Tomer’s Questions on the Future of Media

26. Do advertisers need publishers? If so, is that dependency disappearing? Is “content marketing” the new Craigslist, ridding advertisers of their need for publishers? And is native advertising just an evolutionary step toward another plummet in revenue for the journalism industry? What implications does this have for the influence of money on…

22. Are podcasts making a come-back? If so, why? Is it a fad, or are they here to stay? Is there a way to sustainably monetize podcasts, aside from donations? What lessons does this have for how users engage with news and how media companies monetize it?

64. Did the media create Trump?

Which comes first, the news or the coverage of the news?

This question is a specific application of Question of the Week #31, copy and pasted below.

27. Are we Charlie Hebdo? Should and would media companies take the risk of offending their audiences? Should they be particularly sensitive toward offending their own audiences? How would news coverage be different if media companies were not at all concerned about offending? If there is a balance to be struck, is there a policy that can be applied…

24. Does Google help publishers more than it hurts them? Google News automatically crawls the Internet, scrapes articles, organizes them and presents snippets on news.google.com (and as part of some search results). For some users, their need for news is satiated there, and they don’t visit the publishers’ websites themselves (and thus aren’t exposed…

36. Do freedom of information laws make a difference?

Although these laws require that the government give access to documents, to what extent does the government find ways around them?

55.Why do we care about the news?

If we’re self-interested, why do we care about anything but maybe local news and the tiny percent of news that might actually impact us?

Most people are never going to meet Jeb Bush, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, etc, or be directly affected by anything related to…

3. Are we using the right metrics? Do pageviews get more attention than they deserve? What metric most accurately captures the added value of a media outlet? Must this metric differ when measuring journalistic added value (good done in the world, corruption exposed, etc) as opposed to business added value (revenue potential, engagement, etc)? If…