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| The newsonomics of the mobile aggregator roundup Posted: 02 May 2013 08:54 AM PDT What are we to think when the aggregators start getting aggregated? That’s what’s happening in the mobile aggregation space. Put those two little words — mobile and aggregation — together, and you’ve got intrigue. Aggregation as in the long-debated snippetizing, curating, synthesizing, and more of the voluminous news content created by legacy companies — the kind of aggregation that once drove U.S. publishers mad and still drives German ones into a tizzy. Mobile as in the newest new, the landscape to which we’re all going — the untethered, Steve Jobs-powered Internet without cords. So mobile aggregation is the hottest thing around. Ask Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta, the cofounders of tablet aggregator Pulse. Their three-year-old company just exchanged its independence for $90 million in fast-climbing LinkedIn stock. Ask 17-year-old Nick D’Aloisio, the English teenager who was the face of smartphone aggregator Summly and traded it to Yahoo in March for about $30 million. Ask Mark Johnson, CEO of Zite, which CNN snapped up last summer for a little less than what D’Aloisio got. All of that leaves the mobile aggregation leader, Flipboard, alone in its independence. It also makes it a greater object of affection. As Google and others eye Flipboard, its price tag has now reached $400-500 million. So what we can make of this spate of deals, and what do they mean to news companies? As the unhealed wounds of the first round of web aggregation still chafe, what did publishers learn from it and how are they approaching this next mobile round? What are the newsonomics of this great mobile roundup? It’s absolutely clear why companies are (over-)spending on mobile aggregator plays. Mobile is the greenest field around. We — news consumers — are flocking there. The speed of our migration is breathtaking. About a third of all traffic to news sites now comes from mobile, up from just 25 percent a year ago. Tablet usage, as early adopters are joined by legions of others, keeps growing, and smartphones (which just officially passed dumb phones) are markedly increasing news audience consumption worldwide. (The New York Times debuted a new mobile site yesterday, with the promise of more mobile movement to come.) The common belief: Mobile traffic will exceed web traffic within two to three years. But mobile monetization still gives everyone fits. Match up the 33 percent usage number for news publishers against ad monetization that amounts to no more than 10 percent of their overall digital advertising; for most, it’s considerably less than that. Google and Facebook are, of course heavily investing in mobile ad plays; with Facebook’s last financial report viewed favorably because of its mobile progress. Neither are there yet; even as the tablet holds immense ad potential, the small screen of smartphones bedevils marketing muscularity. If you compare time spent on various platforms to ad money spent, mobile time is the most underrepresented. That will change, and the smartest digital ad players know today’s game is all about positioning, being ready to benefit from the flow of ad dollars, euros, and pounds as money moves more quickly from print, and yes, even web to mobile. Mobile’s great ad growth is captured in the mid-April IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) report:
So in pursuit of Google and Facebook, Yahoo is clearly playing catchup — there as elsewhere — and Marissa Mayer’s acquisition of pubescent Summly, is just one small step in that pursuit. LinkedIn’s mobile strategy has been seen as lagging; Pulse’s tablet presentation — the conveyor belt, or the Automat of the last century brought to the new — helps it further position itself as a news stop for its business influential audience. Design is an important part of these acquisitive moves. One reason these companies have value on the market is that they stand out. It must be said: For the most part, news companies have once again missed a chance to innovate, to make something new of a new platform. Flipboard, Pulse, and Zite each saw the potential of tablet news and magazine feature reading early and set to work to present it harnessing the glowing touchscreen. Now Flipboard 2.0 (build your own magazine) and Zite 2.0 are moving to a next generation. The best newspaper sites have mastered the utilitarian basics, but they hardly break new presentation ground. They also emphasize a single brand, where plainly many readers relish cross-title variety and a bit of serendipity. Innovation on tablet news design has been minimal, and it’s outsiders who largely deserve the credit for it. One noteworthy exception: AP Mobile. While it lacks the finesse of Flipboard, it delivers a national and local experience, bringing in hundreds of local news feeds into its tablet and smartphone products, and is one of the top news apps downloaded in Apple’s App Store. AP Mobile is a rare case of newspaper cooperation, building a single customer experience; now it’s up to AP to deliver the next-generation mobile experiences. By contrast, the magazine industry has gone another direction. Its Next Issue Media consortium stands as a first-of-its-kind compact among the Big Five magazine publishers and offers a great deal ($14.99 a month for unlimited access to 80 top titles) for consumers who want access to multiple titles. But it’s still a 1950s read-title-by-title paradigm in a partial Flipboard world (“The newsonomics of the Next Issue magazine future”). Yes, a partial Flipboard world. Let’s return to the place of aggregation in a more mobile world. Web aggregation snuck up on news sites worldwide. At one point, Google was just a funny word. But within a few quick years, news companies saw that Google had become the web’s primary destination and that they were dependent on it for 20 to 40 percent of their traffic. They railed about the company’s unfair use of fair use, a legal doctrine born in the pre-digital age, but have been unable to do much about ceding their central place in the digital world to the search giant. As the world’s moved mobile more quickly than anyone — including Google — expected, everyone’s trying to figure how news will be found on the smartphone and the tablet. If you’ll recall, in announcing his mobile breakthroughs, Steve Jobs declared the obsolescence of search: In an app world, who needed it? It sounded like great hyperbole, but it’s become unevenly true. Think about how you access CNN or the Times or Slate or Fox News on your phone or tablet. There’s a good chance it’s through a tap on an app, either a native app, or one you’ve created out of the mobile browser. That’s quite different from the use of a browser’s address bar or search box we’re accustomed to on desktop and laptop. While Google still provides 20 to 40 percent of web referrals to news companies, its referral potency on mobile devices is reduced. By how much? The data is too disparate to measure precisely at this point, but the change in behavior is clear. (Just yesterday, BuzzFeed reported a significant drop in search traffic across its tracking network — although others dispute their math.) So where do news companies find themselves, as desktop/laptop reading flattens in minutes and mobile increases? Are they concerned that Flipboard, Pulse, Zite, Summly and the rest will do what Google did to them on the web — get between them and their direct relationships with reader customers, reader customers who are now increasingly being asked to pay for digital and all-access? Not really. There are a couple of reasons why:
Given the roaring adoption of paywalls, the intersection of mobile aggregator and publisher interests reach a new crossroad. So far, Flipboard has agreed to only two full integrations, with The New York Times (allowing its paying customers full access within the app) and with the FT, which is still in progress. Flipboard tells me it is reluctant to commit to many more such integrations, especially with regional news publications. That’s understandable; it’s a lot of work, and without the scale of NYT/FT global news interest, Flipboard’s own return is smaller. For its part, Pulse has tested a paid content niche test with the Wall Street Journal; both it and Zite have done ad sharing deals as well, but not on Flipboard’s scale. Yet in a world in which all-access circulation is the leading core strategy, we’ve got to wonder if a distributed content strategy — such as partnering with Flipboard — is sufficiently served by simply selling advertising — even high-priced tablet ads. It may be. But much sooner than later, publishers will have to tote up their scores and see if they mastered the second round of aggregation much better than they did the first.  |
| When the media — traditional or new — gets a suspect wrong, what are the legal ramifications? Posted: 02 May 2013 07:00 AM PDT
There has been outstanding coverage and analysis of the Boston Marathon bombings and subsequent manhunt by both mainstream and independent media, but one particular aspect which has stood out for many commentators was the role played by social media. For many in the Boston area, platforms such as Twitter and Reddit became a key way for the community to share its experiences and reactions, anger, fear, and prayers. In the Watertown area, social media took on another aspect as the way in which many of us who sat locked in our houses reached out to one another for news and support. However, there was also controversy around social media, in particular concerns about “witch hunts” among social media users while the suspects were still unknown. While these problems were not limited to social media platforms, there has been significant commentary about how social media either helped or hindered law enforcement efforts and public understanding in a crisis situation. As we all try to gain perspective on the events of last month, it is helpful to remember that this far from the first time that reporting on acts of terror has generated mistakes and misidentifications. To the contrary, the natural impulse to identify the perpetrators of horrific acts as quickly as possible has often led to reporting of law enforcement efforts that swept up individuals later cleared of any wrongdoing. Examination of these situations, and the legal cases that resulted, may reveal whether there are unique issues that can be laid at the feet of social media or if these issues appear generally in reporting after terrorist attacks. Here are three case studies. The Lockerbie bombingOn December 21, 1988, an explosive device detonated on Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, resulting in the deaths of all passengers and crew, as well as others on the ground being killed by falling wreckage. On January 31, 2001, a Libyan intelligence officer was convicted and imprisoned for the bombing. During the intervening twelve years, there was widespread discussion and speculation about who might be responsible for the bombing, with the government of Libya being at the center of the leading theory, but with many alternative theories advanced. One such alternative theory was published in a cover story in Time magazine in April 1992, suggesting that the bombing had been the work of a Palestinian group seeking to eliminate U.S. counterterrorism agents on the flight. According to the article, the Palestinian group identified the flight carrying the U.S. agents with the assistance of a U.S./Iranian double agent named David Lovejoy. Time also ran a photograph purporting to be of Lovejoy, which it obtained from an affidavit filed by an attorney for Pan Am in a civil lawsuit related to the bombing. The affidavit claimed that an unnamed source had identified Lovejoy as the man in the photograph. In fact, the picture was of another man, Michael Schafer. As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit would later describe the mistake, “Time’s article, therefore, erroneously identified Schafer, then working in his family’s janitorial business in Austell, Georgia, both as a traitor to the United States government and a player in the bombing of Pan Am 103.” Schafer demanded a retraction from Time, which the magazine published more than a month later. He also sued Time, Inc., for defamation in federal district court in Georgia. The jury returned a verdict for Time in less than an hour. Schafer appealed the ruling, and the Eleventh Circuit reversed, granting a new trial because it found that the jury instructions issued by the district court were confusing. Specifically, the instructions were vague as to the question of whether Schafer needed merely to prove that Time was negligent in checking its facts (the proper standard for liability), as opposed to some level of intent to injure or constitutional “actual malice.” However, the Eleventh Circuit held that Time would be allowed to argue in the next trial that it was not negligent in relying on the attorney affidavit. Time settled the case (Schafer v. Time, Inc.) with Schafer before retrial. The Centennial Olympic Park bombingOn July 27, 1996, a bomb exploded in Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta, killing one person and injuring more than 100 others. For three days thereafter, media coverage identified Olympic security guard Richard Jewell as a hero of the event, based upon his reporting of a suspicious unattended package and his reduction in casualties from the event through his efforts to evacuate people from the area around the package. On July 30, however, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution identified Jewell as the “focus” of the FBI’s investigation of the event, which initiated pervasive and detailed analysis in the press of Jewell, his past, and his potential connection to the bombing. In October 1996, Jewell was cleared of any responsibility for the bombing, with the FBI issuing an unusual official statement that he was no longer a suspect. (In 2003, Eric Robert Rudolph was convicted of the bombing and sentenced to life imprisonment.) Jewell then filed defamation lawsuits against a number of media outlets, including NBC, CNN, the New York Post, and Cox Enterprises d/b/a the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The latter two cases generated significant court decisions.
The 2001 anthrax attacksOver the course of several weeks following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, an unknown individual mailed a series of envelopes containing anthrax powder to various media outlets and the offices of two U.S. Senators, resulting in the deaths of five people and the infection of seventeen others. Throughout 2002 in the immediate wake of the attacks, Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for The New York Times, wrote about the FBI’s handling of information related to a particular suspect he called “Mr. Z.” Much of Kristof’s writing was devoted to collating information about Mr. Z that indicated he was responsible for the attacks. This culminated in an August 13, 2002 article in which Kristof identified Mr. Z as Dr. Steven Hatfill, a research scientist employed by the Department of Defense, and stated that the FBI should “end this unseemly limbo by either exculpating Dr. Hatfill or arresting him.” Hatfill sued The New York Times for defamation in federal district court in Virginia (Hatfill v. The New York Times Co.; Hatfill v. The New York Times Co.). The district court initially dismissed Hatfill’s complaint, finding that Kristof was merely reporting on an ongoing investigation actually focused on Hatfill at the time and was “careful to disavow any conclusion of Hatfill’s guilt.” The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reversed in 2005, and remanded to allow Hatfill’s case to proceed. The Fourth Circuit specifically rejected the Times’ argument that the columns were agnostic as to Hatfill’s guilt:
Importantly, the Fourth Circuit did not address whether the statements in the columns might be either true or protected as statements of Kristof’s opinion — only whether the statements were capable of damaging Hatfill’s reputation. Hatfill’s claims ultimately failed after he was found to be a limited-purpose public figure in connection with the larger controversy over government readiness for bioterrorist attacks. As a result, he was required to prove that Kristof published the statements at issue with constitutional “actual malice,” i.e., subjective knowledge of their falsity or a high degree of awareness of probable falsity. And, as the Fourth Circuit held, the record in the case contained “substantial evidence to support The New York Times’ contention that Kristof actually believed that Dr. Hatfill was the prime suspect,” including a long list of facts with respect to the FBI’s investigation whose truth Hatfill did not dispute. As a result, the court ruled that “no reasonable jury could find that Kristof had a high degree of awareness that Dr. Hatfill was not the anthrax mailer.” The Fourth Circuit therefore affirmed summary judgment in the Times’ favor, and the U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari, ending the case. The FBI’s investigation closed without an arrest after a new primary suspect, Bruce Edwards Ivins, committed suicide in 2007; in 2008, the FBI declared that Ivins had been solely responsible for the attacks. Echoes of the past in the Boston eventsThe applicability of the final legal conclusions in the cases discussed above is likely to be limited in any lawsuits that arise out of last week’s events. Although these cases invoke general principles of defamation law, precise interpretations of the law will vary from state to state, and decisions on issues such as truth, falsity and opinion will turn on the facts of particular cases. Nevertheless, the cases above remain interesting for the aspects of news reporting in a post-attack environment that the courts considered relevant to questions of liability and damage. Similar aspects, including reports of preliminary investigations by law enforcement, reliance on photographs and other information of uncertain provenance or import, and efforts to engage in armchair sleuthing to deduce the responsible party, can be seen in the aftermath of last week’s events in both social media and professional reporting. Examples include:
There are, however, many significant differences from prior events. The most basic is the time frame, which was greatly accelerated from prior events. Articles indicating suspicion of Richard Jewell circulated three days after the Olympics bombing, and he was exonerated over two months later. The Time article inadvertently implicating Michael Schafer was published over three years after the Lockerbie bombing, and a correction ran more than a month later. The New York Times columns about Steven Hatfill began to run in 2002, several months following the anthrax mailings, and Hatfill was not unequivocally exonerated by the government until 2008. In the case of the Marathon bombings, the entire process of investigation, suspicion, misidentification and exoneration took less than a week: The identification of the Tsarnaev brothers as suspects was reported nationally by 8:00 a.m. on Friday, April 19. This is not to suggest that last week’s misidentifications have not been devastating to the individuals involved and their families. Even brief identification as a terrorism suspect can cause tremendous distress, as shown by the desperation of a teenager depicted in the April 18 New York Post story to clear his name, and the increased suffering of Sunil Tripathi’s family, already in torment over his disappearance. That said, the pace of events was such that correct information was released within days, if not hours, so that at least some aspects of the ordeal were not prolonged. Another important difference between last week’s behavior — particularly on Reddit — and prior incidents was the degree to which the ethics of attempting to identify suspects remained at the forefront of the discussion. An extended thread on Reddit (note: profanity beyond the link) discussed the propriety of crowdsourced efforts to identify suspects, including presumptions of innocence, lessons from the Jewell case, and the possibility of ruining an innocent person’s life through rushes to judgment. Users also maintained a list of cleared individuals (link to cached copy on Google) to limit the impact of the crowdsourced search. The architecture of Reddit itself, with its voting mechanism, functions to move discredited information out of public view. Reddit’s staff both publicly and privately apologized to the family of Sunil Tripathi and others affected, despite the fact that Reddit, under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, likely could not be held liable for user content. I will leave to others the questions of the general utility of crowdsourcing in these situations, and whether this evidence of transparency and self-consciousness on Reddit offsets the consequences of users’ activity. For interesting recent perspectives on those questions, see: Alexis Madrigal’s piece in The Atlantic here and his subsequent exchange on Twitter with Dan Sinker of the Knight-Mozilla OpenNews Project; this article by James Surowiecki in The New Yorker; and this article here at Nieman Lab by Mike Ananny. But however these questions are answered, the constant criticism and challenging of conclusions being drawn in coverage of last week’s events is significant. In past events, readers had no effective way to publicly question the information they were receiving from the media. Although the individuals wrongfully identified could file defamation claims in the courts to make a strong public denial of accusations in the press, this tactic is not without its hazards. Lawsuits by their nature cause media organizations to dig in their heels in defense of their reporting, leading to protracted litigation that a plaintiff would have to see through or abandon at the cost of appearing to admit the truth of the accusation. Social media provides another channel of feedback, allowing the public to act as a check on sloppy journalism and unfounded speculation; as Erik Wemple commented for The Washington Post, “When tragedy strikes America, Twitter remembers bad reporting.” ConclusionIn the wake of confusing and senseless tragedy, there is a fundamental human impulse to try to exert control over an often impenetrably chaotic situation. Where a tragedy is caused by human action, that attempt to exert control often manifests as an attempt to identify those responsible. This is not new to last week’s events; the reporting and public discussion in the aftermath of the Marathon bombing bear striking similarities to reporting on past terrorist attacks where the attacker was initially unknown. But despite these similarities, social media platforms allow the public to engage with the fragmentary information available after this kind of event in a much deeper way, as part of the community. While it is debatable whether this form of communal activity is on the whole beneficial or detrimental, social media also provide forums in which this debate itself can take place. This may help to ameliorate some of the more damaging consequences of past events, where misinformation was perpetuated over an extended period before the error was publicly revealed. Jeff Hermes is director of the Digital Media Law Project. This is article is based on a piece originally published at the DMLP’s website.  |
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