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Jones, however, has made a career out of subverting traditional media and acting in bad faith to the delight of his audience.

Charlie Warzel's Alex Jones Scoops Megyn Kelly And Proves The Media Isn't Ready For The Trolls

I just DON’T understand the anti-MSM movement when they suggest their platforms are better. Jones and team in this story argue against lies. But it seems like they are also lying? So why are their lies better? Why is bad faith better than good faith journalism? You’re not convincing me, y’all. Try harder!

GotNews.com, an outlet founded by Charles C. Johnson, who has also helped start a crowdfunding website that pays for private investigations and legal defenses for fringe conservative causes.

A Pro-Trump Conspiracy Theorist, a False Tweet and a Runaway Story, by Jeremy W. Peters

A loud concern I hear from anti-mainstream-media folk is that they are “bout and paid for” by their corporate advertisers. I personally think being bought and paid for by activists is worse?!

omg Washington Post I LOVE YOU! This is a context clue our over-saturated can’t-control-the-distribution media world sorely needs.

PAC taking one out of the “fake news” playbook

I mean, y’all, this Mainstream Media Accountability Survey is evil genius-level shit.

First, I must ask, IS IT REAL? The disclaimer at the bottom (and reports I’ve heard that it leads to the PAC’s donation page) gives me the context clues that it is. (Update: Mashable reports it was sent as an email from the Trump campaign. CAMPAIGN. Why are there still campaign emails?! Is that normal?)

Second, they are using literally all the tricks in the fake news playbook.

1. Misleading URL

GOP.com? “ Paid for by the Republican National Committee. Not Authorized By Any Candidate Or Candidate's Committee.” the homepage says.

2. Similar-but-not-quite? Maybe? logo

Was this their 2016 official campaign logo? Why “Committee”? Why also not 2020? (The 2020 would definitely throw people off.)

3. Sentence structure & word choice

The AV club already did a good job lol-sobbing at this one:

In conclusion

Why? If you hate the media so much, and you hate fake news, don’t act like fake news.

Context I want with my news

I’ve been doing a lot of extra clicking to the “about” section (on Facebook or on-site) of media/publishers, or clicking bylines that are also links. I’m not getting what I want when I do that. What I want is:

Bylines

Is this a regular member of the publication’s staff, or a guest writer

If a guest writer, are they like a freelance journalist, or like an “expert” or a “real person” taking a stance on an issue.

It used to be trendy for headlines for headlines to make this obvious (”I am tktk and that’s why I think tktk about tktk issue”), but this trend has gone away (probably because it’s not as good at generating traffic anymore).

Some of this stuff is hinted at when I click on a byline. Often byline clicks lead to a picture of the author, their Twitter handle, and a list of stories they’ve written. I can assume usually that if they have no picture and one story, then they are a guest. But again, I want to know what kind of guest they are!

Soemtimes, there is a mini bio of the author (so-n-so is the professor of tktk at ttktk) at the bottom of pieces, but I want to know BEFORE I read their stuff!

"About”

How long have you been around

Do you primarily live on social or do you also have a website

Do you have an old-school counterpart (print or television)

Who is your top editor and how much editing experience do they have

What is your primary revenue model -- subscriptions? Ads? Donations/membership?

Are you affiliated with some other non-”media” company, like a PAC or an advocacy organization or a political organization or an NGO or a marketing/advertising agency or a lifestyle celebrity or an Internet celebrity or an association with lobbyists

This is a thing especially on Facebook. It usually goes like this for me: Wow, this video has compelling statements that seem to be facts. Are they facts? Hmmm, I don’t recognize that Facebook page title. >>>Click through>>> Hmmm who are these people? >>>Click “about”>>> Hmm there’s a pithy mission-lite statement, but seriously WHO IS THIS “MEDIA COMPANY”?!

Real journalism organizations could stand out from the pack with these adjustments. Citizens could use these clues to help with their media literacy.

Covering the next president

Michael Calderone in the Huffington Post’s Media Helps Boost Donald Trump’s False Claim That ‘Millions’ Voted Illegally says:

“Too often, news organizations amplify Trump’s assertions in headlines with some variation of “Trump tweets” or Trump claims” or “Trump says” ― whether or not those assertions are true. This seems to be the default in many newsrooms heading into Trump’s presidency.”

Eighteen months ago, my idea was “let’s all in the media agree to largely ignore what this man says.” I wish I had pushed harder on discussing and thinking about this. But during that time period, the politics desk had had its best digital traffic month ever, and I was tasked to analyze why, and what they could repeat to continue with that success. The answer: The Pope visited D.C. (a little bit), but really Trump. Virtually every headline with his name rose to the top of digital traffic. I could immediately see, as a citizen, how dangerous this was, despite the promising outlook for traffic/money/attention/news/my career.

Remember the Jersey Shore? "Ignore!” was my reaction to this horrible blight on our culture at the time. I personally vowed to ignore every little thing they did. No clicks from me. No tweets from me. No outrage from me. These types of humans (I am actually one of these types of humans) feed on attention, and attention rewards them, and I refused to reward them. When Trump entered the presidential campaign, I had flashbacks to Jersey Shore. It’s the same exact type of attention-hogging that we reward, but he’s much more an expert manipulator (I haven’t read The Art of the Deal but folks I know who have say literally his campaign path of outrageous and offensive words are exactly how he describes his whole deal-making communication strategy) and now he’s our president elect. I still literally hesitate every time I have to choose whether to use his name in writing (my preference is Drumpf, popularized by John Oliver), because I know even just typing those letters are a reward with attention he does not deserve.

I assume(d) more experienced, savvy, editorial folks were consciously making a plan about this here, especially after we moved from candidate to president-elect. When Drumpf the candidate said he was essentially disallowing the Washington Post, I had hope my former employer would maybe take a unique, trend-setting stand in how to tweak coverage of him to be of better service to citizens, but I haven’t seen obvious evidence of that. But the Huffington Post article - and my Twitter feed this weekend, warning us not to focus on stupid sh*t he tweets over real actions he’s taking - are showing me that there has not been serious thought and/or thought has not been put into best practices of action for newsrooms.

Is there a role I can play here with a non-editorial role in “the media?”

UPDATE: A share from my dear friend Shauna on Facebook led me to these recommendations about narcissistic personality disorder. These are super helpful.

Fake news and ad $$$

Well I’ve seen all the media companies trying to understand/fix/report etc. this week on what they’re accused of being...

- Facebook fake-news writer

- Media literacy plug-in built by students in a hackathon

Media & bias & truth & tech & systems & my role

Thinking about....

Facebook fake-news writer

Internet and truth

This book on facts

This book on attention

In the days leading up to and following this election, Facebook has been called lots of things — "a website," "an internet company," "a major player in the media universe," "a strange new class of...

"These companies want to say they’re tech companies," he said, "and they are. But they’re also media companies." First, the bulk of their revenue is generated from ads and user attention. Second, they have a disproportionate ability to shape the public sphere.

Everyone hates the “biased media”

I’d like to break this down, but in the meantime I’m dropping these extreme right (wearing a Trump hat in your cover photo makes you less biased than the mainstream media?!) and extreme left (comedian’s in your Facebook channel name, so you’re not a journalist are you?!) examples here. This thinky piece on Fixer Upper also made me ponder where new media “brands” formed from humans selling products fit in to the “biased media” landscape.

- What are the different buckets of things you mean by media - What are the things you see that are biased - What would feel less biased or more trustworthy to you - Media literacy: Spot the differences between news, editorials, and advertising (it’s not just you - this is indeed getting harder) - Let’s talk about money’s role in different media buckets - Let’s talk about personal biases in the roles of prominent media figures / journalists - Taking advantage of Facebook and other audience growth strategies - Recommended news outlets

Looking back at 2010′s ideas on how to save the news

Encouraged to think about what’s missing in Vox Media’s brands’ coverage, I turned back in time to my Tumblr. I used to do a lot more reading (and vague posting) on journalism and art and economic struggles. I was most drawn to the headlines and writers who were looking optimistically for solutions, even if it came with a pinch of sarcasm.

Six years ago, I was still in my first job out of college, not an analyst, living in Alexandria, maybe I had barely started dancing with Glade?, 24. Twenty-fuckin-four, y’all.

Six years ago, I saw “How to Save the News” headline. Probably on Tumblr. Let’s take a look six years later.

“Most Internet and tech businesses have been either uninterested in or actively condescending toward the struggles of what they view as the pathetic-loser dinosaurs of the traditional media. (What is the Craigslist vision for sustaining the news business? Facebook’s? Microsoft’s?)”

Facebook’s now majorly in the game. I guess Microsoft had MSN? I’m not sure. Amazon’s founder, maybe in theory totally separately from Amazon but confusingly maybe not really ~synergy~ bought The Washington Post.

“... what the news business will have to do to “engage” readers again—that is, make them willing to spend time with its printed, online, or on-air products, however much they cost.“

At least five times in this story, James Fallows directly ties “engagement” to time spent. His consistency and clarity on this is fascinating to me, because over three years as an analyst at The Washington Post, no stakeholder — not advertising sales, not adverting clients, not editors, not social staff — was convinced that time was the best metric here. Did we, as analysts, talk people out of that (see Fast Company’s bounce rate and time spent assumptions gone wrong)?

“What was happening to the press, they said, was happening because of huge, historic technological forces rather than because of short-sightedness or backward thinking by publishers, editors, and owners.”

This is a big theme in the story, because it was a big thing Fallows kept hearing, and it didn’t match his expected narrative, so he listened. To me personally, six years later, I feel encouraged, self-congratulatory and emboldened that I’m part of this climate-change-size tidal shift. There’s more to come here, and I am a part of it and I want to continue to be a part of it and can help shape it.

“[”Bundling”] kept publishers from having to figure out whether enough people were reading stories from the statehouse or Mexico City to pay the costs of reporters there.”

Breaking news: The largest swaths of Americans are not reading the statehouse content. They read the shitty, entertainmenty stuff. It’s so depressing that we know this about online content now, but I’m pretty sure this is not a change in our reading patterns, it’s just that we can measure it now.

So there are media organizations now that don’t spend money on that statehouse coverage, which has traditionally been regarded as so important for democracies (Hi, I work for one of them now). People (my dad) are worried about the missing Fourth Estate. Right-leaning folks (my dad) think the shift in what headlines they are served online vs. back when “America was great” means the government has grown too big and out of control without journalist-watchdogs. Pundits (across AM radio waves, conservative Twitter, and of course cable news) have stepped in to feed that fear monster, but as far as I can tell they haven’t spent more resources fixing the system by being better watchdogs. Because, once again, that’s boring, and no one reads it, and it’s expensive.

I think there’s a related issue here that this article doesn’t address. (In fact, Google executives make the opposite argument that I’m about to make: “Sooner or later—maybe in two years, certainly in 10—display ads will, per eyeball, be worth more online than they were in print.” Spoiler alert, that didn’t happen in two years. It hasn’t happened in six. Ten is not looking great from where I sit.)

Along with the same tech distribution changes that led to unbundling, came accurate and fast measurement. More accurate measurement of what users read have brought the click-baiters of the world. More accurate measurement of how advertisements perform have brought down the price of ads.

In print and broadcast advertisements (”top of funnel”/”brand awareness” in this article), there was no way to accurately analyze whether they were working or not. So advertisers kept paying huge sums for it. As an analyst (and probably as a millennial), I have no idea WHY. I need an economist/marketer/psychologist to help me out here.

In digital advertisements, publishers and advertisers can measure their performance. And ugh, just like the numbers of people reading “serious news” articles, the results are pretty disheartening. They tell us the opposite story of what we want to hear. So why would advertisers invest more money in stuff that doesn’t work that well?! Of course they are going to keep driving the price down.

So this is where we are at now:

"Schmidt and his colleagues realize that a modernized news business might conceivably produce “enough” good content for Google’s purposes even if no one has fully figured out how to pay for the bureau in Baghdad, or even at the statehouse.”

I am hoping this “good enough” content stage is just one stop on the “disruption” train. This old article (I twenty-fucking-four, y’all) makes me optimistic that it indeed just Wilmington, Del. on Amtrack’s NE Regional to creative, witty, smart, watchdog media (that doesn’t repeat its understandable growth-driven, well-measured as successes, actions that led to this huge mistake of an election cycle).

^^ I have too many things trying to happen in that paragraph, but I’m going to keep it anyway. Yes I am currently riding on the NE Regional from DC to NY. Yes I am upset about our political state right now. Yes I want to keep being an analyst at a media company;.

Here is also where we are right now:

“It’s obvious that in five or 10 years, most news will be consumed on an electronic device of some sort. Something that is mobile and personal, with a nice color screen. Imagine an iPod or Kindle smart enough to show you stories that are incremental to a story it showed you yesterday, rather than just repetitive. And it knows who your friends are and what they’re reading and think is hot. And it has display advertising with lots of nice color, and more personal and targeted, within the limits of creepiness. And it has a GPS and a radio network and knows what is going on around you. If you think about that, you get to an interesting answer very quickly, involving both subscriptions and ads.”

... 2016 Facebook app is 2010 Google’s vision of the near future of news. Fascinating, right?!

#theatlantic #media

washingtonpost

The sign of not being a grown-up is a cracked screen and your phone isn’t charged.

Overheard at The Washington Post (via washingtonpost)

Understanding one of the most important types of data analysis.

A fabulous primer & reminder.

“You always have to lay your intuition on top of the data.” -- Tom Redman

#data

They may be doing a better job of telling us the news of the day, or the moment, but they show far too little context and relevant related information. It’s not that editors don’t want to include context; the tools just haven’t been available, despite worthy experiments like Circa.

Ken Doctor, in “Newsonomics: Here are 10 questions we’ll be talking about into 2015″ on NiemanLab

I'm sorry to cut you off there, Dave.

Today, I am behind on things. I ask people to don’t hesitate to ping me for reminders.

Sample quote from an email I got from a female today:

“Sorry, can I bug you about this?”

Sample ENTIRE EMAIL I got from a male today:

“Ahem”

rafat

Value Vs Valuation: The Difference In Media

There is a fundamental misunderstanding in media commentary on the difference between valuation and value. One doesn’t lead to other. Good exits in online media are almost always validation on valuation, not on long term or even current value. Great execution on valuation, like Business Insider deserve a lot of respect, but let’s not confuse its value has been validated. It hasn’t, yet.

Value is meaningful utility value of media brands to users personal or professional lives. That is a two-step test as I outlined here, which essentially says this: How much of a personal or professional utility value do your users ascribe to your brand? And how indispensable are you to the ecosystem you exist in?

So when others beat their chest that BI sales validates them, it validates them on valuation & valuation alone. That is execution with an eye on exit, and to their credit, BI and its founders never hid that fact.

Creating media value has always been a game for the long haul, not for the weak of heart, fly-by-night entrepreneurs, you either know how to ride it for years and decades if need be, or you’re just a scenester trying to do the cool media thing because it is what cool kids do.

There are people who build media companies for valuation, then there are others who build media brands for value. Understand the difference.

The loudest proclamations are coming from technology companies who want to steal the intrinsic value of the music for themselves.

Sarah Manning, “Taylor Swift Does Know Something About Relationships,” on Artist Empathy.

“Artists want fans to buy their music. Fans want this music to be easily accessible and reasonably priced. So who is pushing the idea that fans are the ones demanding that music cost next-to-nothing – or else they’ll steal it? Not fans.“

Giving credence to my idea that all tech companies need to sponsor at least newspaper and several artists (dancers, musicians, visual artists). DO IT.

#arts #journalism\#profit #income #business models #benevolent overlords #artistempathy

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