Month: March 2017

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