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Ever since the web was invented, newspapers and other media entities have had to continually expand their view of who their competition is: in the good old days it was other newspapers, and then TV, and then after the web it became other news websites, or maybe [company]Yahoo[/company] or [company]Google[/company]. But even now, their perspective on that competition may still be too narrow — as my friend Om has argued, they are competing with anything that captures a reader’s attention. And I would argue that they are competing with any service that fills an information need.

I started thinking about this again earlier this week, when a link to an old blog post by journalist/programmer Stijn Debrouwere showed up in my Twitter stream, posted and retweeted by multiple people. I couldn’t track down exactly where it came from, but I’m glad it appeared, because it reminded me of how much sense it made in 2012 when it was first published — and how much sense it continues to make.

Debrouwere’s essay is simply called “Fungible.” Fungibility is an economic term that is used to describe products or services that are interchangeable; in other words, if consumers don’t really care whether they get Product A or Product B, then those two things are said to be “fungible.”

Journalism is being replaced

What the web is doing to journalism, Debrouwere argues, is taking the things it used to consider its bread and butter and making them fungible in ways they never were before. That hasn’t just changed the business model for news or media companies, it has changed the expectations of their audience in some fundamental ways, ways that go beyond whether someone reads a news story on the web or in print.

I’m not talking about digital first or about blogging or about data journalism or the mobile web or the curation craze. Yes, journalism has evolved and is better for it. I’m talking beyond that. I’m not even talking about the fact that everyone is a potential publisher now… beyond even that. I think journalism is being replaced.

The examples are legion: as Debrouwere notes, many people used to find new music by reading reviews or coverage in a newspaper or magazine, and did the same thing for movies and TV shows — but now they get access to all the music and movies and TV shows they could want, and all the commentary surrounding them, via services like Spotify or Netflix, or websites like IMDB and [company]Amazon[/company]. So what purpose does the local newspaper or newsmagazine serve?

If you want to read an expert’s take on a variety of different topics, or listen in on an interview with a celebrity like President Barack Obama, you don’t have to wait for a newspaper or magazine or TV network to interview that person — you can find something similar, and possibly even better, in the crowdsourced interviews that appear on sites like Quora and Reddit.

If you want to read about real estate, you can find dedicated blog networks or sites like Curbed, and the same goes for sports: many people are turning away from their baseball or hockey columnists and newspaper coverage to visit crowd-powered sites like SB Nation or Bleacher Report. And then there are media sites created by commercial entities, such as the editorial operation ticket seller Stubhub said it is launching this week — or the example Debrouwere uses, a video-blogging site launched by an electronics chain called SparkFun. As he puts it:

Curbed is a superb real-estate website. Is Curbed journalism because they started out with news and added a marketplace later? Conversely is SparkFun not journalism because they started out selling components and their video blogs came later? When does a blog or podcast or newsletter stop being content marketing and start being journalism with an innovative business model?

Your competition is everywhere

On a local level, a whole series of websites and services from LocalWiki or Everyblock to Pinwheel are providing people with information about their neighborhoods, Debrouwere points out. And many people are duplicating what they used to get from their newspaper by using Twitter, Facebook, blogs and other platforms. As he puts it, those services may not replace a good local newspaper, “but they offer a combo that is increasingly becoming good enough.”

This is an important point: if you’re a media company, your competition isn’t the product or service that is better than you — and it’s certainly not the one that you think is doing journalism — it’s the one that is good enough for your readers or users. In other words, if it provides a service or information that is useful or valuable to them, that is all that matters, not whether it fits the objective definition of something called “journalism.”

I think this is also what Jeff Jarvis means when he talks about journalism as a service, and it’s what I was trying to get at when I wrote about companies like BuzzFeed and Gawker and Quartz and how they see news as a service: they don’t seem to worry much about whether it’s journalism or not, they are more concerned with whether they are serving readers.

What can you do to survive if you are a traditional media entity? You can adapt, obviously, but you can also do a number of other things, Debrouwere says: focus on storytelling and personality, because those things are irreplaceable, and concentrate on appealing to readers who are passionate about a specific topics. Just don’t think that the only things you’re competing with are other journalistic outlets.

Notice that I didn’t mention digital-first or social data crowdjournalism or anything like that? Wonder why? Because the entire point is that journalism is not being disrupted by better journalism but by things that are hardly recognizable as journalism at all. Stepping up your game is always a good idea, but it won’t save you.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Petteri Sulonen and Shutterstock / Twin Design and Thinkstock / Surkov Dmitri

There’s been a lot of discussion in the media-sphere lately about the risks and rewards of Facebook for media companies and publishers of all kinds — a debate that was reignited at the recent Online News Association conference, where former New York Times social-media editor Liz Heron was put on the hot seat about Facebook’s impenetrable algorithm and its effect on the news business. It was simultaneously an admission of the network’s immense power and a revolt against the fundamental inscrutability of that power.

Frustration with that reality has been building for some time now, as media organizations have come to realize that social is the new search — and so they are now just as beholden to [company]Twitter[/company] and [company]Facebook[/company] as they once were to [company]Google[/company], and the new bosses are just as opaque as the old one.

You can see that frustration when people like NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen start trying to game the algorithm by pretending that it’s a personal update instead of a blog post, using words like “congratulations,” etc. Or when Facebook product manager Mike Hudack writes about how the news business has turned to crap, and is quickly besieged by media types who claim his company is to blame.

Media companies have lost control

Liz Heron told the ONA that trying to game the algorithm doesn’t work, and that the only real secret to getting lots of interaction from Facebook for your content is to create and post great content (this was always Google’s argument as well). But what is great content? That’s the existential problem media companies are wrestling with: is it clickbait that drives people to share, or is it in-depth analysis of important topics? And how do we know when we are succeeding?

Part of what makes Facebook hard to figure out as a platform for news or content of any kind is that it’s a moving target. John Herrman at The Awl looked at the top publishers on Facebook as ranked by Newswhip, which tracks the most-shared content, and — depending on how you look at the future of online media — the results were more than a little depressing.

While BuzzFeed and its viral content have been seen for some time as the king of Facebook sharing, Newswhip results show that it has been eclipsed by a BuzzFeed clone called PlayBuzz, a site founded by the son of the former Israeli prime minister that relies heavily on user-generated content, and especially quizzes. In a recent month, according to The Awl post, nine out of the top 10 most-shared posts consisted of either quizzes or fake news reports. As Herrman put it:

What can Publishers Learn From This? A literal interpretation: SUBLIMATE YOUR IDENTITY ENTIRELY, EVERY MONTH, because nothing else works, and the next PlayBuzz or Viral Nova could appear tomorrow and just totally house you out of nowhere.

In a post responding to some of the fears expressed at the ONA meeting and elsewhere about Facebook’s control, David Higgerson — digital publishing director at Trinity Mirror in the UK — wrote a post arguing that media companies need to “get over their fear” of the social network and figure out how to use it to broaden their reach and engage with new audiences in new ways. “Our job as journalists is to be part of that community and give people the content they want,” he said.

It’s not your friend, it’s just a tool

Higgerson is right, of course. If you believe in the principle that former Reuters blogger Felix Salmon and his new boss at Fusion, Margarita Noriega, have described as “promiscuous media” — the idea that content, including journalism, needs to be created and distributed through multiple platforms if it is to be effective — then ignoring Facebook is unwise, and possibly fatal.

News Corp. executive Raju Narisetti made a good point in a response to Higgerson’s argument, however, which is that by giving content to Facebook you are ultimately helping Facebook as much or more than you are helping yourself. How much value are they getting out of that relationship and how much of that is value that you could or should be capturing yourself?

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The bottom line is that Facebook is a corporation that ultimately has its own interests at heart, not those of the media industry or the journalistic community. To the extent that news organizations generate content that improves engagement on Facebook or generates data, then it will promote that content. If that stops working, then it will down-rank that content without a moment’s hesitation.

There’s no better example of the dual nature of Facebook than the “social reader” experiments of 2012, when newspapers like The Guardian and the Washington Post created Facebook apps that allowed users to read their news on the site. At first, those apps generated huge increases in traffic — until Facebook changed its mind about promoting them, at which point they fell off the edge of the earth.

Facebook may be cozying up to journalists and news organizations, because it sees their content as having value in attracting and keeping readers, but that is its only purpose. And anyone doing business with the network should keep that in mind at all times, just as the frog should have kept the scorpion’s true nature in mind in the old fable. Ultimately, it is a tool — one that can cut both ways.

There’s been a lot of discussion in the media-sphere lately about the risks and rewards of Facebook for media companies and publishers of all kinds — a debate that was reignited at the recent Online News Association conference, where former New York Times social-media editor Liz Heron was put on the hot seat about Facebook’s impenetrable algorithm and its effect on the news business. It was simultaneously an admission of the network’s immense power and a revolt against the fundamental inscrutability of that power.

Frustration with that reality has been building for some time now, as media organizations have come to realize that social is the new search — and so they are now just as beholden to Twitter and Facebook as they once were to Google, and the new bosses are just as opaque as the old one.

You can see that frustration when people like NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen start trying to game the algorithm by pretending that it’s a personal update instead of a blog post, using words like “congratulations,” etc. Or when Facebook product manager Mike Hudack writes about how the news business has turned to crap, and is quickly besieged by media types who claim his company is to blame.

Note: This was originally published at Gigaom, where I was a senior writer from 2010 to 2015. The site still exists, but the archive has been taken down.

Continue reading “A tip for media companies: Facebook isn’t your enemy, but it’s not your friend either”

One of the most famous free-speech cases in U.S. history, the one that allowed publishers to live without fear of being bankrupted by a libel or defamation suit, involved a newspaper — namely the New York Times, which was sued in 1964 by an Alabama legislator named Sullivan. But any protection free speech gets in the future is more likely to come from [company]Twitter[/company], [company]Facebook[/company] and [company]Google[/company] than it is from the Times, according to a recent essay in the Harvard Law Review.

Marvin Ammori, an American lawyer who specializes in net neutrality law, wrote about where free speech legislation stands now in the June issue of the magazine, and made the case that social platforms are far more important than the New York Times is now — and in fact are probably more important than the paper was even at the time of its landmark case.

In the next decade, if the Supreme Court hands down a landmark decision about freedom of expression, it is more likely that one of the parties in the case will be Google or Twitter than that it will be the New York Times. Traditional media organizations are no longer the only place to find news or make political arguments.

How strong is their commitment?

The rise of social media, Ammori argues, has created a world where freedom of the press “means freedom not just for an institutional press, but freedom for all of us.” Those platforms have created what Harvard’s Yochai Benkler — who testified in the case against document-leaker Chelsea Manning — has called “the networked fourth estate” or the networked public sphere, one that allows journalistic speech to occur anywhere, at any time.

In terms of their reach, platforms like YouTube and Facebook and even Twitter dwarf the New York Times, Ammori argues — YouTube alone gets as many unique visitors in a day as the New York Times gets in a month. This says nothing about the quality of the content they are consuming, of course, but Ammori’s point is that when Google makes decisions about whether to take down a video like The Innocence of Muslims, it has far-reaching implications.

But are these new stewards of free speech as committed to that principle as the Times and its ilk were? My colleague Jeff Roberts raised that question in a recent post, and some of the legal experts he spoke to weren’t sure of the answer. But Ammori argues that for Twitter and Google at least, a commitment to those ideals is baked into their DNA.

Twitter’s Lee speaks about his company’s founders as one would speak of intrepid newspaper owners: ‘Our legal team’s conceptualization of speech policies and practices emanate[s] straight from the idealism of our founders — that this would be a platform for free expression, a way for people to disseminate their ideas in the modern age. We’re here in some sense to implement that vision.’

Trying to protect free speech globally

Each of the major platforms has been tested in various ways, Ammori notes, from Google’s attempts to resist censorship in China several years ago to Twitter’s struggles with the laws of other countries in which it operates — including France’s desire to prosecute anti-Semitism and homophobia and other forms of hate speech, and the crackdown on free speech in places like Turkey and Ukraine.

In fact, one of the biggest differences between the current free-speech landscape and the one that existed for the New York Times in 1964, Ammori says, is the fact that companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook are having to try and blend U.S. free-speech principles with laws in other countries. That has driven Twitter, for example, to implement a kind of localized censorship where tweets can be hidden from users inside a specific country.

Strictly speaking, of course, the lawyers who litigated Sullivan also faced such a world. But they did not need to be constantly aware of it. In 1964, the New York Times barely operated in Alabama, with only a few hundred subscribers. Today, fewer than half of leading tech companies’ users are within the United States. Their users come from dozens of countries and regions, each with different national and subnational laws, with different cultures, histories, and local community standards.

One thing that Ammori mentions in his essay but doesn’t really flesh out is how much the companies he talks about — including Tumblr, WordPress and others — make decisions based on their own interests, and in effect restrict speech far more than they are required to by law. Facebook in particular routinely removes content that the site has decided might offend its users or advertisers, and it rarely says how it arrived at that decision.

Free speech has been privatized

This isn’t just an academic issue — removing that content, as Facebook has done with images related to the war in Syria, can have very real effects on what we as a society know about important issues, as the investigative blogger Brown Moses has pointed out. Even the algorithmic filtering that Facebook does can have a real impact on what we know about certain events, as sociologist Zeynep Tufekci argued in the wake of the riots in Ferguson. Said Ammori:

Companies generally forbid sharing speech that is illegal and unprotected (such as defamatory comments or copyright-infringing videos), but they also prohibit some content that would be fully protected under the First Amendment. For example, Facebook’s terms state: ‘You will not post content that: is hate speech, threatening, or pornographic; incites violence; or contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.’ The First Amendment would protect, with limited exceptions, all this content.

As free-speech advocates like Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation have pointed out a number of times, the current structure of the social web means that we have essentially given our free-speech rights to a collection of private corporations, who are not bound by the First Amendment. Their commitment to freedom may or may not be sincere, but in the end we get the version of freedom that they choose to provide — and can justify to their shareholders.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / Aaron Amat and Pond5/ Cienpies

Warning: This post may contain statements that sound like an old person lecturing younger readers about how things were better back in the day. I’d like to apologize for that in advance.

Unless you’ve been holed up in a bunker somewhere, you’ve probably heard about Ello, the new social network/platform/website that launched recently and has swept through the social web like a whirlwind. You may even have read one of the dozens of blog posts and news articles about it, including some criticizing its founders for taking venture capital investment after posting a manifesto about the need for freedom, and some that seem to see it as just the latest flash-in-the-pan.

Some or even all of those views may be true. For what it’s worth, the founders of the site — Paul Budnitz and Todd Berger — have told my colleague Carmel DeAmicis and others that pressure to monetize Ello won’t be a problem, despite having raised almost half a million dollars from venture investors, something that blogger Andy Baio of Waxy.org was the first to notice.

A few of the site’s venture backers have also given interviews in which they say they are long-term investors who are primarily interested in the health of the site and building a useful service, not in cashing out as quickly as possible. So perhaps there is a chance that Ello won’t become over-run with banner ads or sponsored posts (the founders say they plan to use a freemium model).

It’s not you, Facebook, it’s me

Business models aside, I’ve been kind of fascinated by Ello since it launched, in part because it seemed to attract a substantial group of users in my social network over a very short space of time — much more so than other networks like App.net, a previous attempt at replacing Twitter with a more open platform. Why is that? I think my friend Om put his finger on it when he said that this frenzy of interest says more about people’s dissatisfaction with the current networks than it does about Ello.

The obsessive coverage of Ello is less about Ello. Instead it really is about our growing dissatisfaction with the state of social networks.

That seems even more likely to be the case because Ello is so difficult to use, and so frustratingly designed: for a site that was founded by artists and designers, and one that seems to have appealed to many early tech adopters and developers, it can be annoying in dozens of small ways. The search function doesn’t really work, you can’t find comment threads very easily — even ones you have participated in — and it periodically just refuses to do something no matter how hard you try.

So why on earth would anyone want to use this new thing? The easy answer is that it’s new, but I think it also fills a kind of yawning void in some users — a void that has been created by a number of factors, including the corporatization not just of Facebook and Twitter but the entire social web. The tools we used to love for their freedom seem more and more constrained — and not designed for us, but for advertisers.

A chance to start over again

As I said when Ello first arrived, I kind of like the fact that it’s hard to use and doesn’t really work properly most of the time, and is filled with a lot of weirdos and cranks. It reminds me of when blogs were new — before they became giant media entities that had to toe the bottom line — or when Twitter had just launched and didn’t work most of the time, and the only people who used it were geeks and nerds.

I remember something that Microsoft researcher danah boyd said when Chatroulette first came out, and people were complaining about how it seemed to be just random people displaying their genitals to strangers — which was undoubtedly true. But boyd said that despite all that, she kind of liked it because it was so anarchic and weird, and reminded her of when the whole web was that way.

I feel the same about Twitter and Facebook — although Facebook has always been a much more tightly-controlled experience, even before it started selling ads and Mark Zuckerberg became a billionaire. But Twitter seems so grown up now, partnering with TV networks and showing you content you may not even want, that it just doesn’t seem the same.

One of the fascinating things about Twitter when it was new was that literally no one had any clue what it was, or what it was good for (if anything) or what it would become, and that includes the founders of the company, as my friend Nick Bilton has chronicled in his book Hatching Twitter. And out of that chaos came something amazing, something that succeeded almost in spite of itself.

New things make us question assumptions

That’s the kind of feeling I get from Ello: not so much that it shows signs of being something hugely successful, but that it’s such a raw, experimental network at this point that it could become anything — or nothing. And that’s interesting. It makes it hard to use, but there’s a sense of freedom and possibility as well.

Clay Shirky, a media theorist and cultural anthropologist, has written about how Ello seems to be trying to find a happy medium between a social network focused mostly on conversation and one focused mostly on blog-style writing. And sociologist Nathan Jurgenson has said one of the most interesting things about Ello is the features that aren’t there, such as “likes” (which the founders have said they excluded deliberately).

As Jurgenson suggested in one of his posts, one of the good things about having a brand new network with new features and new requirements — especially one where you can’t just connect with Twitter and duplicate your existing social graph — is that you have to start from scratch. And maybe by doing so, you reconsider some of the decisions you made on other networks, whether it’s who to follow, or what you choose to share, or even how to behave.

I love these moments of new social media when conversation explodes, moved to imagine how social media can be different, questioning core assumptions instead of just fretting and complaining -all before this paint even dries. That complaining is important, and we’ve done some righteous complaining about Ello already, but I’m embracing this brief, and especially pronounced, moment of imagination.

Will Ello still exist or be useful to large numbers of people a year or two from now? Who knows. I certainly don’t; I thought Twitter would disappear in a matter of months, and look where it is now. But new things like Ello are interesting — if only because they force us to think about how the social web works, and provide a tantalizing glimpse of what might be possible if they worked differently.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Amenic181 and Flickr / Jack Dorsey

Just over a year ago, a Dutch news site called De Correspondent made a fairly spectacular debut — raising more than $1.7 million from about 20,000 people, in what is still one of the world’s most successful journalistic crowdfunding efforts. And how is the site doing now? As it turns out, it is not only doing well financially but along the way it has learned a number of important lessons that other media outlets, both traditional and digital, could stand to learn from.

De Correspondent co-founder Ernst-Jan Pfauth — a former digital journalist with Dutch media entity NRC — recently published an update on Medium about the site’s progress, and said it has been able to convert over half of its initial supporters into regular subscribers. That means it now has almost 30,000 paying customers who contribute $76 a year, or about $2 million.

That’s a fairly amazing amount, considering De Correspondent is a brand new entity — and it’s even more incredible when you consider that the Netherlands only has a population of about 17 million, meaning De Correspondent has attracted a relatively large proportion of the potential audience for digital news in that country.

As I noted when I first wrote about it, the site had a head start in the sense that Pfauth and his co-founder Rob Wijnberg were both widely-known journalists for a popular media outlet, and they also got a lot of TV coverage when they made their crowdfunding appeal. But still, raising $2 million is a notable achievement.

But more than just raising money, De Correspondent has also tried hard to rethink how the news and journalism business works, and how the relationship of a media entity with its readers needs to change, and that’s a big part of what makes it different, as Pfauth describes in his Medium post. Among the key differences are:

Telling readers where the money goes: This is something that succcessful crowdfunding projects often do, but it’s rare for media companies — De Correspondent didn’t just say thank you for the money they raised, they wrote detailed reports for their readers on where the funding was being used and why. It’s a smart way of helping to build trust with your audience, which in turn makes them feel better about contributing.

Talking about your mistakes: The site has freely discussed what it is not doing well, and how it needs to improve — for example, Pfauth has written about how even though the news outlet is digital only and is trying to break the newspaper mold, it still falls into the habit of publishing stories on a predictable schedule instead of figuring out what readers need and giving it to them at a time and in a way that makes sense for them, not for the site or its traditional publishing schedule.

Pfauth and some of the site’s editors and writers also pledged to become more diverse in the types of stories they cover, and more diverse in terms of the people they get to cover those stories — and to broaden the methods they use for storytelling, instead of lapsing back into the tried-and-true newspaper model.

This kind of soul-searching is not common in traditional media, needless to say. It certainly didn’t emerge from the New York Times when that paper announced it was shutting down its NYT Opinion app and laying off 100 editorial staff, nor did any of that play a role in the paper’s internal innovation report.

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Treating your readers like partners: Apart from its openness about finances, or its willingness to admit its mistakes, one of the most compelling things that De Correspondent has done — and in fact the reason why it is committed to those other two things — is to connect readers directly to the writers who work for the site, in as many ways as possible. This is exactly the kind of thing I tried to describe in a post about the NYT’s mobile woes. As Pfauth puts it:

At De Correspondent, we believe that journalists should work together with readers, since every reader is an expert at something. And 3,000 teachers know more than just one education correspondent. That’s why we see our journalists as conversation leaders and our members as contributing experts.

Notice the language: De Correspondent doesn’t have readers or users, it has members. And it doesn’t have comments, it has conversations — ones its journalists are expected to take part in and lead — and it doesn’t have commenters, it has contributing experts. All of those things make a powerful statement about how De Correspondent sees the relationship between its journalism and the people it serves, namely the people formerly known as the audience. Words to live by.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr / Christian Scholz

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange doesn’t normally give a lot of interviews from his sanctuary in the Ecuadorian embassy in London — but when he is promoting a new book, exceptions can be made. So the Australian freedom-of-information activist did one of Reddit’s trademark “Ask Me Anything” interviews about some of the topics he writes about in the book, including Google chairman Eric Schmidt, the future of Bitcoin and the terrorist group ISIS. What follows is a heavily condensed version of that interview.

On the potential of decentralized data protocols like Bitcoin:

Bitcoin is an extremely important innovation, but not in the way most people think. Bitcoin’s real innovation is a globally verifiable proof publishing at a certain time. The whole system is built on that concept and many other systems can also be built on it. The blockchain nails down history, breaking Orwell’s dictum of “He who controls the present controls the past and he who controls the past controls the future.”

On Bitcoin’s long-term value as a currency:

Here’s footnote 185 [from Assange’s book]: On the day of the conversation [with Eric Schmidt], Bitcoin had risen above the US dollar and reached price parity with the Euro. By early 2014 it had risen to over $1,000, before falling to $430 as other Bitcoin-derived competing crypto-currencies started to take off. WikiLeaks’ strategic investments in the currency saw more than 8,000 percent return in three years, seeing us through the extralegal US banking blockade.

Google and its chairman Eric Schmidt

On what Google could be doing to fight surveillance culture:

I think it is misguided to be looking to Google to help get us out of this mess. In large part, Google has us in this mess. The company’s business model is based on sucking private data out of parts of human community that have never before been subject to monitoring, and turning that into a profit. I do not think it is wise to try to “reform” something which, from first premises, is beyond reform.

On Assange’s personal relationship with Eric Schmidt:

Eric Schmidt is personally likeable in the sense that most billionaires are. You can’t get there without making friends. Obama’s also likable, but runs an extrajudicial kill list each tuesday and has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all previous presidents combined. The problem with Google, as in the US administration is not the personalities. It is the structure, the business model and social and ideological matrix in which its decision makers are embedded.

On what countries like Greece should do in dealing with Google:

Your recognition of that visit and what it means is exactly what I was hoping for–simply that people see Google for what it is and when its representatives turn up in Greece or elsewhere they are not falsely perceived to be kindly wizards with hats stuffed with cash but rather understood in the same way that, say, an information pied piper from SAIC might be.

On ISIS and corporate censorship

On terrorist networks like ISIS and what the U.S. should do:

People who argue that ISIS poses a threat to our democracies are out to lunch. ISIS is an ugly phenomenon, but it’s largely the consequence of one blunder after another by the US and its allies in the region, who shouldn’t have been meddling there in the first place. If ISIS poses a threat to anyone, it is to countries in the region, and they are the appropriate parties to address it. If the US and its allies want to reduce “terror” in the region – as Noam Chomsky says – they need to stop participating in it.

On the movie about him, The Fifth Estate:

It is an interesting experience having a $60m attack on your reputation distributed by Disney. It even had a scene in it showing us helping the Iranians explode a nuke until we leaked the script and attacked the producers. The audience could see it was not well intentioned and turned against it. Some of my friends went to see the film, and this was their reaction: We also released our own movie, Mediastan, to compete with the launch of the film. It did well!

On allegations of censorship on Reddit following GamerGate:

It’s pathetic. But censorship by companies controlling privatized political space is now almost a norm. Facebook is implementing its own “laws” for social behavior and politics. Even Twitter has now folded; censoring for example, leaks about the New Zealand prime minister just this week and some time ago banning Anonymous Sweden after a request from that country. High volume publication+control of publication by powerful organisations = censorship, all the time. We have to fight to create new networks of freedom. The old and powerful always become corrupt.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user espenmoe

On a recent visit to New York, I had a chance to catch up with some of that city’s new-media stars, including BuzzFeed, Quartz, VICE Media, Gawker and Tumblr. I’ve already written about one of my takeaways from that trip: namely, how some or all of those companies are looking at what they do through a different lens than many traditional outlets, by seeing their journalism as a service — that is, part of a two-way relationship with readers — rather than just the distribution of content.

This post is more of a round-up of what is happening at each of those companies, as they expand into new areas, which all of them are doing. In fact, my other major takeaway was just how rapidly some of them are growing — Quartz and The Wire just moved into a new space in January and have almost outgrown it, Gawker is moving into a new building next year, and Tumblr is taking over a third floor.

I should point out that my focus on these companies doesn’t mean they are the only ones worth watching in new media, by any stretch. There are dozens of other interesting startups and players both in NYC and elsewhere, including Circa (which just rolled out an upgrade) and NBC’s Breaking News — which recently launched an interesting experiment in location-based news — as well as Business Insider, Vox and solo operations like The Daily Dish and The Information.

Continue reading “New York roundup”

As my colleague Laura Owen has reported, Authors United — a group of writers who are upset at the tactics Amazon is using to negotiate with the French publisher Hachette — has posted a letter to the company’s board of directors, arguing that the online retailer is being unfair to authors. Among other things, the group says Amazon is making a mistake by treating books like any other consumer product.

In fact, in a somewhat bizarre turn of events for a group that is supposedly protesting Amazon’s methods — the refusal to allow advance orders of Hachette books, the removal of some books from the search index, and so on — Authors United makes an odd admission: it agrees Amazon “has every right to refuse to sell consumer goods in response to a pricing disagreement with a wholesaler.”

But wait — isn’t that exactly what Amazon is doing with Hachette, by using a variety of retailing tactics to send a message to the publisher that it is charging too much for its books and/or not giving Amazon enough of the proceeds? It sure is.

So then how could the authors’ group claim that Amazon shouldn’t be able to do the same thing with Hachette that it does with every other product? Simple: because Authors United argues that books are not a consumer good like any other. Books exist in a special category, and that category of products should not be open to traditional negotiating tactics used by retailers. As the letter says:

Amazon has every right to refuse to sell consumer goods in response to a pricing disagreement with a wholesaler. We all appreciate discounted razor blades and cheaper shoes. But books are not consumer goods. Books cannot be written more cheaply, nor can authors be outsourced to China. Books are not toasters or televisions. Each book is the unique, quirky creation of a lonely, intense, and often expensive struggle on the part of a single individual.

Do books belong in a special category?

So that’s the case in a nutshell — books are not like razor blades or shoes, or toasters or televisions. They can’t be produced more cheaply, and therefore by extension prices for books must not fall but should only rise, because that’s what lonely and intense writers require for their livelihood. And authors are better than people who make toasters or televisions, or who work in China.

As with most arguments related to Amazon’s behavior, the Authors United letter plays on a host of emotionally-loaded assumptions about the book business (and it is a business, although perhaps not a very good one). It implies that all authors are starving and intense loners, who write because their muse compels them to, and therefore shouldn’t be used as pawns in Amazon’s chess game with Hachette or any other publisher. Or as author JA Konrath puts it:

We’re special snowflakes, unique and quirky, and the lonely, intense struggle we endure for the sake of ART is much more difficult than coal mining or waitressing or mechanical engineering or brain surgery or conservationism or rocket science.

And yet, despite this image of writers as lonely, starving artists in a garret somewhere, huge quantities of books are sold every year that are clearly based on cold, calculated marketing decisions made by either authors or publishers. Most aren’t even remotely unique, quirky or created by intense individuals struggling to follow their inner voice. So maybe it should be okay for Amazon to fiddle with that supply chain, but not with the one that applies to “real” books.

Clearly, some books play a critical role in society — but then so does music, and no one got upset when Apple started dictating prices and terms to the major record labels, just as Amazon is doing to the big publishers. Here’s Konrath again: “I don’t believe I’m owed a living, or that what I do is particularly important. I’m not curing cancer. I’m not even saving whales. In fact, I’m a damn lucky son of a bitch who gets to make a living doing what I love.”

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Thinkstock / Vasabii and Thinkstock / Worac

Not that long ago, it looked as though Facebook might be softening its previous stance on real names, with comments from CEO Mark Zuckerberg that suggested he saw the value of anonymity in some cases — and at the same time, the social network has expanded the number of gender-related selections users have to choose from. Despite those moves, however, some gay and transgender users say the site is forcing them to use their birth names or have their pages blocked.

According to the website Queerty, the network has been ordering gay users who registered using their drag personas to either set up a fan page or change to their legal name, and has been asking them to send copies of birth certificates and driver’s licenses to verify their identity. Queerty said it was alerted to the crackdown by Sister Roma, the drag persona of a gay man named Michael Williams, who has been forced to change his account to his given name.

What’s odd about the move is that Facebook put together a significant PR campaign earlier this year to promote the fact that it had changed the gender-related menu choices for users, offering more than 50 options for the gay and transgendered — something it said was done after much consultation with gay and transgender advocates. In one article, a trans Facebook engineer named Brielle Harrison even talked about how important this option was for people like herself.

Taylor Hatmaker at The Daily Dot says reports have been emerging from a number of gay communities that other users who registered under drag personas like Sister Roma are also being forced to change their names or risk losing their pages. Although setting up a fan page is an option, Hatmaker — who is gay — points out that this isn’t appropriate for many users, and that forcing them to do so or risk being shut out of Facebook altogether is unfair:

Presumably, Facebook wants to shoehorn these personal identities into Pages, like the ones brands and celebrities use. But for queer users more interested in keeping up with friends and building community than collecting followers, it’s an extremely poor fit. Facebook is making an implicit judgment call here, operating off of the hunch that an account in question is not the “true” identity of the user, which is an inappropriate position to begin with.

As Hatmaker and others like ZDNet columnist Violet Blue have noted, pseudonymity is not just a convenience for many gay and transgender users, but is something they are in many cases compelled to use because of threats of violence, or because revealing their identity could put their jobs at risk. Forcing them to use legal names essentially means forcing them not to use Facebook.

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As Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation pointed out during a discussion of the topic on Twitter, the action against Sister Roma and others may not be a sign that Facebook is actively targeting gay men or drag queens, but could be a result of complaints from those who do want to target those individuals, which Facebook then has to pursue. In any case, she says, the policy is unwise.

Facebook and Google+ were both involved in a “real names” crackdown several years ago, saying their networks were designed for real identities and that pseudonyms made bad behavior more likely to occur. Google has since given up on its real-name policy for Google+, but it seems Facebook is still pursuing that goal — even though it may drive some users away.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Andrea Michele Piacquadio

Even as The Guardian has expanded its international readership dramatically over the past few years, critics have slammed the British news outlet for being a perennial money-loser, with no viable business model apart from the funding it receives via the Scott Trust. As it turns out, that is a pretty viable business model, but now the paper is expanding beyond that by launching a major new live-events strategy and a membership-driven revenue model — and there is a lot to like about that approach as opposed to the paywall model other papers have chosen.

As described in a piece by editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger on Wednesday, the new focus on live events at the Guardian (please see disclosure below) begins with the renovation of a massive former railway structure that’s located near the paper’s office in Kings Cross, which the newspaper company is turning into a kind of convention center or conference venue.

This ambitious effort started with a kind of open-house for readers that the paper put on in 2012, Rusbridger says, in which it opened its headquarters up and spent the weekend having conversations about the future of journalism and society, along with food and music and other entertainment. That weekend convinced the Guardian that a membership-based strategy was a crucial part of its future, he says:

The prospect of being part of the debates, ideas and conversations we could start and host was immensely appealing. Most readers said they would happily contribute money to the ’cause’ of the Guardian – but an overwhelming majority also wanted the journalism to be free, so that it could reach the maximum possible audience. A fair number were happy to be subscribers, but the most hands shot up when asked if they would like to be ‘members.’

Friends, partners and patrons

And so, the paper has launched a formal membership model: without paying anything, readers known as “friends” get access to all of the paper’s journalism online, and can buy tickets to Guardian live events. If they become a “partner,” for $24 a month, they get a discount on tickets as well as the ability to book their tickets in advance and watch livestreams of the events. And for $97 a month they can become a “patron,” and get special access to private events and “unique experiences” not open to other members.

The Guardian isn’t the only newspaper to offer a form of membership, with different benefits based on how much they contribute: the Wall Street Journal offers something called WSJ+ to paying subscribers, which gives them access to invitation-only talks by experts on various topics, as well as special events like museum tours, or discounts on a round of golf at a private course. The New York Times also offers something called “Premier,” which gives subscribers who pay extra access to special features, including behind-the-scenes interviews with journalists.

As Ken Doctor notes in a post at the Nieman Lab blog, a number of media companies are also investing heavily in live events, since some success stories such as Atlantic Media’s dramatic turnaround have shown that events can be a significant draw for readers, and can generate additional revenue.

But what makes The Guardian‘s approach a bit different, I think, is the sheer scale of what they are talking about, and how the events tie together with the membership model. It’s not just one or two events — the British paper is spending a large sum to renovate the former Midland Goods Shed because it plans to host dozens of daily or weekly events, from the small to the large. In a sense, it is going into the conference business in a big way. Is that risky? Sure it is.

Deepening the relationship with readers

What those live events accomplish, as Rusbridger notes when talking about the open-house weekend, is that they deepen and extend the relationship with readers, a relationship that the Guardian editor notes is the most important thing the paper has — more important than its relationship with advertisers, and certainly more important than a relationship with shareholders. As he puts it:

The Guardian and our Sunday title the Observer have no proprietor: the only relationship our journalists have is with our readers. We felt we had a real possibility of deepening the intense bond between the producers and consumers of what we do.

The bottom line is that this relationship with readers is the core of whatever value newspapers have in this digital age — it’s not their ability to print things on paper, or drop objects off at your house. It’s their status as a trusted source of information and content that is relevant to you and your life. And the more they get to know you, the more valuable that relationship becomes.

I’ve written a number of times before about membership-based models like the ones at Talking Points Memo and Techdirt, and how the best of those models replicates what is happening in the music industry: namely, a focus on a deep relationship with fans, and deriving revenue from that instead of focusing on selling access to a specific unit of content or a specific physical product. I think the Guardian is smart to dive into that model in a big way.

Disclosure: Guardian News & Media is an investor in the parent company of Gigaom. Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Thinkstock / Digital Vision

It’s more a cruel coincidence than outright irony, but Reddit finds itself this week at the confluence of two streams, and both of them sum up the site in different ways — one pointing towards the past, and one towards the future. At the same time that the site has come under fire for its role in distributing stolen nude photos of celebrities, it is also rumored to be working on a venture financing round that could value the company at more than half a billion dollars. Will Reddit’s desire for funding trump its legendary commitment to free speech?

Reddit wasn’t actively involved in the hacking of iCloud accounts that led to the publication of hundreds of nude photos of celebrities such as actress Jennifer Lawrence and model Kate Upton, but the site quickly created a forum or sub-Reddit devoted to the pictures — or rather, users of the site did, since one of the unique things about Reddit is that users can create any kind of forum they wish and appoint themselves moderators of it without the company’s approval.

Reddit is a microcosm of the wider Internet. All the good and horrible stuff that happens there happens elsewhere too.

— Alex Fitzpatrick (@AlexJamesFitz) September 8, 2014

Open government or failed state?

The site — which is majority owned by Advance Publications, the parent company of Conde Nast, who bought it in 2006 and spun it off in 2012 — has since removed the sub-Reddit known as The Fappening, and CEO Yishan Wong made a public statement about the move, in which he tried to make it clear what Reddit would do in similar cases. Unfortunately, his comments (both in a public blog post and in a subsequent posting on Reddit itself) seemed to make the situation worse, or at least more confusing. In his blog post, Wong said:

[blockquote person=”” attribution=””]We understand the harm that misusing our site does to the victims of this theft, and we deeply sympathize. Having said that, we are unlikely to make changes to our existing site content policies in response to this specific event. The reason is because we consider ourselves not just a company running a website where one can post links and discuss them, but the government of a new type of community. [/blockquote]

Many interpreted this as meaning Reddit would let any kind of content appear on the site, including violent pornography and other deviant or repulsive behavior, unless that content involved a copyright issue or had to do with celebrities who might launch a lawsuit. The Verge said that if Wong’s analogy to a government was to be taken at face value, then the site would have to be considered “a failed state,” since it allowed its residents to be subjected to all manner of violent imagery and abuse without taking action.

Free speech is a double-edged sword

There’s no question that Reddit is an anarchic environment, in much the same way that its predecessor 4chan is. The Awl published a list of sub-Reddits that few people would be prepared to discuss in normal social circles, including one devoted to bestiality, another dedicated to photos of attractive-looking female corpses, and so on. And yet, it is also responsible for a number of positive things as well (Redditors recently found someone’s missing father), and is seen by many as a force for good rather than evil.

empathy is hard. reddit is a rare place online where there are people actively thinking about how to express it and give more of it.

— joanne mcneil (@jomc) September 8, 2014

Reddit has been down this particular road a number of times already, including a public outcry involving a moderator known as Violentacrez, who ran a sub-Reddit devoted to pictures of women taken without their permission. After he was outed by Gawker — or “doxxed,” as a number of online communities call it when someone’s identity is revealed without their permission — the site removed him as moderator and banned the sub-Reddit. But others continue to be hosted that are just as bad, if not worse.

And yet, the site’s commitment to freedom of speech lies deep in its DNA, as co-founder Alexis Ohanian pointed out in a post earlier this year about his investment in Secret — an anonymous app that has also been criticized for the kind of abusive behavior it allegedly encourages in users, and for what some critics say is a lack of safeguards or protection for those who are targeted by abusers. At the time, Ohanian said:

[blockquote person=”” attribution=””]Like all tools, this new publishing technology comes down to how we as individuals use it, but I’m heartened by every post I see that allows someone to share something about themselves that they’d never have been able to with their name attached… anonymity enables us to be truly honest, creative, and open.[/blockquote]

Can Reddit bridge the gap?

The challenge for Reddit now is: How does it retain its commitment to such free-speech principles while it is trying to raise money from a group of what could be nervous or conservative venture funds? Twitter has also wrestled with its early commitment to being the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party,” and its desire to grow and generate revenue for its public shareholders has led to a form of quasi-censorship in which certain tweets and accounts are banned or hidden from users at the request of governments. But Twitter’s challenges are like a day at the beach compared with Reddit’s.

Remaining committed to free speech is hard enough when the speech you are trying to protect is violent or homophobic or repulsive in a number of other ways, but it becomes exponentially more difficult when you have investors with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line breathing down your neck. Will Reddit start to water down its commitment, in the hope that it can bridge those two divides without losing its soul? Or will it be forced to mimic Facebook, which routinely removes photos of women breast-feeding and never says why?

4chan founder Chris “Moot” Poole has talked about his commitment to free speech and the value of anonymous behavior, and also about how he never really seriously considered raising outside funding because he assumed the content of the site would make that impossible. Reddit is about to try and thread that particular needle, and what the site will ultimately look like after that process is anyone’s guess.

When it comes to content — personal or professional — [company]Facebook[/company] is a classic double-edged sword: it has such incredible reach that you almost have to use it, and it can drive huge amounts of traffic to your content. But at the same time it is a classic walled garden, run by a black-box algorithm that uplifts or down-ranks content for reasons that are completely unknown to anyone outside of the company’s ranks of developers. So how do you work with it, and not give all the power over your content to a proprietary platform?

Blogging and RSS pioneer Dave Winer has one potential solution: work with Facebook, but make sure the blog or site you control remains primary. Winer’s latest blogging tool posts simultaneously to Facebook and a self-hosted blog — and unlike other tools that do this, any changes or updates to the blog version are automatically reflected in the Facebook version as well. That way bloggers and other content creators can take advantage of the strengths of Facebook while still maintaining ultimate control over their work and its distribution.

Especially for media companies, Winer said in an interview, trying to pretend that Facebook doesn’t exist doesn’t really make sense, and isn’t going to work anyway — so as he described in a post, better to figure out ways to use the platform to broaden your reach, but do so in ways that don’t trap your content. That way Facebook wins, but so do you. As he put it to me in our interview:

[blockquote person=”” attribution=””]If you’d asked me whether I thought there should be a Facebook I would have said no, but now they have a billion users or whatever, and at some point you have to reset your thinking, you can’t just say I wish they weren’t there. Any software shipped now exists in a context where Facebook also exists, and to pretend that it doesn’t is to make your world very small.[/blockquote]

Facebook wins, but so can you

What’s particularly interesting about the new tool for cross-posting and updating Facebook posts, Winer said, is that Facebook reached out to him rather than the other way around — a sign that the company is trying to become more open. The contact came from Doug Purdy, a senior manager in charge of Facebook’s API and developer relations who worked at Microsoft in the late 1990s, when Winer was collaborating closely with the software giant.

As it turned out, even Facebook wasn’t aware of how open its API actually was: Winer said that any writing and posting tool should be able to update in both places at once, and the Facebook API documentation specifically said that wasn’t possible — but when Purdy looked into it, it actually was possible, but the documentation hadn’t been updated yet to reflect that.

[blockquote person=”” attribution=””]The way I see it, I’m sort of negotiating on behalf of the open web, asking them to make some concessions… and they are already more open than you think they are. That was the purpose of the tool I produced — it’s a demo, and the point was to show people this is not as limited as people think it is. And their API is incredible, it really is a thing of beauty.[/blockquote]

Supporting the “indie web”

Winer isn’t the only web veteran who has been stressing the importance of maintaining control over one’s content and supporting the open web. Union Square Ventures partner Fred Wilson wrote recently about the power of having a personal blog — which writers like Curbed founder Lockhart Steele and Gawker founding editor Elizabeth Spiers have returned to recently, and is something very different from using third-party proprietary platforms like Medium.

Online journalism veteran Dan Gillmor has also written about the importance of defending the open web, and the efforts of a group of developers and programmers focused on tools that help support what they call the “indie web.” These tools allow content creators to distribute their work everywhere and still maintain control — including one called Bridgy that pulls comments from social networks back into a user’s blog — and the philosophy is to “publish once and syndicate elsewhere.”

Why is this so important? Because as Gillmor put it in his post: “when we use centralized services like social media sites… we are handing over ultimate control to third parties that profit from our work, material that exists on their sites only as long as they allow.” And that’s not open at all.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Luis Santos