I'm a huge fan of Joe Rogan because he is the only mainstream interviewer that can attract so many different people, across spectrums in politics, science, cosmology, archeology. There are doctors studying nutrition, fighters, top athletes... I've learned a tremendous amount about many different subjects with Joe Rogan -- and I'm a fairly new fan -- less than a year.

It's Rogan's respect for his guests that I find so very compelling. He listens. And that creates space for great conversations that can go on for more than three hours. And there's no commercial interruption, there's no over-talkative host that constantly talks over their guests.

But Rogan won't listen to BS -- he's always ready to call out irrational thinking and erroneous claims. Jamie, his ever vigilant and invisible personal assistant quickly checks any factious claims for fiction. Stopping fake facts right there and then at the point of broadcast is brilliant and it's a key responsibility that Rogan recognizes because of his huge audiences.

In this episode we see Rogan's bromance with his pal Sam Harris -- who is an excellent polemicist. There's a very good discussion of podcast media business models and why advertising or subscription models will suit different types of content.

Around 1hr 17 minutes and 45 seconds Sam Harris tells a story of a CEO of a large tech company complaining at dinner that an employee filed a complaint with HR that the restrooms had no litter boxes which violated his rights as a "furry" and self-identifying as a cat.

Irrational Medication...

There's excellent discussion about online toxic cultures. And Sam Harris believes there will be a pill that will cure people of violently responding to other people's beliefs. The pill will calm rage and curb people's irrational thinking. They will remark, "I can't believe I was so upset about this thing." 

I can't see a pill like that succeeding. Irrational righteous rage is an incredible drug, it's an incredibly powerful feeling. We see it practiced in what Rogan calls "recreational outrage." And there's no cure -- yet and it won't be medical. Cutural shift doesn't come in a pill. 

From the cover of Wired Magazine -- Mark Zuckerberg blamed for society's problems.

Frontline, the PBS news program, released a two-part investigation into the history of Facebook and it's evolution from a dorm-room project -- to ask if it has made changes ahead of the midterm US elections and avoid the problems of election meddling..

Titled "The Facebook Dilemma," the lengthy video report.contains little new information. It makes very heavy use of Kara Swisher from Recode -- who does a great job, and Roger McNamee from Silverlake Partners, playing the role of a Mark Zuckerberg insider.

One question at the end of Part 1 was: What exactly is Facebook's dilemma? It's never discussed or explained.

I'd like to know why Frontline expected a 34 year-old software engineer to come up with solutions to really tough societal problems such as fake news and political manipulation of consumers.

Zuckerberg knows Javascript -- why does Frontline (and society) expect him to have special abilities to solve these problems?

The dilemma lies squarely with our legislators -- allow Zuckerberg to continue with an unmanageable media platform -- or demand that he control these issues.

After all, the old media -- newspapers, magazines, radio and TV -- managed to control fake news and hate speech and keep it out of daily view. Why is Zuckerberg allowed to reject this social responsibility that the old media handled so successfully? We already have a solution -- it is called editors.

Yet Zuckerberg doesn't even realize that Facebook is a media company so how can he even begin to effectively address such issues?

Frontline's deep voiced narration asks serious questions and takes Zuckerberg to task -- time and again on the many mistakes he has made along the way.

But he's a software engineer -- he's not supposed to have the solutions! At times this Frontline report sounds like a ponderous parody of itself.

Zuckerberg doesn't share...

There was nothing said about the fact that Zuckerberg doesn't share power. He is is the majority shareholder and controls the most votes and he doesn't have to answer to shareholders. He could single-handedly pivot Facebook in a completely new direction. He could decide to change the business model without requiring any official approval from anyone.

So far, Facebook has sided with advertisers -- an adversarial position towards its users in that requires it to collect ever more personal data. But it doesn't have to be that way.

Zuckerberg is a young man and he wants to be seen as doing something good on a global scale -- which requires a different kind of Facebook than the one we see today that sells out its users to third parties at every opportunity.

But it's clear that Zuckerberg needs help and guidance on what to do.

Frontline had an opportunity to take the Facebook discussion further than the familiar and at times tedious roundup of what's wrong with the social media platform.

The viewer's dilemma is deciding if their time is better spent watching something else. I can recommend Frontline's excellent The House of Saud.

"Ad fraud is at all time highs both in rate and in dollars," says Augustine Fou, an independent ad fraud researcher. "And what's worse is fraud detection is not catching it so people have a false sense of security."

Fou was the former chief digital officer at Omnicom's Healthcare Consultancy Group, a $100 million agency. He just released State of Digital Ad Fraud Q2. The report he shows two examples of "insane profits from ad fraud."

The examples show how arbitrage allows fraudsters buy cheap traffic and sell it at a premium -- achieving gains of 25 times and 45 times return on investments.

Buying $183,000 of traffic can result in a $4.6 million payout. And that is just one campaign and one technique. The potential payout for the year is in the billions of dollars.

Fou notes that the Financial Times discovered ad fraud of as much as $1 million a month going to fake FT.com sites but managed to stop it by persuading 24 advertising exchanges to drop the fraudsters.

FAKE PAGEVIEWS DOMINATE

The extent of the problem is huge. Fraudsters are able to generate a larger inventory of pageviews than all the legitimate publishers combined.

Fou says that much of the ad fraud could be blocked fairly easily but that media buyers are paid by clients to lower the average cost of ads, and that means they buy cheap fraudulent traffic.

"Very, very sad situation. Good publishers that had real journalists and news rooms are dying because they can't make enough money -- because the ad dollars were diverted out of the ecosystem into the pockets of bad guys, via ad fraud," says Fou.

He dispels several myths like that fraud detection and fraud filters work. These have huge security holes. And pre-bid filtering and programmatic ad buying do not reduce ad fraud.

WHO BENEFITS?

The huge amount of fraud is benefiting Google and Facebook, which already dominate all new ad business. These "walled gardens" make it difficult for fraudsters to use the same techniques as they do on the open web.

And recent changes in policy at Facebook have forced many ad tech companies to close because of a ban on third-party data analysis that aids fraudsters.

NO BLOCKCHAIN SOLUTION

Blockchain cannot solve the problem of ad fraud, he says. "The ad tech middlemen who need to adopt it actually prefer to have less transparency not more."

Much of the problem of ad fraud doesn't require new technologies but can be addressed through changes in business practices.

For example, marketers should not incentivize agencies to buy cheap traffic. Also, advertisers should focus on conversions as a metric, and low quality/suspicious traffic sources should be turned off at the start of a campaign and not at the end when being claimed as a refund.

Doc Searls, Editor of Unix Journal writes, "Facebook's Cambridge Analytica problems are nothing compared to what's coming for all of online publishing."

...Every person, and what they look at online, is routinely profiled by companies that receive these data from the websites they visit. Where possible, these data and combined with offline data. These profiles are built up in "DMPs".

Many of these DMPs (data management platforms) are owned by data brokers...There is no functional difference between an #adtech DMP and Cambridge Analytica.

I agree with much of Doc Searls's analysis but I would change the headline to: "Facebook's Cambridge Analytica problems are nothing compared to what's coming for all the Big Brands."

All publishers even large ones such as New York Times contribute a tiny fraction to the overflowing consumer data lakes that are financed by the largest corporations. It's not publishers -- but the Big Brands and their Big Brother ad strategies -- that now come into sharp focus.

Marketing costs have always been huge -- 50% to 80% depending on your industry. If you are a large business like Procter & Gamble -- marketing has always been a science and digital ads make it into a data science because of the vast amounts of information a simple ad collects. 

• To save a few dollars on selling soap powder or any other product and service -- every aspect of our online wanderings both desktop and mobile -- is analyzed and categgorized.

People are told that targeted ads will mean better ads and even maybe less ads. But they aren't told that the same data will make you vulnerabke political manipulation and abuse. And it will get worse as the ad technolgies get better.

Welcome to a future consumer hell where our ad tech is is jeopardising our democracy. 

People don't mind data being used to sell them more stuff that they like --  consumerism is fun. They don't want to be judged by others -- or more vulnerable to hidden manipulation. 

Targeted advertising forces Big Brands into an adversarial position to their customers -- which side are they on?

Take a look:

- Big Brands have been financing the ad technologies that spy-and-snitch on Internet users for years and building ever larger private data dossiers on each consumer.

- The data on consumers will grow and continue to be used in unintended but potentially damaging ways for years.

- Consumers are judged by society and governments because of data used to sell products. By collecting for one innocent purpose you enable the second far more harmful purpose. There's no way to separate one from the other.

- The European GDPR data laws will lead to even more powerful ad tech precisely because of the constraints on sharing data.

- Big Brands' problems will worsen as the ad technologies improve. Advanced AI and algorithms will make the spy-and-snitch ad tech far more effective, powerful and intrusive -- and people will be far more troubled and resentful in the future than today.

Foremski's Take: Big business won't be able to defend its continued use of ad tech and data collection because it runs counter to the interests of society as a whole -- and their customers.

For the sake of a Procter and Gamble being able to save on selling soap powder we have created the means for monitoring and controlling the behaviors of billions of people and making them vulnerable to political and idealogical manipulations. The costs are too high. 

Selling ideas uses the same data as selling shoes. Consumerism enables the technologies of totalitarianism --my fear is that we could paint ourselves into a very unpleasant corner -- a N. Korea but with far more powerful systems for oppression and suppression of dissent.

Ethics will matter...

It's worth highlighting the fact that the Facebook/CA scandal did not involve anything illegal -- it was the terms of service that were broken. It's the overall ethics of the matter that matter.

Businesses will try -- but it's going to be impossible to defend their continued and rapidly improving means of data collection.

Simply put companies have to consider this equation: Saving money on advertising costs versus the colossal potential damage to society and individuals.

If the data isn't collected it can't be leaked, stolen, or abused. Businesses will have to stop the practice otherwise, how will they build the trust they need to do business?

Trust me...click here

Richard Edelman, CEO of the world's largest private PR firm Edelman, warned earlier this year of "an unprecedented crisis of trust in the US" and other countries. A global survey of 33,000 people across 28 countries revealed the issue.

"Building trust is now the No. 1 job for CEOs, surpassing producing high-quality products and services," Edelman said.

How will CEO's build trust while employing spy-and-snitch ad tech and maintaining ever more detailed dossiers on customers?

Trust cannot be built if you are using devious means to sell products and exposing customers to all sorts of other issues and abuses.

Brands will have to side with their customers or accept a permanent adversarial position toward them. The future is rapidly narrowing for the ad tech industry.

I wish Facebook kept an eye out for me -- instead of keeping an eye on everything I do.

If Facebook worked for me, it wouldn't have to keep guessing the news sources or people I want to see in my news feed. I'd gladly tell it. And it wouldn't have to worry about developing ad technologies and new ways to sell more stuff.

If Facebook worked for me, I would pay it to make sure my mom can still get to my photos. I'd pay for messaging, calendar, and other services.

If Facebook worked for me, it wouldn't need to collect, store, analyze, and sell all that private information. It wouldn't need to build all that IT infrastructure.

If Facebook worked for me, it wouldn't have to keep guessing the news sources or people I want to see in my news feed. I'd gladly tell it. And it wouldn't have to worry about developing ad technologies and new ways to sell more stuff.

If Facebook worked for me, I would pay it to make sure my mom can still get to my photos. I'd pay for messaging, calendar, and other services.

If Facebook worked for me, it wouldn't need to collect, store, analyze, and sell all that private information. It wouldn't need to build all that IT infrastructure. And it would have just one person to worry about -- a Facebook user -- instead of having to deal with advertisers, politicians, regulators, privacy groups, endless media attention, and disgruntled staff.

AI and Algorithms...

It's not going to get any better. It's going to get worse, and AI and algorithms can't help.

Zuckerberg clearly wants to do the right thing. A solution to his headaches is to convert Facebook to a paid service -- one that helps people thrive in the modern digital world instead of becoming their chief adversary.

The bell tolls for Google, too. It might think it's getting away scot-free in the storm raging around Facebook, but it won't be able to side-step the inevitable regulations that will come.

They're inevitable because Facebook and Google won the media war. They hold two-thirds of the entire digital advertising market and more than 85 percent of all new mobile advertising deals.

The remainder goes to Microsoft, Oath, Amazon, and Twitter,  in order of size. There is no traditional mass media company on that list.

Mass media laws...

Facebook and Google have disrupted mass media. They have displaced mass media. They are now the mass media. And mass media is heavily regulated. Legislators understand the problems mass media can create -- better than Facebook and Google it seems -- which see themselves only as technology platforms.

Politicians know a media company when they see one, and they will apply similar controls.

Silicon Valley can change entire industries, but disrupting governments is a fantasy. Legislators know how to code laws, which always trumps coding apps.

Robin Li, an investor with the San Francisco venture capital firm GGV Capital, stood in the Madison building in downtown Detroit and said, "This is nicer than San Francisco."

Roose spent three days on a luxury bus with a few venture capitalists touring "rust belt" locations and discovered that there are startups everywhere. Which means one thing: the end of Silicon Valley.

Not one person in the article says, "Silicon Valley is over" so where does the headline come from? A desk editor or sub-editor penned that headline but why?

It's a headline that's not true and not supported by the article -- a strange editorial decision in this age of fighting fake news.

It's also strange why the rise of a regional innovation center in South Bend, Indiana; Flint, Michigan; or Youngstown, Ohio should always be reported as the end for Silicon Valley. Déjà vu all over again, and again and again.

There have been countless media stories over the years about the death of Silicon Valley amid the rise of innovation elsewhere.

We don't live in a binary world. Silicon Valley can continue to do well and other innovation centers can also succeed.

Yet there seems to be a constant desire to see Silicon Valley fail -- not realizing that's how it succeeds -- by funding so many failures.

Silicon Valley knows that the winners more than balance out the losers but that's the secret. Others love to laugh at Silicon Valley's failed startups as if that proves anything.

Silicon Valley Scales

Silicon Valley is not going anywhere and it's not dying. But it is changing.

Yes, you can innovate anywhere in the world -- potentially. But you will come to Silicon Valley to scale your business.

Silicon Valley capital is large and bold and ready to scale a promising startup. And it has the expertise -- both technical and managerial to scale businesses. And it has the connections to sell them.

Scale is the new business of Silicon Valley because scale wins. First to scale trumps first mover advantage and it establishes dominant businesses in each market and industry with little room for other companies.

Scale is not good for innovation because a startup cannot compete against scale -- it would take it years to build its business organically.

Large platform companies such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, SAP, Cisco Systems, Oracle, etc, can acquire startups and immediately scale those technologies across their entire platform. It would take years to do that organically. And all those former startup competitors are suddenly in the dumpster.

Hollywood movie production moved to Canada years ago but LA kept the glamour. The innovation might originate elsewhere but Silicon Valley will keep the innovation mantle even if the source is elsewhere.

Innovation is a brand

Silicon Valley is becoming like San Francisco's Union Square district with its flashy flagship stores for big brands -- designed more for public relations than profit.

Similarly Silicon Valley is where large companies are flocking to site their "Silicon Valley Research/Innovation Labs". A few that are already here: SAP, Baidu, Ford Motor Company, GE, Qualcomm, Samsung, Panasonic, Volkswagen, and there will be lots more joining them.

[Microsoft closed its Silicon Valley Research Lab in 2014 but it doesn't need to establish its innovation capabilities unlike many others.]

No research or innovation will come out of these corporate sites -- unless it's accidental. It is where the big companies can host their key customers and also provide job perks to their global engineers with three-month stints in Silicon Valley. It's for show and not for development.

Silicon Valley is not over -- it will co-exist with every other innovation center.

Lastly, people here aren't much affected by criticism of Silicon Valley because no one identifies with Silicon Valley -- the region only exists for outsiders.

Facebook, Google and Twitter's failure to deal with the damaging effects of fake news has created a broad distrust in social media platforms, search engines and news applications reports the Edelman Trust Barometer 2018 -- a survey of more than 33,000 people in 28 countries.

But trust in journalism has improved greatly and there is now a wide divide between peoples' low regard for media platforms and their much higher respect for journalists and journalism.

Richard Edelman, president and CEO of Edelman, the largest privately held public relations company, said there is "an unprecedented crisis of trust in the U.S." Especially the U.S. government, followed by business, NGOs and media.

"This is the first time that a massive drop in trust has not been linked to a pressing economic issue or catastrophe like the Fukushima nuclear disaster. In fact, it's the ultimate irony that it's happening at a time of prosperity, with the stock market and employment rates in the U.S. at record highs. The root cause of this fall is the lack of objective facts and rational discourse."

A small amount of fake news and the inability of social media platforms and search engines to deal with it has created a cascade of trust issues across all types of institutions in most countries surveyed.

It's a large fallout with a potentially large long-term cost for the media platforms. Facebook shares fell more than 6% when it announced it would stop showing as many news stories in users' feeds -- which signaled that it couldn't find an engineering solution.

The Edelman report discovered that large numbers of people (63%) said they could not trust themselves to know if a news story was from a reputable journalistic source or "tell good journalism from rumor or falsehoods." Yet people's trust in journalism and journalists jumped by double-digits -- the largest of all categories.

Trust in business...

Edelman says that the global crisis in trust can only be addressed by the business community. Nearly two-thirds of respondents expect CEOs to lead on policy-change and not wait on government action. Businesses have a far higher trust rating than government institutions. 

...building trust (69 percent) is now the No. 1 job for CEOs, surpassing producing high-quality products and services (68 percent)....

Technology firms are the most trusted industries (but not the tech media platforms) at 75%; Education 70%; professional services, 68%; transportation 67%; automative 62%; packaged goods 60% and financial services at 54%.

Trust in US headquartered companies showed the largest fall among all countries surveyed.

More details here:

The news release

The PDF of the report

Please see:

No news: The engineering failure to block fake news and hate speech

2018 prediction: The endangered hyperlink

NetSolving Silicon Valley's diversity problem

Facebook's decision to use fewer news items in users' feeds is a direct result of failure to filter out fake news and hate speech - in advance of European laws and increased pressure from US lawmakers.

The move will hurt many large news publishers who have relied on Facebook traffic due to earlier Facebook programs that courted news and magazine publishers to come onto the platform.

Representatives of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube (Google) were grilled by the Senate Commerce Committee in Washington, Wednesday. The Senators were critical of the poor progress made by the companies to quell Russian propaganda, fake news and harmful content.

Dave Lee at BBC News reports,

Google, which owns YouTube, has pledged to hire more human moderators to add an extra layer of protection for this process...

Twitter said it would implement several new measures to monitor discussions for any potential manipulation, as well as open up more formal communications lines with US politicians to escalate any problems.

Foremski's Take: Filtering out most of the news is an easy way for Facebook to tackle the problem of blocking most of the fake news. But it is not a solution. People will still be sharing information of various types and interacting about things that will be classed as harmful content. Filtering out news links is not a solution.

And without a solution Facebook, Google and Twitter and others, all face a future where they must still find a way to deal with fake information and hate speech and all types of other harmful content.

Tens of thousands of top engineers have collectively failed to come up with an engineering solution to this problem despite all their machine learning, AI and algorithmic prowess. Along with access to phenomenal amounts of computing power. It's a big failure. But there is a solution.

Facebook, Google, and Twitter are media companies - they publish pages of content with advertising - and they should look to traditional media companies and see how they handle this problem. They handle it superbly.

A tried and tested solution...

The traditional media industry has a solution that works incredibly well and is available to everyone - it's an open-source solution. It employs editors, journalists, and moderators to ensure third-parties don't use their publishing platforms as vehicles for hate speech, fake news and all the other problems facing the new media companies.

It's not a cheap solution - hiring people is expensive compared to running an algorithm.

But Facebook, Google, and Twitter are rich and their failure at building an engineering solution should not absolve them from using tried and true methods.

Traditional media companies bear this cost burden and so should their much larger and wealthier competitors.

Europe tries to fight hate, harassment, and fake news without killing free speech - Columbia Journalism Review

Facebook's News Feed changes: A look at the likely consequences | ZDNet

Senate presses tech firms on anti-extremism efforts - BBC News

It might seem strange that The Atlantic, an East Coast organization is trying to solve Silicon Valley’s inclusivity problem. But clearly Silicon Valley needs help. It is doing a very bad job. Countless Uber scandals, countless office harassment scandals, countless venture capitalist scandals… and stubbornly low counts on the recruitment of women and minorities.

Inclusivity in Tech…

It was a good turnout and each one the speakers and moderators had something good to say. The audience was just as interesting as the podium when they shared questions and many of them were members and leaders of a variety of activist groups.

I’m positive that the organizers could have picked people at random from the audience for the panels and we would have a great conversation.

- The conference “Inclusion in Tech” is part of AtlanticLIVE events. It began with a town hall discussion on the topic “Why is Silicon Valley So Awful to Women, And What’s Being Done About it?”

I did not catch this session. But my observation is that many Silicon Valley workplaces are awful and the addition of gender discrimination must makes it far worse.]

I caught all of the afternoon sessions: Here’s some of my notes… [My comments are in square brackets.]

- Executive remarks:

Yolanda Mangolini, (above) Director, Global Diversity and Inclusion, Google spoke about how diversity on its teams makes for better products. She showed a video of how a Google camera product had a bug in taking photos of dark-skinned people. The narrator said technology is not racist. The error was due to inadequate product testing against the Google team’s unconscious bias!

[Technology is neutral and independent of its user or developer — this is a running theme in the Google credo — that culture is a factor that can be abstracted and quantified.] 

[The Google video had a confused message: it showed the camera bug being discovered at a party and not by a diverse product team at Google. It did not make a distinction between the value of diversity in product development teams versus and the value of customer usability testing. Also: she made no mention of the infamous email by a Google engineer earlier this year that questioned female attributes in relation to tech jobs! It was a very short presentation and it should have been much more. ]

- Fireside chat: 

Amy Weaver, President, Legal and General Counsel, Salesforce spoke with Steve Clemons, Washington Editor at Large, The Atlantic — mostly about what a great guy Marc Benioff, the CEO and founder of Salesforce is and how Salesforce employees donate so much time to charitable work. Salesforce staff are paid to give seven days of charity work. [If they are paid does this count as volunteering?!] They’ve made a big difference in San Francisco’s middle schools.

[I’m a big fan of Marc Benioff. Charity begins at home and he and Salesforce have made massive contributions locally. Let’s make sure that San Francisco and Silicon Valley public schools become showcases and not basket cases — as many of them are with insanely high drop-out rates. The future is bright but our infrastructure is failing?! It doesn’t add up.]

- Tech in the Heartland

Chris Olsen, Partner, Drive Capital, Mark Orttung, CEO, Nexient chatting with Alison Stewart, The Atlantic.

This was a very awkward session. [Two white middle-aged middle-class guys working as venture capitalists — these are the models for voodoo dolls in this community.]

The VCs talked about working with entrepreneurs in places outside of Silicon Valley and how great it was. The conversation had little to do with the key issues of the conference. When they did fleetingly discuss inclusivity, a person in the audience took them to task on their use of language and asked them to “own” the problem of diversity in the words they choose.

[Language was a key theme here. Time and again speakers and audience would question the words being used in reference to a wide range of diversity issues. This is an incredibly important point. Words matter and they matter more than most people realize. Words make this world and we need to use the right words — and in the right order.]

- The Black Coders of Tomorrow

Kimberly Bryant, CEO, Black Girls Code spoke with Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic. Bryant is a dynamite speaker and immediately hit back at the use of “pipeline” as an excuse by tech companies on their low diversity numbers. Pipeline refers to the small percentage of qualified job applicants that are women and/or minorities. She said there are plenty of qualified people available but they are not being offered tech jobs.

- In Our Own Backyard - 

Mayor Libby Schaaf, City of Oakland with Steve Clemons, The Atlantic. They spoke about Ed Lee, the mayor of San Francisco, who had died that morning. They said he was a champion of diversity.

The mayor said she refused to give Uber a tax break when it announced its HQ in Oakland — unlike Ed Lee with Twitter. She expressed frustration with dealing with the tech community. She said that voters believed she controlled “tech money” which she does not.

She said she wants the tech jobs to go to her community. Oakland kids should be the ones that grow up ajnd take those Silicon Valley jobs.

[Good luck with that, mayor. It’s a marvelous ambition and totally fair but Silicon Valley companies have no connection with their local communities. They hire people based on where they themselves went to school and where they grew up and that wasn’t any place like Oakland. To put it simply: they hire from within their social-economic class — more on that subject later.]

- Where Do We Go From Here? A Town Hall Conversation:

Natalia Oberti Noguera, Founder and CEO, Pipeline Angels; Tariq Meyers, Head of Inclusion and Diversity, Lyft; Aubrey Blanche, Global Head of Diversity and Inclusion, Atlassian, Tom McLeod, Founder and CEO, Omni; Stephanie Lampkin, Founder and CEO, Blendoor; with Alison Stewart, The Atlantic.

A fabulous panel. Natalia Oberti Noguera CEO of Pipeline Angels had a lot of great points to make. I especially liked: “When you see minorities leading the discussions on diversity that’s when we’ve made progress.” [Was she describing the panel?!].

- Stephanie Lampkin told a story of how she taught herself programming as a teenager, studied engineering at Stanford university, post-grad at MIT and was told by Silicon Valley firms she wasn’t technical enough. She started a company so that she could employ her own technical skills. [Pipeline is not an excuse.]

- Tom McLeod shared funny stories of his look being accepted in the mainstream business world yet he is a black man. He understands what makes people comfortable.

- Tariq Meyers spoke about needing to recognize 400 years of American history and how that legacy affects people in the office.

- Aubrey Blanche said she was fed up with the word diversity and that people kept telling her that they were not diverse enough. She said an individual cannot be diverse. However, she did admit to being a “secret Mexican” as if to explain her mainstream look.

[Good point that diversity is found in teams and not individuals. But each of the“ diversity” executives from various companies at the conference was clearly representative of at least one minority, and sometimes more. Employers are clearly choosing people for the job that look diverse.]

Foremski’s Take: The conversation on inclusivity is a tough one and it is a necessarily long one because education and cultural change are hard to speed up.

But also, the conversation needs to add additional dimensions. There was no discussion of class — the social-economic status of job applicants is important.

The subject of class was color-coded but not directly addressed at the conference. When people spoke about minorities, people of color, and other terms they referred to social-economic issues but not directly. Words matter and it matters in understanding why there is a problem of diversity in tech companies.

Tech recruiters hunt in the talent pools of their class environments because they have none other.

If class is not discussed in the context of diversity there will be problems later.

A tech company might look diverse — with Chinese, Indian, African and Argentine software engineers and they might represent a rainbow skin-colors and countries. But they all come from the same class — an international class of privilege. What diversity can be found from their shared experience of private schools and the same middle class values?

Recognition of economic classes and the measure of social mobility is important in understanding the lack of progress on inclusivity in tech.

The Atlantic warns of backlash against more diversity in tech

Rent the Runway CEO: Gender discrimination is larger workplace issue than sexual harassment

Elsevier acquires a business with more than 500 academic institutions as customers and about $20m in annual revenues based on an annual subscription model averaging about $37,000. This compares favorably with the cost of a full-time IT person to run the publishing services using open source software which is the alternative choice.

Three University of California professors founded Bepress in 1999 to make it easier for academics and their institutions to showcase their work in many different formats from academic papers, to books and more. And bepress also tracks downloads and engagement with the content.

I spoke with Jean-Gabriel Bankier, CEO of Bepress since 2009.

"We have millions of papers that are available for free because each university is in competition for students and faculty and funding -- they want to show the world what they have."

Bankier said that in addition to its cloud-based content management system Elsevier also gets a sophisticated analytics technology that provides data on who has accessed the information -- important for evaluating faculty and research.

There are significant benefits from the Elsevier acquisition says Bankier.

"Elsevier's databases have collected significant amounts of metadata around our articles and content which will add considerable value to our users -- we are very excited."

He added that this removes some doubts among potential customers that the company will survive.

Elsevier has been making several similar acquisitions over the past five years: Mendeley, Plum Analytics, and SSRN.

Additional information from the news release:

Bepress allows institutions to collect, organize, preserve and disseminate their intellectual output, including pre-prints, working papers, journals or specific articles, dissertations, theses, conference proceedings and a wide variety of other data.

 ...

By joining Elsevier, bepress can better address institutional promotional needs, such as compete for students, faculty and grants and preserve research data and outputs. Elsevier's suite of products such as Scopus, Pure, SSRN and SciVal suite will enhance the breadth and quality of the reach, promotion and impact services that bepress delivers to its customers.

... 

Bepress' "digital commons" platform supports institutional platforms by providing cross-repository aggregation and referencing by type of content or author into 'Commons' or 'Networks'. Bepress currently has content containing over 2 million articles and 100 million annual downloads.

The issue of fake news is extremely serious and it requires immediate attention.  Its proliferation will undermine trust in everything. Everything will look fake. Including the truth.

Without reliable and trusted information:

- Consumers and commercial buyers will delay purchases.

- Businesses won’t have good information for investment decisions.

- Shareholders won’t have a clear view into investment risks.

The rich get richer…

The winners will be special self-interest interest groups — a variety of organizations with nefarious agendas. They will do very well in a fake news future and will learn to operate with impunity. Because even if outed — the truth will look fake. And anti-truth technologies will act as a red herring for a lot of censorship of valid content. 

It’s very bad for the economy. Fake news is also bad for your head. 

"The point of modern propaganda... is to exhaust your critical thinking"

It's a haunting line from a recent Tweet by Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion and Russian political activist. 

 

"The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth."

https://twitter.com/Kasparov63/status/808750564284702720

Exhausting media...

The non-stop media channels everywhere you look -- now look back at you. And very soon every display near you will have a message specifically for you.

The most advanced technologies of persuasion are coming to a screen near you.Personalized. 24-7.

Will your thoughts and opinions truly be your own? Will they be based on truth or biased by others?

What's the solution? How do we escape fake news and the exhausting never-ending intrusions of influence?

There is a solution that grew out of the 1960s and 1970s when mass media was flexing its muscles and taking a massive cultural toll by trying to exhaust people's critical thinking around civil rights and the Vietnam war: People turned it off, turned away and turned on. The attention became Be. Here. Now.

Original ideas and original thoughts require that you take the time to have original experiences — experiences that are unique and unmediated — un-media-ted through the experience of others.

And that includes having an original experience of yourself. An uncomfortable zone for many. This is why meditation and mindfulness practices are so important to creating original ideas and thoughts. (And keeping notebooks nearby :)

Critical thinking is a limited resource and we could use plenty more of it in every human endeavor. Machines can't do it for us.

AI is a list of responses to a list of inputs — it is not a critical thinking machine. We have to do the critical thinking but the machines will be able to help us fight fake information with sourcing, verification and authentication — they are very good at those tasks. And they don't get exhausted.

The Fake News epidemic is a direct result of our continued failure to create a stable business model around professional news media. We seem to have forgotten that the news media sector continues to be in turmoil.

Take a look at a few of the headlines above from last year. And in just the first few days of 2017:

- Medium — one of the most popular online publishing sites says it will cut 50 jobs and change to an unspecified business model. Medium was founded by Ev Williams, founder of Blogger, co-founder of Twitter.

It doesn't pay for much of its content yet this digital-first social media savvy media company is struggling. All media companies are in the disruptive path - not just digital.

Ev Williams wrote:

 

2016 was our best year yet. Key metrics, such as readers and published posts were up approximately 300% year on year. And we witnessed important stories published on Medium — from world-famous leaders to unknown individuals — on a daily basis.

New York Times also reported growth in readers but warned of further cuts.

 

Our global audience surpassed 200 million monthly users, a multiple of our reach a few years ago…Nothing can disguise the fact that the continued shift from print to digital demands a somewhat smaller and more focused newsroom.

More readers... but less revenues

Medium's 300% growth is an example of one of the most painful paradoxes in the media industry: reporting large new audiences and falling revenues. Media companies have to run forward constantly just to stand-still. There is no stable business model.

It is all because advertising has to compete against the ever lower cost and ever-wider reach of advertising from Google and Facebook.

Some more bad news from January 2017:

After Buyouts and Layoffs, Nearly Two Dozen People Will Leave the Seattle Times Newsroom - Slog - The Stranger

Pandora Reducing Workforce by 7% | Variety

Fusion Faces Its New Reality – WWD 

 Condé Nast Braces for Consolidations This Week Ahead of Annual Meetings – WWD

Foremski's Take: This is a serious failure of the Internet and its collective hive mind of visionaries, computer experts, and software engineers — the world's top gray matter.

Googols of top neurons connecting over the Internet and we still haven't figured out a way to collect the true monetary value of professional news media so that it can be reinvested in producing more high quality media.

Since 2005, after leaving the Financial Times, I've warned that if we can't find a way to pay for professional media then society will pay for it in many unpleasant ways such as a rise of misinformation from special interest groups.

People won't pay for the news media they should be reading but special interest groups will gladly pay for the media the media they want them to read.
We have important decisions to make about a large number of issues such as the economy, the environment, energy, education, elder healthcare and those are just the ones that begin with the letter "E" — there's plenty more issues .

With bad information we won't be able to make good decisions. Software engineers call this GIGO - Garbage In Garbage Out.

It's going to get worse. In an era of free online media the value of free speech is worth about the same — nothing. If it is not seen online then it doesn't exist.

Today it is very easy to buy traffic to whatever special interest groups want to be seen by millions. Money has always been able to buy influence but now it can now buy influence on an industrial scale.

And money has access to the all best technologies of influence — the powerful personalization technologies of the ad tech industry.

It's not a level playing field — and that's dangerous in a democracy. 

- - -

Coming up:

- LonelyGirl15 - a prophetic warning about fake news in 2005.

- Native advertising and Fake News - can businesses become media companies? Can they be trusted?

- The future for a trusted media sector.

The disruption in the media industry is far from over as the transformation to a digital business model continues to challenge large newspaper groups according to recent financial reports.

Gannett and The New York Times Company are among companies reporting a steeper than expected drop in print advertising revenue in their latest financial quarter.

Digital advertising, subscription revenues and tech ventures have not able to fill the gap of as much as a 19% plunge in print advertising revenues as reported Tuesday by NYTimes Company, amid an overall drop of 8% in total advertising revenue for its third quarter.

Last week Gannett reported a 35% drop in national print advertising and job cuts. It also abandoned its hostile bid for newspaper group Tronc.

The Wall Street Journal also announced job cuts and changes to the newspaper. Politico reports that WSJ Editor Gerard Baker told staff:

"All newspapers face structural challenges and we must move to create a print edition that can stand on a sound financial footing for the foreseeable future while our digital horizons continue to expand. As I previously mentioned, there will unfortunately need to be an elimination of some positions as part of this process."

Other large newspaper groups are expected to announce similar large falls in print ad revenues.

Print advertising is in a “freefall” reports Pete Vernon at CJR, following years of “relatively stable decline. Between 2010 and 2015, print advertising fell between five and eight percent each year, according to the Pew Research Center … The problem for publishers is that digital revenues have not come close to replacing their dead tree counterparts.”

Foremski’s Take: We still do not have a viable business model that can sustain the work of professional news journalists. It’s one of the most important problems we face as a global society.

We seem flooded by news media wherever we turn so it might seem as if it is a healthy industry. But it is not.

It is important to see that the disruption in the media industry has not ended or slowed.

With all our visionaries and tech geniuses we still have not figured out the innovation that will enable us to monetize and sustain professional news organizations. 

- Digital advertising is not the answer because it continues to decline in effectiveness and revenues per unit.

- Subscriptions are not effective because they limit the reach of the news stories.

- And a combination of many revenue streams such as conferences, has failed to created a stable and predictable business model.

Print advertising is still very important because it is so large, and it has been in less of a decline than the extremely rapid shift from desktop to mobile advertising, which has caused problems for all-digital media companies.

Print’s relatively predictable revenues provided a buffer of time that enabled newspaper management to downsize and experiment with new sources of revenues. This sudden change removes that buffer and will accelerate media disruption. It is clear is that there will be fewer journalists working by the end of this year.

It means companies will have to learn how to produce and distribute their own stories — because if you aren’t seen you don’t exist.

Every company is a media company….but I bet many will wish they weren’t media companies because it’s hard. 

From left: Vivian Schiller, Christina Farr, Charlene Li, Stephanie Losee.

Social media platforms Facebook, Medium, LinkedIn, Twitter, Apple are competing for traditional media publishers to use them as distribution platforms and in some cases are offering 100% of advertising revenues. Certain publications now rely on the majority of their traffic from these media platforms. But is this an equitable partnership?

Vivian Schiller, a veteran news executive at NYTimes.com, NPR, Twitter, CNN and now Executive Editor-in-Residence at PR firm Weber Shandwick, introduced these and other questions as moderator at Weber’s second Future of Media panel series.  

The San Francisco event featured five additional women and one man: Christina Farr, reporter for Fast Company; Charlene Li principal analyst at Altimeter Group; Stephanie Losee, head of content at Visa; Jillian D’Onfro reporting for Business Insider; and Karen Wickre, content strategist, and Simon Rogers, a Data Editor at Google. 

Here’s some of my notes from the evening:

- Christina Farr spoke about how she loves Twitter and how it helps her work. She prefers to engage with readers on Twitter and wouldn’t know what to do if Twitter went away. She also spoke about metrics and was trying to decide if she wants to know how few or many read each article. She was concerned it might affect her motivation if she spends several days on an in-depth article and few read it.

- Charlene Li made a good argument for publishers to become media platforms in the same way as the social media platforms don’t own content but own the network and community. She pointed out that reporters publish and then engage with readers yet they should engage first, figure out what the readers want before generating new content. She also said that visitor data publishers collect was valuable and could be sold. She pointed out that there are many creative things to be done with media and she was exploring a novel design for an e-book that would let people skim but also dive into it more deeply.

- Stephanie Losee spoke about asking fundamental questions about content such as “why do you want to reach this person?” She said metrics needed to value the reader and that trying to reach a large audience often results in lost focus. Higher numbers are not better. The right content will always find its way to the right person and publishers should offer ways for readers to jump down the rabbit hole and go deeper into a subject. 

- Simon Rogers spoke about his job at Google and using Github to share infographics and other media assets with anyone that wants to use them. He and his colleagues publish news stories every day based on data collected by Google. He said that his newsfeed is personalized via his friends on social media. 

- Jillian D’Onfro said that Business Insider was trying to get readers to its web site but also using social media platforms, keeping a foot in both puddles. She said that for now, things were working out. She isn’t a big fan of video and prefers to write her news reports than present them via video.

- Karen Wickre spoke about the need for consistency in content and doing it again and again. There’s a cumulative value in publishing good content every day.  Success comes to those brands that plug away at it.

It was a large panel but excellent moderating kept everyone in the conversation. The panel covered a large number of topics but in the end it couldn’t decide if social media platforms were a good thing or not. 

- - - 

Foremski’s Take: The trouble with tech media platforms is that they are made by engineers and they don’t understand how content is produced and how much it costs to make. Time and again, content ventures by engineering-led firms fail.

Invest in editors or engineers? Yahoo is a good example of a platform making large investments in content and then pulling back — it has done this three times. When accountants look at the cost of creating content versus the cost of creating code — which can be scaled across the entire platform — it is always an unfavorable comparison.   

Offering publishers 100% of the advertising revenue on a page is the strongest signal that these platforms don’t understand the costs of traditional media publishers. Giving 300% wouldn’t come close to covering the expense of media production.  Yet these platforms believe that they are part of a virtuous cycle in which they drive huge traffic to media companies who then are able to reinvest the money in producing more content. But in practice there is no virtuous cycle because the traffic they bring is low quality and hard to monetize. 

Traditional media companies have consistently been several years behind in understanding the economic trends in their business — it’s too late for them to become broad publishing platforms. Charlene Li’s advice to publishers to become a platform is sensible but unfortunately it’s not realistic. To compete as a platform requires a scale that none of the traditional publishers have, or could build to compete against the engineering-led social media platforms, which were designed for massive scale from the start.

[Publisher as a Platform is an unfortunate acronym when used in the context of media.] 

The title of the event was “Social Channels and Traditional Media: How can they Co-Exist?” They certainly do co-exist — for now.  But how long can traditional media continue to exist?

Social media platforms have helped raise readership numbers for many titles but their revenues continue to shrink. In the old days, more readers always meant more money but not so in the world of digital media. Publishers have to run ever faster just to keep still because the social media platforms have flooded the market with cheap advertising that continues to deflate.

The social media platform and publisher business models are miles apart.  The platforms can survive on tiny amounts of revenue per page but the traditional publishers can’t. It’s an unsustainable relationship that offers no future for traditional media.

- - -

Weber’s Future of Media series is getting better and this time the audience wasn’t shy and asked many  questions. For the next panel in this series I’d love to see Weber sharing some of the lessons learned from working with clients in its MediaCo service, which helps “Every Company Become A Media Company.”

Check Tweets with the hashtag #FutureofMedia and #TFOM16 for additional reports on the event.

It is just a fraction of hundreds of jobs that will be lost in the second half of this year, reports Claire Atkinson for the New York Post.

"There's a goal of a couple of hundred people," said a source familiar with talks. "They don't want to pay out big packages, and they're having negotiations with the unions." The layoffs would likely occur between the Aug. 21 end of the summer Olympics in Brazil and Election Day on Nov. 8, sources said.

The New York Times management was hoping that "native advertising"-- in which brands such as computer maker Dell publish adverts in the newspaper looking like editorial content -- would help to turn around its fortunes. 

Foremski's Take:

The job losses are a reminder that the disruptive forces at work in the media industry are still here and still at work. And that leading media companies have not been able to find a stable and sustainable business model amid continually declining revenues

It is one of the largest failures of the Internet, that we haven't been able to figure to a value-recovery mechanism for the value that journalism provides society.

Tech-enabled media companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter have depressed the value of all digital advertising. And they provide far greater ad distribution than a large national and international newspaper such as the New York Times.

The management of the Gray Lady has consistently misunderstood the economics of their own industry and has been years behind important trends. For example, the NYTimes was an early partner with Google in 2004 and it was several years before it recognized it as a competitor,

Similarly, with native advertising, it does; recognize the damage it can cause. The management of the newspaper allows large brands to place editorial content that looks as if it were written by reporters, but is sold as advertising. The management is risking the loss of readers' trust -- the newspaper's most valuable asset. 

With native advertising, The New York Times management is jeopardizing the future of the newspaper for a handful of beans.  And there is no magic goose laying golden eggs in this story -- just more pain and layoffs. 

Media disruption continues...

From right: Michael Kanellos, (standing) SanDisk; Scott Lowe, Activision; Stephanie Losee, Politico; moderator Henk Campher Allison+ Partners.

The Holmes Report's Innovation Summit in San Francisco featured a panel of former journalists, now engaged on producing a broad range of editorial content for large brands, speaking on the topic of Content Marketing.

The first question was should the average person know anything about Content Marketing? They all nodded vigorously: No, because it is all about great content, and since the goal of Content Marketing is publish editorial content of substantial value then it is no different from the goals of independently produced content.

But there is a difference between the two. One is masquerading as if it isn't advertising. Surely readers should be made aware of the difference rather than everything blending into one? 

[Later, during questions the panel agreed that labelling was important.]

Stephanie Losee from Politico said that things were messy in terms of distinguishing different types of content and that bad players are ruining things for everyone else. But she says things will improve because these are early days -- too early yet to say if content marketing is failing us.

Michael Kanellos from SanDisk said that with content marketing you can design the editorial content to target a specific set of people. An audience of three thousand is more relevant than a mass audience to some clients.

I've noticed that most Content Marketing fails because it is trying to produce Editorial Content but the leadership is in PR or in Marketing and so the result is marketing or PR content. It needs to be editorially led to be successful.

Scott Lowe at Activision said that at his, and other corporations, they are trying to make their editorial departments autonomous in some way. 

Foremski's Take:

My view is that Content Marketing is failing us and causing a lot of damage to society and to the Brands that bankroll this practice.  

Content marketing, especially in the form of Native Advertising where it pretends to be legitimate third-party editorial content -- erodes trust in independent media.

A large Edelman study on Native Advertising found that it boosted perceptions of a Brand if it was seen on a trusted media site; but it did not enhance the reputation of the media site carrying the native advertising.

Brands are eroding trust in the media that carries their traditional advertising. It’s an incredibly short-sighted strategy. The bogus value of native advertising is poisoning an already confused media industry that can’t say no to bad ideas. 

Many people already see all media as corrupt in some way. Content marketing is fortifying this view. 

Content marketing is failing in yet another way: it's too expensive. Creating lots of high quality content is terrifically hard and tremendously expensive -- especially the way PR and Brands do it, with dozens of stakeholders involved at every stage of the production process. 

There is no magic blog post or piece of content that will turn the dial on Brand awareness. Repetition is needed. It costs a lot of money and time to produce a single piece of editorial content and then you have to do it again, and again, and again.

Every company is a media company but they'd rather not be media companies because it is hard work. They will wish they could go back to the good old days when SanDisk would invite Michael Kanellos, senior reporter, on the chip industry beat at CNET News.com, to come visit and Michael might then write a story, and the boost from an independent media source was a lot better than from content on its own site. 

Stephanie Losee spoke about how corporations could effectively sponsor investigative reporting at independent media publications and that trust in the Brand could help to produce trusted news.

I agree and I've said that Corporate Media could potentially win a Pulitzer Prize because Brands would only seek to publish highly trusted content otherwise it would harm their reputation. However, as Michael Kanellos pointed out, Brands are not in the business of investigative news [or winning Pulitzers]. 

There is a role for Brands in helping to build a thriving independent, investigative media industry -- but not through Content Marketing.

Here's some suggestions:

- Brands are buying bogus traffic from bogus publishers to bump up their numbers. At least $6 billion to as much as $16 billion annually is lost by the media industry (which calls it “Ad Fraud” and doesn’t realize it’s their money). Brands should only advertise in Real Media -- vetted publishers that employ journalists, etc. 

- Programmatic ad buying means an individual publisher can't sell the merits of their title and its readership.  Programmatic is problematic because content quality is not directly rewarded.

We still haven’t figured out a stable and sustainable business model for a thriving, independent media industry. Hugely important issue. 

Brands should seek out media titles that are important to them and their industry and then pay extra for advertising to make sure that they are able to stay in business. It beats trying to be a media company.

 Please See: 

Largest Native Advertising Study Finds Benefits For Brands At The Expense Of Publishers

Desperate Moves: NYTimes Reduces Labeling On Native Ads To Appease Brands

The Risks In Native Advertising Subterfuge: The Loss Of Brand Identity And Trust

What's Next When Every Company Is A Media Company? MaaS Media...

John Perry Barlow accepts Internet Archive Hero Award from Brewster Kahle.

The Internet Archive (IA), the San Francisco based non-profit digital media archive, this week announced several new programs in collaboration with major US libraries and a new annual award: Internet Archive Hero.

The programs include partnerships with top libraries and music archive organizations. Music is a key focus for the IA which unveiled a "music locker" approach to enlarging its store of music without triggering copyright suits. It allows music collectors to upload digital copies of their libraries to their music locker stored on the Internet Archive. It will signal if a title has already been digitized and uploaded by another but it will still be available in the music locker. This should increase the size of the music archive by eliminating duplicate work and focusing on titles not yet digitzed.

The Internet Archive is a non-profit organization founded by Brewster Kahle, a former Internet entrepreneur, in 2001. Its mission is to digitize and store as much media culture, newspapers, magazines, books, TV, radio, leaflets that it can find. It has digital versions of some of the first books; and hundreds of thousands of hours of TV broadcasts from stations of all sizes across many decades; it has nearly all the early video games from the 1970 and 1980s allowing people to play them through a virtual game console created in a web browser. 

It's currently storing 20 Petabytes of data and doubling about every year serving about one million daily visitors.

The IA is housed in a beautiful former Christian Science church just a few blocks from Golden Gate park in San Francisco. 

Some newly added archives include obscure collections such as decades of background music played in K-Mart stores from the 1970s onwards.  There are also many rare recordings of early blues music performers. 

Internet Hero award goes to viral marketing pioneers...

Brewster Kahle gave the very first Internet Hero award to the Grateful Dead. His friend John Perry Barlow, a lyricist for the band, accepted the award. Barlow said that the Grateful Dead's popularity was due to allowing its fans to record live shows and share the tapes. 

"The Grateful Dead were the first to exploit viral marketing," said Barlow. "There were many other great bands around when we started by they didn't have the same type of audience we had and with an almost religious fervor."

He said tapes would travel thousands of miles and shared through the mail, which built a massive following for the band. The Grateful Dead were one of the top grossing live acts in the US for many years.  Barlow said that out of about 2300 live shows played by the original members of the Grateful Dead, the Internet Archive has nearly all but a few hundred.

Weber Shandwick had a great turnout for its Future of Media event moving it to FAME on Broadway, a larger location in the heart of North Beach. And we had a rare all-woman panel after the lone male dropped out.

The moderator said it was a pleasure to be part of an all woman panel especially when the subject has nothing to do with women. 

The moderator was Vivian Schiller Executive Editor-in-Residence at Weber Shandwick and the former Global Chair of News at Twitter, and a former CEO of NPR, did a good job including everyone in the conversation even if some panelists were way behind the times in their advice. For example: This is not a good time for journalists to strike out on their own, those days have come and long gone! Teams win.]

Also on the panel: Connie Guglielmo, Editor in Chief at CNET News; MC Walloons, SF Bureau Chief for CNBC; Ann Grimes, Professor at Stanford University and a former Wall Street Journal SF Bureau Chief; Caroline Fairchild, New Economy Editor at LinkedIn.

What struck me about the panelists was that they clearly love their work as journalists and love telling stories.  Connie Guglielmo at CNET News (above) had the best insights into the future of media especially when talking about the tools and technologies journalists could be using.

She told a story about the delight she experienced when she tried out Twitter's Periscope live streaming app at an Apple event and soon had more than 1,000 people watching.

Her pleasure at this discovery was wonderful to hear and it conveyed the fact that all journalists share traits of curiosity and wanting to tell stories to the largest audiences possible. Which is exactly why paywalls are not a business solution because journalists are cut off from the Internet's greatest virtue: virtually unlimited free distribution!

If Connie were experimenting with Periscope behind a firewall she might be discouraged with just a dozen viewers versus more than 1,000.

Paywalls aren't a solution for the future of media but nor is advertising. Advertising cannot support journalism. It no longer carries the value it once did thanks to Google, Facebook, and other large media companies that have drained its value.

These tech-enabled media companies are the competitors to all other media organizations and they have a business model that scales tremendously well. It's not a level playing field yet all traditional media companies have to use Google, Facebook, LinkedIn as distribution platforms. It's not a choice.  

I enjoyed the panel but it was mostly a discussion about new ways of telling stories, such as CNET's quarterly print magazine. An observer listening to the panelists might assume that media disruption is due to a lack of original story telling.  

As a journalist I was taught to follow the money and there you'll find a story and a reason. Follow the money in the media industry and you see media companies backed up against a wall with a shrinking workforce.

Shrinking jobs and diversity

The panel was asked about the lack of diversity in the media industry and lamented the need for diversity in the leadership of newsrooms. Diversity would be easier to achieve if there was a growing number of media jobs, because of a healthy industry, where news media orgs were competing and thriving. We are far from that scenario.

And there is absolutely nothing on the horizon,  there is sign of a solution to this hugely important problem: how does society support quality media such as serious journalism versus that what's not?

How is journalism rewarded if it's not a popularity contest for clicks? Clicks are a poor micro-currency for an online world that lauds content as king yet has no mechanism for distinguishing between and then recovering the value of quality media.

CNET's Guglielmo spoke about the danger of letting popularity be your editorial guide and then, "What are you trying to say?" Newsrooms are forced to chase popularity over establishing an editorial voice because that is the bleak economic reality of their business.

Follow the money. The Future of Media is chasing ever more traffic and clicks while expending ever smaller editorial resources. 

Or is it? What's the world of corporate media up to? Weber Shandwick has a business division called "Mediaco - We Help Every Company Become A Media Company". Luca Penati (above) is MediaCo's West Coast lead.  [I worked with Mediaco last year on a client project.]

Is the Future of Media in the hands of the PR industry? Can PR firms become both the promotors of clients and the press?

Will we need to rediscover the answers to questions we already knew the answers to? Yes. But we have no choice. Journalism has to be reborn and reinvented within an always-on  digital realm of unconstrained distribution. We will find new answers to questions that were once not possible. And that's the fun and innovative work in building the Future of Media.

New ways to tell journalistic stories will emerge in a creative flood but what we need first is innovation in media business models.

- - -

You can read more about my take on the Future of Media here: Weber Shandwick And The Future Of Journalism -SVW

It was great to see some familiar faces at Weber and also Ken Kaplan from Intel, Dave Needle, Chris Preimesberger and Jason Lopez. 

Some more photos from last night's event:

The San Francisco office of PR firm Weber Shandwick is hosting an interesting panel on October 13 with top journalists and corporate media execs titled: Journalism Disrupted, Journalism Reborn: The Future of Media in a Digital World.

Weber scores marks for a female-dominated panel with four of the five panelists: Connie Guglielmo, Editor in Chief at CNET News; MC Wellons, SF Bureau Chief for CNBC; Ann Grimes, Professor at Stanford University and a former Wall Street Journal SF Bureau Chief; Caroline Fairchild, New Economy Editor at LinkedIn; and Joaquin Alvarado, CEO for The Center for Investigative Reporting. 

Weber Shandwick has an active interest in the subject of journalism disrupted as do many PR firms because there’s plenty of new business opportunities. As the number of journalists continues to shrink, PR firms are offering businesses a wide range of editorial media services that includes: creating and publishing online magazines;  writing articles, columns and features; creating video news reports; etc.

Also known as “content marketing” it’s an attempt to try to plug the gaps in media coverage of companies that journalists once provided. It’s become a huge market. 

Weber Shandwick offers its media services through a business division called “Mediaco - We Help Every Company Become A Media Company”. [I worked with Mediaco last year on a client project.]

Foremski’s Take:

The subject of media disruption has been of constant interest to me ever since I left the Financial Times in mid-2004 and became an online publisher. I warned that the media industry was headed for a severe fall as it transitioned to a digital business because online ad revenues would be a fraction of print revenues.

I saw that every company would have to become a media company to some degree, to help tell their own stories. And that’s what has happened over the past ten years as and now “Every company is a media company” is now a well understood concept and it's fueling an explosion of demand for “Content Marketing” — a poor term for what is better described as "Editorial Content" to distinguish it from marketing and PR content.

I’ve worked on editorial content strategies with giant companies such as Intel, which has several high quality media projects, most notably Intel IQ and Intel Free Press. It publishes a lot of high quality editorial content that emulates independent magazines.

EC=MC - the transformative equation for business

Every company is a media company. However, many companies misunderstand what that means. It doesn’t mean writing endless stories about yourself. Media companies provide a service. The Financial Times and Wall Street Journal provide a financial news service and rarely write about themselves.

Corporations need to find a media service they can provide to their target community. It is fine to publish content about yourself but that’s called marketing or PR.

Editorial content should be defined by service…

My definition for “Editorial Content” is that it doesn’t look like marketing or PR content but provides a service to others — it is Media as a Service (MaaS).

Content that is self-serving is called marketing or PR, which is fine and necessary but companies already have plenty of that type of content. Editorial content is different. It is hard to do well.

I was hoping Weber would share some of the lessons it has learned from its Mediaco projects but maybe that’ll be the topic for the next event.

Here’s some lessons I’ve learned:

- Editorial content often turns out looking like marketing or PR — even when former newspaper reporters are hired. This is often because they are led by a marketing or PR boss. Their new boss should be like their old boss.

- Company organizational structure has to change. Editorial must be an independent department in the same way as HR, Finance, Engineering, Marketing, and PR are collaborative but independent groups with their own agendas.

- Corporate media can produce high quality editorial content. It can be better than that produced by independent media organizations.

- Editorial content is journalistic in its look and feel and should offer a service to its target audience. It could be a calendar of events regularly updated; it can be interviews with key industry people not directly associated with the company; it can be a media service that fills a gap in news coverage that independent media once produced; , etc.

Editorial content succeeds when it is Media as a Service (MaaS). The best media is MaaS Media!

The future of corporate media…

I’d love to hear from a panel of people working to create editorial media projects within large corporations such as Ken Kaplan and colleagues at Intel, and similar pioneers at Cisco Systems and other places. These are the people on the front lines in trying to create a new form of corporate media and a future for journalism.

We know journalism is being disrupted. Here’s what we don’t know:

• How does a company create an effective editorial work process? It is not the same way PR or marketing is produced.


• Should you hire former journalists or use PR professionals to produce editorial content?


• Can corporate media can fill the void? 


• How does corporate media create trust?


• Are PR firms able to play both the role of promoter and press? 


• How will journalism be reborn? What will be the new business model?

We are well into the third decade of the web yet we still don't have a media business model to ensure a thriving, competitive, and independent media industry.

Current models are failing fast: Advertising can’t produce enough revenues and paywalls work for small specialist publications but they cut off the Internet’s best publishing feature, one that every media company wants: instant and massive content distribution networks.

There are a million questions about the future of journalism and corporations’ abilities to succeed in this role.

I’ve been working on, and thinking hard about this topic of the future of journalism, for many years. Our failure to develop new ways to support professional journalists is truly an epic fail. 

A thriving independent press is hugely important for a healthy democracy and for a healthy industry sector. Innovation in media business models is sorely needed.

 I may have some answers that I’ll be able to share soon… Stay tuned!

I recently received this well written pitch from Kaitlyn Garcia at VSC Consulting:

Print is dead. Magazines are dying.

Not so, thinks Creativ.

This magazine did something unique. They launched on mobile first, thanks to a large but relatively under the radar startup known as issuu, a platform that helps content creators build long form content vs. the short-form stuff we’re used to on apps like Flipboard.

Creativ, an independent arts and culture magazine grew its readership from 20k to 500k on mobile through issuu first. The rabid popularity of the content on mobile gave Creativ the ability to then expand to print.

The result: Creativ is in 1,700 retail locations across the country.

Why this matters: Publishers are feeling the same pain as musicians — the fear of losing their revenue streams to digital consumers. Platforms like Flipboard, Facebook and Twitter don’t really care too much about publishers, so who does?

Enter issuu: The company is publisher-focused, does no real marketing for its own brand and expects each of its publishers to market their content to their audiences and find it in the issuu app, which has become the largest digital newsstand on mobile, bigger than Apple News Stand.

We think there’s an interesting story here about entrepreneurs like Creativ, and how they plan to make mobile work for them vs. giving up and waving the white flag to their long-form content which people around the world still love.

Foremski’s Take: I’ve always been [puzzled why some people have a hatred of paper-based media versus electronic. Surely it’s about the quality of the content? Paper or electron, if there’s a business model for it it shouldn’t matter how the content is delivered and Creativ is an excellent example of a media company leveraging both forms.

There’s additional benefits to paper. Paper-based media companies such as newspapers have struggled in their transition to a digital business model. But the transition is relatively slow compared with the transition to mobile news media from desktop versions.

The transition has been in progress for at least a decade and it will likely continue for another decade. That’s not true for the transition to mobile media formats from desktop, which is happening dizzyingly fast. 

The smaller screen space and the smaller revenues from mobile advertising are making life very difficult for digital-first media organizations.

Those media companies with legacy paper-based business groups, such as The New York Times, have some protection for their nascent digital businesses. Revenues have been falling faster in digital advertising than in newsprint advertising. 

Paper or electron? It’s good to have both.

Industry sources report that Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters and Axel Springer had placed bids but late entrant Nikkei won it 15 minutes before the announcement from front-runner Axel Springer, which had been in negotiations for about a year. 

The FT has about 737,000 mostly digital subscribers. Nikkei is Asia’s largest independent media business group. It publishes newspapers, magazines, books, database services and broadcasting. The Nikkei newspaper, its flagship publication has 3.12m subscribers.

Foremski’s Take: The sale of the Financial Times was expected as Pearson, its owner has been shedding non-educational assets, and also as its core educational business has slid further into trouble.

Pearson was a loyal if disinterested owner of the FT, which is both good and bad. Nikkei will provide the FT with what it needs the most — the ability to scale its stories across a much larger platform. 

Scale matters and it matters even more in the digital world where advertising revenues continue to plunge for most media organizations and they need to grow just to stand still. The FT is profitable but it is hard to grow fast enough on its own means and merits. A large media company as an owner will provide the FT with the means to accelerate growth and potentially scale FT’s news content across many outlets.

There will be a cultural difference between London and Tokyo, however both sides understand the language of news reporting and what’s important in delivering a highly trusted, high quality news service. It will be interesting to see Nikkei’s plans for the 127 year old FT and what investments it will make in the business.

However, the high valuation of the FT could backfire if Nikkei is unable to monetize its new business group sufficiently — a formidable challenge amid continuing tough times for all media businesses worldwide.

But at least for now, the FT is in the pink and so are its 500 journalists and 50 news bureaus.

- - -

[Silicon Valley Watcher was featured on the front cover of Nikkei’s business magazine in 2007 and in 2008 Japanese TV reporters for Nikkei produced a segment on Silicon Valley Watcher’s articles about how Silicon Valley was being transformed into a media valley.]

The FT has about 737,000 mostly digital subscribers. Nikkei is Asia’s largest independent media business group. It publishes newspapers, magazines, books, database services and broadcasting. The Nikkei newspaper, its flagship publication has 3.12m subscribers.

Circa CEO Matt Galligan in 2013 in the San Francisco office

Jason Abbruzzese reports: News app Circa says it cannot survive as a viable business

News app Circa, once a media darling for its mobile-first approach, has announced that it is going on an "indefinite hiatus" after it was unable to find someone to buy the company.

In a Medium post entitled "Farewell to Circa News," CEO Matt Galligan admitted that while they had succeeded in their goals of making a high-quality mobile news platform, Circa had failed to become a viable business.

Foremski's Take: Producing a "high-quality news platform" is hard, as Circa CEO Matt Galligan says it is but Circa had it easy, it didn't have any reporters writing original stories, it pulled together stories from several major news sites which had journalists on the ground and around the world.

Circa's design was excellent and I loved its use of photos and also the way that stories were structured into self-standing modules of text, which made it easier to push out a new story because background paragraphs and related editorial material was already written. 

But if Circa can't make money while not paying for reporters then imagine how tough it is for news organizations that don't rewrite other people's news reports but pay salaries for large editorial teams.

The media industry disruption continues. And we still have no stable business model to support a thriving independent media industry — it's the biggest and most worrying failure of the Internet, so far.

Foremski's Take: Producing a "high-quality news platform" is hard, as Circa CEO Matt Galligan says it is but Circa had it easy, it didn't have any reporters writing original stories, it pulled together stories from several major news sites which had journalists on the ground and around the world.

As the European Commission considers punitive measures against the US search giants business practices, Google offers to help eight European publishers develop new digital media products and announced it will fund new media projects from a $165m three-year "Innovation" fund.

Glyn Moody at Ars Technica reports that the offer is an attempt to mend bridges with the European Commission as it considers measures to crack down on Google's business practices.

There was also a public mea culpa from Carlo D'Asaro Biondo, Head of European Strategic Partnerships, speaking in London:

"I firmly believe that Google has always wanted to be a friend and partner to the news industry, but I also accept we've made some mistakes along the way."

"Over the years we have worked on a range of news-related initiatives, but we tended to work in isolation, and the feedback has been that Google can be complicated to work with, and at times unpredictable!"

Moody explains that this is not the first time Google has tried to buy its way out of trouble with European authorities. It set up a $66m fund in France to placate publishers and the government from taking additional legal action. 

Google has chosen to work with eight small but very influential European newspaper publishers such as the Financial Times and The Guardian in the UK, as part of a "charm offensive," says Moody.

 Foremski's Take: Google's public semi-apology is interesting but of not much help to European media companies as they struggle to compete with Google as a media company.

The apology and Google's offer to help fund "innovation" in the media industry demonstrates that Google has no idea how to help solve the media industry's problems or that it's a cynical red herring designed to obfuscate the real issue. What's needed is innovation in the media business model and that is impossible. 

Mashing together media feeds and clever CSS and HTML5 creations in amazingly innovative ways that engage and entertain, can only happen if there's a solid revenue base to support the creators. But the media industry has an endlessly eroding revenue base. 

We have failed to develop a mechanism that can recover the value of good journalism versus bad, which would create a virtuous reinvestment cycle. A click is a click no matter the quality of the content.

Google's algorithm can read but it can't comprehend beyond a very primitive level. It looks at only 200 data points to determine a web site ranking and assess the quality of its content. 

Google could help the European newspaper publishers by explaining to them that it is not a technology company, as it has been happy to portray itself over the past decade, but it is a media company -- a highly tech-enabled  media competitor that has digital media products the newspaper publishers will never ever have and which wouldn't do them any good, because they don't have a fraction of the audience and scale that's needed to survive.

That explanation would help the European publishers realize that they are toast and there's nothing they can do about it. The web is a disruptive media technology and it rewards scale. Biggest trumps bigger which beats big in this new media world. Even "Big Media" is not big enough to compete against Google or Facebook. 

The dirty little secret is that Google and Facebook are terrifically bad at monetizing content and it's precisely this failure that harms other publishers. Facebook's 2014 revenues are about $1 per user per month. Its profits are about 25 cents per user per month. Yet it can make billions of dollars in profits because it can sell ads for less money than traditional media companies can afford. Let's not mention all the personal data that Facebook can offer advertisers. 

Google cannot change its nature. Google is like the scorpion riding on the back of the frog that's carrying it to the other side of the river. The frog is the media industry whose support was vital in contributing 50% of Google's revenues, reaching a level that enabled it to IPO in 2004.

But the scorpion cannot change its nature and stings the frog. Without a constant supply of new content Google will run into serious trouble because there's less to index, less new content to sell ads around, and without new web pages there's less reason for users to search Google.

The death of the media industry will kill the web. We'll be liberated from our screens,  we'll walk blinking into the daylight, seeing gigantic animal images in the clouds, and wondering at this awesome 400K resolution,  fully immersive experience of being human. I can't wait :)

A scorpion cannot change its nature and the European Commission won't be able change the fundamental nature of Google's business model.  

Laura Locke, a long-time San Francisco based journalist for Time magazine and the BBC, is profiled in an interview by Flipboard as part of its promotion of its recently introduced curated magazine format. 

Here is an extract from: What I’m Reading: BBC News Reporter Laura Locke | Flipboard

While she doesn’t claim to be a soothsayer, Locke’s reporting helps readers get insights into the next big things. And where does she do some of her research? On Flipboard, of course— which is why we couldn’t help but ask: what are you reading?

I follow a dizzying number of topics—well over a thousand.

Why?

Well, I’ve always been a very curious person with, some say, a rather “wild intellect” and imagination. Flipboard is one platform that helps satisfy my conceptual appetite for in-depth, meaningful content (textual, visual, and aural)—and surfaces all of that on a daily, sometimes hourly basis. And, of course, the UI is strikingly beautiful and flipping articles is, well, simply addictive.

Sources I turn to regularly:

— Hacker News: Y Combinator’s news arm. The community upvotes some terrific and timely tech news, profiles, features and more arcane stories appealing to developers and general readers alike.

— 9to5 Mac and 9to5 Google: Always breaking news on two of Silicon Valley’s legendary companies.

— Techmeme: A highly regarded aggregator for top tech news. There’s no official mobile app, so tapping into the site’s content via Flipboard while on the go is really great. Plus, the look and feel of Techmeme on Flipboard makes it an entirely different viewing experience compared to the Web.

— Flipboard Picks: Insanely great misc. reads and images—a daily go-to.

— World Photography News by Nicholas Goodden & Stewart Duffy: Just go have a look :)

As an undergraduate, I studied English at U.C. Berkeley with an emphasis on multi-cultural, especially African American, literature. My thesis was on the works of novelist Richard Wright and internalized alienation from racism...

Read more about Laura Locke here: What I’m Reading: BBC News Reporter Laura Locke | Flipboard

https://about.flipboard.com/inside-flipboard/what-im-reading-bbc-news-reporter-laura-locke/

It’s hard to predict the future of tech. Overnight sensations can turn into tomorrow’s duds, and anyone claiming to know a thing about what’s next should have plenty of credibility.

One such person is Laura Locke, tech reporter for the BBC. Formerly at TIME, Locke focused her career on covering all facets of the startup scene and nabbed interviews with some of tech’s biggest personalities, such as Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin.

While she doesn’t claim to be a soothsayer, Locke’s reporting helps readers get insights into the next big things. And where does she do some of her research? On Flipboard, of course— which is why we couldn’t help but ask: what are you reading?

I follow a dizzying number of topics—well over a thousand.

Why?

Well, I’ve always been a very curious person with, some say, a rather “wild intellect” and imagination. Flipboard is one platform that helps satisfy my conceptual appetite for in-depth, meaningful content (textual, visual, and aural)—and surfaces all of that on a daily, sometimes hourly basis. And, of course, the UI is strikingly beautiful and flipping articles is, well, simply addictive.

Sources I turn to regularly:

— Hacker News: Y Combinator’s news arm. The community upvotes some terrific and timely tech news, profiles, features and more arcane stories appealing to developers and general readers alike.

— 9to5 Mac and 9to5 Google: Always breaking news on two of Silicon Valley’s legendary companies.

— Techmeme: A highly regarded aggregator for top tech news. There’s no official mobile app, so tapping into the site’s content via Flipboard while on the go is really great. Plus, the look and feel of Techmeme on Flipboard makes it an entirely different viewing experience compared to the Web.

— Flipboard Picks: Insanely great misc. reads and images—a daily go-to.

— World Photography News by Nicholas Goodden & Stewart Duffy: Just go have a look 

As an undergraduate, I studied English at U.C. Berkeley with an emphasis on multi-cultural, especially African American, literature. My thesis was on the works of novelist Richard Wright and internalized alienation from racism.

At Stanford I studied journalism and documentary film and did my M.A. thesis on educational multimedia technology and state government incentives. These topics appear in my magazines as well.

Discovery is constant on Flipboard. One topic I was interested in—but didn’t know the name of—was “Transhumanism.” Despite my familiarity with “The Singularity” and artificial intelligence, I hadn’t heard that term before. It roughly refers to the melding of man and machine.

One of the most surprising discoveries on Flipboard is a social one: While I never set out or expected to meet a new friend on the platform (that’s not how I use it), somehow I connected with an incredible designer in Frankfurt, Germany, who does amazing iPhone portraits. I noticed he visited my magazine regularly and he was incredibly engaged with images and stories I posted. Then we began sharing comments on flips, and I found his designs and artwork on Instagram and in his main Flipboard magazine “MARC2U.”

Marc’s work is ethereal, haunting, serious and whimsical—I’ve never seen anything quite like it—so his designs frequently appear on the cover of TechMuse. I still can’t believe he creates these intricate portraits all on an iPhone. In my view, Flipboard is great venue for showcasing new and unknown artists. Everyone should consider posting original artworks on their magazine covers!

The process of exploring, discovery and learning is my favorite thing to do—that’s really what first attracted me to reporting and writing: working in journalism allows you to be curious on a daily basis. Flipboard only amplifies that experience, accelerates it and beautifies it.

Flipboard’s “Editor” tool is an easy way to grab online stories, photos, videos and audio and flip it into my magazines. I use this feature religiously. I also rely on scanning and flipping loads of content from scores of topics I’m following from Flipboard’s official publishing partners. Those automatically show up in my (personalized) feed.

I tend to follow magazines as opposed to other “people” (individual accounts) — part of my idiosyncratic nature I suppose. I like my journey of news and content discovery to be my own—personal, intimate.

That said, I do enjoy flips from fellow readers with a sharp eye for incredible and unusual reads: Robert Scoble, Mike McCue, Evan Doll, Harry McCrackenand Ken Yeung, I flip their stuff often because we gravitate towards the same stories in tech, science, society, but I also learn a lot from what they are reading, seeing, etc. and I respect and appreciate their perspectives.

Flipboard has been a huge influence on my journalism. My early reporting on the company helped me understand Flipboard’s magic: the platform is fluid, dynamic, real-time: the digital framework encapsulates what is happening in the world, just as print magazines have always done, but Flipboard enables the consuming and sharing of potentially unlimited media streams at an unprecedented velocity. It helps that the user interface is ultra easy on the eyes.

In my own magazines, Flipboard allows me to see themes and identify recurring patterns and even emerging trends. Seven months ago, I started my first and now primary Flipboard magazine, “TechMuse.”

TechMuse

It was purely an organic undertaking. My idea was simply to learn how the magazine-making feature works. A blend of news, images, stories from my own journalism portfolio, etc. I wasn’t entirely sure where I’d go with it—I just began creating something I thought I might like to read.

Soon after, though, I began sharing “TechMuse” with friends, family, colleagues, and on Twitter, etc. I let people know it’s a work-in-progress — “a living, breathing thing that will change over time.”

The magazine really took off, though, when Flipboard started featuring it as a “Top Tech Magazine,” and since Flipboard 3.0 launched with over 30K topics and an amped up algorithmic backend last October, I’ve gone from 39K viewers to almost 60K viewers.

And it keeps on growing. Typically, I get 1K to 3K page views daily and several thousand new viewers a week. My all-time high for page views is 6,690 on a single day in February but a thousand new readers over a weekend isn’t unusual.

During breaking news events such as the death of Robin Williams, three thousand new readers came on within hours: I just began posting news stories, updates and tributes as they began appearing online. When NYT’s media columnist David Carr suddenly died in mid-February, I also began posting right away and gained 600+ new followers in one hour. Besides surging growth, I’m also seeing extraordinary engagement on Flipboard. Some stories can get 150 interactions (likes and re-flips) — that’s astounding — and in my experience unparalleled engagement compared to other social media platforms.

What’s most amazing:

In a magazine mainly devoted to technology, readers’ appetite for content related to mental health, especially as it relates to startups and entrepreneurship, is off the charts. Stories about stress, anxiety, depression, alienation and suicide grab a staggering level of interest and engagement within TechMuse. Three out of five of my all-time “most viewed” posts are concerned with mental health, according to Flipboard’s analytics tool.

It’s great because one of my goals with TechMuse and my other two key magazines “On The Documentary Spectrum” and “Whoosh! (SF)” is inclusion — de-stigmatizing uncomfortable topics, ideas, themes and groups of people — helping mainstream the marginalized in society. I’m proud to be part of that aspirational communication.

I love sharing information and helping keep people aware, educated and empowered. I keep my global base of readers in mind when curating—and hope they can feel the love, energy and thrill of it all as I do. There’s a lot of intent and emotion that goes into my creative process: Flipboard encapsulates it perfectly.

In this Guest Post, PR industry veteran Mike Maney makes a strong case for embargoes. I work with embargoes because publishing a press release before its time is not a scoop. If I'm smart enough, I can come up with an original and exclusive angle on an important story, from having time to ask the right questions. 

By Mike Maney

A common complaint among the media is that embargoes are the spawn of Satan. An unnecessary evil foisted upon reporters for the sake of squeezing every last drop of digital ink from a marketer’s jargon-filled pitch.

This is true of embargoes 99.999% of the time. I’ve railed on them. A lot. I do my best to avoid them. I like laser-targeting stories I’ve uncovered (or manufactured) to the journalist who would be the most interested in the topic. Not the two, three or ten journalists, but the one.

It’s tough work (okay, not tough like oil rigger tough, but…). It requires paying attention to rivers of news, to reading things from wildly different corners of the media world, to actually engaging with reporters as humans when I don’t have anything to sell them.

That isn’t done with a pitch list.

But there’s that other 00.001% of of the time. It’s the time when you actually have news. Not earth shattering “Hey, we found Amelia Earhart!” news, but legit news.

This is when the judicious use of the embargo becomes necessary. It’s necessary not because the news needs to be controlled, but — wait for it — because reporters have made it necessary.

How many times has a company’s news team received this email: “Sorry, my competitor already ran the story. Yes, I know it’s a story my readers should hear, but I can’t do anything with it now that it’s out there.”

So, news that is news isn’t news unless it drives clicks (read: advertising). Uh huh. Yeah. Hence, the embargo. A way for companies to *help* reporters by leveling the playing field and take the “Ooh! I was first! Nah nah nah!” out of the journalistic equation.

Readers don’t care who was first. They care about the story.

The White House press corps has it right, so do some professional sports: pool reporters to cover the basic stuff, individual reporters to dive deep and give stories the attention and analysis they deserve.

AP announced automated game recaps - a victory for data & algorithms is another body blow to journalists 

http://t.co/HPt9bJGHra

— Tim Blair (@TimothyBlair) 

March 6, 2015

Is it time for a similar tech press corp? A corp where rookie journalists are thrown into the pool to cover press release and event news, leaving seasoned reporters the time to dive deeper into the issues and trends that surround the industry?

And, if that’s the model, where do these seasoned reporters dive deep?

They do it from inside the khaki lined walls of Corporate America, where budgets exist to support them and forward-thinking companies give them the access, time and support they need to tell strong, smart and insightful stories.

Because as much as we all want to think the relationship between trade reporter and tech company is adversarial, the reality is all they really want to do is find and tell good stories about their industry.

Sadly, the traditional outlets for telling those stories are dwindling, victim to a business model that relies on commodity news for clicks (see embargo above). But the stories still exist, they still need to get told and there are an increasing number of topnotch reporters on the market who still want to tell them.

- - -

Mike Maney is the founder of ManeyDigital, where he provides experienced communications counsel to startups and members of the Fortune 500.

Eliane Fiolet in a Paris subway train on the superb Traveling Geeks trip that she helped organize in December 2009.

Congratulations to Eliane Fiolet, co-founder of Silicon Valley's Ubergizmo news site for being awarded France's  Chevalier de l'Ordre National du Mérite!

The award recognizes exceptional service in the public sphere. Eliane has worked with many French startups, providing advice and sharing her Silicon Valley connections. She also helped the French Embassy Trade Office with a variety of projects. There will be a presentation ceremony on March 17 in Paris. 

Ubergizmo is a fabulous multilingual gizmo and gadget news and reviews site that's nearly ten years old. I've know Eliane and her co-founder and husband Hubert Nguyen (below) since they started publishing. Hubert was a graphics hardware engineer and Eliane's background was graphics design so both had to learn how to be a publisher and editor very quickly. 

They've worked hard and created an excellent media publication with high quality news and reviews.

Thursday evening in San Francisco I will be emceeing an event organized by NerdWallet, exploring the topic of journalists, "redefining their careers outside traditional media."

Newsrooms are still shrinking and some publications, such as GigaOm,  have closed recently. This is pushing companies to fill in the gap in media coverage by producing more of their own media content. Every company is a media company because they have to, they don't have much choice. 

NerdWallet has more than 50 journalists creating content to help people with financial decisions. 

Here's the details:

Who: An inspiring panel of media professionals, from recent graduates to veterans, all of whom have taken their careers in a unique direction. Hear and meet speakers such as Marisa Wong, managing editor of SlideShare, Stacey Delo of Maybrooks.com, and Todd Lappin, a content strategist at Facebook. They'll talk about their career paths and the future of the industry.

Above, at the recent Crunchies Awards, Om Malik (right) is told by Mike Arrington, founder of news site Techcrunch, that there's far more money in investing in startups than there is in publishing.

The management of GigaOm, the San Francisco-based publisher of tech focused web sites, has abruptly "ceased operations."

GigaOm was founded by Om Malik (above, right). The following notice was posted:

Foremski's Take: One of the biggest disappointments of the Internet Age is that we still do not have a  value-recovery mechanism  for good quality media content. A click is a click is a click - but it's not — some media content is much better than others. But we have no rewards mechanism to support the creation of more great media content.

We still have no satisfactory business model that can save the media industry from the disruptive economic forces of the web, that continue to hound its shrinking news rooms and dwindling pools of exhausted professionals.

And in this second media apocalypse new media companies are squarely in the path of this disruption.

[GigaOm's Matthew Ingram, its Media beat reporter, totally missed this one. He is a constant critic of traditional media businesses versus new media's paperless "advantage."] 

Mobile is killing media...

The shift to mobile is extremely disruptive to new media titles because it is happening much  faster than the transition of business from print to digital (which is still in progress).

The problem with mobile media is that it's near impossible to monetize via adverts that earn one-tenth that of desktop ads, which earn one-tenth of print ads. From dollars, to dimes, to pennies. 

The collapse in ad revenues due to mobile users is a key reason Say Media, a very innovative San Francisco based publisher and advertising network has been selling its titles, such as tech site Read Write. It has pivoted into a technology company with its Tempest content management system.

GigaOm's demise brings up questions if other sites can survive, such as VentureBeat which shares much of the same audience.  Kara Swisher, co-founder of Re/Code, said late last year that the tech news site is not yet profitable following its split from Dow Jones a year ago. 

Unless you are Buzzfeed, Gawker or Business Insider – you can't make a living as an independent publisher from ads because the traffic numbers required are out of reach. And it's getting worse.

- - -

Please see: The Media's 2nd Apocalypse: The Nightmare Rise Of Mobile Tech

The Media Industry Is Blind, Dumb And Dumber: Daylight Robbery - Billions Stolen

San Francisco's Extraordinary Media Heritage - 12 Daily Newspapers

The recent vast viral distribution of "The Dress" story through Buzzfeed, and many other popular news sites, created a media tsunami.

It's an example of Foremski's First Law of New Media at work!

Silicon Valley investors love the scalability of a software-based startup. If business takes-off you add more servers and run more software.

There's far less need to add people, which is good because a people-dependent business doesn't scale through technology, e.g., public relations.

The traditional media industry is a people-based business and it usually requires additional people to produce additional media. It's not scalable in the same way as a software-based business, by adding more machines.

However, there is a very important distinction about a media business that is usually missed:  Content is near infinitely scalable on the Internet. The Internet was built to scale content in seconds.

Other people's servers will gladly carry your content to wherever the Internet ends -- for free!

With one story you can potentially imprint the entire Internet! Try matching that performance with a servers and software business, for example, offering a web service. 

Back in 2006 I cheekily dubbed this effect: Foremski's First Law of New Media -- Content is infinitely scalable. 

I'll tell you the Second Law in a future post! 

I'm a fierce opponent of "native ads" because by their very nature they pretend to be something else, and that damages trust, not just in the publication that hosts them but in all trusted media.

So far, native ads have been sold to product companies such as computer maker Dell, publishing articles in the New York Times that resemble the style of the newspaper's stories. With election season starting up, will we see native ads masquerading as independent political reporting?

Allowing Dell to mimic New York Times' stories is distasteful but less disturbing than if special interest groups sought to sway voters by imitating a newspaper's political coverage.

Desperate times...

The Presidential election season has always provided big paydays for big media companies but will they be able to win those fat political advertising accounts as easily as before?

The media technology platforms of Google, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pintrest, et al. will capture a larger share of political ad money this time around. With media companies already badly squeezed on revenues by their transition to digital, will desperate times lead to desperate offers on native ads?

It would be a very bad move.

Selling trust...

 In the largest study of native ads, commissioned by PR firm Edelman, the majority of 5,000 readers surveyed said they lost trust in media that carried native ads.

 Yet the most effective advertising is in trusted, high quality publications. The buyers of native advertising are actively harming the effectiveness of all their advertising. It doesn't make sense. They are poisoning the well from which we all drink. Without trusted media we can't make good decisions. Garbage in, garbage out.

 The media industry is stunningly clueless, as usual. And its management is all too willing to sell hard-won trust in their publications for a handful of beans. But there's no magic beanstalk and there's no golden goose in this story. There's just more newsroom layoffs and a society struggling with a corrupted media industry.

Politicians should observe carefully how native ads are used during this election season. It costs a lot less to corrupt the media than to corrupt the political process through $3.2 billion in 2013 spending on lobbyists, and more than $6 billion to finance the 2012 US Congressional and Presidential elections.

 - - -

Native Ads Are The Worst Idea In The World - NYTimes Is Clueless -SVW

Largest Native Advertising Study Finds Benefits For Brands At The Expense Of Publishers

Yet Another Study Finds Readers Don't Trust Native Ads

Native Ads Are The Worst Idea In The World - NYTimes Is Clueless

Leslie Kaufman at the New York Times, reported on a study by the Association of National Advertisers into the problem of fake ad clicks:

Study Puts a Price Tag on Fake Ad Clicks - NYTimes.com

Fraudulent operators using robots to impersonate people clicking on digital ads will rob the advertising industry of $6.3 billion in 2015, according to a report published on Tuesday.

Foremski's Take:  Reporters constantly write the story of ad fraud as if the ad industry is the victim. It's not, it is the media industry that's losing billions in revenues. The ad industry is an accessory to this fraud.

That $6 billion could have paid for a lot of journalist salaries.

Trade associations tend to err on the conservative side whenever there is a problem, so the scale of the fraud is likely far higher, and there have been estimates of fraud losses as high as $18 billion a year. 

The ad industry knows the fraud goes on and goes along with it because advertisers want the numbers to justify their ad budgets even though they know a quarter to a third of their spend is for bogus traffic. 

The NYTimes story is an example of how the media industry and its leading publishers don't understand the economics of their own business. 

And it is an example of how advertisers are hastening the demise of the media industry by being complicit in the fraud. They are weakening a vital industry that carries their commercial messages. It's lose-lose.

And the media industry is doing nothing about it. Shocking.

- - -

Please see:

The Media Industry Is Blind, Dumb And Dumber: Daylight Robbery - Billions Stolen -SVW 

Why isn't the media industry screaming mad about this?! Instead it is blind, dumb, and dumber about this issue.

The media industry needs to band together to stop ad fraud today. It should insist that its advertisers, the big brands, sign a pledge not to support ad fraud and only advertise on real media sites.

Here's How To Put Billions Back Into The Media Industry Overnight -SVW

Suzanne Vranica at the Wall Street Journal reported that between $6 billion and $18 billion is stolen every year in the US  because of ad fraud.  The Secret About Online Ad Traffic: One-Third Is Bogus - WSJ.com

Vectors Of Engagement And The Click-Free Digital Economy -SVW

Dan Farber is one of the first tech industry journalists and in his thirty year career he has helped create many top publications and he has led many editorial teams. He "retired" from his senior executive position at CBS News in the summer and posted photos of his idyllic life in Sonoma County.

But I never believed he would be gone for long. After all, how can a dyed-in-the-wool newsman stay away when the world is changing so fast, and this small part of the world on his doorstep has so much to do with it?

This week he joined Salesforce.com as Senior Vice President Strategic Communications.

He'll be working closely with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who is starting to take on more of a leadership position on local and regional matters, a much needed role given his history of philanthropy and his potential to inspire a tech community that seems a little lost.

I'm looking forward to seeing Dan more often and I congratulate him on this next phase of his career. It also gives me a chance to repost my interview with Dan from January this year:

CBS/CNET's Dan Farber: One Of The First Tech Journalists

I caught up with Dan Farber last week at CBS/CNET offices on 2nd Street. He’s been back in San Francisco for about a year after working as Editor-in-Chief at CBSNews.com in New York for several years.

Dan was one of the very first tech journalists, and with more than three decades in this business, he’s also one of the most successful tech journalists around.

He has led large editorial teams at many news magazines and he never missed a stride when the blogging explosion began to push journalists to work harder, faster, and better, by learning new skills in audio, video, and photography.

When I was at the Financial Times I often ran into Dan, and then when I left in 2004 to become what I later learned was the first journalist to leave a major newspaper to become a professional “blogger journalist,” I saw Dan even more — at all the evening events that the daytime journalists would rarely cover.

I would see Dan everywhere, everywhere I was looking for stories: at conferences, press events, media salons, and parties.

On the bus…

One of my favorite times with Dan was when we were on John Furrier’s Bloghous Bus, careening through the rain and the Salinas hills, headed towards Las Vegas and the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show. It was a very surreal experience.

Marc Canter is standing next to me, singing beautiful opera; Robert Scoble has his baby on one arm while he mugs for Rocky Barbanica’s video camera, with Loic Le Meur. The other bloggers are running around simultaneously interviewing each other for each other’s podcasts, and blog sites — it’s all media, all of the time.

Our only Internet connection is my Verizon modem, which somehow, amidst all the hills, is holding its signal more reliably than our bus is holding the rain-slicked curves.

Amid all this swaying tumult and G-force, I catch Dan’s eye and I realize we both have the same smile of bemusement and pleasure at seeing all this blogger media mayhem going on around us. Unadorned, unabashed, and unpretentious.

A spiritual ride…

After nearly as much time in the media business as Dan, the emergence of blogging and its open formats, was a tremendously welcome and refreshing development. Like Dan, I’ve greatly enjoyed the “blogger” addition to my journalistic endeavors, and the new skills I needed to learn in video production and photography.

I love the creative freedom, the instant publishing, and the chance to innovate within a fresh medium. Although I feel very self-conscious when I say this, blogging has also been an incredible spiritual journey.

Always a newsman…

To survive this long as a journalist and editor, in this careening media industry, you need have as strong a news instinct and drive as Dan’s. He says he really likes the dynamic aspect of news, being always-on, always ready to file, always hot on the story whatever time it happens.

The demands of the modern newsroom has burned out many journalists but working faster, better, and harder never seemed to be a problem for Dan. From what I could see of his prodigious output, he did it all without breaking a sweat, as if he was now finally free to use all his newsman superpowers.

There is no longer any technical or production barrier to stand in the way of a newsman’s most treasured first principle: Be first. Then own the story as it develops through the day and into the next, through your expertise and industry contacts.

Original reporting is key to building the best news organizations. ”You can only get it here” — is the credo that drives original reporting. And it’s what many of today’s news sites should rediscover before it’s too late.

Choices…

“I’m not as fast as I used to be,” Dan says with a smile that says he’s still pretty damn fast. His seniority at CBS gives him the freedom to work on whatever he wants, longer articles, and a book project.

Even though he doesn’t have to be involved in the rush of the newsroom there’s a restless pacing in his eyes when he talks about the CNET News.com team, and the need to be on top of the news, and all that follows: The first sharp hit of breaking news, multiple updates, news analysis, maybe a feature, plus producing all the photographs, video, and audio that’s required.

A troubled industry…

I’ve been writing about the media industry being in trouble ever since I left the Financial Times in 2004 — before even the media industry knew it was in trouble. The troubles haven’t gone away and they are accelerating.

I’ve spoken with Dan about this topic many times because I’ve become obsessed with it and I find it endlessly fascinating.

Dan says that he’s confident that media companies will survive by focusing on expertise, that people are drawn to media created by trusted experts. But he agrees that the great challenge of how to pay for it hasn’t been solved.

I’ve called it the biggest failure of the Internet. And I thought it would be solved long before now — 10 years after I first started reporting on this issue.

The lure…

We talked a lot about what keeps us both doing what we do, when so many in our profession have chosen to leave for gentler, and certainly more generous pastures.

I told Dan that I’ve been tempted lately to do the same, to escape the financial pressures of publishing SVW. My landlord has an unhealthy obsession with money, especially my money. I’m trying to help the poor guy and that might mean joining a larger organization, with larger resources. Maybe even changing jobs completely.

I love to do what I do, which is going out and talking to people, then coming back and writing stories of significance and worth. I want to publish as much original reporting, original analysis, original insights — as I can muster and express.

It often feels as if I don’t have a job because it doesn’t feel like work.

Being a journalist is very satisfying and difficult to leave. I understand completely why Dan is still at CBS and still doing what he does.

The future looks bright for Peyman Nilforoush, CEO of inPowered.

InPowered this week announced that its news story promotion service for large brands would not charge for clicks but only for engagement by readers.

The company is fighting against a massive flood of click-bait, fraudulent clicks and shadowy promotional tactics with its policy of only charging customers for engagement.

Companies such as Outbrain and Taboola also offer services to promote stories, but there is an important difference with inPowered's approach: brands cannot change the headline of a story or use images to drive attention.

"You can't use click-bait to lure readers, and no bikinis!" says Peyman Nilforoush, CEO and cofounder.

His brother Pirouz Nilforoush, President and co-founder, says, "Click-bait is killing the web, people are being turned off. We want true engagement with stories from trusted writers who know their areas of expertise because that is what drives purchases."

Inpowered searches hundreds of thousands of sites for news and feature stories. Customers choose a set of stories they would like to promote via inPowered's links to major advertising networks.

InPowered's technology can tell how long a reader spends looking at a story, if they read below the fold, and if they share that story. It can then follow that shared link across the web to count further engagement. 

The stories that generate high reader engagement are prioritized by the algorithm — adding further to the audience of engaged readers while driving traffic to quality media sites. 

And it will only allow corporations to promote stories that are written by credible journalists. Its algorithm tracks each writer's expertise and history to determine who are the best experts in their fields.

Trust leads to sales

InPowered has commissioned research that show readers engage with content from trusted sources and that click-bait, or content created for promotional purposes, fares badly. For this reason inPowered does not like "native advertising," promotional content designed to look as if it is written by a credible publication such the New York Times.

Instead of creating favorable content at great expense, corporations can use inPowered to find the most credible media sources, identify the stories about their products or services that are getting the most engagement, and then give those stories a boost on the web. It's a far better "native ad" because it advertises a great story written by an independent writer.

Foremski's Take: InPowered's approach is bold and prescient. Clicks are becoming worthless as a metric of how content is perceived by readers. Engagement, in the form of someone reading a story or sharing it within their network, is the only true engagement.

It is refreshing to see a company in the advertising business taking such bold moves to protect, and to promote, news stories from trusted sources.

Its service drives engagement — which brands love. But it also drives new audiences to publishers employing real journalists rather than content produced by "brand journalists," which are disguised marketers.

Corporations can try to promote favorable stories produced by their marketing departments but if there is little or no engagement by readers, inPowered's bid process requires ever higher payments to promote those stories. Its algorithm prioritizes the most engaging stories, which turn out to be those from trusted sources. Ad budgets are spent only on the most engaging stories. 

It can thus guarantee true engagement with stories written by independent third-parties with no connection to brand marketing.  

I'm very interested in inPowered because of its commitment to quality content and quality journalism. It is incredibly rare in this business, only  Centro, the Chicago-based ad technology company, has a similar commitment to quality journalism.  

I recommend keeping a close eye on what inPowered does in the future. Its technologies might very hold an important key in helping publishers make money from mobile news feeds, which are currently very difficult to monetize because of small screens and very low ad rates. 

Please see:

InPowered's New Brand Promotion Tool Focuses On Trusted Experts, Not Influencers

Nielsen Study Finds Very Poor Performance For Branded Content

Centro: Chicago's Ad Tech Giant Aims To Revive Journalism

Turmoil at the venerable New Republic. Dylan Byers at Politico reports:

Nine of the magazine's twelve senior editors submitted letters of resignation to owner Chris Hughes and chief executive Guy Vidra, as did two executive editors, the digital media editor, the legislative affairs editor, and two arts editors. At least twenty of the magazine's contributing editors also requested that their names be removed from the magazine's masthead.

The mass departure came one day after a shakeup that saw the resignation of top editor Franklin Foer and veteran literary editor Leon Wieseltier, both of whom resigned due to differences of vision with Hughes, a 31-year-old Facebook co-founder who bought the magazine in 2012. Foer announced his resignation on Thursday after discovering that Hughes had already hired his replacement, Gabriel Snyder, a Bloomberg Media editor who formerly ran The Atlantic Wire blog.

Foremski's Take: The decisions taken by the owners of the New Republic are being dictated by the economics of the media business, which leaves a slim margin for strategic positioning. The protests by its editorial staff are brave but they cannot change the economics of the business.

Everyone is bound by the same economics of the media industry, which requires chasing the same dwindling ad revenues by running ever faster just to stay still.

On top of this, the move to mobile is creating a second apocalypse for the media industry because revenues are as much as one-tenth below desktop. You can't show ten times as many ads on mobile to make up the lost revenues because you wouldn't see any content. 

The New Republic has to become a vanity venture if it is to retain its distinct history and position. It is a foolish strategy to chase traffic as Buzzfeed, et al. Because they will all look like the same magazine with the same stories driven by pageviews. Pageview journalism takes away editorial choice. 

Plus, the New Republic doesn't have the scale to chase the big numbers. 

Problematic programmatic...

The rise of programmatic ad trading is problematic because it makes it hard to sell advertisers face to face on the qualities of a particular magazine. Programmatic measures short-term results rather than long-term advertiser Brand positioning and media partnering.

As more magazines fold the big Brands are having to do more publishing themselves. But being a media company is hard and very expensive. The Brands don't have the editorial processes in place and every piece of content is tremendously costly to produce.

Then add the costs of driving traffic to that article. Then do it again, and again, and keep feeding the daily beast.

Every company doesn't want to be a media company...

The big Brands will wish there existed an independent third-party media industry with which they could work to get their stories told -- like in the old days. Well, they should have supported credible media titles with advertising that was bought at a premium rather than bought at rock-bottom prices through ad trading dashboards.

They should have worked to ensure their media partners survived and continued to produce quality content -- from which their advertising benefits by association. 

Too bad the Brands are so short-sighted. It's going to be a very costly mistake.

A click is unreliable because its origins can be easily obscured for fraudulent reasons and its use as a metric of engagement is incomplete and deeply flawed.

There's a clue to where things are headed in this post by Josh Constine: Why LiveRail Ditched An IPO To Sell Its Video AdTech To Facebook For ~$500M

Facebook has invested a ton into conversion tracking so it knows if you bought something after seeing one of its ads. It all works because people stay logged in to Facebook, which ties together their web and mobile identities.

Online, Facebook uses tracking pixels installed on advertisers’ checkout pages to measure conversions even weeks after an initial view. Offline, it partners with brick-and-mortar purchase data brokers like Datalogix to connect your supermarket buys using a loyalty discount card to your Facebook profile. Businesses can also securely upload privacy-protected records of who bought what at their stores, which Facebook then matches to who saw what ads.

All this lets Facebook tell advertisers when they earned more money from sales inspired by their ads than the ads themselves cost. When it can demonstrate this return on investment, advertisers pour more cash into Facebook’s coffers.

Foremski's Take: The future beyond the "click" will be a fascinatingly complex future and complexity rewards big players. In the above example, Facebook can show the vectors of engagement that led to a purchase. And there's related vectors of engagement (VOEs) such as recommending to a friend after watching an ad, or video. 

There's many other possible VOEs from other platforms. Google could show that a search for Target stores resulted in a visit to Target, thanks to its geo-tracking and seek a payment for providing that service. (It's a way to monetize foot traffic as well as web traffic.)

Publishers have been trying to get credit for sending shoppers to retailers through affiliate links in articles that they read. But this effort is often derailed because shoppers will visit price comparison sites before buying, and it is those last seen sites that get the credit and the affiliate payout. [Skimlinks Says Affiliate Payouts Short-Change Publishers -SVW]

And here's the rub, when there's many overlapping VOEs, and many different paths to the cash register, who can tell which one generated the sale? Which one should be paid?

If a company rewards Facebook for a VOE but ignored Google, will that result in an "optimization" of Google's algorithm that would favor a paying competitor? Most certainly.

Google Facebook, and others, all optimize their ad serving to favor the best revenue generating ads — why would this be any different? VOEs can be optimized in favor of those that pay, just the same as with ads.

Since VOEs can be fluid and are ultimately based on a platform's optimizing algorithm, there's very little transparency into the process of linking marketing with a cash register event. You'll pay to make sure you don't get left out.

Just hand your marketing budget to Google or Facebook or Twitter and they'll do the rest. You can go fishing.

Say Media, the San Francisco publisher of ReadWrite and many other sites, is looking for buyers for its titles as it pivots into a media technologies vendor.

Matt Sanchez, CEO said it was hard for the company to focus on two businesses: growing its media brands and developing media technologies for media companies such as its Tempest content management system.

 Lucia Moses at Digiday reported:

"When we launched Say, it was really about, how do you provide technology and services for independent media," [Matt Sanchez, CEO] said. "It was this vision of building the modern media company by building, partnering with and buying independent media companies, build the tech beneath it and think holistically about the entire media stack. We just came to the conclusion that it's very difficult to do both."

Platishers, beware: Say Media gives up on publishing - Digiday

Foremski's Take:The disruption in the industry isn't confined to traditional media companies — it includes new media companies. The move to mobile is killing them.

Advertising on mobile is a massive problem that is always presented as a huge "opportunity" such as in former Wall Street analyst Mary Meeker's annual report on the Internet. Her slide deck lists US mobile ads as a $30 billion opportunity waiting to be tapped. There is no "opportunity" — the reality is that publishers earn as little as one-tenth the ad money on mobile versus desktop.

Will they show 10 times as many ads to make up for it? That would obscure everything on a smartphone screen.

The move from print to digital produced about one-tenth the ad revenues and now with the shift to mobile there is an additional one-tenth reduction.

It is the second decimation of the media industry. It's not surprising that Say wants to rid itself of its media group.

A paper cushion...

The first media Apocalypse is still in progress — more than a decade of transition to digital is still far from finished. Older publishers, including the New York Times, that still have a substantial legacy print advertising business are lucky, compared to the pure digital media companies such as Say. That's because print ads are going away more slowly than the lightning fast transition to mobile media content.

Say doesn't have a legacy print advertising business to cushion the move to mobile. It had been doing very well, expanding to more than 400 staff as it acquired media titles and ad sales mushroomed to an estimated $100 million in 2011. Plus, it has been quick off the mark in offering new promotional products to advertisers, that improve engagement, native advertising, etc, whatever was trending in the ad world as the next great ad format.

But it wasn't enough to fill the gap in revenues as ad rates across the industry continued to plummet.

Say also worked hard to improve the quality of its editorial content. But with the rise of programmatic ad trading there is no way to profit from producing higher quality media.

Ad-trading algorithms are blind to quality. When machines trade ads there's never a chance to meet face to face with a media buyer and sell them higher-priced ads based on better content.

It's easy to see why Say wants to just sell tech. But will there be enough media companies around over the next few years to become customers for its Tempest magazine publishing platform?

Maybe an extra pivot is necessary: sell to corporations. Every company is a media company and needs the same publishing tools. And they don't need revenue from ads. It's the rise of corporate media — grave new model for the media industry.

- - -

Please see:

The Media's 2nd Apocalypse: The Nightmare Rise Of Mobile Tech

The Death Card In Mary Meeker's Slide Deck

It might not seem surprising to my readers that I'm working on a project with Mediaco, a Weber Shandwick business that advertises, "We Help Every Company Become A Media Company." 

Helping companies be great media companies is a noble calling these days, especially with the huge loss of skilled and experienced media professionals. There's hundreds of years of best practices that still apply regardless of paper and electron.

I'm working on an interesting project with Mediaco's West Coast lead Luca Penati and an enthusiastic team of professionals across many disciplines and locations.

This is what's needed in today's digital media worlds — the complexities of managing fragmented media channels and user interfaces across many devices requires integrated tech, media, design, SEO and communications professionals on the same publishing teams.

Brand publishing on today's scales requires sophisticated tools and apps. There is an opportunity to create a new type of enterprise app, a media publishing platform for corporations that also acts a listening post.  After all, it's a two-way Internet and each screen is both publisher and published.

We live in a world surrounded by media technologies. Computer pioneer Ted Nelson, said "We live in media as fish live in water."

Silicon Valley is a Media Valley, our largest and most dynamic companies are tech-enabled media companies or sell media technologies. Google, Facebook, Twitter publish pages of content with advertising. Intel microprocessors decode and encode high definition video streams in parallel; Apple sells media players and media making devices.

From Gutenberg's movable type to Silicon Valley's dynamic reprogrammable media — it's a huge leap. We know that leaps in media technologies have dramatically changed our society so what will this do?

Media Management Tools...

Enterprises will need a lot of media technologies and this will become a new genre of enterprise apps,  more importantthan ERP and CRM.

Selling media technologies to the enterprise will be a lucrative business and it is one that makes full use of advanced cloud technologies and subscription business models. 

PR is artisanal...

A year ago I asked where are the technologies from the public relations industry? How can PR firms also become tech firms? Where are the scalable technologies of promotion? Ad agencies are great at scalable promotion and this is a vulnerability.

Brand Publishing...

Somehow I missed this last week but Weber Shandwick's Mediaco launched a publishing platform that seems headed in this very direction. It comes from its just announced media tech group focused on brand publishing led by Eric Helgesen. 

Weber Shandwick uses the term "brand publishing" rather than "brand journalism" — a practice that other firms should adopt because it is more accurate and it doesn't snag.

Mediaco Publish is customized for brand publishing. It is built on open-source technologies and industry standard Wordpress that combines custom workflow, multi-channel publishing; tracking and reporting, and all the other features corporations need to be effective digital media publishers. 

Eric Weitner, head of Technology Platforms at Mediaco, used to work at Forbes and helped design its multi-author content management system. I'm looking forward to trying it out.

I'm also looking forward to the arms race as Weber Shandwick's competitors announce their media products and roadmaps. The media tech sector is getting interesting.

Matt Taibbi at a Commonwealth Club event in April 2014.

Former Rolling Stone feature writer Matt Taibbi has pulled out of a new publication funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's $250m First Look Media Group. The unnamed publication was due to be launched in the Fall and Taibbi's departure leaves an editorial team without its chief muckraker.

Omidyar wrote:

I regret to announce that after several weeks of discussions, Matt Taibbi has left First Look. We wish him well.

Our differences were never about editorial independence. ...Now we turn our focus to exploring next steps for the talented team that has worked to create Matt's publication.

...Above all, we remain committed to our team and to the First Look mission.

Foremski's Take:

It's not surprising that Matt Taibbi departed. In late July Omidyar admitted that he had no special plan of solving the problem of funding for good journalism. 

He wrote: "We are unwavering in our desire to reach a mass audience, but the best way to do that may be through multiple experiments with existing digital communities."

Not having a plan to reach a mass audience is like garlic to a vampire when it comes to journalists. I asked Taibbi in April if he felt confident that Omidyar's venture could provide the same large readership that he had at Rolling Stone magazine. He said, "I think so..."

Also, Taibbi is best as a writer with a great editorial team to support his work and he probably isn't best suited to building a newsroom and managing very diverse and large teams of professionals.

Omidyar assumes that by hiring popular journalists he can reach large audiences without much work. But that's not true it takes considerable work to capitalize on star writers and that includes building a large media platform to host their talents. 

Strangely, Omidyar misses the point regarding media business models when he writes that he doesn't want to build one "big flagship site" and wants to run small media "experiments" to figure out what works.

Media business models are based entirely on size and there's no other model unless it is niche and highly targeted and with a costly paywall.  

Could eBay have succeeded if it were fragmented across niche communities of small sellers? Then why does Omidyar think he can succeed with a different strategy?

Omidyar's second look at his First Look Media strategy has zapped all the momentum behind the project and Taibbi's departure is a signal that other leading journalists will heed as a warning. It will be difficult for Omidyar to save this $250m venture.

It's time for a pivot. "MediaX Labs -- incubating great media ventures. By First Look Media."

- - -

Please see:

Analysis: No 'Magic App' For Journalism As Omidyar's $250m First Look Venture Takes A Second Look -SVW

The New York Times is cutting 100 newsroom jobs to ensure long-term profitability because of disappointing performance of new initiatives such as news apps and native advertising to reverse declining revenues.

Jeremy Bar at Capital New York reported:

The New York Times will reduce its newsroom head count by 100 through a combination of buy-outs and, if not enough staffers volunteer, layoffs, according to a memo sent to staff by publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and C.E.O. Mark Thompson.

The company will also cut a few positions from its business side and from its larger editorial operation, the Times' Ravi Somaiya reported.The Times is also ending its NYT Opinion app, which launched in June, due to a lack of consumer interest.

The 100 position reductions will comprise some 7.5 percent of the Times' 1,330-strong newsroom, Somaiya noted.

New York Times to offer newsroom buyouts | Capital New York

Foremski's Take: Media disruption continues to bite into newsroom jobs and if the New York Times is having problems stemming declines in revenues through initiatives such as news apps and "native advertising," where brands pay the advertising department to produce stories that look similar to those produced by journalists, then the rest of the newspaper industry is likely facing the same issues.

It's now very clear that native advertising and news apps won't save US newspapers from the continuing disruption to their business from giant competing publishing platforms such as Google, Facebook and thousands of other web sites. They can thrive on low advertising rates but newspapers cannot because their costs of business are far higher: people producing content is more expensive than servers and software.

However, as newspapers clutch at native advertising and news apps to generate lost revenues, they will sabotage their future and accelerate their demise. They lose reader's trust because of native advertising, and scarce resources are depleted in expensive investments in developing apps.

Faith in "apps" as a savior of newspapers, was widely seen in commentary last year, around Amazon's Jeff Bezos and eBay's Pierre Omidyar announcements of their combined half-a-billion dollars in media investments.  These billionaire technologists were expected to come up with innovative apps to reverse the declines in the news business. They didn't come up with anything new and Omidyar has been forced to drastically scale back his plans because of no clear revenue model. [Analysis: No 'Magic App' For Journalism As Omidyar's $250m First Look Venture Takes A Second Look]

Apps won't save newspapers and nor will native advertising, on which the New York Times' management have placed great hopes. 

Joe Pompeo reporting for Capital New York, writes that marketers have been paying the New York Times advertising department as much as $200,000 to create the content for a native ad — this doesn't include the costs of running the ad.

Pompeo reports that, "The most successful campaigns have netted hundreds of thousands of views."

That's a staggeringly poor return for a hugely expensive native ad, which is essentially just one story. Unlike normal ads which can be re-published many times, and the creative can be used across many publications, native ads are designed to be specific to one publication. Ads require multiple views to make an impression, as much as nine to be effective.

Native ads are an unsustainable business model for newspapers. The costs are too high even for top brands and they'll quickly abandon the practice as enthusiasm for the native ad format across the ad sector, is punctured by the reality of high costs and poor returns. But the damage to a newspaper's credibility will be hard to reverse.

In the largest ever study of native ads by Edelman, the world's largest privately held PR firm, with 5,000 readers polled, brands benefited at the expense of the publication. The majority opinion of the newspaper carrying the native ad declined while that of the brand improved.

The New York Times management is selling its hard won readers' trust in its journalists, for a handful of beans — and there's no magic beanstalk with a goose laying golden eggs in this story — just more pain and newsroom cuts.

- - -

Please see:

Desperate Moves: NYTimes Reduces Labeling On Native Ads To Appease Brands -SVW

 Largest Native Advertising Study Finds Benefits For Brands At The Expense Of Publishers -SVW

Google's run-ins with European regulators have become a never ending marathon with no signs of an end. In the latest development, Robert Thomson, the CEO of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., is lobbying the European Commission to hold Google accountable for abusing its dominant position in search (93% share in Europe).

The BBC reported that Thomson's "strongly worded letter" to Joaquin Almunia, Competition Commissioner, calls

...Google a "platform for piracy" whose power "increases with each passing day."

Europe is seeing a rise of nationalist groups with racist views. Thomson warns that Google's dominance will result in, "A less informed, more vexatious level of dialogue in our society."

He predicts that, "The intemperate trends we are already seeing in much of Europe will proliferate."

Mark Scott at the New York Times, reports that European media companies are concerned, too. 

“We are afraid of Google,” Mathias Döpfner, chief executive of Axel Springer, a German publishing giant, said in a letter to Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, earlier this year. “I must state this very clearly and frankly, because few of my colleagues dare do so publicly.”

Jeff Jarvis, a long-time critic of Rupert Murdoch and the author of "What would Google Do?" called the letter, "A most cynical letter from a most cynical company."

[Disclosure: I used to work with Robert Thomson when he was Editor in Chief of the US Financial Times.]

Foremski's Take: Robert Thomson is right to be concerned about Google because it is a media company: it publishes pages of content and sells advertising around it.

It prefers to be thought of as a technology company because it relies on partnering with media companies for most of its AdSense business, which represents about one-third of total revenues. Major media companies would likely balk at such partnerships if Google nailed its true colors to the mast.

Jarvis calls Thomson's letter "cynical" but what is cynical about points that are incontrovertibly true? Such as:

• - Google's linking to piracy sites.


• - That its own businesses are given a high rank in its index.


• - The sudden changes that will overnight overturn the high rank of businesses.


• - That it punishes small businesses.


• - That it places arbitrary restrictions on other companies using its Android mobile operating system.


• - That its actions commoditize third-party content.

All true. And it does nothing to allay the concerns Europe has with the fact that its digital economy is in the hands of a foreign company 5,500 miles away, that operates in secret, and that is constantly moving into competition with the businesses in its index.

But this is not a US versus European trade dispute. The concerns of European businesses are the same concerns US businesses have with Google. Their list is likely similar to Thomson's and that of the media industry in general. 

The sting in this tale...

The media industry was the first, but it won't be the last to understand that Google is a competitor with great disruptive powers. It can thrive on paltry margins per page published, reliant on the content produced by others, where media companies cannot thrive because creating original content has a high cost of business. 

One reason we see so many cryptic headlines, such as: You won’t believe what models do to prep for NYFW | New York Post - instead of: "Models Prepare For Fashion Week With Grueling Workouts" is that Google's aggregation of headlines often robs the news site of traffic because the headline says what's in the article. 

The crux of the matter is that Google's value is in its index, and in process of monetizing that index it ends up driving down the value of the content it links to. It's the nature of its business.

Google is the scorpion stinging the frog that's carrying it to the other side of the river. Without the frog it drowns and without content to index it has no business. But it can't not sting the frog. 

A scorpion cannot change its nature and the European Commission cannot change the fundamental functions of Google's business model. 

Intel's chips run the Internet, the cloud, PCs and Macs, and every data center around the globe. Its chips touch every aspect of our modern world unlike Apple's products.

The chip technologies Intel unveils affect all of us because they will be deeply embedded in our future, in our common blended reality. Apple's products will just touch a fraction of the developed world and none in the developing world.

Yet all the tech journalists were over at Apple and not at Intel on Tuesday morning.

Every September the media fuss over Apple's product announcements to a degree not shared by most of their readers. It's not tech journalism it is product reporting. There is nothing cool about writing a list of specs about a mass consumer product.

I'm looking forward to the return of tech journalism. It will come.

PS: I'm an Apple fanboy since the Apple II.

I've known Robert Scoble for a long time, nearly ten years. Shortly after I left the Financial Times in mid-2004 to become the first newspaper journalist to make a living as a blogger-journalist, we met in a Manhattan bar.

He was working at Microsoft at the time, and I remember we talked about how difficult it was to hide your true feelings when writing blog posts.It's easy to see if the writer is authentic or not — there seems to be a sort of Turing test at work, an authenticity test that can't be faked.

Over the years Robert has pioneered and greatly boosted the growth of most, if not all the major social media platforms, as an early adopter. His naked enthusiasm is infectious.

I was recently on a Bulldog Reporter panel with Robert and he said something that surprised me. He said he no longer posts on his Scobleizer blog. He has moved over to Facebook because major brands have told him that's where they get the most traffic and engagement. He is also active on Twitter and Google +.

It's a very bold move, especially since posting on Facebook means only a small percentage of your posts are shown to your friends/followers. Prior bold moves included deleting his LinkedIn account and tens of thousands of contacts. 

Leaving your own blog when others are talking about a revival of blogging as a core repository amid a fractured world of social media platforms shows that Robert sees something others don't, like a cat watching something intently that you can't see. 

But maybe it's because Robert doesn't have to make a living from his blog. He's living the dream, he's paid well by Rackspace, a fast growing cloud hosting company, to interview startups, to write and tweet and post all over the place. He is doing what he loves to do.

His identity has been so closely meshed with the rise of blogging that it's difficult to imagine him any other way. But is Robert still a blogger? 

Or is "blogger" an attitude, a cultural identity defined by what you publish, that's no longer defined by how you publish. 

He is still a blogger in my book, a blogger that doesn't need a blog. Robert's publishing platform is the Internet itself.

After giving it some thought I have completely moved to Facebook athttps://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble

I am putting TONS of great content into there. If you aren’t on Facebook, I’m also on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/scobleizeror on Google+ at https://www.google.com/+Scobleizer

Someday I might come back to the blog, but the world has moved and it is on social media.

Scobleizer | Rackspace's Startup Liason Officer

Steven Levy (center) introduced tech book publisher Tim O'Reilly at the 2014 Visionary Awards.

I was on a Bulldog Reporter panel this morning with former Wired senior writer Steven Levy and he spoke about his new gig at publishing platform Medium, which was co-founded by Ev Williams from Blogger and Twitter.

He says that on Medium, he'll be creating a "Tech hub" and he's interested in a very broad range of topics, from "phones to drones." He will be writing a mixture of long form and shorter pieces. He's interested in opinion pieces, too.

The tech hub will have a very high bar for quality and the articles will be fresh and original -- it is not "just aggregating."

He will honor embargoes, scoops are great but not vital. He wants PR people to pitch stories that have context and "must be meaningful beyond day of publication." He hopes to discover "unheralded" writers.

PR people can reach him by email with a subject line with this template for a pitch: "We think X deserves special attention because of Y reach (trend/wider impact)."

Unlike me, he doesn't want to pitched on Twitter, Facebook, or on his cell phone, and he doesn't use LinkedIn. But he would like you to follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

There will be product reviews but don't send him anything unsolicited. He's based in New York but will be over in San Francisco a lot. 

- - - 

I've been a huge fan of Steven Levy ever since reading his book, "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" published 30 years ago. I'm curious to see how he'll move Medium forward. The publishing platform has a nice design but it desperately needs editorial leadership and strategic direction, which the founders haven't been able to provide. 

Hiring a talent like Levy is not cheap. I'm looking forward to seeing how Medium will make money. A nice design is great when you don't have to litter the page with advertising, "native ads" or calls to subscribe.

So many other sites look like Medium these days that it must be hard to standout when so much looks the same. Print media has always jealously guarded its look and feel. But in online media the value of a unique look seems to be forgotten and so many online news sites follow whatever is the current fashion in layouts. 

What hasn't changed is that a publication can still stand out from the crowd with compelling and exclusive stories. Levy certainly knows how to do that. 

- - -

Levy's most recent article, and his last for Wired, "is a deep dive into the attempt to reform calcified and often catastrophic government IT." America's Tech Guru Steps Down--But He's Not Done Rebooting the Government | Enterprise | WIRED

A brand's identity is unique.

Native advertising has become the poster child of content marketing as companies try to raise awareness of their brands through promotional content that looks similar to the native content of a media site.

Where is their brand as differentiator? 

The value of a brand is well known and has been carefully cultivated since industrialization enabled mass commerce which required a global identifier for a company's products.

Brand identity is part science and part art. It is the distinctive look and feel of a brand. It's the logo and the colors and the typeface, and it can tap into a consumer's stored memories and emotions, and all the prior experiences people have with that brand. Its chief characteristic is that it is unique - there's nothing else that looks like it.

Companies pay millions of dollars to create a brand's visual look and appeal. And they spend far more to jealously guard it and protect it from anyone that tries to copy it, or from any other brand that tries to look even just slightly similar.

A brand's look is far more important than the design of any product especially in the fashion industry where there is no copyright on clothes but there is on the labels. Versace won't care much if you copy a shirt but if you copy its label it will hunt you down. 

Yet in native advertising, a brand tries to make its content appear similar to the publication's look and feel. It's essentially trying to merge into the look of another brand -- the media publisher's brand. It seems to go against all the rules of defining a brand, the chief rule being that it is unique. 

Fake Versace...

There can only be one answer to why a company would allow its brands' distinctiveness to be masked by that of a publisher's brand, when publishing their promotional content as "native advertising": Disguise. It makes the paid content look as if it were produced by an independent third party -- the media site itself. It is because readers trust content produced by the publisher but they don't trust paid content. It's plainly dishonest.

And as for the media publisher, why would it allow another company to mimic its brand even slightly?  Why is the New York Times reducing the labeling on paid content? If a company allows others to mimic its look and feel it reduces the value of its own brand.

There are other ways to promote a brand's content that preserves the identity of the brand and the publisher. For example, Techmeme founder Gabe Rivera supports his site by providing his sponsors with links to their content. But that content lives on the sponsor's sites and it is very distinct, and is in line with the brand's look and feel. There is no confusion from the reader's view (below). 

If the New York Times carried an ad that led readers to the brand's site to view content that was formatted to be distinctive and in line with the many elements that make the brand what it is, it would be far better than how paid content is presented in native advertising. The advertiser would also then have the chance to engage the visitors in related content and entice them into exploring its other brands. Visitors might even return on their own.

Dishonest... 

Studies have shown that readers don't like the subterfuge of native advertising and they think less of the publisher. 

And it poisons the well. People become less trusting of the things they read and start to suspect that all media content is corrupt in some way. If they can't figure out who to trust it becomes a big problem for society. 

Native advertising is disingenuous and plainly dishonest in its intent. Is that the association brands want?

- - -

Please see:

Here's What's Missing In Content Marketing: Content As A Service -SVW

 Study on 'native advertising' finds benefits for brands, risks for publishers | ZDNet

Nielsen Study Finds Very Poor Performance For Branded Content -SVW

The Curious Case Of LonelyGirl15... Trust Issues In Content Marketing -SVW

2014 Edelman Trust Barometer: Tech Industry Risks Loss Of Trust As Government Trust Plunges To Record Levels -SVW

The New York Times has chosen the wrong path.

In another demonstration that the management of the New York Times doesn't understand the importance of its readers' trust in editorial content, it has reduced the labeling on paid editorial content.

The move is 180 degrees out of line with the findings of the largest survey of readers' attitudes to native advertising released last week by Edelman, the world's largest privately held PR company. Edelman's survey of 5,000 readers, recommended adding more labeling on native advertising, and it advised publishers to be careful because many readers said it adds no value to their experience.

 Michael Sebastian at Advertising Age, writes

The New York Times has shrunk the labels that distinguish articles bought by advertisers from articles generated in its newsroom and made the language in the labels less explicit.

... Several marketers have bristled at all the labeling, suggesting it turned away readers before they had a chance to judge the content based on its quality.

New York Times Shrinks Labeling on Its Natives Ads | Media - Advertising Age

 Sebastian says, "Reader confusion over what's an ad is inherent."

In its recent financial report, The New York Times Company said that native advertising had started to make a contribution to its revenues but it did not quantify the amount. 

Foremski's Take: The New York Times management is moving against mounting evidence that readers of general news confuse native advertising with native content, and that they don't trust content paid for by brands. 

The management of the New York Times allows the ad sales department of the newspaper to sell and create native advertising for clients. But the editorial side of the business has no say over that content's ethical and editorial standards. Yet that paid content is mixed in with regular newspaper stories. 

This is an untenable situation that's created by the traditional separation of "church and state" within newspapers. The commercial arm of the New York Times is sabotaging the editorial side while the newsroom is supposed to say nothing because it's not its business -- but it is.

Jill Abramson, the former Executive Editor of the New York Times, voiced her strong opposition to native advertising. She was fired earlier this year. This is a harsh message to the newsroom to stay out of the business of the newspaper.

But native advertising eats away at the trust readers have with the newspaper. By reducing the labeling on paid content it will only add to suspicions among readers that all other content is corrupt in some way. 

No magic beans...

It's a very poor bargain. The New York Times recently forecast declining ad revenue for its current quarter despite "growing success" of native advertising products rolled out six months ago. Management is selling-out readers' trust in the newspaper for very little gain. 

Brands are taking advantage of the newspaper's revenue problems but they are shooting themselves in the foot -- and the brain.

The Edelman survey showed great benefit to brands from buying native advertising on well-respected news publications. But very little benefit to brands on sites that were not trusted. Since native advertising reduces readers' trust, it reduces the effectiveness of brand messages. 

Brands should seek to strengthen the relationship between publishers and readers rather than weaken it. 

The tragedy is that the management of the New York Times is selling the newspaper's trusted reputation for independent reporting, for a handful of beans. And in this story, there is no magic beanstalk with a golden goose -- there's just more misery ahead and more newsroom layoffs. 

- - -

Please see:

Yet Another Study Finds Readers Don't Trust Native Ads -SVW

Content Marketing - Here's What's Missing: Media As A Service -SVW

Content Marketing Problems Will Lead To A Revived Media Industry -SVW

Rick Edmonds at Poynter, writes:

That was better than the 2,600 net job loss in 2012 but brings total newsroom employment at newspaper organizations to roughly 36,700, a decline of 3.2 percent from the 38,000 counted in last year's census.

Newsroom employment has fallen 33 percent from a pre-recession peak of 55,000 in 2006 and is down 35 percent from its all-time high of 56,900 in 1989.

Newspaper industry lost another 1,300 full-time editorial professionals in 2013 | Poynter.

The numbers do not count journalism jobs at "digital-only sites." Edmonds says that Pew Research estimates a total of 5,000 such jobs.  Any increase or decrease in those jobs would be a small number compared with all newsroom jobs: 36,700.

 Foremski's Take: Media disruption still continues. And the move to mobile will trigger another large round of layoffs because mobile ad revenues are one-tenth of desktop, which was one-tenth of print ads.

We still do not have a stable media business model that can support newsroom professionals. The longer it takes, the more professionals we lose, and the more we lose in knowledge of best practices and ethics.

Society will pay a high cost for not having a viable media business model because it will enable special interest groups to promote agendas through the media that will profit a minority at the expense of the majority.

People won't pay to read the news they should be reading but special interest groups will gladly pay for the media they want them to read. (Native advertising is a good example.) 

Former Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi will launch a satirical online magazine for First Look Media.

Pierre Omidyar, the co-founder of eBay, has delayed the roll-out of his $250m First Look Media venture.

In a blog post, Omidyar wrote:

We have definitely rethought some of our original ideas and plans... rather than building one big flagship website, we’ve concluded that we will have greater positive impact if we test more ideas and grow them based on what we learn. We are unwavering in our desire to reach a mass audience, but the best way to do that may be through multiple experiments with existing digital communities rather than trying to draw a large audience to yet another omnibus site.

And rather than immediately launching a large collection of digital “magazines” based on strong, expert journalists with their own followings, as we imagined earlier, we’ll begin by building out the two we’ve started and then explore adding new ones as we learn.

...I believe deeply in the importance of the work of independent journalists — people like Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Jeremy Scahill and Matt Taibbi. Whatever direction our experiments lead us, we will continue to invest in our journalists and support their commitment to fearless, fact-based reporting... 

I expect we’ll be in this planning, startup and experimental mode for at least the next few years as we explore how to become integrated into people’s lives in meaningful ways.

Nine Months in, First Look is Still Very Much a Startup - First Look Media

Foremski's Take: It's been clear for some time that Pierre Omidyar has been struggling to find the right strategy for creating a viable  mass-market media business. Nine months into the venture there is no baby to announce, just a long, vague post about having a strong commitment to journalism, the greater good for society, and the marvelous opportunities that technology can bring. But there's nothing new, nothing concrete to announce.

Omidyar says that he's interested in launching small media experiments, which will inform his future launch strategy but will last "for at least the next few years." This is a blow to many in the journalism community who expected Omidyar (and Amazon's Jeff Bezos) to come up with a solution to reverse the fortunes of the media sector because of their familiarity with technology.

There will be no magic app to save journalism.

Searching for strategy...

The venture looked troubled by a lack of strategy from its early days. Omidyar's heart and his money are in the right place when he talks about the importance of journalism to the health of society, but his problem has been in figuring out a viable business that can carry the burden of his ambitious mission.

Earlier this year, Omidyar invited a small group of veteran editors and journalists to offer advice on his venture plans. But that meeting failed to crystalize a launch strategy. 

First Look Media must quickly become commercially viable or it will be seen as a billionaire's vanity project and its reporters will struggle for credibility and relevance. 

Omidyar wants to build a type of media experiments laboratory in San Francisco and double his editorial team to 50 people by the end of this year. However, the delay of its mass-market media business could mean the loss of current journalists, who joined the venture expecting a fast launch instead of years of media experiments.

And it will be hard to recruit new editorial and technical talent if there is little opportunity to reach a mass audience over the next few years. It's a loss of momentum that needs to be reversed otherwise there will more delays.

Media shift still shifting...

Omidyar's challenge is that the media business model continues to shift in the wrong direction. The media industry is still being disrupted and these days, it is by the shift to mobile, where media companies are making one-tenth of the revenue from desktop.

It is a similar difference in revenues seen in the transition from paper to online ads — except that this time, it is at a much faster pace. It's not possible to build a new type of media business when revenues are shifting so quickly, and falling so fast.

What's needed is innovation in the media business model. Solve that and everyone gains.

- - - 

Please see:

The Media's 2nd Apocalypse: The Nightmare Rise Of Mobile Tech -SVW

Here's How To Put Billions Back Into The Media Industry Overnight -SVW

Omidyar's First Look Media Searches For Strategy -SVW

What other industry would sit quietly while being robbed in broad daylight on such a massive scale? As huge as $6 billion to an astounding $16 billion a year is being siphoned away from the media industry through fraudulent advertising methods.

Why isn't the media industry screaming mad about this?! Instead it is blind, dumb, and dumber about this issue.

The media industry needs to band together to stop ad fraud today. It should insist that its advertisers, the big brands, sign a pledge not to support ad fraud and only advertise on real media sites.

It's in the advertisers' interests to support a healthy independent media sector staffed by professionals producing quality content on which their ads will perform fabulously. It's a virtuous circle that keeps producing professional quality media.

But what we have instead, is a race to the bottom as quality of media goes down on falling ad revenues and advertising performance plunges. 

The Wall Street Journal reports that the billions lost to ad fraud are stolen from the advertisers. This is not true, it is the media industry that would get this money.

Advertising agencies and other media buyers, have ad budgets they spend. Their revenues haven't been affected but the media industry is struggling tremendously. It  is clear that more than $10 billion a year could be returned to the struggling media industry virtually overnight if simple measures are taken.

The incentive to shut down advertising fraud will not come from the brands, ad agencies or other ad buyers -- it has to come from the media industry itself.

The ad buyers are complicit in paying for fraudulent traffic to make themselves look better, to make their campaigns look better, they know exactly what they are doing, and the result is that society has to contend with a severely damaged fourth estate. 

Stop the Ad Fraud. We need a strong and independent media industry.

Here is some of my recent coverage of this issue:

 Forensiq: Tracking The Media Industry's Stolen Billions-SVW

Here's How To Put Billions Back Into The Media Industry Overnight-SVW

- - -

The Great Train Robbery was the largest cash haul from a robbery in the UK. Huge amounts of cash were streaming up and down the country on fast mail trains. In 1963 a group of 16 men diverted one of the trains and made off with the equivalent, in today's money, of $40 million. 

Ad fraud cashes in on the large amounts of payments from media ad streams and diverts the cash through fake sites and bogus traffic. Most of the Great Train robbers were caught and put in prison with the leaders getting 30 year sentences. No one is prosecuted for billions in ad fraud.

Here is some Ad Age coverage:

Type

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ANA Is Assessing the Extent of Digital Ad Fraud 30 brands join studyBy Christopher Heine 

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Thirty members of the Association of National Advertisers are participating in a month-long study to examine just how badly bot fraud is impacting digital campaigns. The ANA has teamed with...

July 14, 2014, 11:59 AM EDT

Facebook Claims Baby-Faced Fraudster Used All The Click TricksMarketing underworld exposed By Garett Sloane 

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His tabloid name is the Baby-Faced Wolf of Wall Street, and now Facebook wants to paint him as the face of ad fraud. Martin Grunin, a 22-year-old New Yorker, was...

May 23, 2014, 4:35 PM EDT

Fraud Alert: Millions of Video Views Faked in Sophisticated New Bot Scam TubeMogul outs dozens of suspect sites By Garett Sloane

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A pernicious and sophisticated new form of online click fraud has been uncovered and it's aimed at digital video advertisers, according to ad software firm TubeMogul. The ad tech agency...

April 8, 2014, 3:27 PM EDT

Google's Spider.io Acquisition Boosts Anti-Fraud Team Looks to clean up video, display ad activity By Garett Sloane 

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Google boosted its anti-fraud detection team by acquiring anti-malware company spider.io. The announcement was posted on the DoubleClick Advertiser Blog this morning. Google said the acquisition of London-based spider.io's seven-member team...

February 21, 2014, 11:37 AM EST

Bot Problem Keeps Getting Worse More than half of U.S. traffic, per Solve Media By Mike Shields 

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You might think that all the attention placed on questionable traffic and bots and online ad fraud this past year would be having a big impact on the digital ad...

December 19, 2013, 12:00 AM EST

Ad Verification Firm Pivots to Bot Detection Integral Science says its can stop fake traffic in real time By Mike Shields 

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]]> Sat, 19 Jul 2014 02:11:11 -0700 https://content.presspage.com/clients/150_2054.jpeg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/clients/150_2054.jpeg?10000 https://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/coffee-and-big-data-with-ray-wang---video-series/ https://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/coffee-and-big-data-with-ray-wang---video-series/239220Ray Wang, principal analyst at Constellation Research, has a new video interview series sponsored by Actian, a "Big Data 2.0" company. I watched the latest one, an interview with Vibhor Rastogi from Intel Capital Group. What's the subject? Big data.

Here's the video:

Review: I like Ray and often see him at press and analyst dinners and conferences. He clearly is more used to being interviewed than in interviewing people. But he does a decent job in keeping his own views and his talking to a minimum.

There's a few production issues such as the sound, which is good and rich on his voice but thin and tinny on his guest's voice, but that's fixable.

Ray's position looking straight into the camera while his guest looks at him or isn't sure where to look, could do with some changes and direction. But the incessant linking of everything said to "Big Data" is labored and clearly done to favor sponsor Actian but without providing much in the way of insights into the subject. After the gazillionth mention of "Big Data" I started to cringe every time it was said. 

Here is the rest of the series so far, including with Evernote's CTO, and I'm a big fan of  M.R. Rangaswami from the Sand Hill Group, who advocates for a Chief Data Officer position in corporate C-suites.

]]> Fri, 18 Jul 2014 04:16:57 -0700 https://content.presspage.com/clients/150_2054.jpeg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/clients/150_2054.jpeg?10000 https://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/forensiq-tracking-the-media-industrys-stolen-billions/ https://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/forensiq-tracking-the-media-industrys-stolen-billions/239265

An article from Ad Age about a recent campaign from video ad server firm Vindico.

I recently spoke with Forensiq an interesting startup based in New York that has technologies capable of shutting down advertising fraud -- a huge problem for the media industry.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) trade body estimates ad fraud in 2013 to be at least $6 billion to $7 billion but it could be as high as $16 billion in the US. The Wall Street Journal reports that 35% of Internet traffic is bogus.

And no one is prosecuted.

The WSJ says that the fraud "cheats advertisers." But that is not true, it is the media industry that is being cheated.

The advertising agencies always knew half their advertising was being wasted, now with digital advertising it is only one-third wasted through ad fraud, so they are ahead of the game.  

Ad agencies aren't seeing their revenues plunge because of ad fraud. But media companies are facing massive revenue shortages and ad fraud is one part of that reason.

The fraud is done knowingly by the ad buyers who's interest is in looking good by topping up their numbers for their ad campaigns. They know full-well the traffic is, as the WSJ plainly says, bogus.

But it's easy to stop most of the ad fraud. I recently spoke with David Sendroff, CEO and founder of Forensiq. Its technologies allow ad buyers to identify in real-time if a site is fraudulent with a high degree of accuracy.

Here's some notes from our conversation:

- We inject a tiny bit of code into a client's ad and that enables us to detect many types of fraud based on where the ad is shown.

- We can tell if a site is fraudulent in many ways. We can see if a site is using 1-pixel frames, or is showing hundreds of ads on the same page. Or is showing only part of a client's ad. Or is nesting i-frames inside i-frames. We can tell if there is no real content but the site has been built just for bots.

- We provide a comprehensive database and statistical analysis to identify the problem sites and our dashboard allows clients to only pick high quality pages. 

- There have been university studies showing that there is a high conversation rate for ads on high quality pages. 

- We can distinguish between real people viewing an ad and the use of automated systems.

- We build an overall risk score in real-time that clients use for deciding where to show their ads.

- Our database is updated in real-time because fraudsters are repetitive and the patterns identify the problems. 

- We are also able to monitor for cookie stuffing which is important for affiliate payments. We can detect spoofing of addresses and identities. Clients include AOL, Lendingtree and Groupon.

- Our latest product is LeadiD which helps identify fake leads.

- - -

It's clear that ad fraud can be stopped. However, it won't stop until ad buyers stop the widespread industry practice of buying bogus traffic which make them look good but it is at the expense of huge harm to the media industry.

Centro, the Chicago ad technology giant, is one of the smartest in this sector. It has put together a publisher advertising network that consists of hand-selected and invited publishers. Key requirement is that the publisher has to employ journalists and other media professionals. This guarantees there is no advertising fraud.

Centro will also manage the cookies deposited by advertisers and prevent data collection by unauthorized third-parties,  which becomes a secondary revenue stream for each publisher.

Please see:  Centro: Chicago's Ad Tech Giant Aims To Revive Journalism -SVW

]]> Wed, 16 Jul 2014 09:09:10 -0700 https://content.presspage.com/clients/150_2054.jpeg?10000 https://content.presspage.com/clients/150_2054.jpeg?10000