Category: Fortune

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

Continue reading “Advertising isn’t the solution to the media’s problems — it is the problem”

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

Continue reading “Reddit is at war with itself: Is it a community or a business?”

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

Continue reading “Dick Costolo is right about what Twitter has done for free speech”

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

Continue reading “Here’s what Mark Zuckerberg thinks about the future of news”

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

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

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

Continue reading “One big problem with Facebook as a platform for news: It deletes things”

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

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

It may have been a small deal in monetary terms, but the ripples from Re/code’s acquisition by Vox Media earlier this week continue to spread. One recurring theme is shock and/or bemusement that Re/code couldn’t survive on its own: After all, when it comes to individual media brands, Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg are close to the top of the heap. If they couldn’t make it on their own, what hope is there for others?

Sources close to the Re/code deal said the site still had plenty of cash left from the financing round it did with Comcast Ventures and others. So why not continue to run the site as a standalone entity? Because the writing was clearly on the wall: Re/code was likely never going to get to a size where its business model would make sense, or at least not without more money. And Vox was a lot closer to that goal.

One takeaway, as I tried to point out, is that there’s a “barbell effect” taking place in the media business, where you either have to be tiny and focused on a topic or audience niche—the way sites like The Information and Search Engine Land and Techdirt are—or you have to be giant and mass and have huge reach. Tech analyst Ben Thompson (who is himself a good example of a profitable niche media business) has written about a similar concept known as the “smiling curve” for publishing:

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

Continue reading “Is the balance of power shifting back to big media?”

It’s always fun when Kleiner Perkins Caulfield Byers analyst Mary Meeker comes out with her annual “State of the Internet” slide deck. There often isn’t all that much that is shocking or surprising about her conclusions, but the slideshow condenses and aggregates information about the state of affairs in tech and media in a very useful way. For example, she has one chart that likely strikes terror (or at least should strike terror) into the heart of print publishers everywhere.

The chart shows the percentage of time that U.S. adults spend on various forms of media—print, radio, television, etc.—compared to the amount of advertising spending that is devoted to that medium. And when it comes to print, the slide shows a yawning gap between the amount of attention devoted to that medium and the amount of advertising money that gets spent on it: a gap of 14 percentage points, in fact.

As Josh Benton points out at the Nieman Journalism Lab, this slide shows up every year in Meeker’s presentation. The latest version is actually somewhat better in terms of the gap between attention and spending: in the 2011 version, print got 25% of the spending and just 7% of the attention, for a gap of 18 percentage points. Now the gap has shrunk, but it continues to be larger than any other media with the exception of mobile, which is a relatively new category (and its gap is in the other direction).

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

Continue reading “Everything you need to know about the future of newspapers in one chart”

As has been rumored for some time, Facebook launched a trial project called “Instant Articles” on Wednesday morning—a partnership with nine news organizations, including The New York Times, The Guardian, BuzzFeed, and National Geographic. Under the terms of the deal, entire news stories from those partners will appear inside Facebook’s mobile app and be able to be read there, as opposed to the traditional practice of news publishers posting an excerpt and a link to their website.

At first blush, this sounds like a pretty straightforward exchange of value. Facebook (FB) gets what will hopefully be engaging content for its 1.4 billion or so users, and publishers get the reach that the social network provides—plus keep any revenue from advertising that they sell around that content. (if Facebook sells the ads, then publishers reportedly get to keep 70% of the proceeds.) So everybody wins, right?

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

Continue reading “Is Facebook a partner or a competitor for media companies? Yes”