(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) According to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism’s recent Digital News Report, 41% of consumers surveyed access news via Facebook each week. This trend towards finding, sharing and consuming news via social networks is particularly relevant for younger consumers, who also use other, more private networks such as Snapchat and Whatsapp to share content. Some of the other highlights of the report can be found on our blog.

2) As social media has become increasingly important social media for publishers recent partnerships have developed between publishers and Facebook and Google (such as Facebook’s Instant Articles and the Google Digital News Initiative). These joint ventures are still in their test phases, with Instant Articles surprisingly going quiet after their initial launch and upcoming meetings between Google and publishers scheduled for next week to further develop their partnership. However publishers still remain keen to utilize these platforms in order to improve reach and ad revenues, with NBC News pledging to cover at least 25 features a day on Instant Articles and the New York Times pledging 30 articles a day.

3) Another interesting development in the social media world is the launch of a new platform: Minds.com. The site, which has been backed by the hacker collective Anonymous, is committed to ensuring privacy, transparency and security. The site also encrypts users conversations, addressing the growing awareness users have of privacy and sharing of data, and it rewards interaction by promoting sites, giving points to users the more they post, comment, share or vote. In contrast, Facebook revealed new service providing possibility to encrypt private emails by a password, indicating that they are sensitive to the fact that users are demanding more privacy online. However, thee site has simultaneously come under fire in Belgium for ignoring European privacy laws, so it will be interesting to follow how this pans out.

4) This concern for privacy has also had an impact (or at least should have had an impact) on the way journalism is done in the post-Snowden age. Journalists have always had a moral responsibility to ensure the confidentiality of sources, and given the knowledge they now have of metadata and the ease at which third-parties can collect information on a person’s activities, it has become necessary for journalists to take precautions to ensure confidentiality. It also has caused debates on what the role of journalists is in democracy, as well as who can be considered a journalist.

5) This week also saw the launch of YouTube Newswire, which is an initiative of the Google News Lab and Storyful. This new project aims to curate YouTube videos, which are then contextualized by the Storyful newsroom’s team of editors and provided to journalists as a way for them to discover news video of major events and to highlight eyewitness reporting. The project hopes to harness the production of user-generated content in a way that is meaningful to journalists.

6) On the more negative side, a recent study by WAN-IFRA has shown that newspaper circulation revenue has passed advertising revenue for the first time, leading to the unfortunate conclusion (which many already knew) that the basic assumption of the news business model - that advertising subsidises the production of news content - is dead. While print still is responsible for the majority of advertising revenues – and innovative advertising strategies in print still prove successful – publishers still struggle with monetizing their online content.

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