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What’s happened to media companies in the last decade or so — and what continues to happen to them even now — is like a more boring, digital version of the Trials of Job. He’s the Biblical character who got hit with boils and **, all to test his belief in God.

For traditional media companies, there’s no hail of frogs — just a steady decline in print subscriptions and TV viewership, then lower ad revenue, then the move to mobile and even lower ad revenue, and now the dominance of Facebook and other platforms.

All of these things have one underlying theme: Namely, a complete and total loss of control over the audience, or what Dan Gillmor has called “the people formerly known as the audience.” In some cases, media companies may have only had an illusion of control, but those kinds of illusions can be even more powerful than the real thing in some ways.

It was so much easier back in the good old days, in the 1970s and 1980s. Media companies controlled not only most of the news and entertainment that got produced, but also the channels through which it got distributed — newspapers and magazines and radio stations and TV networks. And that scarcity generated huge revenues via advertising.

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

Continue reading “Prediction: In 2016, media companies will lose even more control”

Political speech is a unique animal, especially during an election campaign, often mixing hyperbole with flowery language and aggressive rhetoric designed to inflame a particular passion. But Donald Trump is arguably in a category unto himself. More than almost any other presidential candidate, he is prone to telling flat-out lies, making up facts, and distorting the truth to a prodigious extent.

This kind of behavior creates a tricky problem for the media. How should they deal with Trump and his falsehoods? If he were just a joke candidate without a hope of ever being the Republican nominee, it would be easy enough to ignore him. But he appears to stand a better than even chance of getting the nomination.

If media outlets attack Trump’s lying directly, they run the risk of being accused of bias by his supporters and Republicans in general. In fact, that kind of reaction is already occurring in response to a New York Times editorial that accused the billionaire businessman of playing fast and loose with the truth on a number of issues, including whether Muslims in New Jersey cheered on 9/11.

Part of the problem is that Trump and his candidacy are to some extent a creation of the mainstream media — or at the very least, the two have developed a disturbingly co-dependent relationship.

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

Continue reading “What should the media do when Donald Trump blatantly lies?”

Every week or two, it seems, another giant web platform introduces something that alters the landscape for media companies. That includes everything from Facebook’s Instant Articles initiative — which was followed by the new Notify alert app that launched this week — to Google’s “accelerated mobile pages” project, Twitter Moments and Apple News.

In each case, a massive web company with hundreds of millions or even billions of users is asking media companies and publishers to provide their news and other content to the platform essentially for free. In return, they get to reach a broader audience (theoretically), and they get faster-loading and/or better-looking articles, and in some cases a share of the advertising revenue.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that this is one of the thorniest issues that media companies of all kinds are struggling with. Should they play ball with Facebook or Apple or Google? And what if they don’t? What happens to their traffic and/or revenue? And what do they give up if they do decide to take part?

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

Continue reading “What should media companies do now that platforms control the world?”

A growing number of online publishers, including giants like BuzzFeed, have come to rely on Facebook for a significant proportion of their traffic — in some cases as much as 60% of it. For the most part it’s a win-win relationship, with Facebook providing reach and a share of advertising revenue, in exchange for a supply of engaging content. But every now and then, we get a glimpse behind the curtain at just how much power that relationship gives to Facebook, and the consequences if it changes its mind.

We got another one of those on Monday, courtesy of a report from Digiday about some new numbers from SimpleReach, an online analytics company. According to the firm’s latest survey, the top 30 publishers in terms of visibility on Facebook have seen their traffic plummet by more than 30% since the beginning of the year.

While SimpleReach said that some publishers saw an increase in traffic from Facebook — including Vice Media and Refinery29 — the majority saw it fall. And to compound the problem, the more reliant a media outlet was on the social network, the more they saw their traffic from Facebook drop this year: The Huffington Post saw a decline of more than 60%, and BuzzFeed saw its Facebook referrals fall by more than 40%.

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

Continue reading “Facebook and the media have an increasingly landlord-tenant style relationship”

If you’re of a certain age, the web has a single thing at its core, and that is the hyperlink—those blue links that allow one page to connect to another, creating a kind of interlocking global mesh of URLs. But if you’re someone who lives on social networks like Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat, links don’t matter nearly as much because you hardly ever see them, and even if you do, you probably never click on them.

Facebook’s “Instant Articles” and Twitter’s new Moments feature seem to be accelerating this phenomenon, for better or worse. The whole point of Facebook’s project, in which it has formed partnerships with publishers like the New York Times, is that the content from those publishers exists completely inside Facebook’s mobile app. It’s consumed there, and shared there—there’s no link to an external site because it’s not necessary.

Twitter seems to be taking a similar approach with Moments, which consists of curated tweets and images that are selected by the company’s editorial staff. They are a great way to catch up on the news, but if you want to get at the link to the underlying content, it is hidden three clicks deep in a sub-menu. Realistically, there’s zero chance that anyone will actually click on any of those links.

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

Continue reading “Facebook, Twitter and the death of the link”

Google won a decisive victory on Friday in a copyright-infringement case that the Authors Guild originally launched almost a decade ago. A federal appeals court ruled that the company’s book-scanning project, which has turned millions of books into searchable digital files, is entitled to the full protection of the “fair use” clause in copyright law.

The case is hugely important, not just for Google and for the authors whose works are being digitized, but for the principle of fair use itself. Copyright law may be murky and difficult to pin down at the best of times, but interpreting the concept of fair use often makes regular copyright law look like a day at the beach.

That’s because what qualifies as fair use — which theoretically allows anyone to use copyrighted content without having to get permission from the creator or rights-holder — isn’t spelled out in federal copyright law. It’s something that ultimately has to be decided by a court, and even then the judges have to consider four factors before they can come to a decision. Those factors are:

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

Continue reading “Google’s victory in book-scanning case is totally justified”

Every few weeks, it seems, another media outlet kills off its reader comments, saying they are filled with trolls and spam and/or they are too much effort to maintain. This week it’s Motherboard, the tech site from Vice Media, which claims that it has replaced comments with something better — namely, a selection of emailed letters to the editor, which editor-in-chief Derek Mead says will be published once a week “or thereabouts.”

Motherboard joins a growing group of sites that have shut down their reader comment sections over the past year or so, including The Verge, Re/code, Mic, The Week, USA Today and Popular Science just to name a few. But are media outlets being too hasty in giving up on this outlet for reader feedback? I think they are.

The note from Mead hits all the usual highlights about why comments are bad, and why sites like Motherboard have decided to get rid of them: 1) They are filled with “garbage” from trolls, and that in turn keeps others from commenting; 2) Moderation would take resources that could be better spent on “real” journalism; 3) Commenters are a small proportion of readers, and therefore not worth bothering with; 4) Social media like Twitter and Facebook exist, and therefore no one needs comments.

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

Continue reading “Are comments dead, or have media outlets just given up on them?”

As expected, Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey has once again taken the helm of the company he helped create, despite the fact that he also happens to be the CEO of another startup, digital payment company Square. Twitter’s board appears to be convinced that Dorsey has what it takes to build and grow the service, despite his somewhat troubled history with the company. But will he be able to fix the mistake Twitter made several years ago, when it turned its back on the idea of being an open ecosystem?

Much of the coverage of Twitter [fortune-stock symbol=”TWTR”] tends to focus on the minutiae of the service, and the features that it does or doesn’t have: Whether it should allow tweets of greater than 140 characters, for example, or the idea of introducing a curated feed a la Facebook, which is what the company’s highly-touted Project Lightning is supposed to be all about — as though that will make everything right.

These questions and debates, however, tend to assume that Twitter itself is the only one who can solve these problems. The assumption is that it needs to have a product-focused CEO who can dream up solutions or features that will magically make Twitter the billion-plus user service it has always wanted to be. This is partly why there was such a clamor for Dorsey to return — because founders, even ones with a troubled history, are seen as having quasi-magical powers when it comes to fixing the thing they created.

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

Continue reading “Dear Jack: Twitter needs to become more open or it will die”

As the refugee crisis continues to escalate in Europe, stories about the human toll that this takes on families trying to escape the war in Syria keep hitting the airwaves, including a recent news item about a truckload of more than 70 refugees who died of heatstroke in Austria, victims of a smuggler. On Wednesday, another soon-to-be iconic image of the crisis was published on a number of news sites: A photo of a young Syrian boy’s lifeless body, washed up on the Turkish seashore.

The photo of the boy, reportedly a three-year-old named Aylan Kurdi, triggered a debate not unlike the one that reverberated through the media-sphere after the shooting of Virginia journalists Alison Parker and Adam Ward last week, gunned down by a disgruntled former co-worker who shot live video of himself doing the deed.

The fact that social networks such as Twitter and Facebook tend to auto-play embedded videos and auto-show photos in a user’s stream became part of the discussion, since those settings force people to see such disturbing images whether they want to or not. But there’s a larger issue, which is the question of whether we have some kind of public duty to watch these horrific scenes, in order to force ourselves to confront the reality of the violence that is taking place around us.

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

Continue reading “Sometimes we need to see horrific images like that Syrian boy washed up on the beach”

If you spend much time on Twitter, you already know that one of the things it excels at is breaking news, whether it’s real-time updates on demonstrations in Turkey, or early reports from an earthquake or tsunami halfway around the world. New research from the American Press Institute confirms that Twitter is a real-time news network for many users, and that is both good news and bad news for the company as it tries to re-ignite its flagging share price.

The study, which involved an online survey of more than 4,700 social media users, was a collaboration between the American Press Institute and Twitter, which funded the study and provided access to its database for the institute to use. Research firm DB5 analyzed and compiled the results.

Almost 90% of the users who responded to the survey said they use Twitter for news, and a majority (74%) say they do so every day. About 40% of them said they use Twitter to be alerted to breaking news, and about the same proportion said they use it to keep up with the news generally. About three quarters (73%) of those who use the service for news follow individual journalists, writers and commentators, and about two-thirds (62%) follow institutional or corporate news accounts.

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

Continue reading “Twitter needs the news and the news needs Twitter”

The ongoing battle that the Authors Guild has been waging against Amazon escalated this week, as the group made a formal request to the Department of Justice that it investigate the company for monopolistic practices and anti-competitive behavior. The Guild has been pushing this case for some time, along with a number of other groups representing authors and publishers, arguing that Amazon controls a giant chunk of the e-book market, and that it has been using this power for evil instead of good.

In a letter that the Guild sent to the DoJ recently supporting its request, the group lays out the core of its argument, and the key point that its case will hinge on: It says that even if Amazon’s behavior leads to lower prices for books, this shouldn’t be the department’s only concern. Instead, the Guild says that the regulator should look at how Amazon’s anti-competitive tactics affect society as a whole.

In a section of the letter that refers to the recent decision that found Apple guilty of conspiring with book publishers to raise e-book prices, the Guild warns the DoJ about “the long-term dangers of interpreting antitrust law solely to favor low book prices.” The court, it says, took a “narrow view of antitrust law, assuming that low book prices to consumers trump all, even if the low prices are artificial loss leaders intended to lure buyers into a single company’s shopping platform.” Instead, the Guild says:

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

Continue reading “Here’s why the Authors Guild’s antitrust claim against Amazon is doomed”

There are signs of it everywhere, if you look closely. A streaming-video service that many older Internet users have probably never heard of sells for $1 billion. Facebook buys WhatsApp for a mind-boggling $19 billion. And a YouTube video creator with a ridiculous name makes an estimated $7.5 million per year and has close to 40 million subscribers.

In a nutshell, the media world as we know it (or used to know it) is in a state of flux unlike anything we’ve seen before—and that includes the invention of television itself. Many mainstream media companies, meanwhile, are still trying to come to grips with the concept of “cord cutting,” which is a little like worrying about a flat tire on your bicycle when you are stuck in the middle of a 12-lane highway.

David Pakman, former CEO of eMusic and now a partner with venture capital firm Venrock, did a good job of sketching out the shifting media landscape in a recent piece he published on Medium, in which he took a look at where Internet and mobile users, and particularly millennials, are spending their attention.

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

Continue reading “The attention economy and the ongoing implosion of traditional media”

Back in the good old days of traditional media, advertisers and publishers were the best of friends. Publishers of newspapers and magazines and other things enjoyed a monopoly on information distribution, and therefore commanded a large share of the attention of readers, and advertisers piggy-backed on that monopoly, which in turn helped to pay the freight for all of that content.

Unfortunately, the Internet has changed all of that, and now the advertising business is as much a threat to traditional media entities as it is a friend.

No more monopoly

All of this has dismantled any monopoly or near-monopoly that traditional publishers had on content delivery or attention. But that’s not the worst of it. That’s just level one of what is increasingly becoming a multi-level bloodbath for media companies.

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

Continue reading “Advertising isn’t the solution to the media’s problems — it is the problem”

For those unfamiliar with Reddit, the recent controversy that shut down dozens of popular forums on the site probably seemed like much ado about nothing: A well-liked staffer who handled Reddit’s “Ask Me Anything” interviews was let go, for reasons that were largely unclear. In other words, the kind of thing that happens at websites everywhere without it turning into a four-alarm fire. But in Reddit’s case, the firing of Victoria Taylor has laid bare a tension that lurks at the heart of the online community.

If you read through even a few of the thousands of posts and Twitter comments and related outcry about Taylor’s departure, and the subsequent shut-down of popular threads or “sub-Reddits” like r/movies and r/music, it becomes obvious that for many of the site’s users, the issue is about more than just the firing of one employee.

The incident appears to have triggered a lot of anger and resentment about the direction Reddit has taken over the past year, and in particular the movement towards making it more of a self-sustaining business rather than just an online community. Much of that criticism has been focused on CEO Ellen Pao, but some has even spilled over onto one of the site’s co-founders, Alexis Ohanian, who returned to the company as chairman last year, after the departure of former CEO Yishan Wong.

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

Continue reading “Reddit is at war with itself: Is it a community or a business?”