‘Pictures came and broke your heart’: the social video factor
Our personal weekly selection about journalism and innovation. Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.
Published in
4 min readAug 26, 2016
edited by Marco Nurra
- BuzzFeed will split itself into two new departments: news and entertainment. Expanding video, but not downsizing news, as Mathew Ingram reported this Wednesday: “One reason for the move is the need to create more video because that’s where most of the money is in the media industry, and particularly at BuzzFeed — which, like several other media outlets, is being paid by Facebook to create live video.”
- The rise of video is making 2016 a weird year to be a digital publisher. Facebook has shifted the formula by which it sorts your News Feed to prioritize video over outbound links. It’s easy to talk about this in the abstract as a set of levers and incentives that digital publishers are forced to apprehend. But the change in priorities of advertisers and distribution channels is more than just a minor new hurdle — it’s a requirement for those publishers to enter an entirely new business.
- Some publishers are worried about the viability of branded video on Facebook. Media companies are amassing increasingly large audiences for video on Facebook, allowing them to make more money from producing and distributing videos paid for by advertisers. But the more popular video becomes on the social network, the more some publishers worry about how Facebook’s policies will evolve regarding such branded content videos. Facebook says it has no plans to take a cut of the growing business or to penalize advertiser-sponsored videos.
- The New York Times’ public editor, Liz Spayd, has written an (auto-) critical analysis about the strengths and weaknesses of their Facebook Live videos: too many don’t live up to the journalistic quality one typically associates with The Times.
“I need no convincing that live, interactive video is a medium worth embracing. If you’re not experimenting in the digital age, you won’t survive. But this particular experiment veers significantly from The Times’s past approach to new journalism forms. The newsroom has shown that innovation doesn’t have to equate with poor quality. Whether it was with interactive graphics, virtual reality or podcasts, The Times is a model for innovating at a thoughtful, measured pace, but with quality worthy of its name. This time, that’s not the case.”
- Oculus’ new Barack Obama video highlights the biggest roadblock for VR going mainstream. Produced to mark the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service today (25 Aug), the new video launches on both National Geographic’s and Oculus’ Facebook page (Facebook happens to own Oculus), as well as the Oculus store.
- A strange new class of media outlet has arisen to take over our news feeds. While web publishers have struggled to figure out how to take advantage of Facebook’s audience, native Facebook page publishers have thrived. Unburdened of any allegiance to old forms of news media or the deployment of any sort of ideological balance, this new kind of publisher has a freedom that more traditional publishers don’t: to engage with Facebook purely on its terms. These are professional Facebook users trying to build media companies, in other words, not the other way around. “It’s like a meme war.”
- How hoaxers are finding new, effective tactics to trick the public — and make money in the process. It’s easy to describe what “fake news websites” are, and how they work: these sites publish stories that look and read like real news articles but are completely fake. They exist in order to earn money from ads. But many of them are now evolving in order to find new ways to fool people, and to make money.
- The more partisan your online media diet, the less likely you are to believe fact-checkers. Reading lots of partisan news makes you more likely to hold inaccurate beliefs even if you are aware of the prevailing evidence, according to a study published this month in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.
- “Bad Plea Deals” is the CIR’s first project made specifically for Instagram. The investigative series will unfold in 21 chapters posted three times a day for seven days. These chapters (photos and videos) represent the number of years since the investigation’s main subject was convicted. Rolling it out three times a day, day-by-day, offers readers the chance to move through time with the story.
- The New York Times has created a newsroom-wide team for covering race. Rather than covering race all at once or assigning a single reporter to the topic, they have created a team of journalists in different departments throughout the newsroom who conceive and develop stories related to the subject.
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