The war for ads between publishers and Facebook, 360-degree video and the fight for survival
Our personal weekly selection about journalism and innovation. Join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.
Published in
5 min readMar 30, 2018
edited by Marco Nurra
🔔 Pleased to announce our 700+ confirmed #ijf18 speakers. All festival sessions are free entry for all attendees. Come and join us!
- Two months post-News Feed tweak: real news is not drowning, comments are growing, and videos are still winning, NewsWhip says. The full report can be found here.
- The Big Data Panic. Cambridge Analytica said it could move the minds of American voters. Science tells a different story.
- Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica problems are nothing compared to what’s coming for all of online publishing. “Let’s start with Facebook’s Surveillance Machine, by Zeynep Tufekci in last Monday’s New York Times. Among other things (all correct), Zeynep explains that ‘Facebook makes money, in other words, by profiling us and then selling our attention to advertisers, political actors and others. These are Facebook’s true customers, whom it works hard to please.’ Irony Alert: the same is true for the Times, along with every other publication that lives off adtech: tracking-based advertising. These pubs don’t just open the kimonos of their readers. They bring people’s bare digital necks to vampires ravenous for the blood of personal data, all for the purpose of returning ‘interest-based’ advertising to those same people. With no control by readers (beyond tracking protection which relatively few know how to use, and for which there is no one approach or experience), and damn little care or control by the publishers who bare those readers’ necks, who knows what the hell actually happens to the data? No one entity, that’s for sure.”
- Will news organizations face Facebook-fueled blowback for using third-party tracking on their own sites? “The sins are different; but they are still sins, just as apples and oranges are still both fruit. Exposing readers to data vampires is simply wrong on its face, and we need to fix it.”
- Want readers to start trusting you again? Stop stalking them across the internet. [Poynter’s Melody Kramer · August 8, 2017]
- Why tech platforms should give users more control — and how they can do it. “I’ve long believed that the platforms — and all companies that create marketing-oriented databases about us, from whatever sources — should be required to 1) let users remove everything companies have collected about them via their use of online services; 2) make all data, including conversations, “portable” in ways that would enable competitors to woo people onto other services (especially ones that made privacy a feature); 3) limit what they can do with the data they do collect; 4) offer easy-to-use “dashboards” giving users granular control over privacy and data-sharing setting; and 5) disclose absolutely everything they do, in simple language that even a U.S. president could understand. The complications in doing these things are enormous. Maybe it’s impractical, or even impossible.”
🔔 Dan Gillmor will be a #ijf18 speaker at the following events:
🔴 WikiTribune: the news is broken and we can fix it
🔴 Media literacy unconference
To Facebook — and its critics: please don’t screw up our internet. “I admire a report about how the leaders of our tomorrow — the youth of Parkland — are using social media to change the world. […] To echo Margaret Sullivan, these young people are ‘amazing communicators’. That is to say, they are smart, informed, and articulate. Now if you try to argue that they come off so well because they come from privilege — and they do — listen to all the many young people from many different schools and communities who spoke and were interviewed at the March for Our Lives. This is an articulate generation. The collection of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Snap did not ruin them. It empowered them. It connected them. It taught them how to speak to a public. In these dark, divided, Trumpian times when even an optimist such as myself could start to lose hope, I have regained my optimism watching, listening to, and following these young people. […] I would call them more than ‘content creators’. I would call them leaders.”
🔔 Jeff Jarvis will be a #ijf18 speaker at the following events:
🔴 Help define the moral imperatives that should be guiding media and platforms’ decisions
🔴 Quality news on Facebook: a conversation with Campbell Brown
🔴 Moral panic over technology: is it all that bad?
🔴 A deeper definition of community: it’s more than just conversation - Why Al Jazeera taught young refugees how to tell their own stories in 360 degrees. Staff from Contrast VR, Al Jazeera’s immersive media studio, took their kit to Jordan, training seven young people in spherical storytelling.
🔔 Contrast VR’s Viktorija Mickute will be a #ijf18 speaker - Do 360-degree video news stories generate empathy in viewers? Researchers found that VR made viewers “more likely to report a desire to take action” and greater recall.
🔔We’ll tackle this topic at #ijf18 with Marc Ellison, Joe Inwood, Viktorija Mickute and Joffrey Monnier
🔴 Empathy engine or poverty porn? The challenges of telling stories from the developing world with 360 video - Mexican reporter killed in Veracruz state. Leobardo Vázquez Atzin was shot dead on 21 March by unknown assailants in the restaurant he owned in the town of Gutiérrez Zamora, approximately 200 miles east of Mexico City.
🔔 We’ll tackle this topic at #ijf18 with Cynthia Rodriguez, Ivan Grozny Compasso, Riccardo Noury and Tiziana Prezzo
🔴 “If you write you’ll die”: the fight for survival of journalists in Mexico - Egypt: arrest and deportation of Bel Trew, a correspondent for the Times, is the latest incident in an unprecedented crackdown. Arrest and deportation of the Times correspondent is the latest incident in an unprecedented crackdown.
🔔 Bel Trew will be a #ijf18 speaker at the following events:
🔴 Survival mechanisms for Middle East journalists
🔴 Al-Sisi’s Egypt: elections, repression, the Giulio Regeni case - Open letter to diplomats in Malta regarding the Daphne Caruana Galizia murder. Eight international freedom of expression organisations signed an open letter urging diplomats in Malta to make their presence felt concerning the investigation of the Daphne Caruana Galizia murder.
🔔 We will consider this subject at #ijf18:
🔴 Daphne. Who was Daphne Caruana Galizia and why was she murdered? First screening of the documentary
🔴 Investigating links between governments and organised crime: the murders of Daphne Caruana Galizia and Ján Kuciak - Turkey: Crackdown on Social Media Posts. “Turkish authorities have detained and prosecuted large numbers of people over social media posts criticizing Turkey’s military operation in the northwest Syrian district of Afrin. The crackdown violates the right to peaceful expression.”
🔔 We’ll tackle this topic at #ijf18 with Yavuz Baydar, Marta Ottaviani,Sarphan Uzunoglu, Servet Yanatma, Stefan Candea, Zeynep Sentek and Craig Shaw
🔴 Searching for online media business models in Turkey
🔴 How can journalism networks help investigations under authoritarian regimes? Case study: Turkey - Report: Diversity and Inclusion at The New York Times. The NYT joins the ranks of (still too few) American media companies voluntarily disclosing staffing composition/diversity data. Here’s Gismodo Media’s data.
- This is the next major traffic driver for publishers: Chrome’s mobile article recommendations, up 2,100 percent in one year. It’s already driving almost as many visits as Twitter, and publishers have no idea why their stories get chosen (or don’t).
