(Left) Karin Fleming, Communications and Administration Officer at EMMA/the Future Media Lab..
In the most recent edition of our bi-weekly news roundup, Karin Fleming 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 Karin’s choices for this week:
1) Twitter Inc. has apparently struck a deal with Google Inc. to make tweets visible in Google’s search results in real-time. Bloomberg News reports that the agreement gives Google access to the stream of data generated by users, with the goal to get tweets more visible to non-users and to generate more advertising revenue for a larger audience. It’s speculated that the deal states that Twitter will receive data-licensing revenue, meaning that Google will pay Twitter for better access to its content. If these rumours pan out, what will this mean for news publishers, who have been arguing for this for years?
2) Ken Doctor, of the Nieman Journalism Lab, explores how the old is being made new again: Publishers are rediscovering that predictability — in time, length, and format — are meaningful to consumers as the develop newsletters to keep audiences engaged; boundaries still exist between content and ads, be it e-commerce or digital native advertising; and appropriate regulation of market dominance remains relevant. In Doctor’s words, “it isn’t the majestic algorithms of the day that change everything. It’s our understanding of fairly unchanging human habit that comes first — with the new algorithms then smartly applied.”
3) At the end of January, the BBC released the first part of a report that will outline how they plan to adapt to evolving technologies and changes in consumer behaviour. “The Future of News” report, as summarised by the Nieman Journalism Lab, contained information about how the BBC is using chat apps to help spread the news to their audiences, how they need to include more local news coverage, and that they have to rethink how stories are told and how interaction with readers and sources is conducted. In addition to the report, the BBC also released a video of interviews with digital journalists on how they see the future of news.
4) Should the Right to be Forgotten decision, which said that individuals could request Google to remove links about themselves from online search results, only be applicable in Europe? An advisory group says “yes”, arguing that “the rights of those outside the EU to access information should also be considered”. However not everyone in the group agreed, with some arguing that the right to privacy of European citizens needed to be enforced worldwide.
5) British Facebook users are being prompted to register to vote ahead of the general election that will take place on 7 May, which begs the question: what impact could this campaign potentially have on the outcome of the elections? In the 2008 presidential election in the US, studies showed that Facebook’s “I Voted” button caused an extra third of a million people to vote (2.2%). Given that the use of different social media networks may differ by political preference, the Facebook push to voters could certainly give a bigger boost to voters of one party over another. The concerns are similar to what Robert Epstein wrote about in June 2014 when he postulated that search manipulation could potentially sway an election in one direction, directly putting democracy at risk.
6) Snapchat, the photo messaging app, launched a new feature called “Discover” at the end of January that partners with ten top media companies to bring mobile-native news stories to users. The launch is being praised due to the “low friction” news experience it promotes, given that news items will be brought directly to audiences via a format that feels native to the platform, yet remains flexible in form. And while the engagement numbers seem incredible thus far, some warn publishers to be wary of depending too much on such outlets, as the beneficiary of the deal remains the platform itself.
7) As publishers shift to different platforms, they also are investing in developing unique experiences for their audiences on multiple, autonomous platforms. Whereas previously the ad tech industry pushed standardization onto publishers, with the result being increasingly static user experiences, today’s the burden of ad standardization is being placed on technology.
8) At a time when cameras are incorporated into every cellphone and images can be shared instantly with someone across the globe, what makes a photograph worth publishing? The National Press Photographers Association in the US asked this question last year, conducting a study to determine what makes a photograph memorable and shareable. The study also determined that in addition to the professionalism of the photograph, also captions were important to contextualize and understand what was being seen, with well-written or lengthier captions increasing the likelihood of a photograph receiving attention.
9) Following an article by Lindy West in The Guardian on her experience with trolls on social media (where she wrote that while she understood that Twitter was “within it rights to let its platform be used as a vehicle for sexist and racist harassment” following recent calls to crack down on abuse on the site), Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo wrote in an internal memo that he took personal responsibility for the company’s failure to address this problem and their lack of action causes them to lose core users every day.
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