Posts tagged media

The Illusion of Choice

Media Consolidation Infographic

Source: Frugal dad

frugaldad.com

Repetition: The Key to Spreading Lies by Ross Pomeroy

Over time, studies have shown that repetition leads to familiarity, which is the key to fostering belief. Unfortunately, once familiar misinformation is embedded into our psyche, it can be incredibly difficult to dislodge. Prior research from Schwarz has found that attempting to debunk myths by presenting contradicting facts can easily backfire.  The research indicated that any repetition of misinformation — even if the purpose is to debunk — can serve to perpetuate it.

This means that those fighting for the spread of truth — scientists and educators, for example — have to perform a delicate tap-dance when it comes to quelling misinformation, as any actual mention of the misinformation could hinder their honest pursuits. 

Or they could just forget the tap dance and, instead, play the game: If you want the public to believe something, just yell it louder, say it simpler, and repeat it more often than anybody else.

realclearscience.com

A Code of Conduct for Content Aggregators

As words and articles became digitized over the last 15 years, they began to float, there for the plucking and replication elsewhere. Words like “curation” and “aggregation” became the language of the realm, sometimes used as substitutes for describing the actual creation of content. What had once been a craft was rapidly becoming a task.

Traditional media organizations watched as others kidnapped their work, not only taking away content but, more and more, taking the audiences with them. Practitioners of the new order heard the complaints and suggested that mainstream media needed to quit whining and start competing in a changed world, where what’s yours may not be yours anymore if others find a better way to package it.

So where is the line between promoting the good work of others and simply lifting it? Naughty aggregation is analogous to pornography: You know it when you see it.

The New York Times

futurejournalismproject: Forbes Blogger Steals $20,000 and 1 Million Pageviews from New York Times by Changing Headline Now how’s that for a grabber? If it got your attention it just demonstrates how important headlines are in online journalism. Sensationalism, link bait, and a little SEO can be worth tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to your organization. The New York Times  got into a bit of a dustup over a piece of its investigative reporting that became a runaway hit only after it appeared Kashmir Hill’s Not-So Private Parts blog on Forbes.  Nick O’Neill writes: They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but how much is a title worth? If the story that proceeds is any indicator, a title is worth over 6700 words and months of research. It all began Friday when the New York Times published an article “How Companies Learn Your Secrets“. It was an extremely long article which discussed how large companies like WalMart and Target collect data about your individual consumption patterns to figure out how to most efficiently make you happy. It was a great piece but there was one problem: it didn’t have the title it deserved. The original title was “How Companies Learn Your Secrets.” Kashmir Hill, a writer at Forbes, realized this and quickly developed a condensed version of the article with a far more powerful title: “How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did“. It cut out the crap and got to the real shocker of the story. As of the writing of this story, the New York Times article has 60 likes and shares on Facebook versus 12,902 which the Forbes article has. The Forbes article also has a mind boggling 680,000 page views, a number that can literally make a writer’s career. Even those numbers are a bit dated. The Forbes retelling will likely hit 1 million views before Monday morning. And beyond the pageview count, and prestige for the reporters involved, there’s a very real monetary cost associated with sloppy or overly-cautious headline writing. Let’s calculate. A June 2010 report from Econsultancy pegs the average CPM for all news sites at $7 industry-wide. CPM stands for cost per mille and represents the amount of money publishers receive from display advertisements for each thousand pageviews. According to the report, the New York Times brand was receiving 32.5 million monthly viewers and 719 million pageviews in May of 2010. An average CPM of $7 drags down the likely value of display advertisements on the NYT, the website for the paper of record. I tried to dig up some display advertising rates for NYT.com and I found a current rate sheet. That said, but I can’t conceive of anything less helpful. (The Times has a bit of attachment to opaque financial disclosures)  Assuming that the current CPM for the New York Times is $20,  the company forfeited $20,000 in potential advertising revenue to Forbes on the basis of a headline. My guess is that the Times has a much higher CPM than $20. Considering what staff journalists earn these days, a single headline cost The New York Times newsroom the equivalent several months of a reporter’s salary.  And the story no doubt  required the investment hundreds of man hours, and thousands of dollars in wages to. Unfortunately, it’s fair game and nothing will stop it from happening again. The whole episode reminds me of the story from the Steve Jobs autobiography. In the early 1980s Jobs asked Gates and Microsoft to create a version visual interface, BASIC, for Apple’s Macintosh computers. In November of 1983, before Apple was able to ship its Apple IIs with a graphical user interface, Microsoft had already released an early version of Windows for IBM compatible machines, based on the product originally developed for Apple. Jobs was furious at Gates for ripping off the Windows operating system from Apple and summoned him to Cupertino for a brow beating. In a boardroom packed with Apple minions Gates calmly explained to Jobs that both Apple and Microsoft had stolen the idea from Xerox research, which they had been too slow to commercialize themselves. Gates told Jobs, “I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.” The rich neighbor is The New York Times in the news business. Almost every news outlet worth its salt rewrites original New York Times stories and tailors them for a specific audience. Parasitic properties like Gawker and Huffington Post would not exist were it not for the nourishment of a host like the Times. Today both are much larger and more robust organizations that publish plenty of original content. Unfortunately for The New York Times Company, it is still years away from realizing the dollar value of its editorial influence, and its considerable investment in original reporting. In the meantime, expect the break-ins to continue unabated. Image:Flickr

futurejournalismproject:

Forbes Blogger Steals $20,000 and 1 Million Pageviews from New York Times by Changing Headline

Now how’s that for a grabber? If it got your attention it just demonstrates how important headlines are in online journalism. Sensationalism, link bait, and a little SEO can be worth tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to your organization.

The New York Times  got into a bit of a dustup over a piece of its investigative reporting that became a runaway hit only after it appeared Kashmir Hill’s Not-So Private Parts blog on Forbes. 

Nick O’Neill writes:

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but how much is a title worth? If the story that proceeds is any indicator, a title is worth over 6700 words and months of research. It all began Friday when the New York Times published an article “How Companies Learn Your Secrets“. It was an extremely long article which discussed how large companies like WalMart and Target collect data about your individual consumption patterns to figure out how to most efficiently make you happy. It was a great piece but there was one problem: it didn’t have the title it deserved.

The original title was “How Companies Learn Your Secrets.” Kashmir Hill, a writer at Forbes, realized this and quickly developed a condensed version of the article with a far more powerful title: “How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did“. It cut out the crap and got to the real shocker of the story. As of the writing of this story, the New York Times article has 60 likes and shares on Facebook versus 12,902 which the Forbes article has. The Forbes article also has a mind boggling 680,000 page views, a number that can literally make a writer’s career.

Even those numbers are a bit dated. The Forbes retelling will likely hit 1 million views before Monday morning. And beyond the pageview count, and prestige for the reporters involved, there’s a very real monetary cost associated with sloppy or overly-cautious headline writing. Let’s calculate.

A June 2010 report from Econsultancy pegs the average CPM for all news sites at $7 industry-wide. CPM stands for cost per mille and represents the amount of money publishers receive from display advertisements for each thousand pageviews. According to the report, the New York Times brand was receiving 32.5 million monthly viewers and 719 million pageviews in May of 2010. An average CPM of $7 drags down the likely value of display advertisements on the NYT, the website for the paper of record.

I tried to dig up some display advertising rates for NYT.com and I found a current rate sheet. That said, but I can’t conceive of anything less helpful. (The Times has a bit of attachment to opaque financial disclosures)  Assuming that the current CPM for the New York Times is $20,  the company forfeited $20,000 in potential advertising revenue to Forbes on the basis of a headline. My guess is that the Times has a much higher CPM than $20. Considering what staff journalists earn these days, a single headline cost The New York Times newsroom the equivalent several months of a reporter’s salary.  And the story no doubt  required the investment hundreds of man hours, and thousands of dollars in wages to. Unfortunately, it’s fair game and nothing will stop it from happening again.

The whole episode reminds me of the story from the Steve Jobs autobiography. In the early 1980s Jobs asked Gates and Microsoft to create a version visual interface, BASIC, for Apple’s Macintosh computers. In November of 1983, before Apple was able to ship its Apple IIs with a graphical user interface, Microsoft had already released an early version of Windows for IBM compatible machines, based on the product originally developed for Apple. Jobs was furious at Gates for ripping off the Windows operating system from Apple and summoned him to Cupertino for a brow beating. In a boardroom packed with Apple minions Gates calmly explained to Jobs that both Apple and Microsoft had stolen the idea from Xerox research, which they had been too slow to commercialize themselves. Gates told Jobs, “I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”

The rich neighbor is The New York Times in the news business. Almost every news outlet worth its salt rewrites original New York Times stories and tailors them for a specific audience. Parasitic properties like Gawker and Huffington Post would not exist were it not for the nourishment of a host like the Times. Today both are much larger and more robust organizations that publish plenty of original content.

Unfortunately for The New York Times Company, it is still years away from realizing the dollar value of its editorial influence, and its considerable investment in original reporting. In the meantime, expect the break-ins to continue unabated.

Image:Flickr

Our system of law doesn’t acknowledge the derivative nature of creativity. Instead, ideas are regarded as property, as unique and original lots with distinct boundaries. But ideas aren’t so tidy. They’re layered, they’re interwoven, they’re tangled. And when the system conflicts with the reality… the system starts to fail.

Why Curation Is Important to the Future of Journalism

Why Curation Is Important to the Future of Journalism
Despite shrinking newsrooms and overworked reporters, journalism is in fact thriving. The art of information gathering, analysis and dissemination has arguably been strengthened over the last several years, and given rise and importance to a new role: the journalistic curator.

The concept of curating news is not new. One can look to the supply-chain process of a news organization to see that several roles (editor, managing editor, etc.) have curation as a core competency; that is, the organizing of information filed by reporters into a deliverable packages for readers.

But with the push of social media and advancements in communications technology, the curator has become a journalist by proxy. They are not on the front lines, covering a particular beat or industry, or filing a story themselves, but they are responding to a reader need. With a torrent of content emanating from innumerable sources (blogs, mainstream media, social networks), a vacuum has been created between reporter and reader — or information gatherer and information seeker — where having a trusted human editor to help sort out all this information has become as necessary as those who file the initial report.

“Curation,” says Sayid Ali, owner of Newsflick.net, “gathers all these fragmented pieces of information to one location, allowing people to get access to more specialized content.”

Having (somewhat) unwittingly turned my Facebook wall into a curated selection of news over the last several years, the recent transition into more explicit curation here on Tumblr has been a natural progression.  The fundamental question which remains is how long aggregation and reblogging will be an effective medium for information filtering if producers and publishers of original content are unable to sufficiently monetize their own output.  Content farms are processed corn products compared to a well written steak of a piece like How Your Cat is Making You Crazy, but Felix Salmon makes a great argument that the more is more philosophy of content as commodity is the better business model.  As audiences fracture and hyper specialization and differentiation increase, there still seems to be a genuine opportunity to compile and disseminate the highest quality writing to a more discerning readership.  My experience of sharing  weightier pieces on Facebook with my friends and family has consistently surprised me with the unexpected level of interest from certain quarters.  My intention with this blog is to walk the slack line between connecting readers who aren’t avid media junkies with the best content from mainstays such as The Atlantic and The New York Times, without alienating a hardcore audience with nothing more than trending retreads.  

In our post postmodern, remix friendly, pastiche culture of wikipedia copy and paste, where do we define the line between symbiosis and parasitism? Editorial discretion and the expression of taste through selectivity is a means of reducing the signal/noise ratio of the internet, but it remains a fundamentally secondary role.  Without the production of original content, Tumblr and the internet itself would be reduced to the giant echo chamber some fear it has already become.  One of my favorite quotes is:

“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.” — Andre Gide

I hope that through tasteful culling and insightful commentary I am able to provide a symbiotic rather than parasitical contribution to the interwebs.

Mashable

Fox News ‘course correction’ rankles some

As a white, male, middle-aged conservative talk radio host from Virginia, John Fredericks is something close to the Platonic ideal of a Fox News fan.

And until last year, he was one. But then Fox’s treatment of the Republican primary race — the presentation of Karl Rove as a political analyst despite his having “thrown in for Romney” and Sean Hannity’s clear ties to the Republican establishment — began to grate on him. So he changed the channel.

“I’ve gone from all Fox to no Fox, and replaced it with CNN, which I think right now is giving me a much fairer analysis of what’s going on,” he said. “I feel they’ve lost that independent conservative mantra that had drove people like me to them. I used to feel that I got it straight, and I got an independent conservative view. Now, what I get is some wholly owned subsidiary of the RNC [Republican National Committee].”

Newsflash: Fox News viewers don’t actually want fair and balanced.

politico.com

Quality vs quantity online

Have we really — finally — reached the point at which quality is asserting itself in the form of monster pageviews? Especially given the fact that the New York Observer, the subject of my original post, is getting fewer pageviews now than it was in its much more assiduously edited days at the end of 2007.

If we have reached that point — and I hope that we have — it’s a function of the way that the world of the web is moving from search to social. Companies like Demand Media were created to game search — to take what people are genuinely interested in, and then exploit those interests to get undeserved traffic and ad revenues. Gaming social media, by contrast, is much harder: people tend not to share things  they don’t genuinely like.

…while I’m extremely happy to see high-quality journalism reach a very large audience online, I’m far from convinced that we’re about to enter a golden age where publishers get rewarded for spending lots of effort and money on commissioning, editing, and publishing extraordinary content. The web is still a mass medium, and cats-make-you-crazy stories are hard to scale, while commodity content is much easier to replicate. If you want to get to half a million pageviews, you’re always much more likely to get there with a thousand blog posts than you are with a single swing for the fences.

blogs.reuters.com