(Left) Veronika Jermanova, Communications Intern at EMMA/the Future Media Lab..

In the most recent edition of our bi-weekly news roundup, Veronika Jermanova 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 Veronika’s choices for this week:

1) The biggest news this week was Google’s announcement that it will be completely restructuring how it operates, beginning with the creation of a new publicly traded company Alphabet Inc. Under the new structure, Alphabet will become the holding company of all Google’s diverse business enterprises, among which Google will be the largest. For details, check out Google co-founder Larry Page’s announcement on Alphabet’s website. While there were rumours that suggested this shift might be associated to the Google antitrust case with the European Commission, Politico confirmed that this reorganisation won’t have any impact on this case’s investigations.

2) Facebook is currently working on developing a new application to woo journalists. The application, which is currently in the early stages of testing, will enable journalists to send notifications to users in case of breaking news. Additionally, Facebook also announced its new live-streaming capabilities, Facebook Mentions, through which public figures can interact with their audience by uploading a video.

3) Publishers continue to keep up with market demands by developing new, innovative approaches for how to keep subscribers or to get even closer to them. For instance the New York Times plans to make its mobile ads more native and less interruptive. The new ads format will be rolled out in September to its smartphone app. Another new ‘trick’ some publishers, such as the New York Time and Huffington Post, have adopted is the use of truncated articles with a button ‘read the whole article’. The use of truncated articles enable readers to more easily scan content while still having easy access to the rest of an article. This strategy has resulted in a moderate increase in the time readers spend on content on their mobile devices.

4) Yet another publisher testing out new, innovative partnerships is Condé Nast, who recently announced a new cooperation with Amazon. With newsstand sales decreasing, Condé Nast decided to offer its most desired print magazine issue, September’s Vogue issue, for sale through the platform. Monica Ray, the Executive Vice-President for Consumer Marketing at Condé Nast, stated that this initiative might be extended to other publisher’s portfolio. This is the first initiative of its kind for Amazon.

5) The United Kingdom may have gotten a little overzealous in its reform of copyright legislation, with the High Court overturning the right to transfer copyrighted works from one medium (MP3) to another (CD), even after the legal purchase of the content. This ruling has, in essence, made it illegal for iTunes users to burn a CD in the UK. That said, as this area of copyright law is very complex, the government is at the moment discussing the implications of the ruling and the available options. However the origin of this case goes back to 2014 when the UK government made a new set of regulations regarding copyright for digital songs.

6) Native advertising is the future and publishers are embracing it. However, as a new discipline it is not always easy to do it right. At the end of 2014, IAB Europe published the ‘Native Advertising Playbook’ in an effort to provide clarity on native advertising options. This year, they released a supplement to this publication: Deep-Dive on In-Feed Ad Units. But why is native advertising capturing our attention? This Webpronews infographic breaks down the reasons why native advertising so effective.

7) Finally, start your weekend by checking how news-savvy you are: take the World News Quiz! (Note: may test some other things as well)

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