(Left) Karin Fleming, Communications Manager 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) Automation in the newsroom — essentially using algorithms to write or contribute to articles on various topics — is becoming increasingly common, with the AP producing about 3,500 stories per quarter through automation. Such a shift raises a number of questions about journalistic ethics and audience targeting, but also about the potential impact of limiting- or removing- the human element from the journalistic process. After all, data isn’t equal to information or insights. Rather, data needs to be interpreted in order to be effective, meaning that human editors are still a crucial part of the process.

2) As data becomes increasingly important for the creation of content, it also highlights an on-going struggle publishers face: getting enough data on their audiences in order to create personalized content. This is addressed in the article above in regard to transparency and privacy concerns, but another major concern has to do with the rise of platforms, such as Facebook, Google and Twitter, and their use of publisher’s content without giving publishers access to crucial audience data. This results in missed revenue opportunities for publishers, but also the inability to tailor their content to what their audience wants. This could be one of the reasons that local news is facing a significant decline. That said, the alternative — not utilizing these platforms — is a non-solution, since this will result in a publication’s invisibility online.

3) The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is continuing to fight against ad-blockers, going so far as to say that a lawsuit could be possible in the future. The use of ad-blockers has continued to rise, costing publishers an estimated $21.8 billion in revenue this year. As a result, many publishers are exploring alternative options, such as branded content. The IAB TechLab is also exploring ways to address some of problems ads cause, such as slower page-load times, a reason many cite for using the ad-blockers.

4) Hearst’s president and CEO Duncan Edwards discusses the firms shift in focus from “months to moments” in the FIPP blog last week. This new strategy, he says, follows the changing reading habits of many consumers, making it necessary for up-to-the minute content that has been optimized for social.

5) Reader engagement is a key concern for many media companies. With the overabundance of information available online, engagement is what keeps readers coming to your site — and staying there. For Evan Hansen, the head of content labs at the online publisher Medium, the way to do this was to create a network where readers could engage with one another as opposed to just with the author of an article. While Medium is still struggling to determine their revenue model — and is faced with criticism regarding their strategy to not pay most of their freelancers, instead saying that writers are rewarded by exposure and followers — their emphasis on building a network of engaged readers is crucial.

6) Following on the last point, the co-founder and COO of RYOT News talk about how the future of journalism is inextricably linked to technological advancements and social media in this video. They say, given the current technology - where an iPhone fitted with a light and microphone replaces the news vans of the past - anyone has the chance to become a publisher or content producer. But for me the most interesting feature of RYOT News is that it’s acting not just as a news site, but also a portal for calls to action on issues related to humanitarianism, social justice, world news or culture. This enables readers to become uniquely invested in the stories they read and the site fosters an audience that not only is informed about events around the world, but is empowered to take action.

 

Read something that you think needs to be shared? Please send me an e-mail: [email protected]