Weekend Read
A double feature this weekend: Over the past two weeks, newsrooms delivered stories about Nobel Prizes for fearless journalism to Facebook’s terrible fortnight, to publisher innovation around niche data to plummeting American trust in media. Bonus news: when Facebook went down this week, traffic to newsrooms went up.
I wrote this OpEd on the political donations of traditional and social media owners for the Press Gazette and why we need more transparency, while the LA Times announced it would hire a slew of social media storytellers as Gannett wrangles union woes. Frank McCourt just announced his ambitious new $250-million plans to fix social media and remake the way we share online. He earmarked $25 million to help develop a “Decentralized Social Networking Protocol” or DSNP, a new open-source, blockchain-enabled protocol for managing data on the internet. Don’t miss The Atlantic piece by Adrienne LaFrance, The Largest Autocracy on Earth.
No dust settling on this highway,
Heidi
Americans' Trust in Media Dips to Second Lowest on Record – Gallup
In all, 7% of U.S. adults say they have "a great deal" and 29% "a fair amount" of trust and confidence in newspapers, television, and radio news reporting -- which, combined, is four points above the 32% record low in 2016, amid the divisive presidential election campaign between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. In addition, 29% of the public currently registers "not very much" trust and 34% have "none at all."
Whistleblower accuses Facebook of misleading public and investors | FT
Don’t miss the 60 minutes interview.
When Facebook went down this week, traffic to news sites went up » Nieman
For a whopping five hours plus, people read news, according to data Chartbeat gave us this week from its thousands of publisher clients across 60 countries.. (And they went to Twitter; Chartbeat saw Twitter traffic up 72%. If Bad Art Friend had been published on the same day as the Facebook outage, Twitter would have literally exploded, presumably.)
At the peak of the outage — around 3 p.m. ET — net traffic to pages across the web was up by 38% compared to the same time the previous week, Chartbeat found. By the way, here’s how Chartbeat defines direct traffic and dark social, from CMO Jill Nicholson.
Nobel Peace Prize to Journalists, Highlighting Fight for Press Freedom – NYT
In an era of increasing authoritarianism and swirling misinformation, Maria Ressa and Dmitri A. Muratov, who lead independent news outlets in the Philippines and Russia, were honored for their work to hold leaders to account.
One of the founders of the independent newspaper founded in 1993 and jointly owned by Gorbachev, a banker, and the newspaper's staff, has seen six of its reporters killed under Putin. Mr. Muratov has been its editor in chief since 1995. Despite a continual barrage of harassment, threats, violence, and even murders, the newspaper has continued to publish.
Since its start, six of the newspaper’s journalists have been killed, the committee noted, citing Anna Politkovskaya, who wrote revealing articles about the war in Chechnya.
Frank McCourt Wants to Build a New Model for Social Media - WSJ
The real estate magnate’s Project Liberty is a $250 million effort to remake the ways we share information online. It bothers Frank McCourt, the billionaire real estate mogul and former Los Angeles Dodgers owner, that his data—his contacts and search history, his shopping preferences, and driving habits—is being harvested and used in ways he can’t control. “Big tech knows more about me than my wife, and I didn’t give them that permission,” he says over Zoom from his home in Wellington, Fla., where he lives with his wife Monica and their two young children.
The fact that a few powerful internet players are “hoarding and exploiting” the personal details of users is not only “inherently unfair,” Mr. McCourt argues, but also socially corrosive. He blames the rise in extremist views in the U.S. and around the world on social-media companies that prioritize “audience engagement” over the welfare of customers.
The plan includes $75 million to establish an interdisciplinary McCourt Institute to research and develop an ethical framework for new technology, in partnership with Georgetown University, his alma mater, and Sciences Po of Paris. Mr. McCourt has also promised $25 million to help develop a “Decentralized Social Networking Protocol” or DSNP, a new open-source, blockchain-enabled protocol for managing data on the internet.
The founder of Facebook’s CrowdTangle tool is leaving - The Verge
CrowdTangle has been at the heart of an internal Facebook debate about transparency
Did? or How AT&T helped build far-right One America News - Reuters
A Reuters review of court records shows the role AT&T played in creating and funding OAN, a network that continues to spread conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Research reveals millions in US political donations by media moguls - PressGazette
More transparency in donor transparency is needed.
Did Elon Musk, one of the biggest donors to Wikipedia, really give only $40,000 to politics and the DC machine in 2020-2021? Marc Benioff, the current owner of Time, active in homelessness issues in San Francisco, gave just $5,000 to his SalesForce PAC. His fellow tech giants – who control much of our information ecosystem – are similarly elusive. Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, gave but $15,000 in total over the past 20 months through his PACs Blue Origin and Amazon, while his net worth grew to near $200bn. Susan Wojcicki, a major donor to Wikipedia and CEO of YouTube, only donated $8,000 through Google Netpac.
That’s it? I found these figures wanting.
Facebook is having a Big Oil moment - Recode
As they’ve done with fossil fuels and tobacco in the past, lawmakers have set their sights on the social network.
At its best, Facebook’s products are a resource that has led to some good. (Connecting people online can be a powerful thing!) The company also produces an untold quantity of byproducts that lead to a lot of undesired effects. (Helping destroy democracy wasn’t exactly part of Mark Zuckerberg’s plan for world domination.) With nearly 3 billion users around the globe, Facebook isn’t going away anytime soon.
The Big Tobacco metaphor does a good job of framing Facebook’s products as unhealthy. The only problem with comparing the two is that you can pretty easily avoid cigarettes these days. But it’s actually quite difficult to spend a day on the internet without interacting with Facebook.
The Largest Autocracy on Earth - The Atlantic
Facebook is acting like a hostile foreign power; it’s time we treated it that way.
Mark Zuckerberg, unlike Einstein, did not dream up Facebook out of a sense of moral duty, or zeal for world peace. This summer, the population of Zuckerberg’s supranational regime reached 2.9 billion monthly active users, more humans than live in the world’s two most populous nations—China and India—combined.
To Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, they are citizens of Facebookland. Long ago he conspicuously started calling them “people” instead of “users,” but they are still cogs in an immense social matrix, fleshy morsels of data to satisfy the advertisers that poured $54 billion into Facebook in the first half of 2021 alone—a sum that surpasses the gross domestic products of most nations on Earth.
GDP makes for a telling comparison, not just because it gestures at Facebook’s extraordinary power, but because it helps us see Facebook for what it really is. Facebook is not merely a website, or a platform, or a publisher, or a social network, or an online directory, or a corporation, or a utility. It is all of these things. But Facebook is also, effectively, a hostile foreign power.
YouTube is banning prominent anti-vaccine activists and blocking all anti-vaccine content – Washington Post
The Google-owned video site previously only banned misinformation about coronavirus vaccines. Facebook made the same change months ago.
Google, YouTube to prohibit ads and monetization on climate denial content - Axios
It's one of the most aggressive measures any major tech platform has taken to combat climate change misinformation.
Details: Google advertisers and publishers, as well as YouTube creators, will be prohibited from making ad revenue off content that contradicts "well-established scientific consensus around the existence and causes of climate change," the company's ads team said in a statement.
"This includes content referring to climate change as a hoax or a scam, claims to deny that long-term trends show the global climate is warming, and claims denying that greenhouse gas emissions or human activity contribute to climate change."
Ads and monetization will still be allowed to run alongside other climate-related topics, like public debates on climate policy, impacts of climate change, and new research around the issue.
Former NYT CEO, celebrated Filipino editor (now Nobel Prize winner) to lead new independent media fund – The Hill
Former New York Times CEO Mark Thompson and veteran Filipino journalist and activist Maria Ressa will be joining forces to lead a new initiative aimed at supporting independent media outlets and journalism around the world.
TikTok hits 1 billion users - Axios
CEO interview: B2B without paywalls, how Industry Dive grew into $80m 'journalism first business’ - Press Gazette
“It became very popular to say that ad models wouldn’t work and that everything has to be subscription,” Griffey tells Press Gazette via a video call. “But what we said was that ad models and marketing models still really work if the audience is incredibly valuable. And where the audiences are very valuable are in niches.”
Starting out with “a couple of hundred thousand dollars” of angel investment, they launched their business with five B2B websites, covering construction, education, marketing, utility and waste.
Google News Shh-owcase: Publishers break silence over secret deals behind $1bn scheme - Press Gazette
Over the past 12 months, Google has offered three-year Showcase contracts to hundreds of publishers across 16 countries. Most have accepted their payments, while a minority are holding out for more.
These multi-million-dollar deals bind together more than 1,000 individual news outlets with Google – one of the largest and most highly scrutinised companies on the planet.
And yet, in part because of strict confidentiality clauses that come attached with Google’s offers, little is known about News Showcase.
News U.K. puts its data at the nucleus of post-cookie push for media budgets - Digiday
What Social Media Needs to Learn From Traditional Media | WIRED
A teenager on TikTok disrupted thousands of scientific studies with a single video – The Verge
That video got 4.1 million views in the month after it was posted and sent tens of thousands of new users flooding to the Prolific platform. Prolific, a tool for scientists conducting behavioral research, had no free screening tools in place to make sure that it delivered representative population samples to each study. Suddenly, scientists used to getting a wide mix of subjects for their Prolific studies saw their surveys flooded with responses from young women around Frank’s age.
For researchers who rely on representative samples of the US population, that demographic shift was a major problem with no obvious cause and no immediately clear way to fix.
LA Times invests in digital storytellers for social media - LA Times
We will add 15 positions — nine to grow the core audience team and an additional six aimed at producing lively, original content that will pop on social platforms from Twitter to Instagram to TikTok and beyond. This new squad of internet storytellers — our “meme team” — will experiment with form and voice, starting conversations with their content, building online communities and establishing new relationships between the L.A. Times and people who may not currently think of us as a part of their world.
This is a major investment in our digital growth and a critical step toward attracting new readers. The expansion will benefit the entire newsroom and every area of our coverage. In total, the positions include audience and social media editors, SEO and news aggregator producers, social content creators and a user-generated content expert.
Latinos more likely to get, consume, share online misinformation, fake news - NBC
Latino audiences are more likely to receive, consume and share fake news and misinformation online compared to the general population, a new Nielsen report on U.S. Latinos shows.
The data and information firm looked at a subset of the top 100 U.S. news sites across the political spectrum, including some Spanish-language sites, in which at least 20 percent of their reach came from Latino audiences over the past year. Over that time period, 28 percent of the content presented to Latinos contained content flagged as mixed, biased, extremely biased, conspiracy or pseudoscience.
More Facebook fallout:
Has Mark Zuckerberg’s total control of Facebook turned into a liability? | John Naughton | The Guardian
Facebook Staff Demand Answers as Latest Crisis Hits — The Information
Who is Antigone Davis? Facebook Head of Safety to Testify to Senate – Tech Policy
Once identified in a television interview as the “woman in charge of your child’s safety on Facebook,” Antigone Davis is not yet among the more well-known representatives of the company. But with concerns about the impact of social media on kids and teens renewed by reports in the Wall Street Journal about the impact of Instagram on teen mental health and its efforts to market products to young children, that may be about to change.
Facebook Asks Oversight Board for Guidance on How It Regulates High-Profile Users – Wall Street Journal
The board recently cited inconsistencies in the way Facebook makes content decisions, after a WSJ investigation
Facebook no longer wants to 'move fast and break things' - Axios
Facebook on Monday said it will invest $50 million over two years in global research and program partners to ensure its metaverse products "are developed responsibly."
"It's almost the opposite of that now long-abandoned slogan of 'move fast and break things,'" Facebook's VP of global affairs Nick Clegg told Axios in an interview at The Atlantic Festival Monday. "This is going to be a much more gradual, deliberate and therefore a much more thoughtful process of building technology."
Time partners with Charter to expand into work coverage – Axios
"Charter," the new digital media company centered around the future of work, is partnering with Time Inc. to distribute its content across Time's owned and operated channels, executives tell Axios. The partnership launches Tuesday with the first edition of a new column about the modern workplace written by veteran business journalist S. Mitra Kalita.
Kalita's work will appear jointly in TIME and Charter. Her column is "a joint investment in her work," said Kevin Delaney, founder, and CEO of Charter. Kalita authored Fortune's "Worksheet" newsletter during the pandemic.
"There is no financial exchange in this partnership, but we can imagine opportunities to jointly propose advertising and sponsorship offerings,” said Jay Lauf, co-founder and president of Charter.
Charter, which launched in June, is led by Quartz and New York Times digital veterans. Delaney says it has over 40,000 email subscribers.
"It's been three years since Marc and Lynne Benioff acquired Time and during that time, we've been on a journey to figure out how Time should live as an independent company," said Samuel Jacobs, deputy editor of Time magazine. "Part of that journey is thinking about what to cover. Increasingly we've decided to put that focus into business coverage." Jacobs notes that in January of 2021, business accounted for 3% of Time's digital coverage, compared to 20% in August.
Gannett’s union woes - Axios
The pandemic sparked a union frenzy amongst local Gannett papers. Three New Jersey outlets — the Bergen Record, the Daily Record, and the NJ Herald — voted to form a union in February.
Since February, around a dozen Gannett newsrooms have voted to unionize or have announced intentions to do so. There are currently over 40 Gannett newsrooms unionized with the NewsGuild.
Earlier this month, the NewsGuild of New York, which represents roughly a dozen Gannett newsrooms across four groups in New York and New Jersey, filed Unfair Labor Practice charges against Gannett's management.
The charges allege that Gannett interfered with the federally-protected right of workers to organize and form a union.
German Neo-Nazis Are Still on Facebook. And They’re Using It to Make Money - PBS
This story is part of a collaboration between The Associated Press and FRONTLINE that examines challenges to the ideas and institutions of traditional U.S. and European democracy.
It’s the premier martial arts brand in Europe for right-wing extremists. German authorities have twice banned their signature tournament, called Kampf der Nibelungen, or Battle of the Nibelungs. But the group still thrives on Facebook, where organizers maintain multiple pages, as well as on Instagram and YouTube, which they use to spread their ideology, draw in recruits and make money through ticket sales and branded merchandise.
The Battle of the Nibelungs — a reference to an old heroic epic much loved by the Nazis — is one of the dozens of far-right groups that continue to leverage mainstream social media for profit, despite Facebook’s and other platforms’ repeated pledges to purge themselves of extremism.
All told, there are at least 54 Facebook profiles belonging to 39 entities that the German government and civil society groups have flagged as extremist, according to research shared with The Associated Press by the Counter Extremism Project, a nonprofit policy and advocacy group formed to combat extremism. The groups have nearly 268,000 subscribers and friends on Facebook alone.
Q: The most-bought newspaper by the BBC in 2020? A: The Times. - Press-Gazette
A freedom of information request to the BBC revealed that more than 52,000 copies of the publication were purchased, equivalent to 144 copies per day.
As of last year, News UK stopped sharing its circulation figures with the Audit Bureau of Circulations however, as of the last report (shared in March 2020) The Times was the seventh-highest selling UK-wide national newspaper, putting it around mid-table.
News UK titles accounted for the largest number of newspapers delivered to the BBC which included 45,897 copies of The Sun, 6,476 copies of the Sunday Times, and 4,359 copies of the Sun on Sunday.