For the month of August, a number of non-subscription articles on the Financial Times website were displayed with a third of the words missing. This was done to illustrate the damage that ad-blocking does to the revenue of online publishers, the percentage of removed words representing the percentage of revenue lost by the company to ad-blockers. This innovative approach may have more impact than the messages used by a number of other publishers warning users of the threat posed by ad-blocking to online publishers, as only a small percentage of the general public is aware of this problem.

Innovative text-to-video creation platform Wibbitz have conducted a study on how different audiences and demographics respond to the newest media technologies employed by publishers. The study covered four of the most recent developments in news publishing technology: Live Video; Chatbots; Wearables and Virtual Reality.

Facebook replaced its trending editors with a new fully automated trending module last week. According to the Guardian, the team was fired without notice at a meeting with a security guard present, with four weeks’ severance. The move towards automation has so far turned out to be quite a disaster, as the new algorithm has pushed false, misspelled and obscene stories to the top of the trending list, resulting in a picture of a man masturbating with a chicken burger going viral. It would seem that in some cases the human brain can still do the job better than computer algorithms.