In the latest edition of our bi-weekly news roundup (the earlier posts can be read here), Susan Clandillon shares the news that caught her eye in the past two weeks. The news round-up is a way for the Future Media Lab. team and members of the Future Media Lab. network to share articles about innovations and developments in the media sector, including references to relevant media policy debates.

Here are Susan’s picks for this week:

1) Frédéric Filloux of Monday Note talks about the Rise of AdBlockPlus, and the backlash against it from the publishing sector. He reports that this week, French publishers GESTE and the French Internet Advertising Bureau are following their German colleagues and are preparing themselves to sue the creator, startup Eyeo GmbH. They are readying themselves for legal action on the grounds that this technology poses a major economic threat to their business models by blocking advertising content. As Filloux notes, most people download AdBlockPlus to get rid of pop-up windows, screaming videos, or videos that are impossible to mute, however once it is downloaded on a browser, it will block out all adverts. He states that there would be less need for a technology such as this one if we did not have these kinds of unacceptable ads, and suggests that the best way to fight these technologies would be for the advertising and the publishing world to come together and clean up the ‘ad mess’.

2) Emily Bell writes for the Guardian again this week, with an article titled ‘Can Silicon Valley disrupt journalism if journalists hate be disrupted?’ Last weekend a large proportion of the New Republic staff wrote an open letter which they posted on the Facebook page of Robert Reich, the former labor secretary, following the mass resignation of staff and unpaid ‘contributing editors’ at the magazine. The publication was bought out by Chris Hughes (Facebook co-founder) in 2012. In October this year, Hughes appointed Guy Vidra as chief executive (formerly Yahoo), and made plans to transform the New Republic into a ‘vertically integrated digital product’. However, as you would imagine this fed into the current malaise surrounding the creep of Silicon Valley into the journalism sphere, and brought on fears of reputable journalistic sources like the New Republic being turned into listicalized content production lines. Indeed Bell notes that the people who are investing most heavily in journalism are coming from outside the field, such as tech billionaires like Hughes, Omidyar (E-Bay/First Look Media) and Bezos (Amazon/Washington Post).

3) The New York Times also chronicles the recent revolt at the ‘New’ New Republic. Mahler and Somaiya write that we should have seen it coming, how could the college roommate of Mark Zuckerberg buy up the ultimate symbol of old media - dating back to the Woodrow Wilson administration - and not cause some form of disruption? Alongside the appointment of former Yahoo official Guy Vidra, Hughes replaced beloved editor Franklin Foer with former editor of the Atlantic Wire and Gawker Gabriel Snyder. It was this action that sparked the mass resignations at New Republic, and has led to the cancellation of the next issue. As Mahler and Somaiya point out, if Silicon Valley based tech companies are going to rescue traditional journalism outlets then they are proving to be complicated saviours. This long-read article gives insight into the leadership of Mr. Hughes since 2012, and compared this with the stewardship of Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post. Well worth a read.

4) Tim Ryan of the American Journalism Review looks at 2015: The Year of the Smartwatch. He says that we need to start thinking about what news would look like on a watch, as wearables might well be the next big thing in mobile journalism. He does concede that it will probably be through a combination of smartwatch and smartphone that users will consume news in the near future. Dan Shanoff, found of curation service Quickish, points at the move towards ‘glance journalism’. This represents the next challenge for news publishers and they must try to summarize compelling headlines in glance format. Some major networks have already begun their foray into this area, with CNN’s mobile app currently supporting Samsung Gear watches.

5)From the Nieman Lab, Ken Doctor looks at ‘The newsonomics of the newly quantified, gamified news reader’ this week with a focus on the Daily Beast, and their Daily Breakdown feature which launched in August 2014. More than 1/3 of customers are visiting this section of the app, and the majority of these are millenials (they make up 54% of the sites mobile users). These folk like and want interactivity, and this is something that is delivered by the Pandora-esque feature known as the SKIP button. In algorithmic terms skip = -1 point, the opposite of a story read; while prompted suggestions that are followed through by the user are worth +1 points, such as ‘you’ve read a lot of articles by this author lately, would you like to follow him? Click here.’ etc. The reader can then examine their metrics within the Beast app, with generated percentages of the types of stories you are skipping or reading. Mike Dyer, co-managing director and chief product office of the Beast, calls this the Nudge Engine, which he says is a lighter touch on personalization: individualization.

6) Tech Crunch’s Natasha Lomas questions “How do you balance the competing interests of personal data privacy with the rapacious appetites of big data fueled digital businesses?” This is something that the European data protection authorities are still wrangling with. Today they have published a joint declaration on the principles they think are necessary to achieve a balance - published by Europe’s article 29 working party. Lomas speculates that there will be efforts in the coming weeks to soften Europe’s position on data protection for its web users in light of the ongoing TTIP negotiations, and coupled with ongoing lobbying from US tech giants. See Lomas’s article for a summary of the WP29’S declaration.

7) This week the Pew Research Center’s Internet Project has published a summary of its findings from a survey into whether Americans feel more or less informed as a result of the internet. American adults cite the internet and cell phones as having benefits in learning, sharing and diversifying the flow of information into their lives, with 87% of online adults starting that the internet and cell phones have improved their ability to learn new things, with only 26% of those surveyed saying that they felt overloaded by so much information. When it comes to news, 75% of people felt that they were now better informed about national news, 74% about international news and 72% about pop culture.

8) Joshua Brunstein reports for Bloomberg Business week on an interesting development in the publishing world. In the aftermath of a nasty feud with Amazon, French publisher Hachette has turned its head towards a new and unlikely bookseller, Twitter. In the coming month Hachette will use Twitter’s new buy button to sell copies of a limited number of books by musician Amanda Palmer, astronaut Chris Hadfield, and writers at the Onion. This provides a new way for publishers to get around Jeff Bezo’s empire, and is good news for Twitter in terms of keeping the wolf from the door, and generating money for their long-suffering investors. A win-win? Time will tell…

9) On the theme of next generation journalism, journalism.co.uk writes about the five teams of student journalists who are reporting from the Axel Springer Academy in Berlin on the topic of ‘generation separation’ in 15 European countries through social media. The five teams are apparently tracking topics in Europe that we need to take a closer look at. These range from discrimination, independence movements, populism, economic crisis, to ethnic diversity across the continent. By using social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instragram and Youtube, these young journalists are publishing their reports. These reports are then collected by a team in Berlin and posted on the Generation Separation website.

10) Now for something totally bizarre, and a little pre-holidays treat. It’s Olivia Newton John’s 1985 journalism-themed hit “Queen of the Publication”. Enjoy!