Data protection and the threat of Pokemon Go, new online media strategies and journalistic responsibility in the face of terrorism

Friday, August 19, 2016      Future Media Lab.       0

Continuing with our bi-weekly news roundup, George Sims shares the news that caught his eye over the last 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 George's choices for this week:

An innocent game or one step closer to “Big Brother”? Marit Hansen, privacy commissioner of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, has warned “Pokémon Go” users in an interview with Handelsblatt that it is in fact the biggest data collecting service out there, with full control over all major features of the users’ smartphones, sourcing data from cameras, microphones, GPS and even friends’ lists. One of the problems, mentioned by Deutsche Welle, is that the developer Niantic could use the game as a marketing tool, deliberately affecting consumer behaviour by steering them with Pokémons towards retail outlets. Legally, this is a difficult question because of the international scope of the enterprise. The Federation of German Consumer Organizations (VZBV) has however challenged 15 clauses of “Pokémon Go” developer Niantic’s terms of usage and privacy statements, threatening to go to court if their demands were not met. The first deadline for the court date has passed (9th of August), and the VZBV have pushed the date back by a month after Niantic allegedly contacted them.

“It's good to have the king of the internet in your court.” Facebook have announced that it will stop allowing ad-blockers to function on its website. This is “a wake-up call for any publishers who haven’t taken ad-blocking seriously so far” according to David Chavern, president and CEO of the Newspaper Association of America. Despite the social media giant having its own interests behind the move (a multi-billion dollar advertisement income for one), many publishers are praising Facebook’s decision, as it can only be an advantage to have the heavyweight of the online world on your side. The fight for finding a viable funding system for online publication continues, and the much-repeated motto of “quality content costs” sounds more confident with as important an ally as Facebook.

The future of online media? Publishers are experimenting with new media to cover the Olympic Games. As an event with a fixed date and a certain amount of time for planning, the Olympic Games provides news organisation with a great platform for experimenting on publishing strategies within the digital realm. This year’s edition has seen interesting new features such as NYT’s interactive athlete profiles and The Washington Post’s interactive scale map, showcasing the possibilities that technological advancement provides for news outlets in matters of innovative publishing techniques.

How is Western Media adapting to covering the recent rise in terrorist attacks on the continent? Al-Jazeera discussed last month’s killing of civilians in Munich on Inside Story with Philipp Rotmann, Associate Director of the Global Public Policy Institute (GPPI) and Habib Battah, Editor-in-Chief of the Beirut Report. The panellists raised important issues such as Western media’s role in spreading islamophobia. Habib Battah in particular, spoke of the responsibility of journalists to avoid simplistic discourse and categorization, pointing to the lack of in-depth sociological and psychological analysis of the perpetrator’s motives for committing a mass killing or terrorist attack if he/she is Muslim or affiliated with a known Islamic terrorist organisation. In the case of white non-Muslim perpetrators, the motives behind the attack are analysed and discussed for a long time afterwards, whereas it is easy and convenient for Western media to just put Muslim terrorists in the box of “Islamic extremists, without having to analyse each case in depth. Philipp Rotman called for media and governments to thoroughly investigate every case rather than feed the stereotypes and overreactions that only strengthen the terrorists’ narrative.

EU “Link tax” faced with widespread criticism. Some of the recently published EU copyright reform proposals are outdated, according to The Parliament Magazine’s Daniel Dalton. Setting aside the few sensible ideas such as the portability proposal, many of the Commission’s suggestions are ridiculously incongruous to the development of today’s digital market. A bid to enforce a 20% European content quota on on-demand video services such as Netflix, as well as the so-called “link tax” are some examples of the discrepancy between policy-makers’ ideas about how the market functions and the views of the actual actors running it. Mr. Dalton explains that the “link tax” (forcing news aggregators to pay publishers a fee for content displayed on their search engines) would make it more difficult for smaller-scale or new publishers to enter the market as well as depriving consumers of a large amount of content. For more information and the possibility to speak out against the “link tax”, visit Save the Link.

“A slow magazine or a fast history book” - Rob Orchard. 

In an era of fast, competitive headlines designed to catch the reader’s eye (and particularly to get the most clicks), instant, on-the-spot breaking news is the norm, leaving readers accustomed to short, factual, and sometimes inaccurate articles with little or no analysis involved. Delayed Gratification is a quarterly magazine that delivers what co-founder Rob Orchard calls Slow News, a new form of journalism which takes a look at major events after the media hype has died down, allowing the writer to analyse them within a broader context than Breaking News stories do. A slick design and a large number of original infographics have made this print project viable despite the market shifting towards digitalization.

The European Journalism Observatory (EJO) has opened its counterpart for the Arab world: The Arabic Journalism Observatory (AJO), which will serve the same function as the EJO but in Arabic countries. A bid to provide Arabic media with a platform to share views and experiences on reporting in the various countries of the region, the AJO website is in Arabic and will also be translated into French.

“I don’t think you can be a good journalist if you don’t have empathy.” - Kareem Shaheen (The Guardian)

Telling the Human Story is a ten-minute film by Polis & the London School of Economics (LSE) about the challenges faced in the very human approach chosen by Lebanese journalists covering the refugee crisis. The film features a number of journalists based in Lebanon who have been covering the story from a very human perspective since the beginning. One of the featured journalists, Carine Torbey (BBC Arabic), mentions the interesting fact that as the crisis has been drawn out, the stories are having to be more powerful and inventive in order to get readership, because the general public has become accustomed to the constant news about refugees.