Weekly Media News
It is great to see that some newsrooms are worth serious cash. Future bought The Week and several other Dennis publications for 300 million pounds, and Axel Springer, who was in talks with Axios, is now in talks with Politico while Forbes is turning to a SPAC. It looks like the German mega publishing house wants an American foothold in addition to its ownership of Inside.
However, social media continues to challenge the media ecosystem. This latest Pew study is interesting, with roughly half of U.S. adults now saying that the government should take steps to restrict false information, even if it means giving up the freedom to access and publish content. Don't miss Nieman fellow Joseph Bernstein’s story I sent from Harper's on disinformation and content moderation and why it feels like a big industry that is not getting it done. It went viral in media circles this week. Also, Martha Minow's interview on de-platforming, cancel culture, and the First Amendment is worth a read. The Princeton story on aborting its research using Facebook data adds yet another university to the roster on the trouble accessing Facebook data to study the space. Looks like it is a hard stop to really know what’s going on with those political ad buys. Remember, last U.S. election was the most expensive with a spend of over $11 billion.
Happy weekend,
Heidi
More Americans now say the government should take steps to restrict false information online than in 2018 - Pew Research Center · Aug 2021
Roughly half of U.S. adults (48%) now say the government should take steps to restrict false information, even if it means losing some freedom to access and publish content, according to the survey of 11,178 adults conducted July 26-Aug. 8, 2021. That is up from 39% in 2018. At the same time, the share of adults who say freedom of information should be protected – even if it means some misinformation is published online – has decreased from 58% to 50%.
When it comes to whether technology companies should take steps to address misinformation online, more are in agreement. A majority of adults (59%) continue to say technology companies should take steps to restrict misinformation online, even if it puts some restrictions on Americans’ ability to access and publish content. Around four-in-ten (39%) take the opposite view that protecting freedom of information should take precedence, even if it means false claims can spread. The balance of opinion on this question has changed little since 2018.
Future buys The Week’s Publisher, Dennis, for 300M pds - The Press-Gazette
Future currently owns 163 brands and 43 in the US. Its brands reach one in three people in the US, it said. Meanwhile, around 56% of revenues at Dennis come from the States.
Subscriptions make up around three-quarters of Dennis' revenues (up from 40% in 2019) and Future said this would materially increase its recurring revenues in a way that benefits from stability and customer retention.
Dennis launched the US version of The Week in spring 2020 with the aim of repeating this success.
It also expanded into the US with the acquisition of financial publishing business Kiplinger in 2019. This has contributed to 16% revenue growth at Dennis in the year to June, it said.
In the financial year to the end of December 2020, Dennis reported revenue of £104.8m, up 12% from the year before, and adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization up 14% to £20m. Dennis made almost 70 people, or about 15% of its workforce, redundant last summer after its advertising and events revenues “deteriorated” during the Covid-19 crisis, but it avoided closing any titles unlike many other magazine publishers (including Future).
Bad News: Selling the story of disinformation by Nieman ’21 J. Bernstein - Harper’s
The Commission on Information Disorder is the latest (and most creepily named) addition to a new field of knowledge production that emerged during the Trump years at the juncture of media, academia, and policy research: Big Disinfo. A kind of EPA for content, it seeks to expose the spread of various sorts of “toxicity” on social media platforms, the downstream effects of this spread, and the platforms’ clumsy, dishonest, and half-hearted attempts to halt it. As an environmental cleanup project, it presumes a harm model of content consumption. Just as, say, smoking causes cancer, consuming bad information must cause changes in belief or behavior that are bad, by some standard. Otherwise, why care what people read and watch?
Big Disinfo has found energetic support from the highest echelons of the American political center, which has been warning of an existential content crisis more or less constantly since the 2016 election.
Politico Is Looking for a $1 Billion Deal with Axel Springer - NYT
Led by its owner, Robert Allbritton, Politico has been in talks with Axel about a potential investment or an outright sale, two people familiar with the matter said. Such a deal would amount to a hefty premium for Politico, which generates about $200 million a year in revenue, they said.
YouTube’s Chief Business Officer on TikTok, Shopping and Future Deals - TheInformation
As YouTube’s chief business officer, RobertKyncl oversees global partnerships with media companies, artists, and creators. Those internet personalities are starting to gravitate to a product YouTube rolled out nearly a year ago: a quick and easy way to produce short-form videos, like the ones popularized by TikTok.
“That was a missing format for us,” Kyncl said in an interview with The Information. “We were missing the easy-to-use, low table-stakes format. That’s very critical to the next generation
Rumble, a YouTube rival popular with conservatives, will pay creators who ‘challenge the status quo’ - WashPost
The video site has exploded during the pandemic as a home for anti-vaccine misinformation and conservative complaints about Big Tech censorship
The New York Times is making about a third of its newsletters subscriber-only - Nieman
The existing newsletters going subscriber-only include On Politics, Well, Watching, Parenting, Smarter Living, At Home and Away, On Tech With Shira Ovide, On Soccer with Rory Smith, and those from columnists Jamelle Bouie, Paul Krugman, and Frank Bruni.
Facebook selects local journalists paid in $5 million newsletter recruitment push - Reuters
Facebook has chosen 25 local independent journalists to be paid out of a $5 million pot to write for its newsletter site Bulletin through multiyear deals, the company told Reuters on Thursday.
Facebook launched Bulletin in June as a standalone newsletter subscription service with free and paid articles and podcasts. It is the social media giant's attempt to compete in the booming email newsletter trend led by companies like Substack.
Facebook has previously announced about 40 writers on Bulletin and says there will be more than 100 on the platform "by the fall." A spokeswoman declined to say how many subscribers Bulletin has at present.
Selected writers include those covering immigrant communities in Atlanta, climate issues in North Carolina's Coastal Plain, and insights from Latino business leaders in Florida.
informed., you want to be? A trio of European media veterans take on the problem of news economics with new layered technology – Techcrunch
Benjamin Mateev, Martin Kaelble, and Axel Bard Bringéus have come together to launch informed. (official branding: no caps, mandatory period). The Berlin-based startup wants to be a layer on top of prominent paywalled news services, connecting readers with curated “playlists” of news and opinion stories called Read Lists and augmented with an original summary. The company was founded in January, is currently in beta, and has raised a “significant pre-seed by modern standards” from local shop 468 Capital.
How the US tech giants could fall. Covid only bought them time - FT
The writer, Morgan Stanley Investment Management’s chief global strategist, is the author of ‘The Ten Rules of Successful Nations’.
The world’s tech giants have embedded themselves so deeply in the popular imagination that few people can picture a digital world led by any other names. But this assumption overlooks how quickly capitalism can cut giants down to size. American tech companies lead the world’s top 10 by market value and many commentators and investors see no reason to question their continued dominance. Dozens of analysts rate each of the big tech firms, and every single one of them currently has a buy rating on Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft. Apple and Facebook are also more widely favoured than the typical stock.
The conventional narrative is that these giants are growing bigger, faster, and more durably than their predecessors. As internet platforms, they benefit from “network effects”, increasing efficiency and momentum as they gain customers and entrench their hold on the economy at a speed, it has been said, never before seen “in the history of capitalism”. Only we have seen much of this before…
Explosive growth spurts are normal when capitalism is working. So is creative destruction. Big companies grow unwieldy. They talk about staying paranoid but they don’t, really, falling out of touch with young tastes and ceding ground to nimbler rivals.CNN public editor: On climate coverage, it’s day and night - CJR
It was a stark divide between day and evening. Across the cable news sphere, primetime morphs into opinion and polarizing narratives, while dayside presents more news and facts. On Monday, if you were able to watch CNN during the day (not a luxury open to many), then you would have learned about the climate report, Covid hotbeds throughout the country, Taliban gains in Afghanistan, and the Dixie fire in California. Conversely, during primetime, nearly every show led with the same topic: CNN’s foil-du-jour, Ron DeSantis.
Martha Minow on deplatforming, cancel culture and the First Amendment - Harvard Gazette
I wrote a book to examine the challenges and decline of the news industry during a time of exploding misinformation and disinformation, a global pandemic, and great challenges to democracies in the United States and elsewhere. Certainly, one big dimension of this context is [what] some people are calling [an] infodemic: the flood of information that is enabled by the internet, and particularly social media. But it is not just social media. It’s conventional media, particularly cable news, but also some broadcast news.
Most of the sources of communications are private, and private communications are not governed by the First Amendment. Private companies are entitled to edit, elevate, suppress, remove [speech], whether it’s in broadcast, cable, or on a social media platform. Indeed, private companies have First Amendment freedoms against any government intervention.
Facebook shared new data about what’s popular on its platform. The answers are deeply weird – Washington Post
The report shows a Green Bay Packers alumni page and an online CBD store, not right-wing pundits, are among the most viewed links in people’s feeds, as Facebook pushes back against independent studies
We all know what kinds of posts we see when we open Facebook. But what is everyone else seeing in their personalized feeds? And just how much of it is divisive, misleading, or outright false?
Those questions have never had a definitive answer, partly because Facebook keeps secret much of the relevant data. Analytics tools such as Newswhip, which is independent, and CrowdTangle, which Facebook owns, provided windows into what’s trending on the social network
Facebook has long argued such “top 10” lists present a skewed view of its platform, making conservative commentators such as Ben Shapiro, Dan Bongino, and Franklin Graham seem more popular than they really are. But it struggled to back up its claims without offering more data of its own.
On Wednesday, the social giant announced that it will begin publishing a quarterly report of its own, called the “Widely Viewed Content Report,” that slices its data along new lines to produce a very different set of rankings. Instead of presenting Facebook as a hotbed of right-leaning politics, the company’s inaugural report presents a far weirder, messier, and spammier picture: the news feed as a junk-mail folder.
It shows, for instance, that the most-viewed link on Facebook in a recent three-month period was to the website of a Wisconsin firm that offers to connect Green Bay Packers fans to former players. The second most viewed link was to the online storefront of Pure Hemp, which sells CBD products. The third-most-viewed post in the same period, by Facebook’s reckoning, no longer exists at all. A preview of the post that appears in search engines suggests it was a viral meme encouraging users to disclose personal information to discover their “porn name.”
Princeton researchers ditch Facebook political ad project after the platform used a debunked FTC privacy defense - Digiday
When policymakers want to understand how political ad targeting affects elections, they look to academic researchers, and those researchers look to one of the most important platforms that sell those ads: Facebook.
Now, Princeton University researchers who applied months ago to access Facebook-sanctioned political ad data have pulled the plug on that would-be project, blaming the platform’s rigid contractual requirements and its now-debunked claim that the company’s settlement with the Federal Trade Commission prohibited Facebook from negotiating its terms of data access. The researchers’ decision comes on the heels of Facebook’s shutdown of another high-profile political ad research project at New York University.
For Princeton researchers including Orestis Papakyriakopoulos, a Ph.D. at the University’s Center for Information Technology Policy, the key sticking point was a contract Facebook requires research institutions to sign before accessing its data. In particular, he and others on his digital tech policy research team were concerned that agreeing to the contract would give Facebook the right to remove information from their research findings had they actually went through with the project.
“It doesn’t make sense for us to do research for six months and then not be able to publish it,” Papakyriakopoulos told Digiday.
An apt and funny take on the problem with our media ecosystem via a new HBS miniseries “Clickbait” - Nieman Lab
“Clickbait gussied up as high-minded trendy woke bullshit”: The White Lotus casts its critical gaze on digital journalism. The HBO miniseries is about the unreality of wealth, but Rachel ends up being one of the most relatable portrayals of contemporary news media to date.
In just a few scenes, Rachel encapsulates the frustrating reality of working in news media today: It’s passé to point out that most of us are poorly paid, but few will admit publicly that they don’t even get to do the work they want to do in exchange. And it is “rude,” as Shane points out, to consider an assignment on your honeymoon. But every freelancer knows, you have to consider every opportunity carefully.