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Twitter is often criticized—and rightfully so—for some of the decisions it has made in the past, including the fact that it moved too slowly to try and stop abuse of the service by trolls and bots. But there is one thing the company routinely does right, and that is to fight back against government attempts to force it to reveal user information.

It did so again on Thursday, by filing a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security in San Francisco. In the suit, Twitter has asked a judge to block the government’s order to divulge the personal details of the user behind a so-called “rogue” account, which claims to be run by employees of the Citizenship and Immigration Services department.

According to the company’s filing, the @ALT_uscis account “has often criticized immigration policies” introduced by Trump, including the travel ban imposed on a number of Muslim countries. The account, which was created right after the first Executive Order that introduced the ban, is one of a number of accounts that purport to be run by either current or former government employees.

“Defendants may not compel Twitter to disclose information regarding the real identities of these users without first demonstrating that some criminal or civil offence has been committed,” Twitter argues in its complaint. “Defendants have not come close to making any of these showings.”

We're glad Twitter is pushing back. We'll be going to court to defend this user's right to anonymous speech. https://t.co/tqj5XrNvgn

— ACLU (@ACLU) April 6, 2017

This is not the first time Twitter has used the courts to fight such demands by the U.S. government. One of the first was in 2011, when the Justice Department ordered it to produce information about several of the people associated with the WikiLeaks account, including founder Julian Assange, hacker activist Jacob Appelbaum and Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir.

As it has in the current case, Twitter rejected the order and also defied the government’s demand that it not inform the individuals in question about the agency’s request for information.

Ultimately, Twitter lost that case, which was supported by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. But it at least tried to resist the government’s demands, and it tried to force the incident out into the public eye as much as possible. Many other tech companies—including Facebook—comply with such requests but say very little about them.

Twitter fought a government order in 2012 that tried to get it to reveal information about an account associated with the Occupy Wall Street protests. And it has also fought in court to block demands by other governments, including those from the Turkish authorities, that have tried to force it to shut down accounts critical of those in power.

It appears from the evidence introduced by Twitter in the current case that the government has been trying to identify the users behind the rogue account since early March, when the Customs and Border Protection agency sent the company a court order demanding the personal information of whoever created it. The order also forbid Twitter from informing those users of the government’s request.

Instead of complying, however, Twitter told the users behind the @ALT_uscis account about the agency’s demands, and filed suit to try and have the order struck down.

In its legal argument, the company makes the case that the CBP order goes beyond the scope of what is normally permitted by subpoenas of that kind, and it also argues that submitting to the agency’s demand would have a chilling effect on the users’ freedom of speech and therefore is in contravention of the First Amendment’s protections for such speech.

“The CBP Summons is unlawful and unenforceable because it violates the First Amendment rights of both Twitter and its users by seeking to unmask the identity of one or more anonymous Twitter users voicing criticism of the government on matters of public concern,” the filing states.

The company’s submission to the court goes on to point out that a “time-honored tradition of pseudonymous free speech on matters of public moment runs deep in the political life of America,” and that these First Amendment rights are “at their zenith when, as here, the speech at issue touches on matters of public political life.” The Supreme Court has written about the necessity for anonymity to allow for criticism of the government, the filing says.

Whether Twitter is ultimately successful or not in its latest attempt to resist the government’s attacks on the free-speech rights of its users, it deserves a lot of credit for at least trying to do so. That’s more than many companies do.

It may have come as a surprise to many last year when Twitter struck a deal with the NFL to live-stream Thursday night games. But it wasn’t much of a surprise when the league chose to sign a similar deal with Amazon on Tuesday instead of renewing its arrangement with Twitter.

Why? Because there are two things that leagues like the NFL are usually looking for when it comes to signing those kinds of streaming contracts: One is money, and the other is reach. And as much as it might like to, Twitter [fortune-stock symbol=”TWTR] can’t really compete with giants like Amazon or Facebook when it comes to either one of those factors, nor will it be able to any time soon.

The deal that the NFL signed last year with Twitter, for example, was worth $10 million. The deal that the league signed with Amazon on Tuesday—which was virtually identical in almost every way—was worth $50 million, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.

Twitter might have been able to justify spending $10 million on the digital-streaming rights to football games that are already available on traditional television (where NBC and CBS own the rights). But it would be hard for it to justify spending five times that much, especially since it is currently under a lot of financial pressure after missing its revenue targets.

Amazon [fortune-stock symbol=”AMZN], however, has oceans of cash available to spend—not just because it has over $20 billion in cash on its books, but because its AWS hosted-computing platform spins off huge amounts of money. And the company has made it clear that it wants to expand in the area of streaming not just sports but other kinds of traditional TV content as well.

On top of that, the online retailing giant also has a much stronger strategic case to make for bidding on rights like the NFL, and that makes it easier to justify paying a higher price. That’s because the streaming will be offered through its Amazon Prime subscription service, where it will be able to promote the rest of its retailing interests to a captive audience.

Twitter likely hoped that offering Thursday night football games through its platform would generate significant amounts of new sign-ups or boost engagement, or produce a bump in advertising revenue. But it doesn’t seem to have accomplished any of those things to any great extent.

There haven’t been any signs of a real increase in new users as a result of having the broadcasts available. Twitter’s user growth in the U.S. remains stuck at zero, which is part of what has investors concerned. And the fact that the company missed its revenue estimates last quarter suggests the video deal didn’t really help the bottom line much either.

When it comes to reach, Twitter said the NFL games got about 300,000 simultaneous viewers per minute. That’s by comparison to more than 15 million who watched the games on traditional television, which means that for the NFL, the Twitter deal was more or less a rounding error.

The Amazon streaming deal is only available to Prime members, and that is a smaller number than the 300 million that Twitter claims to have. But those viewers are theoretically much more inclined to buy things (since they have already shown a willingness to pay for Amazon’s service) and that makes them a much more desirable audience than random Twitter users.

If Amazon wins over Twitter in this kind of contest, then Facebook [fortune-stock symbol=”FB] is even more likely to come out on top, because the ocean of cash it has to draw on is even more massive, and so is its reach. And it too has shown an interest in expanding its offerings of TV-style content.

Twitter has said that it wants to do more NFL-style deals—and it points out that it aired more than 800 hours of live-streaming content in the first quarter of this year, including sports, news and entertainment. But that doesn’t change the fact that in any bid that forces it to go up against Amazon or Facebook, the odds are stacked against it.

Thanks to the current super-charged political climate, discussion of political issues seems to pop up almost everywhere, even during coverage of football games. In recognition of that, ESPN has issued new guidelines for how and when its staff are supposed to mix sports and politics.

In a blog post about the new rules, ESPN public editor Jim Brady acknowledged that coming out with these kinds of guidelines is something that typically happens before an election, not after. But “we are living in unique political times,” he said, and so the Disney-owned network decided it was necessary to clarify the rules.

Patrick Stiegman, ESPN’s head of global digital content and the chairman of the company’s internal Editorial Board, said that “given the intense interest in the most recent presidential election and the fact subsequent political and social discussions often intersected with the sports world, we found it to be an appropriate time to review our guidelines.”

The network’s managing editor of newsgathering, Craig Bengtson, said both the tense political climate in the U.S. and the changing media environment made it necessary for the network to revisit the topic.

“We have the convergence of a politically charged environment and all these new technologies coming together,” Bengtson said. “We wanted the policy to reflect the reality of the world today. There are people talking about politics in ways we have not seen before, and we’re not immune from that.”

The ESPN executives said that no specific incidents that led to the changes, but the issue of politics and the sports network has been the subject of much conversation of late. Some conservative websites and news outlets have criticized what they say is a a left-leaning agenda at ESPN.

It’s not just external critics of the network that have raised the issue. As Brady noted in a blog post in November: “There’s a feeling among many staffers—both liberal and conservative—that the company’s perceived move leftward has had a stifling effect on discourse inside the company and has affected its public-facing products.”

Brady quoted one conservative staffer at the time as saying “If you’re a Republican or conservative, you feel the need to talk in whispers. There’s even a fear of putting Fox News on a TV.”

The network’s updated political guidelines state that “our reputation and credibility with viewers, readers and listeners are paramount. Related to political and social issues, our audiences should be confident our original reporting of news is not influenced by political pressures or personal agendas.”

Despite this statement of intent, however, it could be difficult—if not impossible—for the network to convince its critics that it is not being influenced by political beliefs or agendas. In fact, even the fact that it has issued updated rules is being used by some sites as evidence that the network wants to become more political rather than less.

WHY @ESPN HAS LOST MILLIONS OF VIEWERS: New guidelines encourage Nitwit Hacks to connect sports with politics https://t.co/z8jI6D3ptn *

— ConserValidity (@ConserValidity) April 4, 2017

The new guidelines state that anchors and other journalists at the network are free to discuss political issues, but that they should be connected directly to a sports-related topic. And those who are in commentary roles are free to discuss politics if it’s relevant, the network says.

The Daily Wire said that the new statement of objectivity “isn’t going to help much: CNN believes the same, and their reporting is slanted heavily to the left.” The site added that the sports network engages in “selection bias” by choosing to cover stories with a political agenda, such as Caitlyn Jenner’s gender change.

The new rules boil down to “talk politics, so long as it’s leftist,” the Daily Wire said, arguing that former coach Mike Ditka “lost his job for speaking up in favor of Donald Trump and against Barack Obama on NFL Countdown” and other on-air personalities such as Curt Schilling and Chris Broussard have also been penalized for stating conservative views.

Commentator Sage Steele was also replaced on the network’s NBA Countdown show, something critics portrayed as payback for making statements that were seen as controversial politically, including a comment about Trump’s immigration bam

So while ESPN may have wanted to clarify what is expected of its staff when it comes to political discussion, in the process it appears to have just given its critics even more ammunition with which to attack the network for its alleged political leanings.

Fox News is facing what appears to be a growing advertiser boycott of its top-rated show, “The O’Reilly Factor,” after news broke that host Bill O’Reilly was the subject of five sexual-harassment cases launched by former staff.

Mercedes-Benz pulled its ads from the Fox News show on Monday as a result of the allegations, and two other major automotive brands announced similar moves on Tuesday.

A spokesperson for Mercedes said Monday that because of the “disturbing allegations” against the Fox News host, the luxury car maker had decided that The O’Reilly Factor was not “a good environment in which to advertise our products right now.”

Hyundai told CNN that while it didn’t currently have ads running on the show, it had taken steps to ensure that future ads wouldn’t appear there. And on Tuesday, BMW announced it would also be removing its ads from the program.

Hyundai: We had upcoming advertising spots on The O'Reilly Factor but are reallocating them due to the recent and disturbing allegations

— Emily Steel (@emilysteel) April 4, 2017

A New York Times report published on the weekend found that Fox News’ parent company 21st Century Fox and Bill O’Reilly paid out a total of $13 million to settle harassment cases launched by five women since 2002.

The money was paid “in exchange for agreeing to not pursue litigation or speak about their accusations” against O’Reilly, the Times report said. The Fox News host has said that the accusations are untrue, but neither he nor 21st Century Fox have denied making the payments.

“We had advertising running on The O’Reilly Factor, and it has been reassigned,” Mercedes-Benz spokesperson Donna Boland told CNN. “Given the importance of women in every aspect of our business, we don’t feel this is a good environment.”

Hyundai said it would not run ads that were planned for the show because of the “recent and disturbing allegations,” and that it would continue to “monitor and evaluate the situation” as it planned future advertising decisions.

Another car maker, Lexus, told CNN: “We take our duties as a responsible advertiser seriously, and seek to partner with organizations who share our company culture and philosophy of respect for all people. We will continue to monitor the situation and will take any appropriate action.”

Unless it grows significantly, however, the advertiser boycott is unlikely to make a dent in the show’s profitability. According to recent estimates, The O’Reilly Factor generated almost half a billion dollars in ad revenue between 2014 and 2016.

This helps explain why Fox News recently extended O’Reilly’s contract (which was set to expire this year) despite the multiple allegations against him. According to the New York Times, the Fox host makes about $18 million per year.

Industry insiders say while major brands may pull their ads from specific shows that are caught up in controversy, they usually return once the public furor has died down, especially if those shows have high ratings.

So far, multiple sexual-harassment cases involving the network don’t seem to have put much of a dent in its viewer numbers. In addition to the O’Reilly allegations, Fox has also been dealing with the fallout from harassment allegations involving former chairman Roger Ailes, who left the network last year.

The U.S. Attorneys Office is reportedly investigating whether Fox News properly disclosed the payments it made to settle cases launched against Ailes over the years.

Just last week, numbers from audience-measurement firm Nielsen Research showed that O’Reilly pulled in more viewers than any other cable news program in history. That helped Fox News clinch the top spot for most-watched cable news network for the 61st quarter in a row. The network even beat out non-news programming such as ESPN.

On Monday, Fox News sent a memo to employees telling them to report any inappropriate behavior to the human resources department or network executives. The network’s new head of human resources said he wanted to reiterate this message “in light of some of the accounts published over the last few days.”

The election of Donald Trump as president may be having a questionable effect on the economic and political outlook for the U.S., but it has been a considerable shot in the arm for the TV news business, according to new numbers from Nielsen.

Adults over 18 watched over 27 billion minutes of national cable-TV news programming per week last year. That’s almost 45% more than they watched in 2015, according to Nielsen’s latest Total Audience Report, which looks at consumption patterns for cable as well as smartphones and desktop computers.

While cable TV saw the largest jump, Nielsen said that news consumption across all media — including radio, traditional broadcast TV and smartphones — rose by 18% compared with a year earlier, to 73.5 billion minutes per week.

Adult news consumers spent close to 6.5 hours a week watching national cable TV news last year, the report found. That’s an increase of almost an hour and a half from the previous year, and almost two hours more than they watched during the last presidential election cycle in 2012.

The election campaign boosted news consumption significantly, the firm said, along with other major news events such as the “Brexit” vote in the UK, the war in Syria, the Zika virus and a number of terrorist attacks and news about refugees.

Nielsen also looked at how news consumption is trending in 2017. “Spoiler alert: the year is starting with even more news viewing/listening/reading than the 2016 average,” said Glenn Enoch, senior VP of audience insights at Nielsen.

For the month of January, the average U.S. viewer spent two hours and 11 minutes watching national cable news every week, Nielsen said. That’s an increase of about 20 minutes from the average consumption period for last year.

Last week, Fox News and CNN both reported their highest viewership numbers in over a decade. Fox in particular had the best performance of any 24-hour cable news network ever, and even beat out regular cable networks such as ESPN.

The Nielsen report also notes, however, that cable-TV news is still overwhelmingly dominated by older audiences. For people over 50 years of age, cable TV news makes up more than 11.5% of their TV viewing, but it only accounts for about 2.5% of the TV watching of those between 18 and 35.

And while news consumption got a boost from the election, the Nielsen figures show that cable TV watching as a whole is still in decline. People spent an average of 142 hours and 35 minutes every month watching live TV as well as recorded or time-shifted TV in the fourth quarter of last year, Nielsen said.

That number is about five hours less than the firm’s audience numbers from the previous year. Older audiences between 50 and 64 watched almost 193 hours of TV a month, more than twice the amount watched by those between 18 and 24.

When critics started accusing Facebook of harming journalism by harboring “fake news,” the social network initially balked at admitting any responsibility for the problem. But that attitude has changed dramatically in recent months. Among other things, Facebook started what it calls the Journalism Project, which it says is aimed at helping media outlets figure out how to use the web to improve their content and their business models. And now the company has committed to help fund a separate effort aimed at rebuilding trust in news.

In an announcement released Monday morning, Facebook became part of a $14-million effort called the News Integrity Initiative, a project spearheaded by Craigslist founder and journalism advocate Craig Newmark. The initiative will fund applied research and projects related to improving news literacy and trust in journalism, as well as convening events at which experts will discuss related issues.

In addition to Facebook and Newmark, founding members include the Ford Foundation, the Democracy Fund, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Tow Foundation, Mozilla and New York-based startup incubator Betaworks. The project will be run out of the City University of New York’s journalism school.

CUNY professor Jeff Jarvis, who will be directing the project as part of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, said in a blog post, said that it stemmed from conversations he had with Newmark about the need to fight back against the rise of fake news and misinformation.

Note: This was originally published on Fortune magazine’s website when I was a senior writer there.

Continue reading “Facebook partners with Craig Newmark to fund Journalism Trust Project”

Amid all of the upheaval and disruption the media business has gone through over the past decade, there is one major shift whose long-term effects are likely to outweigh almost all the others, and that’s the massive power shift towards social platforms like Facebook.

In the not-so-distant past, much of the power and influence — both financial and journalistic — that traditional media entities used to have stemmed from their control over the distribution channels through which their content reached its audience. In other words, the printing plants and newspaper trucks and satellites and broadcasting facilities.

While all of those things still exist, they are no longer the only game in town when it comes to distribution, and therefore they are no longer the only game in town when it comes to making money from control of that distribution. Much of that power (and money) has shifted to Facebook.

This fundamental realignment of the planets in the media universe is the topic of a massive new report from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, authored by Tow director Emily Bell and former Tow fellow Taylor Owen.

Note: This was originally published on the Fortune website, where I was a senior writer

Continue reading “The Platform Wars: How should media deal with a frenemy like Facebook?”

When I used to cover the banking industry, one firm was known to insiders as “the bank most likely to step on a sharpened stick.” What they meant was that this bank seemed to be so accident prone (or cursed) that if there was a problem to find, it would somehow find it.

It’s hard not to think of this phrase whenever Twitter launches a new feature. It’s not just that the company has lost 80% of its former market value over the past few years, or that it failed to generate much interest from a raft of acquirers last year, despite massive leaks about all the offers it was fielding.

Whenever the service even tries to do something good, it can’t seem to avoid shooting itself in the foot somehow. In the latest example, it announced that @ replies won’t count towards the 140-character limit, as it promised months ago. You might think that this new development would be a good thing. But most users appear to hate it, in part because the execution is clunky at best.

It’s true that almost every tweak that Twitter has made to the service has been received with howls of outrage. Many people just don’t like change. But there are valid criticisms of the latest move, which point out that it makes certain aspects of Twitter harder rather than easier.

In some ways, Twitter is caught in a classic Catch-22. It needs to boost its user base and engagement levels to prove to investors (and potential acquirers) that there’s still some juice in the engine. But every change it makes irritates hard-core users. And so it lurches forward, stumbling and falling and then getting back up again like some kind of cartoon zombie.

Note: This was originally published at Fortune magazine’s website, where I was a senior writer

It’s often difficult to figure out exactly where some social services are headed, since they seem to be going in half a dozen different directions at once. But that’s not a problem with Facebook. Co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has made it crystal clear for some time that he sees video—and particularly live video—as the future, and the social network is busy doubling down on that bet. And given its size and reach, it would be unwise to bet against the big blue machine.

Zuckerberg’s clearest statement about where he sees Facebook going came last year at the social network’s F8 developer conference in San Francisco. Asked about the future of the news feed, the Facebook CEO said: “Fast forward five years, it’s going to be [mostly] video. If you look out even further, it will be more immersive content like AR and VR.” According to some recent reports, Zuckerberg is “obsessed” with live-streaming.

In the meantime, the network’s engineers have been busy tweaking the algorithm to push videos—especially news-worthy or popular ones—higher in the news feed. And all that tweaking has had the desired effect: Facebook now gets more than 8 billion video views a day. A view is defined as anything longer than three seconds, but that is still a massive amount of video content being watched on the platform (Snapchat is also close to this number).

It’s not as though the power of video—or the fact that video views still monetize better than just about any other form of content—is a big secret in social media-land. YouTube is a massive revenue generator for Google (now known as Alphabet) and has been for some time, pulling in about $7 billion in revenue last year according to some estimates. With those kinds of numbers, YouTube could easily be worth as much as $70 billion if it was a standalone business.

In fact, Facebook has been taking a very similar approach to video as YouTube took in its early days, in the sense that much of the most popular video content on the network consists of bootlegged or “freebooted” clips of the latest viral event. The company says it is working on its own version of YouTube’s Content ID for copyright holders, but in the meantime it is getting massive video numbers, and it is becoming known as the place to go for that kind of content.

So in video, as in so many other things, Facebook is playing catch-up. But some of the best technology companies out there (including Google) have done the same thing: Wait until a trend becomes fairly obvious, and then throw everything you have at it, including acquiring whoever seems to have momentum. It’s why Facebook was willing to pay so much for both Instagram and WhatsApp, and combining those businesses with the network’s massive reach has been like pouring gasoline on a fire.

In December, Facebook boosted its video bets by rolling out live video for all users, something it had been beta-testing with celebrities such as comedian Ricky Gervais and media entities like Univision, where anchor Jorge Ramos has been using the feature to do live reporting on breaking news stories. And this week, the social network announced that it is tweaking the news feed again, to make live video reports more prominent. It described the new feature in a blog post.

“We are considering Live Videos as a new content type – different from normal videos – and learning how to rank them for people in News Feed,” Facebook said. “As a first step, we are making a small update to News Feed so that Facebook Live videos are more likely to appear higher in News Feed when those videos are actually live, compared to after they are no longer live. People spend more than 3x more time watching a Facebook Live video on average compared to a video that’s no longer live.”

As with virtually everything that Facebook does, the end goal is to drive engagement—to keep users on the platform longer, so that they become more valuable to advertisers. And there are reports that Facebook is courting Hollywood stars with offers to pay them to use the live-video feature, just as it has been trying to convince newspapers and other publishers to provide content via Instant Articles.

Facebook may have started out trying to make the news feed “the best personalized newspaper,” as Zuckerberg and product head Chris Cox once described it, but it’s clear that the future of the news feed looks a lot more like TV than it does like a newspaper.

The giant social network is far from alone in planning for this future, obviously. Even newspapers are trying to become video platforms. Twitter has a live video platform called Periscope that it has been trying to get some traction for, but Facebook’s network effects are so powerful that it could easily leapfrog over everyone else. The effect of having more than a billion people a day using your platform and sharing videos is a huge competitive advantage.

So what comes next? It’s not hard to see Facebook following the YouTube model even further. Just as the Alphabet subsidiary is making the transition from being a free-for-all video platform to a more subscription-based future with services like YouTube Red, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Facebook at some point forming partnerships with video creators or media outlets and giving them a platform for their own TV-like creations, and possibly even subscription services.

If the future of the web looks like the early days of cable TV, as some media-watchers have argued, then Facebook doesn’t just want to be another channel—it wants to be the TV set, cable box and the platform for all the channels at the same time. And it has a market cap of $300 billion and about $17 billion worth of cash on hand that it would be more than happy to spend in order to buy that future.

Jim Romenesko got an email from an ex-USA Today newspaper executive who was up in arms about comments made by the current editor-in-chief of the paper, David Callaway, who said that he could see the paper stop publishing daily in “five or six years.” This former ad-sales manager, Jim Gath, wrote a long rant on Facebook — which Romenesko also published on his blog. I’ve read a lot of pro-print and anti-digital invective from newspaper executives over the years, but this one takes the cake.

In a nutshell, Gath says the biggest problem with print newspapers isn’t a secular or systemic decline in print advertising because of the internet and competing platforms like Facebook. It’s the lack of executives with “guts,” he says. Oh, and also too many corporations that are run by “bean counters.” The fact that print media may be on the down-swing business-wise is nothing but an excuse, he says:

“That’s the excuse of losers. The excuse of hand-wringers who have no idea what to do. The excuse of the unimaginative. The excuse of those who don’t have the thrill of challenges & of competition coursing through their bloodstreams. The excuse of people who buy into the notion that ‘it just can’t be done’. The excuse of big corporations run by bean-counters.”

Gath goes on at length about the guts and determination of the early USA Today staff, from the “delivery people who drove through the morning darkness” to the people who slept “4 to a room for 3 hours a night just to get the paper out.” If it wasn’t about a newspaper, it would sound an awful lot like the big speech made in every cheesy war movie. I kept waiting for him to repeat the line from Animal House: “Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? No!”

USA Today founder Al Neuharth got the “bean counters” in a room and “read them the riot act.” But the great franchise is dying, Gath says — because no one has any guts any more. There’s “No imagination. No competitive spirit. No drive.” Nothing about the way that advertising has changed with digital, nothing about competitive pressure from online platforms, nothing about the loss of a print-based monopoly or the evolution of information distribution. Just no one with guts, and too many bean-counters.

If I hadn’t seen it on Romenesko, I would have thought it was a post on Clickhole, the parody site run by The Onion. Unfortunately, it’s not a parody. At least we can rest easy knowing that Jim Gath doesn’t run a real newspaper any more.

It was a common practice for 19th-century newspapers to republish poems, fiction excerpts, and even lists of facts that were originally published elsewhere. Editors would subscribe to many newspapers and would cut out things they thought were interesting, relevant, or fit a space on the page that they needed to fill and then republish them in their own papers, Cordell explained.

“Many 19th-century newspapers are comprised primarily of content from other newspapers,” he said. “They were more aggregators than producers of original content. And often they were created by very small staffs, and scholars such as Ellen Gruber Garvey have shown that this aggregation is what allowed newspapers to spread as rapidly as they did in the 19th century, because you didn’t have to produce the whole thing.”

Source: Listicles, aggregation, and content gone viral: How 1800s newspapers prefigured today’s Internet » Nieman Journalism Lab

This is a fascinating New York Times piece about how Saudi teens use apps to get around the conservative culture in that country:

Life for many young Saudis is an ecosystem of apps. Lacking free speech, they debate on Twitter. Since they cannot flirt at the mall, they do it on WhatsApp and Snapchat. Young women who cannot find jobs sell food or jewelry through Instagram. Since they are banned from driving, they get rides from car services like Uber and Careem. And in a country where shops close for five daily Muslim prayers, there are apps that issue a call to prayer from your pocket and calculate whether you can reach, say, the nearest Dunkin’ Donuts before it shuts.

Source: Young Saudis, Bound by Conservative Strictures, Find Freedom on Their Phones – NYTimes.com

There’s been a lot of attention paid to Twitter recently, thanks in part to a disappointing earnings report that caused the stock to fall by more than 20 percent, wiping about $8 billion from the company’s market value. But this is about more than just a quarter that failed to meet the market’s expectations for profit or revenue growth — it’s about whether Twitter can ever meet those expectations, given the way the service is constructed and the strategy that it has chosen to follow.

Ironically, many of the things that currently hinder Twitter’s success arguably originated because of the company’s attempts to generate the kind of financial results that would meet Wall Street expectations.

Freelance tech analyst Ben Thompson has written about many of these issues recently, both on his Stratechery blog and in his email newsletter . In one of the latest, Ben argued that Twitter needs new leadership, in part because it can’t seem to figure out how to generate enough growth in new users and because its advertising strategy is all over the map. The current leadership of the company simply hasn’t shown that it can meet either challenge, he says:

The trouble for Twitter is that awareness of the service has long outstripped its usability. And yet, despite the fact that Twitter has struggled with new user growth for years, almost nothing was done to improve the product or on-boarding experience until just the last few months, when the company finally rolled out a new logged-out page meant to entice people with Twitter’s content, as well as an instant timeline that helped people get started. Unfortunately, both efforts seem to be too little too late: Twitter admitted on the earnings call that neither improvement had increased retention.

Bulldozing the third-party ecosystem

In addition to all of that, Ben also focuses — both in his latest post and in some of his more recent writings — on something that I’ve thought a lot: Namely, a crucial turning point in Twitter’s evolution that arguably helped put it where it is today, both in a positive sense (it is a publicly-traded $25-billion company) and a negative one (its growth potential is in question and its strategy doesn’t seem to be working). And that turning point happened about five years ago, when Twitter decided to turn its back on the third-party ecosystem that helped make it successful in the first place.

This process began gradually, with the acquisition of Tweetie — which became Twitter’s official iOS client — and restrictions on what third parties could do with tweets, including selling advertising related to them. But it escalated quickly, and arguably became an all-out war with Twitter’s moves against Bill Gross, the Idealab founder and inventor of search-related advertising, who was busy acquiring Twitter clients and trying to build an ad model around the public Twitter stream. The idea that someone could monetize Twitter before Twitter itself got around to doing so was what one investor called a “holy shit moment” for the company. As I wrote at the time:

Critics have accused the company of “nuking” the developers and services that helped it achieve its early growth in its drive to monetize its network, in much the same way that Hunch founder and angel investor Chris Dixon criticized the company last year for “acting like a drunk guy with an Uzi” after it acquired Tweetie. Anyone who is still under the impression that Twitter is the friendly, touchy-feely company that co-founder Evan Williams used to run — the one that admitted it “screwed up” relations with developers by moving too quickly — is living in a dream world.

The board of directors and Twitter’s executive team clearly believed that in order to manage the growth of the company — and in order to generate enough revenue to justify the multibillion-dollar valuation given to it by its investors — Twitter needed to take full control over every aspect of the service. So third-party clients were shut down or restricted, API access and advertising rules were strictly enforced, and so on. For many of the developers and startups that helped generate user growth for Twitter in its early days this was a kick in the teeth, but that didn’t matter. Twitter was going public and getting a good valuation was top of the list of must-have items.

Could it have taken a different path?

Twitter obviously felt that this was the only route available to it — but is that true? I don’t think so, and neither do others, including one of the earliest Twitter employees: Alex Payne, who ran the developer and platform side of the company for a long time. After he left in 2010, he described a letter that he had sent to the executive team arguing that Twitter was making a mistake by closing down the network, and that it should have made the opposite decision: that is, by becoming as open as possible. In a nutshell, he said, Twitter’s choice was to become more open — to decentralize the network — or die like other walled-garden platforms before it.

Ben makes a somewhat similar argument in his “Twitter and What Might Have Been” post: although he doesn’t say Twitter will die because of the decisions it made, he does say that the company could arguably have generated as much or more value by taking the open path rather than shutting down the ecosystem. And that’s because the core value of the service is the “interest graph” of its users, not the app itself or timeline views or whatever other metrics the company has come up with to satisfy Wall Street. And monetizing that interest graph might actually be better accomplished with partners rather than trying to do it all within the native app or website:

I would argue that what makes Twitter the company valuable is not Twitter the app or 140 characters or @names or anything else having to do with the product: rather, it’s the interest graph that is nearly priceless. More specifically, it is Twitter identities and the understanding that can be gleaned from how those identities are used and how they interact that matters. If one starts with that sort of understanding — that Twitter the company is about the graph, not the app — one would make very different decisions. For one, the clear priority would not be increasing ad inventory on the Twitter timeline (which in this understanding is but one manifestation of an interest graph) but rather ensuring as many people as possible have and use a Twitter identity. And what would be the best way to do that? Through 3rd-parties, of course!

Last year, Twitter effectively admitted that it needed third-party developers and apps to achieve its growth potential: the company had a developer conference and talked about how it wanted to work with outside entities to build things that would work with the API, including some new ventures aimed at turning Twitter into a single-login identity service and other initiatives collectively known as Fabric.

For anyone who had worked with Twitter in the past, however, this was a little bit like Fox Inc. asking for chicken volunteers to help it build a new hen-house. As far as I can tell, there’s little or no evidence that Twitter’s outreach program is working.

What would Twitter be like today if it had embraced its ecosystem and tried to build on it instead of cutting it off at the knees? I don’t really know, and I’m not sure anyone does. But I think it would have a lot more goodwill to spend — both with developers and with users — than it does now, and I think many aspects of the service that it is now trying to build up, including smart recommendations and curation, would be a lot better off with outside input than they are now.

Would that help Twitter justify its multibillion-dollar market cap? I don’t know. But as a user, I think it would ultimately be a better service, and maybe even a better company.

 

According to a number of sources — including the Guardian, as well as journalism professor Jeff Jarvis and Capital New York columnist Ken Doctor — Google will announce tomorrow that it has formed a partnership with eight European publishers, including the Guardian, the Financial Times, El Pais and Die Zeit and is creating a 150 million Euro “innovation fund.”

It’s probably no coincidence that Google has been under fire in the EU of late, with allegations that it has distorted search results as well as a burgeoning antitrust investigation into allegedly anti-competitive practices. Many publishers have also complained for years about Google News “stealing” their content, and the partnership deal is roughly similar to other deals the search giant has cut in Belgium and France. Says the Guardian piece on the announcement:

In the new partnership with eight publishers, including the Guardian, Google is to establish a working group to focus on product development as well as providing a €150m (£107m) innovation fund over three years, alongside additional training and research. Publishers are keenest to explore the product development which Google promises will aim to “increase revenue, traffic and audience engagement”.

While publishers and media types in the EU celebrated the announcement, others said they would much rather than publishers do their own innovating instead of relying on Google to do it for them — or to pay them to do it. On top of that, I have to wonder whether the media outlets involved in this deal are cutting a deal with the wrong enemy. As social discovery overtakes search (particularly for millennials), it feels as though they should be more concerned about Facebook rather than Google.

I’ve been thinking for some time now about movies I want to introduce my teenage and twenty-something daughters to — and we’ve already been through a bunch of great ones like Terminator, Blade Runner, Breakfast Club and Groundhog Day. But then I thought about some of the great lesser-known cult movies, the weird or bizarre or campy ones that I remember from my youth.

So I asked my Twitter followers about their favorite cult films, and got some great responses (I also triggered a kind of Twitter war over whether quoting people’s tweets using the new embed feature is rude and/or noisy, but I will leave that for another day). Here’s a list of the top 50 suggestions — I didn’t include every one, but they all appear in the tweets I’ve embedded below. Thanks to everyone who contributed.

Buckaroo Banzai Napoleon Dynamite The Hunger The Ninth Configuration Eraserhead The Wicker Man The Man Who Fell to Earth Time Bandits Tremors Evil Dead 2 Zardoz Mad Max Phantom of the Paradise The Dark Crystal Fifth Element Dreamscape Twelve Monkeys The Warriors Big Trouble in Little China Johnny Dangerously Harvey Withnail and I The Lost Boys Tank Girl Highlander

Local Hero Shallow Grave Howard the Duck Weird Science Brazil Donnie Darko Paris Texas THX 1138 Doc Hollywood Pulp Fiction The Big Lebowski A Boy and His Dog Seven Samurai Plan 9 From Outer Space Brother From Another Planet Escape From New York Logan’s Run True Romance Ghost World Heathers Harold and Maude Hackers Run Lola Run Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure Snowpiercer

Cult Movies
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