July 2015 – mathewingram.com/work

July 21, 2015December 6, 2024

Advertising isn’t the solution to the media’s problems — it is the problem

Back in the good old days of traditional media, advertisers and publishers were the best of friends. Publishers of newspapers and magazines and other things enjoyed a monopoly on information distribution, and therefore commanded a large share of the attention of readers, and advertisers piggy-backed on that monopoly, which in turn helped to pay the freight for all of that content.

Unfortunately, the Internet has changed all of that, and now the advertising business is as much a threat to traditional media entities as it is a friend.

No more monopoly

All of this has dismantled any monopoly or near-monopoly that traditional publishers had on content delivery or attention. But that’s not the worst of it. That’s just level one of what is increasingly becoming a multi-level bloodbath for media companies.

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

July 7, 2015December 6, 2024

Does Facebook have a duty to the news or to journalism, and if so what is it?

As Facebook takes on a larger and larger role as a platform for journalism, the debate over what its duties or responsibilities are towards the media industry—or if in fact it has any at all—continues to heat up. The deal that the giant social network has cut with a number of media partners, including the New York Times and the Guardian, is that it will help make their articles look if they are published directly through its mobile app under the “Instant Articles” program. In return, Facebook agrees to give those outlets a share of the revenue generated from the advertising around those articles.

This seems like a fairly straightforward business deal: Media companies get better distribution and a better mobile interface, and they get either 70% or 100% of the advertising revenue, depending on whether they sell the ads or they let Facebook sell them. But the arrangement has raised all kinds of difficult questions about whether it is actually a Faustian bargain—one that provides a much greater long-term benefit for Facebook than it does for the media outlets that provide the content.

One of the questions at the center of this debate is whether Facebook has any kind of duty or responsibility to the news or to journalism. In a piece he wrote for Medium, CUNY journalism professor Jeff Jarvis tried to tackle some of these issues, and he splits it into two related questions: 1) Should an informed society be part of Facebook’s mission? and 2) Does the company bear any kind of civic responsibility for the news?

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

July 6, 2015December 7, 2024

Reddit is at war with itself: Is it a community or a business?

For those unfamiliar with Reddit, the recent controversy that shut down dozens of popular forums on the site probably seemed like much ado about nothing: A well-liked staffer who handled Reddit’s “Ask Me Anything” interviews was let go, for reasons that were largely unclear. In other words, the kind of thing that happens at websites everywhere without it turning into a four-alarm fire. But in Reddit’s case, the firing of Victoria Taylor has laid bare a tension that lurks at the heart of the online community.

If you read through even a few of the thousands of posts and Twitter comments and related outcry about Taylor’s departure, and the subsequent shut-down of popular threads or “sub-Reddits” like r/movies and r/music, it becomes obvious that for many of the site’s users, the issue is about more than just the firing of one employee.

The incident appears to have triggered a lot of anger and resentment about the direction Reddit has taken over the past year, and in particular the movement towards making it more of a self-sustaining business rather than just an online community. Much of that criticism has been focused on CEO Ellen Pao, but some has even spilled over onto one of the site’s co-founders, Alexis Ohanian, who returned to the company as chairman last year, after the departure of former CEO Yishan Wong.

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

July 2, 2015December 7, 2024

Dick Costolo is right about what Twitter has done for free speech

Twitter is far from perfect in many ways, both as a social product and as a business. It has repeatedly vacillated about what it wants to be, switched product chiefs the way some people change their socks, bulldozed its third-party developer community (and then tried to kiss up to them when it needed them), and introduced too many features that appeal to advertisers but not to its long-time users.

But despite all of that, the service is still an incredible tool for distributing information in real-time, and for empowering free speech by virtually anyone with a PC or mobile phone, anywhere in the world. Dick Costolo, whose last day as CEO of Twitter was July 1, made this point in a piece he wrote that was published in The Guardian, arguing that while the company started as a social tool for Silicon Valley geeks to stay in touch with one another, it eventually grew to the point where it “started to represent the democratic ideal of access for all.”

“Today, people can access information from its original source, instantly. This makes it much more difficult to use information as a tool for wielding power because information is equally, immediately available. It means there are more perspectives on a news story – from mainstream media, eyewitnesses or the newsmakers themselves. It means the record can be set straight when something is reported inaccurately. And that what constitutes a news story is not just decided by a select few, but by individuals all over the world.”

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

July 1, 2015December 7, 2024

Here’s what Mark Zuckerberg thinks about the future of news

Facebook has always had a somewhat fraught relationship with the news: Many users seem to think of the social network as just a place where they can see a friend’s baby or dog photos, but research shows a growing number of people also get their news there. And co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has made it clear that he wants news to play a much larger role in Facebook, with features like Instant Articles—the mobile-news partnership with media outlets like the New York Times that is rolling out soon.

In a public question-and-answer session that he participated in on Tuesday, the Facebook CEO reiterated his pitch for Instant Articles, saying the new feature is simply an attempt to help users consume more news by making those stories load faster and look better on mobile devices.

“One of the biggest issues today is just that reading news is slow. If you’re using our mobile app and you tap on a photo, it typically loads immediately. But if you tap on a news link, since that content isn’t stored on Facebook and you have to download it from elsewhere, it can take 10+ seconds to load. People don’t want to wait that long, so a lot of people abandon news before it has loaded or just don’t even bother tapping on things in the first place, even if they wanted to read them.”

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