There's been a lot of hoopla recently over the SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and ProtectIP bills being proposed right now in congress. Tumblr waged a phone campaign against SOPA, and many tech companies like Google have urged lawmakers to vote against these bills.
To give you a little background, SOPA and ProtectIP both greatly increase the faculties given to the U.S. Government as well as copyright holders to shut down websites containing content deemed questionable. Wikipedia describes possible legal repercussions for infringers allowed by SOPA by saying the following: "the actions could include barring online advertising networks and payment facilitators such as PayPal from doing business with the infringing website; barring search engines from linking to such sites and requiring Internet service providers to block access to such sites. The bill would make unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content a felony." ProtectIP is more directed at sites being run overseas; it would require internet service providers to block access to sites hosting questionable content through removal of DNS records for those sites (making it much more difficult for the average user to reach the site).
Though if used exactly as intended these bills seem fairly reasonable (with the exception of the severity of SOPA's punishments), these bills give the government and copyright holders a huge amount of power in determining whether a site has engaged in infringement. Neither bill requires any due process for takedown requests, and make it difficult for accused sites to appeal the action taken against them. This can lead to some major problems for the legitimacy of the internet as a source of unbiased news.
If abused, the government and copyright holders could use these bills to censor content on any website they want. Both the government and copyright holders could block access to any website, even if it isn't really infringing content (counting on the long appeal process for restoring access to that site). And if the website has time-sensitive material, that material's value could be ruined if the website is taken down at the wrong time. What if the government just disagrees with something, or sees something exposing corruption within their ranks? They could censor whatever they want. This could never be done for paper sources of news, but if we move completely to online news the government could have the power to censor any news they want. If these bills are passed, online news has no chance at becoming a legitimate unbiased source.
Sunday, December 4, 2011
Sunday, November 27, 2011
Investigative Journalism in Online News
As news content and news readership move from print to online media, many have worried about the fate of investigative journalism. The current model for online content monetization is driven by advertising, promoting higher volume of content creation at the price of content quality. Investigative reports could take as long as a few weeks or months to write, tying up one or more reporters for that time, so in a volume-driven environment investigative reporting is not financially viable. Furthermore, because information flows so freely on the internet, investigative journalism has become much less lucrative. Because investigative reports can be picked up and republished quickly by other news outlets, online publishers have very little exclusivity, making it more difficult for them to drive readers to their site and increase revenue.
Investigative journalism is necessary as a check on the government, corporations, and public figures. Investigative journalists expose corruption, crime, and unethical practices by these people/entities, and by doing so prevent them from getting away with what they've done. But most importantly, the very presence of investigative journalism prevents people from taking part in unethical practices in fear of being exposed. Without investigative journalism, who would investigate the practices of government officials? The government itself? There are too many conflicts of interest there. Without investigative journalists like Woodward and Bernstein, its likely that Richard Nixon would have gotten away with the crimes he committed. Investigative journalists have also been fairly successful in exposing corporate wrongdoing; even though the government is supposed to fulfill this role on its own, investigative journalists have discovered many crimes that the government has missed.
Although some people say that the movement to online content will be the death of investigative journalism, a few different models for online investigative journalism have been proposed and I think one or more of them will probably be successful. The two most viable of these, in my opinion, are a non-profit model and a crowd-funded model, which I will explore below.
A non-profit model for investigative journalism would involve multiple, independently run non-profit companies employing journalists to create investigative reports. These companies would be privately funded, possibly endowed, and could also get revenue from advertising or subscriptions. By being created for the sole purpose of investigative reporting, and being funded independently (and not by governments), these groups should be able to fulfill the need for investigative journalism. One company, ProPublica, has already been operating successfully using the model I described since 2008. And another group, The Center for Public Integrity, has been operating with this model since 1989! My guess is that these sites' revenue and newsrooms will grow greatly in coming years.
The other model for investigative journalism which I believe is highly viable, albeit less developed, is crowd-funded journalism. In a crowd-funded model, journalists would do some digging to find out about a story on their own, then briefly summarize their findings on a site like Spot.us in a pitch to possible funders. Then, if a story meets the journalists funding goal, he or she would complete their investigation and publish an article about it. With a highly decentralized model like this, freelance reporters could find things to investigate and be paid for their work independently of one another and of any employer, meaning that they would have no conflicts of interest. However, for some investigative reports, posting a pitch publicly could compromise the reporter's ability to investigate further, and could also release enough information for other reporters to investigate the same thing and beat the original reporter to publishing.
The internet will not kill investigative journalism; investigative reporting will always continue in some form due to peoples' innate curiosity. But hopefully through a non-profit or crowd-funded model, we can sustain or even increase the level of investigative journalism we're all accustomed to today.
Sources: Crowdfunding: Bringing Journalism Back to Life, New Sources of Funding, New Sources of Reporting
Investigative journalism is necessary as a check on the government, corporations, and public figures. Investigative journalists expose corruption, crime, and unethical practices by these people/entities, and by doing so prevent them from getting away with what they've done. But most importantly, the very presence of investigative journalism prevents people from taking part in unethical practices in fear of being exposed. Without investigative journalism, who would investigate the practices of government officials? The government itself? There are too many conflicts of interest there. Without investigative journalists like Woodward and Bernstein, its likely that Richard Nixon would have gotten away with the crimes he committed. Investigative journalists have also been fairly successful in exposing corporate wrongdoing; even though the government is supposed to fulfill this role on its own, investigative journalists have discovered many crimes that the government has missed.
Although some people say that the movement to online content will be the death of investigative journalism, a few different models for online investigative journalism have been proposed and I think one or more of them will probably be successful. The two most viable of these, in my opinion, are a non-profit model and a crowd-funded model, which I will explore below.
A non-profit model for investigative journalism would involve multiple, independently run non-profit companies employing journalists to create investigative reports. These companies would be privately funded, possibly endowed, and could also get revenue from advertising or subscriptions. By being created for the sole purpose of investigative reporting, and being funded independently (and not by governments), these groups should be able to fulfill the need for investigative journalism. One company, ProPublica, has already been operating successfully using the model I described since 2008. And another group, The Center for Public Integrity, has been operating with this model since 1989! My guess is that these sites' revenue and newsrooms will grow greatly in coming years.
The other model for investigative journalism which I believe is highly viable, albeit less developed, is crowd-funded journalism. In a crowd-funded model, journalists would do some digging to find out about a story on their own, then briefly summarize their findings on a site like Spot.us in a pitch to possible funders. Then, if a story meets the journalists funding goal, he or she would complete their investigation and publish an article about it. With a highly decentralized model like this, freelance reporters could find things to investigate and be paid for their work independently of one another and of any employer, meaning that they would have no conflicts of interest. However, for some investigative reports, posting a pitch publicly could compromise the reporter's ability to investigate further, and could also release enough information for other reporters to investigate the same thing and beat the original reporter to publishing.
The internet will not kill investigative journalism; investigative reporting will always continue in some form due to peoples' innate curiosity. But hopefully through a non-profit or crowd-funded model, we can sustain or even increase the level of investigative journalism we're all accustomed to today.
Sources: Crowdfunding: Bringing Journalism Back to Life, New Sources of Funding, New Sources of Reporting
Monday, November 14, 2011
Content Specialization
The internet has enabled on a large scale something we've never had before: content specialization. Before the internet, the only way to specialize content for a specific audience was through print. Books and magazines in particular could be catered to a very small audience. But more dynamic forms of media, like television and the radio, could never be used for specialized content. Content on these mediums needed to be very generally applicable because the space for such content was so limited (finite number of TV/Radio channels available), making the opportunity cost of airing specialized content high. But with print media, the opportunity cost of publishing a book or magazine is virtually zero, because an infinite number of print publications could be created.
The internet has enabled for dynamic media what was once only possible for static media like books or magazines. The opportunity cost of putting something on the internet is virtually zero, and the marginal cost per viewer online is also vanishingly small. People have the freedom to find almost anything they want on the internet, and if what they're looking for isn't there they have the power to create it themselves. Due to this, the internet has fueled an explosion of content, some professionally created but mostly user generated. Now specialized news videos, podcasts, and more can be accessed online, and news sites focused on small niche markets have been highly successful (TechCrunch, a blog about startups, and Mashable, a blog about social media, are great examples of this).
It's arguable, in fact, that the internet has been so successful that content producers have been forced to specialize. People aren't drawn as much nowadays to news written for a wide audience because they now have more personally-relevant alternatives. Television and radio viewership has been declining for a long time, and in my opinion this is probably one of the biggest causes of that decline. Furthermore, the explosion of content fueled by the internet has meant that content producers have begun fighting much harder to win viewers. Terms like linkbaiting and SEO, describing the ways in which people drive viewership, have become commonplace.
The internet has completely revolutionized the way we all consume content. But what we've seen so far, in my opinion, is only just scratching the surface of what's possible. Though no technology exists for this yet, imagine the possibilities that machine learning and language processing could hold once completely perfected. It may be possible one day to design a system that learns what content you like and writes new content specifically for you based on these preferences, drawing from a large store of data. Algorithmically generated content would open huge new possibilities, and some companies have begun experimenting with this already.
This post was inspired by an article on Seth Godin's blog, describing what he terms "the scarcity of attention".
The internet has enabled for dynamic media what was once only possible for static media like books or magazines. The opportunity cost of putting something on the internet is virtually zero, and the marginal cost per viewer online is also vanishingly small. People have the freedom to find almost anything they want on the internet, and if what they're looking for isn't there they have the power to create it themselves. Due to this, the internet has fueled an explosion of content, some professionally created but mostly user generated. Now specialized news videos, podcasts, and more can be accessed online, and news sites focused on small niche markets have been highly successful (TechCrunch, a blog about startups, and Mashable, a blog about social media, are great examples of this).
It's arguable, in fact, that the internet has been so successful that content producers have been forced to specialize. People aren't drawn as much nowadays to news written for a wide audience because they now have more personally-relevant alternatives. Television and radio viewership has been declining for a long time, and in my opinion this is probably one of the biggest causes of that decline. Furthermore, the explosion of content fueled by the internet has meant that content producers have begun fighting much harder to win viewers. Terms like linkbaiting and SEO, describing the ways in which people drive viewership, have become commonplace.
The internet has completely revolutionized the way we all consume content. But what we've seen so far, in my opinion, is only just scratching the surface of what's possible. Though no technology exists for this yet, imagine the possibilities that machine learning and language processing could hold once completely perfected. It may be possible one day to design a system that learns what content you like and writes new content specifically for you based on these preferences, drawing from a large store of data. Algorithmically generated content would open huge new possibilities, and some companies have begun experimenting with this already.
This post was inspired by an article on Seth Godin's blog, describing what he terms "the scarcity of attention".
Sunday, November 6, 2011
Micropayments and Online Content
Its no secret that most major content producers are slowly dying as our society transitions to using digital forms of content more exclusively. Newspapers are universally in trouble right now; as revenues continue to decline, and newspaper companies go further and further into debt, most newspaper executives have turned to slash and burn techniques in a last ditch effort to save their businesses. Magazines aren't far behind; magazine readership has also been declining for a few years now. So far, these businesses have had very little success in monetizing their content online. In most cases, the revenue generated through advertisement pales in comparison to what was possible with print editions.
Many ideas for monetizing content more effectively online have been proposed, and a few of the more agile newspapers and content producers have begun to experiment with some of these ideas. Today I'm going to look at what is in my opinion one of the more compelling but as of yet unproven of these ideas: micropayments.
Micropayments are very small payments made in exchange for something in return. Although most payment companies (PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, etc.) define micropayments as any transaction under 10-20 dollars, most people consider micropayments to be an order of magnitude smaller, around 20 or 25 cents in exchange for, say, an article on the internet. By charging users very small amounts for each action they take on a website, proponents of micropayment technology believe that the friction to paying for content will be reduced. Rather than having to pay ahead of time for a subscription, users will be able to amortize this cost over time as they use a product or consume content more and more.
Micropayments are not a new idea. This idea was attempted many times in the late 1990s and early 2000s during the dot-com boom. Some have said simply that the idea won't work, mostly saying that users won't like being charged small amounts.
Here's what's different this time: consumers are much more willing to pay for content online than they used to be, because they are more comfortable with exclusively reading online. It's been shown that users are more willing to pay for things on the internet than they ever have been before, and in surveys users have said that they would be willing to pay for high quality content that is exclusively on the internet. If someone could create a truly low-friction, easy to use micropayment system they may actually be successful this time around.
Many ideas for monetizing content more effectively online have been proposed, and a few of the more agile newspapers and content producers have begun to experiment with some of these ideas. Today I'm going to look at what is in my opinion one of the more compelling but as of yet unproven of these ideas: micropayments.
Micropayments are very small payments made in exchange for something in return. Although most payment companies (PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, etc.) define micropayments as any transaction under 10-20 dollars, most people consider micropayments to be an order of magnitude smaller, around 20 or 25 cents in exchange for, say, an article on the internet. By charging users very small amounts for each action they take on a website, proponents of micropayment technology believe that the friction to paying for content will be reduced. Rather than having to pay ahead of time for a subscription, users will be able to amortize this cost over time as they use a product or consume content more and more.
Micropayments are not a new idea. This idea was attempted many times in the late 1990s and early 2000s during the dot-com boom. Some have said simply that the idea won't work, mostly saying that users won't like being charged small amounts.
Here's what's different this time: consumers are much more willing to pay for content online than they used to be, because they are more comfortable with exclusively reading online. It's been shown that users are more willing to pay for things on the internet than they ever have been before, and in surveys users have said that they would be willing to pay for high quality content that is exclusively on the internet. If someone could create a truly low-friction, easy to use micropayment system they may actually be successful this time around.
Monday, October 31, 2011
Crowd-sourcing in News Generation
In an effort to sift through the growing amount of data available to them, many professional journalists have turned to crowd-sourcing as a means of analyzing big data sets. WikiLeaks has been doing this since its inception, relying on the internet at large to find meaning in the hundreds of thousands of documents they leak. But some sites, like The Guardian, have taken a more calculated approach, creating an interface for their readers to analyze documents page by page and find pages that they should look at more closely.
Taking crowd-sourcing somewhat to the extreme, some newspapers have experimented with moving towards fully crowd-sourcing their news gathering operations, and as newspapers' revenues continue to plummet, this model seems more and more appealing as a cost-cutting measure. Gannett, publisher of around 90 daily newspapers in the U.S., including USA Today, started moving towards a fully crowd-sourced model as long ago as 2006, and other newspapers have followed suit since then.
But what's most interesting in this space is sites that are using crowd-sourcing to do completely new things, not just to cut costs. Ushahidi, in my opinion, is one of the most compelling examples of this. Ushahidi allows people around the world to contribute original information and data and synthesizes this in meaningful ways. For example, during a crisis in Kenya, Ushahidi was used by citizens around the country to report where acts of violence had occurred and where people were gathering to protest. Ushahidi's platform was able to map these locations out and synthesize data on the overall trends being reported. Something like this would be impossible to pull off via traditional methods, and because citizens are passionate about a topic like this, they are very willing to contribute their time and knowledge for the greater good.
People have just begun to explore the possibilities that crowd-sourcing holds for news generation online. So far no single model for crowd-sourcing has stuck in news generation, but I think we can be fairly certain that crowd-sourcing, in some form, will be around for a long time to come.
Taking crowd-sourcing somewhat to the extreme, some newspapers have experimented with moving towards fully crowd-sourcing their news gathering operations, and as newspapers' revenues continue to plummet, this model seems more and more appealing as a cost-cutting measure. Gannett, publisher of around 90 daily newspapers in the U.S., including USA Today, started moving towards a fully crowd-sourced model as long ago as 2006, and other newspapers have followed suit since then.
But what's most interesting in this space is sites that are using crowd-sourcing to do completely new things, not just to cut costs. Ushahidi, in my opinion, is one of the most compelling examples of this. Ushahidi allows people around the world to contribute original information and data and synthesizes this in meaningful ways. For example, during a crisis in Kenya, Ushahidi was used by citizens around the country to report where acts of violence had occurred and where people were gathering to protest. Ushahidi's platform was able to map these locations out and synthesize data on the overall trends being reported. Something like this would be impossible to pull off via traditional methods, and because citizens are passionate about a topic like this, they are very willing to contribute their time and knowledge for the greater good.
People have just begun to explore the possibilities that crowd-sourcing holds for news generation online. So far no single model for crowd-sourcing has stuck in news generation, but I think we can be fairly certain that crowd-sourcing, in some form, will be around for a long time to come.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
News Aggregators
Link aggregators have been a staple of the internet for nearly its entire modern existence. The first was Slashdot in 1997, and since then Digg and Reddit have come to prominence. Niche link aggregation sites like HackerNews have also been fairly successful in serving smaller groups of internet users. So what implications does the use of user-driven content curation have for the consumption of online news?
Link aggregator sites try to create a community by allowing users to submit links, vote links up or down, and have conversations about the links submitted. This tends to work fairly well; links usually generate some good conversation and breaking news tends to make it to the front page of the aggregator sites fairly quickly.
But users can also game the system, exerting influence over what links get voted up or down through their networks of friends. Users of Digg during its heyday (2006-2009 or so) all know who "MrBabyMan" is, and some users revolted against his dominance of the network. MrBabyMan seemed to dominate the network through his group of friends on Digg, and at times the entire front page of Digg was filled with stories submitted by him. Other sites have also had similar problems with spammers and overly dominant users as a result of their reputation management systems and social tools, and this problem still persists today.
Another interesting implication of link aggregation sites is the risk for Groupthink. Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon by which people in groups or communities can become closed-minded to new ideas or new ways of thinking. Link aggregation sites tend to take on a sort of collective opinion on different issues (Reddit Trees is a great example of this), which can crowd out conflicting opinions or viewpoints from conversation. This could mean that link aggregators have the ability to sway public opinion on controversial issues, because only the group opinion is represented on their sites.
Link Aggregators are a great source of user-curated news on the web, promoting interesting stories and providing an alternative to professional media online. But there are some things to watch out for when using these sites to learn about important issues or topics, because users (and the site at large) can dictate the types of links that are promoted on the site.
Link aggregator sites try to create a community by allowing users to submit links, vote links up or down, and have conversations about the links submitted. This tends to work fairly well; links usually generate some good conversation and breaking news tends to make it to the front page of the aggregator sites fairly quickly.
But users can also game the system, exerting influence over what links get voted up or down through their networks of friends. Users of Digg during its heyday (2006-2009 or so) all know who "MrBabyMan" is, and some users revolted against his dominance of the network. MrBabyMan seemed to dominate the network through his group of friends on Digg, and at times the entire front page of Digg was filled with stories submitted by him. Other sites have also had similar problems with spammers and overly dominant users as a result of their reputation management systems and social tools, and this problem still persists today.
Another interesting implication of link aggregation sites is the risk for Groupthink. Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon by which people in groups or communities can become closed-minded to new ideas or new ways of thinking. Link aggregation sites tend to take on a sort of collective opinion on different issues (Reddit Trees is a great example of this), which can crowd out conflicting opinions or viewpoints from conversation. This could mean that link aggregators have the ability to sway public opinion on controversial issues, because only the group opinion is represented on their sites.
Link Aggregators are a great source of user-curated news on the web, promoting interesting stories and providing an alternative to professional media online. But there are some things to watch out for when using these sites to learn about important issues or topics, because users (and the site at large) can dictate the types of links that are promoted on the site.
Sunday, October 16, 2011
Affiliate Content in Online News
A growing trend on news sites today is the use of affiliate content. Massive sites like The Huffington Post and Business Insider are scraping content from other websites and reposting it on their own sites (in many cases rewriting the headlines of articles to be more inflammatory). They also allow users to submit articles they write themselves, using the website community to vet content and identify poor information or writing. Though there are many issues surrounding the debate on affiliate content usage, I'm going to focus on the effect of this change on you and me, the consumers of online content.
The Huffington Post was (relatively) recently sold to AOL for the staggering sum of 315 million dollars. Business Insider has raised 13.6 million dollars in financing, meaning most likely its valuation is somewhere in the ballpark of 20-40 million dollars. These sites are generating great profit on the backs of unpaid bloggers, and aggregating even more content from the internet at large. Major accusations have been claimed against these sites for linkbait titles and content scraping without permission, but they continue to grow their viewership and generate staggering profits through advertising and intelligent SEO.
So what does this mean for us, the consumers of content online? In my opinion, the model that these sites are using successfully today means that going forward, the quality of content on the internet will decline in favor of increased quantity. The linkbaiting tactics that HuffPo and BI are using will make it much harder to trust the validity of content we see online anywhere, and their use of content scraping of quality personal blogs and news sites, taking revenue and viewership away from these sites, is a great disincentive for these sources to make their content freely available to the internet at large.
The direction we are going right now is not good, but we, as online news consumers, have the power to change this. If viewership declines on The Huffington Post, Business Insider, or any other affiliate content site, they will be forced to reexamine their business model. Hopefully, they will see that in most cases, consumers prefer quality to quantity.
The Huffington Post was (relatively) recently sold to AOL for the staggering sum of 315 million dollars. Business Insider has raised 13.6 million dollars in financing, meaning most likely its valuation is somewhere in the ballpark of 20-40 million dollars. These sites are generating great profit on the backs of unpaid bloggers, and aggregating even more content from the internet at large. Major accusations have been claimed against these sites for linkbait titles and content scraping without permission, but they continue to grow their viewership and generate staggering profits through advertising and intelligent SEO.
So what does this mean for us, the consumers of content online? In my opinion, the model that these sites are using successfully today means that going forward, the quality of content on the internet will decline in favor of increased quantity. The linkbaiting tactics that HuffPo and BI are using will make it much harder to trust the validity of content we see online anywhere, and their use of content scraping of quality personal blogs and news sites, taking revenue and viewership away from these sites, is a great disincentive for these sources to make their content freely available to the internet at large.
The direction we are going right now is not good, but we, as online news consumers, have the power to change this. If viewership declines on The Huffington Post, Business Insider, or any other affiliate content site, they will be forced to reexamine their business model. Hopefully, they will see that in most cases, consumers prefer quality to quantity.
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