Media heads towards 'winner take all' landscape: “You don’t want to be a second- or third-tier partner."

IS IT boom or doom in the news business? Headline-grabbing sums are being invested in online newspapers... Yet for those publications founded in the era of hot-metal type, advertising revenues continue to fall... American dailies lost around $30 billion in ad spending between 2005 and 2014, or 60% of the total... the main hope is to find ways of b…

Attacks by Islamic militants, unjustified arrests, assaults, harassment, threats and tougher legal restrictions made it harder for editors, reporters and photographers to hold the powerful to account across the region this year, according to media organizations and NGOs.Hopes that politicians would increase protections for independent media after …

the power of Facebook’s algorithmic News Feed... doesn’t show users everything their friends post, and so Facebook can demand a toll from publishers for placement in the stream. Today that toll looks like simply programming content to the algorithm, tomorrow it looks like publishing Instant Articles, and maybe next year it looks like paying Facebo…

Just in time for your Christmas break, a hand-picked selection of posts designed to give you something to think about as the year turns.

Each year, we ask some of the smartest people in journalism and digital media what they think is coming in the next 12 months. Here’s what they had to say. - Predictions for Journalism 2016 » Collections » Nieman Journalism Lab » Pushing to the Future of Journalism

What are Europe's most innovative news applications and initiatives?

for anyone outside Facebook’s Partner Publisher network, the new feature can be somewhat confusing.

We sift through the academic journals so you don’t have to. Here are 10 of the most interesting studies about social and digital media published in 2015.

the Internet now seems to be on constant boil... extremists of all stripes are ascendant, and just about everywhere you look, much of the Internet is terrible...social networks seem to be feeding a cycle of action and reaction. In just about every news event, the Internet’s reaction to the situation becomes a follow-on part of the story, so that …

The innovation we talk of in journalism isn’t the kind of innovation designed to radically change the way consumers behave, it’s really just short term reactionary attempts to try and deliver content to platforms the majority of consumers already use... Innovation in tech is rarely if ever short term... We’re being taken on this journey and it …

We used to have publications that covered a broad swath; now we have niche. We’ve gone from lists to listicles. Articles are supplanted by particles ... news as fluid and ever-updating. This will be the year where the pioneers succeed in reassembling the parts. It seems unlikely that the power of the press will lie solely in large news institutio…

We are creating open-source tools and resources for publishers of all sizes to build better communities around their journalism. We also collect, support, and share practices, tools, and studies to improve communities on the web. All of our tools are open source and free... small, flexible tools that plug into each other and also work with exist…

Solutions journalism is rigorous and compelling reporting about responses to social problems.It investigates and explains, in a critical and clear-eyed way, examples of people working toward solutions. It focuses not just on what may be working, but how and why it appears to be working, or alternatively, why it may be stumbling.Using the best avai…

2046: News organizations had great opportunities back in 2016. Management could have chosen to invest into meaningful, long-term R&D.; Instead, distribution became the domain of technology companies alone, who as a result, now control every aspect of how we get the news today.... An alternate 2046: News organizations had great opportunities back i…

Thank god for ad blocking... the handwringing and number-crunching over its impact on digital revenues...will change the conversation about revenue models for media companies. Newsrooms now regularly produce interactive and data-driven stories, launch podcasts, and experiment with new, structured formats... Longform storytelling is in a seriou…

My prediction for 2016 is that distributed platforms and native environments will be more valuable than the traditional homepage.... Apple News and Apple TV, Facebook Instant Articles, Google AMP, Twitter Moments, Snapchat Discover, 360º video and VR, over-the-top TV, chat apps — these are all products, platforms, and programs developed (ish — G…

a new wave of “homeless” media companies that don’t require a home page; their sole purpose is to syndicate content.... With native content consumption on third-party platforms growing, will it still be relevant for media companies to invest significant resources on running and maintaining their websites and mobile apps?

On Thursday night, as part of its ongoing coverage of the shootings in San Bernardino, Calif., The New York Times highlighted reader comments in one of its most prominent digital spaces: The top of its homepage... While Times journalists interact with readers on social platforms, the paper also makes an effort to bring the conversation back to …

So, optimistically, I guess, we build a new independent media on a bedrock of explaining and celebration and condemnation, with a side of antagonistic reporting (or hopefully more) and infinite essays and personal narratives bubbling underneath it all (and occasionally breaking through). - Access Denied - The Awl

most politics coverage is about politicians, not the things I care about and the actions I could take... Political journalism could imagine the audience as agents, people who act. Political journalism could be genuinely empowering, if it started from the concerns of the people it’s supposed to serve and not the spectacle of elections... In t…

NYTimes' “verified commenters.”... few hundred people whose comments are posted without moderation can end up dominating the reader commenting system... causes quite understandable resentment among thousands of others...Because they go up first, their comments are almost guaranteed to get the most exposure, “and hence rise to the top and be seen …

So is the world any more “outraged” than it’s always been? Nah. We’re just getting toyed with. - 5 things the media does to manufacture outrage. — Medium

this week El País pulled the plug on Aguilar’s column after he told the New York Times that the Spanish newspaper’s financial problems were compromising its editorial line... there are people so exasperated that they’re leaving, sometimes even with the feeling that the situation has reached levels of censorship.” - El País goes to war with t…

Extinction-level events have more or less become the new normal in the news business... journalism should have been wiped out by now. And yet it’s surprisingly resilient ... necessary to step back from the #contentwars and start, well, building new things. Every minute spent debating whether bloggers are journalists... is time not spent making …

news operations  are... losing a degree of ownership over their audiences... the number of people they reach is potentially greater than ever [but] through much larger third parties... coming to terms with just how directly their industry’s business model is coming into competition with that of their new, and much larger, partners... The tec…

There's never been a better time to innovate in media, so it's good to be back to EurActiv. Eight years ago I helped launch BlogActiv, before leaving for the world of EU communications agencies. Give or take a month or two, my 6-month stint fell in the middle of EurActiv's 15 years of life so far. It's good to be back, albeit p…

A quick post to Medium in response to: Facebook Will Be Every Publisher’s CMS And That Is Probably A Good Thing: For a publisher to adopt Facebook as their CMS would be a form of surrender, handing over their future to someone else. - I don’t know if you’re wrong, but I hope you are — Medium

I feel reasonably confident that within the next 6–12 months, you will only see Instant Articles in the mobile newsfeed. Why? Because they are better... they will eventually be available on all Facebook environments. There is seemingly nothing stopping Facebook from rolling out a full front-end to the product so writers can produce directly in …

As we head deeper into the annual bloodletting that is news media budgeting for the new year, here are 10 of my top questions that I think we’ll talking about into 2016.... (my faves): Vice, Vox Media, and BuzzFeed have seen hundreds of millions in investment... we have word that Business Insider will test reader revenue... Who will follow s…