Month: April 2015

There’s been a lot of attention paid to Twitter recently, thanks in part to a disappointing earnings report that caused the stock to fall by more than 20 percent, wiping about $8 billion from the company’s market value. But this is about more than just a quarter that failed to meet the market’s expectations for profit or revenue growth — it’s about whether Twitter can ever meet those expectations, given the way the service is constructed and the strategy that it has chosen to follow.

Ironically, many of the things that currently hinder Twitter’s success arguably originated because of the company’s attempts to generate the kind of financial results that would meet Wall Street expectations.

Freelance tech analyst Ben Thompson has written about many of these issues recently, both on his Stratechery blog and in his email newsletter . In one of the latest, Ben argued that Twitter needs new leadership, in part because it can’t seem to figure out how to generate enough growth in new users and because its advertising strategy is all over the map. The current leadership of the company simply hasn’t shown that it can meet either challenge, he says:

The trouble for Twitter is that awareness of the service has long outstripped its usability. And yet, despite the fact that Twitter has struggled with new user growth for years, almost nothing was done to improve the product or on-boarding experience until just the last few months, when the company finally rolled out a new logged-out page meant to entice people with Twitter’s content, as well as an instant timeline that helped people get started. Unfortunately, both efforts seem to be too little too late: Twitter admitted on the earnings call that neither improvement had increased retention.

Bulldozing the third-party ecosystem

In addition to all of that, Ben also focuses — both in his latest post and in some of his more recent writings — on something that I’ve thought a lot: Namely, a crucial turning point in Twitter’s evolution that arguably helped put it where it is today, both in a positive sense (it is a publicly-traded $25-billion company) and a negative one (its growth potential is in question and its strategy doesn’t seem to be working). And that turning point happened about five years ago, when Twitter decided to turn its back on the third-party ecosystem that helped make it successful in the first place.

This process began gradually, with the acquisition of Tweetie — which became Twitter’s official iOS client — and restrictions on what third parties could do with tweets, including selling advertising related to them. But it escalated quickly, and arguably became an all-out war with Twitter’s moves against Bill Gross, the Idealab founder and inventor of search-related advertising, who was busy acquiring Twitter clients and trying to build an ad model around the public Twitter stream. The idea that someone could monetize Twitter before Twitter itself got around to doing so was what one investor called a “holy shit moment” for the company. As I wrote at the time:

Critics have accused the company of “nuking” the developers and services that helped it achieve its early growth in its drive to monetize its network, in much the same way that Hunch founder and angel investor Chris Dixon criticized the company last year for “acting like a drunk guy with an Uzi” after it acquired Tweetie. Anyone who is still under the impression that Twitter is the friendly, touchy-feely company that co-founder Evan Williams used to run — the one that admitted it “screwed up” relations with developers by moving too quickly — is living in a dream world.

The board of directors and Twitter’s executive team clearly believed that in order to manage the growth of the company — and in order to generate enough revenue to justify the multibillion-dollar valuation given to it by its investors — Twitter needed to take full control over every aspect of the service. So third-party clients were shut down or restricted, API access and advertising rules were strictly enforced, and so on. For many of the developers and startups that helped generate user growth for Twitter in its early days this was a kick in the teeth, but that didn’t matter. Twitter was going public and getting a good valuation was top of the list of must-have items.

Could it have taken a different path?

Twitter obviously felt that this was the only route available to it — but is that true? I don’t think so, and neither do others, including one of the earliest Twitter employees: Alex Payne, who ran the developer and platform side of the company for a long time. After he left in 2010, he described a letter that he had sent to the executive team arguing that Twitter was making a mistake by closing down the network, and that it should have made the opposite decision: that is, by becoming as open as possible. In a nutshell, he said, Twitter’s choice was to become more open — to decentralize the network — or die like other walled-garden platforms before it.

Ben makes a somewhat similar argument in his “Twitter and What Might Have Been” post: although he doesn’t say Twitter will die because of the decisions it made, he does say that the company could arguably have generated as much or more value by taking the open path rather than shutting down the ecosystem. And that’s because the core value of the service is the “interest graph” of its users, not the app itself or timeline views or whatever other metrics the company has come up with to satisfy Wall Street. And monetizing that interest graph might actually be better accomplished with partners rather than trying to do it all within the native app or website:

I would argue that what makes Twitter the company valuable is not Twitter the app or 140 characters or @names or anything else having to do with the product: rather, it’s the interest graph that is nearly priceless. More specifically, it is Twitter identities and the understanding that can be gleaned from how those identities are used and how they interact that matters. If one starts with that sort of understanding — that Twitter the company is about the graph, not the app — one would make very different decisions. For one, the clear priority would not be increasing ad inventory on the Twitter timeline (which in this understanding is but one manifestation of an interest graph) but rather ensuring as many people as possible have and use a Twitter identity. And what would be the best way to do that? Through 3rd-parties, of course!

Last year, Twitter effectively admitted that it needed third-party developers and apps to achieve its growth potential: the company had a developer conference and talked about how it wanted to work with outside entities to build things that would work with the API, including some new ventures aimed at turning Twitter into a single-login identity service and other initiatives collectively known as Fabric.

For anyone who had worked with Twitter in the past, however, this was a little bit like Fox Inc. asking for chicken volunteers to help it build a new hen-house. As far as I can tell, there’s little or no evidence that Twitter’s outreach program is working.

What would Twitter be like today if it had embraced its ecosystem and tried to build on it instead of cutting it off at the knees? I don’t really know, and I’m not sure anyone does. But I think it would have a lot more goodwill to spend — both with developers and with users — than it does now, and I think many aspects of the service that it is now trying to build up, including smart recommendations and curation, would be a lot better off with outside input than they are now.

Would that help Twitter justify its multibillion-dollar market cap? I don’t know. But as a user, I think it would ultimately be a better service, and maybe even a better company.

 

According to a number of sources — including the Guardian, as well as journalism professor Jeff Jarvis and Capital New York columnist Ken Doctor — Google will announce tomorrow that it has formed a partnership with eight European publishers, including the Guardian, the Financial Times, El Pais and Die Zeit and is creating a 150 million Euro “innovation fund.”

It’s probably no coincidence that Google has been under fire in the EU of late, with allegations that it has distorted search results as well as a burgeoning antitrust investigation into allegedly anti-competitive practices. Many publishers have also complained for years about Google News “stealing” their content, and the partnership deal is roughly similar to other deals the search giant has cut in Belgium and France. Says the Guardian piece on the announcement:

In the new partnership with eight publishers, including the Guardian, Google is to establish a working group to focus on product development as well as providing a €150m (£107m) innovation fund over three years, alongside additional training and research. Publishers are keenest to explore the product development which Google promises will aim to “increase revenue, traffic and audience engagement”.

While publishers and media types in the EU celebrated the announcement, others said they would much rather than publishers do their own innovating instead of relying on Google to do it for them — or to pay them to do it. On top of that, I have to wonder whether the media outlets involved in this deal are cutting a deal with the wrong enemy. As social discovery overtakes search (particularly for millennials), it feels as though they should be more concerned about Facebook rather than Google.

I’ve been thinking for some time now about movies I want to introduce my teenage and twenty-something daughters to — and we’ve already been through a bunch of great ones like Terminator, Blade Runner, Breakfast Club and Groundhog Day. But then I thought about some of the great lesser-known cult movies, the weird or bizarre or campy ones that I remember from my youth.

So I asked my Twitter followers about their favorite cult films, and got some great responses (I also triggered a kind of Twitter war over whether quoting people’s tweets using the new embed feature is rude and/or noisy, but I will leave that for another day). Here’s a list of the top 50 suggestions — I didn’t include every one, but they all appear in the tweets I’ve embedded below. Thanks to everyone who contributed.

Buckaroo Banzai Napoleon Dynamite The Hunger The Ninth Configuration Eraserhead The Wicker Man The Man Who Fell to Earth Time Bandits Tremors Evil Dead 2 Zardoz Mad Max Phantom of the Paradise The Dark Crystal Fifth Element Dreamscape Twelve Monkeys The Warriors Big Trouble in Little China Johnny Dangerously Harvey Withnail and I The Lost Boys Tank Girl Highlander

Local Hero Shallow Grave Howard the Duck Weird Science Brazil Donnie Darko Paris Texas THX 1138 Doc Hollywood Pulp Fiction The Big Lebowski A Boy and His Dog Seven Samurai Plan 9 From Outer Space Brother From Another Planet Escape From New York Logan’s Run True Romance Ghost World Heathers Harold and Maude Hackers Run Lola Run Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure Snowpiercer

Cult Movies
!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?’http’:’https’;if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+”://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”;fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,”script”,”twitter-wjs”);

If by some bizarre twist of fate you have a life that doesn’t revolve around new-media entities like BuzzFeed and their impact on journalism and advertising and content in general, then this probably won’t interest you. But for anyone who does pay attention to such things, the idea of an interview between Gawker and BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith and founder Jonah Peretti about the site’s deletion of posts involving advertisers is like a candle flame to a moth — in other words, pretty irresistible.

The actual facts being referred to in the interview — that is, the posts that were deleted and BuzzFeed’s justification for why it did this, as well as editor-in-chief Ben Smith’s admission that he made a mistake — has been written about quite a bit (including a post by me). The interview post, however, is so gigantic and disjointed and rambling that I found it hard to follow, so I tried to pull some of the really interesting parts out.

The interview was triggered by the deletion of two posts, both of which were removed by Smith in what he later admitted was a breach of the site’s standards guide. Those deletions and the attention they drew in turn convinced the site to review all of the posts that had been deleted in the past. At the beginning of the interview, Peretti and Smith talk about why some earlier posts were deleted, including the hundreds that Gawker writer Keenan Trotter wrote about last year:

Jonah: This was a period where we didn’t have a deletion policy. If you were an editor and you wrote something and then you thought later, oh, this is kind of dumb and I was to delete it, you could delete the post.

Ben: And that was fine. And there’s not huge numbers of them, but there’s a fair number of those, there were posts that were dup—

Jonah: Duplicates, or errors, or text tests, or stuff like that.

Which is church and which is state?

According to BuzzFeed, the Dove post and the Monopoly post were deleted because they were “hot takes” and the site is trying to cut down on those, not because they involved an advertiser. But Smith admits that there were a couple of posts that were deleted that did cross the boundaries between editorial and advertising in an unpleasant way, both of which involved Pepsi and were written by Samir Mezrahi. And the discussion of this decision-making process is interesting. One post was a humorous take on what might be under Pharrell Williams’ hat:

Ben: It was actually a great post. There were many hilarious things under his hat, including doge. And Samir had taken the GIF of doge coming out from under Pharrell’s hat. Or, I’m not even sure if he’d seen it. But I got a complaint from the creative side that editors were taking their stuff and remixing it and not crediting their post or Pepsi. It was a confusing situation. Not—it was just a confusing situation. And I said to him, hey, we’re working, our creative team—which at this point is across the hall—is working with Pepsi on this social stuff, so don’t take their stuff, don’t use it in an editorial context. Church and state.

Jonah: One of the concerns is the impression that an editor was posting positive things about a brand because they were an advertiser. And that’s something I think, you know, as we grow, I don’t have much experience with church and state stuff. But as we grow, you start thinking, ok, if someone really loves pumpkin-spice lattes and they write a whole post about it and then it turns out that Starbucks is an advertiser, does that create the impression that they were influencing editorial, even though they had no idea that someone was an advertiser, and so there was—

The second post by Mezrahi was a critical one about accounts you should unfollow on Twitter, and that included Pepsi. What is most fascinating about this whole situation is that — as Smith points out — when Mezrahi posted about the soft-drink company, the Twitter account for Pepsi was actually being operated by his BuzzFeed colleagues across the hall. In other words, staffers from the advertising and marketing part of BuzzFeed, the part that operates like a digital ad agency, were in charge of the account that he was criticizing and/or praising. And this is what Smith and Peretti seemed most concerned about — that this would look bad.

Ben: It depends how you look. But when the priest wants to reach over—I’m sorry, I’m [unintelligible], block that metaphor. When church, when edit, what is our rule about edit playing in our advertising? Not in advertising in general, not around advertisers, but specifically with advertising being created across the hall by people at our company. And this is something I had never in my life considered, but seemed actually like a thing that we should absolutely not do. So we deleted the post, which at the time was what we did with posts that were inappropriate.

Keenan: What was the problem? Say more about what the problem was.

Ben: That you had an editor who was engaging specifically with things that were created—specifically with stuff that our creative team was working on, twice that week, with the same project.

Keenan: What’s wrong with that, exactly? What do you mean by “engaging”? It was clearly critical of it.

Ben: Well, no, the first one he was promoting. The second one, he was critical but—maybe the post is lost, but there was other celebratory stuff in there. He was just, like, touching it, you know? He was writing about advertising that was created by BuzzFeed that he knew, or that I believed, that was…

Ben: It’s obviously an appearance issue. It’s something that I feel really strongly about, it’s in our standards, you’ve probably seen it. There’s an exception to that, which is news. If there’s an ad on BuzzFeed, if there’s an ad—you know, if The New York Times carries an open letter, and it’s news, New York Times reporters will write about it as news. But the bar is at least as high, and probably a little higher, I think, just for—because, what are you doing? It seems really obvious to me.

The downside of having an internal ad agency

A lot of critical reaction to the interview has made BuzzFeed out to be some kind of horrible monster for having an internal ad agency that designs or crafts content for brands like Pepsi — and even in some cases runs their Twitter account during certain events — and for having a policy that supposedly prevents BuzzFeed from writing about advertisers. But that’s not really what Smith is saying at all. The policy appears to be not to write either positively or negatively about specific advertisements that either appear on BuzzFeed and/or are created by BuzzFeed’s in-house staff, because it might create the appearance of a conflict of interest:

Ben: So basically, in our standards, it says, “Please do not write positively about advertising that appears on BuzzFeed. Please do not do ad criticism about ads that appear on BuzzFeed. If it’s newsworthy that’s an exception to this rule.” That feels appropriate to me. Well, I don’t know, do you guys do that? Have you ever written about, like, this is a gorgeous banner?

Keenan: I just don’t see what the problem is with criticizing advertisements on BuzzFeed.

Ben: I don’t think in principle it is [a problem], I think anybody who doesn’t work for BuzzFeed should do it. But I don’t want our editors engaging in either criticism or, what we do much more, celebrations, of advertisements that are on BuzzFeed that are created by our creative team.

Keenan: But what is the scope of “advertisements”? Does that mean the brand, or—?

Ben: No, it does not mean the brand, it means specific campaigns, it means, they were creating content for this Twitter feed that he was talking about, that week, at the Super Bowl, where he was talking about the Super Bowl. It’s narrow. It does mean the company, it does not mean, hey there’s an ad on another site from an advertiser.

An important principle, flawed execution

What’s interesting to me about this whole debate is that BuzzFeed and Smith are arguably on the side of the angels in this one — at least in the sense of the journalistic ethics around advertising. Yes, they have an in-house ad agency that creates content, but my sense is that they want to maintain as firm a wall between advertising and editorial as possible, which is theoretically what journalistic ethicists would want them to do. And yet they are being criticized for doing so (and admittedly, the way the deletion of posts was handled was flawed, as Smith has admitted).

Ben: To me, it’s just like, you want readers to know that edit and advertising are separate things and that they don’t touch each other. And if that’s reporters, as happened twice in a week, if that is reporters promoting advertising, if that’s reporters criticizing it, no thank you. There’s an infinite number of things to write about, it just feel like, whether you celebrate it or criticize it, you just winding up blurring a line that readers are always struggling to understand in the best of times.

Ben: I think this specific question of advertising that is created by our advertising team is actually a really weird—a strange, marginal case, and a very small one, and one that I had never in my life thought about before, but that once we thought about, and I talked about with my team, we had a long conversation, internal and external, about standards. Starting with this post, we wound up thinking, that is a very strange little case, and it’s one that makes us—I would be very—here’s the real thing, I would be very uncomfortable with a post that was, this ad that I saw on BuzzFeed moved me to tears and I think it’s the most brilliant thing in the world. That would be a very strange thing, don‘t you think, or no? Do you think I should publish that?

There’s no question that having ad agency staff creating content for brands in the same building as the editorial staff writing what’s supposed to be journalism can cause problems. In at least one case, according to Smith, someone moved from creating advertising — where they worked on the Microsoft account — over to the editorial side, where they started writing about the company. The software giant complained, and Smith said at first he rejected their complaint, but then he thought more about it and decided that this shouldn’t occur. And that feels like another case where the site tried extra hard to make the division between editorial and advertising even clearer.

Jonah: He was working on their business, doing work for Microsoft, and then switched to edit and started…

Ben: And started writing about Microsoft. And they complained. And inititally I was like, I don’t care if you complain. And then they said, well wait, this guy was making ads for us last week. And that felt to me, OK, that’s a really legitimate, strange situation. So we’re going to make a rule that in the very unusual cases—there’s one woman now, she’s a designer who crossed from advertising into editorial—we’re going to have a six-month cooling off period where you can’t write about ads. So that was the other one.

So what’s the bottom line here — is BuzzFeed some kind of evil empire bent on distorting or perverting journalism? I don’t think so. If anything, it seems to have bent over backwards to try and appear as ethical as possible, to maintain a line between editorial and advertising, or church and state as the old metaphor goes. Is it confusing to have a single company both creating ads or doing social marketing for brands and also doing journalism? Sure. And I get the feeling that Smith and Peretti are both trying to figure out how that works exactly. But at least they are being public about it.

I meant to write about this when it happened, but I was busy getting ready to fly to Italy for a conference (I know, I know) and so I didn’t get the chance. But I think Clay Shirky pointed out something interesting in a recent conversation with New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan about what the future holds for traditional media entities like the Times — and it’s something that I confess had not really occurred to me. Namely, the idea that instead of declining slowly over time, print advertising revenue could suddenly hit another cliff and go into free fall.

The subject came up after Sullivan posted a column about the Times’ continued reliance on the print side of its business, something that still generates over 70 percent of the company’s revenue — as it does for most newspapers. According to the public editor, more than a million people still buy the Sunday paper each week, a number that has declined from 1.8 million in 1993. The average age of a print reader is 60.

The suggestion from Times executives was that print would likely be around for some time, and that print subscribers and advertising would also likely continue to generate a large chunk of revenue for some time. But in an emailed response to the column, Shirky suggested a “darker narrative” — in a nutshell, he said he expected the pattern of print-revenue decay, which is currently fairly slow, to accelerate.

“The people you quote — Baquet, Caputo — seem to be betting that the current dynamics of slow decline form the predictable future for your paper. I doubt this, and the alternate story I’d like to suggest is that print declines will become fast again by the end of the decade, bringing about the end of print (by which I mean a New York Times that does not produce a print product seven days a week)”

And why does Shirky think the decline of print-advertising revenue will pick up speed again? Because he argues that there is a kind of cliff approaching when it comes to the willingness of advertisers to support the paper financially when its readership in print continues to dwindle. Beyond a certain point, expensive ad campaigns won’t make sense given the small number of readers:

“Both your Sunday and weekday readerships are already near important psychological thresholds for advertisers — one million and 500,000. When no advertiser can reach a million readers in any print ad in the Times (2017, on present evidence) and weekday advertising reaches less than half a million (2018, using the 6 percent decline figure you quoted), there will be downward pressure on CPMs.”

This is the part that hadn’t occurred to me — that advertisers have a psychological point beyond which it isn’t worth spending much on a print campaign. And although I don’t know for a fact whether Shirky is right about the numbers, the argument itself seems plausible. And as he goes on to point out, even as revenue is declining sharply, the costs of producing the print product will not. The problem with print, he notes, is that “the advantageous returns to scale from physical distribution of newspapers become disadvantageous when scale shrinks.”

“The ad revenue from a print run of 500,000 would be 16 percent less than for 600,000 at best, but the costs wouldn’t fall by anything like 16%, eroding print margins. There is some threshold, well above 100,000 copies and probably closer to 250,000, where nightly print runs stop making economic sense. This risk is increased by The New York Times’s cross-subsidy of print, with its print+digital bundle.”

Is Shirky right about a second cliff? I don’t really know. But I think his argument should be required reading for newspaper executives who still believe that the decline of print advertising revenue and readership will be a gradual sailing-off-into-the-sunset kind of affair. It could be anything but. Sullivan said she plans to post more about her conversation with Shirky, so hopefully this discussion will continue.

Even as Facebook tries to convince news publishers like the New York Times to publish directly on its platform — instead of just posting excerpts with links to their websites — the company continues to demonstrate why that is such a Faustian bargain. On Tuesday, for example, the social-networking behemoth announced some new tweaks to its news-feed algorithm, and warned that publishers might see a decline in “post reach and referral traffic” as a result.

In its post about the new changes, Facebook tried to soften the blow by pointing out that referral traffic to media publishers has more than doubled in the past 18 months, and that it is always trying to help publishers find the right audience for their content by “optimizing how it is discovered and consumed.” The problem, of course, is that no one really knows what Facebook means by terms like optimization. Does it mean choosing the most high-quality content? Showing users what they want? Some combination of both? It’s unclear.

What is clear is that news publishers — and media companies of all kinds — have no real choice when it comes to dealing with Facebook, regardless of the terms of engagement. The social network is one of the largest digital platforms in existence, with a global audience of more than 1.4 billion, and it is also the way in which a majority of younger users find their news. Choosing to avoid Facebook simply isn’t an option if you want your content to be found.

Unfortunately, how Facebook feels about your content can differ from one moment to the next. Fans of the social-gaming company Zynga know this all too well: games like Farmville were once worth hundreds of millions of dollars because they were promoted by Facebook — but that vast audience disintegrated almost overnight when the social platform changed its algorithm.

What’s ironic about the latest negotiations with publishers is that news companies got much the same treatment not long ago: several outlets created “social reader” applications that built up millions of readers, until the social platform changed its mind again and downgraded their content, and those readers vanished.

(This is just an excerpt. You can find the rest of this piece at Fortune)

Updated at 4:21 ET on Friday, April 10

Not long after this post was published (thanks a lot, Ben) BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith admitted that he had made a mistake in removing both the Dove post and the Monopoly post referred to below — saying he “blew it” by asking editors to delete those posts, against their better judgement and in contravention of the site’s own standards and practices guide. He said he reacted impulsively and was wrong to do so, and that neither removal had anything to do with advertisers being involved. Both posts have been reinstated with notes that say they were “inappropriately deleted amid an ongoing conversation about how and when to publish personal opinion pieces on BuzzFeed.” I think Ben deserves a lot of credit for admitting his error so quickly and publicly.

The brouhaha

If you’re not glued to media Twitter the way I am, you might have missed a seemingly minor kerfuffle — or perhaps it was more of a brouhaha — about a post that BuzzFeed removed concerning the recent Dove soap campaign aimed at making women feel better about themselves. Writer Arabelle Sicardi wrote a critical piece for the Life section about the company’s approach and BuzzFeed editors took it down and left in its place a note saying it wasn’t the right “tone” for the site (that note appears to have also been removed). After much criticism from journalists, including a piece at Gawker’s media blog, editor-in-chief Ben Smith posted a tweet with the text of a memo the Life editors sent around about their decision to remove the post (thanks to the folks at the Internet Archive, the original post is available here if you want to read it).

No more hot takes

In a nutshell, Smith argued that the piece was removed because BuzzFeed is trying to do fewer “hot takes” — that is, personal posts about the writer’s response to some event or news (I asked whether it would have stayed up if the writer had sought out others with the same views, but haven’t gotten a response). As more than one person pointed out in the aftermath of this decision, whatever the merits of the original post might have been — and many people thought it was more than fair — removing an entire post due to its content is explicitly forbidden in BuzzFeed’s code of conduct, which I wrote about when they first released it publicly. It specifically says “Editorial posts should never be deleted for reasons related to their content, or because a subject or stakeholder has asked you to do so.”

The siren song of advertising

To make matters worse, Dove happens to be an advertiser with BuzzFeed, creating the impression that the site took the post down because it was critical of an ad partner (Smith says he didn’t know Dove was an advertiser until the Gawker story appeared). And that’s not the only incident of its kind — another post, which was critical of the board game Monopoly from Hasbro, was also removed after Hasbro and BuzzFeed announced a partnership related to the game. And according to several sources, the “robots.txt” file that tells search engines what files or pages to avoid when their indexing robots are crawling the site specifically refers to the post about Monopoly, as well as a post about chips — meaning those posts would not come up in a Google search on that topic.

It does look peculiar that 2 out of 39 lines here http://t.co/tAnIkugXH7 concern Monopoly and Lay's potato chips. pic.twitter.com/2sYI7ijnrc

— Gabe Rivera (@gaberivera) April 10, 2015

Much of what BuzzFeed has done so far could be either mistakes in judgement or simple errors, including the removal of the Dove post (although the robots.txt file is much harder to explain). Is it BuzzFeed’s right to do whatever it wants to maintain the “tone” it is looking for in its Life section? Of course it is. And it’s possible that the standards that editors are trying to uphold in that section are different than the ones that it is trying to encourage or stick to in the News section of the site. But it’s not clear whether that’s the case — and even if it is whether any readers will be aware of that difference. And while I don’t think the vast majority of readers will either notice or care, those who do notice might start to wonder how much they can trust the site as a news source.

That trust is something BuzzFeed is trying to build up, presumably, so that people (including advertisers) will take it seriously as a news entity as it tries to expand into foreign reporting and investigative news. And just like Rolling Stone magazine with its flawed investigation into the UVA rape story, BuzzFeed risks losing some of the trust it has banked by not being transparent about what it’s doing and why. It’s possible that there won’t be any short-term repercussions as a result of such behavior, but long term it could be harder for the site to argue that it is a reputable news entity — if in fact that is something it cares about, which I think it is.

Washington Post editor-in-chief Marty Baron isn’t exactly a raging digital-first zealot as far as newspaper executives go, so it’s refreshing to see just how blunt he was in his assessment of the industry in a recent speech he gave at the University of California. Some might argue — as my friend Chris Anderson, a CUNY journalism professor, did in a tweet — that much of what Baron is saying amounts to time-worn clichés and things that everyone should know by now. And I think there’s some truth to that. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t plenty of people who need to hear them anyway.

One of the most crucial points is that the forces of change that have been disrupting and transforming the media industry for the past decade or so aren’t something that can be argued with, or reasoned with, or held at bay through the powers of persuasion. They are like a fast-moving glacier or global climate change — a force of nature that you can either figure out how to adapt to or be swept under by. Trying to hold it at arms length is like King Canute commanding the tide to stop.

“As we make this move, the first casualty is sentiment. The forces at work don’t care about how we prefer to do our jobs, how easily we adjust to change, how much we have to learn. They don’t care about any extra workload. This transformation is going to happen no matter what. And there is only one realistic choice available: We can do what we must to adapt and – ideally – thrive. Or not — in which case we are choosing to fail. If this pace of change unnerves you, there is no consolation. Things will only get faster. And for those who resist the change rather than embrace it, there will be no forbearance or forgiveness. Their destiny is to be pushed aside and forgotten.”

Part of the sentiment that needs to be done away with, Baron says, is around the permanence of print. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, many newspaper executives continue to see their print operations as the jewel in the crown — despite the fact that they are making less money all the time, and have fewer readers. Although print still makes up a substantial proportion of a newspaper’s assets, Baron says, publishers have to disabuse themselves of the notion that print will always exist.

“We can start by discarding the lingering notion that paper will remain for long a big part of what we do. It will not. For a while, yes. But it will not last. Let’s also abandon the idea, still common in newsrooms, that what’s on the front page is more important, has greater value, carries greater prestige than what we disseminate on the web. It isn’t more important. It is a statement of our values, a defining and tangible representation of what we see in the world. We want to be smart about the front page. We want to be careful. It is important, just not more important than what’s on the web.”

Baron goes on to talk about how newspapers need to lower the barriers — both physical and psychological — between the business side of their companies and the editorial side, since all parts of the business need to co-operate in order to survive. Newsrooms must “participate in creating products that appeal to advertisers, boost readership, and deliver satisfying results for both,” he says, without abandoning the principles of independent and honest coverage. And newspapers have to think differently about how they tell stories as well, he says — instead of thinking instinctively that traditional forms are inherently superior to new digital alternatives.

Is any of this revolutionary or even surprising? Not really. Not to anyone who has been paying attention over the past few years, or to anyone who has seen a newspaper balance sheet. But I don’t think the Washington Post editor was talking to those people. He was talking to the vast middle layer of newsroom managers who think that if they nod towards the web and talk about “engagement” or pageviews now and then, their job is done. It isn’t, of course. Whether they feel it or not, the glacier is in motion, and they will be swept under unless someone convinces them to pay attention. It’s not clear to me that even speeches by people like Marty Baron will accomplish this, but it’s worth a shot.

Anyone who knows me is probably aware that the sudden death of Gigaom last month hit pretty hard. Not just because I spent five years of my life there, but because I felt that we had built an amazing team, and had done some really first-class work covering all aspects of emerging tech and the networked economy. So it’s great to be able to say that a big chunk of the Gigaom team — including me — are joining Fortune magazine next month, where we will be able to continue that work.

As Om put it in his post about the news, the death of one thing often creates new forms of life from the pieces that are left behind, and I hope that Stacey Higginbotham, Katie Fehrenbacher, Jeff Roberts, Barb Darrow, Jonathan Vanian and I will be able to do exactly that for Fortune. Here’s what the magazine said about our arrival:

“Six of the journalists from the tech web site Gigaom will be joining Fortune in the next few weeks. These journalists are leaders in covering an interconnected group of technologies — cloud computing, big data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, robotics, sensors, social collaboration, energy technology — that are profoundly remaking the foundations of global business. Readers of Fortune increasingly recognize they need to master the implications of these technologies for their companies, or face disruption by others who do. We intend to be their guide — in print, on the web, and through our conferences.”

Fortune is a great journalistic brand, and I have a lot of respect for the folks who work there, including editor Alan Murray and writer/editors like Dan Primack, Adam Lashinsky, Leena Rao, Erin Griffith, Philip Elmer-Dewitt and Andrew Nusca. Grafting pieces of other media outlets onto a new host is never an easy task, but I have no doubt that we will be able to make it work — and not just make it work, but take Fortune and Time Inc. to new heights of smart technology coverage. Onward!

There’s an old adage in journalism that says: “Any story that looks too good to be true probably is.” And yet, respected media entities repeatedly print news stories that turn out to have been exaggerated wildly or completely fabricated. Why? Because in many cases the desire to tell a great — or important, or scandalous, or fascinating — story trumps journalistic principles. In the latest example, Rolling Stone magazine reported a blockbuster story about campus rape at the University of Virginia that appears to be almost completely untrue.

After months of criticism of the piece — which told the story of a sexual-assault victim named Jackie and her attempts to get the university to take action against her attackers — the magazine agreed to submit its work to an independent review by the Columbia Journalism School in New York. The review board’s report was released late Sunday night, and it contains a litany of journalistic malfeasance on the part of the Rolling Stone writer and her editors.

Among other things, the reporter involved in the story apparently failed to do even a minimal amount of checking to determine whether Jackie’s account of the assault could be corroborated, such as trying to track down and confront the individuals she identified, or trying to verify some of the obvious details of the attack. And that continued to be the case even as the story went through multiple levels of editorial oversight. As the report puts it:

“[This] is a story of journalistic failure that was avoidable. The failure encompassed reporting, editing, editorial supervision and fact-checking. The magazine set aside or rationalized as unnecessary essential practices of reporting that, if pursued, would likely have led the magazine’s editors to reconsider publishing Jackie’s narrative so prominently, if at all.”

Why would an institution like Rolling Stone — which has made a name for itself in the past with deeply reported features like the piece it did on former NATO commander Stanley McChrystal, which got the general fired — take such a risk? Former New York Times editor Bill Keller argued in an interview with the Times that the pressure from the internet to engage in “clickbait” exacerbated the problems with the story, and there is some truth to that. Even though Rolling Stone is a monthly magazine, it is part of a much more competitive media landscape than ever before.

But the real reason why the magazine and its editors failed to perform some of the most rudimentary journalistic tasks is the same as it has been in almost every previous example of such malfeasance — including the New York Times’ reporting on the case for intervention in Iraq in 2003, and the more recent Newsweek blockbuster feature on the secretive inventor of Bitcoin, which also turned out to be almost completely fabricated. And the reason is that the writers and editors in question desperately wanted the story to be true.

Campus rape is arguably a huge problem in America, and an extremely painful one, and stories like the one told by Jackie are all too commonplace: male fraternities as a breeding ground for such behavior, campus officials overlooking or downplaying such incidents, victims being blamed for their own assaults, and so on. Jackie’s tale was the perfect synthesis of all of these sub-themes, and as such it could be counted on to be both a massive attention-getting device and an important political and cultural document. The perfect combination. The report says:

“The problem of confirmation bias – the tendency of people to be trapped by pre-existing assumptions and to select facts that support their own views while overlooking contradictory ones – is a well-established finding of social science. It seems to have been a factor here.”

This desire to have a story be true is such a powerful drug that it can overcome even the most hard-core and deeply-ingrained journalistic instincts of senior editors at institutions like the New York Times, Newsweek and obviously Rolling Stone. It can convince a writer that checking a source’s report isn’t worth it, and it can convince editors not to bother requesting such a check. In the case of the Rolling Stone feature, interestingly enough, having more editors apply their expertise to the story may have actually exacerbated the problem rather than curing it, according to former Columbia journalism professor Bill Grueskin.

There’s one other aspect of the Rolling Stone controversy that stands out, and that is the almost complete lack of repercussions for any of the writers and editors involved in the story. The magazine should be congratulated for asking for — and then making public — an independent investigation of its practices, something that happens all too infrequently. But how could it then decide to absolve its staff of any penalty for their failure, and on top of that say it doesn’t plan to change any of its editorial processes?

If the trust of readers is one of the most valuable currencies we have in the current media landscape — as I would argue it is — then Rolling Stone banked a substantial amount by agreeing to the public review, but has spent all that and more by failing to take even the most rudimentary steps to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

There’s a great interview over at the Nieman Journalism Lab with Tom Standage, deputy editor for digital at The Economist, in which he talks about the value proposition that the magazine — whether in print or online — tries to keep in mind when it comes to serving its readers. And it boils down to a single thing: namely, that the Economist wants its audience to feel like they have learned whatever they need to know about a topic by reading its coverage, regardless of what format it appears in.

“We sell the antidote to information overload — we sell a finite, finishable, very tightly curated bundle of content. You can never finish the Internet, you can never finish Twitter, and you can never really finish The New York Times, to be honest. So at its heart is that we have this very high density of information, and the promise we make to the reader is that if you trust us to filter and distill the news, and if you give us an hour and a half of your time, then we’ll tell you what matters in the world.”

Ultimately, what the Economist is selling is an illusion — the illusion that you only need to read one thing in order to learn everything about a topic or an event. But that illusion can be very powerful, and very appealing. I remember a friend of mine saying some time ago that one of the main selling points of a physical newspaper is that you can finish it, and he’s right. There’s something very satisfying about getting to the end of a newspaper or a book and thinking “Okay, I’m done now.”

Links ruin the illusion of completeness

Where I disagree with Standage in his approach is when he describes why the Economist doesn’t link out to either other media outlets or even external websites in its digital offerings, like the daily update called Espresso. In effect, the reason for not doing that is an extension of the argument he makes about convincing people they only need to read one thing. Linking to other websites or sources of information would ruin the illusion of completeness, and then readers would be worried that they weren’t being completely informed. So the magazine doesn’t do it.

“Another aspect of it is that we don’t do links. The reason that we don’t do links, again, if you want to get links you can get them from other people. You can go on Twitter and get as many as you like. But the idea was everything that you need to know is distilled into this thing that you can get to the end of, and you can get to the end of it without worrying that you should’ve clicked on those links in case there was something interesting. So we’ve clicked on the links already and we’ve decided what’s interesting.”

As someone who believes in the fundamental value of links — and has often criticized traditional media outlets for their attempts to pretend that they have produced the sum total of all necessary information — I’m not sure I can agree with Standage on his approach. I understand why it makes for a saleable product for the Economist, and I understand why it might be appealing to readers. But I still think it leaves something out, and something critically important, which is the ability to check, verify, expand on and test the assumptions in a particular piece.

If media entities don’t take advantage of the web’s ability to link to supporting sources of information, or to give readers their own resources to check a hypothesis — if all they do is publish a giant chunk of content with no links in it — then what is the point of putting it online in the first place? It might as well have stayed in print, because it isn’t taking advantage of the medium.