Month: October 2016

It’s getting harder and harder to believe Facebook when it says it’s not a media company. The social network just said that even if an image or a story posted on the site breaches its community standards, it will leave the post up if it is deemed to be “newsworthy.”

But how will Facebook determine whether something is newsworthy and therefore deserves not to be deleted by the site’s censors? That remains unclear.

The site’s responsibilities as a media entity were also highlighted Friday by a report that some staffers wanted to delete posts by the Trump campaign because they believed they should qualify as hate speech, but were ultimately over-ruled by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the decision to allow Trump’s posts to remain resulted in complaints that the founder and CEO was bending the site’s rules for the Republican candidate. Some employees who work reviewing content on the site reportedly threatened to quit.

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

Continue reading “Facebook will decide what is newsworthy, says it still isn’t a media company”

For some time now, the New York media world has been waiting breathlessly to see who would be anointed as the next publisher-in-waiting at the New York Times. On Tuesday, the waiting ended when the paper said Arthur Gregg Sulzberger had been chosen as the new deputy publisher, and thus the expected future publisher.

There wasn’t any white smoke from a chimney the way there is with a new Pope, or anyone waving from a balcony the way the royal family likes to do it in Britain. But in New York media circles it was pretty much the same thing, since the Suzlbergers are about as close to royalty as you can get.

The winning candidate, AG (as he likes to be called) has been just one of the potential kings in waiting, since there are several branches of the family, each with an heir interested in the top job.

This competition among cousins is one of the reasons why media watchers have been awaiting the naming of a successor to current publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. Would it be AG, who is the current publisher’s son? Or Sam Dolnick or David Perpich, who are his nephews?

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

Continue reading “The Sulzberger dynasty tightens its grip on the New York Times”

What if newspapers hadn’t rushed headlong into digital, spending billions to put up free websites, but instead had focused on strengthening their print operations? Could they have avoided some of the carnage many have suffered in the past decade?

It’s a tempting scenario, one put forward by veteran media writer Jack Shafer in a piece at Politico, based on a recent study of the newspaper business. But it is fatally flawed.

The study, by University of Texas researchers Hsiang Iris Chyi & Ori Tenenboim, is entitled “Reality Check.” It looked at the online readership of 51 major daily newspapers in the U.S. (excluding national papers like the New York Times and USA Today).

The researchers found that few of these metropolitan dailies have seen any growth in their online readership since 2007. More than half have actually lost readers since 2011, and the average paper’s digital readership is about a third the size of its print readership.

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

Continue reading “Sticking with print would not have helped newspapers avoid death”

Given what is happening in the U.S. election campaign, there has never been a more crucial time for fact-checking of news stories, and Facebook seems to be doing a fairly poor job of it. Now Google has waded into the fray with a new fact-checking tag for Google News.

As Google’s head of news, Richard Gingras, explained in a blog post, Google is going to be highlighting pages in Google News that fit the criteria for fact-checking.

For some time now, Google has had a series of sub-categories that it groups articles into, including “highly cited” — which is the rough equivalent of Facebook’s Trending Topics, meaning it has been linked to a lot by prominent sites, as well as “local source.”

Now there will be a “fact check” tag as well. Sites that want their articles to be eligible just have to add a certain kind of formatting to their pages, as specified by Schema.org, an open community sponsored by Google, Microsoft and other tech companies.

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

Continue reading “Google wants to help promote fact-checking in Google News”

Regular dumps of classified documents and other internal communications have become a fixture of modern life, thanks in part to stateless — and frequently lawless — entities like WikiLeaks. But is publishing those leaks always the right thing to do?

That’s the question that is raised by the recent leak of private emails from John Podesta, the campaign chairman for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

The WikiLeaks dump consists of tens of thousands of emails, sent to a wide variety of people, about a range of topics that includes both the Clinton campaign and virtually every other aspect of Podesta’s personal life.

The most interesting thing about the leak is that it appears to have been carried out with the assistance of certain shadowy characters connected to the Russian secret service, according to a statement from the U.S. intelligence department.

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

Continue reading “Publishing hacked private emails can be a slippery slope”

If you spend any time on Facebook then you’ve probably seen them, either in your main news feed or in the “trending topics” section — clearly fake news stories designed to get you to click, many of them playing on the latest conspiracy theory surrounding the 2016 election.

These are the kind of stories that Facebook’s trending editors used to weed out, but then the site fired all the editors it was using for that purpose, after a controversy over allegations of political bias, and since then it has been using algorithms.

According to a recent experiment by the Washington Post, however, getting rid of the human beings isn’t really working that well — at least not at keeping out the fakes.

In order to see what Facebook considered a trending topic and why, the newspaper’s Intersect team started tracking what stories and links were trending every hour, and sent those links out as an email news digest, as well as keeping a record of them in a database.

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

Continue reading “Facebook still has a fake news problem”

There are a lot of things we can blame Donald Trump for, but the Republican presidential candidate has accomplished at least one thing of value: By lying so repeatedly and enthusiastically, he has managed to convince the New York Times that it needed to be more skeptical.

This assessment comes from the Times‘ executive editor Dean Baquet, in a recent interview with media analyst Ken Doctor, published by the Nieman Journalism Lab.

Before Trump came along, Baquet says the paper struggled with how to call out lies. “I think that Trump has ended that struggle,” he says. “I think we now say stuff. We fact-check him. We write it more powerfully that it’s false.” Doctor suggests Trump gave the Times “the courage” to assert the truth.

Courage? If you’re not a media insider, this might strike you as a little odd. Shouldn’t the New York Times of all places be skeptical when it comes to political statements in particular?

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

Continue reading “Why did it take so long for the New York Times to tell the truth?”

The word roller-coaster doesn’t even begin to describe the ride that Twitter shareholders have been on so far this week — and it’s not over yet by a long shot.

First, the company’s share price price [fortune-stock symbol=”TWTR”] zoomed higher early in the week, on reports that the company could be a takeover target for several large tech and media companies, including Google, Disney and Salesforce. But late Wednesday, the stock collapsed after reports that poured cold water on that initial enthusiasm.

When the stock opened for trading on Thursday morning, it was almost 20% lower than it had been the day before. That wiped more than $2 billion from the company’s market capitalization.

According to anonymous sources who spoke to Recode, neither Google nor Disney are interested in making a bid for the company, although both have reportedly taken a look at doing so. Apple is also not considering an acquisition of the social network, according to similar reports.

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

Continue reading “Here’s why Twitter’s share price is tanking”

By all accounts, the process of selling Twitter is well under way. The company has hired an investment advisor and is expected to start receiving bids later this week from a group of interested parties that reportedly includes Google, Salesforce and Disney.

As it does in almost every case in which a once-promising technology company is about to be acquired, Twitter’s likely sale represents both a success and a failure.

But Twitter’s (TWTR) story is also a story of failure—a failure to capitalize on that early promise and a failure to properly manage the company’s growth or strategy.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg once famously described Twitter as “a clown car that drove into a gold mine,” and for much of its history the clownish aspects of the company have been far more obvious than the golden parts. In a very real sense, it’s almost a miracle that the service still exists at all considering all the turmoil and upheaval in the executive suite.

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

Continue reading “Jack Dorsey has failed to save Twitter, now it’s someone else’s turn”