Category: Fortune

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

Continue reading “Chicago man films himself being shot and killed on Facebook Live”

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

Continue reading “Gawker bankruptcy filing and likely sale means Peter Thiel has already won”

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”

Facebook has grown so dominant that it is one of the world’s largest nations, and co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is effectively the dictator of that country, according to Peter Sunde, the co-founder of the Pirate Bay file-sharing site.

Sunde made his remarks during an interview with CNBC at a conference in Amsterdam organized by The Next Web. “Facebook is the biggest nation in the world and we have a dictator, if you look at it from a democracy standpoint,” Sunde said. “Mark Zuckerberg is a dictator. I did not elect him. He sets the rules.”

You can’t opt out of Facebook. I’m not on Facebook but there are a lot of drawbacks in my offline world. No party invitations, no updates from my friends, people stop talking to you, because you’re not on Facebook. So it has real life implications.

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

Continue reading “Zuckerberg is dictator of the world’s largest nation, Pirate Bay founder says”

Gawker Media, the New York-based blog network founded by Nick Denton, has already had to seek outside funding from a Russian investment fund as a result of a $140 million judgement recently won by former wrestler Hulk Hogan. Now, the company is said to be exploring a sale of some or all of its assets.

The only question is: Who would agree to buy it knowing that billionaire Peter Thiel is determined to destroy it by whatever means necessary?

Earlier estimates, including one from Nick Denton himself, have pegged Gawker’s value at about $250 million. Any offer for the company’s assets, however, would have to include a potential payment of as much as $140 million to Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel, so a bid of $50 million or so is still within the ballpark of what Gawker is theoretically worth.

In an emailed statement, a Gawker spokesman said that nothing has changed, and that the company has “always said we’re exploring contingency plans of various sorts” in case the Hogan judgment is upheld on appeal. The spokesman went on to say:

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

Continue reading “Targeted for destruction by a billionaire, Gawker puts itself up for sale”

Some billionaire venture capitalists fund bizarre research into how human beings might become immortal, while others want to set up a series of islands on which people could live without being subject to the laws of a specific country. And some get their lawyers to shop around for lawsuits they can fund in order to help put a news website out of business.

Peter Thiel, the man best known for his early investment in Facebook and for being a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, isn’t just any billionaire VC. He’s doing all of those things at the same time. The Immortality Project and the Seasteading Institute seem harmless enough, for the most part, but Thiel’s funding of a $140-million lawsuit against Gawker Media is anything but—if you have any interest in a free press, that is.

After Gawker founder Nick Denton suggested earlier this week that a wealthy benefactor was helping fund wrestler Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against the company, Forbes named Thiel as the one providing the cash. Finally, late on Wednesday, the billionaire came forward and admitted to the New York Times that he helped to finance not just Hogan’s legal case, but at least one other case against Gawker, as part of a plan he has been working on for several years.

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

Continue reading “Billionaire Peter Thiel says to defend journalism he needs to crush it”

The legal fight between former wrestler Hulk Hogan and Gawker Media inevitably lends itself to metaphors taken from the WWE. But is Hogan the “face,” or good guy, and Gawker founder Nick Denton the “heel,” or bad guy—or is it the other way around? To further complicate things, a new character has now been added to the drama: The rich benefactor who has been bankrolling and possibly also controlling the heavyweight battle from behind the scenes.

After a report by Forbes, which the New York Times eventually corroborated, billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel gave the NYT an interview in which he admitted to helping fund Hogan’s legal case. Thiel is probably best known for being an early investor in Facebook and a co-founder of PayPal.

To recap, Hogan sued Gawker for invasion of privacy after the site published a story in 2012 about the wrestler having sex with a friend’s wife, and included a short clip from a recording of the act. Hogan said he was unaware he was being recorded and that his reputation was besmirched, and earlier this year he won a judgement of $140 million that Gawker is appealing.

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

Continue reading “The Gawker vs. Hulk Hogan case just got a lot more important”

Controversy continued Thursday over the question of Facebook’s influence on the news that more than a billion people see every day. In the latest developments, the company’s editorial guidelines around its Trending Topics feature were leaked to The Guardian, and the social-networking giant quickly published its own version, along with another internal document that describes how it decides what news to include and what not to.

The controversy got started earlier this week, with a piece by Gizmodo that looked at how several journalists who worked on the Trending Topics feature were treated by the social network, and what they were expected to do.

The original story mostly focused on how these editorial contractors believed they were simply training Facebook’s news-filtering algorithms, and didn’t feel that the social network cared about journalism much, except as raw material for its engagement engines. Then a second piece appeared that featured comments from an anonymous editor about how staff routinely kept certain sites and topics out of the Trending feed.

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

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Don’t blame me for the prominence of Donald Trump, says Jeff Zucker. At least, that was the gist of what the CNN boss told BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith in a Q&A session with journalists on Wednesday. In a nutshell, the network is covering the front-runner in a hotly contested presidential race, he said. In other words, CNN is just doing its job. But is it really that simple?

For an alternative viewpoint, all we have to do is turn to some recent remarks made by another network executive, in this case Les Moonves of CBS. During a discussion at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom conference in San Francisco, the CBS chairman said that Trump and the Republican race “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” He went on to say:

The money’s rolling in and this is fun. I’ve never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.

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

Continue reading “Yes, the media is partly to blame for the rise of Donald Trump”

Back when the news was printed on dead trees, fixing mistakes or changing the tone of a story was impossible without stopping the presses and printing a whole new version. That’s no longer the case, thanks to the internet—news stories can now be updated in the blink of an eye. But as the New York Times has discovered, that can be both a blessing and a curse.

In the latest dust-up over its post-publication editing process, the Times has come under fire for changes to the tone of a story that the paper ran on Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. As far as some Sanders supporters are concerned, the editing is a sign of how the paper is willing to twist the record to favor Hillary Clinton.

The original story was fairly complimentary about Sanders’ record of promoting public-spirited legislation in Congress. It admitted that his record of actually succeeding in getting such bills passed was not great, but the tone of the piece was favorable enough that Sanders’ campaign shared it as though it was an endorsement.

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

Continue reading “The NYT needs to be more transparent about when and why it changes the news”

The media had it a lot easier before Donald Trump become the leading Republican candidate for president because it was easier to treat him solely as a sideshow. The Huffington Post even vowed that it would only cover Trump in the entertainment section.

But as his support grew, the media found itself impaled on the horns of a dilemma: Trump is great for ratings, but his campaign—including his treatment of the press—is increasingly disturbing.

Man, who would have expected the ride we’re all having right now? The money’s rolling in and this is fun. I’ve never seen anything like this, and this going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.

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

Continue reading “Love and hate: The media’s co-dependent relationship with Donald Trump”

As revenues continue to decline for newspapers in the U.S. and elsewhere, many have adopted paywalls or digital-subscription models, inspired by the New York Times‘ metered access plan. But there have been a number of significant holdouts, and one of the most prominent is The Guardian in Britain. Now, the paper’s CEO says it may start to charge readers for content—does that mean its commitment to not having a paywall has crumbled?

Chief executive David Pemsel says no. What the Guardian has in mind, he says, is expanding its existing membership-based program, and potentially offering content to paying members that isn’t available to non-paying readers. As he described it in a recent interview:

That might mean producing some journalism which only our members can access but no, it’s not a paywall. A paywall is a very different route, which of course we have considered, but putting one up now would diminish our reach and influence around the world, which is the opposite of what we’re trying to do.

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

Continue reading “The Guardian, paywalls and the death of print newspapers”

A few months ago, a U.S. appeals court ruled unanimously that Google’s scanning and indexing of millions of books was not a wholesale attack on authors and the copyright system, as the Authors Guild has been arguing for years, but is clearly permitted under the “fair use” exemption in copyright law. Unsatisfied, the Guild is now trying to convince the Supreme Court to hear its case.

But the authors’ group is still wrong.

In 2004 Google sent its moving vans to the libraries and carted off some 20 million books. It copied them all, including books in copyright and books not covered by copyright. It asked no authors or publishers for permission, and it offered no compensation for their use.

Clearly, the Guild wants to make it sound as though Google somehow got away with a daylight robbery of 20 million books, stealing them from copyright holders with no thought for the impoverished authors who wrote them. But that’s not how two separate U.S. courts have seen it, and it’s not even close to being an accurate reflection of the case.

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

Continue reading “The Authors Guild is still wrong about Google’s book scanning”