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:
Jim Rutenberg / New York Times:
In the era of the curated digital feed, readers now experience the day’s stories as a kind of choose-your-own-news adventure — AUSTIN, Tex. — A fascinating story emerged about Netflix last week. — The Daily Mail reported that the streaming television service was developing …
The Choose-Your-Own-News Adventure
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/12/business/media/mediator-personalized-feeds-news-choice-jim-rutenberg.html
A fascinating story emerged about Netflix last week.
The Daily Mail reported that the streaming television service was developing new interactive technology allowing viewers to direct the plots of certain television shows, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style.
The company later told me that the experiment was focused on children’s programming, more as a developmental learning tool than as some new twist on the modern media sphere’s rush to give you exactly what you want when you want it.
No matter how far the experiment goes, Netflix is again in step with the national zeitgeist. After all, there are algorithms for streaming music services like Spotify, for Facebook’s news feed and for Netflix’s own program menu, working to deliver just what you like while filtering out whatever might turn you off and send you away — the sorts of data-driven honey traps that are all the talk at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival going on here through this week. So why not extend the idea to the plots of your favorite shows?
Tomi Engdahl says:
But that’s no big deal anymore — at least if you consider the way people are being primed to shape the arc of the narratives on their highly personalized electronic screens to suit their own tastes, even if it means banishing inconvenient facts.
Understanding how that is playing out more broadly will help explain why you and your aunt’s new boyfriend can see the same events unfold in Washington and have utterly different ideas about what just happened.
It started with President Trump’s Twitter posts accusing former President Barack Obama of having wiretapped his phones at Trump Tower. Game on.
you would have seen commentary on why Mr. Trump’s charge was so believable (Breitbart) and, shockingly, how it’s even possible that the C.I.A. hacked Clinton campaign email but made it look as if Russia had done it
Really, arguments between adherents of the different adventure plots are the stuff of cable news programming, with each narrative vying for supremacy in debates that too often become arguments over established facts that should be indisputable.
Our Mediapost conversation wandered into whether the big platforms could inject individual information streams with more fact-based items that might run counter to a person’s baseless beliefs. Intriguing. But there’s not a ton of economic incentive for the platforms to give people what they don’t want.
You could throw on the goggles, become a bird and fly around. If virtual reality can allow a human to become a bird, why couldn’t it allow you to live more fully in your own political reality
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/12/business/media/mediator-personalized-feeds-news-choice-jim-rutenberg.html
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kelly Fiveash / Ars Technica UK:
Facebook says moderation “was not working” in response to BBC probe of sexualized photos of children on FB, where 82 of 100 reported posts were not removed
Facebook—in hate crime clash with MPs—claims it’s “fixed” abuse review tool
Twitter, Google, and Facebook scolded over lax response to online abuse.
https://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2017/03/facebook-hate-crime-sexualised-images-abuse-review-tool/
Facebook has claimed that it tweaked its community standards review system that allows users to report abusive, offensive, and illegal images and posts in light of a BBC investigation that highlighted the ease with which obscene material could be found on the site.
In a clash with MPs, the company’s UK policy director Simon Milner told the home affairs committee chair Yvette Cooper that the images reported by the BBC were “rather innocent” but added that comments below the pictures were “horrible.”
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Amar Toor / The Verge:
Germany’s justice minister introduces draft law proposing fines of up to $53M on social media companies that fail to remove hate speech — Justice ministry says Facebook and Twitter are still failing to quickly remove illegal content reported by users — The German Justice Ministry …
Germany considers 50 million euro fines for social media companies that fail to remove hate speech
http://www.theverge.com/2017/3/14/14920812/germany-facebook-twitter-hate-speech-fine-law
Justice ministry says Facebook and Twitter are still failing to quickly remove illegal content reported by users
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Michael Schuman / Washington Post:
By disparaging media in US, Trump gives tacit permission for autocratic authorities around the world to dismiss press reports as false and to harass journalists
Trump’s media-bashing is making it easier for foreign regimes to gag the press
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/03/09/trumps-media-bashing-is-making-it-easier-for-foreign-regimes-to-gag-the-press/?utm_term=.35f76a06f1a3
Foreign correspondents already have a risky job. Now that risk is being increased.
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Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land:
Google adds “Upsetting-Offensive” tag for its quality raters to use in flagging search results; Google engineer says “demonstrably inaccurate” info is a target — Google is undertaking a new effort to better identify content that is potentially upsetting or offensive to searchers.
Google launches new effort to flag upsetting or offensive content in search
http://searchengineland.com/google-flag-upsetting-offensive-content-271119
Using data from human “quality raters,” Google hopes to teach its algorithms how to better spot offensive and often factually incorrect information.
Google is undertaking a new effort to better identify content that is potentially upsetting or offensive to searchers. It hopes this will prevent such content from crowding out factual, accurate and trustworthy information in the top search results.
“We’re explicitly avoiding the term ‘fake news,’ because we think it is too vague,” said Paul Haahr, one of Google’s senior engineers who is involved with search quality. “Demonstrably inaccurate information, however, we want to target.”
New role for Google’s army of ‘quality raters’
The effort revolves around Google’s quality raters, over 10,000 contractors that Google uses worldwide to evaluate search results. These raters are given actual searches to conduct, drawn from real searches that Google sees. They then rate pages that appear in the top results as to how good those seem as answers.
Quality raters do not have the power to alter Google’s results directly. A rater marking a particular result as low quality will not cause that page to plunge in rankings. Instead, the data produced by quality raters is used to improve Google’s search algorithms generally.
Those guidelines have been updated with an entirely new section about “Upsetting-Offensive” content that covers a new flag that’s been added for raters to use. Until now, pages could not be flagged by raters with this designation.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Alexandra Bruell / Wall Street Journal:
Report: US digital ad spend to rise 16% in 2017 to $83B, as ad revenue of Snapchat to rise 158%, Facebook by 32%, Google by 15%, and Twitter to drop by 4.7%
U.S. Digital Ad Market to Grow 16% This Year, Led by Facebook and Google
Snapchat poised for “explosive growth” but will remain a small piece of the entire digital ad pie, according to eMarketer’s forecast
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-digital-ad-market-to-grow-16-this-year-led-by-facebook-and-google-1489489202
Total digital ad spending in the U.S. will increase 16% this year to $83 billion, led by Google’s continued dominance of the search ad market and Facebook’s growing share of display and mobile ads, according to eMarketer’s latest forecast.
Google’s U.S. revenue from digital ads is expected to increase about 15% this year, while Facebook’s will jump 32%, more than previously expected, according to the market research company’s latest forecast report.
But Facebook’s furious growth is also starting to slowly shrink the gap with longtime digital ad king Google. As the overall digital ad industry expands, Google’s share of the U.S. market will shrink slightly to 40.7% in 2017, as Facebook steals share from competitors to reach 19.7% of the market, eMarketer predicts.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook, Google slammed for ‘commercial prostitution’
MPs accuse social media firms of profiting from hate
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/15/twitter_facebook_and_google_slammed_for_commercial_prostitution_by_mps/
Google, Twitter and Facebook were hauled over the coals by MPs yesterday in a select committee hearing in where they were accused of “having no shame” and engaging in “commercial prostitution”.
The hearing was on the topic of online hate and what the social media/advertising platforms are doing to combat its proliferation online.
Labour MP Chuka Umunna noted that last year Google made $34bn in operating profit, adding that a person who posts a video makes $7.6 per 1,000 views.
He said: “Supporters of Isis have been posting videos and tagging the option of making money from ads alongside videos, which makes them and you money.”
Umunna said: “There are not many business actives where someone would openly give evidence to committee that they are making, and the people who use their platform are making, money out of hate… you as an outfit are not working nearly hard enough to deal with that.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook, Twitter and Google grilled by MPs over hate speech
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-39272261
Social media giants should “do a better job” to protect users from online hate speech, MPs have said.
Executives from Facebook, Twitter and Google were asked by the Home Affairs select committee why they did not police their content more effectively, given the billions they made.
They were told they had a “terrible reputation” for dealing with problems.
The firms said they worked hard to make sure freedom of expression was protected within the law.
Social media firms accused of ‘commercial prostitution’
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/03/14/social-media-firms-accused-commercial-prostitution/
Social media companies have been accused of “commercial prostitution” and having “no shame” after being grilled by MPs over their failure to take down abusive content.
“You all have a terrible reputation among users for dealing swiftly with problems in content even against your own community standards”Yvette Cooper
Ms Cooper told the three social media giants that she found none of their responses “particularly convincing”.
“Surely when you manage to have such a good reputation with advertisers for targeting content and for doing all kinds of sophisticated things with your platforms, surely you should be able to do a better job in order to be able to keep your users safe online and deal with this kind of hate speech.”
She added: “Don’t you feel any sense of responsibility as a multi-billion pound organisation to at least check that you are not distributing material from proscribed organisations?”
Simon Milner, of Facebook, said the social media site spends a lot of time, effort and resource to tackling the problem.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Guardian pulls its ads from Google and YouTube after placement next to extremist material
https://betanews.com/2017/03/16/guardian-pulls-google-ads/
The Guardian has pulled all of its ads from both Google and YouTube. The British newspaper was unhappy to discover that advertisements for its membership scheme were placed next to extremist material.
It is understood that the positioning was accidental, but the Guardian’s chief executive described the situation as “completely unacceptable”.
David Pemsel wrote to Google saying: “The decision by the Guardian to blacklist YouTube will have financial implications for the Guardian in terms of the recruitment of members to fund our journalism.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
How to survive gaslighting: when manipulation erases your reality
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/mar/16/gaslighting-manipulation-reality-coping-mechanisms-trump?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Copy_to_clipboard
Ariel Leve offers strategies to stay resilient in the face of psychological abuse that distorts the truth – much like what’s coming from Trump’s administration
Tomi Engdahl says:
Charlie Warzel / BuzzFeed:
How Techmeme continues to set the agenda for influential tech readers, without chasing scale or adopting the trappings of most media firms
Meet The Man Whose Site Mark Zuckerberg Reads Every Day
https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/meet-the-man-who-shapes-techs-narrative?utm_term=.oim9GYN4dO#.qi3LYRqP0B
For the last decade, Gabe Rivera has been quietly shaping the tech industry’s story for its top
executives, investors, and journalists. But is the editor behind Silicon Valley’s Drudge Report ready to reckon with his influence?
Techmeme wields tremendous power over a tremendously powerful group of people.
Techmeme may be a niche site compared to the Facebooks and the YouTubes of the world, but the tech-news aggregator influences the people who make the Facebooks and the YouTubes of the world: Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai are both confessed readers, as are LinkedIn’s Jeff Weiner, former PayPal exec and current Facebook Messenger head David Marcus, former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella.
Techmeme, then, wields tremendous power over a tremendously powerful group of people. And as its founder, Rivera has been quietly defining Silicon Valley’s narrative for the industry’s power brokers for more than a decade. But Rivera is uncomfortable — or unwilling — to reckon with how his influence has affected one of the most important and powerful industries in the world. The result is that Rivera can cast himself both as a gimlet-eyed insider with a powerful readership and as a mostly anonymous entrepreneur running a niche link blog from the comfort of his home. It’s a convenient cognitive dissonance.
Rivera worked as an engineer at Intel in the early aughts before launching Techmeme in 2005 as an automated news site that rounded up links from mainstream outlets and obscure technology blogs
verything about Techmeme and its lingering success seems to defy the contemporary wisdom of building a popular website. It publishes zero original reporting and is not a social network. It doesn’t have a mobile app or a newsletter or even much of a social presence beyond its Twitter account, which posts dry commodity news with zero flair for clickability. Revenue comes from sponsored posts and a “who’s hiring” page (Rivera makes a point not to seek any outside funding). Its headlines are typically fact-spattered and unwieldy synopses of the stories they tout
For its first seven years, Techmeme retained the look of the cluttered, aggressively hyperlinked design fever dream of the mid-2000s web; after a 2012 redesign, it now looks like a text-only newspaper homepage and still eschews the most bare-bones navigation features. In an era where the homepage is thought to be on life support, Techmeme is basically nothing more than exactly that, full of wonky text.
And yet. Run a search query for “Techmeme killer” and you’ll see a graveyard of old headlines for failed experiments
Google Ventures general partner and former TechCrunch writer M.G. Siegler told me most reporters he knows check the site regularly. “The same also seems to be true of many VCs I know,” he said via direct message. “It’s simply the best way to quickly get caught up on what you need to know in our industry.”
When I asked if he views himself as a journalist, Rivera seemed uninterested in the classification. “I guess not? I mean, I don’t care. It’s just a definition,” he said. “It’s a purely semantic thing. We do journalistic things and I edit the editors, so…sort of?”
“Monthly uniques are a particularly bad stat for aggregators like Techmeme.”
In a 2011, Siegler published a post arguing that “tech blogging is a game” with only three key elements “that matter: pageviews, scoops, and Techmeme.” He continued, “Techmeme is the most fascinating game. Everyone in the industry reads the site, and all serious tech bloggers know where they stand on the Leaderboard.”
Looking at Techmeme’s leaderboard and its top 30 publishers, it’s clear that the site tends to favor insidery blogs, many of which feature high-volume work like product announcements and updates over in-depth reporting and analysis.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jessica Toonkel / Reuters:
Advertisers try to scrub ads from Breitbart and other sites, resorting to double checking where their ads get placed by automated buying systems — Some advertisers are working overtime to scrub their spots from websites including Breitbart News, an unintended consequence
Advertisers seek more control after unintended Breitbart spots
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-advertisers-breitbart-blacklist-idUSKBN16S0D7
Some advertisers are working overtime to scrub their spots from websites including Breitbart News, an unintended consequence of the automated ad buying systems that are meant to lower costs and allow for more targeted advertising.
Those trying to keep their ads off certain websites are finding they must take steps to verify the spots they bid for are where ads actually appear and that there are no third parties involved that can result in ads winding up in unintended places.
Tomi Engdahl says:
‘Snapchat’s audience is too young for us’ says Heineken as it builds its mobile strategy around Instagram instead
http://www.thedrum.com/news/2017/03/16/snapchats-audience-too-young-us-says-heineken-it-builds-its-mobile-strategy-around
As Snapchat’s age demographic matures, alcohol brands are beginning to take notice of its advertising potential, however Heineken insists that the platform’s audience is “too young for us” and will instead focus on Instagram as it makes mobile a bigger part of its sports marketing efforts.
The beer brand is planning to double its digital marketing spend by 2020 and has set itself the lofty ambition of becoming the benchmark of creativity in the mobile world. Yet it will pursue this goal without the use of one of the biggest social media platforms.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Elle Hunt / The Guardian:
Facebook starts flagging potential fake news stories as “disputed by multiple, independent fact-checkers”
‘Disputed by multiple fact-checkers’: Facebook rolls out new alert to combat fake news
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/22/facebook-fact-checking-tool-fake-news
Feature – which flags content as ‘disputed’ – trialled on story that falsely claimed thousands of Irish people were brought to the US as slaves
Facebook has started rolling out its third-party fact-checking tool in the fight against fake news, alerting users to “disputed content”.
The site announced in December it would be partnering with independent fact-checkers to crack down on the spread of misinformation on its platform.
For some users, attempting to share the story prompts a red alert stating the article has been disputed by both Snopes.com and the Associated Press. Clicking on that warning produces a second pop-up with more information “About disputed content”.
“Sometimes people share fake news without knowing it. When independent fact-checkers dispute this content, you may be able to visit their websites to find out why,” it reads. “Only fact-checkers signed up to Poynter’s non-partisan code of principles are shown.”
The International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) is hosted by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. The IFCN code promotes excellence in non-partisan and transparent fact-checking for journalism.
Paul Joseph Watson, editor-at-large of conspiracy theory website Infowars, was critical of Snopes’ involvement in flagging disputed content, claiming: “Snopes is a bias [sic], far-left outfit. It is not a responsible ‘fact-checker’.”
Concern about the impact of fake news on social media escalated after the US election, prompting Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to confirm that the platform took misinformation seriously and was working to combat its spread.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch:
Universe, a mobile-only website builder, launches an iOS app and announces $3.2M in funding led by Box Group
Universe, a mobile-only website builder, lets you create pages in ‘under a minute’
https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/22/universe-a-mobile-only-website-builder-lets-you-create-pages-in-under-a-minute/
The business of platforms for developing websites and publishing online is a crowded one, with established players like WordPress, Wix, Zoho, Weebly, Duda Mobile and Squarespace competing against newer entrants like Medium and the likes of LinkedIn. Now make way for another one: Universe, a startup that hopes its mobile-first approach for building “light” websites on mobile — the pitch is that these can be built in “under a minute” — can give it a unique foothold in the market.
Universe, which is based out of Brooklyn, New York, is today launching its first app, for iOS, with $3.2 million in funding from General Catalyst, Greylock Partners (from its development and seed fund), Eniac Ventures and led by Box Group.
Sites tacked to Universe’s own domain are free, while those registered with custom domains start at a competitive $2.99/month.
Universe tackles the balance between creativity and templates to speed things up with a slick interface that presents the real estate of the phone as a 3×5 area, where you can select a background and then start to add text, photos, videos and link modules through a drag and drop interface.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jessica Guynn / USA Today:
Despite Google’s assurances, AT&T, Verizon, others pull ads from Google and YouTube over concerns ads could appear next to content promoting terrorism and hate — SAN FRANCISCO — AT&T says it’s pulling its business from Google and YouTube despite the Internet giant’s pledge this week …
AT&T, other U.S. advertisers quit Google, YouTube over extremist videos
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/03/22/att-pulls-google-youtube-ads-over-offensive-content/99497194/
SAN FRANCISCO — AT&T, Verizon, Johnson & Johnson and other major U.S. advertisers are pulling hundreds of millions of dollars in business from Google and its video service YouTube despite the Internet giant’s pledge this week to keep offensive and extremist content away from ads.
AT&T said that it is halting all ad spending on Google except for search ads. That means AT&T ads will not run on YouTube or two million websites that take part in Google’s ad network.
“We are deeply concerned that our ads may have appeared alongside YouTube content promoting terrorism and hate,” the company said in an emailed statement. “Until Google can ensure this won’t happen again, we are removing our ads from Google’s non-search platforms.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Geof Wheelwright / GeekWire:
Twitter partnering with IBM’s Watson team to “identify abuse patterns” among users on Twitter before the behavior starts, says VP of data strategy Chris Moody
Twitter starts using IBM’s Watson technology to help identify bullies who tweet
http://www.geekwire.com/2017/twitter-starts-using-ibms-watson-technology-help-identify-bullies-tweet/
LAS VEGAS — Twitter wants to do a better job of policing bullies who tweet, and Twitter vice-president of data strategy Chris Moody declared from the keynote stage at IBM’s InterConnect conference this week that it is using IBM Watson technology to help meet that challenge.
“We have had some abuse on the platform. We’ve talked very publicly in the in the last few months and said our number 1 priority is stop the abuse,” he said. “But it’s a very, very hard challenge.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
52% of all websites are in English, but only 25% of the world understands English. Find out how healthy the Internet is.
The Internet Health Report
What’s helping (and what’s hurting) our largest global resource
https://internethealthreport.org/v01/?utm_source=desktop-snippet&utm_campaign=IHR&utm_medium=snippet&utm_term=6221&sample_rate=0.01&snippet_name=6221
Welcome to Mozilla’s new open source initiative to document and explain what’s happening to the health of the Internet combining research from multiple sources.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Instagram begins blurring some sensitive content, opens two-factor to all
https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/23/instagram-begins-blurring-some-sensitive-content-opens-two-factor-to-all/
Instagram is already doing a lot to spot and censor posts that violate its community guidelines, like outright porn, but now it’s also taking steps to block out potentially sensitive material that might not technically run afoul of its rules. The social network is adding a blurred screen with a “Sensitive Content” warning on top of posts that fit this description, which basically means posts that have been reported as offensive by users, but don’t merit takedowns per the posted Instagram guidelines.
This is an app feature that will add a step for users who aren’t worried about being scandalized by images posted on the network, since you’ll have to tap an acknowledgement in order to view the photo or video.
Instagram’s new blurred content filters are another step in its continued efforts to clean up its act relative to community abuse and spam.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Benjamin Mullin / Poynter:
Some independent publishers that moved to Medium in 2016, like The Establishment and Film School Rejects, are doubtful of subscription model’s revenue potential
Burned once, publishers are wary of Medium’s new subscription offering
http://www.poynter.org/2017/burned-once-publishers-are-wary-of-mediums-new-subscription-offering/453283/
The Establishment, a scrappy, four-person outlet funded and run by women, was considering moving its site to Medium. Taking the plunge would mean free hosting, access to the company’s minimalist content management system and a variety of business opportunities.
And more money. The Establishment, like other publishers, inked a deal with Medium that guaranteed the site a healthy stream of revenue based on the amount of traffic to the site. That amount, which was negotiated individually with each publisher, varied: One publisher interviewed for this article said it was just under $3 per thousand pageviews. Still, Calkins said, she raised questions about Medium’s commitment to publishers during meetings with the company’s team.
Then, on Jan. 4, Medium CEO Ev Williams pivoted. Decrying advertising-based publishing as “a broken system,” he laid off 50 employees, including several that worked with publishers. Publishers could still sell their own ads and make money via membership, but gone were revenue guarantees from Medium’s native advertising deals, which some publishers were banking on to keep them afloat.
“Right now, we’re very concerned about the future of our site’s partnership with Medium,”
“Obviously, I don’t see selling articles to Medium as a sustainable business model for Latterly,”
The Establishment has also begun hustling to come up with new revenue streams.
After the announcement, Calkins and her team began a fundraising campaign that has so far brought in $25,000. They’ve seen some success from Medium’s membership feature, and they’re selling merchandise to help defray costs. But they’ve still had to cut back their publication frequency and make significant spending cuts.
“Maybe the takeaway is, ‘don’t trust Medium, ever,’”
digital advertising is notoriously difficult to pull off. Companies often promise lots of inventory and high clickthrough rates, but selling advertising online is getting increasingly difficult.
Medium is still covering costs for publishers, including hosting, content management and site maintenance.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Elizabeth Dwoskin / Washington Post:
Analysis finds ads for big brands placed on politically extreme and derogatory content across the web, highlighting broader issues with programmatic advertising
For advertisers, algorithms can lead to unexpected exposure on sites spewing hate
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/for-advertisers-algorithms-can-lead-to-unexpected-exposure-on-sites-spewing-hate/2017/03/24/046ac164-043d-11e7-b1e9-a05d3c21f7cf_story.html?utm_term=.03448cc46216
What Ellis had stumbled on was a little-known facet of the booming world of Internet advertising. Businesses using the latest in online advertising technology offered by Google, Yahoo and major competitors are also increasingly finding their ads placed alongside politically extreme and derogatory content.
That’s because the ad networks offered by Google, Yahoo and others can display ads on vast numbers of third-party websites based on people’s search and browsing histories. Although the strategy gives advertisers an unprecedented ability to reach customers who fit a narrow profile, it dramatically curtails their ability to control where their advertisements appear.
“No one has any idea where their ads are going,” said Ellis. In some cases, he added, ad networks “are monetizing hate.”
The Post’s examination found that the networks had displayed ads for Allstate, IBM, DirectTV and dozens of other household brand names on websites with content containing racial and ethnic slurs, Holocaust denial and disparaging comments about African Americans, Jews, women and gay people.
Some of these sites, the Post found, featured hateful and derogatory content throughout. In others, it was confined to comment sections, where users went far beyond the language used by the sites’ writers
“No business wants to be associated with sites like that,” said Andy Kill, spokesman for genetic testing company 23andMe. “If you’re trusting an ad algorithm to do this, this is what can happen,” he said. “It’s frustrating.”
The problem has emerged as Web advertising strategies have evolved. Advertisers sometimes choose to place their ads on particular sites — or avoid sites they dislike — but a growing share of advertising budgets go to what the industry calls “programmatic” buys. These ads are aimed at people whose demographic or consumer profile is receptive to a marketing message, no matter where they browse on the Internet. Algorithms decide where to place ads, based on people’s prior Web usage, across vastly different types of sites.
Many of the companies contacted for this story — including IBM, bareMinerals, Macy’s, Everquote and Allstate — expressed surprise and dismay that their ads appeared near derogatory content.
Some advertisers also expressed frustration that ad networks had failed to keep marketing messages from appearing alongside reader comments that might upset customers — even on sites that themselves do not promote extremist content.
‘It’s whack-a-mole’
The issue of ad placements has become charged in an era of rising political polarization. The number of right-wing hate sites, as well as sites that traffic in sensationalist news and hoaxes, has doubled over the past year, according to ad auditing firm DoubleVerify.
With so many new sites, it’s difficult for advertisers to avoid having their ads appear in unwelcome places. “It’s whack-a-mole,” said Wayne Gattinella, chief executive of DoubleVerify. “You can flag keywords. You can use algorithmic decision-making to minimize it, but there is no way to filter the word choice in real time.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tess Townsend / Recode:
YouTube’s ad mess gives advertisers leverage for what they really want: More data
YouTube’s ad mess gives advertisers leverage for what they really want: More data
Advertisers are tired of just trusting Google.
http://www.recode.net/2017/3/24/15015070/google-ad-controversy-advertisers-leverage
As far as advertisers are concerned, there are really only two ways to place ads online: The “open web” where you can track the ads, and “walled gardens” where you can’t.
Google falls into the second bucket.
That means marketers have had to trust Google to make sure their ads are doing what they’re supposed to do, including appearing in the correct places. But after they discovered last week their ads were funding YouTube videos containing hate speech and extremist messages, they suspended their business.
Here’s where it could get interesting. Advertisers now have some leverage to try to get what they really want: More data.
Google did announce this week it would give advertisers more control over where their content goes and do more to police which YouTube videos would be eligible for ads. Still, the details of what Google is willing to give is still being hammered out, sources say.
Tomi Engdahl says:
YouTube’s $25 billion ad problem
That sounds pretty bad! But it could be much worse for Alphabet and its investors.
http://www.recode.net/2017/3/23/15035524/youtube-google-advertising-25-billion-market-cap
Big advertisers are punishing Google over its YouTube problem by pulling some of their ads.
The good news for Google and its Alphabet parent company: This won’t hurt Google’s core ad business.
The bad news for Google and its Alphabet parent company: Investors are worried anyway.
Here’s what the second part of the equation looks like: GOOGL shares are down more than 4 percent since Friday, when news reports about big brands’ ads running against offensive YouTube videos really got going. That means Alphabet has lost about $25 billion in market cap in less than a week.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Avoiding articles from “the creep”: People trust news based on who shared it, not on who published it
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/03/avoiding-articles-from-the-creep-people-trust-news-based-on-who-shared-it-not-on-who-published-it/
“When people see news from a person they trust, they are more likely to think it got the facts right, contains diverse points of view, and is well reported.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tony Biasotti / Columbia Journalism Review:
Ex-USA Today NASCAR writer Jeff Gluck is on track to earn $78K a year in revenue from 800 subscribers through crowdfunding site Patreon — It’s a heady time for publishers of subscription-supported news. The New York Times added more than half a million paying online readers in 2016 …
‘I thought I’d give it a shot’: Two sportswriters find success crowdfunding
http://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/sports-crowdfunding-patreon-nascar-basketball-subscriptions.php
It’s a heady time for publishers of subscription-supported news. The New York Times added more than half a million paying online readers in 2016, and its digital subscription revenue was up 17 percent from the year before. The Washington Post says it doubled its digital subscription revenue in 2016, and The Wall Street Journal also reports healthy subscriber growth.
It turns out that people are willing to pay for news. But the Times, Post, and Journal are some of the world’s biggest news organizations. What happens when a solitary journalist tries a business model dependent on paying subscribers?
For Jeff Gluck and Derek Bodner, two self-employed sportswriters who recently started crowdfunding their independent journalism, what happened was better than either had hoped. Gluck covers NASCAR and makes around $6,500 a month from 800 subscribers through the subscription payments site Patreon. Bodner, a basketball reporter and analyst who focuses on the Philadelphia 76ers, has Patreon revenue of around $4,500 per month from 1,600 subscribers. Both give away most of their work on their own websites, with supplemental goodies like email newsletters for paying supporters.
Tomi Engdahl says:
UW professor: The information war is real, and we’re losing it
http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/uw-professor-the-information-war-is-real-and-were-losing-it/
A University of Washington professor started studying social networks to help people respond to disasters. But she got dragged down a rabbit hole of twitter-boosted conspiracy theories, and ended up mapping our political moment.
Starbird argues in a new paper, set to be presented at a computational social-science conference in May, that these “strange clusters” of wild conspiracy talk, when mapped, point to an emerging alternative media ecosystem on the web of surprising power and reach.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Science vs fake news – the fight is on
https://horizon-magazine.eu/article/science-vs-fake-news-fight_en.html
Call it fake news, false content, or propaganda, either way we are in a new era of misinformation and it’s influencing elections and fuelling extremism all around the world. Now, researchers are tackling the challenge head on by helping journalists and social media platforms verify video content and understand how 21st-century propaganda works.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Benjamin Mullin / Poynter:
Facebook, Craig Newmark, Mozilla, Betaworks, others help launch $14M global News Integrity Initiative administered by CUNY to improve online news literacy
Can trust in the news be repaired? Facebook, Craig Newmark, Mozilla and others are spending $14 million to try
http://www.poynter.org/2017/can-trust-in-the-news-be-repaired-facebook-craig-newmark-mozilla-and-others-are-spending-14-million-to-try/454330/
A global coalition of tech leaders, academic institutions, nonprofits and funders, including Facebook, Mozilla and Craigslist Founder Craig Newmark, on Monday announced a $14 million initiative to combat declining trust in the news media and advance news literacy.
The News Integrity Initiative, which will be administered by the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, will unite an initial group of 19 organizations and individuals around the world to make journalism more informative and help news consumers understand it better.
The new project has a tough road ahead. The rise of filter bubbles, the metastasis of hyperpartisan news and other factors have caused trust in the media to sink to an all-time low. President Trump’s repeated condemnation of the press and the national media’s failure to correctly forecast the winner of the 2016 presidential election has likely not done much to heal the rift between news consumers and the media in recent months.
In the past, much of the discussions around news literacy have been focused entirely on improving the consumer’s understanding of the media, said Jeff Jarvis, the director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, which is overseeing the grant. In part, this project aims to focus the attention on changes that news organizations and platforms could make to improve the ways they inform their users.
“I think we in journalism can do a lot to teach the platforms about journalism and public responsibility,” Jarvis said. “I think they can do a lot to teach us about resetting our relationship with the public we serve and how we can better inform the public conversation together. Because that conversation isn’t happening solely on our site anymore. It’s happening obviously all across the net.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Its not just you: science papers are getting harder to read
http://www.nature.com/news/it-s-not-just-you-science-papers-are-getting-harder-to-read-1.21751
Papers from 2015 are a tougher read than some from the nineteenth century — and the problem isn’t just about words, says Philip Ball.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sam Thielman / The Guardian:
Interview with Tim Berners-Lee on his 2016 ACM A.M. Turing Award, the recent privacy vote, clickbait, and online advertisements
Tim Berners-Lee: selling private citizens’ browsing data is ‘disgusting’
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/04/tim-berners-lee-online-privacy-interview-turing-award
As the world wide web creator accepts the prestigious Turing award, he talks to Sam Thielman about the US Congress’s rollback of privacy rules and fake news
Berners-Lee expressed particular concern for the Federal Communications Commission’s decision to scrap an Obama-era rule that would have prevented ISPs from harvesting their customers web logs. “That bill was a disgusting bill, because when we use the web, we are so vulnerable,” he said.
Berners-Lee has spent years fighting to protect an open internet and against privatization of personal data.
Did you have any notion of how radically information technology would change the world? I don’t know if anyone conceived of the way it would change everything from finance to journalism.
The idea was that it was universal and there should be no boundaries to it. There should be a sense that you can put anything on it: you can put scribbled notes on it, you can put beautiful artwork on it, and you can connect them together so people can go back later and see a connection between the scribbled note and the artwork it became. And you should be able to link to anything, and so you should be able to put anything on the web. That was the driving force behind the design, and motivation for trying to get people onboard.
You remember that before the web there were bulletin boards
That utopianism seems to survive in open-source communities.
There are a core group of people from within the web community definitely pushing it from that point of view. Right now, though, there are people who despair because everyone’s in the same social network and it’s just as though they had just dialed up to America Online. They might as well have kept America Online, rather than move to Facebook!
Are we reaching a breaking point when it comes to the centralization of the internet?
Advertising and clickbait have gotten to a point where people find them really frustrating and intolerable. Clickbait, which is written in such a seductive way that it’s almost impossible not to click on it, along with pop-up advertising, are both pushing people very, very hard so that they’re liable to lash back and just deliberately pay for anything that won’t have ads, basically.
We might get a pushback there. People can pick things up on the internet very quickly but they can also drop them very quickly. If your favorite social network suddenly became uncool – you’ve seen how people switch from one photo app to another, from Instagram to Snapchat – I think we might get a world in which certainly those who can afford it block out a space where their children can learn online without spending most of their time watching ads, for example, and therefore get a better education.
t is a bit of a worry that those who can afford it will have a better online experience than those who can’t will have. They’ll be able to afford real news; those who can’t afford it will put up with the ads and they won’t have the same quality of life.
I spoke to a lot of people during the election who seemed to have been getting a completely parallel set of news stories that had no relation to reality – do you think that’s a consequence of the advertising economy? What’s going to happen there?
Well, those people you’ve talked to, there’s a lot of them. Their ability to get good-faith, unbiased medical advice, as opposed to medical advice that is always selling you to the nearest proprietary drug and that sort of thing, that is worrying. One of the things which I have been suggesting is that people who run social networks have an obligation to step back. You post something and get a like or a retweet; that’s all very well, but what are the emergent social consequences when you put that in front of everybody? I think the major social networks have taken a big step back recently. The sort of world that we have is a function of the way we code Facebook.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kim Dotcom could be building bitcoin’s killer app
https://qz.com/948260/kim-dotcoms-micropayments-service-bitcache-could-be-bitcoins-killer-app/
Bitcoin’s price has been soaring, and if entrepreneur and provocateur Kim Dotcom’s latest scheme takes off, it’ll rocket even higher. The founder of Megaupload, who the US government has called a fugitive from copyright infringement charges, is creating a payments platform called Bitcache, which will let people get paid for digital content with bitcoin.
Dotcom tweeted a video showing a demo of the Bitcache system today. A user can upload any file or video stream and charge others to download it, setting the price himself. The uploader then gets paid in “Bits,” which can be converted into bitcoin. Precise details of how the Bitcache system works remains scarce
Micropayments for content is one of bitcoin’s most talked about uses. The Aspen Institute’s Walter Isaacson has called it journalism’s “savior,” while the creator of Javascript, Brendan Eich, is building a variety of technologies to turn it into a reality.
Kim Dotcom’s idea is to allow any publisher on the web to easily charge readers tiny amounts for content with “one line of code” on their website. This service would eventually extend beyond individual files or streams to entire websites, he says in his demo video.
The odds are stacked against Kim Dotcom’s new venture. He’s launching Bitcache as a service for a rebooted version of his original enterprise Megaupload
Kim Dotcom announces new Bitcoin venture for content uploaders to earn money
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-newzealand-bitcoin-dotcom-idUSKBN17705U
Controversial New Zealand-based internet mogul Kim Dotcom plans to launch a Bitcoin payments system for users to sell files and video streaming as he fights extradition to the United States for criminal copyright charges.
“You can create a payment for any content that you put on the internet…you can share that with your customers, with the interest community and, boom, you are basically in business and can sell your content,” Dotcom said in the video.
He added that Bitcontent would eventually allow businesses, such as news organizations, to earn money from their entire websites. He did not provide a launch date.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land:
An in-depth look at recent challenges to Google’s search reputation, from fake news sites in results, to disturbing answers from Google Home
A deep look at Google’s biggest-ever search quality crisis
http://searchengineland.com/google-search-quality-crisis-272174
Under fire for months, can Google reverse the drip-drip-drip of criticism as incorrect, absurd or even dangerous results surface to the top?
Tomi Engdahl says:
Emma Thomasson / Reuters:
German cabinet approves plan that could fine social networks up to $53M if companies do not remove hate speech quickly
German cabinet agrees to fine social media over hate speech
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-germany-hatecrime-idUSKBN1771FC
Germany’s cabinet approved a plan on Wednesday to fine social networks up to 50 million euros ($53 million) if they fail to remove hateful postings quickly, prompting concerns the law could limit free expression.
Germany has some of the world’s toughest laws covering defamation, public incitement to commit crimes and threats of violence, with prison sentences for Holocaust denial or inciting hatred against minorities. But few online cases are prosecuted.
“There should be just as little tolerance for criminal rabble rousing on social networks as on the street,” Justice Minister Heiko Maas said in a statement,
The issue has taken on more urgency as German politicians worry that a proliferation of fake news and racist content, particularly about 1 million migrants who have arrived in the last two years, could sway public opinion in the run-up to national elections in September.
A spokesman for Facebook, which has 29 million active users in Germany – more than a third of the total population – said the company was working hard to remove illegal content, but expressed concern at the draft law.
The draft law would give social networks 24 hours to delete or block obviously criminal content and seven days to deal with less clear-cut cases, with an obligation to report back to the person who filed the complaint about how they handled the case.
Tomi Engdahl says:
YouTube will now block ads on channels with under 10,000 views
https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/06/youtube-will-now-block-ads-on-channels-with-under-10000-views/?sr_share=facebook
YouTube is taking measures to help ensure its user-generated content doesn’t end up positioning ads by big brands next to questionable content. The social network will not allow ads on channels that have fewer than 10,000 views total, across all their posted videos.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ben Popper / The Verge:
YouTube says it will only allow channels with 10K lifetime views to monetize videos, to help make sure revenue flows only to those who play by the rules — The rule change is meant to weed out bad actors — Five years ago, YouTube opened their partner program to everyone.
YouTube will no longer allow creators to make money until they reach 10,000 views
The rule change is meant to weed out bad actors
http://www.theverge.com/2017/4/6/15209220/youtube-partner-program-rule-change-monetize-ads-10000-views
Five years ago, YouTube opened their partner program to everyone. This was a really big deal: it meant anyone could sign up for the service, start uploading videos, and immediately begin making money. This model helped YouTube grow into the web’s biggest video platform, but it has also led to some problems. People were creating accounts that uploaded content owned by other people, sometimes big record labels or movie studios, sometimes other popular YouTube creators.
In an effort to combat these bad actors, YouTube has announced a change to its partner program today. From now on, creators won’t be able to turn on monetization until they hit 10,000 lifetime views on their channel. YouTube believes that this threshold will give them a chance to gather enough information on a channel to know if it’s legit. And it won’t be so high as to discourage new independent creators from signing up for the service.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook tests a second News Feed headed by a rocket ship icon
https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/29/facebook-tries-a-second-news-feed-headed-by-a-rocket-ship-icon/
Facebook’s launch of Stories may be the social network’s big news of the week, but some Facebook users have spotted another addition, and are thoroughly confused. A “rocket ship” icon has popped up in the app of select users worldwide, adjacent to the News Feed button. Its appearance is prompting a lot of users to wonder, “what on earth is this thing?”
The button may be either at the top of the screen or the bottom, depending on whether the user is on iOS or Android.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land:
Google adds fact checking information to search results and Google News worldwide — Last October, Google launched support to highlight fact-checking articles within Google News in the US and the UK. Now those articles will get special presentation as part of general Google searches worldwide.
Google expands fact-checking effort to all searches worldwide
http://searchengineland.com/google-expands-fact-checking-272698
Is an online claim true or not? Google hopes special callouts for fact-checking articles will help searchers get the right answers or better make their own decisions.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Barry Schwartz / Search Engine Land:
Google says it has reduced fake Google Maps listings by 70% since June 2015 by improving business verification methods and using machine learning to fight spam
Google says it has reduced fake Google Maps listings by 70% since 2015
Company cites machine learning and new business verification techniques as main reasons for the decline.
http://searchengineland.com/google-says-reduced-fake-google-maps-listing-results-272638
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nieman Lab:
Scholars studying “fake news” say documenting how it moves and mobilizes people can help tell us why it circulates — Just as with works of art or literature, the meaning of a fake news story or image cannot be sharply separated from different ways of seeing, cultures of reading, or traditions of interpretation around it.
What does fake news tell us about life in the digital age? Not what you might expect
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/04/what-does-fake-news-tell-us-about-life-in-the-digital-age-not-what-you-might-expect/
“By looking more closely at how fake news moves and mobilizes people, we can develop a richer picture of not only how much it circulates where, but also why it circulates and how it resonates amongst different publics.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nausicaa Renner / Columbia Journalism Review:
First Draft News launches a Field Guide to Fake News, with exercises to help anyone understand how stories travel on social media — If there’s one—and only one—thing we can say definitively about fake news, it’s that it inspired some great reporting, of a kind that has never before been prominent in the public sphere.
First Draft releases guide to savvy reporting on fake news
http://www.cjr.org/analysis/first-draft-field-guide-fake-news.php
If there’s one—and only one—thing we can say definitively about fake news, it’s that it inspired some great reporting, of a kind that has never before been prominent in the public sphere.
For those journalists without a computational background, many of his reporting tools may seem opaque. How does a journalist go about tracking how fake news stories have circulated on social media, much less assess their partisanship en masse?
Thankfully, for the rest of us, First Draft News has produced a “Field Guide to Fake News,” launched today at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy. (Not to be confused with “Tips for Spotting False News” released by Facebook yesterday.)
While the Guide is not explicitly geared toward teachers, it is chock full of exercises to guide us laymen through the legwork of understanding how stories travel on social media. The exercises are called “recipes.” The “ingredients” are a set of links to fake news stories you want to track. Recipes come in different “flavors” depending on how tech savvy the reader is. And the serving suggestions include how the recipes may be used to encourage better understanding.
http://fakenews.publicdatalab.org/
A Field Guide to Fake News explores the use of digital methods to trace the production, circulation and reception of fake news online.
It is a project of the Public Data Lab with support from First Draft.
An open access sample of the first three chapters of the guide is available
Tomi Engdahl says:
Alexios Mantzarlis / Poynter:
Google is rolling out a “fact check” feature in its search results that will include who said each claim and its accuracy rating within a featured snippet — Google rolled out a new feature Friday morning that will help fact checks stand out in search results.
Google is now highlighting fact checks in search
http://www.poynter.org/2017/google-is-now-highlighting-fact-checks-in-search/454668/
Google rolled out a new feature Friday morning that will help fact checks stand out in search results.
If a search query returns a result that includes a fact check, it will be featured as a snippet on the result page
The snippet will always include who said the claim and its accuracy rating. If a publication fact-checked more than one claim on the same topic, each fact check will be featured in a carousel.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Reuters:
Reuters begins appending a link to its Trust Principles at the bottom of stories and will also occasionally provide explanations for how pieces were reported — (NEW YORK) You may not be familiar with the Thomson Reuters Trust Principles, but to us at Reuters they are our indispensable compass.
To our readers, from the Editor-in-Chief
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-backstory-editor-idUSKBN178208
(NEW YORK) You may not be familiar with the Thomson Reuters Trust Principles, but to us at Reuters they are our indispensable compass. Created in 1941, in the midst of World War II, they call upon Reuters and its employees to act at all times with integrity, independence and freedom from bias. The Trust Principles were built into the charter of Reuters when it went public in 1984 and into the founding documents of the Thomson Reuters Corp. after it was formed in 2008. In their clarity and uncompromising standards, these principles have proven invaluable in guiding our journalists over the past 75 years, and they continue to help us report honestly and fairly in today’s challenging environment.
Starting today, you’ll see that we have attached a link to the Trust Principles at the bottom of all stories on Reuters.com.
The Trust Principles
https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en/about-us/trust-principles.html
Thomson Reuters is dedicated to upholding the Trust Principles and to preserving its independence, integrity and freedom from bias in the gathering and dissemination of information and news.
Tomi Engdahl says:
LiveJournal trial a storm in a safe harbour
Forum might be liable for celeb image breaches
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/11/livejournal_trial_a_storm_in_a_safe_harbour/
US forum admins will be watching a Californian court with nervous interest, as social forum LiveJournal goes to trial for copyright infringement.
The trial is being seen as a test of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), since LiveJournal had previously argued it was protected by that law’s safe harbour provisions.
Part of the problem for LiveJournal is it wasn’t some random user that took images taken by Marvix Photographs and posted them in 2010 to the popular “Oh No They Didn’t” group – it was moderators from the site.
Worse: once pics that included a pregnant-looking Beyonce created a hit, LiveJournal decided to run ads on the offending forum.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Facebook’s Sandberg says number of monthly advertisers tops 5 million
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-advertising-idUSKBN17C1FC
Facebook Inc (FB.O) plans to announce on Monday that more than 5 million businesses are advertising on the social network each month and that it is updating its suite of ad services to try to draw more small businesses onto its mobile platform.
The company said in September that it had 4 million advertisers
The world’s largest social network, which is free to users, has 1.9 billion people on it.
Facebook is locked in a battle with Alphabet Inc’s Google (GOOGL.O) for dominance in digital advertising. The two Silicon Valley giants are expected to soak up some 46 percent of online ad spending in 2018, according to research firm eMarketer.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Casey Newton / The Verge:
How Facebook’s shifting priorities and inferior monetization options for Instant Articles are leading some big publishers to abandon the format — Facebook’s Instant Articles promised to transform journalism — but now big publishers are fleeing — Inside Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters …
Instant recall
Facebook’s Instant Articles promised to transform journalism — but now big publishers are fleeing
http://www.theverge.com/2017/4/16/15314210/instant-articles-facebook-future-ads-video
Inside Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters, the arrival of Instant Articles in the spring of 2015 was presented as a cause for celebration. Talking with reporters, executives described the fast-loading, natively hosted articles as a promising new creative format.
For publishers — and journalism — the stakes were high. Readers who once regularly visited their desktop websites now got their news from Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and other apps outside of publishers’ control. For many large publishers, survival would depend on whether they could build loyal audiences inside third-party mobile apps.
Publishers were wary. Some feared Facebook would absorb so much content behind its walled garden that the web itself could be at risk. “Platforms are eating our business, and we’re letting it happen,”
“Do you have any proof that publishers using another company’s proprietary platform have ever created a lasting and sustainable business?” asked John Battelle, a media industry veteran. (The answer appeared to be no.)
There was optimism, too. Facebook’s daily aggregation of eyeballs is the largest in human history, and publishers were eager for the chance to capture more of them.
But two years after it launched, a platform that aspired to build a more stable path forward for journalism appears to be declining in relevance. At the same time that Instant Articles were being designed, Facebook was beginning work on the projects that would ultimately undermine it. Starting in 2015, the company’s algorithms began favoring video over other content types, diminishing the reach of Instant Articles in the feed.
After scrambling to rebuild their workflows around Instant Articles, large publishers were left with a system that failed to grow audiences or revenues.
Since last year the number of publishers using Instant Articles grew 16 times, to 9,000 publishers
Now publishers are turning their attention elsewhere. Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages project borrows elements from Instant Articles while giving publishers more control. (Publishers that use paywalls, such as the Times, can implement them in AMP but not Instant Articles.) Articles published through AMP remain part of the open web, which publishers generally prefer to Facebook’s closed ecosystem, and Google has flooded AMP with traffic from search. Most importantly, it makes more money than Instant Articles. By February, it was serving 7 percent of all traffic to major US publishers.
Publishers are also paying increasing attention to Apple News, which added push notifications
“A lot of the frustrations you hear are business model frustrations, rather than the performance of their content on Facebook or otherwise,”
If Instant Articles can’t build traffic or revenue, perhaps it can at least inspire loyalty in publishers’ existing audiences.
Slate’s Carey said the company has seen early success in attracting newsletters subscribers this way. The company is shifting away from a page view-driven business model to one that emphasizes reader loyalty. (Loyal readers are more likely to sign up for Slate Plus, its premium subscription product.)
Neha Gandhi, senior vice president of content and strategy at Refinery29, told me Instant Articles “neither helps nor harms” the company’s efforts to build audiences through Facebook. The publisher remains part of the program so it can beta test new features, such as the newsletter modules.
Meanwhile, the News Feed is as unpredictable as ever. The ones who can afford to adapt to every new format Facebook introduces, hoping that, in aggregate, engaging with the platform’s ecosystem will lead to profits. “It’s the constellation of things that we have on Facebook,”
“Facebook changed, and so did publishers,” Herrman said. “The underlying dynamic didn’t, at least not that much.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Margaret Sullivan / Washington Post:
Great local reporting remains alive in a dying newspaper industry, but employment trends show it urgently needs support — In only 15 years, American newspaper companies slashed their workforces by more than half — from 412,000 employees in 2001 to 174,000 last year.
Great local reporting stands between you and wrongdoing. And it needs saving.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/great-local-reporting-stands-between-you-and-wrongdoing-and-it-needs-saving/2017/04/16/e763803e-1ba1-11e7-9887-1a5314b56a08_story.html?utm_term=.bc30a2718c1d
In only 15 years, American newspaper companies slashed their workforces by more than half — from 412,000 employees in 2001 to 174,000 last year.
what’s in trouble as newspaper staffs decline across the country, with many companies struggling to stay solvent after the precipitous — and accelerating — decline in print advertising revenue.
“Regional and local newspapers have been decimated,” Northeastern University’s Dan Kennedy wrote last week.
Digital reporting outlets and local TV stations do good work but, as Kennedy noted, research has shown that “some 85 percent of accountability journalism is produced by newspapers.”
And the need for scrutiny only grows.
“Across the country, state lawmakers and agency officials operate with glaring conflicts of interest and engage in brazenly cozy relationships with lobbyists,”
One of the best ways to hold government accountable is by having a skilled beat reporter
But nationwide, the number of statehouse reporters was down even more sharply than overall reporting staffs, a Pew study reported in 2014.
Even weakened, regional newspaper journalism is still making a powerful difference today.
“An industry that is dying is still alive,” wrote Roy Peter Clark on Poynter.org, in a piece before the Pulitzer awards. “While alive, it may continue to perform vital services to a community — services such as news and information, keeping an eye on city hall, on sewage in the bay, on the failures of local schools.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Rich McCormick / The Verge:
Several hours passed before Facebook removed a video of a murder shared on the social network — Facebook took posts down hours later — A Cleveland man is at large after reportedly killing someone and uploading the footage to Facebook. The video appears to show a man identified by police …
Cleveland manhunt underway after video of murder uploaded to Facebook
Facebook took posts down hours later
http://www.theverge.com/2017/4/16/15321282/cleveland-murder-facebook-live-steve-stephens
A Cleveland man is at large after reportedly killing someone and uploading the footage to Facebook.
Facebook has removed the video and Stephens’ account, but it took the company several hours to take them down after Stephens started his attack at around 2PM local time. “This is a horrific crime and we do not allow this kind of content on Facebook,” a company spokesperson said in a statement to BuzzFeed. “We work hard to keep a safe environment on Facebook, and are in touch with law enforcement in emergencies when there are direct threats to physical safety.”
It’s not clear whether Facebook acted on its own to remove the posts, or reacted to requests from local law enforcement officials to take them down.
Tomi Engdahl says:
10 years of hope and hard lessons on the Facebook Platform
https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/17/bizarre-dev-triangle/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mike Caulfield / Medium:
Facebook’s “Tips to Spot False News” take too much time, are too generic and dated, and focus on easily gamed information on questionable sites
Facebook’s News Literacy Advice Is Harmful to News Literacy
https://medium.com/@holden/facebooks-news-literacy-advice-is-harmful-to-news-literacy-3b354919b14d
Sometime yesterday, Facebook rolled out the largest media literacy campaign in the history of the world.
Unfortunately, most of what it contained was bad advice.
There Is No Evidence Any of This Works
Those who have followed my work here and elsewhere will recognize that this is the “checklist” approach to news literacy: look at an article and then see how closely the article displays the attributes of a fake story.
The idea that multiple sources mean anything in a world of cut-and-paste clickbait is odd. Fake stories spread faster than real stories, and get copied more places.
Get Off the Page and Ask the Web
This is all ridiculous advice, and it actually is the precise opposite of what experts do. Expert fact-checkers don’t count misspellings or rely on the site’s about page to tell them the truth. You don’t go to the about page of a truly fake site and find a page that says “Site written by Macedonian teens and promoted by a Russian botnet.”
Expert fact-checkers don’t look at the site because they don’t trust the site. As we’ve said many times before, fact-checkers do the opposite of what Facebook is recommending here. They get off the page. They stop looking at what the page says about itself, and start learning what the network says about the page or claim. They look up the site in Wikipedia, or the cited experts in Google Scholar. They use the power of the network to check stuff on the network.
This Facebook advice? It’s indistinguishable, for the most part, from what you would have told students in 1995. And beyond the ineffectiveness of it, it has potential to do real harm. It was precisely these impulses — to judge resources by look and feel and what they say about themselves — that propagandists played on so expertly in 2016.
The history of technology is that the fakers are going to get even better at these things next time around. Yet the Facebook advice doesn’t even seem to realize how good they got at this in 2016.
Tips to Spot False News
https://www.facebook.com/help/188118808357379?_fb_noscript=1