Overview: Media

Good intro to what Apple and Google are doing in the privacy space to fend off regulation. TL:DR; "Get ready for more random ads online, higher prices and subscriptions galore. But your privacy concerns may still not fade."Apple kicked this off in 2017 with a new Safari preventing the technology used by marketing companies to follow peop…

McNamee has mentored many of the people who have transformed Silicon Valley... advised Mark Zuckerberg to turn down Yahoo’s offer... a billion dollars... encouraged Zuckerberg to hire Sheryl Sandberg...Ten days before the Presidential election... “I am disappointed. I am embarrassed. I am ashamed,”... I was expecting them to take it seriously... t…

The Study doing the Saying is from the News Media Alliance, the industry trade group ... the whole megillah is based on one stray number mentioned at a lunch in 2008... $100 million. From that one number, you can “extrapolate in a straightforward way” to $4.7 billion today... my son has gained exactly 39.7 pounds from the moment of his conception …

Google is suspending a search feature that displayed fact checks associated to publishers after receiving criticism from conservative news outlets.... Reviewed Claims column that matched outlets’ disputed claims with fact checks contributed by independent fact-checking organizations to the Schema.org ClaimReview markup... The Daily Caller publishe…

it will rank news organizations by credibility based on user feedback... trust rankings will emerge from surveys ... Google announced it would cancel a two-month-old experiment, called Knowledge Panel, that informed its users that a news article had been disputed by independent fact-checking organizations... Facebook learned the wrong lesson fro…

Instead of having to look at what weird things other people are interested in... Google shows me the weird things I’m interested in... a fundamental shift in content consumption from curation based on our explicit choices to curation based on our implicit preferences mined from past behavior.

Now feels like the right time to take a step back, look at the landscape of VR and AR, and share a bit on how we think about the space: where we are, where we’re going, why it matters to Google, and why it matters to the world... VR can put you anywhere, and AR can bring anything to you... in time, these points on the spectrum will blur... let’s c…

Google News determines whether an article might contain fact checks in part by looking for the schema.org ClaimReview markup. We also look for sites that follow the commonly accepted criteria for fact checks.... use that markup in fact-check articles.

There’s large-scale, statistically significant research into the impact of search results on political views... Google is doing a horrible, horrible job of delivering answers here. It can and should do better... people are finally saying, ‘Gee, Facebook and Google really have a lot of power’ like it’s this big revelation. And it’s like, ‘D’oh.’”…

Zuckerberg’s emerging dilemma. He doesn’t want Facebook ... to be an arbiter of what’s legit and what’s not. But if Facebook is now going to prohibit fake news sites from using its ad network to sell ads, it will need a list of its own... Google has long had its own list of legitimate news sources... hasn’t apparently wanted to cut into its own…

“a monopoly of content distribution that will be mainly driven by user-generated content, and by professional content by commercially interested players.... pretty traumatic scenario of information or propaganda. It will be very painful for democracies.”

Google formed its Digital News Initiative... €150-million innovation fund, though I see that more as a blackmail pot than as a strategic benefit to a struggling industry: bags of coins tossed to drowning journalists.

The code behind the effort is all available on Github... the fact that it uses an open repository doesn’t mean that Google isn’t running the project, or deciding what gets included and what doesn’t... publishers have another option ... simply take the best parts of the specification from the publicly available documentation and implement those …

"Accelerated Mobile Pages speed up mobile page load times through a new open framework called AMP HTML, which Google says "allows websites to build light-weight web pages." Google says it has nearly 30 publishers signed on to participate in the project, including The New York Times, Vox and Gannett." (What was the point posting each of the 6 ar…

the Google standard gives publishers a streamlined page-loading script they can use that takes advantage of smart caching of content—either on their own servers or on Google’s servers—to make the various elements load faster...an order of magnitude faster than the typical mobile page... a completely open standard that any publisher can implemen…

Google and Twitter to help publishers show “instant articles” to people who use their services on mobile phones... Twitter users or Google search users who click on a link while using their phones will see full articles pop up on their screens almost immediately... an open source project, and hope to convince multiple tech companies to adopt it…

...with iOS 9 and content blockers, what you're seeing is Apple's attempt to fully drive the knife into Google's revenue platform.... So it's Apple vs. Google vs. Facebook, all with their own revenue platforms. Google has the web, Facebook has its app, and Apple has the iPhone. This is the newest and biggest war in tech going today. And the …

If the rules are approved, Google may eventually have to pay newspaper and magazine groups whenever links to their content are shown ... Similar copyright rules ... have so far backfired ... In Germany, Google removed many local organizations from its news service, which led to a drastic fall in online traffic to some newspapers’ sites. Local publ…

"Now we in journalism get to stand back and see technology titans jump over each other to bring benefits to news. But we’d best not stand back too far. We journalists and publishers must collaborate with the platforms as we demand that they collaborate with us. And as they teach us about technology, we must teach them about journalism." - Playi…

Google, eight major publishers across Europe, and a couple of trade organizations are forming a partnership ... an alliance born out of desperation on the part of publishers and opportunity on the part of technology companies... the largest news and information companies in the world will be formed out of a hybrid of these current entities... …

"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.

"the system ... counts the number of incorrect facts within a page ... by tapping into the Knowledge Vault, the vast store of facts that Google has pulled off the internet. Facts the web unanimously agrees on are considered a reasonable proxy for truth. Web pages that contain contradictory information are bumped down the rankings." - Google wan…

Apparently we are all now "little more than webs of flesh spun over packages of saleable data", according to a searing indictment of Google's anti-anonymity policy specifically. This is required reading for anyone interested in a balanced view of anonymity, privacy and public discourse: "The Google+ so-called "real name" policy can best be descr…

Consider this your starting point to tap into Google’s suite of digital tools that can enhance newsgathering and exposure across television, radio, print and online. Whether it’s refining your advanced search capabilities, improving audience engagement through Google+, or learning how to visualize data using Google Maps, this website is intended …

"That's about 100,000 business opportunities we provide publishers every minute." - good article on how slow the newsindustry was. Interesting thoughts too on balancing algorithmic approach with human concerns. Google News at 10 - The Atlantic http://t.co/Fupf11B6