Month: June 2016

It’s easy to get frustrated with social media sometimes—the endless inane Twitter fights, the shallow selfies and food porn on Instagram, videos of exploding watermelons and other ephemera on Facebook. But every now and then, something happens that reminds us of how powerful these platforms can truly be, especially when traditional media either isn’t available or fails to do its job properly.

The sit-in on Wednesday in the House of Representatives is just one recent example. In case you missed the whole thing, a group of Democratic members led by Rep. John Lewis of Georgia decided to protest the lack of a vote on proposed gun-control legislation. In the Senate, the group would have been able to filibuster to show their displeasure, but that isn’t allowed in the House—so they staged a sit-in.

In the not-so-distant past, that would have been the end of it. Without cameras broadcasting the event, reports may have filtered out gradually via other means, but there would have been no real-time visual evidence. But now, everyone with a smartphone is effectively their own media company, a reporter and broadcaster all in one, thanks to Twitter and Facebook and their live-streaming tools. In other words, media has been almost completely democratized, for better or worse.

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

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Facebook Live, the social network’s popular live-streaming video feature, has become a home for a wide range of content, including the famous video of a Star Wars fan enjoying her new purchase of a talking Chewbacca mask. But the feature has a darker side as well — on Wednesday, a Chicago man was shot and killed while filming himself on Facebook Live.

According to Chicago police, 28-year-old Antonio Perkins was shot at about 8:45 p.m. while streaming video of himself and a number of friends who had gathered on South Drake Street. Perkins can be seen talking to the camera while walking, and then multiple shots are heard and he falls to the ground. The screen goes dark, but bystanders can be heard screaming in the background. The video had been watched more than 550,000 times by mid-afternoon on Friday.

The incident is the second time this week that Facebook Live has been used during a violent crime. On Tuesday, an ISIS sympathizer in France stabbed a police office and his partner and took the couple’s 3-year-old son hostage. While in the couple’s house, he broadcast a message live on Facebook with the boy in the background (he was later rescued by a SWAT team). The video has been removed.

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

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Two reports on the health of the news business dropped this week, one from the Pew Research Center and one from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. The former concentrates on the landscape in the United States, while the latter is more global, but the picture they paint is fundamentally the same: Print and traditional news outlets are waning, while Facebook’s dominance continues to grow.

More than half of the consumers who were surveyed by the Reuters Institute (50,000 people in 26 countries) said that they find news via social media every week, and about 12% of them said it was their main source, with Facebook by far the largest single source. For the 18-24 age group, almost 30% said that social media is their main source when it comes to getting news. The results on the industry have been dramatic, said the report.

The Pew Center study, which was released on Wednesday, has more detail on how the print newspaper business has been decimated by the shift to digital. Last year, the sector “had perhaps the worst year since the recession,” the study notes, and even the industry’s online efforts aren’t really helping much. Average circulation—print and digital combined—fell another 7% in 2015, the largest drop since 2010. Total advertising revenue fell by nearly 8%, including both print and digital.

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

Continue reading “The news landscape: print continues to crumble as Facebook dominates”

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump announced late Monday afternoon that he was revoking the press credentials of the Washington Post for being “phony and dishonest.” It wasn’t immediately clear what the paper did to spark this move, but Trump said in a Facebook post that he was doing so because of its “incredibly inaccurate coverage” of his campaign.

In a previous Facebook update that was posted less than an hour earlier, Trump provided some clues as to why he wanted to punish the Post‘. According to the candidate, the newspaper was being phony and dishonest because it used a headline for his recent speech that said “Donald Trump suggests President Obama was involved with Orlando shooting.”

Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron said in a statement that Trump’s decision “is nothing less than a repudiation of the role of a free and independent press,” and that the newspaper would “continue to cover Donald Trump as it has all along — honorably, honestly, accurately, energetically, and unflinchingly. We’re proud of our coverage, and we’re going to keep at it.”

In a sign of just how low Trump’s standing is with the Washington press gallery, a host of media organizations took to Twitter to congratulate the Washington Post and its reporters for being blocked from official coverage of the Trump campaign. Many of them have either been banned altogether or had their credentials revoked after displeasing the candidate.

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

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When the Hulk Hogan vs. Gawker Media case first became public, it seemed like little more than a legal tiff between a former wrestler and a media outlet that reported on some of his bad behavior. Nothing out of the ordinary, in other words.

But that was before Hogan won a $140 million judgement from a Florida jury—and before it emerged that billionaire Peter Thiel was financing the case, in an attempt to drive Gawker out of business. And now he appears to have succeeded in doing exactly that.

The main creditor, not surprisingly, is Hulk Hogan, and by extension Peter Thiel. On the bankruptcy filing, Gawker lists its current assets at $50 million to $100 million.

In conjunction with the filing, Gawker Media’s parent company also issued a release saying it has agreed to sell the websites and other assets to Ziff Davis, the publisher of PCMag magazine and owner of websites such as the gaming hub IGN and Ask Men. Although neither Gawker nor Ziff Davis have provided a price for the sale, sources estimate it is between $90 million and $100 million. Last year, before the Hogan lawsuit blew up, Gawker was estimated to be worth as much as $250 million.

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

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Anyway you look at it, the World Wide Web is an incredible achievement. The way that it effortlessly allows billions of Internet users from around the world to connect and accomplish things they never could have before makes it easily one of the most impressive inventions of the past century. In fact, it’s so amazing that it seems churlish to criticize it — unless you happen to be the guy who invented it in the first place, of course.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee (who told me once that if anyone calls him Sir in a social setting, they have to buy a first round of drinks) did exactly that during a recent symposium on the future of the web called the Decentralized Web Summit, which was convened in an old church in San Francisco by long-time Internet activist Brewster Kahle.

The downside of the way the web has developed since it was created in 1989, Berners-Lee said, is that the same technology that allows for incredible examples of connectivity also supports “spying, blocking sites, re-purposing people’s content [and] taking you to the wrong websites,” he said, which “completely undermines the spirit of helping people create.”

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

Continue reading “The web needs fixing, says the man who invented it”