Nieman Journalism Lab |
| This Week in Review: Facebook social apps’ dropoff, and AOL’s Huffington Post dilemma Posted: 11 May 2012 07:00 AM PDT
Slideshows, Facebook apps, and annoyed readers: After a few weeks revolving around News Corp., the media-watching world seemed to fixate on The Washington Post this week, focusing specifically on two developments: First, Adweek’s Lucia Moses reported that several top Post editors and reporters met with the newspaper’s president, Steve Hills, and that among other things, he urged them to produce more pageview-grabbing slideshows. The Atlantic Wire’s Alexander Abad-Santos called it “one of the more disturbing things you’ll hear from someone in charge of one America’s best papers,” and his colleague, Alexis Madrigal, further explained the futility of slideshows. Those slideshows, he argued, may be producing more pageviews, but they’re not actually drawing more people. And the people that do read them come away with the feeling that the site doesn’t value them. “People know when your product is cheap; there is no ‘trick’ of the web,” he wrote. The second development came when Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici reported that the number of users of its Facebook Social Reader had dropped precipitously over the past month or so. BuzzFeed’s John Herrman noticed that a lot of other Facebook social apps have experienced a similar drop, including The Guardian’s, and proposed that the decline might be because the apps just enable too much sharing, even for Facebook: “they felt more like the kind of cold, descriptive, invisible and yet mandatory services we’re used to seeing from Google rather than genuinely new and useful tools for spreading information.” SF Weekly’s Dan Mitchell agreed, calling the apps “spam, basically.” But there seemed to be something amiss with such a simple explanation. Jeff Sonderman of Poynter noticed that there was a huge change in most apps’ statistics around April 10, and TechCrunch’s Josh Constine hypothesized that the drop was a result of Facebook’s transition to “Trending Articles,” which made social reader articles much less prominent in users’ news feeds. That theory was confirmed by editors at the Post and the Guardian, as the Lab’s Justin Ellis found. From this explanation came a different lesson for news orgs — as GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram argued, with a social reader, “Facebook owns you, in the sense that it controls access to your content. It controls who sees it and when, and it controls how it is displayed — or even whether it is displayed.” Sonderman made a similar point and also touched on the user annoyance issue. Facebook, for its part, countered that engagement on many of its social apps is up, and Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon pointed out that even though there was a valid logistical explanation for the user decline, many observers still insisted on sticking to user annoyance as the root cause.
As Huffington told it, she asked for the role reduction as an attempt to focus more specifically on HuffPo and gain more independence for her site. She also said she’d been approached by private-equity firms trying to buy HuffPo from AOL, though she said nothing had come of it. Huffington insisted her relationship with AOL CEO Tim Armstrong was fine, but others were skeptical. New York magazine’s Joe Coscarelli said it’s tough not to see this as “a crack in the facade of a relationship many believed to be doomed from the start.” GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram was similarly dubious, and he also explored some possibilities for a HuffPo sale, concluding that Huffington will either take her site private again or end up taking over the whole operation at AOL. Forbes’ Jeff Bercovici wondered why AOL doesn’t just sell HuffPo anyway, but reasoned, as Ingram did, that AOL has invested all of its content resources into HuffPo, leaving the company with very little in the way of media if it were to sell. AOL, he argued, overpaid for HuffPo on the premise that it could replicate the site’s model across its other properties, which hasn’t panned out. AOL also announced its most recent quarterly earnings, which were higher than expected, though one of its key ad metrics was down, and, as All Things D’s Peter Kafka reported, its traffic continues to slide. Meanwhile, PandoDaily (made up largely of ex-TechCrunchers) reported that AOL is shopping TechCrunch and Engadget for $70 million to $100 million. Armstrong denied that, and TechCrunch said the rumors of a sale actually originated from AOL’s aborted plans to spin the two blogs into their own company.
Amid all this, News Corp.’s profits keep growing. Its net income grew 47 percent, and its profits, announced this week, beat analysts’ estimates. The company’s costs from the scandal keep soaring, too, hitting $167 million since last summer. The New York Times’ David Carr said News Corp.’s continued profits and its board’s ongoing support of Rupert Murdoch might make him still seem invincible, but he’s still on an irreversible fall. He pinned much of blame for News Corp.’s tone-deafness on the board, saying that “the primary reason Mr. Murdoch has not been held to account is that the board of News Corporation has no independence, little influence and no stomach for confronting its chairman.” Former Times editor Bill Keller, meanwhile, said Murdoch’s greater shame will be Fox News’ pretensions at honest journalism. Reading roundup: A few smaller stories running a little bit more under the radar this week: — Jason Pontin of Technology Review wrote a piece on how publishers have grown disillusioned with apps after expecting them to do so much to restore their old business models, concluding regarding his own publication’s app experience: “I hated every moment of our experiment with apps, because it tried to impose something closed, old, and printlike on something open, new, and digital.” GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram echoed Pontin’s discontent with apps, and Dave Winer and Doc Searls touted the superiority of rivers of news over apps. — The New York Times’ Binyamin Applebaum documented the frenetic daily routine of Business Insider blogger Joe Weisenthal, and Reuters’ Felix Salmon responded that Weisenthal’s style isn’t something indicative of bloggers in general, but unique to his distinctive personality. — Finally, Belgian developer Stijn Debrouwere wrote a fantastic post on the astounding number of ways that journalism is being chipped away at by services and sites that aren’t journalistic themselves, but that are being consumed by people instead of news. Give it a read — it’s probably the best piece about the state of journalism yet this year. |
| Howard Rheingold on how the five web literacies are becoming essential survival skills Posted: 11 May 2012 06:12 AM PDT
Howard Rheingold isn’t too concerned about whether Google is making us stupid or if Facebook is making us lonely. Those kind of criticisms, Rheingold says, miscalculate the ability humans have to change their behavior, particularly when it comes to how we use social media and the Internet more broadly. “If, like many others, you are concerned social media is making people and cultures shallow, I propose we teach more people how to swim and together explore the deeper end of the pool,” Rheingold said Thursday. Rheingold was visiting the MIT Media Lab to talk about his new book, Net Smart: How to Thrive Online, which examines how people can use the Internet not just to better themselves, but also society as a whole. Rheingold has a longer online history than most, going back to The WELL, one of the first online forums back in the 1980s. Ever since writing about that experience, Rheingold has developed a habit for dropping the kind of book that not just probes what it means to be online, but charts what that means for all of us. Net Smart is a book for an era where we’ve moved past just creating online identities and communities, but still have to educate ourselves on how to operate in day-to-day life. Rheingold said he believes a better understanding and deeper use of things like Google, Facebook, and Twitter are “essential survival skills” that will last beyond today or the lifespan of those individual companies. The fact that those companies have grown so large so quickly has led to as much speculation about their financial futures as their impact on our attention span and privacy. But Rheingold says the analysis often focuses on the potential damages of these new platforms rather than their benefits. “Knowing that something is broken, or that there are costs to it we had not thought of when we first started using it, is not enough to tell you what to do or how to fix it,” he said. Instead, Rheingold wants to focus on how we use these tools and how users can become more mindful and literate. Net Smart offers up a set of five literacies Rheingold sees as important: attention, participation, collaboration, “crap detection,” and network smarts. As we’ve become more sophisticated in the ways we use the web, we need to adjust how we use it, being able to tell fact from rumor and able to call on the skills and resources of a community to help answer our questions. What distinguishes Rheingold’s work here is the attention to, well, attention. He’s talking about metacognition, or making ourselves more aware of what we’re doing online. We often divide our attention online, but at any given moment make “micro decisions” about what we’re going to do — write emails for work, watch a YouTube video, get lost in Twitter. Rheingold says we have to connect our attention to our intention and be more aware of how what we’re actively doing relates (or often doesn’t) to what we need. That helps when you’re looking for a restaurant recommendation, but also when you want to find accurate information about a court verdict. “Finding the best stuff and sharing what we found is one way of improving ourselves, but also improving the commons,” he said. In that way, attention connects with participation and collaboration. The act of sharing not only builds intelligence but shows good faith in a community. It also has a reinforcing quality; once you go from being a passive part of a community to liking, retweeting, and curating, you increase your activity as well as your value. The act of transforming information into knowledge and making it usable to people will always have value, no matter what platforms exist, Rheingold said. “The proliferation of media has not stopped — if anything it has gone into hyperdrive,” he said. “If you want to keep up with anything, it’s not about keeping up with technologies, it’s about keeping up with literacies.” Photo of Rheingold by MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito used under a Creative Commons license. |
This week, on ‘as AOL turns’: AOL’s been providing us with a steady supply of drama over the past couple of years, and this week came the latest bits of maneuvering: A month after she was 
A deepening scandal and rising profits for News Corp.: It was a quieter week for News Corp. after the whirlwind of the last few weeks, but there were a few smaller developments. The company’s British newspaper division 
| You are subscribed to email updates from Nieman Journalism Lab To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |