(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) It’s clear that print is going through a bit of turbulence right now, with digital publishing thriving. This point was succinctly put by a friend of mine on Facebook when he posted a photo of the (ironically the print version) NYTimes article on self-driving cars, which was accompanied by an illustration of a man in a self-driving car…reading a printed newspaper. “Of course,” wrote my friend, “the NYT predicts the future will include people riding around in self-driving cars, reading 19th-century era print media.” The idea that print is dead is pretty pervasive; it’s the mantra that has echoed through the media sector for years now. However, print continues to not only persist, but in some ways thrive. Michael Brunt, CMO of the Economist argues that this is due to the fact that print has become a luxury or experiential product.
2) As news organisations continue to struggle with their relationship to social media, one news organisation has learned how to turn clicks into subscribers. The New York Times has been trying to fight against such “drive-by readers”, who are sent to their content via Facebook but tend not to remain engaged in the material very long, by using the start-up Keywee to target audiences on Facebook to visit their site.
3) In other social media news, Twitter has launched a new article preview pane that allow publishers to include an expanded summary of a link that is tweeted. It’s still not clear if this “Facebookization” of Twitter will benefit publishers by driving interest in their links, or if it the summaries will provide enough information that the links aren’t clicked.
4) Has Apple become the newest “frenemy” of publishers? Apple recently announced that they will be replacing their Newsstand with Apple News, a service that will use publishers’ content without compensating them for it. Additionally, Apple also announced a new ad blocking extension for their iOS9, which could end up being the start of their monopolization of ad revenues on all iOS devices
5) Facebook’s algorithms now injected with a human element: users are now able to modify which friends they would like to see pop up in their News Feed. This change feeds into Facebook’s goal of knowing everything about their users, both on- and off-line, which will enable them to exert more influence over the users (think back to when they studied the emotions of users back in 2012, which caused public trust in the platform to erode).
6) A new study on the audiences for viral news had some surprising results: it’s not millennials who make up the bulk of their consumers, it’s the mothers. Sites like Viral Nova, LittleThings, and Upworthy, which are all top viral content mills, aren’t responsible for publishing the memes of yesterday that caused the rise in popularity of sites like “i can haz cheezburger” and “9gag”, rather they are now focused on creating inspirational, happy content that your mother would approve of - and share.
7) In preparation for their annual world congress (taking place on the 13-15 October 2015 in Toronto), FIPP has been interviewing many big names of the magazine world. From Zed Zawada, CEO of Media Service Zawada (MSZ), an Eastern European media company that specialises in children’s magazines, to Al Zikovitz, founder of Cottage Life and Lynda Reeves, the founder, publisher and president of House & Home Media. The interviews examine the changing role of print in the increasingly digital world, the diversification of the sector, as well as the importance of brand credibility today.
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