Finnish Internet Users are Most Avid Consumers of Online News article says that news and information sites capture a large proportion of the European on-line audience with 8 in 10 Internet users accessing one of these sites in September 2013. 338 million people visited a news or information website via a desktop or laptop during the month. 97 percent of Finnish Internet users visited a news site during the month, followed by Sweden and Norway.
I live in Finland. I have over several years pretty much converted my reading habits from printed magazines to on-line format. I used to read pretty much on printed magazines, and even been active writer to Prosessori and Tietokone print magazines. Things have changed. I have canceled pretty many printed publications I used to read. I have canceled the daily printed newspaper (I get it only on weekends) and I read my daily news on-line, most often on computer or smart phone. Some years ago I did not like e-book type flippy magazines but nowadays I have used to read many of professional magazines in that format.
I have to admit that the print magazine business is really changing from what it was some years ago. And it has caused problems to publishing companies.
Digital technology is reinventing our whole world, in service of you and me. It’s free enterprise on steroids. It’s bypassing the old gatekeepers. The digital revolution has completely changed the world of news. The media world has changed when all parties are on common ground on the Internet. Journalism is generally changed in the direction of a more critical. Users have changed, and they choose to participate. The consumers are organizing their use of media in a different way than before. Technology eventually mows down its forces of resistance. The mercantilists can only delay but never finally suppress the human longing for a better life.
Bold and Innovative article tells that there’s no doubt that in recent years the newspaper business has faced a punishing challenge that would be difficult for anyone to cope with. Readers have gravitated to computers and mobile devices. Display advertising has declined sharply (Newspaper Ad Revenues Fall to 60-Yr. Low in 2011). Classified ads have been eviscerated. Digital dollars have been hard to come by. The disruption has been enormous.
Digital ad revenues does not seem to be the solution for most publishers. This Is the Scariest Statistic About the Newspaper Business Today article tells that In 2012, newspapers lost $16 in print ads for every $1 earned in digital ads and it’s getting worse. The digital ad revolution, always “just around the corner”, seems to remain tantalizingly out of reach for most newspapers.
Programmatic Era Isn’t Benefiting Publishers article tells that real-time bidding is a great advertiser-centric concept; advertisers can bid what they want, based on their own parameters and audience targets. Yet for the sell-side (publishers), the picture has been less than rosy. The inconvenient truth is programmatic ad buying stems from an on-line advertising industry drowning in an ocean of available display impressions — 5 trillion were served in 2012. As the supply side of a massively imbalanced supply-demand equation, publishers have not come out on top.
Mag Bag: Record January For Magazine Web Sites article tells that digital audiences for magazines are growing fast, with big increases in consumption via apps and Web sites.
The promise of the Internet was that anyone with a keyboard and a connection could become a publisher and make tons of money. Like many promises rooted in theory, when it comes to practicality, things are quite different. Publishers Opt Out of the Pageview Rat Race article tells that the reality of the digital ad system is that scale still matters. Smaller publishers have the deck stacked against them. They’ll never get the traffic numbers brands and buyers want. And in the age of automated ad systems, finding large pools of specific audiences is easy — and cheap. For many small publishers, it all adds up to the need to take a different route. Smaller publishers can’t compete on a CPM basis. The pendulum is swinging for publishers that can convince brands that money is better spent on creating custom content and targeted messaging for these passionate audiences.
The digital revolution has already killed several well known old publications. Last year, Newsweek published its last print edition. Reader’s Digest Is Bankrupt as Iconic Magazine Falters article tells that RDA Holding Co., publisher of the 91-year-old Reader’s Digest magazine, filed for bankruptcy. And those are not just isolated incidents.
Innovate to adapt
Bold and Innovative article tells that the culture tied to the past and wary of innovation has only compounded the damage. Too often the response has been simply to cut, cut, cut. The result: a much weaker product trying to stay alive in a brutally competitive environment. For publishers whose businesses had evolved during the long day of print newspapers and magazines, the expansion of the Internet was terribly disorienting. The biggest risk is not rethinking business models. If newspapers are to survive in the digital age, they’ll need a bold, innovative, proactive approach. 4 pillars of media transformation article says that the print-vs.-digital debate seems almost trite by today’s increasingly complex media landscape.
State Of The News Media: Everything In Decline But Digital article tells that “State of the News Media” report offers a mostly pessimistic assessment of the condition and trajectory of various news media in the US today. In perhaps its most striking finding, the report shows how declining revenues leading to repeated cost-cutting have hurt readership and audience loyalty: slipping quality and diminished coverage have alienated large numbers of people who’ve abandoned news publications or outlets. Nearly one-third—31%—of people say they have deserted a particular news outlet because it no longer provides the news and information they had grown accustomed to. This applies to news media across the board, not just newspapers.
Call it “digital first” if you want, but today’s publishing imperative is really about distributing content wherever your audience wants it – on the web, through mobile devices, at events, or in print. You don’t necessarily need to focus exclusively on digital natives – but it helps. Adding outside talent can help to change your culture by infusing new ideas. Should staffs be integrated across print and digital? There’s no consensus on the best approach. Innovation must be supported by a structured format for vetting ideas, assigning resources, and managing projects as they evolve.
Wired switches leadership at Wired.com, underscoring the rise of digital media article tells that the Wired magazine is shifting to an integrated print and digital model. Ironically for such a forward-facing publication, Wired is a relative latecomer to this approach.
When a technology goes digital, it changes everything. For starters, the rate of technology improvement takes a new slope — transitioning from glacially slow to exponentially fast. Think about online search and how it changed the way we find information, how social media changed the way we receive news, and how electronic books and e-readers changed the way we buy books. When a technology goes digital, words like “library,” “newspaper,” and “bookstore” start to sound like relics of the past.
Digital publishing is also in constant transition. Coming to an e-book or car near you: the Web article tells that World Wide Web Consortium is now adapting Web technology for publishing industries to replace proprietary technologies used in e-readers. “The Web equals publishing” “There’s really no difference anymore.”
By helping others become competent communicators, legacy media make themselves stronger article tells that strengthening community competence and awareness is not only a good deed. It is a great business opportunity. And a relationship builder. No bond is stronger than the one you bind while learning together.
177 Comments
Gaye says:
Highly descriptive blog, I loved that bit.
Will there be a part 2?
Tomi Engdahl says:
Yous there will be part 2.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer: media relations are trickier now due to fast news cycle and social media that competes with legacy outlets to set agenda —
Top Obama Adviser Dan Pfeiffer Dismisses ‘Fake’ Media Uproar Over ‘Latte Salute’
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/25/dan-pfeiffer-latte-salute_n_5883012.html
Obama’s media diet: heavy on print/online news, light on TV
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2014/09/8553341/obamas-media-diet-heavy-printonline-news-light-tv
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Yahoo Directory — Once The Internet’s Most Important Search Engine — Is To Close
Once the Google of its time, the Yahoo Directory is finally coming to the end of its slow death.
http://searchengineland.com/yahoo-directory-close-204370
For some, it may seem like there has always been Google, and it’s always been the main way people have found things on the web. But before Google, there was the Yahoo Directory and its hand-compiled list of websites, organized into topics. Now, the venerable Yahoo Directory is closing.
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Izetta says:
If you have an election related issue you’d like to see explored, please let me know.
Women have not only a truly self-serving media center stage,
they have the very real legal framework to spearhead and catch their agenda.
Learn to be aware of your intuition, and you will get better over time.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook has sued spammers for nearly $2 billion
“We will fight back to prevent abuse on our platform”
http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/3/6901293/facebook-has-sued-spammers-for-nearly-2-billion
Facebook is in a constant battle against spammers trying to take advantage of its network, and it’s been fighting back against them in a number of different ways — including in the courts. In total, Facebook says that it’s now “obtained nearly $2 billion in legal judgments” against various spammers.
In particular, Facebook appears to be focused on spammers who sell fake Likes, generally to businesses interested in boosting their popularity. In its post today, Facebook explains that its tools generally make this ineffective — in fact, Facebook says that buying Likes will “do more harm than good” for a business’ page.
Keeping Facebook activity authentic
https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-security/keeping-facebook-activity-authentic/10152309368645766
Tomi Engdahl says:
The digital revolution is a challenge for the marketing
Corporate marketing is investing heavily with digital technology. More than three out of four marketing executives believe analytics, as well as digital and mobile technologies to change the corporate marketing significantly in the next five years.
E-mail marketing, online advertising and search engine optimization efficiency has increased significantly year. Email Marketing’s growth rate was 14 percentage points. Instead, telemarketing role and effectiveness have decreased from the previous year up to 23 per cent, says Accenture’s data sheet.
Marketing managers are investing in digital and mobile technologies – aim to improve the customer experience
Accenture’s new global survey shows that 78 percent of executives believe marketing analytics, digital and mobile technologies to fundamentally alter the business marketing over the next five years. An equal number of respondents (79%) believe that their company is transforming for five years, fully functioning digital company. More than 33 per cent of corporate marketing believes in the corresponding digital investments to take more than 75 per cent of marketing budgets over the next five years.
“While marketing managers take digital technologies and channels of their own, they can help their businesses to take advantage of digital opportunities more widely and to protect themselves from digital threats,”
Other findings of the survey:
Mobile channels valuation is determined by age group. Seven out of ten children under 50 years of age marketing the corresponding mobile channels as important to keep existing and potential customers, reaching out, while the 51-year-olds and parents feel this way less than half.
The respondents consider the customer interface-workers and customers spread by oral information still very important marketing channels. However, email marketing, online advertising and search engine optimization of efficiency growth in the 2012 survey year was significant, e-mail marketing with regard to 14 percentage points. Telemarketing role and effectiveness dropped sharply, meaning up to 23 per cent from the previous year.
Every fourth name in digital marketing integration, the biggest obstacle to the right of lack of technology or tools.
Sources:
http://www.tivi.fi/uutisia/yritysmarkkinointi+digimurroksessa+ndash+unohda+puhelinmyynti/a1017604
https://www.sttinfo.fi/release?releaseId=18354100
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Tomi Engdahl says:
Jeff Bezos’s New Plan for News: The Washington Post Becomes an Amazon Product
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-10-06/jeff-bezos-plan-for-news-washington-post-becomes-an-amazon-product
Jeff Bezos wants to turn the Washington Post into a national publication, and he’s going to use his other company—Amazon.com (AMZN)—to help achieve that goal.
For the past few months, a group inside the Post has been working on a new application that will offer a curated selection of news and photographs from the daily newspaper in a magazine-style, tablet-friendly format. The application will come preinstalled on Amazon’s newly updated Kindle Fire tablet, expected to be launched later this fall with the larger 8.9-inch screen, according to people with knowledge of the Post’s plans.
The app will be free for owners of the larger Kindle, at least at first. It will eventually be available for download on other Kindles as well as to owners of Apple’s (AAPL) iPad and various Android devices, and it will carry a monthly subscription fee. A Post spokesperson declined to comment.
Tomi Engdahl says:
A tip for media companies: Facebook isn’t your enemy, but it’s not your friend either
https://gigaom.com/2014/10/09/a-tip-for-media-companies-facebook-isnt-your-enemy-but-its-not-your-friend-either/
Facebook seems to produce a kind of existential dread in news organizations and journalists, since it plays an increasingly large role in whether anyone sees their content. That shouldn’t keep them from using it, but they need to keep in mind that it is just a tool
Media companies have lost control
Liz Heron told the ONA that trying to game the algorithm doesn’t work, and that the only real secret to getting lots of interaction from Facebook for your content is to create and post great content (this was always Google’s argument as well). But what is great content? That’s the existential problem media companies are wrestling with: is it clickbait that drives people to share, or is it in-depth analysis of important topics? And how do we know when we are succeeding?
Part of what makes Facebook hard to figure out as a platform for news or content of any kind is that it’s a moving target.
While BuzzFeed and its viral content have been seen for some time as the king of Facebook sharing, Newswhip results show that it has been eclipsed by a BuzzFeed clone called PlayBuzz
It’s not your friend, it’s just a tool
News Corp. executive Raju Narisetti made a good point in a response to Higgerson’s argument, however, which is that by giving content to Facebook you are ultimately helping Facebook as much or more than you are helping yourself. How much value are they getting out of that relationship and how much of that is value that you could or should be capturing yourself?
The bottom line is that Facebook is a corporation that ultimately has its own interests at heart, not those of the media industry or the journalistic community. To the extent that news organizations generate content that improves engagement on Facebook or generates data, then it will promote that content. If that stops working, then it will down-rank that content without a moment’s hesitation.
There’s no better example of the dual nature of Facebook than the “social reader” experiments of 2012, when newspapers like The Guardian and the Washington Post created Facebook apps that allowed users to read their news on the site. At first, those apps generated huge increases in traffic — until Facebook changed its mind about promoting them, at which point they fell off the edge of the earth.
Facebook may be cozying up to journalists and news organizations, because it sees their content as having value in attracting and keeping readers, but that is its only purpose.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Haters gonna hate: A guide to the backlash against Vice
Ricardo Bilton | October 9, 2014
http://digiday.com/publishers/haters-gonna-hate-guide-backlash-vice/
The hype cycle for publishers is a cruel thing. One day the darling, the next you’re getting a Code:Red.
Just look at Vice. In 20 years, Vice has gone from being a small counterculture magazine to becoming the media world’s latest obsession, earning it a $2.5 billion valuation. And, inevitably, it has attracted its share of haters on the way to the top.
The conventional wisdom about Vice is that it natively speaks the language of hard-to-reach millennials in a way that few existing media brands can match. It turns out that that’s not exactly true.
While Vice claims that it has 150 million unique visitors a month, its comScore numbers give it a much smaller reach of just 9.3 million people. The story is the same on YouTube, where Vice and Vice News have 5 million and 977,908 subscribers, respectively.
The problem? That’s YouTube’s audience, not Vice’s.
“They don’t even own their own voice because all of their scale is on other people’s platforms,” said one media executive. “How can they be worth that much and only have less than 10 million monthly UVs?”
While Vice is a media company, its real business is in Virtue, its agency arm.
Vice is just another media sweatshop.
For a company worth $2.5 billion, you’d think that Vice would be able to pay its reporters a decent wage. Not so. Vice employees and contractors told Gawker in May that Vice paid them just $30,000 a year, which they say is barely enough to cover New York City rents.
Vice News isn’t real news.
Vice has also taken heat for its unconventional approach to news coverage, which typically involves reporters actively being a part of the stories they’re reporting.
But while Vice has covered some big stories, the company’s brand of news coverage hasn’t sat well with traditional media types.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The evolution of audience buying
http://digiday.com/sponsored/workflow-automation/
Over the last couple of decades, technology has had a massive impact on consumer behavior and media consumption but, until recently, had almost no impact on how advertising is purchased and sold. Somewhere along the line, media fragmentation outpaced the ad industry.
The typical ad agency’s media planning and buying processes were designed in a time where we had five TV networks and a couple of dozen print magazines. It didn’t translate well to the consumer Internet where fragmentation created headaches and extra work for media buyers. As digital media budgets grew, so did the number of rows on the spreadsheets used for building media plans and the number of bodies required to manage them. The goal was to achieve audience scale for the advertiser, but in doing so many agencies nearly crippled themselves with the cost of human resources.
About 10 years ago, the ad network model allowed publishers to monetize unsold inventory, making it easier for buyers to build to scale. This helped a little, but it was still a solution void of tech innovation. We also saw ad tech vendors pop up everywhere. They offered something different but still relied on field sales teams to drive revenue, feeding off the buyer’s insatiable appetite for the next new thing. These were manual workflow solutions responding to the market’s need for more effective audience buying. We were still missing out on the promise of technology.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Guardian forms new editorial teams to enhance digital output
http://www.journalism.co.uk/news/guardian-forms-new-editorial-teams-to-enhance-digital-output/s2/a562755/
Visual journalism, data journalism and audience development teams are all being restructured under plans from new executive editor for digital Aron Pilhofer
The Guardian is reorganising parts of its newsroom to better serve its digital audience.
Visual journalism, data journalism and audience development teams will all be restructured after new executive editor for digital, Aron Pilhofer, spent the summer visiting other media organisations for inspiration.
The new Guardian Visuals team will bring together the “raw materials of visual journalism”, Pilhofer said, combining the graphics desk, picture desk, interactive team and parts of the digital design and multimedia teams.
Citing his summer visit to National Public Radio (NPR) as a particularly strong influence, Pilhofer hopes the organisation of the new team will “break down the barriers” that may currently limit some projects.
“The problem when you have these kind of silos is that it’s hard to assemble teams that are cross-disciplinary,” he said, “and have the right combination of designers, developers, graphic artists, photographers.”
The team of editors will be lead by an as-yet-unappointed editor of Guardian Visuals who will co-ordinate how certain stories are told and assemble teams around big events.
The different desks will remain “semi-autonomous” but will eventually move closer together physically, with the intention of fostering “those accidental conversations that can only happen when you’re sitting next to somebody”, he said, “and we want to create a space for that to happen”.
While the Guardian’s Data Blog has won awards for its work, Pilhofer wants to build a “more formalised desk” of specialists to collaborate with the rest of the newsroom on stories and projects.
Tomi Engdahl says:
British Lawmaker Publishes Detailed Report on Copyright Education
http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/legal-and-management/6281502/british-lawmaker-publishes-detailed-report-on
Tomi Engdahl says:
It was great having you, magazines. Let’s just say goodbye now
https://gigaom.com/2014/10/12/it-was-great-having-you-magazines-lets-just-say-goodbye-now/
When print magazines are gone, how much will we miss them?
Magazines have been an important part of my reading and regular life, but they aren’t like books, where I actually can’t imagine what both my life and the entire course of human history would look like without them. For all of the debates about publishers and Amazon and so on, I don’t believe that books are going away, even in print form. Magazines, on the other hand, are dying a slow death in a corner.
Like the very last black rhino on the planet finally dying in captivity, perhaps the story will appear years from now — but not that many years — on the front page of the New York Times and/or whatever Buzzfeed-type thing we are reading then (JK, the NYT will still be around, I hope!). Then many people will say, “Magazines! Huh. I haven’t thought about those in, well, oh, since I let my last magazine subscription run out twenty years ago.”
The joy we get from throwing magazines away seems like a bad sign for their future. On the one hand, there is something nice about reading something you know is finite. Unlike the endless internet that you will never conquer, once you’ve read a magazine you’ve read it, and you get a nice feeling of accomplishment at least until the next issue arrives. On the other hand, it’s a reminder of what a curious position magazines hold — they are so much more disposable than books that you almost wonder why they should be in print form at all, and yet once they go online you tend to lose your incentive to read them, since there’s so much other stuff to read online.
“What happened?” they’ll ask. And whether my answer refers to rhinos or magazines, it will be the same. “I’m not sure,” I’ll say. “It kind of just happened.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Article on future of media written in Finnish:
Median tulevaisuus ja 13 trendiä – mitä media on vuonna 2030?
http://digitalistnetwork.com/median-tulevaisuus-ja-13-trendia-mita-media-vuonna-2030/
Tomi Engdahl says:
How An IT Guy Stranded In Paris Turned Himself Into The Most Powerful Source Of Apple News
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-9to5mac-story-seth-weintraub-mark-gurman-2014-10?op=1
There’s one website that breaks more Apple news than any other — 9to5Mac.
Though its competitors are more experienced and better funded, 9to5Mac has established itself as the go-to website for Apple news. It’s regularly cited by the most influential news outlets in the world, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
John Gruber, an influential writer who focuses on Apple, says he sees “something worth reading on 9to5Mac at least once a week… No other site is quite like theirs.”
But 9to5Mac can also ruffle the feathers of its competition — namely, other Apple blogs.
its relationship with other Apple blogs, including 9to5Mac, was “friendly but competitive.”
The fact is, there’s a lot of money in writing about Apple, the world’s most valuable company that’s also notorious for its secrecy. And 9to5Mac’s ability to get exclusive stories, paired with its unique pay structure, makes it a big target — for better or worse.
Seth Weintraub, 40, is the founder of 9to5Mac. He also founded two other “9to5” sites: A blog dedicated to Google news, 9to5Google; and 9to5Toys, which highlights popular deals for gadgets, technologies, and more. He also recently launched “Electrek,” which covers electric cars, mostly Tesla.
Weintraub doesn’t come from a journalism background, and never had plans to become a media maven.
But when Rachel received a fellowship offer to study in France for nine months, he said, “Screw this, I’m just gonna go enjoy Paris.”
“I had some money saved,” he says, “And I had some Computerworld contacts I had corresponded with for some time. There was a need for Apple IT writing but I had always put it off. But once I got to France there weren’t a lot of options for someone without command of the French language or valid working papers, so at that point, I kind of jumped.”
Weintraub hadn’t considered reporting or publishing his own material previously, but had contacts at market research firm IDG who would regularly bounce tech questions of him for story ideas. When Weintraub contributed his first freelance story to Computerworld, it was an immediate success
Weintraub started writing for Computerworld, but he was cranking out more articles than it could actually run. So with his surplus of Apple-related stories, he started a blog.
At first, 9to5Mac was a solo effort. Weintraub would post three or four times a day, importing stories from various Apple business magazines and adding his own analyses. But about three months into the blog, a friend of a friend who had worked with Apple, had some unseen images of the “fat iPod nanos” Apple had yet to announce — so after some editing, he posted them to 9to5Mac.
By breaking news, 9to5Mac quickly become bigger than Computerworld’s blog, at least in terms of page views.
9to5Mac was burgeoning, but it wasn’t enough to live on. When we ask Weintraub how much money the site was making at the time, he says, “Pennies.”
“Five bucks a day, tops. On a big story day, probably $30 to $40, through ad sites. At that point, we were still living off of my wife’s fellowship.”
Eventually, 9to5Mac turned into a real business, but Weintraub says it all happened gradually, and he needed to keep working full-time at other jobs.
web page says:
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Tomi Engdahl says:
German Publishers Bow To Google’s Market Power In Ongoing Text Snippets Fight
http://techcrunch.com/2014/10/23/kapitulation/
A tug of war between Google and German publishers over how online news content is displayed in search results has ended in surrender (for now) for the publishers — who have grudgingly agreed the search giant can display snippets of their content without paying them for the privilege of doing so.
The backstory here is that the German publishing industry lobbied for a copyright law extension at the start of last year to cover so-called news snippets — as they were unhappy that Google’s business was benefiting from free use of their content.
That ancillary copyright law, catchily known as ‘Leistungsschutzrecht für Presseverleger‘ in German, ended up being watered down to excuse Google from a requirement to pay for using snippets.
When the ancillary copyright law came into force in Germany in summer 2013 several major German publishers initially opted not to pull their snippets from Google, presumably fearing the impact of doing so on their traffic — given that other publishers’ snippets would inevitably become more visible in search results.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Amazon’s crowdsourced publishing program, Kindle Scout, is now open for voting
http://thenextweb.com/media/2014/10/27/amazons-crowdsourced-publishing-program-kindle-scout-now-open-voting/
With Kindle Scout, Amazon’s taking a 21st century approach to publishing, letting readers nominate which books progress to funding. It’s like your favorite reality TV show, except for books.
Amazon launched Kindle Scout in the US a couple of weeks back, but today sees the program officially open for voting. It means you can now read excerpts from hitherto unpublished books and, if you like them, give your thumbs-up.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why It Is Time For A Vertical Media Collective
http://rafat.org/post/101055476726/why-it-is-time-for-a-vertical-media-collective
For all the hype that media loves to shower on itself, vertical media companies, outlets and startups are the invisible middle child that everyone ignores. Even media reporters writing at vertical media outlets ignore it, while using those platforms to talk about the same five BuzzVoxViceQuartz538Gawker & the ilk.
Why not? What business engenders loyalties if it doesn’t have passion behind it?
In other words, lots of lessons to be learned by sharing knowledge about building these vertical media companies. For now, neither the success of the vertical companies nor these lessons get shared by the larger media covering the media or tech industry.
This Vertical Life: The Media Models I Admire
http://rafat.org/post/98408899976/this-vertical-life-the-media-models-i-admire
Verticals have a particular attraction for me, which may have something to do with my general obsessiveness. Picking a topic you’re willing to spend a good number of years in, going deep into it with everything you have, and build the largest and most influential voice in it, that is what I have built my life and companies around.
And as a student of verticals in digital media, I learn and get inspired by companies that have the discipline to innovate in these focused verticals whether on the consumer side or the business side.
While the rest of the media writes about the same five so-called-innovative-news/media/content-startups over and over again (check any Carr/Ingram/any-other-media-reporter article about BuzzVoxViceAtavistQuartz538GawkerUpworthyFirstLookInformation & ilk), verticals in digital have been buzzing even before blogs became mainstream, and a lot of them have experimented and thrived beyond just media-as-product.
Tomi Engdahl says:
CPJ: In almost all cases, journalists are still being killed with no consequences
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/277219/cpj-in-almost-all-cases-journalists-are-still-being-killed-with-no-consequences/
On Tuesday, the Committee to Protect Journalists released a report entitled “The Road to Justice: Breaking the Cycle of Impunity In the Killing of Journalists.”
Those first two lists contain 361 names.
The third list, with the names of those whose killers were prosecuted, has just nine names.
Breaking the Cycle of Impunity in the Killing of Journalists
http://www.cpj.org/reports/2014/10/the-road-to-justice-killing-journalists-impunity.php
The lack of justice in hundreds of murders of journalists around the world is one of the greatest threats to press freedom today. While international attention to the issue has grown over the past decade, there has been little progress in bringing down rates of impunity. States will have to demonstrate far more political will to implement international commitments to make an impact on the high rates of targeted violence that journalists routinely face. A special report by the Committee to Protect Journalists
Tomi Engdahl says:
USA Today, WSJ, NYT top U.S. newspapers by circulation
http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/mediawire/277337/usa-today-wsj-nyt-top-u-s-newspapers-by-circulation/
The Alliance for Audited Media issued its last-ever six-month circulation report today. Here are the top newspapers in the U.S., by total average circulation in September 2014:
USA Today (4,139,380)
The Wall Street Journal (2,276,207)
The New York Times (2,134,150)
AAM is discontinuing the print report in favor of more detailed, more frequent reports on individual titles.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Interesting new media service:
Ebolatracking
http://ebolatracking.org/
The internationalization of the 2014 West African Ebola Virus epidemic with case importation in Nigeria, Senegal and the USA has generated increased alert worldwide.
EbolaTracking taps into the Twitter Streaming API and monitors tweets mentioning ebola-related keywords. A machine learning system trained with the supervision of experts filters informative tweets. Geographical entities mentioned in tweets – such as country and city names – are identified using the GeoNames database and used to place tweets on a global map.
The map shows events, i.e., groups of tweets that recently mentioned the same place.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Should journalism worry about content marketing?
Corporate brands now compete for audience with an aggressive storytelling strategy
- See more at: http://www.cjr.org/cover_story/should_journalism_worry_about.php?page=all#sthash.CVUeKxH9.dpuf
Tomi Engdahl says:
With Magazine, CNET Tech Site Makes Jump From Screen to Page
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/03/business/media/technology-website-cnet-to-jump-from-screen-to-page.html?_r=0
A LEADING technology website, CNET, is expanding into a platform that its users praise as portable, accessible and affordable. And unlike tablets, smartphones or laptops, it is also good for squishing bugs.
The platform is print periodicals, as CNET brings out on Monday a magazine, also named CNET, that carries a cover price of $5.99 and is being sold on newsstands and at stores like Costco, Target and Walmart. The quarterly magazine’s premiere issue, which runs 128 pages and is dated winter 2014, features the rapper and actor LL Cool J on the cover.
CNET will print about 200,000 copies of the inaugural issue of the magazine, which will carry articles of its own rather than recycling content from cnet.com. Among the first issue’s articles are “The Ultimate Tech Gift Guide,” “Driving Reinvented: The 2014 Tesla Model S” and “Should You Wait for the Apple Watch — or Not?”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Snapchat is in partnership talks with BuzzFeed, Time, others
http://digiday.com/platforms/snapchat-partnerships-talks-espn-spotify/
Snapchat is in negotiations with Comedy Central, Spotify and Vice for the upcoming launch of Discover, a section within the app that will serve users articles, music and video produced by prominent media companies, according to people familiar with the matter.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Germany’s top publisher bows to Google in news licensing row
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/05/us-google-axel-sprngr-idUSKBN0IP1YT20141105
Germany’s biggest news publisher Axel Springer has scrapped a move to block Google from running snippets of articles from its newspapers, saying that the experiment had caused traffic to its sites to plunge.
Springer said a two-week-old experiment to restrict access by Google to some of its publications had caused web traffic to plunge for these sites
Chief Executive Mathias Doepfner said on Wednesday that his company would have “shot ourselves out of the market” if it had continued with its demands for the U.S. firm to pay licensing fees.
Springer said traffic flowing from clicks on Google search results had fallen by 40 percent and traffic delivered via Google News had plummeted by 80 percent in the past two weeks.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Reuters ends reader comments on news stories, citing migration of discussions to social media; ability to comment remains on columns, blogs —
Editor’s note: Reader comments in the age of social media
http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2014/11/07/editors-note-reader-comments-in-the-age-of-social-media/
During the past few years, much has changed about how readers interact with news. They find coverage in diverse places and in new ways. They watch video, use graphics and calculators and relate to content far differently than in the past.
Considering these dynamics, Reuters.com is ending user comments on news stories. Much of the well-informed and articulate discussion around news, as well as criticism or praise for stories, has moved to social media and online forums. Those communities offer vibrant conversation and, importantly, are self-policed by participants to keep on the fringes those who would abuse the privilege of commenting.
We still will host comments on our opinion and blogs sections of Reuters.com so columnists and readers can exchange ideas on interesting and controversial topics.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Germany’s top publisher bows to Google in news licensing row
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/05/us-google-axel-sprngr-idUSKBN0IP1YT20141105
Germany’s biggest news publisher Axel Springer has scrapped a move to block Google from running snippets of articles from its newspapers, saying that the experiment had caused traffic to its sites to plunge.
Springer said a two-week-old experiment to restrict access by Google to some of its publications had caused web traffic to plunge for these sites, leading it to row back and let Google once again showcase Springer news stories in its search results.
Springer, which publishes Europe’s top-selling daily newspaper Bild, said Google’s grip over online audiences was too great to resist, a double-edged compliment meant to ram home the publisher’s criticism of what it calls Google’s monopoly powers.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The War of the Words
http://www.vanityfair.com/business/2014/12/amazon-hachette-ebook-publishing
Amazon’s war with publishing giant Hachette over e-book pricing has earned it a black eye in the media, with the likes of Philip Roth, James Patterson, and Stephen Colbert demanding that the online mega-store stand down. How did Amazon—which was once seen as the book industry’s savior—end up as Literary Enemy Number One? And how much of this fight is even about money? Keith Gessen reports.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Digital News Asia Raises $300K To Bring Old School ICT Journalism To The Web In Southeast Asia
http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/09/digital-news-asia-raises-300k-to-bring-old-school-ict-journalism-to-the-web-in-southeast-asia/
A tech news site writing about another tech news site has the potential to get very insider baseball-ery, so I try to carefully pick and choose which of our peers to shed light on. With that in mind, Digital News Asia (DNA) — a small but interesting collection of unashamed “old school” journalists — has raised a $300,000 seed round as it aims to expand its brand of reporting across Southeast Asia.
Started by three experienced tech hacks based in Malaysia and with a total editorial team of five, the two-year-old company netted its first funding round from IdeaRiverRun (IRR), a Malaysian private investment firm with a track record of working with digital media startups.
There are plenty of tech blogs covering news from across Asia — including us here at TechCrunch, of course — so what makes DNA so special?
Well, the founders believe their identity is a little different. Rather than focusing on tech news, DNA wants to cover the entire ICT pie — including the very much trade and B2B aspects of tech news.
Oh, and it isn’t a blog. So they say.
“Bloggers serve a very important function in disseminating news and views, but we also believe that the ecosystem has matured to a point where tech journalism can also play a role,” Asohan Aryaduray, the publication’s Executive Editor and co-founder explained to TechCrunch over email.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cory Doctorow: “We’re all sharecroppers in Google’s fields for the rest of eternity”
The novelist talks about the totalitarian perils of copyright law and how the Internet is changing art
http://www.salon.com/2014/11/06/cory_doctorow_were_all_sharecroppers_in_googles_fields_for_the_rest_of_eternity/
Tomi Engdahl says:
What Happens When Nobody Proofreads an Academic Paper
http://science.slashdot.org/story/14/11/12/0213234/what-happens-when-nobody-proofreads-an-academic-paper
Drafts are drafts for a reason. Not only do they tend to contain unpolished writing and unfinished thoughts, they’re often filled with little notes we leave ourselves to fill in later. Slate reports on a paper recently published in the journal Ethology that contained an unfortunate self-note that made it into the final, published article, despite layers upon layers of editing, peer review, and proofreading.
This Is What Happens When No One Proofreads an Academic Paper
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/11/11/_crappy_gabor_paper_overly_honest_citation_slips_into_peer_reviewed_journal.html
Wiley, the publisher, responded by removing the paper and says it will republish it with the line removed and the change noted. “We are in the process of investigating how this line made it to publication,” the Wiley spokesperson said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Future of Programmatic: Automation + Creativity + Scale.
http://digiday.com/event/digidayprogrammaticsummit2014/
The media world is undergoing a wholesale shift from manual processes to automated systems that strip out waste and inefficiency. The earliest instances of this shift caused ripples of fear of commoditization, unsafe environments and a depressing lack of art to go with the science of data-driven placements.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Samsung’s review of its own Gear S concludes that it’s ‘awesome’
http://www.theverge.com/2014/11/11/7192585/samsungs-review-of-its-own-gear-s-concludes-that-its-awesome
Samsung Tomorrow is Samsung’s version of Nokia Conversations: it serves as the official blog for the company and is managed by its Corporate Communications team. It is also, apparently, a technology review site.
Posted today, this Gear S analysis is the latest in a running series of Samsung Tomorrow “unofficial reviews” of the company’s latest hardware.
What it doesn’t disclose anywhere is whether the self-identified “most average editor” authoring the piece is employed by Samsung, or that he’s writing for a website owned by Samsung. This leaves ample room for misinterpretation, as readers might stumble upon the review and believe it to be the work of a keen Samsung fan rather than a company employee. The actual content of the review is thinly veiled marketing copy, regurgitating the features of the Gear S and decorating them with a few flourishes of approving commentary.
As flawed as human reviews of electronic gear can be, the best way to make them useful for others is to identify any existing biases and try to mitigate them. Or at least try to be upfront and transparent about them.
Samsung’s only following in Nokia’s footsteps here
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ben Smith, @crushingbort and @blippoblappo talk about plagiarism
http://www.poynter.org/mediawire/top-stories/281449/ben-smith-crushingbort-and-blippoblappo-talk-about-plagiarism/
I teach a journalism ethics class at Duke University that focuses on issues of trust. I spend about half the semester exploring the pros and cons of anonymous sourcing, the other half on plagiarism and fabrication.
The plagiarism by Benny Johnson at BuzzFeed has not only prompted a new round of discussion about copying and pasting in the digital age, it involves an anonymous posse — two bloggers who call themselves @blippoblappo and @crushingbort. After BuzzFeed fired Johnson for 41 incidents of plagiarism, Blippo and Bort have been on a relentless crusade against columnist and CNN host Fareed Zakaria.
“BuzzFeed, before I started, was more of a content lab … kind of curating the hot conversations from the web, using algorithms to find them,” Smith said. That resulted in “tons and tons of stuff that was in that era were lists of broken links and broken images and broken videos. And we kind of really sloppily said to editors, like ‘Hey we have all this old stuff. You can’t edit it anymore because we’ve changed our CMS, it’s a huge effort to fix it. … If there’s stuff you care about, we’ll save it. We’re gonna go ahead and get rid of everything else, because we don’t want to be serving pages that have broken links.’ ”
The mistake, Smith said, was “instead of thinking, ‘Won’t it be weird for readers when they pull up a page, and it vanished?’ we thought like ‘Oh, this is a convenient way to deal with all these old things,’ which was incredibly untransparent, and not very well thought through. Gawker noticed, and wrote a good story about it, and that’s good. I’m all for that. That’s how you learn.”
Smith told the class that BuzzFeed was in the process of writing an ethics manual. “As we’ve grown, and now that we have 250 editorial staffers, sometimes it’s helpful to have specific rules,” he said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Typewriters are back, and we have Edward Snowden to thank.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/11/12/typewriters-are-back-and-we-have-edward-snowden-to-thank/
In writing, music, photography and other areas, “outdated” technologies have initially been valued for their retro, nostalgic appeal in the hipster culture.
Now people are seeing the security benefits of returning to other so-called anachronistic technologies. Typewriters, for instance, are experiencing a revival in politics.
While this move might be viewed as somewhat regressive, it’s actually progressive. Let me explain.
Following last year’s NSA leaks, the Russian government is also set to return to typewriters in an effort to avoid hacking.
Initially considered obsolete in the digital age, typewriters are experiencing a slow but noticeable resurgence.
American media theorist Henry Jenkins once claimed that old media never die – they simply transform. In contemporary society, it appears that not only do old media and technology never die, but they return.
Technological determinism and the “doctrine of progress” dictates that society must move in a forward momentum toward digitally efficient technologies that operate faster, better and longer.
The use of old technologies is criticized for being anachronistic and pretentious, but people from politicians to artists are acknowledging the benefits of older technological instruments.
Analog technology is not only valued for its nostalgic, retro value, but for its simplicity in an increasingly digitized world that is vulnerable to hacking and privacy breaches. So while digital technology is heralded as the most efficient in terms of speed and productivity, older technologies offer something perhaps more valuable but under-appreciated.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why social is key to creating habit-forming news products
https://medium.com/@sarahmarshall/why-social-is-key-to-creating-habit-forming-news-products-55a5b05810b4
Social media editors such as myself may often be judged on the traffic they drive to a news site rather than on reader engagement.
Why do people form habits around products?
According to Nir Eyal, it’s often fear that encourages a person to return to a product again and again. Boredom drives return visits to YouTube, loneliness encourages people to go to Facebook, uncertainty encourages people to search Google, he says.
So for newspapers, news sites and digital products, perhaps the driver is FOMO, a fear of missing out. People return to find out about the key news events that they don’t want to miss.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How America’s Oldest Magazines Are Modernizing (And Monetizing) Their Archives
Iconic magazines have different strategies for surfacing their pasts.
http://www.foliomag.com/2014/how-america-s-oldest-magazines-are-modernizing-and-monetizing-their-archives#.VGjJxRbOW3o
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google has free speech right in search results, court confirms
https://gigaom.com/2014/11/17/google-has-free-speech-right-in-search-results-court-confirms/
A San Francisco court ruled last week that Google has the right to arrange its search results as it pleases, which confirms the company’s long-held position, while underscoring the stark difference in how U.S. and European authorities seek to regulate the search giant.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Machine-Learning Algorithm Ranks the World’s Most Notable Authors
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/532591/machine-learning-algorithm-ranks-the-worlds-most-notable-authors/
Deciding which books to digitise when they enter the public domain is tricky; unless you have an independent ranking of the most notable authors.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Crowdfunded Linux Voice Magazine Releases First Issue CC-BY-SA
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/14/11/18/1636234/crowdfunded-linux-voice-magazine-releases-first-issue-cc-by-sa
Linux Voice, the crowdfunded GNU/Linux magazine that Slashdot has covered previously, had two goals at its launch: to give 50% of its profits back to the community after one year, and release each issue’s contents under the Creative Commons after nine months
Download Linux Voice issue 1 — with audio!
http://www.linuxvoice.com/download-linux-voice-issue-1-with-audio/
Yes, it’s been nine months since the first issue of Linux Voice hit the newsstands, so we’re making it available under the Creative Commons BY-SA license. In a nutshell: you can modify and share all content from the magazine (apart from adverts), even for commercial purposes, providing you credit Linux Voice as the original source, and retain the same license.
Highlights in this issue: make delicious beer with BrewPi, understand how Bitcoin works, and secure your communications with PGP. Plus many more tutorials, features and interviews — 116 pages in total!
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Facebook Is Influencing Who Will Win the Next Election
http://politics.slashdot.org/story/14/11/19/0657239/how-facebook-is-influencing-who-will-win-the-next-election
[Facebook] announced yesterday that it was shutting down a feature that the Obama campaign used in 2012 to register over a million voters. During the election supporters shared access to their list of Facebook friends list with the campaign through an app. Researchers have found that while people view often political messages with skepticism, they are more receptive and trusting when the information is coming from somebody they know. The feature was credited with boosting Obama’s get-out-the-vote efforts which were crucial to his victory, but Facebook has decided to disable this ability in order to (rightfully) protect users from third-party apps collecting too much of their information.
Facebook shutting down a key path Obama used to reach voters
An upcoming code change means Obama’s groundbreaking 2012 outreach on the site won’t happen again
Jon Ward
By Jon Ward November 17, 2014 4:23 AM Yahoo News
http://news.yahoo.com/facebook-slams-the-door-on-political-campaigns-212248365.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Introducing FB Techwire
http://media.fb.com/2014/11/18/introducing-fb-techwire/
Since it launched in April, FB Newswire has made it easy for journalists and newsrooms to find, share and embed newsworthy content from Facebook.
Today we’re introducing FB Techwire, a resource for journalists to discover original content including breaking news, first-person analysis, photos and videos posted to Facebook by technology influencers and organizations. Like FB Newswire, FB Techwire is also powered by Storyful, the leader in social content discovery and verification for newsrooms.
Tomi Engdahl says:
GROUP HUG, shouts Facebook. C’mere and let us MONETISE you some more
App guys? Still happy with using Facebook login?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/19/facebook_groups_app/
Facebook’s app-breakout strategy – aimed at spreading its tentacles further in an effort to squeeze more ad revenue from its userbase – continued on Tuesday, with the launch of a Groups app.
The Mark Zuckerberg-run company already has a Groups feature on the desktop and mobile versions of Facebook, which is apparently used by 700 million people. The Groups app will continue to work within the main site, unlike the Messenger service which now has a standalone app that to date has been shunned by over half a billion Facebookers.