Month: February 2015

It’s been several years now since The Guardian and other newspapers and media entities started talking about being “digital first,” meaning the web and digital platforms were the most important home for their content, with print as a secondary offering. But the New York Times resisted any such sweeping statements, even as it invested more in online. Now, the paper’s executive editor has announced what — for the Times at least — amounts to fairly momentous change: the daily news meeting will be about digital, not what is going to appear on Page One of the print version.

The Page One meetings at the Gray Lady are somewhat legendary, both inside and outside the building — seen by many as a kind of crucible in which the best Times journalism is forged, like the blacksmithing operation that the Greek god Hephaestus used to run on Mount Olympus. Now, however, executive editor Dean Baquet says the morning news meeting will be devoted to pitches by the various section editors about which stories they think deserve to get the best play on the paper’s website.

In a memo that was widely circulated (I got it from different sources), Baquet described the move as “a small but significant step in our digital transformation,” and an attempt to “elevate the primacy of our digital platforms in the daily life of the newsroom.” So in addition to its functional purpose, the move is a signal to the rest of the newspaper about what he sees as important.

“These changes are intended to ensure that our digital platforms are much less tethered to print deadlines. We need to be posting more of our best stories not in the late evening, but when The Times’s digital readership is at its height: between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. This new system will, in particular, give us more flexibility in targeting readers on mobile… and on platforms like Facebook.”

It would be easy to criticize the Times for being late to this particular party, but at least they have decided to show up. And while the morning meeting change might seem like a cosmetic adjustment, such signals can have an over-sized effect on the insular culture within a newspaper like the Times, where every tea leaf and perceived slight in the lunch-room is pored over for what it signifies.

And the ripple effect of those meetings could be significant: for all the newspaper’s talk about wanting to adapt more quickly to the web, and all the great suggestions in the widely talked-about innovation report that got leaked last year, those morning news meetings with their traditional pitches for Page One continually reinforced the fact that print was what really mattered at the end of the day.

The latest move is the next step in a process that started about six months ago, in the wake of the innovation report: Baquet said that the Page One discussions would be de-emphasized in the morning meetings, with digital getting more stage time. But now he has removed the print discussions from those meetings altogether, and made it clear that digital — and multi-platform — needs to be the focus. Welcome to the party, Dean.

Everywhere you look, a social platform of some kind is either looking to become a publisher or has already done so, whether it’s by hiring writers and editors, as Medium has, or by encouraging media companies to allow their content to live on its platform, as both Snapchat and Facebook do. While other platforms get most of the publicity, however, there is one player on the field that seems to be consistently underestimated as both a platform and a publisher, and that’s LinkedIn.

Maybe it’s because the site is somewhat ugly to look at and often difficult to use, or because the bulk of the activity that occurs there is utilitarian — people looking for jobs, people reviewing candidates for jobs, professional networking and so on — but its appeal and power as a publisher is often overlooked.

That might be a mistake: As Ad Age magazine noted earlier this week, LinkedIn has been hiring journalists from places like Fortune (where executive editor Dan Roth used to work before he joined the company) and the Wall Street Journal to create, edit and manage content. Those who just joined include former Fortune reporter Caroline Fairchild, former WSJ social-media editor Maya Pope-Chappell, and veteran journalist **, who is based in India.

From platform to publisher

The hires mark another step in the site’s gradual evolution from being just a static place where people put their curriculum vitae to being a content destination. The first step in that process was the launch of LinkedIn Today several years ago, a daily news offering much like the email newsletter round-ups that many traditional media entities put out. Then LinkedIn bought the news-recommendation service Pulse so it could make better recommendations for users.

After that came the LinkedIn Influencer program in 2013, which attracted celebrities like Virgin founder Sir Richard Branson by offering them a platform to express themselves. Medium has taken much the same approach, and recently convinced the White House to post both President Obama’s budget and his State of the Union address there. And like Medium, LinkedIn eventually opened its platform to everyone.

As the Ad Age piece points out, these kinds of efforts make LinkedIn look a lot more like a competitor for existing media companies than a partner — and a competitor that is doing better at the business that those media entities used to think they owned, which is advertising: last year, LinkedIn sold almost half a billion dollars in ads, which is more than all but the top tier of media companies.

Content is a sideline

Much like Facebook, what LinkedIn offers to publishers and to individual writers — and to brands who advertise on the platform as well — is reach: in Facebook’s case, it’s the ability to target and reach huge numbers of users who are in the right demographic. In LinkedIn’s case, it’s the ability to reach large numbers of readers or users who are interested in professional topics, business-related issues, etc. It’s like a collection of trade magazines, where the content is curated by people who work in those fields.

I spoke to a woman recently who was uncomfortable about using Facebook and Twitter, and said that LinkedIn was the social network or platform where she spent the most time, and got the most value. For her, the fact that the site was boring and professionally-oriented — which some users see as a negative — was actually a good thing, because she could catch up on links or content that was worthwhile a lot faster.

At a time when business publications like Forbes are becoming more and more like platforms in an attempt to monetize their audience, and in some cases straying a lot closer to the grey areas of sponsored content and native advertising than many would like, it seems natural that platforms like LinkedIn would try to become more like business publications. And the thing that makes them a fearsome competitor is that content is a sideline business for them — even if it doesn’t work, they still have a pretty good business. Their traditional media competitors, however, are fighting for their lives.

Writing about death is never easy. But it’s especially hard when it involves a close friend, and when you feel as though they left the party too soon, with so much undone, and unsaid. It says a lot about New York Times media writer David Carr that even though I wasn’t one of his close friends, he made me feel as though I was — and I know many people who felt the same way, because they poured their hearts out on Twitter and Facebook after finding out that he passed away suddenly late Thursday.

As more than one person at the Times mentioned, it was fitting that he was in the newsroom when he collapsed that night, because he loved the paper and his colleagues and his job so much, and often talked about how it hardly seemed like work at all. His defence of the Times and its journalism in the movie Page One — when he chewed out Vice Media founder Shane Smith — became legendary almost as soon as the movie aired.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLmkec_4Rfo?rel=0&showinfo=0&w=640&h=360]

That incident made him sound like the crusty old defender of everything traditional about journalism, and I bugged him more than once on Twitter about it (he called me “future boy” at one point, as I recall). But David was actually much more inclined towards the experimental side of the business, which makes sense when you remember that he started with a scrappy weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, and only later managed to elbow his way onto a national stage with a job at the New York Times.

David was one of the first at the Times to really adopt Twitter, and often talked about it removed the barriers between journalists and the people they served, and how that made journalism better. He loved experimenting with things like video and blogs, which he did for the inaugural Carpetbagger Oscars blog, and he was fascinated by almost every new-media thing that came along, even if he didn’t really understand it. The curiosity and passion for his work is one of the things I remember most.

David Carr stood out because at a time when the news industry is struggling for its soul, he exemplified both soul and integrity. RIP

— Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) February 13, 2015

Whether he was writing about the arrival of something new like Vice or Vox, or covering the decline of something old like the Chicago Tribune, David managed to find something human in the story he was writing — and he had a way with a phrase that made his pieces enjoyable even if you already knew all the details. He had no sentimental attachment to print, per se, but he definitely had an attachment to journalism, and the need to dig for the truth and not be distracted by the noise and lights.

When we talked about the evolution of newspapers, he said he liked to think of there being a print “room” and a digital “room,” joined by a long, dark hallway. Since papers couldn’t turn the lights out in one room and move en masse to the other, most were stuck in that hallway, he said — without knowing how long it would take to get to their destination, or whether the people they bumped into were friends or enemies.

Outside of my family, handful of people I'd crawl through shards of glass to help. David was one of them. And i was 1 of thousands for him.

— Seth Mnookin (@sethmnookin) February 13, 2015

David and I only met a few times. We never shared any of the personal moments that Circa’s Anthony De Rosa recalls in his memorial post, or the kind of relationship that he had with CNN’s Brian Stelter, who Carr often joked was a robot designed to replace him. But every time we saw each other, he made me feel as though we were the best of friends, and that all he cared about was catching up with me on what I’d been doing, or downplaying his own work in that “aw shucks” way.

The first time we met, at a media event in Toronto that I later wrote about, we talked about Twitter and the future of newspapers and paywalls — and when I went to shake his hand as he was leaving, he pulled me in and gave me a bear hug. For someone who could be caustic in his judgements when writing about media executives and other people he saw as venal or mean-spirited, he was unfailingly kind and generous.

David Carr's special air was that of a man who got a second chance at life, and made sure as hell he wasn't going to blow it this time.

— Jacob Weisberg (@jacobwe) February 13, 2015

As Slate editor Jacob Weisberg noted on Twitter after David’s passing, it felt as though at least some of his warmth and generosity came about because his earlier life before the Times was so bleak — a subject he wrote about in his biography, Night of the Gun, where he described being a cocaine addict. He managed to survive that period, and it seemed as though he wanted to make up for all that cruelty by being as kind as possible to everyone he met afterwards. As he put it in his book:

“Here is what I deserved: hepatitis C, federal prison time, H.I.V., a cold park bench, an early, addled death. Here is what I got: the smart, pretty wife, the three lovely children, the job that impresses… I have lived most of the last two decades showered by those promises that recovery delivers, with luck, industry and fate guiding me to a life beyond all expectation.”

Cocaine addiction wasn’t the only battle David fought: he also had to deal with Hodgkins lymphoma, which affected his lymph nodes, and the radiation as a result of that cancer was what gave him the thin-necked and slightly stork-like posture he had for the rest of his life — something he tried to cover up by wearing scarves whenever possible (he also lost a spleen, a pancreas and half his gall-bladder). But he never complained about being uncomfortable or in pain, even when he clearly was.

https://twitter.com/nickbilton/status/566083796227723264

If recovering from both of his physical challenges could be seen as a second or even third chance at life, David definitely made the most of it. But unlike some who pretend their jobs are the most important things on the planet, he was unfailingly humble — often describing himself as the luckiest guy in the room, someone who got to do what he loved and call it a job, someone who had gotten away with a “great caper” as he liked to say. His joy at the gift of just being alive was infectious.

David’s death has taken away a wonderful voice, a media writer whose skill and commitment and insight made his work a pleasure to read and impressed everyone who knew him — even those he criticized. But more than that, his death has taken from the world a true Southern gentleman, a rapscallion, a kind and generous soul, and an occasional badass motherfucker. Rest in peace, David. You will be missed.

David Carr, the irrepressible media writer for the New York Times, died on Thursday night at the age of 58, after a long career that saw him rise from the weekly papers in Minneapolis — where he worked while fighting a cocaine addiction — to the highest perch in the media industry. He was a friend to almost all who knew him, and mentored an entire generation of young journalists. I’ve written a personal remembrance of him, but here I’ve collected some of the thoughts and memories of his friends and peers. There are more of them in a Storify module I made.

The NYT is now confirming that David Carr has died. This is unfathomably sad news. He had so many things still to tell us.

— Jake Silverstein (@jakesilverstein) February 13, 2015

https://twitter.com/xeni/status/566078015231115265

A giant, gone. (Sorrow.) David Carr, Media Equation Columnist for The Times, Is Dead at 58, via @nytimes http://t.co/nVYa44coLs

— C.J. Chivers (@cjchivers) February 13, 2015

https://twitter.com/aoscott/status/566079860754644992

David Carr, 2008. (Photo by Chester Higgins.) pic.twitter.com/17j49rJ8fr

— Joshua Benton (@jbenton) February 13, 2015

https://twitter.com/aoscott/status/566079860754644992

https://twitter.com/jelani9/status/566083946409377792

Of all the cats, David Carr was the coolest. He will be missed.

— Seth Meyers (@sethmeyers) February 13, 2015

https://twitter.com/PamelaPaulNYT/status/566080643206234112

https://twitter.com/_alastair/status/566327042317496320

Heartbroken about David Carr's death. Great journalist, but more important, great human being. Will miss him.

— Arianna Huffington (@ariannahuff) February 13, 2015

https://twitter.com/nickbilton/status/566083796227723264

https://twitter.com/gabrielsnyder/status/566080844499255299

RIP! @carr2n you personfied dignity, courage & hope. You inspired us to be better. You were kind, giving & loving. I will miss you deeply!

— OM (@om) February 13, 2015

We use the phrase "one of a kind" too frequently in journalism, IMHO. We really should save it for the likes of @carr2n. He earned it. RIP.

— Jim Brady (@jimbrady) February 13, 2015

So devastating. Will miss @carr2n … Can't fathom. He was the very best in this business. Huge empty hole on so many levels.

— Jim Bankoff (@Bankoff) February 13, 2015

@carr2n You enriched my life, inspired me, made me still love the NYTimes 🙂
and educated all of us. May you rest in peace.

— (((Andrew Rasiej))) (@Rasiej) February 13, 2015

“The generosity of David Carr” by @AntDeRosa https://t.co/l2VJKVciPk

— Medium (@Medium) February 13, 2015

https://twitter.com/dickc/status/566100446872236033

A light went out.

— Nick Denton (@nicknotned) February 13, 2015

pic.twitter.com/uZLMAmJAR6

— wendy macnaughton (@wendymac) February 13, 2015

David Carr was the Keith Richards of media reporting – after all he’d been through, it was like he was indestructable. And now he’s gone.

— acarvin.bsky.social aka Andy Carvin (@acarvin) February 13, 2015

"We all walk this earth feeling we are frauds. The trick is to be grateful and hope the caper doesn’t end any time soon.” -David Carr.

— Emily Steel (@emilysteel) February 13, 2015

Carr was one of those people whose taste and integrity you just wanted to live up to.

— John Hodgman (@hodgman) February 13, 2015

One of the great things about David Carr was he was unflinching in talking truth to power. In that way he was a model for all journalists.

— Steven Greenhouse (@greenhousenyt) February 13, 2015

@carr2n RIP brother. You were the last of a dying breed. It all just gets shittier from here.

— shane smith (@shanesmith30) February 13, 2015

We see the pressure that journalism and the media are under from governments around the world when journalists are jailed in countries like Egypt, or murdered, or silenced in various other ways. But it’s not until we get a global picture from something like the annual World Press Freedom Index that it becomes obvious how endangered a free press has become — even in the United States, which has fallen steadily in the media-freedom rankings every year.

If nothing else, this kind of overview reinforces one thing: Namely, the necessity and importance of having alternative forms of media and speech, whether it’s Twitter and YouTube and Instagram or a media entity like WikiLeaks. These can be blocked and content can be banned by governments, but it is harder to do. In effect, it forces repressive governments to play a giant game of Whack-A-Mole by going after every individual user who posts a photo or uploads a video.

Difficult to ban

Turkey, for example, has been trying very hard over the past year to get content removed from and/or blocked by Twitter — including an account belonging to an opposition newspaper — and the government’s court orders for personal information have skyrocketed. To Twitter’s credit, the company has resisted these orders, and is fighting others in court, and the social network remains a crucial lifeline for many citizens who are trying to keep track of what their government is doing.

And why would something like WikiLeaks be important, despite the various well-documented flaws in that organization and its leader Julian Assange? Because press freedom in the United States has been declining for years. According to the index, the U.S. is now in 49th place — behind the tiny Polynesian nation of Tonga — compared with just five years ago, when it was in 20th place. The government’s ongoing campaign against WikiLeaks is part of that, as is the action taken against journalists like James Risen, who has resisted attempts to get him to reveal his sources.

A drastic decline

The Press Freedom index is compiled every year by the group Reporters Without Borders, which was founded in 1985 and campaigns on behalf of journalists around the world, as well as tracking abuse and repression directed towards the media. And the latest survey comes to a rather grim conclusion: press freedom has declined dramatically around the world, with more than half of the 180 countries ranking lower than in 2013.

“There was a drastic decline in freedom of information in 2014. Two-thirds of the 180 countries surveyed for the 2015 World Press Freedom Index performed less well than in the previous year. The annual global indicator, which measures the overall level of violations of freedom of information in 180 countries year by year, has risen to 3,719, an 8 percent increase over 2014 and almost 10 percent compared with 2013.”

In the most recent survey, many of the usual suspects show up in the negative column: Libya, where journalists continue to be kidnapped and in some cases murdered, and of course Russia — where the government has blocked websites and even shut down alternative media outlets that were critical of the administration. Also in the bad-and-getting-worse column are countries like South Sudan, Venezuela and even Italy, where journalists have been threatened by criminal groups like the Mafia.

New media is everywhere

Reporters Without Borders also mentions how some areas of the world are effectively “black holes” when it comes to measuring the freedom of the press, and many of these dark spots appear in the region that is at the bottom of the global index — North Africa and the Middle East. Many areas, the group says, “are controlled by non-state groups in which independent information simply does not exist.”

Obviously, Twitter and Facebook and Instagram — or even entities like WikiLeaks — aren’t a solution to these kinds of systemic problems. But the simple fact that individuals around the world now have access to some or all of the same tools that journalists do means that we can get information directly from places like Egypt or Iran or Turkey, without having to rely on a professional press that has been muzzled or brought to heel.

That’s why some of the new-media efforts I think are the most interesting and important are the ones that are trying to harness this vast volunteer workforce in some way, whether it’s through verification tools like Storyful, or online community efforts like Reportedly from First Look Media, or crowdsourcing efforts like the Ukraine Vehicle database project that British blogger Eliot Higgins recently launched.

Craig Silverman, the author of a book about journalism and fact-checking called Regret The Error and a column by the same name at the Poynter Institute, has come out with a major report on the problem of online hoaxes and misinformation, a study he did for the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. It is an impressive survey of how the desire for pageviews and online “engagement” compels many online media outlets and even individual journalists to distribute untrue or dubious content.

In the pre-amble to his report, Craig (who I should note is a friend) points out that while we usually expect news organizations to disseminate “quality, accurate information” about the world around us, many media companies — and not just digital upstarts but traditional ones as well — persist in distributing questionable information, even when they likely know it is false:

“News websites dedicate far more time and resources to propagating questionable and often false claims than they do working to verify and/or debunk viral content and online rumors. Rather than acting as a source of accurate information, online media frequently promote misinformation in an attempt to drive traffic and social engagement.”

A human need to share

Recent examples of hoaxes are legion, and many of them have been debunked on a site that Craig started called Emergent.info — an attempt to create a kind of crowdsourced verification engine that can latch onto hoaxes and determine quickly whether they are true or not. From snow on the pyramids in Egypt to a woman who allegedly had three breasts, every month or so seems to spawn a fresh batch of questionable news reports, many of which show up on some of the leading news websites such as CNN and even Reuters.

As Craig notes in his report (which I encourage you to read if you care about this topic), hoaxes and rumors are not new to journalism — there have been outlets that specialize in that for as long as there have been newspapers, whether it’s the British tabloids or the National Enquirer. But a combination of factors have led to an explosion of misinformation, including the rise of the social web and the 24-hour news cycle. Silverman uses the example of the disappearance of Malaysian flight 370:

“The drive to fill the empty space with something — particularly on cable news — was partly human nature, and also partly dependent on the need to meet the public’s insatiable demand for information. All of us — journalists and the public — sought to understand what had happened. But facts were sparse. So we engaged in collective sensemaking and rumor propagation to fill the void.”

Fake news goes viral

In effect, we are all CNN now: Every website that wants to attract an audience, no matter how large or how small, feels the overwhelming pressure to be first with a news report — regardless of how questionable it might be. And the more salacious or titillating that report is, the more likely an editor is to hit the publish button, and to hide his or her doubts behind a question-mark headline or the phrase “reports say.”

Occasionally, the tension between wanting to be first with a report that people might click on and wanting to be accurate bursts out into the open, as it did in 2013 during a conversation between Gawker founder Nick Denton and one of his then-writers, viral specialist Neetzan Zimmerman — who at the time was responsible for posts that drove tens of millions of unique visitors to the site, by reporting on whatever was going viral on dozens of social networks. At one point, Zimmerman says:

“Most viral content demands from its audience a certain suspension of disbelief. The fact is that viral content warehouses like BuzzFeed trade in unverifiable schmaltz exactly because that is the kind of content that goes viral. People don’t look to these stories for hard facts and shoe-leather reporting. They look to them for fleeting instances of joy or comfort. That is the part they play in the Internet news hole.”

Who cares if it’s true?

As part of his report, Silverman talks about the psychology behind why we all participate in distributing hoaxes and rumors and questionable information — and we definitely all do it, even journalists. I freely confess that I have retweeted news stories or headlines or reports that I haven’t verified, even though I am regularly humiliated for having done so when they turn out not to be true. Usually it’s because I am in a hurry, and the report seems so interesting or believable that I don’t bother to check.

In many cases, we re-publish and distribute these reports because on some level we want them to be true. We want to believe that a woman who posed for a photo in Iraq with a rifle is single-handedly leading a battalion against the forces of ISIS. Why? Because it would make a great story. And that’s why the single best advice for journalists or anyone else is “If it seems too good to be true, it probably isn’t.”

In other cases, however — and I would argue that this is a much larger problem than media companies redistributing false information or questionable reports — the vast majority of people simply don’t care whether a report is true or not. They are going to share it anyway, because it is funny, or touching, or creepy, or disturbing. In other words, it sparks some kind of human emotion. Fusion writer and former Reuters columnist Felix Salmon described this well in a piece he wrote in 2013:

“The reasons that people share basically have nothing to do with whether or not the thing being shared is true. If your company was built from day one to produce stuff which people want to share, then that will always end up including certain things which aren’t true.”

The lines have blurred

This is the one big issue with attempts at crowdsourced verification, whether it’s Emergent.info or Facebook’s recent announcement that it is trying to crack down on hoaxes that get spread via the social network: Facebook’s attempt in particular relies on people to click a button and flag something as a potential hoax — but most people are never going to do this, not just because it takes effort on their part, but because they may not even care whether the report is true or not. They will share it anyway.

In the old days, when media came to us via certain distinct channels — a newspaper, a TV network, a magazine, etc. — it was easy to distinguish fact from entertainment, or gossip and rumor from the truth. Certain outlets could be trusted, and others couldn’t. But now, the media we consume comes at us from all directions, after being shared and re-shared, and the original source isn’t always obvious. And factual news content blurs into entertainment content until everything looks the same.

In effect, we are all engaged in trying to figure out whom to trust and when, and the barriers between us and the sausage-making process known as journalism have been largely removed. That means it’s not just up to media organizations to fix this problem, although they definitely play a major role — it’s up to all of us as news consumers.

If there’s one word that sums up where most media entities are looking for the future, it’s “mobile” — almost every news service and website is focusing on mobile because that’s where the younger users are, and therefore that’s where the growth is. In fact, NowThis just finished getting rid of its website altogether because it said there was no purpose in having one.

Flipboard, however, is going in the opposite direction: On Tuesday, the company said it is finally embracing the web, with a full-featured site that not only reproduces what the app offers, but builds on top of it.

So why is Flipboard going in the opposite direction to almost everyone else? In an interview, co-founder and CEO Mike McCue said there’s a simple answer, which is that Flipboard was mobile before almost anyone else — in fact, the app was one of the first to show the real possibilities of the brand new Apple iPad when it first launched in 2010. So being mobile is not really an issue for the company. But what Flipboard was missing, McCue said, was a way to tie together the web and mobile easily. The original website the company debuted in 2013 allowed users to read articles, but didn’t let them do much else.

Lessons from mobile

The launch of Flipboard’s web version fixes that, he said: it allows users who have built profiles and curated magazines and share content through the app to reproduce all of that behavior on the web and more. And in a sense, the Flipboard CEO said the web version has been in the works for almost as long as the company itself:

“Originally, we were going to build Flipboard on the web. Having been at Netscape for a while, I had a passion for the web, but when I thought about it, the web just wasn’t as capable — browsers weren’t as capable, they didn’t have as much horsepower. But we had heard rumors about the tablet coming from Apple, and we realized that would be the right first-launch platform for us.”

McCue said the web version of Flipboard has a number of features that the news-reading and recommendation platform wouldn’t have been able to build if it wasn’t for years of developing the mobile app and learning how to sort and format content for different devices. So for example, he said, Flipboard can recognize when the content it is displaying would look better as a photo gallery, and automatically resize the images for full-width, or figure out where to put the headline text.

My first thought was that Flipboard might have decided to focus on the web because growth in the app is slowing, but McCue says that’s not the case — in fact, he said, “everything is up, anywhere from 50 to 300 percent, depending on what stat you look at.” According to recent estimates, the company has over 100 million registered users, and it recently confirmed that 50 million of those are monthly average users, up from 30 million last year.

Flipboard has been through several iterations now, as it has evolved from just a mobile app for reading RSS feeds and websites: the first big launch for the company after its birth came in 2013, when it added the ability for users to curate articles from their streams into their own “magazines.” There are now 15 million magazines that have been created by users, McCue said, up from about 10 million last year. And the second big launch gave users much more choice in terms of what to follow in the app — using recommendation software developed by Zite, which Flipboard acquired last year.

Better monetization

As with its mobile version, part of what Flipboard feels it offers to publishers is the ability to display their content in a beautiful way, and also to display advertising in the same way, McCue says, which theoretically should lead to better monetization than the typical web banner ad. So the company is working with a select group of publishers to host their content and custom advertising inside the web version, and share that revenue.

In the past, Flipboard has been criticized by some publishers and media companies for aggregating their content without paying for it — in much the same way that Google has been criticized for doing with Google News. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo took aim at Flipboard for this in 2013, and said he was pulling his content from the platform. For many publishers, Flipboard opens links inside a browser rather than displaying the full content, and McCue said that will happen on the web as well. But he hopes publishers will choose to work with the platform instead of fighting it:

“For the moment, links on the web will just go to the publisher’s website, but we are working on some deals with publishing partners where we can do the same on the web as we do on the mobile app — show magazine-style content and serve ads and share that revenue. We can generate formats and layouts like the NYT’s Snowfall, a really visual magazine style, and we are hoping to do that for a number of publishers.”

For all of the upheaval and turmoil that the internet has created in the media industry, and the explosion of new formats and birth of new companies like BuzzFeed and Vox and First Look Media, there are some things that have remained almost impervious to change, and one of those is the “homepage.” Even some digital-only news sites have opted for something not that far removed from the traditional newspaper or magazine homepage, with a curated selection of stories chosen by editors, or a chronological blog style.

Is that really the best we can do? Melody Kramer doesn’t think it is — or at least she would like people to think a little more outside the box, as it were. A former digital strategist at National Public Radio, she developed a devoted following via the Social Media Desk blog she set up for NPR on Tumblr and has since left for a job with a federal government skunkworks called 18F (she also has a newsletter in which collects all sorts of fascinating things).

In a recent post on Medium, entitled “64 Ways to Think About a News Homepage,” Kramer enlisted a number of friends, many of whom have nothing to do with the news business (which in itself is kind of an extension of a recurring feature she does, called “How Do You Get Your News?,” in which she interviews people from outside the news industry about how they get their news). And each suggestion is illustrated with what appears to be the actual hand-written or hand-drawn version of that idea.

The result is fairly crude, like someone videotaped a whiteboard session over a few beers with some smart friends. But for me at least, the value isn’t in any one single idea — since there is no “silver bullet” answer to what a homepage should be — but more in the approach itself, which tries to forget everything we knew about a news homepage and come up with better or different ideas about how we could organize information. Here are some of the themes that jumped out at me when I read the post:

Customization: One concept that connects many of the ideas in Kramer’s post is personalization. So, for example, one idea is to turn a news homepage into a “Choose Your Own Adventure” kind of story, in which readers choose which threads to follow and the story is ultimately constructed by them through those choices; another idea sees the homepage as a “treasure map” that lets readers pick different spots to dig or drill down into a topic; and a third lets readers choose how much time they have and how much they want to know about a story, and then tries to deliver that.

Other views: Some of the ideas Kramer’s group mentioned are clearly an attempt to get out of the so-called “filter bubble,” in which we spend too much time focused on topics or stories that are already of interest to our social network. So one proposal is for a homepage that allows a reader to see the news through someone else’s eyes; another would show news that was read or shared by people far away from the user; and a third proposes that the homepage be set up to show news that surprises the reader (although it’s not clear how it would do that, unless it knew you very well).

More depth: A number of the ideas in the list seemed to be oriented around the kind of market that Vox was set up to serve — namely, a market of readers looking for more depth and context and background for the stories that are flowing past them all the time. So one idea would have a homepage where each story came with links to background articles, stories on a similar topic, etc. (probably the closest to a traditional news-site approach), while another would have each story include links to the sources the reporter used to put the story together, and background articles he or she used.

Some of the ideas suggested by Kramer’s group, like the one that recommends background links for each piece — or the one that would allow users to zoom in and out to see the broader context for an issue-based story — are at least close to what traditional digital and print news outlets are doing, or trying to do. But some are refreshingly bizarre, like the one that suggests a homepage where the selection of news is driven by some action the reader takes, like a “spin the wheel” kind of approach; or the one where news reading becomes a game and if you don’t win then you lose your “life” and have to come back later.

Many of these are unworkable, or ill-advised, or just plain loony — but what I admire about them is that they are trying to rethink what it means to even have a homepage at all. Why do we do it the way we do? What is good and bad about that? Kramer also mentions some existing sites that are trying to do this in one way or another: so, for example, Quartz’s homepage is basically its email newsletter of headlines, and Mashable’s homepage is entirely driven by algorithms.

Reading through Kramer’s post, I couldn’t help but think about when I worked at a newspaper and was on a task force devoted to rethinking the home page: I suggested that the site have three home pages — one where it showed you what stories the editors thought were important, one where it showed you stories that the site knew you might be interested in (based on its knowledge of your behavior) and one where you could see what other readers liked, based on what they clicked on or shared or commented on.

At this point, we have plenty of sites that give us the first of those, some that try to give you the second now and then — and social media has more or less taken care of the third one, although it is still too cumbersome for many people to use regularly as a news-discovery engine. Even after a decade and a half online, media outlets still have a long way to go before they really reinvent themselves.

Almost every week, it seems, we have a new case in which social platforms and media outlets — which are increasingly becoming the same thing, in many ways — are faced with a difficult choice: Should they post that video of someone being beheaded, or some other horrible thing? Or should they save users and viewers from seeing it by never publishing it, or taking it down? In the most recent case, YouTube chose to remove a video of a Jordanian pilot being set on fire by ISIS, while Fox News published it.

The argument in favor of not publishing such videos — or taking them down when they are posted on a platform like YouTube — is fairly obvious: Namely, that it’s horrific, and many people will be offended by seeing it, especially the family and friends of the victim. Also, these videos are essentially recruiting tools for ISIS, and so many argue that by publishing them, Fox News and others are aiding the enemy.

Assuming these things are true, what justification could there be for arguing that media outlets should publish them, or that YouTube and Twitter and Facebook are wrong to remove them? At the risk of agreeing with Fox News, I think there are a couple of good reasons. One is that there’s a public interest in allowing free speech, even speech we disagree with or find abhorrent. In fact, the real test of our commitment to this principle is whether we defend someone’s right to say offensive things.

Freedom of speech

One common response to the free-speech argument is that platforms like Twitter and YouTube and Facebook are private companies, and therefore they don’t really have any commitment to uphold free speech, because the First Amendment only applies to actions taken by the government. But this doesn’t really hold water for a number of reasons: for one thing, freedom of speech is a principle many believe is worth upholding even when it doesn’t apply to government — that’s why there were “Je Suis Charlie” marches.

Also, media outlets like the New York Times are private companies just the same as Facebook is, and yet most people see these traditional media entities as having a public duty to freedom of information and free speech. So why doesn’t YouTube have the same duty? Why do we complain when the New York Times hides important information, but we don’t see it as a breach of social responsibility when Facebook takes down pages with information about Syrian chemical weapon attacks?

There’s a clear risk to handing over much of our free-speech rights to private platforms like Facebook, or even Twitter — a risk that critics like Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Rebecca MacKinnon of Global Voices have written about. How do we know what they are removing, or why? You may agree with their decision to not show a beheading video, or to filter Google searches so that “How do I join ISIS?” doesn’t come up, but what else are they hiding from you for your own good?

A duty to be informed

But free speech isn’t the only reason why I think we should be pressuring YouTube and Facebook not to remove this kind of content. The second reason was summed up well by former journalist Sylvie Barak — when I asked on Twitter whether such videos should be banned. She (and several others) argued that it is our duty as citizens to be as informed as we can be about the behavior of groups like ISIS, especially when we are committing significant military resources to fighting them:

https://twitter.com/sylviebarak/status/563005701707292672

Piers Morgan made essentially the same argument in a post he wrote about why he forced himself to watch the video of the Jordanian pilot being set on fire: he said he felt it was necessary in order to fully appreciate the barbaric nature of ISIS — something he said wouldn’t be accomplished by just reading a description of the incident. A writer with the Times of Israel made a very similar case in a piece she wrote.

My friend Andy Carvin wrote a post recently in which he talked about wrestling with the issue of whether to link to or embed this kind of content — something he ran up against during his time reporting on the Arab Spring uprisings. Such behavior is horrific, he said, and yet there are dozens of cases in which media entities have made the decision to show similar things: naked children running from U.S. napalm attacks on Vietnam, for example, or American soldiers dead on a beach.

The argument in these cases is that there is a social duty that trumps the digust such images produce: that people need to see this kind of behavior in order to appreciate what is happening in the world — either what is being done to our citizens by others, or what we are doing to someone else. Isn’t that a duty that should apply to Twitter and Facebook and YouTube as well as the New York Times? And if not, why not? If you want to see the video in question, there’s a Fox News version here.