Month: November 2015

Political speech is a unique animal, especially during an election campaign, often mixing hyperbole with flowery language and aggressive rhetoric designed to inflame a particular passion. But Donald Trump is arguably in a category unto himself. More than almost any other presidential candidate, he is prone to telling flat-out lies, making up facts, and distorting the truth to a prodigious extent.

This kind of behavior creates a tricky problem for the media. How should they deal with Trump and his falsehoods? If he were just a joke candidate without a hope of ever being the Republican nominee, it would be easy enough to ignore him. But he appears to stand a better than even chance of getting the nomination.

If media outlets attack Trump’s lying directly, they run the risk of being accused of bias by his supporters and Republicans in general. In fact, that kind of reaction is already occurring in response to a New York Times editorial that accused the billionaire businessman of playing fast and loose with the truth on a number of issues, including whether Muslims in New Jersey cheered on 9/11.

Part of the problem is that Trump and his candidacy are to some extent a creation of the mainstream media — or at the very least, the two have developed a disturbingly co-dependent relationship.

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

Continue reading “What should the media do when Donald Trump blatantly lies?”

Every week or two, it seems, another giant web platform introduces something that alters the landscape for media companies. That includes everything from Facebook’s Instant Articles initiative — which was followed by the new Notify alert app that launched this week — to Google’s “accelerated mobile pages” project, Twitter Moments and Apple News.

In each case, a massive web company with hundreds of millions or even billions of users is asking media companies and publishers to provide their news and other content to the platform essentially for free. In return, they get to reach a broader audience (theoretically), and they get faster-loading and/or better-looking articles, and in some cases a share of the advertising revenue.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that this is one of the thorniest issues that media companies of all kinds are struggling with. Should they play ball with Facebook or Apple or Google? And what if they don’t? What happens to their traffic and/or revenue? And what do they give up if they do decide to take part?

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

Continue reading “What should media companies do now that platforms control the world?”

A growing number of online publishers, including giants like BuzzFeed, have come to rely on Facebook for a significant proportion of their traffic — in some cases as much as 60% of it. For the most part it’s a win-win relationship, with Facebook providing reach and a share of advertising revenue, in exchange for a supply of engaging content. But every now and then, we get a glimpse behind the curtain at just how much power that relationship gives to Facebook, and the consequences if it changes its mind.

We got another one of those on Monday, courtesy of a report from Digiday about some new numbers from SimpleReach, an online analytics company. According to the firm’s latest survey, the top 30 publishers in terms of visibility on Facebook have seen their traffic plummet by more than 30% since the beginning of the year.

While SimpleReach said that some publishers saw an increase in traffic from Facebook — including Vice Media and Refinery29 — the majority saw it fall. And to compound the problem, the more reliant a media outlet was on the social network, the more they saw their traffic from Facebook drop this year: The Huffington Post saw a decline of more than 60%, and BuzzFeed saw its Facebook referrals fall by more than 40%.

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

Continue reading “Facebook and the media have an increasingly landlord-tenant style relationship”