I write about issues going on in transition from traditional print media to on-line digital media in my posting Old media and digital media – part 1. This post is a continuation to it. The situation does not look too good for traditional media. Traditional media has been able to solve it’s challenges with aggregation or pay-wall. The future seems to be quite bad for traditional print media that can’t adapt to changed situation.
Despite two decades of trying, no one has found a way to make traditional news-gathering sufficiently profitable to assure its future survival. Only about a third of Americans under 35 look at a newspaper even once a week, and the percentage declines every year. A large portion of today’s readers of the few remaining good newspapers are much closer to the grave than to high school. Today’s young people skitter around the Internet. Audience taste seems to be changing, with the result that among young people particularly there is a declining appetite for the sort of information packages the great newspapers provided.
What is the future of media? There is an interesting article on future of media written in Finnish on this: Median tulevaisuus ja 13 trendiä – mitä media on vuonna 2030? It shows 13 trends that I have here translated to English, re-arranged, added my comments and links to more information to them. In 2030, the media will look very different than today.
The new gerations no longer want to pay for the media: Since the same information, benefits, entertainment provided free of charge, they are not prepared to pay. Older generations support the traditional media for some time, but they are smaller each year. Media consumption continues to rapidly change, and advertisers will follow suit digital and mobile channels, which will affect the media sales because advertisers no longer need the intermediary role of the media companies to communicate with their customers.
This does not look good for media companies, but situation even worse than that: When media personnel, production and distribution costs are rising every year and so the order than the ad revenue will be reduced year by year, deprivation twist to push media companies to the rest of the best authors, owners become impatient and expected returns are reduced. Companies are moving their marketing investment priorities for the purchased media.Corporate communications professionals continues to grow and the number of suppliers will continue to fall.
Technological developments enhance the above trends: Technology eliminates the barriers to entry to the traditional media sector and at the same time create new sectors. Technological media competition winner takes all because new scalable technology to create competitive advantages. Very many news writing tasks can be automated with near real-time and reliable enough translation technology The media world is undergoing a wholesale shift from manual processes to automated systems that strip out waste and inefficiency (The Future of Programmatic: Automation + Creativity + Scale).
Strong continuous technological change and automation mean that media consumption will continue to change for the next decade at least as strong as the previous ten years, whether we like it or not. Critical journalism makes searching for new alternative ways to do their work and to fund its work.
Media’s direction is sure to bring, and an ever increasing rate - in an increasingly digital, more mobile, more and more tailor-made … The newspapers will be read mostly on mobile devices. Information is obtained much earlier, in an increasingly digital and real-time. A lot has changed now already.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
American Press Institute:
Study: factors affecting trust in news include ad intrusiveness, load times, navigability, up-to-date details, conciseness, accuracy, and more
A new understanding: What makes people trust and rely on news
https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/reports/survey-research/trust-news/
This research was conducted by the Media Insight Project — an initiative of the American Press Institute and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research
What factors drive people to trust news reporting sources?
Percent of…
Adults who say accuracy is a critical reason they trust a news source 85%
Adults who say having the latest details is a critical reason they trust a news source 76%
Adults who value news reporting that’s concise and gets to the point 72%
Digital news consumers who believe it is vital ads not interfere 63%
Political news consumers who highly value experts and data in reporting 79%
Lifestyle news consumers who say it’s important their source is entertaining 53%
Facebook news consumers with a lot of trust in the news they see there 12%
Among the study’s findings:
Accuracy is the paramount principle of trust
The second‑most valued factor related to trust, however, has more to do with timeliness.
And the third‑most cited factor in why Americans rely on a news source is related to clarity. Fully 72 percent say it is extremely or very important to them that a news report be concise and gets to the point.
Online, still other factors come into play. Here people cite three specific factors as most important: That ads not interfere with the news (63 percent); that the site or app loads fast (63 percent); and that the content works well on mobile phones (60 percent). In contrast, only 1 in 3 say it is very important that digital sources allow people to comment on news.
One of the new discoveries in this study is that the reasons people trust and rely on a news source vary by topic.
Even how people rank specific elements of digital presentation varies by topic.
People who rely on social media heavily for news are highly skeptical of the news they encounter in those networks. Just 12 percent of those who get news on Facebook, for instance, say they trust it a lot or a great deal.
To overcome that general skepticism, social media news consumers say they look for cues to help them know what to trust there. The most important of those, cited by 66 percent of Facebook news consumers, is trust in the original news organization that produced the content.
About 4 in 10 Americans (38 percent) can recall a specific recent incident that caused them to lose trust in a news source. The two most common problems were either instances of perceived bias or inaccuracies.
“For a source I trust, I will talk about an article or something I heard and forward the link to a friend or family member, or I will tell them to tune in to listen. For YouTube, I will subscribe to their page and encourage others to view their content,” said Timothy, an older, hard news respondent, during the virtual activities.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The best practices for innovation within news organizations
https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/reports/strategy-studies/best-practices-for-innovation/?utm_source=website&utm_medium=footer&utm_campaign=20150610
It is not one thing or product; innovation is about how your organization works and moves forward.
During these discussions, several key areas of innovation rose to the top, and are the focus of this study:
Leaders must set, enforce but also nurture priorities.
How to create a culture and structure for innovation.
How to generate and pursue ideas.
How to gather feedback, measure and iterate.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Google punts freebie DDoS shield to hacks, human rights worthies
Reverse proxying traffic might save headaches
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/25/google_freebie_ddos_shield/
Google has launched a free service to protect news websites against DDoS attacks.
Project Shield will also be offered to human rights and election monitoring websites as a way of fending off increasingly commonplace site-swamping DDoS assaults. Google is offering to “reverse proxy” qualifying websites’ traffic through Google’s cloud platform. Publishers can opt in to route all their traffic through Google by making changes in their DNS settings.
Google has promised not to use log info in order to serve advertising. The advantage for publishers is that a successful attack would effectively have to be strong enough to destabilize Google’s cloud instead of simply knocking over a WordPress installation, a much easier proposition for attackers.
One disadvantage is that sites would become inaccessible from countries that block all Google IP addresses. In many such cases, the sites might be censored anyway, and reachable only through VPNs or Tor. Publishers would also have to put their faith in Google and its security.
Project Shield
https://jigsaw.google.com/products/project-shield/
Every day, independent news, human rights, and election monitoring sites around the world are taken offline and silenced by attacks on their servers. Project Shield uses Google’s technology to protect websites at risk and keep them online.
Protecting websites from digital attacks
Background
A distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) is a type of digital attack where a hacker exploits thousands, or even millions, of computers and tricks them into visiting a website at the same time. The resulting flood of traffic often overwhelms servers and the website goes offline.
Independent news sites, election monitors, and human rights groups often don’t have the resources to protect themselves from attacks, which makes them an easy target for people who wants to censor free expression.
Project Shield uses technology called a reverse proxy, which allows a webmaster to serve their site through Google infrastructure for free, providing a “shield” against would-be attackers. So far we’ve protected hundreds of news organizations and human rights websites that have faced attacks aimed at censoring free expression. By protecting these sites, we’ve helped to keep vital information online during elections, major crises and conflicts.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ann Christy:
How scammers are making thousands of dollars via Kindle Unlimited by publishing fake e-books that are free to buy
KU Scammers on Amazon – What’s Going On?
http://www.annchristy.com/ku-scammers-on-amazon-what-you-need-to-know/
This is extremely long and probably only of interest to indie authors, but it does impact readers who shop Amazon, so I’m putting it here for anyone.
Discoverability is an author’s word when it comes to books…it’s the holy grail of the indie
Now, it is also a reader problem. The scammers have made finding books too difficult. Readers are going back to older methods for finding books or even worse, simply writing off any new author out of hand unless the recommendation comes from an actual person on Goodreads or forum or the like.
For those who don’t know, to be in KU, a book can’t be available at any other vendor. Amazon exclusive.
KU pays authors based on a communal pot. It is not based on the price of the book. The amount KU subscribers pay is then divided between all authors based on how many of their pages were read by users.
So, it’s a pie. Some get a bigger slice, some a smaller, but the pie is finite and must be shared. So, if scammers take out of that pie, it comes directly out of the pockets of the others.
KU 2.0 (which is what we’re in now) pays by the page. Not pages in books, but pages reader reads.
The pay per page is a small number and varies by a few thousandths of a penny each month, but it seems to be settling in at around $00.0045 per page. That equates to about $1.575 for a 350 page book.
One of the scammers has YouTube tutorials on how to pull the scam. He showed a screen shot of a 15 year old kid’s KDP Dashboard who made over $70,000 in one month pulling this scam. And there are HUNDREDS of them.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dylan Byers / CNNMoney:
New York Daily News fires an editor for removing attribution from columns by writer Shaun King, who was accused of plagiarism — Daily News fires editor after Shaun King accused of plagiarism — The New York Daily News has fired one of its editors for removing attribution from columns …
Daily News fires editor after Shaun King accused of plagiarism
http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/19/media/shaun-king-daily-news-plagiarism-accusations/
The New York Daily News has fired one of its editors for removing attribution from columns by writer Shaun King, which made it appear as though King had plagiarized the works of others.
On Tuesday, Daily News editor-in-chief Jim Rich told CNNMoney that the editor in question had “made a series of egregious and inexplicable errors,” and on at least three occasions “deleted attribution that made it appear passages from Shaun King’s columns were not properly credited.”
“These mistakes are unacceptable and the editor in question has been fired,” Rich said. The Daily News did not identify the editor, but a source with knowledge of the situation said it was editor Jotham Sederstrom.
Rich also said that “because of the recurring nature of this editor’s specific mistakes,” the Daily News was “currently reviewing all of the columns he edited.”
The announcement came after a chaotic day in which King had vehemently defended himself against mounting accusations of plagiarism.
Rich corroborated King’s explanation, calling it “an editing mistake.”
King finished with a categorical denial of any wrongdoing
“The Daily News says this was editor’s error, but either way the result is the same,” executive editor Noah Shachtman told CNNMoney. “In journalism we’re not judged by our rough copy, we’re judged by what we put on the web, what we put on the page.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Benjamin Mullin / Poynter:
Accelerated Mobile Pages launches on Google News — Google on Wednesday announced that it’s integrating Google News with Accelerated Mobile Pages, the burgeoning web standard that aims to make the mobile web faster. — Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, launched on Google Search earlier …
Accelerated Mobile Pages launches on Google News
http://www.poynter.org/2016/accelerated-mobile-pages-launches-on-google-news/407892/
Google on Wednesday announced that it’s integrating Google News with Accelerated Mobile Pages, the burgeoning web standard that aims to make the mobile web faster.
Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, launched on Google Search earlier this year after a months-long ramp-up and development process. Thousands of publishers, including The New York Times, The Guardian and The Washington Post, have been among the early adopters of the standard.
AMP is a lightweight framework that cuts loading time for news articles by, among other things, paring back ponderous elements of a webpage. Google was the standard-bearer for the effort, but it’s been tweaked and tinkered with by legions of publishers and developers in the months since its debut.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jack Shafer / Politico:
BuzzFeed’s fun, shallow content like exploding watermelon videos isn’t destroying journalism, just mirroring the light stories that newspapers have always used — Why BuzzFeed’s Exploding Watermelon Won’t Destroy Journalism — Just look at the New York Times’ long history of cat coverage.
Why BuzzFeed’s Exploding Watermelon Won’t Destroy Journalism
Just look at the New York Times’ long history of cat coverage.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/04/journalism-future-buzzfeed-watermelon-new-york-times-stories-cats-213820#ixzz46P1VfWDP
Tomi Engdahl says:
Get Used to It: Ad Blocking Isn’t Going Away Any Time Soon
https://www.wired.com/2016/04/get-used-ad-blocking-isnt-going-away-time-soon/
Ad blocking is the nemesis of the news and ad industries. But, despite growing efforts by publishers to combat the practice, it’s probably not going away any time soon.
Market research group eMarketer today estimated that 27 percent of internet users in the UK—more than 14 million people— will be using ad blockers by the end of next year. That’s up from this year’s estimate of 20.5 percent and nearly double the estimate for last year (14 percent).
“There’s no doubting that ad blocking is now a very real issue for advertisers,” eMarketer senior analyst Bill Fisher said. “Next year, over a quarter of the people they’re trying to reach will be willfully making themselves unreachable.”
The prediction mirrors other reports that ad blocker usage is growing. Last year, Adobe and Pagefair released a report that found that nearly 200 million people around the world use some form of ad blocker, costing publishers $22 billion in lost ad revenue in 2015.
At the same time, some publishers at least are trying to show their audiences that they’re sensitive to concerns over tracking and the frustration and irritation of intrusive ads.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Duncan Robinson / Financial Times:
Social networks like Facebook and Snapchat face challenge of getting parental consent for under-16 users in EU after new rules go into effect 2018
Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter have tough task on rules for kids
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0%2F1a392244-055e-11e6-9b51-0fb5e65703ce.html#axzz46YAbQk3U
Social networks will need to get parental consent for users under 16
across the EU when new rules requiring social networks to get parental consent from all users under the age of 16 come into force in 2018.
While parents may face awkward questions, the likes of Facebook and Snapchat will have the logistical and legal challenge of abiding by the new law. If they do not, they run the risk of fines of up to 4 per cent of global turnover under a sweeping data protection regulation finally agreed by MEPs in Strasbourg last week.
The scale of this demand is significant. Big social networks such as Snapchat, Facebook — and its picture-sharing service Instagram — as well as Twitter all have large numbers of young users.
Big technology groups will have to come up with a way of gathering parental consent for these users or banning them from the service.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Paul Farhi / Washington Post:
Despite recent accuracy and speed, doubts about TMZ as a news source persist due to its tabloid nature and admitted practice of paying sources for information
TMZ was first — again. Will its word alone ever be good enough for traditional media?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/tmz-was-first–again-will-their-word-alone-ever-be-good-enough-for-traditional-media/2016/04/22/822613ae-0805-11e6-bdcb-0133da18418d_story.html
To almost no one’s surprise, the first media outlet to break the shocking news about Prince’s death on Thursday was TMZ.com, the gossip website that has landed numerous celebrity-related scoops.
Yet even though TMZ had the story before anyone else — it posted the news around 12:50 p.m. Eastern time — other news organizations delayed reporting it. It wasn’t until the Associated Press confirmed the legendary musician’s death 17 minutes later that outlets around the world, including The Washington Post, the New York Times, the Guardian and BBC, jumped in, posting brief alerts citing AP’s dispatch from Chanhassen, Minn.
The delayed reaction illustrates a paradox about TMZ: Although it has been quite reliable on many major stories, mainstream news sources are reluctant to rely on its say-so alone. The news, in effect, doesn’t become news until another source matches TMZ’s reporting.
Admittedly, AP’s initial report about Prince had a key advantage over TMZ’s story: The AP bulletin cited a source, Prince’s publicist, Yvette Noel-Schure, who confirmed the singer’s death.
Despite all that, Waxman remains cautious: “When they report something, it makes me think they’re probably right, but it might be premature or incomplete. Maybe someone had a heart attack, but, no, he didn’t die. That they had much of the story but not all of the story.”
TMZ rarely reveals its sourcing, paid or otherwise, making the veracity of what it reports more opaque.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ad-blocker blocking websites face legal peril at hands of privacy bods
Publisher’s software could break EU cookie laws
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/23/anti_ad_blockers_face_legal_challenges/
Websites that detect ad-blockers to stop their users from reading webpages could be illegal under European law.
Alexander Hanff, a privacy campaigner and programmer, says he has received a letter from the European Commission confirming that browser-side web scripts that pick out advert blockers access people’s personal data (ie: the plugin stored on their computer). Thus, just like you need to give permission to EU websites to access and store your cookies, ad-blocker detectors must ask for permission before probing your browser.
Therefore, under EU law in force since May 2011, people must give their consent before an anti-ad-blocker script can run and hide content on a page. Of course, while waiting for that consent from a visitor, the site could refuse to show anything, but then the publisher will scare off all readers, even the ones who turn out to be not running anti-ad plugins. If the page is viewable while waiting for the consent, then blocking ad-blockers is pointless.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Alex Spence / Politico:
Financial Times memo warns of daunting conditions, indicates delays in filling job vacancies and, streamlining print production as print advertising slumps
Spence on Media
Politics, power and media in Europe.
Financial Times: ‘We are facing daunting conditions’
Warning of ‘tough times ahead’ as UK newspaper industry hammered by advertising slump.
http://www.politico.eu/blogs/spence-on-media/2016/04/financial-times-we-are-facing-daunting-conditions/
The Financial Times is braced for “daunting trading conditions,” its managing editor has warned, in the latest sign of the severe challenges hitting the U.K.’s newspaper industry.
Newspapers including the Guardian, Independent and Times have announced drastic moves in recent weeks as they search for ways to secure their futures amid vast changes in media consumption. The FT, which appeared to be better positioned to weather the storm than many of its Fleet Street peers, is also feeling the squeeze.
“We are facing some daunting trading conditions in 2016,” the managing editor James Lamont warned FT staff this week in an internal memo seen by POLITICO.
The FT’s commercial team is “braced for tough times in the months ahead,” Lamont said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
‘Dangerous times’ for Europe’s journalists
http://www.politico.eu/blogs/spence-on-media/2016/04/dangerous-times-europe-journalists-dunja-mijatovic-protests-turkey-germany-pegida/
OSCE media watchdog: Free speech at risk as EU grapples with the migration crisis and terrorism threat.
“We live in a more dangerous time for journalists,” Mijatović told POLITICO.
Autocrats in countries like Russia, Turkey and Azerbaijan are bullying independent critics into silence, while established democracies such as the U.K. are introducing sweeping new laws to track terrorists that could be used against media organizations.
EU ‘should be leading by example’
Shortly before speaking to POLITICO, Mijatović had been huddling with her 16-person staff at their office in Vienna for the first time since her reappointment, discussing their priorities for the next 12 months.
There’s a lot on the agenda.
In Germany, a criminal investigation into the comedian Jan Böhmermann for insulting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on TV has sparked an angry debate about free speech. In Turkey, Erdoğan has seized opposition newspapers and prosecuted critical journalists.
Less publicized, but equally alarming, is a spate of attacks against media organizations in the Balkans, Mijatović’s home region, that are having a “tremendous chilling effect” on journalism.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mark Toner / INMA:
Washington Post begins selling its content management system Arc to small publishers, sees a $100M market including media and non-media companies — The market for The Washington Post’s content management system, Arc, could be more than US$100 million, including media and non-media companies.
Washington Post finds unexpected revenue stream with content management system
21 April 2016 · By Mark Toner
The market for The Washington Post’s content management system, Arc, could be more than US$100 million, including media and non-media companies.
Read more: http://www.inma.org/blogs/ideas/post.cfm/washington-post-finds-unexpected-revenue-stream-with-content-management-system#ixzz46kRjt2qD
Tomi Engdahl says:
John Herrman / New York Times:
Vox is launching a gadget blog, Circuit Breaker, on Monday, primarily as a Facebook page, with a section on The Verge’s website as well — Vox Media Tries Something Old on Something New — Vox Media, the ambitious online news start-up that runs Vox, a politics site; SB Nation …
Vox Media Tries Something Old on Something New
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/25/business/vox-media-tries-something-old-on-something-new.html?_r=0
Vox Media, the ambitious online news start-up that runs Vox, a politics site; SB Nation, a network of sports sites; and The Verge, a site about technology, says its next new project will be reviving something old.
First, the new: A new outlet, called Circuit Breaker, will begin publishing on Monday, primarily as a Facebook page, not a separate website, a first for Vox Media.
Now the old: Circuit Breaker will be, in the words of The Verge’s editor, Nilay Patel, a “classic gadget blog,” one that publishes news and gossip about technology products at a frenetic pace.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How One Startup Is Blocking Ad Blockers
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/2029615-how-one-startup-is-blocking-ad-blockers/?sidebar=morein
People like free stuff, like consuming online articles and videos without looking at the annoying pop-up ads. And now there are plenty of ad blocking tools that avoid online ads, banners, and videos. But they pose a great threat to publishers that depend on ad revenues for survival.
“The incredible growth of ad blocking has reached the tipping point where sites will no longer be able to operate,” Justin Bunnell, CEO of AdSupply Inc. states on the company’s website.
“If ad blocking continues unchecked, it will eliminate the advertising revenue websites need to survive. It is like expecting a movie theater to stay in business when 30 percent of their audience does not pay for a ticket.”
Launched in December 2015, BlockIQ is a software that bypasses ad blockers and enables publishers to recover lost revenue.
There are different apps and browser extensions that prevent advertising from displaying on websites, resulting in lost revenue for the website operator. They remove elements from the website HTML and block connections to ad servers.
Ad blockers globally are growing at a rate of 41 percent annually, according to the PageFair and Adobe 2015 Ad Blocking Report. Roughly 200 million people use ad blocking applications. And the cost of blocking ads is over $21 billion in 2015, which is 14 percent of the global ad spend. This cost will double in 2016, according to the estimates.
“Ad block is a threat to the very existence of the world wide web,” AdSupply says on its website.
On an average site, 20 percent of ads are blocked. On gaming and technology sites the ad blocking can go up to 40 percent. Ad block applications have been the no.1 sellers in the IPhone App Store, according to AdSupply.
Companies including Google, Amazon, and Microsoft pay huge fees to AdBlockPlus to get their ads whitelisted, according to media reports.
Mobile video will represent 72 percent of global mobile data traffic by 2019, up from 55 percent in 2014, according to Cisco Systems.
“Everything is moving towards video and it is moving fast on all devices. When you go to websites like ESPN, everything is video,” said John Strong, Chairman and CEO of Adaptive Medias Inc.
“Video is effective, interesting, and gets attention. So advertisers definitely like it more than a simple display. This does not mean display advertising is going away, but video is moving so quickly that it is getting a larger online content pie.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Casey Newton / The Verge:
None of the changes Twitter made over the past year have broadened the appeal of the core service
Nothing Twitter is doing is working
Jack squat
http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/26/11513294/twitter-q2-earnings-miss
Twitter reported its first-quarter earnings today, and they came in under expectations: the company’s haul of $595 million was less than the $607.8 million that analysts expected, and so is the $590 million to $610 million it expects to make in the current quarter.
Marketers have withheld their advertising dollars accordingly — as the analyst Ben Thompson has written, while Twitter has retained its big brand advertisers, it has failed to develop an enormous self-serve ad platform in the manner of Google and Facebook. (An example of self-serve ads would be app install ads, which have been tremendously successful at Facebook and much less so at Twitter.) It’s simply not clear that Twitter is as effective at direct marketing efforts as its rivals, and its revenues have suffered accordingly.
In some cases, Facebook simply copied successful aspects of Periscope. But it has also been savvy in diverting the attention of celebrities and the media from Twitter, offering them cash to participate and a larger audience for their videos. (Facebook videos also don’t disappear after 24 hours, as on Periscope — a crucial differentiator for publishers and individuals who are hoping to reach the biggest possible audience.) And Facebook boldly put video front and center in its flagship app
Asked about Facebook today, Dorsey was casually dismissive. “We’ve been doing live for 10 years, and we believe we have a leadership potential in it” — Dorsey said, before catching himself. “A leadership position in it.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Olivier Laurent / TIME:
Getty Images files EU antitrust complaint against Google for scraping pics from websites, displaying and allowing downloads of hi-res images
Google Accused of Enabling Photography Piracy
http://time.com/4307769/google-getty-images/
Photography company Getty Images is accusing Google of scraping images from third party websites and encouraging piracy, adding a new wrinkle to the Mountain View, Calif.’s ongoing legal battles in Europe.
In its complaint to the European Union’s antitrust commission, Getty says Google Images, which displays full-screen slideshows of high-resolution copyrighted images, has hurt the stock agency’s licensing business as well as content creators worldwide.
The complaint comes less than a week after the European Union’s antitrust commission charged Google with using unfair practices to promote its own services on Android devices.
Miyashita claims Google is siphoning traffic and profits from photographers as a result of its practices.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Esquire removes satirical article after criticism
http://www.capitalnewyork.com/article/media/2016/04/8597724/esquire-removes-satirical-article-after-criticism
Late on Tuesday night, Esquire.com removed a satirical article written by Rurik Bradbury that it had published online earlier in the day.
This is not the first time that a publication has published and then deleted a post written in the voice of Bradbury’s satirical character. Al Jazeera America found itself in a nearly-identical situation two months ago.
Bradbury pointed to a series of tweets from the legal blog Popehat defending Bradbury’s post as satire protected under the First Amendment.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Alex Kantrowitz / BuzzFeed:
Source: Facebook is offering some content creators around $250K for 20 live video posts per month over a three-month period — As Social Shifts To Video, Content Creators Win Power And Dollars — Photo illustration by Alex Kantrowitz, BuzzFeed News / Thinkstock-Facebook
As Social Shifts To Video, Content Creators Win Power And Dollars
http://www.buzzfeed.com/alexkantrowitz/as-social-shifts-to-video-content-creators-win-power-and-dol?utm_term=.bvwLpBRbr
The social platforms are all competing for quality video, but only a select few can deliver it. Which means if platforms want the programming, they’ll have to pay up.
The meeting displayed something new that major social companies are now starting to reckon with: Very few people, relatively speaking, are capable of regularly creating compelling videos that others want to watch. And as social platforms look to saturate their feeds with video — live or otherwise — rather than just pictures and text, they’re essentially competing for the same limited set of good videos. So those who create the quality stuff can demand payment.
In recent weeks, those payments have begun flowing. Twitter and Facebook both started handing out multimillion-dollar wads of cash to bring quality video content to their platforms.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Peter Kafka / Re/code:
Twitter’s user growth problems become ad revenue issue as firm struggles to compete with new products like Snapchat, lacks scale to take on Facebook, Google — Twitter is going to have a hard time fixing its ad problem — For the last couple of years, two things about the Twitter narrative …
Twitter is going to have a hard time fixing its ad problem
http://recode.net/2016/04/27/twitter-is-going-to-have-a-hard-time-fixing-its-ad-problem/
For the last couple of years, two things about the Twitter narrative have been constant: It has a user growth problem, but it doesn’t have an advertiser problem.
Now Twitter has an advertiser problem, too.
Twitter fessed up to it yesterday, acknowledging that brand advertising was “softer than expected” and promising that things would get better. Maybe not right away but, they hoped, by the fall.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tim Peterson / Marketing Land:
LinkedIn’s ad revenue grew 29% YoY to $154.1M in Q1, propelled by sponsored content which accounted for $86.3M, growing 80% YoY
LinkedIn’s sponsored content pivot helps ad revenue hit $154.1 million
http://marketingland.com/linkedin-q1-2016-earnings-175092
LinkedIn’s ad revenue grew by 29% in the first quarter of 2016, thanks to nearly 80% revenue growth from sponsored content alone.
Like seemingly every other digital media company, LinkedIn’s ad business has been making a hard pivot toward sponsored content and away from boring banners. And it seems to be working.
LinkedIn’s ad business — which the business-centric social networks calls Marketing Solutions because jargon — hit $154.1 million in revenue for the first quarter of 2016. That’s a 29% increase year-over-year.
Sponsored content — which includes posts that companies can pay to place in people’s feeds and pin on their own pages — now accounts for 56% of LinkedIn’s ad revenue. That translates to around $86.3 million, having grown by almost 80% over the past year.
On the flip side the “Premium Display” side of LinkedIn’s ad business — banner ads it slots on the right-hand side of its desktop site — continues to dwindle.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Debunking the Drone Versus Plane Hysteria
http://hackaday.com/2016/05/02/debunking-the-drone-versus-plane-hysteria/
The mass media are funny in the way they deal with new technology. First it’s all “Wow, that’s Cool!”, then it’s “Ooh, that’s scary”, and finally it’s “BURN THE WITCH!”. Then a year or so later it’s part of normal life and they treat it as such. We’ve seen the same pattern repeated time and time again over the years.
Seasoned readers may remember silly stories in the papers claiming that the Soviets could somehow use the technology in Western 8-bit home computers for nefarious purposes
more recently groundless panics have erupted over 3D printing of gun parts.
The latest piece of technology to feel the heat in this way is the multirotor. Popularly referred to as the drone, you will probably be most familiar with them as model-sized aircraft usually with four rotors. We have been fed a continuous stream of stories involving tales of near-misses between commercial aircraft and drones, and there is a subtext in the air that Something Must Be Done.
The catalyst for this piece is the recent story of a collision with a British Airways plane 1700ft over West London approaching London Heathrow.
Are multirotors unfairly being given bad press? It certainly seems that way as the common thread among all the stories is a complete and utter lack of proof.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Michael Nunez / Gizmodo:
Ex-Facebook news curators describe suppressing conservative news, being instructed to include non-trending stories, removing news about Facebook itself — Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” …
Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News
http://gizmodo.com/former-facebook-workers-we-routinely-suppressed-conser-1775461006
Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.
Nick Statt / The Verge:
Facebook says it has “rigorous guidelines” in place to protect neutrality and consistency of its Trending Topics section, in response to Gizmodo report — Facebook has responded to allegations in a Gizmodo report that its contract news curators actively censored stories …
Facebook says it doesn’t permit censorship in Trending Topics
Report said conservative outlets were being left out
http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/9/11644442/facebook-trending-topics-censorship-allegations-bias-gizmodo
Facebook has responded to allegations in a Gizmodo report that its contract news curators actively censored stories from conservative publications when selecting which items appear in its Trending Topics section. In a statement given to The Verge, the company does not actively deny that members of its news operation were censoring stories from right-wing outlets like Breitbart and The Drudge Report. However, a Facebook spokesperson did say the company does not “permit the suppression of political perspectives” and has never banned a news outlet from appearing in the Trending Topics bar.
Tomi Engdahl says:
YACHT’s sex tape hoax underestimated the empathy of the internet
The band’s recent stunt proves you can’t really control something once it’s on the internet
http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/10/11652960/yacht-band-sex-tape-hoax-jona-bechtolt-claire-evans
Yesterday morning, the Los Angeles band YACHT released a statement on Facebook saying that a sex tape made by the band’s two members (Claire L. Evans and Jona Bechtolt) had been leaked online. “We assumed that we were the only people who would be privy to that video,” the band wrote. “I guess we were naive. Now you have the option to be privy to that video. For us, that’s a shame.” The statement received an outpouring of sympathy from fans and famous friends. The band later announced that they would “take ownership” of the video by selling it, and asked fans to pay $5 to download it. But by this morning, Jezebel had confirmed the leak was a hoax, and that no sex tape had ever existed at all. As people started to slowly realize that the leak was nothing more than a wrongheaded publicity stunt, reactions to it were almost uniformly negative.
There are several issues at play here that joined together to create this seemingly inevitable mess. First, the major issue: that YACHT pretended to be victims of a sex crime, further complicating the challenges of real-life victims to be taken seriously.
Evans and Bechtolt were obviously trying to make a statement about news organizations, and their willingness to mine trauma and celebrity for content. And the “write now, think later” mantra of online news organizations does often lead to mistakes and shoddy reporting.
YACHT is a savvy band, they understand the way information is transmitted on the internet, but this time, they critically misjudged their audience and the dynamics of social media. They told an awful lie to thousands of fans, and these fans almost uniformly responded with sympathy and outrage, only to later find out they had been duped.
Bechtolt and Evans are smart; their work usually plays with technology and the darker side of the future. They know enough about the internet to have predicted this response. But they apparently thought they could pull this off, even ignoring concerns from their publicist.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kevin Draper / Gawker:
As digital sites woo advertisers, they conflate metrics for digital video viewership and traditional TV — We are, right now, in the midst of a digital media upheaval. What was previously conventional wisdom—that a media company with hopes of turning a profit needs, above all, to achieve scale—is being proven false.
Internet Video Views Is A 100 Percent Bullshit Metric
http://gawker.com/internet-video-views-is-a-100-percent-bullshit-metric-1774349561
We are, right now, in the midst of a digital media upheaval. What was previously conventional wisdom—that a media company with hopes of turning a profit needs, above all, to achieve scale—is being proven false. The new conventional wisdom is that video will be digital media’s savior, but it is only a matter of time before this is proven false too.
It’s all about video: “To qualify as a NewFronts presenting company, presenters must create original content in video format that is available online.”
For context, last year CNN averaged 712,000 viewers in primetime. Brands, according to the argument BuzzFeed is implicitly making, should therefore pay something like the same to message and tell stories against BuzzFeed’s next smash hit as they currently pay for commercials during the evening on CNN. Right? Well, no.
At its peak 807,000 people watched that damn watermelon explode, which is actually orders of magnitude fewer than the average of 712,000 people watching primetime CNN last year.
Television ratings are measured by the privately-held Nielsen Corporation, which pays a small amount of money to around 25,000 of the 116.4 million “TV homes” in America to install People Meters. Using special remote controls, these People Meters measure what is being watched, by whom, and for how long.
The TV ratings Nielsen reports aren’t concurrent viewers, but rather “average minute audience,” which is exactly what it sounds like.
If BuzzFeed’s watermelon video had been measured the way a TV show is, its viewership would’ve been closer to zero than the 807,000 it trumpeted to advertisers.
The conflation of digital and traditional viewership metrics has gotten under the skin of TV people, and for good reason. If advertisers can be hoodwinked into believing that a sizable number of people are actually watching things on Facebook Live, they will direct their money online, where the ad rates are much, much lower than they are on TV.
Since it was broadcast live, the watermelon explosion has been watched by 10.7 million people, per Facebook’s count.
Leaving aside digital video’s low viewership when measured like TV, advertisers don’t even look at TV ratings the way everybody else does. They buy ads based mainly upon C7 ratings, which measure how many viewers watched commercials as they aired and up to seven days after.
Nielsen struggles to capture the entire universe of “television” so far as it takes in DVRs, streaming services, mobile devices, and so on.
One day—maybe soon—video viewership will be measured much more accurately than it is now.
It is worth considering, though, whether the availability of more precise metrics is beneficial to media companies. In some ways, the huge disparity between ad rates for print and digital is because online we can better measure exactly how ineffective advertising actually is
But if digital media companies want to command anywhere near the same lucrative ad rates as TV networks, they’ll have to prove their videos consistently get the same audience as television networks. Which they can’t, because they don’t.
Facebook is nobody’s friend, and especially not journalists’. They want to make live video look as attractive as possible to suck news organizations into providing high-quality content that users will engage
I sure as hell don’t know how to fund modern journalism on a broad scale, but I have been around just long enough to understand not only that live video isn’t a silver bullet, but that there is no silver bullet.
It is worth noting that the most successful Facebook Live videos so far have essentially been gimmicks; the type of things more palatably referred to as “content” than “journalism.”
And that, right there, is likely to be the future of digital media, and increasingly its present too.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Information Age is over; welcome to the Experience Age
http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/09/the-information-age-is-over-welcome-to-the-experience-age/?ncid=rss&cps=gravity_1462_-1580978442120517870
Twenty-five years after the introduction of the World Wide Web, the Information Age is coming to an end. Thanks to mobile screens and Internet everywhere, we’re now entering what I call the “Experience Age.”
When was the last time you updated your Facebook status? Maybe you no longer do? It’s been reported that original status updates by Facebook’s 1.6 billion users are down 21 percent.
The status box is an icon of the Information Age, a period dominated by desktop computers and a company’s mission to organize all the world’s information. The icons of the Experience Age look much different, and are born from micro-computers, mobile sensors and high-speed connectivity.
The death of the status box is a small part of a larger shift away from information moving toward experience. What’s driving this shift? In short, the changing context of our online interactions, shaped by our connected devices.
Facebook is an Information Age native. Along with other social networks of its generation, Facebook was built on a principle of the desktop era — accumulation.
But mobile has changed how we view digital identity. With a connected camera televising our life in-the-moment, accumulated information takes a back seat to continual self-expression. The “virtual self” is becoming less evident. I may be the result of everything I’ve done, but I’m not the accumulation of it. Snapchat is native to this new reality.
the real innovation of Snapchat’s ephemeral messages isn’t that they self-destruct. It’s that they force us to break the accumulation habit we brought over from desktop computing.
Show, don’t tell
The central idea of the Experience Age is this — I’ll show you my point of view, you give me your attention. I hear you yelling, “That’s always been the story of social!” And it has. But what’s changed is that the stories we tell each other now begin and end visually, making the narrative more literal than ever.
In the Information Age, the start of communication was information.
By contrast, Snapchat always starts with the camera. Feedback is sent passively — swiping up on your story reveals which friends watched your snaps. In the Experience Age, the primary input is visual and the dominant feedback is attention.
Today the feedback loop connecting sharing and attention starts and ends on mobile; in the future, it could start with contact lenses and end in VR, for example.
This reality frames Facebook’s recent investments, which bring live video, 360-degree cameras and VR as products all into a single portfolio. But Facebook isn’t the only tech giant looking ahead and seeing how all these technologies might line up.
The experience stack will drive new products to market faster as each layer can grow independently, while at the same time benefiting from advancements in the layers below. An example of this phenomenon is high-speed 3G enabling Apple’s App Store, which together advanced mobile as a whole. The best products of the Experience Age will be timely new applications that leverage step-change advancements in bottom layers. Given that some layers are still nascent, tremendous opportunity is ahead.
Tomi Engdahl says:
European average was 6.1 connected devices
According to a recent European study Adobe’s 85 per cent of consumers varies between different devices using the network. The study also shows that the European consumer has an average of 6.1 network-connected device.
People are not loyal to your phone using the Internet and web content. Only 40 per cent feel that brands are able to provide a consistent and personalized user experience across all devices. The research results were forcing firms to rethink their role as producers of the experience and contribution of the consumer experience, which is to maintain the customer’s attention.
Source: http://etn.fi/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=4404:eurooppalaisilla-keskimaarin-6-1-nettiin-kytkettya-laitetta&catid=13&Itemid=101
Tomi Engdahl says:
Shan Wang / Nieman Lab:
Knight Foundation report: users spend 5% of mobile time on news sites and apps, Reddit users spend five times as much time in Reddit app than any other news app — People read the news on their smartphones (duh). They will even read longform (to a certain extent).
We know people read news on their phones. But from what sources?
http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/05/we-know-people-read-news-on-their-phones-but-from-what-sources/
People read the news on their smartphones (duh). They will even read longform (to a certain extent). But do these smartphone users prefer getting their news from apps or news sites? What are their news-reading behaviors within different apps? And what else do we know about these news readers?
Some findings on usage:
— These monitored mobile users spend about five percent (more than two hours) of their mobile time each month on news. The time they spent within news apps and on news sites directly seems to have decreased over the past year.
— In contrast, 27 percent (more than 12 hours) of mobile time each month is spent on social networking sites. Additional survey data found that 70 percent of Facebook users use the platform for news every day.
— Reddit users are power users: They go to the app frequently and spend five times as much time within the Reddit app as other top news apps.
— Not surprisingly, the report found that the mobile news readers who use dedicated news apps spend a substantial amount of time within the apps. Those apps have much smaller audiences compared to mobile websites
https://medium.com/mobile-first-news-how-people-use-smartphones-to
Tomi Engdahl says:
Adblock Plus is now installed on over 100m devices
http://www.thedrum.com/news/2016/05/09/adblock-plus-now-installed-over-100m-devices
Leading online adblocker, aptly named Adblock Plus has announced that it is actively utilised on over 100m web browsing devices across desktop, mobile and tablet.
Adblocking is not going away anytime soon, whether viewed as a deathblow to the current online revenue generating model, or just another industry challenge resulting in a better consumer experience, and AdBlock Plus is one of the leaders in the industry.
The company does not block all ads, instead it issues a whitelist letting some work through its firewall – for a fee.
As a result of the rise of adblocking usage, earlier today (Monday 9 May) some of the advertising industry’s largest stakeholders including World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), magazine trade body FIPP, the NAA, Mozilla and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) all gathered for talks organised by PageFair, to find a work around to combat the rise of blockers.
Cross-industry manifesto to ad blocker pandemic on its way
http://www.thedrum.com/news/2016/05/09/cross-industry-manifesto-ad-blocker-pandemic-its-way
The advertising industry’s largest stakeholders, including those representing the world’s biggest advertisers and media owners, as well as consumer advocate groups are in talks to establish a consensus on how best to serve ads to consumers using ad blockers.
The talks have been facilitated by PageFair – described by many as an anti-ad blocker – plus digital publisher trade body Digital Content Next. Representatives of all sides have been asked to share their view on how best to resolve the questions raised by the surge in ad blocking use.
Other parties, such as media agencies have also contributed to the discussions, which ultimately came down to one question: ‘what is the best way to use online ad serving technologies that cannot be circumvented by ad blockers?’
PageFair’s Dr. Johnny Ryan, told The Drum the series of roundtables (three in total) have been taking place since late last year, with the anti-ad blocker pitching the idea to publishers as “revenue recovery”.
“Now that the consumer has done away with the status quo, we have to ask ourselves [as an industry] how can we make the web a more sustainable environment for publishers?,” he said. “Encryption alone does not solve it.”
Ryan explained that PageFair has a means of serving ads that cannot be encumbered by ad blocking extensions downloaded from the web (although he did not elaborate further as to how).
Despite this technological ability having been on offer for some time, the question has always remained: why serve an ad to someone that has elected to download an ad blocker?
Tomi Engdahl says:
Blocking ads? Smaller digital publishers are smacked the hardest
More mobile operators to incorporate the software
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/11/juniper_reckons_adblocking_will_cost_pubs_27bn/
Analyst firm Juniper Research has stared into its crystal ball and predicted that digital publishers stand to lose over $27bn (£18bn) by 2020 due to ad-blocking.
Developer activity is set to increase over the next five years making ad-blockers more sophisticated and difficult to overcome, according to the research.
The research reckoned that smaller publishers are most at risk from the rapid adoption of ad-blocking software as they often solely rely on revenues from advertising to continue operating.
While ad-blocking is limited to browsing activities at present, publishers are likely to face the additional threat of in-app ad-blockers in the future, it said.
Pressure will also increase from network operators, it said, noting that Hutchison’s Three is already set to roll out ad-blocking at a network level to all of its customers.
Research author Sam Barker added: “Adoption is being driven by consumer concerns over mobile data usage and privacy. They are also incentivised to adopt the technology in order to reduce page load times.”
Currently Adblock Plus is the most widely used filtering software.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Justin Oskofsky / Facebook:
Facebook explains how Trending Topics works, publishes internal guidelines, reiterates that discrimination against sources of any political origin isn’t allowed — At Facebook, we stand for connecting every person — for a global community, for bringing people together, for giving all people a voice …
Information About Trending Topics
http://newsroom.fb.com/news/2016/05/information-about-trending-topics/
At its core, Trending Topics is designed to help people discover major events and meaningful conversations. Trending Topics is a feature we added in 2014 — separate from a person’s News Feed — to help people discover content that is both popular in the world and meaningful to them. Topics that are eligible to appear in the product are surfaced by our algorithms, not people. This product also has a team of people who play an important role in making sure that what appears in Trending Topics is high-quality and useful.
The Trending Topics team is governed by a set of guidelines meant to ensure a high-quality product, consistent with Facebook’s deep commitment to being a platform for people of all viewpoints. Our goal has always been to deliver a valuable experience for the people who use our service. The guidelines demonstrate that we have a series of checks and balances in place to help surface the most important popular stories, regardless of where they fall on the ideological spectrum. Facebook does not allow or advise our reviewers to discriminate against sources of any political origin, period. Here are the guidelines we use.
Mark Zuckerberg / Facebook:
Mark Zuckerberg promises “full investigation” on Trending Topics matter, will talk to “leading conservatives” — I want to share some thoughts on the discussion about Trending Topics. — Facebook stands for giving everyone a voice.
https://www.facebook.com/zuck/posts/10102830259184701
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sam Thielman / Guardian:
Leaked documents show human intervention at almost every stage of Facebook’s news operation — Exclusive: Leaked internal guidelines show human intervention at almost every stage of its news operation, akin to a traditional media organization — Leaked documents show how Facebook …
Facebook news selection is in hands of editors not algorithms, documents show
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/12/facebook-trending-news-leaked-documents-editor-guidelines
Exclusive: Leaked internal guidelines show human intervention at almost every stage of its news operation, akin to a traditional media organization
Leaked documents show how Facebook, now the biggest news distributor on the planet, relies on old-fashioned news values on top of its algorithms to determine what the hottest stories will be for the 1 billion people who visit the social network every day.
The documents, given to the Guardian, come amid growing concerns over how Facebook decides what is news for its users. This week the company was accused of an editorial bias against conservative news organizations, prompting calls for a congressional inquiry from the US Senate commerce committee chair, John Thune.
The boilerplate about its news operations provided to customers by the company suggests that much of its news gathering is determined by machines: “The topics you see are based on a number of factors including engagement, timeliness, Pages you’ve liked and your location,” says a page devoted to the question “How does Facebook determine what topics are trending?”
Casey Newton / The Verge:
Facebook director of product management for News Feed says Trending Topics team’s priority is bug fixing, biased News Feed wouldn’t serve 1B users well
A long talk with Facebook about its role in journalism
Happy birthday, Instant Articles!
http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/12/11663578/facebook-journalism-instant-articles-will-cathcart-interview
A year ago today, Facebook introduced Instant Articles — a quick-loading news format, hosted on Facebook’s own servers, that opens inside the company’s flagship app up to 10 times faster than the mobile web. What began as a small test has now rolled out broadly to hundreds of publishers, and the format is now available for anyone to use. Consumers have responded well to faster news browsing: the company says people are 20 percent more likely to read Instant Articles, which are accompanied by a lighting bolt icon in the feed, and 30 percent more likely to share them with friends.
If consumers’ embrace of the format was easy to predict — who enjoys waiting for a website to load? — publishers’ feelings about Instant Articles were harder to gauge. The run-up to launch was met with tremendous anxiety among some publishers as they grappled with two realities: one, the majority of their audience is consuming news on Facebook; and two, allowing Facebook to host their articles directly meant giving up some control over their appearance and the ads that could run inside them. More than one publisher worried Facebook’s end game was to get publishers “hooked” on the format and then demand an ever-growing share of their ad revenue.
But so far, Facebook has taken the opposite approach. When publishers asked to be able to include more ads per article, Facebook let them. In March, it enabled video advertising; a week later, it allowed publishers to share sponsored posts as Instant Articles. In short order, Instant Articles became a model for the industry, with Apple and Google quickly stepping in to offer content hosting solutions of their own.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sometimes We Need Human Employees, Facebook Admits
http://www.wired.com/2016/05/facebook-acknowledges-sometimes-needs-humans/
In typical Facebook fashion, Facebook wants you to know it is a transparent company, one “that stands for connecting every person” in the world. In equally typical fashion, it’s telling you this without telling you much at all.
The company published a blog post today explaining how its “trending topics” feature works. “Topics that are eligible to appear in the product are surfaced by our algorithms, not people,” Justin Oskofsky, Facebook’s vice president of global operations, writes. “This product also has a team of people who play an important role in making sure that what appears in trending topics is high-quality and useful.” (A comical statement to anyone who has taken a peek at their “trending topics” box.)
The post comes amid days of widespread concern about the feature. On Monday, Gizmodo published an article titled “Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News.” It cited former employees of the trending team who said Facebook instructed them to act like “news curators” and told them they could inject certain stories into the trending section.
The story prompted outcries among journalists. Republican Senator John Thune sent a public letter to Facebook, asking the company to explain whether it had “manipulated content.” And today, The Guardian released internal Facebook documents outlining guidelines for the “trending” team, indicating that editors are in fact involved in deciding and describing those trending topics.
It seems Facebook wants to clear the air. “Facebook does not allow or advise our reviewers to discriminate against sources of any political origin, period,” Oskofsky writes.
Tomi Engdahl says:
We Said We’d Be Transparent … WIRED’s First Big HTTPS Snag
https://www.wired.com/2016/05/wired-first-big-https-rollout-snag/
Two weeks ago, WIRED.com tackled a huge security upgrade by starting a HTTPS transition across our site. (What’s HTTPS, and why is it such a big deal? Read all about it here.) The original plan was to launch HTTPS on our Security vertical and then roll it out across all of WIRED.com by May 12. However, only our Transportation vertical is making the switch today. We set ambitious goals for our HTTPS transition, so our revised timeline isn’t a total surprise—but we promised we’d be transparent about the process with our readers. So here are the unique challenges that are making our HTTPS launch take a little longer than we’d hoped.
SEO
Temporary SEO changes on your site are a possible consequence of transitioning to HTTPS.
This type of SEO change is not without precedent. We expect that our site will rebound, so we are giving it more time to recover before committing to HTTPS everywhere.
Mixed Content Issues
As we previously explained, one of the biggest challenges of moving to HTTPS is preparing all of our content to be delivered over secure connections. If a page is loaded over HTTPS, all other assets (like images and Javascript files) must also be loaded over HTTPS. We are seeing a high volume of reports of these “mixed content” issues, or events in which an insecure, HTTP asset is loaded in the context of a secure, HTTPS page. To do our rollout right, we need to ensure that we have fewer mixed content issues—that we are delivering as much of WIRED.com’s content as securely possible.
“When people ask why transitioning to HTTPS is so difficult, this is why: Sites like WIRED.com have a massive amount of data to process and understand.”
We’ve learned a lot by monitoring mixed content issues in the past two weeks.
We’ve been trying to find a suitable metric for gauging progress on handling mixed content issues. So far, we’ve found the ratio of mixed content issues to page views to be helpful. This metric is not affected by spikes in traffic and is thus a good metric to compare day-to-day progress towards our goals of minimizing mixed content issues.
What’s Next?
We promised we would be transparent about the struggles and triumphs of our HTTPS rollout. Today we’re acknowledging a delay—but we’ve got good news too. If you read this article about our editor Alex Davies blacking out in a jet, you’ll see that you are reading it over HTTPS.
Tomi Engdahl says:
EU gives up single digital market for audiovisual content
http://www.broadbandtvnews.com/2016/05/12/eu-gives-up-single-digital-market-for-audiovisual-content/
TV broadcasters, platform operator and other providers of audiovisual content can continue to block access to their content for internet users from other EU countries.
The planned abolishment of geoblocking will not be pursued any longer, reports German business newspaper Handelsblatt with reference to an EU regulation draft, adding that the European Commission wants to publish the legal document in two weeks.
The leaked draft does prohibit the blocking of websites and the products they offer for citizens from other EU countries. But article 1 makes it clear that audiovisual services are exempt from the rule, for example movies, TV series and sports coverage.
The European Commission will not take up the geoblocking issue again, the paper quotes sources in Brussels. This would include the planned harmonisation of copyright.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Coming Soon: New .Blog Domains for Websites
.Blog domain extensions will be available to all websites starting this year.
https://en.blog.wordpress.com/2016/05/12/coming-soon-new-blog-domains-for-websites/
For more than a decade, the word “blog” has been synonymous with “your home on the web.” And since 2005, WordPress.com has been proud to help you create a unique space that is all yours.
Now we’re excited to announce a brand new way to create a unique identity for your website: .blog, a top-level domain extension that will let you create a customized name and web address for your site.
A name that’s all yours
Just like .com before it, .blog is clear and accessible, and it creates millions of fresh, new options for naming your blog. It’s the perfect place to build your home on the web.
The .blog domains are coming this year
Tomi Engdahl says:
Danah Boyd / Data & Society:
Zuckerberg’s statement of Facebook neutrality is dangerous because all systems are biased, whether human or algorithmic
Facebook Must Be Accountable to the Public
https://points.datasociety.net/facebook-must-be-accountable-to-the-public-72a6d1b0d32f#.kqn44l63i
A pair of Gizmodo stories have prompted journalists to ask questions about Facebook’s power to manipulate political opinion in an already heated election year. If the claims are accurate, Facebook contractors have depressed some conservative news, and their curatorial hand affects the Facebook Trending list more than the public realizes. Mark Zuckerberg took to his Facebook page yesterday to argue that Facebook does everything possible to be neutral and that there are significant procedures in place to minimize biased coverage. He also promises to look into the accusations.
As this conversation swirls around intentions and explicit manipulation, there are some significant issues missing. First, all systems are biased. There is no such thing as neutrality when it comes to media. That has long been a fiction, one that traditional news media needs and insists on, even as scholars highlight that journalists reveal their biases through everything from small facial twitches to choice of frames and topics of interests. It’s also dangerous to assume that the “solution” is to make sure that “both” sides of an argument are heard equally. This is the source of tremendous conflict around how heated topics like climate change and evolution are covered. It is even more dangerous, however, to think that removing humans and relying more on algorithms and automation will remove this bias.
Recognizing bias and enabling processes to grapple with it must be part of any curatorial process, algorithmic or otherwise.
There never was neutrality, and there never will be.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Anna Fifield / Washington Post:
North Korean media tour raises questions about what is real and what is staged
I went to North Korea and was told I ask too many questions
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/i-went-to-north-korea-and-was-told-i-ask-too-many-questions/2016/05/11/620b659e-ded6-488c-bfb0-1319ddedcea5_story.html
“You ask too many questions,” Mr. Jang told me. “It’s a little hard to work with you.”
My North Korean minder — Jang Su Ung, one of two provided by the state to monitor (or “care for,” in their words) three Washington Post journalists on our visit to Pyongyang — was clearly exasperated.
Yoon gave a perfect North Korean answer. “We are suffering under U.N. and U.S. sanctions, and that’s why we learned how to make this equipment,” he said. “The Great Leader Marshal Kim Jong Un taught us to learn about technology and science so we have the ability to develop by ourselves.” This equipment may look old-fashioned on the outside, but inside the casing was cutting-edge technology built by North Korean doctors, Yoon told me with a straight face. Riiiiight.
After much whispering and efforts to get me out the door, someone turned on the power and we waited for what seemed like five minutes for the Microsoft Windows-based computer to boot up. Then it needed a password, and none of the six or so staffers in the room knew it.
Someone eventually arrived and entered it, and the English-language software started whirring
Happy now? The unspoken question hung in the air, as the hospital staff seemed eager to get rid of me. Jang was not happy. In North Korea, reporters take dictation. This kind of insistent questioning, this unwillingness to automatically believe what I was told, was not welcome.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Ricardo Bilton / Nieman Lab:
SecureDrop use is growing in newsrooms, but security fears mean few will detail exactly how they use it — For newsrooms, the first rule about SecureDrop is you don’t talk about SecureDrop — or not too much, anyway. — That’s clear from a new report from Columbia’s Tow Center for Journalism …
SecureDrop use is growing in newsrooms, but security fears mean few will detail exactly how they use it
http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/05/securedrop-use-is-growing-in-newsrooms-but-security-fears-mean-few-will-detail-exactly-how-they-use-it/
For newsrooms, the first rule about SecureDrop is you don’t talk about SecureDrop — or not too much, anyway.
That’s clear from a new report from Columbia’s Tow Center for Journalism, which looked at how sites such as The Intercept, Gawker and ProPublica are making use of SecureDrop, the encrypted anonymous commutation software maintained by The Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF). As of writing, 14 news organizations, three journals, and eight nonprofit groups are using SecureDrop, according to FPF. Eighty organizations are waiting for the FPF to help them get it installed.
— News organizations say SecureDrop is useful, the definition of usefulness varies. While most news organizations have adopted SecureDrop as a way to get new stories, news organizations say that SecureDrop is useful even if no stories come from it. Gawker editor John Cook, for example, said that, at the very least, using SecureDrop communicates Gawker’s commitment to protecting sources.
— News organizations are reluctant to discuss exactly how they use SecureDrop.
— Most news organizations designate just a few people to monitor their SecureDrop. These people, usually editors, then distribute those tips to the right reporters. This arrangement is due to the complexity of accessing SecureDrop, which can only be used via a dedicated computer in a newsroom
— Not even encrypted channels are immune to trolls and spam. Running a SecureDrop, like any other communications channel, means having to sift through plenty of spam, unhelpful news tips and conspiracy theories from well-meaning readers. Some submissions aren’t news at all.
— SecureDrop is good for the first point of contact, but reporters often switch to other channels.
Tomi Engdahl says:
“An essay in bot form”: Text with this basic text bot to read about (and discuss) the bot boom
http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/05/an-essay-in-bot-form-text-with-this-basic-text-bot-to-read-about-and-discuss-the-bot-boom/
“The bot was made to argue about something. The point of the bot wasn’t to serve you. It was to propose an argument in and of itself.”
It started as a sort-of-joke writer Kyle Chayka made a few weeks ago, after he’d been reading a lot about bots.
Chayka then actually created that weekend bot, which was “kind of an absurdist joke about bots and sort of the pointlessness of this delivery mechanism for all the same stuff.” The joke caught the attention of the editors of MEL Magazine
The piece wasn’t presented as a chunk of text on the MEL Magazine website, though. It is instead delivered through a series of chat interactions.
The essay bot continues to ask questions and offer tidbits as the user texts responses — I sent 17 texts before getting to the end of the road
But this particular bot wasn’t offering any of the services promised by the bots on Facebook Messenger or in Slack or by Amazon’s Echo: buying stuff online, requesting Ubers, delivering the news (this, this, and this), reporting the weather, or even assisting in social media duty (hello, New York Times Blossom bot). This bot, annoyingly, kept questioning my understanding of what a bot really was, offering quips like “I think we bots have more potential than just acting as digital functionaries, serving your habits. What else do you want us to do?” and “Even I’m a product of human labor, no smarter than a Choose Your Own Adventure Book.”
“The bot was made to argue about something. The point of the bot wasn’t to serve you. It was to propose an argument in and of itself,” Chayka said. “It’s an essay, in bot form.”
Chayka wrote a complete script for how the essay would play out, including each text interaction and all the possible responses.
“A big part of the project was to solicit answers from people and respond to them. I’m interested in people’s answers to the questions I’ve posed. That’s how this bot works: by questioning you,”
“If you write a normal essay, you don’t control how people see it and read it. You don’t know how they’re responding at every paragraph.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Christopher Heine / Adweek:
The Daily Mail says it posts 1,200 stories, 10K photos, and 650 videos a day, has 80M US visitors per month
Daily Mail Is Now Posting 650 Videos a Day and Getting 383 Million Monthly Views Reveals a bevy of ridiculous stats By Christopher Heine
http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/daily-mail-now-posting-650-videos-day-and-getting-383-million-monthly-views-171439
The U.K.-based publisher is now posting 650 videos a day, which has resulted in a 516 percent jump in views in the past year. It’s getting 383 million monthly video views, 12 million video views per day, and claims an 80 percent completion and viewability rate.
“It’s become to many people the publication for news and entertainment,” said former CNN anchor and Daily Mail editor-at-large Piers Morgan. “People average 20 minutes on the site.”
Here’s a quick look at the other stats Daily Mail offered at its NewFronts presentation Thursday:
It draws 240 million monthly global visitors.
The publication gets 80 million U.S. visitors a month.
With 350 journalists worldwide, it posts 1,200 stories a day.
It also publishes 10,000 photos each day.
Forty-six percent of its web traffic comes from people going directly to its homepage.
Tomi Engdahl says:
OpenX Launches the School of Programmatic in the US
http://venturebeat.com/2016/05/17/openx-launches-the-school-of-programmatic-in-the-us/
OpenX, a global leader in driving superior monetization for publishers, today announced the U.S. launch of its successful School of ProgrammaticTM. First launched in London in 2015, the OpenX School of Programmatic was created in response to the growing demand among ad tech professionals for general and expert education focused on enabling publishers and marketers to most effectively use programmatic technology.
“Programmatic advertising is now the default technology for managing inventory and campaigns across multiple screens and formats. However, its specific and often complex taxonomy and practices are constantly changing, creating an ongoing need among publishers and marketers to be fluent in the latest innovations and applications,” said Jason Fairchild, co-founder and CRO, OpenX.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Knight Foundation:
Knight Foundation, Columbia University launch First Amendment Institute, a $60M project to help in legal fights over online privacy and free speech
Knight Foundation, Columbia University launch First Amendment Institute, $60 million project to promote free expression in the digital age
http://www.knightfoundation.org/press-room/press-release/knight-foundation-columbia-university-launch-first/
Project will support litigation, research and education on threats to freedom of speech and the press, and help shape First Amendment law in digital media
Tomi Engdahl says:
David Wertime / Foreign Policy:
Study: 488M, or 1 of every 178 posts, on China’s social media each year come from pro-government propagandists
http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/05/19/meet-the-chinese-internet-trolls-pumping-488-million-posts-harvard-stanford-ucsd-research/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Tim Cushing / Techdirt:
Federal Judge Says Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine A Perfectly Legitimate Source Of Evidence
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160518/08175934474/federal-judge-says-internet-archives-wayback-machine-perfectly-legitimate-source-evidence.shtml
from the score-one-for-the-internet’s-unofficial-backup-system dept
Those of us who dwell on the internet already know the Internet Archive’s “Wayback Machine” is a useful source of evidence. For one, it showed that the bogus non-disparagement clause KlearGear used to go after an unhappy customer wasn’t even in place when the customer ordered the product that never arrived.
It’s useful to have ways of preserving web pages the way they are when we come across them, rather than the way some people would prefer we remember them, after vanishing away troublesome posts, policies, etc. Archive.is performs the same function. Screenshots are also useful, although tougher to verify by third parties.
“The potential uses of the Wayback Machine in IP litigation are powerful and diverse. Historical versions of an opposing party’s website could contain useful admissions or, in the case of patent disputes, invalidating prior art. Date-stamped websites can also contain proof of past infringing use of copyrighted or trademarked content.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Evolving Storytelling to Marry the Ancient Skills with the Digital Age
http://hackaday.com/2016/05/20/evolving-storytelling-to-marry-the-ancient-skills-with-the-digital-age/
Storytelling is an art. It stretches back to the dawn of man. It engages people on an emotional level and engages their mind. Paulina Greta Stefanovic, a user experience researcher and interaction designer is on the cutting edge of bringing our technology together with the best human aspects of this long tradition.
The information age is threatening storytelling — not making it extinct, but reducing the number of people who themselves are storytellers. We are no longer reliant on people in our close social circles to be exquisite story tellers for our own enjoyment; we have the luxury (perhaps curse?) of mass market story-telling.
Paulina’s work unlocks interactive storytelling. The idea isn’t new, as great storytellers have always read their audience and played to their engagement. Interactive storytelling in the digital age seeks to design this skill into the technology that is delivering the story. This is a return from passive entertainment.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Copyright Law Is Being Misused To Remove Material From the Internet
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/05/23/154211/how-copyright-law-is-being-misused-to-remove-material-from-the-internet
Revealed: How copyright law is being misused to remove material from the internet
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/23/copyright-law-internet-mumsnet
When Annabelle Narey posted a negative review of a building firm on Mumsnet, the last thing on her mind was copyright infringement
Writing a bad review online has always run a small risk of opening yourself up to a defamation claim. But few would expect to be told that they had to delete their review or face a lawsuit over another part of the law: copyright infringement.
Mumsnet received a warning from Google: a takedown request had been made under the American Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), alleging that copyrighted material was posted without a licence on the thread.
As soon as the DMCA takedown request had been filed, Google de-listed the entire thread. All 126 posts are now not discoverable when a user searches Google for BuildTeam – or any other terms. The search company told Mumsnet it could make a counterclaim, if it was certain no infringement had taken place, but since the site couldn’t verify that its users weren’t actually posting copyrighted material, it would have opened it up to further legal pressure.
In fact, no copyright infringement had occurred at all. Instead, something weirder had happened. At some point after Narey posted her comments on Mumsnet, someone had copied the entire text of one of her posts and pasted it, verbatim, to a spammy blog titled “Home Improvement Tips and Tricks”.
Whoever sent the takedown request, Mumsnet was forced to make a choice: either leave the post up, and accept being delisted; fight the delisting and open themselves up to the same legal threats made against Google; or delete the post themselves, and ask the post to be relisted on the search engine.
Mumsnet deleted the post, and asked Google to reinstate the thread
Censorship by copyright
The motivation of Ashraf can only be guessed at, but censorship using the DMCA is common online. The act allows web hosts a certain amount of immunity from claims of copyright infringement through what is known as the “safe harbour” rules: in essence, a host isn’t responsible for hosting infringing material provided they didn’t know about it when it went up, and took it down as soon as they were told about it.
In practice, however, this means that web hosts (and the term is broadly interpreted, meaning sites like YouTube, Twitter and Google count) are forced to develop a hair-trigger over claims of copyright infringement, assuming guilt and asking the accused to prove their innocence.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dylan Byers / CNNMoney:
Industry observers and some staff believe BuzzFeed will eventually curtail news to focus on more profitable video and entertainment — Early last year, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti wrote a blog post titled “Why BuzzFeed Does News,” a battle cry for journalism that had the unintended effect of unnerving some members of the news division.
Can BuzzFeed News survive the shift to video?
http://money.cnn.com/2016/05/24/media/buzzfeed-news-video-future/
Early last year, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti wrote a blog post titled “Why BuzzFeed Does News,” a battle cry for journalism that had the unintended effect of unnerving some members of the news division.
By then, BuzzFeed News had been humming for three years. It lived within a larger apparatus of entertainment content — which, Peretti’s post acknowledged, was a much bigger business. But it was the quality journalism that made the site an industry darling.
“News is the heart and soul of any great media company,” Peretti wrote. “News might not be as big a business as entertainment, but news is the best way to have a big impact on the world.”
Privately, Peretti also told employees that journalism was essential to maintaining the brand’s credibility. When BuzzFeed went courting global companies for ad deals, BuzzFeed’s commitment to news could be a difference maker. It gave the company prestige. Plus, Peretti said, he liked journalism, and since BuzzFeed could afford it — why not?
Meanwhile, BuzzFeed is increasingly staking its future on video, where entertainment is top priority. At the beginning of 2015, video accounted for 15% of the company’s revenues. Today, it’s approaching 50%, according to a company spokesperson.
While news content has generated major advertising premiums and revenue for these hybrid companies, BuzzFeed News doesn’t generate a quantifiable advertising premium for BuzzFeed, which is why it’s vulnerable. Mashable, a much smaller company, recently cut its news staff in order focus on video.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Margaret Sullivan / Washington Post:
Obama administration promised transparency, but delivered opacity, stonewalling FOIA requests, punishing a whistleblower, and threatening a reporter with jail — Some things just aren’t cool. One of those, according to our no-drama president, is ignorance.
Obama promised transparency. But his administration is one of the most secretive
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/obama-promised-transparency-but-his-administration-is-one-of-the-most-secretive/2016/05/24/5a46caba-21c1-11e6-9e7f-57890b612299_story.html
Some things just aren’t cool. One of those, according to our no-drama president, is ignorance.
“It’s not cool to not know what you’re talking about,” President Obama said during his recent Rutgers University commencement address. It was a swipe clearly intended for he-who-didn’t-need-to-be-named: Donald Trump, the likely Republican nominee for president.
After early promises to be the most transparent administration in history, this has been one of the most secretive. And in certain ways, one of the most elusive. It’s also been one of the most punitive toward whistleblowers and leakers who want to bring light to wrongdoing they have observed from inside powerful institutions.
Promising transparency and criticizing ignorance, but delivering secrecy and opacity? That doesn’t serve the public or the democracy. And that’s deeply uncool.