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You might have heard: Facebook says it’s going to start “allowing more items that people find newsworthy, significant, or important to the public interest—even if they might otherwise violate our standards” (Facebook Newsroom) and as Facebook employees were pressured to remove Donald Trump’s posts as hate speech, Mark Zuckerberg ruled that it would be “inappropriate to censor the candidate” (Wall Street Journal)
But did you know:By ruling that Trump’s posts were allowed on Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg proved that he’s Facebook’s editor (Guardian)
“Mark Zuckerberg is officially the editor-in-chief of the world’s largest news organization, though he may not know it yet,” Julia Carrie Wong writes. Facebook is instituting “editorial standards analogous to those of a newspaper,” with Zuckerberg having final word in those matters. And, by choosing not to remove Trump’s posts that violated Facebook’s rules on hate speech, Zuckerberg established himself as editor of the social network. Facebook defended the decision, saying “When we review reports of content that may violate our policies, we take context into consideration. That context can include the value of political discourse” and Trump’s posts were “an important part of the conversation around who the next US president will be.”
+ Some lingering questions in the wake of Facebook’s announcement: How will Facebook apply its rules for different geographic areas, and how will it deal with “journalism’s battle of ideas”? (George Brock)
+ Margaret Sullivan: If Trump loses the presidential election, media organizations need to let go over coverage of Trump in favor of covering “Trumpism” and what motivated Americans to identify with his message (Washington Post)
+ Noted: The Wall Street Journal is seeking a “substantial number” of buyouts to limit layoffs, and all employees will be eligible for buyouts (CNN Money); The Center for Public Integrity is spinning off the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which coordinated the Panama Papers, as an independent nonprofit organization (Center for Public Integrity); Fusion executives are holding meetings to discourage employees from unionizing (Wall Street Journal); Jeff Bezos says he wants to move The Washington Post from “making a relatively large amount of money per reader, having a relatively small number of readers” to “a model where we make a very small amount of money per reader on a much, much larger number of readers” (Adweek)
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Measuring investigative journalism’s impact on society: 8 good questions with James T. Hamilton
Investigative journalism often comes at a high cost to news organizations, but Stanford University professor James T. Hamilton has found through his research that investigative journalism’s benefits to society are often even greater. We talked to Hamilton about how he calculated real-world impact of investigative journalism and what news organizations can do to fund their work and measure their impact on society.
Successful experiments in mitigating ad-blocking: The Financial Times removed words from its stories and 47 percent of readers agreed to whitelist the site (Nieman Lab)
In July, the Financial Times ran a series of 30-day experiments to test what it would take for readers to turn off their ad blockers. About 15,000 of FT’s readers were split into three groups, with each seeing a different tactic: One group saw a percentage of words removed from stories representing the share of revenue that comes from ads, while another group couldn’t access the site at all without turning off the ad blocker. The last group saw a message asking them to whitelist the site, but their access wasn’t blocked. FT says blocking words from stories was successful, as was blocking users from entering the site entirely: 47 percent of the group with words missing from the story whitelisted the site; 69 percent of the group who couldn’t access the site at all whitelisted the site, while 40 percent of the group whose access wasn’t restricted whitelisted the site.
How Quartz ensures that it’s a global brand as a US-based publisher (Digiday)
When Quartz launched in 2012, the company set out to be a “global, mobile-first publication for the business set.” Now, 47 percent of its audience comes from outside the U.S. When U.S.-based publishers try to expand their international audiences, Lucia Moses writes that it often involves retrofitting their brands for those audiences. But Quartz’s strategy is a bit different, largely because international has been an integral part of its mission from the beginning: It hasn’t struck deals with overseas publishers to build audiences, choosing to focus on keeping its voice and brand consistent across audiences.
+ Quartz is launching a new weekly lifestyle newsletter called Quartzy (Quartz), “a breezy read that captures ephemeral moments of stories that we are not looking for, but which sit well with a lean back weekend audience” (Garcia Media)
What happened to the Internet on Friday: A massive DDoS attack targeted an Internet infrastructure company (Wired)
You might have noticed on Friday that it seemed like parts of the Internet just weren’t working. That’s because there was a major distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) on the East Coast, taking down websites like The New York Times, Spotify and Twitter. The attack started around 7 a.m. on Friday and targeted Internet infrastructure company Dyn, which is headquartered in New Hampshire. Dyn mitigated three waves of attacks on Friday, and called it a “very sophisticated and complex attack.” Wired’s Lily Hay Newman writes, “The situation is a definite reminder of the fragility of the web, and the power of the forces that aim to disrupt it.”
+ The attacks were carried out through the “Internet of Things”: Home appliances like DVRs were hacked and carried out the attacks without their owners knowing (Krebs on Security) and Bruce Schneier writes that the attack shows that someone is figuring out how to take down the entire Internet (Schneier on Security)
How the Internet is like TV: To make the Internet better, we need to start paying for the things we get on the Internet (Atlantic)
“A lot of people say, ‘I hate ads, I’m sick of ads, I’m sick of clickbait, I’m sick of this race to the bottom,’” Columbia University professor and author of “The Attention Merchants” Tim Wu says. “If you say that, you have to put your money where your mouth is. We have to get over our addiction to free if we’re going to save the web. That’s us, the users. We can’t expect everything to be free and to be good. … The history of the last 10 years of the Web is a bit like the first 10 years of television. There were all these great hopes for what TV would be. But then it became an ad battle, and the only programs that succeeded were game shows and cowboys. Television only got better with the rise of paywalls [like premium cable].”
The business-of-news storylines we’ll be paying attention to into 2017: Gannett’s growth and the blurring lines between comedy and news (Nieman Lab)
Looking ahead to 2017, Ken Doctor says Tronc could very well disappear as we pay more attention to companies like GateHouse and Gannett. Among Doctor’s 10 storylines to watch in 2017: How big can Gannett become? How will comedians like John Oliver and Samantha Bee continue to blur the lines between journalism and entertainment? Will newspapers declare their “independence from print”? How will GateHouse recover from “embarrassment beyond embarrassment” for how it dealt with the sale of the Las Vegas Review-Journal?
The post Need to Know: Oct. 24, 2016 appeared first on American Press Institute.
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