June 2015 – mathewingram.com/work

June 25, 2015December 7, 2024

Dow Jones chief warns media orgs on the dangers of Facebook and Apple’s walled gardens

After dipping their toes in the water with Facebook’s new “Instant Articles” mobile offer last month, several of the social network’s media partners are planning to dive in head-first this week—publishing as many as 30 articles a day through the new feature, in the case of the New York Times. But Dow Jones CEO Will Lewis says his colleagues should be careful about putting their content into walled gardens like Facebook.

During a panel discussion at the Cannes Lions advertising confab in France, Lewis said that news publishers need to be wary of offers from companies like Facebook (FB) and Apple (AAPL)—which recently announced its own media offering, a News app that will be curated by human editors—and Snapchat, which has a platform called Discover. Handing over content means a loss of control, Lewis said.

One of the considerations for companies like Dow Jones, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal, is that services like Instant Articles and Apple’s News app don’t necessarily help media entities that have a paywall, Lewis said. Dow Jones is in discussions with Apple, Facebook and Snapchat about potential partnerships, the CEO said, but “advertising is not going to be enough.”

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

June 15, 2015December 7, 2024

One big problem with Facebook as a platform for news: It deletes things

As Facebook rolls out its “Instant Articles” initiative, in which news entities such as the New York Times and The Guardian are publishing directly to the social network, instead of just posting links to their own sites, media organizations and industry watchers are wrestling with the idea of Facebook as a platform for news. There’s the influence of the news-feed algorithm, for one thing, which is poorly understood—primarily because the company doesn’t really talk about how it works. But there’s also the fact that Facebook routinely deletes content, and it doesn’t talk much about that either.

In what appears to be one recent example, photojournalist Jim MacMillan happened to be walking through downtown Philadelphia shortly after a woman was run over by a Duck Boat (an amphibious vehicle that takes tourists around the harbor). Reverting to his journalistic training, he took a picture of the scene and posted it to his accounts on Instagram and Facebook, along with the caption “Police hang a tarp after a person was caught under ‪#‎RideTheDucks‬ boat at 11th and Arch just now. Looks very serious.”

“We do things like this to eliminate the possibility that loved ones will learn of the death from anyone but official sources and to spare viewers the traumatic effects of graphic imagery whenever possible,” he wrote. “In other words, I was operating conservatively within standard practices of photojournalism. That was my best effort to be sensitive to the victim while responsible to the public’s right to know.”

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017

June 5, 2015November 26, 2024

Marc Andreessen on Edward Snowden, acts of treason, mass surveillance and Silicon Valley

While freedom-of-information advocates and critics of the U.S. government’s policies on mass surveillance were busy celebrating the 1st anniversary of Edward Snowden’s massive NSA leaks, venture capitalist and former Netscape founder Marc Andreessen was pushing a somewhat different message. In his view, Snowden is a traitor whose acts — along with the resulting confusion they have created about what the NSA is doing — have endangered U.S. foreign relations and U.S. companies, and therefore he shouldn’t be celebrated as a hero.

Andreessen made some of his remarks in a video interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin for the CNBC show Squawk Box (which is embedded below), and then followed up later with a discussion on Twitter, which I have edited into a Storify module and also embedded below. In the video, which is also embedded below, Andreessen says Snowden is clearly a traitor for leaking the NSA documents to then-Guardian blogger Glenn Greenwald and his partner, filmmaker Laura Poitras:

Obviously he’s a traitor — if you look up in the encyclopedia ‘traitor,’ there’s a picture of Edward Snowden. He’s like a textbook traitor, they don’t get much more traitor than that… Why? Because he stole national security secrets and gave them to everyone on the planet.

Note: This was originally published at Gigaom, where I was a senior writer from 2010 to 2015. The site still exists, but the archive has been taken down.

June 1, 2015December 7, 2024

Print readership is still plummeting, and paywalls aren’t a long-term solution

The fact of declining print readership of newspapers and magazines won’t come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention over the past decade or so, but the real impact can be felt when someone puts hard numbers on that trend—as depressing as it might be for traditional print-focused publishers. One of the latest surveys to do so comes from ZenithOptimedia, and among other things it shows that readership of print newspapers has fallen by a staggering 25% in just the last four years.

From a media point of view, the overall tone of the survey is actually pretty optimistic, depending on how you look at it. The agency (which is an arm of the marketing giant Publicis Groupe) says that its research showed media consumption as a whole continues to expand—driven primarily by the Internet and new forms of digital consumption. In total, it says the average consumer globally will spend 492 minutes, or about eight hours, consuming some kind of media this year.

In addition to the 25% drop in print-newspaper consumption, magazine readership fell by 19% in the same four-year period. Although traditional television use has also fallen, it has declined by a much smaller amount—only 6% since 2010. ZenithOptimedia says that it expects consumption of print newspapers will continue to drop by almost 5% per year over the next several years, and magazines almost as much. These figures correlate with other estimates of declining attention, including some that tech analyst Mary Meeker included in her overview of Internet trends.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune, where I was a senior writer from 2015 to 2017