mathewingram.com/work

As critics slam Facebook for the role they believe it — and in particular its penchant for fake news stories — played in the election of Donald Trump, CEO Mark Zuckerberg continues to resist any attempt to pin some of the blame on his company. But in doing so, he misses the point.

Over the weekend, the Facebook co-founder took to the site to respond to some of those criticisms. He said he “cares deeply” about the fake news problem and wants to get it right. But he also said that he doesn’t believe fake news contributed to the election’s outcome.

“Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99% of what people see is authentic,” Zuckerberg wrote. And since only a very small amount of those hoaxes relate to politics, and an even smaller number related to Clinton specifically, he argued that “this makes it extremely unlikely hoaxes changed the outcome of this election in one direction or the other.”

The Facebook CEO also scoffed at the suggestion that the company is actually a media entity, or that it should behave like one, something many have argued for some time.

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

Continue reading “Mark Zuckerberg continues to miss the point on Facebook and media”

It’s bad enough that media companies of all kinds are struggling with declining revenue, fragmented audiences and the increasing power of intermediaries like Facebook. Now add to that a president who has shown himself to be actively hostile towards the press and the First Amendment.

What does that future look like? It looks like a pitched battle between a man who made his own media rules and rode them to victory, and a traditional press that has lost much of its power.

Many media outlets are still licking their wounds over their failure to predict that Trump might win, a victory that came despite a wave of fact-checking and reporting on his numerous falsehoods and ethical failures. The only exception to this is cable television, which made so much money from covering him that introspection over the outcome is unlikely.

But even cable giants have to contend with a media landscape that has fractured and heaved to the point where alternative media players and social media arguably played a far larger role in the election than any mainstream media source, including television.

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

Continue reading “President Donald Trump vs. the media is going to be an epic battle”

The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States has triggered a frenzy of blame and finger-pointing unlike anything we’ve seen in decades. Racists are to blame! Democrats who didn’t vote are to blame! It’s the media’s fault! No, it’s Obama’s fault!

There’s another name that some critics would like to add to that list — and possibly even put at the top of the list — and that is Facebook [fortune-stock symbol-“FB”].

Why Facebook? After all, didn’t millions of people vote for Donald Trump of their own free will? Surely no one is suggesting that Facebook somehow rigged its news feed to convince people to vote for Trump? No, no one is suggesting that. But there are other ways to influence an election.

In particular, there are those who argue that Facebook fueled Trump’s rise by circulating a host of fake news stories about political topics, and ese stories helped tip the scale in his favor.

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

Continue reading “Here’s why Facebook is partly to blame for the rise of Donald Trump”

If you are looking for a word to describe the feeling in the nation’s newsrooms after a Donald Trump win, “shell-shocked” would probably be a good one. How is this possible, when every poll and prediction site said that Hillary Clinton would win? How could everyone have gotten it so wrong?

The inescapable fact is that most of the mainstream media got it wrong because they simply couldn’t believe that Americans would elect someone like Donald Trump. Denial can be a powerful drug.

In part, that’s because much of the East Coast-based media establishment is arguably out of touch with the largely rural population that voted for Trump, the disenfranchised voters who looked past his cheesy exterior and his penchant for half-truths and heard a message of hope, however twisted.

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

Continue reading “Here’s why the media failed to predict a Donald Trump victory”

If you spend enough time on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, it’s easy to convince yourself that both are just giant echo chambers, where users with specific political views talk to each other, and different viewpoints are ignored. But new research shows that’s not always the case.

According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, a non-partisan think tank located in Washington, D.C., being exposed to differing views through social media can actually cause people to rethink how they view a political issue. Not always, but sometimes.

The Pew study found that 20% of those surveyed said that they had modified their stance on a social or political issue because of something they saw on social media, and 17% said that viewpoints they encountered through social media had changed their views about a specific candidate.

Democrats were a little more likely than Republicans to say they had modified their views as a result of something they saw on social media, the study said.

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

Continue reading “Seeing different viewpoints on social media can actually change minds”

As the U.S. election approaches, after one of the most divisive campaigns in recent memory, everyone has their own version of who is to blame for Donald Trump. Some blame the party itself, some the economy — but many seem to blame the media for helping promote him, or at least not doing enough to stop him.

Is that really fair? Yes and no. There’s no question that certain media outlets, especially cable news networks, played a key role in helping the former reality-TV star reach a broader audience. But the truth is much more complicated than just “CNN and Fox News created Donald Trump.”

Whether because he cleverly managed to spot the weaknesses in the current media environment, or simply stumbled onto a plan that wound up working, Trump and his campaign succeeded in doing what amounts to an end-run around the traditional media.

In the past, media outlets like the New York Times or CNN were in an a position of power relative to political candidates, especially those like Trump — someone without any kind of traditional political track record or campaign support. If they didn’t cover you, you effectively didn’t exist.

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

Continue reading “How Donald Trump took advantage of a broken media landscape”

If you are playing poker, you’d better hope your opponent isn’t being bankrolled by a billionaire with a long memory and almost infinite patience. That’s at least one potential lesson to be learned from Gawker Media’s long-running legal battle against former wrestler Hulk Hogan.

Gawker founder Nick Denton said Wednesday that the bankrupt company has agreed to settle the case. Court documents show that Gawker will pay Hogan a total of $31 million.

That’s still a fairly huge sum, but it’s significantly less than the $140-million judgement that Hogan and his backer — Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel — won in a Florida jury trial.

Gawker is also paying two other individuals who sued the company a total of $1.2 million. Shiva Ayyadurai sued Gawker for questioning his claim that he invented email, and Ashley Terrill sued because of a Gawker story about the dating app Tinder.

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

Continue reading “Gawker Media agrees to settle Hulk Hogan case for $31 million”

The fact that print-based advertising revenue is declining is no surprise to anyone following the media industry. But what is hitting publishers like the New York Times particularly hard is that this drop isn’t at a steady pace—instead, it’s actually been picking up speed.

In the first quarter, for example, the newspaper’s revenue from print advertising fell 9%. In the second quarter, it dropped 14%. And in the latest quarter, it fell almost 19%.

On the plus side, the Times‘ digital-advertising revenue climbed 21% in the latest quarter. But despite that growth, it still remains a much smaller number: The Times made $44 million on various forms of digital advertising, including native or sponsored content, but almost twice that much from print advertising.

The company said that growth in digital came from its in-house native advertising business, and also from video (among other things, the paper is being paid an estimated $3 million by Facebook to produce regular video clips for the social network’s Facebook Live feature).

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

Continue reading “The New York Times scrambles to avoid the print advertising cliff”

They’re almost a web fixture: Those spammy-looking links at the end of news articles, with photos of former TV stars and headlines like “What she looks like now will amaze you!”

But despite the fact that many readers—and news companies, for that matter—hate them, they’re probably not going away anytime soon.

Depending on the size of the outlet and the amount of traffic they can generate, a contract with Outbrain or Taboola—the two largest providers of such links—can mean millions of dollars in guaranteed annual income. And if your print advertising is declining 30% in a single quarter, that sounds great.

To take one prominent example, Time Inc. (which owns Fortune magazine), signed a deal with Outbrain in 2014 that was worth an estimated $100-million to the magazine publisher over three years.

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

Continue reading “There’s a simple reason for all those Taboola and Outbrain links”

It’s getting harder and harder to believe Facebook when it says it’s not a media company. The social network just said that even if an image or a story posted on the site breaches its community standards, it will leave the post up if it is deemed to be “newsworthy.”

But how will Facebook determine whether something is newsworthy and therefore deserves not to be deleted by the site’s censors? That remains unclear.

The site’s responsibilities as a media entity were also highlighted Friday by a report that some staffers wanted to delete posts by the Trump campaign because they believed they should qualify as hate speech, but were ultimately over-ruled by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the decision to allow Trump’s posts to remain resulted in complaints that the founder and CEO was bending the site’s rules for the Republican candidate. Some employees who work reviewing content on the site reportedly threatened to quit.

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

Continue reading “Facebook will decide what is newsworthy, says it still isn’t a media company”

For some time now, the New York media world has been waiting breathlessly to see who would be anointed as the next publisher-in-waiting at the New York Times. On Tuesday, the waiting ended when the paper said Arthur Gregg Sulzberger had been chosen as the new deputy publisher, and thus the expected future publisher.

There wasn’t any white smoke from a chimney the way there is with a new Pope, or anyone waving from a balcony the way the royal family likes to do it in Britain. But in New York media circles it was pretty much the same thing, since the Suzlbergers are about as close to royalty as you can get.

The winning candidate, AG (as he likes to be called) has been just one of the potential kings in waiting, since there are several branches of the family, each with an heir interested in the top job.

This competition among cousins is one of the reasons why media watchers have been awaiting the naming of a successor to current publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. Would it be AG, who is the current publisher’s son? Or Sam Dolnick or David Perpich, who are his nephews?

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

Continue reading “The Sulzberger dynasty tightens its grip on the New York Times”

What if newspapers hadn’t rushed headlong into digital, spending billions to put up free websites, but instead had focused on strengthening their print operations? Could they have avoided some of the carnage many have suffered in the past decade?

It’s a tempting scenario, one put forward by veteran media writer Jack Shafer in a piece at Politico, based on a recent study of the newspaper business. But it is fatally flawed.

The study, by University of Texas researchers Hsiang Iris Chyi & Ori Tenenboim, is entitled “Reality Check.” It looked at the online readership of 51 major daily newspapers in the U.S. (excluding national papers like the New York Times and USA Today).

The researchers found that few of these metropolitan dailies have seen any growth in their online readership since 2007. More than half have actually lost readers since 2011, and the average paper’s digital readership is about a third the size of its print readership.

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

Continue reading “Sticking with print would not have helped newspapers avoid death”

Given what is happening in the U.S. election campaign, there has never been a more crucial time for fact-checking of news stories, and Facebook seems to be doing a fairly poor job of it. Now Google has waded into the fray with a new fact-checking tag for Google News.

As Google’s head of news, Richard Gingras, explained in a blog post, Google is going to be highlighting pages in Google News that fit the criteria for fact-checking.

For some time now, Google has had a series of sub-categories that it groups articles into, including “highly cited” — which is the rough equivalent of Facebook’s Trending Topics, meaning it has been linked to a lot by prominent sites, as well as “local source.”

Now there will be a “fact check” tag as well. Sites that want their articles to be eligible just have to add a certain kind of formatting to their pages, as specified by Schema.org, an open community sponsored by Google, Microsoft and other tech companies.

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

Continue reading “Google wants to help promote fact-checking in Google News”

Regular dumps of classified documents and other internal communications have become a fixture of modern life, thanks in part to stateless — and frequently lawless — entities like WikiLeaks. But is publishing those leaks always the right thing to do?

That’s the question that is raised by the recent leak of private emails from John Podesta, the campaign chairman for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

The WikiLeaks dump consists of tens of thousands of emails, sent to a wide variety of people, about a range of topics that includes both the Clinton campaign and virtually every other aspect of Podesta’s personal life.

The most interesting thing about the leak is that it appears to have been carried out with the assistance of certain shadowy characters connected to the Russian secret service, according to a statement from the U.S. intelligence department.

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

Continue reading “Publishing hacked private emails can be a slippery slope”

If you spend any time on Facebook then you’ve probably seen them, either in your main news feed or in the “trending topics” section — clearly fake news stories designed to get you to click, many of them playing on the latest conspiracy theory surrounding the 2016 election.

These are the kind of stories that Facebook’s trending editors used to weed out, but then the site fired all the editors it was using for that purpose, after a controversy over allegations of political bias, and since then it has been using algorithms.

According to a recent experiment by the Washington Post, however, getting rid of the human beings isn’t really working that well — at least not at keeping out the fakes.

In order to see what Facebook considered a trending topic and why, the newspaper’s Intersect team started tracking what stories and links were trending every hour, and sent those links out as an email news digest, as well as keeping a record of them in a database.

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

Continue reading “Facebook still has a fake news problem”