Nieman Journalism Lab |
- For NBCNews.com, a new website comes with new privacy standards
- From Nieman Reports: After the shouting, bridging the divide
- The newsonomics of Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo legacy challenge
- The Associated Press introduces a new…print product for members
| For NBCNews.com, a new website comes with new privacy standards Posted: 17 Jul 2012 10:56 AM PDT
It’s unlikely that many news consumers will read the fine print that comes with the splashy rebranding from MSNBC.com to NBCNews.com. The new website’s privacy policy was adopted to “align with NBC Universal standards in privacy,” the network’s chief digital officer, Vivian Schiller, told me. “If you go through it with a fine-toothed comb, I don’t think you’ll find it much different,” she said. But there are a few key things about the changing privacy policy that you should know. I caught up with our good friend Jeff Hermes, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, to make sense of the differences between the old policy and the new one. For one thing, NBC News has removed users’ ability to opt out of targeted advertising.
“Microsoft explicitly talks about ways to opt out of that kind of advertising,” Hermes said. “They give you the option of opting out of receiving targeted ads. They specifically identify third-party ad networks that they work with, and give you links to see if those networks offer opt-outs. That information isn’t included in the NBCNews.com policy. NBCNews.com does have a clause saying you can send a request asking that they stop using the information they’ve gathered about you, but it’s not an opt-out. If you request that they stop using your information, great, but that applies only to information you’ve provided before, and if you want them to stop using your information completely you have to stop using the site.” Another key difference involves changes to the privacy policy itself. Microsoft explicitly says that upon changing its privacy policy, it will “notify you either by prominently posting a notice of such changes prior to implementing the change or by directly sending you a notification.” NBCNews.com doesn’t rule that out, but it doesn’t make any specific promises either. From the NBCNews.com policy:
“In other words, ‘If we decide to make material changes, what we’re going to do is change this document,’” Hermes said. “They have the option, if they want, of making material changes to the privacy policy and the only thing they do to inform people is changing the policy itself. They say they might — they could — post a notice on the homepage but they’re not committing to do that.” Overall, Microsoft’s policy is more thorough and technically specific, Hermes says. But he points out there are areas of the NBCNews.com policy that merit praise. For example, it features a section detailing data collected by social media plugins. From the privacy policy:
“I actually found it interesting, and a good thing, that NBC was specifically disclosing facts about the interactions of social media sites with their sites,” Hermes said. “I didn’t see something comparable about Microsoft’s policy.” Another area where NBC News exhibited “some degree of thoroughness and thinking” was with regard to children’s privacy issues. Whereas many websites deal only with children under 13 — in order to comply with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act — NBCNews.com also addresses teenagers’ privacy.
(I’m sure that proviso will lead to millions of parent-child bonding moments over the minutia of website small print.) There are some areas of the new privacy that raise questions, like a section that says NBCNews.com may collect information from use of “wireless applications” like mobile apps. That piqued Hermes’ interest because the language isn’t “terribly specific.” Another question: The omission of a reference to “web beacons” — which Microsoft’s policy explains as a way to help count and track site visitors — from the old policy to the new one. Both policies are jargon-rich at times. But where NBCNews.com is less specific than Microsoft, Hermes suspects it’s at least in part an attempt to be strike a more comprehensible tone. “Again, Microsoft contains more technical detail, but the NBC policy nevertheless might be more accessible to the general reader,” he said. “There are pros and cons to either approach, so long as you can provide the user meaningful information. It’s this continuous tension between what needs to be said and not saying too much.” Hermes has been working with these kinds of policies for quite some time now, and they’ve gone from being relatively simple explanations to complicated legalese. Gradually, as policies expanded, they began to “look more like complicated user contracts” than disclosures. There has been a push to again simplify them, but it’s not easy. Hermes said there’s still more he’d like to see in the NBCNews.com policy. “I would like to see a little more detail about what information they’re intending to collect through wireless applications,” he said. I would like to see an opt-out in terms of use of information for behavioral marketing, and I would like to see more robust notification in terms of modifications to the policy…It’s not like either company is going out of its way to say, ‘We’re never going to use your information.’” |
| From Nieman Reports: After the shouting, bridging the divide Posted: 17 Jul 2012 09:28 AM PDT
Editor’s Note: Our colleagues upstairs at Nieman Reports are out with their Summer 2012 issue, “Truth in the Age of Social Media,” which focuses on issues like verification, crowdsourcing, and citizen journalism. We’ve been giving you a glimpse at some of their stories, but make sure to read the issue in full. In this piece, Buffalo News Editor Margaret Sullivan — who was announced Monday as The New York Times’ new public editor — reflects on victims in the media, and the tension between journalistic sensitivity and a desire to be provocative. As I watched media coverage of the racially charged shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida earlier this year, I found myself thinking about sensitivity and respect. Those issues were big ones for me and The Buffalo News in New York two summers ago. As Geraldo Rivera of Fox News declared that black teens should avoid wearing hooded sweatshirts and some spectators gleefully welcomed revelations about Martin’s less-then-angelic past behavior, all of the questions came flooding back. How can we best avoid blaming the victim? Doesn’t the public have the right to know all the facts, not just the ones that support a particular point of view? How do placement and emphasis (in newspaper terms, a front-page headline versus three paragraphs at the end of a story) figure into media decision-making? How does the desire to be provocative (consider Rivera’s March 22 tweet: “His hoodie killed Trayvon Martin as surely as George Zimmerman”) weigh against responsible commentary and reporting? As race-oriented stories continue to emerge—and they surely will—those questions deserve to be thought about and talked about in newsrooms. And we can do that most effectively if we broaden the base of those in our conversations, recognizing that diversity is more than numbers; it’s the power of what happens when different voices are truly heard. This reality was brought home to me in the aftermath of the furor that erupted in Buffalo’s black community over a story the News published in August 2010. The bloodiest crime in the city’s recent history began as a wedding party. Actually, it was a year-after-the-wedding party for a Buffalo couple who had moved to Texas and married there but had come back to celebrate with hometown friends. The setting was City Grill, an upscale restaurant downtown. Keep reading at Nieman Reports » |
| The newsonomics of Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo legacy challenge Posted: 17 Jul 2012 07:26 AM PDT
Call it a Hail Marissa pass. Kudos to the Yahoo board for shaking up the conventional wisdom, going long, going young, and going Google. Against a history of failure, it has chosen success — the gold-plated success of Google — and thrown both Yahoo watchers and staffers for a loop. The onrushing changes at Yahoo have seemed almost Marxist — as in Groucho — as troops have been led this way (let’s dominate the display ad market through the wizardry of our integrated bought-and-built ad technology) and then back again, as ad staff has been laid off, cut back, and told that ad-tech outsourcing was on the horizon. Yahoo as product company. Yahoo as sales company. Yahoo as digital Hollywood company. Watching the parade of costumes has been like peeking at those silly old-timey Western dress-up booths at county fairs. Yahoo — despite its $5 billion in annual revenues and a billion in net profit — seems like the Rodney Dangerfield of media companies. It just can’t get no respect. So why not try to buy a little respect? 37-year-old Marissa Mayer has known little but success, and the emerging respect and self-confidence that accompanies it, since she joined Google as a 24-year-old. She brings something Yahoo badly needs: an aura of success and of discipline. That’s a start, as she takes on the challenge of what is a legacy web company. Number one by traffic, Yahoo seems as much a legacy company as a newspaper or local TV station — legacy as in the encumbrance of long-time, if fading, success. Its legacy is the desktop. It survived Excite, Lycos, Infoseek, Netcenter, and many more. In the seeds of its own success as a portal, it’s found out how hard it is to transition from the portal era. Now, as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple come to dominate our lives — and our pocketbooks — with the four dominant S’s (search, social, shopping, software) of our time, the portal is rapidly diminishing in value. That question — what is Yahoo? — is, in a sense, the only one Marissa Mayer needs to answer. Her five predecessors in five years failed at that seemingly simple task. Answer that question, and the strategic, product and organizational decisions flow from it. Fail to answer it, and imagine your portrait alongside Scott Thompson, Carol Bartz, Jerry Yang, and Terry Semel. As we look at the news of the past week — an amazingly busy July, testimony to the acceleration of media change in this year — we see that identity question popping up all around. Within the question is the newsonomics of identity: what does a media brand mean these days? NBC’s first step yesterday, following its long-brewing divorce from Microsoft, was to rechristen its MSNBC.com news portal as NBCNews.com. While some have suggested that divorcing it from the left-leaning MSNBC channel is the primary reason, certainly the re-ascendance of — and concentration on — the NBC name makes even more sense. NBC has brand equity, nationally and locally — and it will soon have greater global resonance. MSNBC has never rolled off the tongue. Now NBC, with strong intact leadership (Steve Capus, Vivian Schiller) can move forward, backed by the might of owner Comcast, as it competes with other global news players, including the Times, the Journal, the BBC, ABC, Bloomberg, Reuters, AP, and the Guardian. Brand identity also runs through the other big media story of the week. As Tribune Company finally emerges from bankruptcy, drip by drip, the question re-emerges: What is the Tribune Company? Is it eight daily newspapers, the core of what Tribune once meant? Is it those papers and its 23 broadcast stations — which now out-value the newspapers at least three to one — and Career Builder? Or: Does this company still have a reason to stick together? We can point to technology and infrastructure ties as a reason, but these may well be overwhelmed as assessment of individual property values is made by the new ownership, financial players who want out. Certainly, the Tribune means something in Chicago, the Times in L.A. (where no one needs to tell would-be buyer Eli Broad about the value of that brand), and the Courant in Hartford. What’s the print/digital brand promise, though, to readers and to advertisers in 2012? That’s a more difficult question, and one symptomatic of newspapers, and increasingly local broadcasters, current market woes. Identify. Promise. Brand. These are issues have been bedeviled Yahoo for years now. In a world of changing media and consumer devices, the ability to make a promise and fulfill it better than anyone else is the key to success. Which is why that quartet of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon are winning, and most of the rest of legacy web media, legacy print media and legacy broadcast media are losing. As Mayer moves 5.5 miles mostly east to her new Sunnyvale office today, she will briefly enjoy her wunderkind status. Then, we’ll see how well her detail-oriented, user-centric mindset can effect change. Sure, Yahoo has lots of good products — she has already cited finance and sports — but what great, clearly ahead-of-the-pack ones does it have? Where can it pick its spots? In business, it is outgunned by Dow Jones, Reuters, and Bloomberg. In sports, ESPN, MLB, Comcast, and Fox are pouring in huge resources. New partnering — built on the ABC and CNBC deals — may help, but isn’t everyone doing those kinds of deals these days? Is there something distinctive that Mayer can bring to the Yahoo user experience? I suspect that new focus will be distinctly mobile. Tablets and smartphones are the new playgrounds, with lots of eager and less-habituated readers and viewers. Individual news, business, and sports brands have been ascendant on the tablet, as the old aggregators (Google Currents, AOL Editions, Yahoo’s Livestand, on which it recently pulled the plug) have failed to transition their desktop advantages over to the new medium. Is there a Google-simple trick Mayer can find up her sleeve to differentiate the newest Yahoo and please the hell out of consumers? Beyond that customer-centric enigma is the big question of what kind of advertising company Yahoo wants to be now. If it pursues ad outsourcing, that only puts more pressure on it to quickly create more products that are at least insanely good. If it stays in the ad game (even as its display competitor Microsoft is acknowledging its own ad futility against Google market dominance with a big writedown), how will it compete? Does Mayer, a strategic builder of technology solutions, reverse recent course and re-commit Yahoo back to advertising focus? Will it try to hold on to its partnership with half the U.S. daily press, through the Newspaper Consortium, as those members begin to contemplate the mature deal that may well pass into history by the end of 2013, if not sooner? What has the experience of leading Google’s latest push into local advertising taught Mayer? Google Maps, Google+, Google Ad Words Express, Google Zagat, Google Places are all meshing into Google Places for Business, meaning a better place for local merchants to invest their marketing dollars — with Google. Is the Men in Black memory eraser part of Mayer’s Google contract? Or will Yahoo, and its news partners, benefit from her recent experience? We’d have to believe that the odds against Mayer are long. She inherits a mess, and she’s an inexperienced CEO. She knows product, but she’s not a deal-maker. She’s got the experience of one great company, but no other. The game is newly afoot though, and therein lies the serial pleasures of Yahooing. Photo of Mayer by J.D. Lasica used under a Creative Commons license. |
| The Associated Press introduces a new…print product for members Posted: 17 Jul 2012 07:00 AM PDT
At a time when “digital first” is the slogan du jour in newspaper corner offices, the Associated Press is offering its subscribers a product — one that’s meant to be printed out, ink-on-paper style. Starting this week, the wire service will distribute paginated sports specials to preview major events like the NFL draft, Major League Baseball playoffs, NASCAR’s Cup Series, and top golf tournaments. The series is branded AP Sports Extra, and the first one will preview the British Open this week. The 10 annual extras will be free to newspapers that already subscribe to AP Sports content, and they’re an attempt to help AP members who’ve cut back on their sports copy desks — with a revenue-generating twist. Jim Reindl, who’s in charge of sports products and business development at the AP, says the print-focused initiative definitely “caught a few people by surprise” when he first pitched it internally. “I would say the reaction initially was: ‘Hmm. Pagination, huh?’” Reindl told me. “But you know, it’s not a product that’s foreign to us. It’s not a business model that AP has entertained, like going into the pagination business, but we’ve certainly talked about it on and off over the years.” Sports coverage has been an area of recent experimentation for the AP. Last year, it started offering multiple versions of baseball stories so that the hometown of the losing team had coverage better tailored to local readers’ narrative interests. (When your team loses, you want to know how they blew it before you read about how the other team won.) That “hometown ledes” project was so popular that the AP began offering multiple versions of college and pro football game stories, too. Hometown ledes came out of the editorial department, and sought to help newspapers save money by making it so they didn’t have to send reporters to every away game. Sports Extra is also about leveraging resources, but it’s aimed at increasing ad revenue rather than cutting costs. As Reindl puts it, the AP sees an opportunity to “add value,” literally, where newspapers need it most.
The overhead cost for the AP minimal. Postmedia Editorial Services, the Toronto company that’s producing the series, already does lots of layout outsourcing for U.S. and Canadian newspapers. “What they want to be able to do is have the AP sports content in-house, and make it easier for them to go to any paper and say, ‘Look, we can do sports,’” Reindl said. In coming months, the AP will assess its events line-up. Reindl also says he doesn’t expect Sports Extras to work in every market, and he’s already heard “mixed reactions” from newspapers. Some worry about the cost burden associated with printing extra pages — even if those pages are able to bring in more ad dollars. “Frankly, it’s an experiment,” Reindl said. “We’re going forward with it and we’ll have to see how the market really adapts to it. This is an opportunity where we can try to help the industry still make money off of its core print product. The proof is always in the pudding.” Photo of Citizens Bank Park by Andrew Bartlett used under a Creative Commons license. |
Sports Extras will come with a ready-to-sell ad hole, and newspapers will get the schedule of extras a year in advance to help sales teams sell ads. The inclusion of photos on some Sports Extra pages is a small bonus for the relatively small number of AP Sports subscribers that don’t also subscribe to the wire service’s photos. The special pages will be distributed through AP Exchange — the place where newspapers already go to select AP stories and photos for publication — so Reindl says it won’t require any training or effort to find the new pages. (They’ll be available in broadsheet, half-broadsheet, and tabloid sizes.)| You are subscribed to email updates from Nieman Journalism Lab To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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