting restriction, which requires on all publications within the United Kingdom to cease any mention of the details of the arrest or court proceedings of [redacted], was issued Friday afternoon
Shortly after the issuance of the press ban on the case, several media outlets, including Breitbart London, the Mirror, the Daily Record, Birmingham Mail, and the Russian state broadcaster Russia Today, complied with the restriction and removed articles concerning [redacted]’s case.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_Kingdom
Tomi Engdahl says:
Benny Geteng / Post Courier:
Papua New Guinea says it will ban Facebook for a month in the future in a bid to crack down on fake users and study how fake news and pornography spreads
https://postcourier.com.pg/shutting-facebook-png-reality/
Tomi Engdahl says:
There’s A Glaring Problem With Kim Kardashian’s Scientific Paper
http://www.iflscience.com/technology/theres-a-glaring-problem-with-kim-kardashians-scientific-paper/
Kim Kardashian West is not known for her scientific prowess. With her tendency to break the Internet, you might even say she was sent here to destroy one of the world’s greatest scientific achievements to date.
Which is why we were pretty surprised to read that she is listed as an author on an incredibly complex scientific paper, co-authored by Satoshi Nakamoto, the inventor of Bitcoin.
The paper, titled Wanion: Refinement of Rpcs
But, of course, there’s a problem with the paper, which was accepted for publication by the Drug Designing & Intellectual Properties International Journal. If you take a closer look, it’s complete gibberish.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook kills its ‘Trending’ section
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/01/facebook-kills-its-trending-section/?utm_source=tcfbpage&sr_share=facebook
Facebook really doesn’t want to be a media company. The social network announced this morning it’s removing its often controversial “Trending” section from its site next week, in order to make way for “future news experiences,” it says.
Over 80 news publishers are currently testing the “breaking news” label, which allows them to opt to flag their Instant Articles, mobile and web links, and Facebook Live video as breaking news, the company tells us.
Facebook says that the early results from this testing have led to a 4 percent lift in click-through rates, a 7 percent lift in Likes, and an 11 percent lift in shares. The product is still in what Facebook calls “alpha” testing
Tomi Engdahl says:
Are algorithms hacking our thoughts?
https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/20/are-algorithms-hacking-our-thoughts/?sr_share=facebook&utm_source=tcfbpage
Are algorithms hacking our thoughts?
Adriana Stan, Mihai Botarel
May 21, 2018
hacking-brains
Adriana Stan
Contributor
Adriana Stan is the public relations director of W magazine and a writer on media, culture and technology. She is also the co-founder of the Interesting People in Interesting Times event series and podcast.
More posts by this contributor
Social media, politics, and the bubble of distraction
Patterns, Predictability, and the Rise of Donald Trump
Mihai Botarel
Contributor
Mihai Botarel is the co-founder of RXM Creative and a writer on society and technology.
As Facebook shapes our access to information, Twitter dictates public opinion and Tinder influences our dating decisions, the algorithms we’ve developed to help us navigate choice are now actively driving every aspect of our lives.
But as we increasingly rely on them for everything from how we seek out news to how we relate to the people around us, have we automated the way we behave? Is human thinking beginning to mimic algorithmic processes? And is the Cambridge Analytica debacle a warning sign of what’s to come — and of happens when algorithms hack into our collective thoughts?
It wasn’t supposed to go this way.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Guardian:
How media avoided amplifying extremists’ voices in the past, and why todays newsrooms should reconsider “strategic silence” to avoid radicalizing readers
The case for quarantining extremist ideas
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jun/01/extremist-ideas-media-coverage-kkk
When confronted with white supremacists, newspaper editors should consider ‘strategic silence’
In regions where quarantine was deployed successfully, violence remained minimal and Rockwell was unable to recruit new party members.
The Media Manipulation research initiative at the Data & Society institute is concerned precisely with the legacy of this battle in discourse and the way that modern extremists undermine journalists and set media agendas. Media has always had the ability to publish or amplify particular voices, perspectives and incidents. In choosing stories and voices they will or will not prioritize, editors weigh the benefits and costs of coverage against potential social consequences. In doing so, they help create broader societal values. We call this willingness to avoid amplifying extremist messages “strategic silence”.
Editors used to engage in strategic silence – set agendas, omit extremist ideas and manage voices – without knowing they were doing so. Yet the online context has enhanced extremists’ abilities to create controversies, prompting newsrooms to justify covering their spectacles. Because competition for audience is increasingly fierce and financially consequential, longstanding newsroom norms have come undone. We believe that journalists do not rebuild reputation through a race to the bottom. Rather, we think that it’s imperative that newsrooms actively take the high ground and re-embrace strategic silence in order to defy extremists’ platforms for spreading hate.
Strategic silence is not a new idea. The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s considered media coverage their most effective recruitment tactic and accordingly cultivated friendly journalists.
The KKK was so intent on getting the coverage they sought that they threatened violence and white boycotts of advertisers. Knowing they could bait coverage with violence, white vigilante groups of the 1960s staged cross burnings and engaged in high-profile murders and church bombings.
The emphasis of strategic silence must be placed on the strategic over the silencing. Every story requires a choice and the recent turn toward providing equal coverage to dangerous, antisocial opinions requires acknowledging the suffering that such reporting causes.
Newsrooms must understand that even with the best of intentions, they can find themselves being used by extremists.
If telling stories didn’t change lives, journalists would never have started in their careers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
When ‘hipster fascists’ start appearing in the media, something has gone very wrong
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/22/when-the-media-starts-celebrating-hipster-fascists-something-has-gone-very-wrong
The Sunday Times profiled members of Generation Identity with a picture that made them look like members of a boyband. This dangerous trend of humanising extremists must stop
Fascism is all the rage these days. Hate is haute, white nationalism is the new black and neo-nazism never looked so good. So the Sunday Times – which recently published a piece about the white nationalist movement Generation Identity (GI) – would have you believe, anyway.
Profiles of fascists tend to come in different flavours.
Not every darling of the “alt-right” is a fascist or racist, of course, but neither are they simply intellectual retrogrades crusading for free speech, as some coverage suggests. The most recent example of this is the New York Times’s story about the “intellectual dark web”, which profiled rightwing favourites such as Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro. This article had the audacity to present Peterson et al not as incredibly problematic reactionaries, who have been given high-profile platforms, but as “iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities … largely locked out of legacy outlets”.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Gabriel Snyder / Columbia Journalism Review:
Q&A with Kurt Andersen, Erica Cerulo, Elizabeth Spiers, and Choire Sicha on journalists as entrepreneurs and how business and editorial skills overlap — At some point, nearly every journalist might consider the great leap: Should I go into business for myself?
“I was trying to not have a job”
https://www.cjr.org/special_report/journalist-entrepreneurs.php/
At some point, nearly every journalist might consider the great leap: Should I go into business for myself? CJR contributing editor Gabriel Snyder sat down with four current and former journalists who have taken that risk to ask: Do journalists make good entrepreneurs?
Tomi Engdahl says:
A journalist’s resurrection poses threat to public trust
https://www.cjr.org/watchdog/babchenko-ukraine-assassination.php
He was a “martyr for the freedom of Russia and for peace in Ukraine” and “an outspoken critic of the Kremlin.” He was memorialized with flowers and photographs outside his apartment. He is, as you’ve probably heard by now, very much alive.
Arkady Babchenko, the dissident Russian journalist living in Ukraine, shocked his friends and colleagues by turning up yesterday at a press conference meant to update the investigation into his murder. He explained that he had faked his own death, with the help of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), in a Hollywood-style sting operation designed to capture those who really were out to get him. SBU claimed that Russian operatives plotted Babchenko’s assassination, and that they have a suspect in custody.
“This journalist’s reappearance is a great relief but it was distressing and regrettable that the Security Service of Ukraine played with the truth,” Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Christophe Deloire said in a statement. “Was such a scheme really necessary? There can be no grounds for faking a journalist’s death.”
“This could have been a story about how, in all likelihood, Russian special services ordered the killing of a journalist in Kiev,”
There are concerns about how the Babchenko saga plays into the ongoing tensions between Russia and Ukraine, both over territory and control of information—and what a journalist was doing in the middle of an argument between two states. Immediately after reports of Babchenko’s death broke, Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman blamed Russia in a post on Facebook.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Max Willens / Digiday:
Delivering exclusive or early-access podcasts is expensive, labor-intensive, or leaky as dominant platforms by Apple and Google don’t support paywalling content — In theory, premium podcasts should be a great tool for publishers that want to retain and grow their subscriber bases.
‘A pain in the ass for users’: Subscription publishers wrestle with delivering exclusive audio
https://digiday.com/media/pain-ass-users-subscription-publishers-wrestle-delivering-exclusive-audio/
In theory, premium podcasts should be a great tool for publishers that want to retain and grow their subscriber bases. In practice, they’re mostly a headache.
The New York Times and Slate (and, yes, Digiday) offer either early or exclusive podcast access to their subscribers, but there is no easy way to deliver that kind of content through Apple and Google, the two dominant podcast platforms.
Workarounds are labor-intensive, expensive or leaky. And while only a handful of publishers have this problem — less than 5 percent of the 44,000 podcasts hosted by Liberated Syndication, better known as Libsyn, offer a premium tier, said Rob Walch, the company’s vp of podcaster relations — the lack of a simple solution also means some publishers have dropped exclusive podcasts out of their subscription offerings or may hesitate to include them in the future.
“It is a pain in the ass for us, and more importantly, it’s a pain in the ass for users,”
Over the past five years, podcasting has grown from a desktop-dominant medium to a mobile-dominated one. More than three-quarters of podcast listeners say they typically listen to podcasts on a mobile device rather than a desktop, up from 42 percent in 2013, according to Edison Research.
Moving to a standalone app comes with its own problems.
Just setting up and hosting a separate feed adds extra costs as well. While there are a number of hosting solutions, the costs for a paywalled or private feed are “just ridiculous,”
Publishers simply looking for a way to extract consumer revenue from their podcasts have more options at their disposal, like setting up a Patreon or adding themselves to a bundle such as Stitcher Premium. But for publishers that haven’t made podcasts a centerpiece of their content, the hurdles may discourage some from including premium shows in their subscription packages.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Adrianne Jeffries / New York Magazine:
How Right Media, a New York-based adtech company, built the first internet ad exchange in 2005 and gave birth to programmatic advertising
How to Succeed in Advertising (and Transform the Internet While You’re At It)
http://nymag.com/selectall/2018/05/right-media-creators-of-the-first-ad-exchange.html
We have programmatic advertising to thank for the internet’s wealth—and privacy problems. And we have Right Media to thank for programmatic ads.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Pew Research Center:
Pew study: 68% of Americans say they feel overwhelmed by the amount of news available, with the number rising to 77% among Republicans
Almost seven-in-ten Americans have news fatigue, more among Republicans
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/06/05/almost-seven-in-ten-americans-have-news-fatigue-more-among-republicans/
If you feel like there is too much news and you can’t keep up, you are not alone. A sizable portion of Americans are feeling overwhelmed by the amount of news there is, though the sentiment is more common on the right side of the political spectrum, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted from Feb. 22 to March 4, 2018.
Almost seven-in-ten Americans (68%) feel worn out by the amount of news there is these days, compared with only three-in-ten who say they like the amount of news they get. The portion expressing feelings of information overload is in line with how Americans felt during the 2016 presidential election, when a majority expressed feelings of exhaustion from election coverage.
While majorities of both Republicans and Democrats express news fatigue, Republicans are feeling it more. Roughly three-quarters (77%) of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents feel worn out over how much news there is, compared with about six-in-ten Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (61%).
Feeling overwhelmed by the news is more common among those who follow the news less closely than among those who are avid consumers.
(Most Americans – 65% – say they follow the news most of time, whereas 34% say they follow only when something important is happening.)
Those less favorable toward the news media are also the most “worn out.” Eight-in-ten of those who think national news organizations do “not too” or “not at all well” in informing the public are feeling this exhaustion.
(Overall, 17% of Americans say national news organizations are doing very well at keeping the public informed of the most important national stories of the day, while 24% say they do not too or not at all well; the largest portion, 58%, say the news media do fairly well.)
Tomi Engdahl says:
Pete Brown / Columbia Journalism Review:
Study: Apple News overwhelmingly favors national outlets in newsletters, with just 14 of the 390 articles reviewed coming from regionally focused publishers — Stung by changes to Facebook’s News Feed, publishers are reportedly “falling in love with Apple News”—though the affection may not always be mutual.
https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/study-apple-newss-human-editors-prefer-a-few-major-newsrooms.php
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jim Waterson / The Guardian:
The UK government approves bid from US media giant Comcast to take over Sky, indicates it will approve 21st Century Fox’s rival bid if they sell Sky News
Sky takeover: Murdoch must offload Sky News to get green light
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jun/05/sky-takeover-murdoch-sky-news-uk-fox-comcast
UK government conditionally clears Fox and Comcast offers, setting up bidding war
Tomi Engdahl says:
Savannah Dowling / Crunchbase News:
Patreon says it has 100,000 creators supported by 2M individuals with paid memberships, as it acquires Kit, a platform for discovering and sharing merchandise
Patreon Acquires Kit To Bring Merch To Patron Memberships
https://news.crunchbase.com/news/patreon-acquires-kit-to-bring-merch-to-patron-memberships/
Patreon, the company that helps artists and other creators receive an income through patron memberships, announced today that it acquired New York-based Kit, a network that allows users to make money by reviewing and sharing products online.
Through Patreon, creators ranging from makeup gurus, painters, and musicians are supported by their subscribers and fans with tiered memberships. With its platform, Patreon aims to reshape the way that people think about art as a “sensible” profession.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Are algorithms hacking our thoughts?
https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/20/are-algorithms-hacking-our-thoughts/?utm_source=tcfbpage&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29&sr_share=facebook
As Facebook shapes our access to information, Twitter dictates public opinion and Tinder influences our dating decisions, the algorithms we’ve developed to help us navigate choice are now actively driving every aspect of our lives.
But as we increasingly rely on them for everything from how we seek out news to how we relate to the people around us, have we automated the way we behave? Is human thinking beginning to mimic algorithmic processes?
Tomi Engdahl says:
http://vinhirvel.puheenvuoro.uusisuomi.fi/256231-eun-13-artikla-saattaa-uhata-koko-internetia
Tomi Engdahl says:
The erosion of Web 2.0
How we lost our way… and found it again
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/05/the-erosion-of-web-2-0/?utm_source=tcfbpage&sr_share=facebook
It seems quaint to imagine now but the original vision for the web was not an information superhighway. Instead, it was a newspaper that fed us only the news we wanted.
was supplanted by the concept of User Generated Content – UGC – a related movement that tore down gatekeepers and all but destroyed propriety in the online world.
That was the arc of Web 2.0: the move from one-to-one conversations in Usenet or IRC and into the global newspaper. Further, this created a million one-to-many conversations targeted at tailor-made audiences of fans, supporters, and, more often, trolls. This change gave us what we have today: a broken prism that refracts humanity into none of the colors except black or white. UGC, that once-great idea that anyone could be as popular as a rock star, fell away to an unmonetizable free-for-all that forced brands and advertisers to rethink how they reached audiences.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Next year, people will spend more time online than they will watching TV. That’s a first.
It’s happening faster than expected.
https://www.recode.net/2018/6/8/17441288/internet-time-spent-tv-zenith-data-media
Tomi Engdahl says:
Former Tory chancellor takes over newspaper, sells “money-can’t buy” coverage to Uber, Google and others
https://boingboing.net/2018/06/02/george-osborne.html?utm_source=moreatbb&utm_medium=nextpost&utm_campaign=nextpostthumbnails
George Osborne was David Cameron’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, the architect of UK austerity; he was fired by Theresa May when she became Prime Minister and he did not run for re-election in the disastrous election of 2017, instead taking a job as editor-in-chief of the Evening Standard.
At the Evening Standard, Obsorne concocted a momey-making scheme called London 2020 that involved selling “favourable” coverage to large corporations, promising them “money-can’t-buy” articles that would run as regular editorials without any indication that they were paid-for ads, and not journalistic stories.
Companies paid up to £500,000 for inclusion in the scheme, including Uber (Osborne is given £650,000/year as a part-time advisor to Uber investors Blackrock, who hold a £500m stake in Uber) and Google.