Overview: Media

Apple isn't the only one developing an exclusive news service for its mobile customers. Samsung has announced a partnership with Axel Springer... to develop a news platform exclusive to Samsung Galaxy... UPDAY is being pitched as an "aggregated news content platform," with stories selected both algorithmically and by a local team of news editor…

One of the best longreads re: the future of news media I've read in a while: "Websites... have been able to accumulate enormous audiences with incredible speed by harvesting referrals from social networks... Websites plausibly marketed these people as members of their audiences, rather than temporarily diverted members of a platform’s audience.…

"How the Islamic State is leaving tech companies torn between free speech and security is a labyrinthine topic... Today’s 8,000-word-plus story on the subject, part of The Washington Post’s “Confronting the Caliphate” series, comes with the background knowledge and context right in the story itself... Knowledge Map, appears as highlighted links…

"AOL's online dominance was such that building sites for the traditional web became secondary ... Companies fought over who had the best relationship with AOL, thereby allowing them access to audiences that their competitors didn't have.... If you're starting to think that 1995 AOL sounds a lot like 2015 Facebook, you'd be right. 20 years late…

"We get what we measure and we are measuring the wrong things... old, mass-media metrics of reach and frequency — translated into their digital equivalents: unique users and pageviews — turn out to be profoundly corrupting... attention is a much more productive measure of media value than traffic.... There is a richer set of metrics that matter…

"Google announced a new partnership with several publishers on Tuesday. ...The Digital News Initiative.... I’m a huge fan of this idea. Contributoria (an open journalism network) and Swarmize (a data journalism platform) wouldn’t exist today without it.

Google promised a €150 million fund to promote platform and product digital news innovation, working with eight top European publishers... Europe is the squeaky wheel that Google decided to grease, with a sum that sounds large to cash-starved news publishers but is a pittance to Mountain View. It's 0.001% of Google's $14.4 billion profit in 201…

The Digital News Initiative (DNI) is a partnership between Google and news publishers in Europe to support high quality journalism through technology and innovation.

"content-sharing deal between the BBC and regional newspapers ... BBC’s local news websites display links to stories carried by participating titles in the area. The newspapers themselves are free to choose which stories they want to be linked from the BBC’s ‘Local Live’ web feed, which updates readers on breaking news throughout the day." - BB…

"Here's how Blendle works: Users register for Blendle and put in their credit-card details just once at the beginning of the process in which they create a newsfeed of stories about the topics in which they are interested. When they click on a headline, the app/website takes a small payment. And — perhaps the most intriguing part of the whole offe…

"The much fussed-over crisis in media isn’t the crisis of journalism. "Printing yesterday’s news on paper and slapping an ad on it — that’s a 19th-century formula, and in 2015 there are reporters and executives who are surprised the model isn’t working. The nostalgia for a past that was a very comfortable one at the beginning of our careers and so…

"the most crucial element of Facebook’s new power: the right to chose between the free expression of ideas or to instead impose censorship when it deems content unworthy... How will its algorithms handle stories posted directly to Facebook that question Facebook’s monopoly status? ... If the Washington Post posted its PRISM story about collusion …

"Skeptics are howling that this is a Faustian bargain—that the media are mortgaging their long-term futures for short-term gain... Facebook has presented the news media with a collective-action problem. News sites aren’t blind.... if they could all get together and decide, as a group, what to do about Facebook, no doubt they’d think long and hard…

"The problem is that Facebook controls what you see and when. If it becomes the primary way to consume news and watch videos, what happens when a news story is controversial about the company itself? Or isn’t within its content guidelines (like pornography)? You’ll be receiving a filtered version of the internet that’s controlled by one company."

"The New York Times is preparing to plant a taproot right inside the highly walled garden that is Facebook." - Memo To Publishers: Watch Where You Put That Taproot… — Medium

"The coverage of HSBC in Britain's Telegraph is a fraud on its readers. If major newspapers allow corporations to influence their content for fear of losing advertising revenue, democracy itself is in peril." - Why I have resigned from the Telegraph | openDemocracy

Good overview of Circa's approach: "A new model for online journalism is emerging, focusing on the atomization of news stories into “bite-sized chunks” of information aimed at mobile audiences."

With a very nice longform, multimedia html5 presentation to boot. "In this bustling environment, there is less news and more noise. ..." More news but even more noise, rather.

"While many journalists have lost faith in the future of their trade, venture capitalists are taking the opposite view.... providing big chunks of funding to online news providers, such as BuzzFeed, Vice, and Vox. Some of what these publishers put out is mere click bait, but they also produce serious journalism... subscription-based journalism ..…

After the standard survey of Facebook's impact on news & democracy, an interesting analysis of the way Facebook's: "trending topics has had a deeply pernicious effect on the way news is produced... encourages publications to look for what's trending and pump out something on that subject as quickly as possible... lots of quickly aggregated p…

" The Independent... on the hunt for digital growth ... taking a page out of the book of digital native publishers with high-metabolism, social media-optimized content with the newly launched i100, a site heavy on visuals that offers social media-oriented twists on the news, explainers and viral Web commentary. The result: stories like “Has the Ry…

"Following on the heels of the Guardian and Metro UK, News UK has developed a Creative Content Unit to focus on native advertising... We've entered a new world where lines are fuzzier. The ethics shouldn't be fuzzy... If you're straight up and disclose who you are and where you're coming from, readers are mature enough to determine whether it's s…

"... a new way of measuring the actual attention of readers, as part of a move to get publishers and advertisers to stop focusing only on clicks and pageviews... Unlike pageviews, which simply measure whether a page has loaded, or even unique visitors ... metrics like “active exposure time,” ... can determine how much time a reader spent with a s…

"Over the past 18 months, Mashable — helped along by a $14 million infusion of capital — has doubled in size ... announced its first international expansion... [and] opened a Los Angeles office Mashable chose London because it’s a prime market for advertising" - Mashable, too, heads to Europe | Poynter.

A useful look at how user-centricity has leapt out of the web department and into the business strategy: "... Quartz ... Gawker, BuzzFeed and Tumblr... are increasingly thinking about what they do as providing a service, not just as a business that generates content and then delivers it to people.... you have to experiment, and iterate rapidly, …

"Today, we have seen the proliferation of new news ventures thanks to some fortuitous changes in the funding environment, such as venture capitalists, tech philanthropists, and big companies willing to take a chance on actual content produced by journalists as opposed to funding platforms or aggregators. And they all have mission statements speaki…

"a new paper by Harvard's Yochai Benkler ... on what Wikileaks reveals about the emergence of a networked modern press... Wikileaks "forces us to ask how comfortable we are with the actual shape of democratization created by the Internet." ... how the public responds is a particularly compelling force. "The people formerly known as the audience"…

"...another link in a chain of legal rulings that help establish the idea that bloggers - and other members of ... "the networked fourth estate," ... can be seen as performing acts of journalism... we need to protect acts of journalism, not just specific actors who engage in them. the First Amendment protects acts of journalism or publishing — …

"more publishers are trying to opt out of the pageview rat race.... The Financial Times will next month begin selling time by the hour for any ad ... The Economist Group is rolling out a new set of “dynamic attention metrics” to help advertisers buy time rather than impressions for their ads."... The rise of clickbait ... can be tracked back to …

"... It goes by many other pseudonyms — “native advertising,” “content marketing” — but the basic value proposition in most cases is the same. Publishers work with sponsors to create content that is “native” to the particular platform (in some cases looking very similar to editorial content) and is more engaging than display advertising.... This…