Weekend Read
The Atlantic is not holding back this month. It sharpened its lens on three behemoths in US local news and how they fail us: Alden Global Capital, Gannett, and Facebook. Each story captures the challenges of our journalism ecosystem and as a collective, it is powerful.
While Adrienne LaFrance’s story on Facebook - The Largest Autocracy on Earth offered me something new, MacKay Coppins’ piece on Alden Global Capital and Godfrey’s piece on GateHouse (now Gannett) offered acrid clarity on what is lost when local newsrooms disappear.
Coppins writes in A Secretive Hedge Fund is Gutting Newsrooms:
“When a local newspaper vanishes, research shows, it tends to correspond with lower voter turnout, increased polarization, and a general erosion of civic engagement. Misinformation proliferates. City budgets balloon, along with corruption and dysfunction. The consequences can influence national politics as well; an analysis by Politico found that Donald Trump performed best during the 2016 election in places with limited access to local news.”
In What We Lost when Gannett Came To Town, Godrey writes:
“By now, we know what happens when a community loses its newspaper. People tend to participate less often in municipal elections, and those elections are less competitive. Corruption goes unchecked, and costs sometimes go up for town governments. Disinformation becomes the norm, as people start to get their facts mainly from social media. But the decline of The Hawk Eye has also revealed a quieter, less quantifiable change.”
Godfrey goes further to show how our communities have lost quotidian glue:
“When people lament the decline of small newspapers, they tend to emphasize the most important stories that will go uncovered: political corruption, school-board scandals, zoning-board hearings. But often overlooked are the more quotidian stories: stories about the annual Teddy Bear Picnic at Crapo Park, the town-hall meeting about the new swimming pool design, and the tractor games during the Denmark Heritage Days.”
I’m not convinced robust national news, global news, and Substack bloggers can restore the shared narrative and trust required for communities to thrive. Local news needs its revenue model back or platforms to prioritize and sustain it.
Heidi
Politico’s New Owner Plans to Grow Staff, Launch Paywall - WSJ
Axel Springer, whose $1 billion acquisition of Politico is expected to close next week, also eyes foreign-language editions. Axel Springer plans to eventually put Politico’s content behind a paywall and immediately boost the political-news publisher’s headcount by more than 10% once the German conglomerate’s $1 billion deal to buy the company closes, expected next week.
Axel Springer Chief Executive Mathias Döpfner expects to hire 100 people across the company’s management and editorial staff, which currently number 900 in the U.S. and Europe. He also laid out tentative plans for an international push—including intentions to publish in several different languages.
Mr. Döpfner said he plans to grow Politico’s footprint both in the U.S. and overseas by introducing new industry-focused products and services and by broadening the scope of coverage. He said he expects Politico’s main news offerings, now free, to go behind a paywall in the medium term.
How TikTok Is Changing YouTube – TheInformation
YouTube is copying TikTok’s growth playbook by paying professionals to produce original short videos.
After YouTube in May said it would give $100 million to individual video creators to post original “Shorts,” the Google-owned company approached companies that produce scripted YouTube shows with similar offers. As part of its pitch, YouTube is dangling additional money for video production as well as other incentives, including giving those videos prominent placement on the YouTube mobile app, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.
Shorts launched seven months ago in the U.S. after debuting in India a year ago. After YouTube began promoting Shorts, prominent video creators saw faster growth for views of their Shorts compared to views of their longer videos, according to data from Tubular Labs, a measurement firm that tracks video viewership data on YouTube.
Thomson Reuters launches $100 mln venture capital fund - Axios
Thomson Reuters Corp is launching a $100 million venture capital fund to invest in early-stage companies that serve professional audiences in the legal, tax and accounting, and news media business. The fund, named "Thomson Reuters Ventures," is part of Chief Executive Steve Hasker's plan to transform the provider of news and information to professionals into what it calls a "content-driven technology business."
Pat Wilburn, Chief Strategy Officer at Thomson Reuters will serve as executive director of the fund.
Top Democrats unveil bill to rein in ‘malicious algorithms’ – WashPost
Top Democratic lawmakers unveiled a major proposal Thursday that could hold digital platforms like Facebook and Twitter legally responsible for making personalized recommendations to users that lead to their physical or emotional harm.
The bill is set to be introduced Friday by four leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee — Reps. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.), Mike Doyle (D-Pa.), Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), and Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) — which holds broad jurisdiction over tech issues including Section 230.
“Designing personalized algorithms that promote extremism, disinformation and harmful content is a conscious choice, and platforms should have to answer for it,” Pallone said.
Lawmakers’ latest idea to fix Facebook: Regulate the algorithm – WashPost
The software that makes those decisions for each user, based on a secret ranking formula devised by Facebook that includes more than 10,000 factors, is commonly referred to as “the news feed algorithm,” or sometimes just “the algorithm.” On a social network with nearly 3 billion users, that algorithm arguably has more influence over what people read, watch and share online than any government or media mogul.
Microsoft Abandons LinkedIn in China – WSJ
Citing Challenging Operating Environment - Retreat marks the biggest departure from China by a major tech company in years
LinkedIn said it would replace its Chinese service, which restricts some content to comply with local government demands, with a job-board service lacking social-media features, such as the ability to share opinions and news stories.
Nick Clegg on regulation and a new agency – Yahoo News
We’ve argued for creating a new digital regulatory agency to navigate competing trade-offs in the digital space – much like the Federal Communications Commission oversees telecoms and media.
We’ve proposed ways to reform Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, including requiring platforms to be more transparent about how they remove harmful and illegal content – and requiring large companies like Facebook to demonstrate they comply with best practices for countering illegal content to earn the law’s protections.
We support efforts to bring greater transparency to algorithmic systems, offer people more control over their experience and require audits of platforms’ content moderation systems – which, of course, include algorithms.
Big Tech to be forced to hand over data on political ads – Politico Europe
Social media companies could face hefty fines if they don’t publish detailed information on political ad buyers, according to an EU internal document.
The UK Attempt to Take On Silicon Valley – FT
Britain by 2010 had produced fewer than a dozen tech groups valued at more than £1bn. This summer the outgoing chief of Baillie Gifford — the Scottish fund manager that made early bets on Amazon, Facebook, and Tesla — lamented that the UK was yet to produce a huge global success on the scale of Silicon Valley’s trillion-dollar companies or to rival the likes of Tencent and Alibaba in China. “Why have we not grown any giant companies?” James Anderson, joint manager of Baillie Gifford’s Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust, asked the Financial Times in June. “It seems to me there is a real problem here.
Revolut, the six-year-old digital bank valued at $33bn in July, and Hopin, a two-year-old virtual events start-up that was priced at $7.8bn in August, demonstrate that valuable businesses of global scale are being built more rapidly than ever in the UK.
Swiss media join forces to allow readers to use a single login – Nieman Lab
OneLog brings together some of the largest and most trusted Swiss media companies. Their single sign-on solution will reach 2 million active accounts in 2022 — representing one in four inhabitants in the country.
Three years ago, media executives from Switzerland’s largest media companies were gathered on a lake for an annual conversation about the news industry. By the time they got on dry land, plans for what became the Swiss Digital Alliance — including TX Group, CH Media, NZZ, Ringier, and public broadcaster SRG — had been set in motion.
Some of their news sites are free, others require a paid subscription. Most had their eyes on better data in order to sell digital advertising, but others — the public broadcasters in the group — were barred from that revenue stream.
The founding media partners all agreed, however, that having more first-party data and increasing the share of registered visitors would allow them to build better relationships with readers and more relevant news products.
Family Foundation Quietly Going To War With Facebook Over How It Affects Kids’ Brains - Forbes
As Facebook morphs into a corporate pinata, increasingly loathed on both the left and right over its seemingly blithe regard for accuracy, democracy and the self-worth of girls, Jim Winston, the son of the late founder of a sizable family foundation, is quietly opening a multiplatform front against the social media giant, focusing on the effect such platforms have on adolescent brains.
Winston’s father built a fortune from scratch in real estate and investments, and directed almost all of it to pass on his death to a family foundation that today has assets worth more than $100 million. The foundation has five family directors including Winston’s sister and three cousins, but Winston, who is a single father of two and psychologist by training, is the one spearheading a fight against Facebook and other social media giants.
On a theoretical level, he helped fund an entire curriculum, “Social Media, Technology and the Adolescent Brain,” at his alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Second, the foundation plans to roll out a modified course in conjunction with UNC to what they see as the most vulnerable population: middle schools. From there, Winston will take the fight to the larger public through a documentary series designed to expand on the success of the Social Dilemma – tentative title, The Parent Dilemma.
New owners seek to revive Missouri newspapers sold by Gannett – Missouri Independent
The media giant has sold 12 papers in smaller communities as it streamlines national operation.
Stewart Bainum, Chairman of Choice Hotels to Launch Local Digital Baltimore Nonprofit News - The Atlantic
Baltimore has always had its problems, David Simon told me. A former Sun reporter whose work on the police beat famously led to his creation of The Wire on HBO, “But if you really started fucking up in grandiose and belligerent ways, if you started stealing and grifting and lying, eventually somebody would come up behind you and say, ‘You’re grifting and you’re lying’ … and they’d put it in the paper.”
“The bad stuff runs for so long now,” he went on, “that by the time you get to it, institutions are irreparable, or damn near close.”
Stewart Bainum, since losing his bid for the Sun, has been quietly working on a new venture. He has set out to build a new publication of record from the ground up. In recent months, he’s been meeting with leaders of local-news start-ups across the country—The Texas Tribune, the Daily Memphian, The City in New York—and collecting best practices. He’s impressed by their journalism, he told me, but his clearest takeaway is that they’re not nearly well funded enough. “You need real capital to move the needle,” he told me. Otherwise, “you’re just peeing in the ocean.”
Next year, Bainum will launch The Baltimore Banner, an all-digital, nonprofit news outlet. He told me it will begin with an annual operating budget of $15 million, unprecedented for an outfit of this kind. It will rely initially on philanthropic donations, but he aims to sell enough subscriptions to make it self-sustaining within five years. He’s acutely aware of the risks—“I may end up with egg on my face,” he said—but he believes it’s worth trying to develop a successful model that could be replicated in other markets. “There’s no industry that I can think of more integral to a working democracy than the local-news business,” he said.
Machine-written literature and the future of news – Aeon Magazine UK
The research laboratory OpenAI – an Elon Musk-backed initiative that seeks to build human-friendly artificial intelligence – has developed a series of powerful ‘language models’, the latest being GPT-3 (third-generation Generative Pre-trained Transformer).
A language model is a computer program that simulates human language. Like other simulations, it hovers between the reductive (reality is messier and more unpredictable) and the visionary (to model is to create a parallel world that can sometimes make accurate predictions about the real world). Such language models lie behind the predictive suggestions for emails and text messages. Gmail’s Smart Compose can complete ‘I hope this …’ with ‘… email finds you well’. Instances of automated journalism (sports news and financial reports, for example) are on the rise, while explanations of the benefits from insurance companies and marketing copy likewise rely on machine-writing technology. We can imagine a near future where machines play an even larger part in highly conventional kinds of writing, but also a more creative role in imaginative genres (novels, poems, plays), even computer code itself.
Today’s language models are given enormous amounts of existing writing to digest and learn from. GPT-3 was trained on about 500 billion words. These models use AI to learn what words tend to follow a given set of words, and, along the way, pick up information about meaning and syntax.
This week I listened to Jill Lepore’s book – If Then: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future.
I was fascinated by the early study of social networks led by social scientists, the early players in the field of computer social study, and the introduction of computer use in politics. Here is Lepore’s New Yorker piece: How the Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future. When J.F.K. ran for President, a team of data scientists with powerful computers set out to model and manipulate American voters. Sound familiar?
This led me to an article on “the ethics of predictive journalism” - Columbia Journalism Review in April 2020.
One organization practicing exceptional transparency in predictive modeling for the 2020 elections is the Washington Post. In addition to blog posts detailing its election modeling, the Post publishes in-depth academic papers and even the code for some models. As data scientist Lenny Bronner writes, “It’s important to explain what our models can and cannot do.” It’s not that everyone will look at all that information, but that it’s available for inspection to the few who really want to kick the tires.
As predictions grow into and beyond their journalistic roots in elections, transparency, uncertainty communication, and careful consideration of the social dynamics of predictive information will be essential to their ethical use. We should expect the experiences of data journalists to coalesce into a set of ethical expectations and norms. We’re not there yet, but perhaps one day there will even be a style guide for predictive journalism.