from MediaFile:
Content everywhere? More like content nowhere
Will Big Media and Big Tech companies ever stop punishing their biggest fans?
Like many people, I woke up yesterday and reached for my iPad for my morning hit of news, entertainment and information, so I could start my day. (And like many, I’m embarrassed to admit it.) Padding to the front door to get a newspaper still sounds more respectable, but my iPad gives me a far more current, rich and satisfying media experience than a still-warm printed Times could ever produce.
Except, lately, it doesn’t. Yesterday morning, I saw the exciting news that Bill Simmons, ESPN’s most popular, profane and controversial writer, had secured an interview with President Obama. Simmons published his interview in podcast, text and video form on Grantland, a longform sports journalism website he founded last year under the ESPN umbrella. I clicked over to the story from my Twitter feed and saw three YouTube excerpts of Simmons with Obama. And that’s all I saw. When I hit play on the videos, I discovered ESPN had set them to be “unavailable” on mobile devices.
Moving on, I tried to read a New York Post headline that also found its way into my Twitter feed. But when I tapped in, the Post webpage that loaded was not the story I wanted to read. Instead it was a notice, which I took as an admonition, that to read New York Post content on an iPad, I would have to download the app, which retails for $1.99.
I want to make it clear that I’m not against paying for content. But what I’ve just described aren’t paywalls, where publications warn users that they won’t be able to consume content for free.
The situations I’m describing are blanket denials of content because of a choice I made about which device to use. With these tactics, media companies aren’t creating content paywalls, they’re creating content ghettos. Big Media, set my content free! Stop messing with the user experience to deny readers their content simply because you can detect what platform they’re on. And stop punishing users who are investing in the latest devices to consume your output. In other words, grant my hyper-advanced iOS device or my friend’s fancy new Android phone just as much access to the Web as my mother’s four-year-old Windows XP PC. Which one of us do you think wants to watch Simmons talk crossover dribbles with the Commander-in-Chief?
from Paul Smalera:
What real Internet censorship looks like
Lately Internet users in the U.S. have been worried about censorship, copyright legalities and data privacy. Between Twitter’s new censorship policy, the global protests over SOPA/PIPA and ACTA and the outrage over Apple’s iOS allowing apps like Path to access the address book without prior approval, these fears have certainly seemed warranted. But we should also remember that Internet users around the world face far more insidious limitations and intrusions on their Internet usage -- practices, in fact, that would horrify the average American.
Sadly, most of the rest of the world has come to accept censorship as a necessary evil. Although I recently argued that Twitter’s censorship policy at least had the benefit of transparency, it’s still an unfortunate cost of doing global business for a company born and bred with the freedoms of the United States, and founded by tech pioneers whose opportunities and creativity stem directly from our Constitution. Yet by the standards of dictatorial regimes, Internet users in countries like China, Syria and Iran should consider themselves lucky if Twitter’s relatively modest censorship program actually keeps those countries’ governments from shutting down the service. As we are seeing around the world, chances are, unfortunately, it won’t.
Consider the freedoms -- or lack thereof -- Internet users have in Iran. Since this past week, some 30 million Iranian users have been without Internet service thanks to that country’s blocking of the SSL protocol, right at the time of its parliamentary elections. SSL is what turns “http” -- the basic way we access the Web -- into “https”, which Gmail, your bank, your credit card company and thousands of other services use to secure data. SSL provides data encryption so that only each end point -- your browser and the Web server you’re logging into -- can decrypt and access the data contained therein.
By blocking SSL, Iran has crippled Tor, a program that enables Internet users to anonymize not just their content but their physical location as well. Tor is a very common workaround for users in totalitarian regimes to access Twitter, Gmail, Facebook and other services. It’s hard to come up with an apt analogy for Iran’s unprecedented blockage -- it’s not just that the letters you send are read by the Post Office and photocopied for their records, it’s that the Post Roads themselves have been closed off, so you can’t even send a letter in the first place. That’s the net effect of blocking SSL in Iran.
The hacking group Anonymous has brought down all kinds of websites in protest, mostly over copyright, in the U.S. and Europe. I don’t advocate their targeting any country’s servers for retribution, but where is the outrage or public demonstration or media attention over the denials of Iranians’ basic freedoms to communicate, via the Internet?
Unfortunately, it’s still too easy for Internet companies and even the Internet’s founding fathers to dismiss the importance of the tools they created in fostering free and open public dialogue, especially in places like Iran. Recently, legendary engineer and Google Vice-President Vint Cerf published a New York Times op-ed entitled “Internet Access is Not a Human Right,” where he wrote: “Internet access is always just a tool for obtaining something else more important.” How wrong he is. Cerf’s line of thinking eviscerates the Internet -- the wonder of the modern world he helped build. Cerf argues that humans have the right to “lead healthy, meaningful lives,” including having “freedom from torture or freedom of conscience.” Yet, we live in the 21st century: It’s hard to see how, among people whose economies are developed enough to afford them communication devices, Cerf would excuse governments that curtail their citizens’ freedom and right to use the ultimate communications tool -- the global network of the Internet. In fact, in underdeveloped parts of the world, the cost to have a cell phone that connects to the Web can be quite affordable.
I’m not arguing semantics here -- if our society excludes the Internet from the fundamental rights of human communication, we also excuse totalitarian regimes like Iran’s from any repercussions when it comes to blocking that avenue of human contact. It’s a dangerous compromise to make in a world that only gets more digital with each passing day. And it also conveniently excuses the free world from having to do much of anything about it. We wouldn’t forgive Iran if it threw 30 million citizens into solitary confinement -- so why would we ignore it when the Iranian government effectively cuts the entire population off from the outside world, to stifle their voices during a critical electoral cycle?
The example of Iran is well taken in this article, but I would like to add one: I lived and taught in Zhuhai, China, from August 2007 to July 2009. As an expatriate, I didn’t seem to have my computer monitored and censored very much, but my students at United International College surely did.
We take our freedoms for granted. I don’t any more. I know what it is like to live in a country where “freedom of expression” is a sham. We shouldn’t let that happen here, which doesn’t mean condoning criminal activities on the net, but it does mean a conscious guarding of freedom of speech.
from Paul Smalera:
Twitter’s censorship is a gray box of shame, but not for Twitter
Twitter’s announcement this week that it was going to enable country-specific censorship of posts is arousing fury around the Internet. Commentators, activists, protesters and netizens have said it’s “very bad news” and claim to be “#outraged”. Bianca Jagger, for one, asked how to go about boycotting Twitter, on Twitter, according to the New York Times. (Step one might be... well, never mind.) The critics have settled on #TwitterBlackout: all day on Saturday the 28th, they promised to not tweet, as a show of protest and solidarity with those who might be censored.
Here’s the thing: Like Twitter itself, it’s time for the Internet, and its chirping classes, to grow up. Twitter’s policy and its transparency pledge with the censorship watchdog Chilling Effects is the most thoughtful, honest and realistic policy to come out of a technology company in a long time. Even an unsympathetic reading of the new censorship policy bears that out.
To understand why, let’s unpack the policy a bit: First, Twitter has strongly implied it will not remove content under this policy. If that doesn’t sound like a crucial distinction from outright censorship, it is. Taking the new policy with existing ones, the only time Twitter says it will ever remove a tweet altogether is in response to a DMCA request. The DMCA may have its own flaws, but it is a form of censorship that lives separately from the process Twitter has outlined in this recent announcement. Where the DMCA process demands a deletion of copyright-infringing content, Twitter’s censorship policy promises no such takedown: it promises instead only to withhold censored content from the country where the content has been censored. Nothing else.
To be sure, that’s censorship of a kind, but compared to the industry censorship even Americans have long lived with -- take the Motion Picture Association of America, which still censors films based on dubious standards of taste and morality -- it’s positively enlightened. And it never permanently destroys or pre-empts content, the way the MPAA does.
Further, for a country to censor content, it has to make a “valid and properly scoped request from an authorized entity” to Twitter, which will then decide what to do with the request. Twitter will also make an effort to notify users whose content is censored about what happened and why, and even give them a method to challenge the request. According to Twitter’s post, a record of the action will also be filed to the Chilling Effects website. The end result of a successful request is that the tweet or user in question is replaced by a gray box that notifies other readers inside the censoring country that the Tweet has been censored:
disagree with your reasoning if the end result of a successful censorship request is (quote) “that the tweet or user in question is replaced by a gray box that notifies other readers inside the censoring country that the Tweet has been censored…. it’s instead a bright signal to a country’s online citizens that their government is limiting their free speech.”
condoms for tweets and safe social intercourse
timid walter mitty comes to mind … ‘bright signals’ and all
@ iq160 – finding alternatives to restrictive laws are the jouissance of internetting
Supporting the past, ignoring the future
By Rasmus Kleis Nielsen The opinions expressed are his own.
Western media industries are going through a rapid and often painful transformation today with the rise of the Internet and mobile platforms, the erosion of the largest free-to-air broadcast audiences, and the decline of paid print newspaper circulation.
Despite all these changes, the important and sometimes neglected ways in which governments provide support for the media have remained largely unchanged for decades.
There is a real need to reform our 20th century support arrangements to make sure they effectively serve our needs in the 21st century. Public sector support for the media should not be industrial policy, propping up specific ailing incumbents, but democratic policy, aimed at ensuring that timely, accessible news from a diversity of sources is available to the entire population.
Most media companies prefer not to talk about the support they receive from their government, but all developed democracies intervene in media markets in direct and indirect ways to serve a range of public interest goals.
The most important intervention in much of Western Europe is licence fee funding for public service broadcasting, based on what is basically a ring-fenced tax on households that own television or radio receivers. The United States also provides funding for public broadcasting, but on a much more limited scale and through direct federal and state appropriations.
“New” media? The only news sites I read online – and I read a lot of it – are the online versions of print publications: newspapers, or, in the case of Reuters, a company which supplies newspapers. I read the above article without knowing exactly what the writer is advocating, as the article seemed an exercise in beating-around-the-bush; but if the article is aimed at subsidizing people who stumble off sidewalks reading twitter and obtaining their culture through torrents, I’d rather the taxpayer was not further molested.
The Fox in the Tea Party
By Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson
The views expressed are their own.
Many observers of the role of U.S. media in politics as of the early twenty-first century are alarmed that partisanship has crept in. This rarely bothers very conservative pundits, of course, because (even if they constantly complain about “liberal media bias”) they know that the elephants in the room are on their side. Liberals and self-styled nonpartisan critics engage in constant tut-tutting about the horrors of partisan media. They forget that American democracy was born and flourished through the nineteenth century in an environment where major newspapers, the mass media of the day, were all closely aligned with political parties. “Objective news” was not to be found; nineteenth-century editors and reporters alike presented highly selective versions of the facts, often in luridly emotional ways.
Only in the twentieth century, as sociologist Michael Schudson explained in his ground-breaking book Discovering the News, did professional journalists gain a degree of autonomy. Journalists developed norms of objectivity and “balance,” which leading newspapers and, later, television networks tried to follow, more or less. Norms of objective journalism led to the convention of looking for quotes from sources on “both sides of the issue”—a practice more reflective of the fact that there were two major parties roaming the U.S. political tundra than of any law that major questions have only two possible answers. Social movements and protest efforts outside the two major parties found it harder to get a hearing in the objective-and-balanced media regime.
Given the impressive scope of conservative media, American democracy is, in an important sense, caught betwixt and between in the new media world. The frank, exuberant, all-around partisanship of the nineteenth century is not quite what we now have. True, there are both liberal and conservative bloggers, and on the tube, the Fox political slant is weakly countered by liberal-slanted shows on MSNBC. But mostly what America has right now is a thousand-pound gorilla media juggernaut on the right, operating nineteenth-century style, coexisting with other news outlets trying to keep up while making fitful efforts, twentieth-century style, to check facts and cover “both sides of the story.”
A few weeks after Rick Santelli’s tea party rant on CNBC, Fox News soon recognized a major conservative phenomenon in the making and moved to become cheerleader-in-chief. Fox began to cover the first major tea party rallies six weeks in advance, starting with a March 5, 2009 appearance by Newt Gingrich to talk up the protests on Greta Van Susteren’s show. Scarcely a trickle of Tea Party events occurred over ensuing weeks, but that did not prevent Fox News hosts and guests from speculating wildly about the likely huge size and impact of the forthcoming rallies. Viewers watching Fox News in early 2009 were told that “Tea Party protests are erupting across the country” and assured that “these tea parties are starting to really take off.” Newt Gingrich went on air to make the confident prediction that the April 15th rallies would have “over 300,000” attendees. By late March, Glenn Beck had not only attended a rally in Orlando, Florida. He had interviewed Tea Party activists from Houston and Indianapolis days before rallies occurred in those cities, featuring their plans and pitching their events. For the Tea Party in its vulnerable infancy, the mobilizing impact of such advance coverage in national prime time was invaluable. The Tea Party idea was presented as the “coming thing” to an audience primed for the message. Conservative Fox viewers across America heard that people like them were ready to stand up to Obama and the Democrats—and they were told when and where.
I enjoyed reading this article. The posts are good too.
from The Great Debate UK:
Women leaders: High peaks, low gullies
- Glenda Stone is an Australian businesswomen in the UK, CEO of Aurora and a commentator on economic gender issues. The opinions expressed are her own. Reuters will host a “follow-the-sun” live blog on Monday, March 8, 2010, International Women’s Day. Please tune in.–.-
In Australia there is a common expression of social phenomenon called the “Tall Poppy Syndrome”. It is a pejorative term that describes human behaviour of attacking, despising or attempting to cut down or criticise people of genuine merit because their achievements or talent distinguish them above their peers. Targets are often accomplished people with a public profile: business leaders, politicians, academics - and at times even celebrities and sporting personalities.
The media can be especially vicious in strategising, fuelling and orchestrating smear campaigns with the sole intention of defaming and questioning the character and ability of high-profile leaders.
So three questions arise: Do different countries differ in their appetite and media tolerance for Tall Poppy Syndrome? Has inaccurate, sensationalist, instant reporting in the media become a globally accepted normative standard? And are women even greater targets for negative media attention because of unfair, deeply ingrained societal gender bias?
The UK is one of the most competitive and intensive media consuming countries in the world. In fact, any country where the Murdoch empire towers, a full and crowded range of media exists ranging from the most unintelligent sensationalist reporting through to attempts of more fact based and balanced coverage.
Unlike France where newspapers like Le Monde present lengthy fact- based articles so that readers can consider multiple perspectives and make up their own mind, the UK resorts to six or seven word headlines and light sensationalist text designed to control the minds of the masses, often without them even having to read the article. There has been a significant dumbing down in reporting over the past decades and the masses are simply told unquestionably what to think and believe.
Leaders are constantly attacked and defamed, and a mindset of “if it is not negative it is not news” prevails. Some may argue that social media such as Twitter drive and thrive from this phenomenon, as does the all too familiar tit-for-tat political retaliation banter.
from The Great Debate UK:
Newspapers and Democracy in the Internet era: ‘The Italian Case’
Carlo de Benedetti, Chairman, Gruppo Editoriale L'Espresso/La Repubblica, will deliver the 2009 Reuters Memorial Lecture on ‘Newspapers and Democracy in the Internet era: The Italian Case'.
The Reuters Memorial Lecture commemorates journalists who have lost their lives in pursuit of their profession.
The lecture will be followed by a panel discussion chaired by John Lloyd, with Timothy Garton Ash and Paolo Mancini. Reuters correspondents will be live blogging throughout.
To join the discussion click on the 'make a comment' link at the top of the liveblog panel.
from The Great Debate UK:
Past and present: a correspondent in Iraq
-Tim Cocks is a Reuters correspondent in Iraq.-
This month we reported that the number of civilians dying violent deaths in Iraq had hit a fresh low since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion -- about 125 for September.
Sounds like a lot, but for a country that only two years ago was seeing dozens of bodies pile up in the streets each day from tit-for-tat sectarian killing, it was definitely progress.
And as I prepare to end my assignment in Iraq this week, I need no argument from numbers to convince me that things are better here than when I arrived in Feb. 2008.
During my first few months, militants loyal to to anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr were raising hell in Baghdad, firing mortars and rockets at the Green Zone almost every hour. We could hear or feel them thud on impact, especially when they fell short, on our side of the Tigris.
A rocket hit the BBC building opposite us, causing a blast loud enough to shake our windows, although thankfully no one at the BBC was hurt by the strike.
U.S. airstrikes on Baghdad's Sadr City slum were killing many civilians. Roadside and car bombs were erupting all over the place and the streets were largely deserted after dark.
The embedded version of Iraq’s history leaves much unsaid. Its omissions, lack of candid insight and substitution of anecdote for fact also tend to leave generations of American foreign policy to be based on derivative opinions of generally pig-ignorant hecklers with no concept of what has been destroyed there, how vastly and at what cost.If you had seen Iraq in the 1970s, you would understand the differences brought about there by American intervention as universally deleterious.And, frankly, unforgivable.
from The Great Debate UK:
Google juice dampens news headlines
- Mic Wright is Online News Editor at Stuff. The views expressed are his own -
Google juice – it sure isn't tasty but it is vital for anyone writing news online. The slightly irksome term refers to the mysterious combination of keywords and linking that will drag a webpage to the top of Google's search pages.
While the exact way Google's search algorithm works is largely a mystery to outsiders, news sites know it's vital to write headlines stuffed with the keywords that the search engine seeks out.
Online, the perfect punning headlines created by The Sun newspaper's super sub-editors just won't cut it. News stories on the web are all about the facts and the most successful sites are constantly checking to see what keywords will send you soaring up the Google search rankings. If you story isn't on the front page, it's not getting clicks, the less clicks you get the less likely it is that your advertisers' ads are going to get seen.
Now Google has announced that it's been working on a brand new version of its search engine and it's likely that online headlines are about to get even more straight forward. The new iteration of Google's most profitable invention is codenamed Caffeine thanks to its speediness. It has already been made available for users to test and besides the noticeable increase in speed, it appears to make search a more real time experience than we've previously seen.
The move to real time search, showing web pages in search results as soon as they appear, is a response to the instantaneous nature of Twitter which has recently got the jump on Google when it comes to breaking news. Currently there is a slight but noticeable lag with Google results – its search crawlers (programmes that scour the web to see what sites have been updated) don't grab changes immediately. But with the new version of the search engine they will.
Hi “The Bell” and Ian,
I don’t think we actually disagree on this. To put the short post into context – it was written at Schiphol airport at very short notice at Reuters’ request. I was glad to contribute but it represents a very slight comment on an issue which I could speak about for hours.
I agree that creativity remains the key in getting your news noticed. I also believe that it’s important to have a dedicated audience and to serve them well. My comment was purely on the way that Google’s search algorithms affect the craft of writing headlines. It’s moved from an art to a science in some respects.
I work on a site where quality is our biggest watch word. I have not hoisted the “white flag” nor will I ever do so. I have a background in both print and online journalism and I love good journalism. I work hard and I believe in creating great features and news stories. But as a professional working in this industry, I can’t ignore the material realities of getting things noticed online.
The Bell – I did not deny that Google search results are based on many more things than simply keywords. BUT this piece was about the affect that Google changing their approach to keywords and headlines will have. The recipe for their algorithm is a mystery in many way – very few people know everything they take in to account and how that mix is worked out. I am not afraid of Google, I am not claiming to be “with-it” or totally on the ball about everything.
However, I’m also not big on being called “mate” by anyone. You make some good points but this was a very short and quick look at a particular element of Google searches and their affect on the way news is written. I don’t make the rules nor do I believe that it’s necessary to stick to them slavishly. You clearly know your stuff but don’t presume that I’m a knumbskull. I’m not.
from The Great Debate UK:
Free may be a radical price, but is it progressive?
-Padraig Reidy is news editor at Index on Censorship. The opinions expressed are his own.-
Mainstream consumer media is, it is agreed, in trouble. The idea of paying for one or two newspapers a day is now confined, it seems, to quaintly old-fashioned types who boast of their ignorance of the Internet, or business who actually need the information in the pages of the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal.
Wire services’ content is processed so fast by subscribers that one can barely spot the time difference. Local newspapers are seeing their stock in trade diminished. When one’s entire life is catalogued on Facebook and Flickr, there’s little thrill in having your picture in the local paper, or indeed huge necessity in publishing births, deaths and marriages. And why place a classified ad in a newspaper, when we have eBay and Gumtree?
The solution? Some, such as "Wired" magazine editor-in-chief Chris Anderson, would suggest simply giving things away. Anderson’s new book, "Free: The Future of a Radical Price" is available for free from the web until 1 August, while the hardback edition will be sold, at a price, in shops and on Amazon.
The idea, Anderson tells the Los Angeles Times is that some of those who download for free will also buy the book, if they are sufficiently impressed, of course. It’s a principle that has already been seen at work in the music world, where Radiohead released ‘In Rainbows’ freely on the web, and later released the album to shops, without any noticeable decline in sales.
But can this model work for news, long term? Books and songs are thing we accumulate, collect and return to. Professionals, academics and institutions aside, very few people retain newspaper articles in any way. Yesterday’s news tends to be precisely that, condemned, at best, to the recycling bin. Online, trends tend to move so fast that one could seriously question Chris Anderson’s ‘Long Tail’ theory.
Old news articles’ major purpose now seems to be for cutting and pasting into online arguments on forums and messageboards, useful for those engaged in debate, but perhaps not so much for anyone wishing to create revenue from content.
Yes and no. It’s both too late and too early.
There is, of course, no such thing as a free lunch. There’s only a subsidised lunch, and the “free” content on the Internet is all subsidised in some way or another. When a blogger gets paid for adverts that his readers see (if they don’t have ad blockers), we all pay slightly more in the shops for the advertised goods than we ought to; when a company gives away a million free games to sell a thousand, the thousand people are paying more than they ought so the 999,000 pay less than they ough, and so on.
Like sex, every generation thinks that it is the first to discover the secret of an economy funded entirely by subsidy. Of course, from the Romans to the Soviets, from British Leyland to French farmers, it all eventually goes belly up. The “free” Internet economy will go belly up too, though nobody can yet say when or how. But once it has done, order will be restored to the news industry. And any other industries that have been trashed along the way.
