For anyone who loves taking pictures, the arrival of digital photography has been a huge benefit: for one thing, even the cheapest smartphone has a camera in it whose quality would have seemed almost unimaginable a decade ago. The result is that it is easier than it has ever been to take a good snapshot, but it also means we are drowning in digital photos. And instead of taking up a few shoeboxes in the corner of the basement somewhere, they are piling up on memory cards and hard drives and DVDs, as well as on dozens of incompatible photo-sharing services and social networks. Where are these digital memories going to be when we need them in the future?

I have been thinking about this ever since I got my first digital camera (which had a then-impressive resolution of 1.2 megapixels), and it comes to mind every time I try to organize all the photos I have taken across multiple computers and devices and services. I was reminded of it again on Thursday when I attended the funeral of an old family friend. As with so many life events, there were stand-up photo galleries put together by his daughters and other relatives, with hand-picked prints from his early years: his wedding, his children when they were babies and so on. Afterward, there were family albums to look through, each with treasured (if slightly yellowing) photos of special moments.

Will our digital photos be there when we want them?

There was a DVD of some photos as well, but it wouldn’t play on the funeral home’s DVD player for some reason. That got me thinking about the technological aspect of trying to retain our digital memories — the need to transfer photos and video from incompatible format to incompatible format, from old memory cards or Minidiscs to new ones, the fears about DVDs deteriorating over time until they become unreadable. Printed photos may get yellow, but at least you can still make out what is in them.

Of course, we should all be printing out special photos that we take and storing them carefully so that we will always have a copy. But who has the time to do that? The same people who are scanning all of their old printed photos and saving them somewhere other than a shoebox, presumably. There are services that will do this for you, of course, but that also takes time and is expensive. Like many people, I try to back up my pictures to an external hard drive, and I also use Flickr as a backup. But how do I know Flickr will still be around in 20 or 30 years? Facebook clearly wants to be the main repository for your digital memories with its new Timeline view, which looks better when you upload all of your photos, and it is a useful feature. But what happens if Facebook becomes the next AOL or the next Friendster? Then you have to download all of those photos (if Facebook still has them) and find somewhere to put them.

That is the other downside of digital photography. At the funeral I attended, there were a handful of photos of special moments, and it probably didn’t take all that long to pick them out, even though this friend took a lot of pictures during his life. But with film cameras, most people would wind up with perhaps a few dozen photos during the course of a year, taken at birthdays, on holidays, etc. Now it is so easy to take pictures that it is difficult to stop — I went on vacation for a couple of weeks and took over 300 photos. More than 250 million pictures are uploaded to Facebook every day.

Easier to take but harder to find

Not all of those photos are worth keeping, of course, but when storage is so cheap and sorting through them takes so long, why not just put them all somewhere and forget them? And so they pile up, gigabyte after gigabyte. Some recent research found that 39 percent of those surveyed couldn’t find digital pictures of a recent life event, even one that took place less than a year earlier. Instead of helping us remember the key moments in our lives, digital photos seem to be making it harder.

Apps like Instagram and Path, both of which I love, actually make this problem worse instead of better in some ways. They are great for sharing quick snapshots of a place you are visiting or someone you are with or what you are eating — and you can share those easily to Flickr and Facebook and Tumblr and lots of other platforms (more than 26 photos are uploaded to Instagram every second). But do you want to save all of these for a lifetime, along with the ones you took of your new baby or your sister’s wedding? Probably not. So again, there is a filtering problem.

These problems are compounded when it comes to video, of course: It is just as easy to shoot, takes even longer to process or edit, takes up more space, and yet is likely to be just as ephemeral in nature. And that is not to mention all the videos that are trapped on Hi-8 tapes and mini-DVDs and other formats.

In the past, photographs were treasured because they were so rare: It took so long to make them and the process was so expensive that having one meant a lot. It was like a moment in time had been frozen forever, and the way those photos could trigger memories was unlike almost anything else. Now photos are just another form of digital detritus; there may be treasures in there somewhere, but we don’t have time to find them, if we can even remember where they are. Photography seems to have become more ephemeral, less permanent — whether that is a good thing or not remains to be seen.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Dear Photograph and Flickr user Leon Rice-Whetten

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Just a day after Sky News told its journalists they should not post any kind of breaking news to Twitter — and also blocked them from retweeting anyone but an official Sky News account — the BBC has released a new version of its social-media policies that also requires reporters to file updates to news editors first rather than posting breaking news to Twitter. The BBC’s social-media editor says the policy isn’t as draconian as some critics are portraying it, but the emphasis on protecting the British national broadcaster’s existing news structure is just another example of how traditional media entities are struggling with their relationship to Twitter in an era of real-time, distributed news.

In a blog post at the BBC site, social-media editor Chris Hamilton says that the broadcaster recognizes the value of Twitter as a platform for distributing its content, a way of gathering news and a way of engaging with readers. But for now, he says, the national news network wants breaking news to be processed through its existing news system so that it reaches BBC viewers and readers through the broadcaster’s channels and sites rather than on Twitter. As Hamilton put it in his post:

[O]ur first priority remains ensuring that important information reaches BBC colleagues, and thus all our audiences, as quickly as possible – and certainly not after it reaches Twitter.

Hamilton and other BBC staffers, including BBC World Affairs producer Stuart Hughes, pointed out both on Twitter and in comments on blog posts about the move that the BBC has an internal publishing system called Quickfire that allows journalists for the news service to put content into its system via SMS or email — so that they could theoretically post something for editors and to Twitter at the same time. In other words, Hamilton said, the service is “talking about a difference of a few seconds” between content making it into the official system and being posted to Twitter.

Serve the reader, wherever they may be

That said, however, the focus of the policy update is clearly to put the emphasis on publishing news to the BBC’s existing properties first, rather than on Twitter. Why? Hamilton isn’t quite as clear on that as he is on the specifics of the rules. It could be that the news outlet wants to have news checked first by an editor, so that the BBC avoids the kind of fiasco that occurred when CBS Sports and other media entities repeated the erroneous news that Penn State coach Joe Paterno had died. Or it could be that the BBC is worried about competitive issues, as the Associated Press seems to be in promoting its own “don’t break news on Twitter” rules.

Financial Times columnist John Gapper, who defended the move in a conversation with me on Twitter, said it makes sense for news outlets like the BBC to try and preserve some news for their existing readers and viewers, and added that it doesn’t make sense to employ a journalist whose “loyalty is to his Twitter feed” instead of his organization. In other words, news should be saved for the company in an attempt to maintain its brand (and revenue), rather than being given away on Twitter for nothing.

To me, this puts the emphasis in the wrong place. I think news outlets that encourage their employees to break news on Twitter — such as Reuters, where social-media editor Anthony De Rosa wrote a critical post about the Sky News move — see the value of having journalists who become sources of news for their followers, many of whom may already be readers of their journalism, and others of whom may be potential readers. Whether that news comes after it has hit the wire, or after it has appeared on a BBC website, or whether it is even a retweet of someone close to the events, doesn’t really matter to most people.

One of the realities of a world in which distribution of content — including news — has been fundamentally democratized is that the value of a “scoop” or breaking news update is declining rapidly. The half-life of that kind of news is so short, and it becomes a commodity so quickly, that there is little value in trying to protect it for very long (although some are trying hard to do so via the courts). Look at it this way: if a single tweet from someone on your staff gives away enough of the value of your story that you have to forbid it, you have a lot bigger problems than just breaking news on Twitter.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Lili Viera De Carvalho and Rosaura Ochoa

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Updated: Path and Pinterest are probably two of the hottest social services right now, racking up millions of users and generating an ocean of favorable coverage. But both have gotten tripped up by the same thing that has made the social web a minefield for both Facebook and Google: namely, decisions that put their interests ahead of their users and a lack of disclosure about what was going on behind the scenes or under the hood of their services. Will these missteps spell doom for either company? Probably not. But the backlash is a welcome reminder that for social apps, the trust of users is not something to be toyed with.

Path, a mobile photo-sharing app that expanded to become a full-fledged mobile social app when it relaunched a couple of months ago, was co-founded and is run by Dave Morin, an early Facebook staffer. You might think the privacy blowups that the giant social network has experienced over the past couple of years would make Path pretty sensitive to handling user data properly, but that doesn’t seem to be the case: Earlier this week, controversy erupted when it was revealed that Path was uploading all of its users’ contacts to the company’s servers, something many users have taken as a breach of their privacy.

It may not seem like a big deal, but you should still disclose it

In public comments on the blog post that first brought this to light, Morin apologized and said that Path will fix the problem in an upcoming version by requiring users to explicitly opt-in. He also tried to defend the company’s behavior by saying that it is the “industry best practice.” As a commenter on the Hacker News thread about the issue put it, however, a better phrase might be “industry lowest common denominator.”

Update: Path’s CEO later apologized in a blog post for the way the service handled users’ data, and has said that in an attempt to make up for its mistake it has deleted any address data that was stored on its servers.

It is true that other apps and services also do this, including WhatsApp, Beluga, Hipster and others, and the ability to do so has been a part of Apple’s iOS since 2008. Others have also noted in Path’s defense that Apple allows apps to upload contacts without explicitly asking users for permission – something that it doesn’t do for other data such as a user’s location. And it is also true that importing a user’s address book makes it a lot easier to scan for friends who are already on Path and that this can be a benefit for a user in the long run.

That said, however, the anger and shock that Path’s move seems to have triggered among many users — some of whom say they have deleted the app and will never return — makes it pretty clear that even if this behavior has benefits for users, the lack of disclosure about what Path was planning to do is a deal breaker for many.

Pinterest, meanwhile, did something completely different to upset some of its users, but the underlying lesson is the same: The company — which says it has built up a massive user base of more than 10 million in just two months — is a content-sharing service where fans of different products and websites can post (or “pin”) their favorites. Since popular posts can drive a lot of traffic to websites that sell these products, Pinterest has been adding affiliate links that generate revenue for the site when users click on them.

Lesson: Never take your users for granted

As many of the company’s defenders have pointed out, this behavior makes a huge amount of sense for Pinterest, since it is providing a free service and needs to generate revenue somehow. But as with Path’s move — which also makes a lot of sense from a purely utilitarian point of view — Pinterest failed to disclose what it was doing to users or at least failed to make it obvious. Perhaps the company thought (as Path likely did) that users wouldn’t mind. But it turns out that plenty of them do mind.

Path’s decision seems the more surprising of the two, if only because there are so many examples of similar undisclosed or opt-in-by-default moves that have triggered a huge amount of backlash, and not just for Facebook but for Google as well. The search giant’s engineers also clearly thought that merging people’s email contact lists with their new Buzz service was a great idea — after all, it was the most efficient way to populate a user’s follow list. But many users disagreed, and so did the federal government, and the resulting backlash arguably helped kill Google’s first attempt at a real social service.

The lesson here is that for social apps, the trust of users is paramount, and the best way to maintain that trust is to be as open as possible about everything that is occurring, particularly if it involves a user’s personal data. Whatever you are doing with it may not seem like a big deal to you, but better to be open about it than have it revealed by someone else, at which point you look sneaky. As Craigslist founder Craig Newmark has put it, “Trust is the new black,” and it never goes out of style.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Lars Plougmann and Christian Ditatompel

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Even as some news outlets like Associated Press hire social-media editors to try and figure out how to make use of tools like Twitter for journalistic purposes, others seem to be intent on locking these tools down and removing as much of the social aspects from them as possible. According to a report in The Guardian, broadcaster Sky News has come out with a new policy that bars reporters from posting anything other than work-related content on Twitter, prevents them from breaking news through the service — and even forbids them from retweeting anything that doesn’t come from a Sky News account. As with so many other similar social-media policies, this completely misses the point of what makes Twitter so powerful.

Although it doesn’t link to an actual document, the Guardian story quotes from the Sky News guidelines, which tell reporters not to tweet about stories if they are not “a story to which you have been assigned or a beat which you work,” and says that anything approaching breaking news must be sent to a Sky editor first before being posted. The policy says that retweeting other Sky journalists is fine — provided they are posting updates about a story to which they have been assigned — but it says Sky staff are forbidden from retweeting anything that hasn’t been posted by a Sky News account:

Do not retweet information posted by other journalists or people on Twitter. Such information could be wrong and has not been through the Sky News editorial process.

Twitter is the newswire now, for better or worse

This is even more draconian than the most recent example of a news outlet trying to lock down Twitter use — namely, the Associated Press newswire, which came out with standards for retweeting that not only mis-stated how the process works on Twitter, but also forbade journalists working for the newswire from retweeting anything without adding a comment to make it clear that they were not agreeing with the person being retweeted. The AP rules also strictly forbid breaking news on Twitter, which ignores the fact (as I pointed out at the time) that for many people the real-time information network has become the newswire.

Since then, AP has hired Eric Carvin to be the service’s social-media editor (Carvin is the brother of National Public Radio’s Twitter phenom Andy Carvin, who turned his Twitter account into a one-man newswire during the Arab Spring revolutions). At a recent social-media event in New York, Eric told me that he was trying hard to convince the wire service that the benefits of social tools like Twitter outweigh the disadvantages. But as with so many traditional media outlets, both AP and Sky chose to focus their policies on what their staff shouldn’t do, instead of concentrating on what they should do.

As we’ve pointed out before, these kinds of rules seem to be aimed at trying to remove the human being from the process, something that may work in traditional forms of media, but fails miserably when using social tools like Twitter. The whole point of using them is to be social, and that means expressing human emotions and possibly even opinions in some cases. The best social-media policies — like the exceptionally minimalist version that Media News CEO John Paton came up with — simply ask reporters and editors to be themselves, but to think about what they post before doing so, and to use common sense and “don’t be stupid.”

Why remove the social from social media?

Sky News says in the email it sent to employees that the guidelines were necessary to ensure that “there is sufficient editorial control of stories reported by Sky News journalists and that the news desks remain the central hub for information.” And obviously, a news service doesn’t want dozens of reporters tweeting rumors and innuendo about major breaking stories, or tipping competitors off to a scoop. But banning staff from retweeting anyone outside the Sky News operation makes no sense whatsoever, as Charlie Beckett of the London School of Economics notes — Sky reporters should be seen as the key sources for information, regardless of where it comes from.

During the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, New York Times reporter Brian Stelter was the first to broach the rumor — on Twitter — that the terrorist leader had been killed, when he retweeted a post from the former chief of staff for Defence Minister Donald Rumsfeld. Some wondered whether Stelter would get in trouble from the Times for retweeting something that hadn’t been confirmed, and for posting it before his own newspaper. But as far as I know, there were no repercussions — and Stelter’s tweet in turn was retweeted thousands of times, and likely broke the news to many.

That’s what Twitter can accomplish if you use it properly, instead of seeing nothing but threats and potential negative repercussions. Like other media outlets that have tried the same approach, Sky News risks removing all the benefits of a powerful media tool by treating its staff as though they were disobedient children. Elana Zak of 10,000 Words has a Storify roundup of some other responses to the Sky News policy.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users and Rosaura Ochoa

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As Facebook draws close to the billion-user mark and a $100-billion market valuation, the giant social network’s dominance has reignited old fears about the decline and fall of the open web. John Battelle argues that we need a manifesto for the truly open Internet in order to rally the troops, but blogging veteran Robert Scoble says it is too late and he has already given up the fight. And longtime technology watcher and investor Esther Dyson says we need to remember that the Internet is prone to cycles of open vs. closed. In the end, the only thing that determines whether a closed model succeeds is the willingness of users to put up with its restrictions. For Facebook, that is both its biggest strength and its biggest weakness.

Not that long ago, the open web seemed to be the default for most users: America Online, one of the longest-lasting of the old walled-garden portals, was mostly an afterthought, used only by older consumers who were tied to its dial-up business (a business that even now continues to provide the lion’s share of AOL’s declining profits). Google was the model of the open web, with its objective algorithms and its commitment to sending users away instead of trying to keep them on its site. Websites and blogs were run on open platforms like WordPress (see disclosure), TypePad or Blogger, and anyone could link to anyone.

Then along came Facebook, which took the ultimate “gated community” approach right from the outset by restricting access to university students. As it grew and expanded, it maintained this walled-garden strategy by making it easy for users (and their precious data) to get into its network but much harder for them to get out — something Google highlighted in an attack on the social network’s data-hoarding policies. And the trend has only continued with the rollout of Facebook’s frictionless-sharing apps, which effectively make the network the hub of personal activity of all kinds, even newspaper reading.

If the garden is appealing, the walls don’t matter

What is the benefit for users that makes them so eager to place their entire online experience in the hands of a single company? The same as it was with America Online: namely, the fact that it provides a friendlier, safer — and ultimately easier to use — version of the Internet for non-geeks. As John Battelle puts it:

The open web is full of spam, shady operators, and blatant falsehoods. Outside of a relatively small percentage of high quality sites, most of the web is chock full of popup ads and other interruptive come-ons [but] in the curated gardens of places like Apple and Facebook, the weeds are kept to a minimum, and the user experience is just . . . better.

For open-web advocates like Dave Winer, there is almost nothing to like about this phenomenon — or, to shift the spotlight from Facebook for a moment, the fact that a powerful, global real-time information network like Twitter is controlled by a single corporate entity. The risks for Twitter users have been highlighted by the company’s announcement that it will censor tweets if asked to do so and by attempts on the part of countries like Brazil (and even the U.S.) to force the company to either turn over data or block specific accounts that they disapprove of.

Open alternatives such as Status.net and the would-be Facebook competitor Diaspora exist, and they have attracted support from the hard-core geek community. But they have made virtually zero impact on the vast majority of Internet users, who seem more than happy to disregard all the warnings about proprietary models coming from open advocates, including the man who invented the World Wide Web.

If there is one thing that we can learn from the runaway success of Apple, it is that the vast majority of users don’t particularly care about abstract concepts like openness or metaphors like walled gardens. What they care about, as Chris Saad of Echo and Dataportability.org noted recently, is that the products or services that matter to them about are easy to use and provide some benefit to them. In effect, they are willing to make a trade-off between the virtues of data portability or the downsides of having a single entity control their experience and the benefit they get from that product or service.

If you stop being useful, users will revolt

If you have a really attractive garden, users are more than happy to spend time there without moaning about the walls or the gates. In a nutshell, that explains Facebook’s dramatic rise: It has made connecting with friends and sort-of friends so easy and provided so many obvious benefits — photo sharing being one of the main ones — that most users have been blissfully unconcerned about giving so much of their personal data to the network. And while some argue they should be paid for their membership, others clearly feel that the trade-off is more than worth it.

So far, so good. But the looming risk for both Facebook and any other provider that wants to control the output of its users — including Twitter and Google — is that even complacent users can become militant when the service they depend on mistreats them in some way. We have seen flashes of that whenever Facebook changes its privacy settings, when Twitter changed its censorship rules, and even when Google started fiddling with its search results to promote its own social network instead of remaining objective about its content. And we see flashes of it when Facebook blocks content, as it has with breast-feeding photos — causing demonstrations by outraged user groups.

While none of these tremors has turned into a seismic shift so far, that doesn’t mean they won’t. AOL seemed so dominant in its time that it managed to convince Time Warner that it was worth $160 billion, in what is still one of the most disastrous technology deals of all time. But it faded because users realized that the benefits of being inside its garden were far outweighed by the downsides and that the open Internet wasn’t so bad after all. Will users eventually come to the same conclusion about Apple or Facebook — or even Google?

For social networks and tools like Facebook and Twitter, the relationship with users is an even more fragile one. Facebook’s 800 million users may seem like an unassailable moat around the giant social network, but if enough of them decide they are better off elsewhere, Facebook will become a ghost town. Twitter could easily meet the same fate. As Mark Zuckerberg prepares to count his billions, he needs to remember that in the end, it’s not open or closed that wins — it’s useful and not useful.

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Whenever newspaper executives get together to bemoan the fate of their industry, someone inevitably brings up the so-called “original sin” of the online news business — namely, a failure to charge for content when the web was new. One of the latest manifestations of this idea appears in an upcoming e-book called “Why American Newspapers Gave Away the Future,” from former Wall Street Journal executive Richard Tofel, which looks at the failure of newspapers on a number of levels. But this theory that newspapers could have somehow won a war against the internet if they had just charged users for content misses the point — the point being that the media game is now being played according to different rules.

Although Tofel’s book isn’t available yet (it will be available for download on Wednesday), media blogger Jim Romenesko has some excerpts from the text, and among other things the author appears to be suggesting that newspapers could have saved themselves from certain doom if they had only continued the practice of charging for their content when the internet came along. As Tofel puts it:

How, as a visitor from another planet might ask, did a large industry that had successfully charged customers for its product for more than a century come to decide to give that product away and thus threaten its very existence?

Putting content online for free was not a sin, nor was it original

Tofel notes in the comments section of Romenesko’s blog that his view of the evolution of newspapers and the web is more nuanced than just believing that they could have saved themselves by putting up paywalls, but this still sounds like the old “original sin” argument that has been rattling around in media circles for years now. One of the first to put it into words was former newspaper editor Alan “Newsosaur” Mutter, who said “the Original Sin among most publishers was permitting their content be consumed for free on the web,” and suggested that recovering from this sin was going to be just as hard as recovering from the sins committed in the Garden of Eden.

Another outlet that took up the idea of an “original sin” was the American Journalism Review, which wrote about how the failure to charge for content when newspaper websites first appeared was a decision that doomed the industry to poverty and irrelevance. As one journalism professor quoted in the piece put it:

When newspaper publishers decided they couldn’t charge for content, Reisner says, they started giving it away, and wound up “being sluts who’d put out for any old Google that came their way.”

This idea is part of the same conceptual framework as News Corp. billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s continued insistence that Google and other online news aggregators are “stealing” content from newspapers, and that they should be forced to pay for it. Both viewpoints are an attempt to reimpose the traditional structure of the media business — in which newspapers had something close to a monopoly on the news, and also controlled one of the primary platforms through which it was distributed.

Neither of those things are the case now, as Om has described in his posts about the “democratization of distribution,” and as I’ve pointed out in posts about the disruption of the business of journalism, and what the new world of media looks like. News sources can “go direct” and publish their own content, as can anyone with a blog or a Twitter account, and new media entities can be born from virtually nothing — as the rise of The Huffington Post indicates. News now comes to readers in hundreds of different ways, not just through one or two platforms, and in the long run that is fundamentally a good thing.

Charging for content would only have delayed the inevitable

It’s also worth noting, as some did when the “original sin” idea first appeared, that newspapers have never made the bulk of their income from readers who pay for content. Subscription prices and newsstand sales have always been subservient to advertising, and in some cases giving content away can be a totally viable business model, provided advertisers are willing to pay enough for the attention of those readers. That value proposition worked in print, but it fails online — and that failure would not have been any less painful if newspapers had charged for access.

If anything, the original sin of newspapers was a failure to appreciate all the ways in which the internet was going to fundamentally change the nature of their business, and a failure to try and adapt to those changes quickly enough. In some ways, trying to perpetuate the old model of charging for their content — in the case of classified ads, for example — delayed that process of adaptation, and thereby allowed someone without preconceived notions about the marketplace (namely, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark) to win without even trying to disrupt the media industry.

Would any of this have changed if newspapers had simply charged for their content? No. Paywall fans like to point to the Wall Street Journal and The Economist as examples of how media outlets can charge users and remain financially healthy — or even to the New York Times, which has convinced about 325,000 people to subscribe and is estimated to be making about $80 million or so from the venture. But those examples ignore the fact that not every newspaper can be the WSJ or the NYT or The Economist, and they also ignore the fact that the revenue picture at New York Times is far from rosy, despite its paywall.

Success in the news business isn’t going to come from staring longingly into the past and thinking about some mythical Golden Age in which newspapers all charged for their content and the internet was not a disruptive force. The disruption has happened, and the business has been irrevocably altered — if they want to survive, newspapers should spend more time thinking about how to adapt, and less time dreaming about how much better life would be if only they had put up a paywall 10 years ago.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Gabriel S. Delgado and

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If there was a bright spot in the latest quarterly results from the New York Times, it’s the fact that the newspaper’s metered paywall has attracted almost 325,000 subscribers willing to pay a monthly fee for the site. Despite all the celebrating from the pro-paywall camp, however, that bright spot was more than overshadowed by the other dark clouds in the numbers — including the fact that print advertising revenue continues to decline, and the paper’s former online jewel About.com got whacked by Google’s algorithm updates. Anyone who takes on the job of CEO at the media company is going to have to start thinking creatively about its business, because all the easy money has already been made.

Although the paywall and related print-subscription deals helped boost circulation revenue by almost 5 percent in the NYT’s media group — which includes the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the International Herald Tribune — and digital advertising revenue was also up by about 5 percent for the quarter, neither of those things were able to compensate for the continued drop-off in print advertising. Print ad revenue fell by almost 8 percent, which helped push the NYT’s fourth-quarter profit down by more than 12 percent, and for the full year the company reported a loss of $40 million.

Paywall revenue isn’t even close to making up the gap

The New York Times didn’t provide any helpful charts that would make the reality of this situation more obvious, so one blogger decided to come up with his own. Paul McMorrow, an editor at CommonWealth magazine, put together a chart that shows the contrast between the NYT’s advertising revenue, circulation revenue and its total revenue:

According to newspaper-industry analyst Ken Doctor, the NYT is probably pulling in about $86 million or so from its digital paywall — or “metered access,” as the paper likes to call it, since you get to read 20 articles for free before you get hit with a request for your credit card. But that’s not even close to being enough to make up for the decline in ad revenue, both print and digital, which dropped by 7 percent in the quarter.

One of the biggest problems for the Times is that its former online star About.com, which the company bought in 2005 for $410 million, has seen both its profitability and revenue-generating ability implode in the wake of an update to Google’s search algorithm — a change that was designed to penalize what the company called “low quality” content sites, or what some call “content farms.” In the most recent quarter, the NYT said About’s revenue fell by 26 percent, and profit fell by a staggering 67 percent.

As McMorrow’s chart shows, the Times is still far under water in terms of revenue, despite the benefit of its paywall. As I’ve argued before, there’s nothing wrong with having a paywall — although in many cases it amounts to building a wall of sandbags around the print newspaper edition, which provides most of the ad revenue — but if a paywall is your only strategy for responding to digital disruption of the media business, then you are almost certainly doomed, whether you are the New York Times or not.

Which way will the new CEO go — towards the past or the future?

So what should a new CEO be looking at to revitalize the NYT for a digital age? Ken Doctor suggests that the paper needs to look beyond just subcription revenue and focus on how it can target those 325,000 digital subscribers — since it knows who they are and where they live, and it already has their credit-card numbers.

I would take it one step further, however, and suggest that the new CEO think about some of the suggestions about “reverse paywalls” that have been made by journalism professor Jeff Jarvis, and also by former Washington Post managing editor Raju Narisetti (who is now at the Wall Street Journal in a digital role). The main principle behind this idea is that regular readers should get more than just a sales rep hitting them up for a monthly payment — the fact that they are a devoted fan should entitle them to earn rewards, whether it’s money off their subscription for interacting with the paper, or offers that others don’t get.

The NYT has taken a few steps towards trying to build relationships with its readers through what I’ve called the “levelling up” process that it recently added to its comment section, where readers can achieve preferred status for good behavior. Those are the building blocks of a relationship that the paper could use to its own benefit in all kinds of ways, many of which could generate new sources of revenue — real-life events, for example, which has been one of the things that has helped turn The Atlantic around, or a line of e-books based on the newspaper’s original reporting.

Another thing the NYT could — and should — be thinking about is what the role of an information provider is in the digital age. Is it to act as a gatekeeper for certain kinds of data and try to reimpose the scarcity that used to exist in the print era? Or is it to find partners to distribute that information in as many ways as possible, and to think of the paper as a data platform, as The Guardian has with its open-platform project? One way looks to the past, and the other to the future. Which way will the NYT go?

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users jphilipg and Giuseppe Bognanni

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As more authors choose to do an end-run around the traditional book business by going the self-publishing route, traditional publishers are finding it harder and harder to justify their existence. While some have risen to the industry’s defence — arguing that a good publisher helps refine a book, or acts as a curator by filtering out the lower-quality content — others are ready to do away with them altogether. In the latter group are authors like entrepreneur James Altucher, who argues that everyone needs to become a self-publisher, and J.A. Konrath, who says publishers are tied to a “broken, outdated and increasingly irrelevant business model.”

Altucher, who has been a financial analyst, a stock trader and founded several technology companies over the years, says that anyone who is in business or is a writer of any kind — including bloggers — should publish their own books. E-books are “the new business card,” he says. And why self-publish? Among other things, Altucher argues that the marketing value publishers provide is virtually wortheless, that writers have more control over their books and keep more of the revenue when they self-publish, and that author advances are going to zero as margins in the publishing industry come under pressure.

Konrath, meanwhile, hits many of the same points in his recent comments about the lack of value that publishers provide — especially for authors who already have an audience and are willing to design and promote their own books. Konrath made his comments in response to a profile of his former publisher, who he said were “dedicated, talented professionals” working in a broken and outdated industry.

Services publishers provide are increasingly unnecessary

Authors who have defended their publishers, including one we wrote about recently who made the decision not to self-publish her novel, argue that good publishers provide a number of services both for authors and for the book business in general — including the “curation” of new books, where publishers discard the dross and focus on the best. But Konrath says this is increasingly unnecessary:

Curation is no longer important. Readers are very capable of finding ebooks that interest them (the same way they can find YouTube videos, websites, and TV shows that interest them.) They no longer need to be told by a publisher, “This is worthy.” They can make that call on their own.

The author also notes that by acting as gatekeepers, publishers miss a lot of potentially good books — including his own. While his former publisher released one of his books in several countries, Konrath says they passed on two subsequent titles: the one that they promoted has made about $60,000 in three years, while the two that the publisher decided not to release have brought in four times that amount in just two years. Konrath and Altucher both note that traditional publishers still take a substantial proportion of the revenue from a book — over 50 percent in many cases — for doing relatively little. Says Konrath:

I understand Grand Central has overhead. But as an author, why should I care? I can hire out for editing, proofreading, formatting, and cover design, and those are fixed, sunk costs. Once those are paid, I can earn 70% on a self-pubbed ebook. Plus, I can set my own price. Lower prices sell more copies.

Publishers are still thinking like gatekeepers

Konrath also makes the point that many traditional publishers seem to spend most of their time trying to promote the sale of printed books, and as a result are distorting or not taking advantage of the market for e-books — including pricing them too high, as we’ve pointed out in the past. This kind of behavior, he says, feels more like an industry that is trying to protect its existing business model at the expense of its authors:

Originally, the purpose of a publisher was to connect writers with readers. Lately, publishers are more concerned with selling as many pieces of paper as possible. Ebooks are priced high to protect paper sales. The agency model was forced on Amazon is to protect paper sales. Windowing is to protect paper sales. If publishers truly wanted to connect writers and readers, there is no better way to do it than digitally.

We’ve written a number of times about the disruption the publishing business is undergoing, much of which is coming from Amazon — both through its Kindle-based self-publishing features, and through its increasingly aggressive moves to bolster its own status as a publisher, by signing authors like Tim Ferriss. Every few months there seems to be a new self-publishing success story, whether it’s young-adult author Amanda Hocking with her $2 million in revenue or million-selling author John Locke.

The main point both Altucher and Konrath are making, I think, is that traditional publishers who want to remain in business are going to have to reconsider a lot of fundamental aspects of their current model — including their existing fee structure — and try harder to make the case to authors that they serve a purpose at all. As Konrath says: “Writers are essential. Readers are essential. Publishers are not.” And if you are no longer essential to the process, your job just got a lot harder.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users David Daniels and Jeremy Mates

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In a blog post at her eponymous website, Arianna Huffington has provided some numbers that describe the growth of the news network over the past year — a year that coincided with its acquisition by AOL for $315 million — and more than a few of them are eye-popping. At a time when some newspaper websites are happy to get page views in the tens of millions in a month, The Huffington Post racked up more than a billion page views in December. And while page views can be inflated, some of the site’s other metrics show that if there’s one thing the team that build the HuffPo understands, it is how to get reader engagement to hit levels that other news sites and publishers can only dream of.

It should be noted that AOL started redirecting its existing news portal site to the Huffington Post site in May, which undoubtedly helped boost many of the traffic numbers (although it’s not clear just how many visitors the AOL News site was getting when it made the switch). That could help explain why unique monthly visitors — a metric that many websites prefer over raw page views — climbed by almost 50 percent to 36 million. But in any case, that puts the site ahead of the New York Times, and not far behind the Daily Mail, the largest newspaper site with 45 million unique visitors a month.

Not the web’s largest news site, but it’s getting there

The Huffington Post isn’t quite the largest news site on the web just yet — Yahoo News says that it gets more than 80 million unique visitors a month, and more than 5 billion pageviews, and CNN gets about 73 million uniques a month. And there are some other massive websites who are on the fringes of the media business: Reddit recently crossed the 2 billion page-view mark, and says it gets about 34 million uniques a month, and Tumblr said recently that it gets over 15 billion page views a month, and reaches about 120 million users through its network of 42 million blogs.

Apart from the monthly unique visitor or page-view figures, however, some of the most fascinating numbers from Huffington Post are the ones around reader participation, including more than 6 million comments in the past month alone, and more than 1.4 million referrals from Facebook in a single day. Some of the other numbers include:

• Comments on a single day: 253,331 (Jan 25, 2012)
• New commenters signing up per day: 5,500
• Social referrals in a month: 21.6 million (December 2011)
• Facebook referrals in a day: 1.4 million (January 4, 2012)
• Blog posts in last year: 61,688
• Stories published per day: over 1,000

One of the secrets to the site’s massive traffic numbers is probably the sheer volume of stories and blog posts that Huffington Post publishes — over 1,000 every day. Many of those, of course, are likely to be the kind of “aggregated” story from another publication that has drawn so much criticism from traditional news entities such as the New York Times. And in many cases, at least judging by the numbers above, the Huffington Post is probably getting orders of magnitude more engagement from readers even on those stories than the newspaper or website that originally carried them.

The lesson: Use whatever social tools are available

Among the things the Huffington Post did that helped make it a social-news behemoth was to integrate Facebook’s open platform (then called Facebook Connect) into the site almost as soon as it was launched — something that immediately allowed readers to see what articles their friends had read, shared and commented on. That drove millions of readers to the site, and also boosted the number of comments by over 50 percent. And the site has also integrated virtually every other sharing tool known to man to make it easy for readers to share, and even come up with some of its own.

Traditional media critics attack the Huffington Post for its aggregation, but as Nieman fellow David Skok pointed out recently at the Nieman Lab blog, aggregation is deeply embedded in the DNA of the media industry, and always has been. And as we’ve tried to point out before at GigaOM, aggregation and particularly curation are two of the skills that modern media companies need the most — or readers overwhelmed by information will go elsewhere, whether to apps like Flipboard and Zite or to new services that give them the tools they need to filter that growing ocean of content.

Some media outlets are experimenting with new services that show they understand this, including Reuters with its just-launched Social Pulse feature — which aggregates top news from both its wire service and other news sites. Meanwhile, new players like BuzzFeed (which is run by many of the key players from the early Huffington Post) are moving from being just aggregators to becoming news entities in their own right by hiring reporters, and even Tumblr is hiring journalists to act as curators of its network — a very media-like thing to do. New media entities are everywhere, it seems.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Libertinus Yomango and World Economic Forum

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There has been a lot of attention — to say the least — paid to Facebook’s long-awaited public stock offering, which could put a valuation on the company as high as $100 billion. For the first time, average investors will get a chance to own a piece of the massive social network and its multibillion-dollar revenue stream. But in a very important way, Facebook still remains a private company. Why? Because it is controlled by CEO Mark Zuckerberg through a special class of stock that gives him super-voting rights, and he also controls the board. In other words, you may own stock in the company, but you have virtually no say in what happens to it.

As described in the Facebook prospectus, when new shareholders buy stock in the company, once it is publicly traded they will get class A shares, which carry a single vote each. Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of the early investors in the company own class B shares, which have 10 votes each. The co-founder and CEO has about 28 percent of this class of stock; but he also has voting agreements with a number of other Facebook insiders and co-founders that give him about 57 percent of the votes in the company.

Zuckerberg retains control forever, even after his death

And what happens when other holders of the class B super-voting stock decide to sell their shares, as some early investors will no doubt do when the company starts trading publicly? At that point, they are automatically converted to class A shares, which means Zuckerberg’s control over the voting structure effectively remains the same. And the Facebook founder even has the right to transfer control of the company to a handpicked successor after his death.

Facebook is far from the only tech superstar to choose this kind of tiered structure: Larry Page and Sergey Brin retained control of Google after it went public by owning super-voting shares that gave them 10 votes per share, although the two have said they will be selling some large chunks of their stock over the next couple of years, which will reduce their control. Zynga also has super-voting shares that give founder and CEO Mark Pincus 10 votes per share, just as LinkedIn’s and Groupon’s founders have votes that come with 150 votes each.

So are multiple-voting shares good or bad? That depends on whether you believe that giving a 27-year-old entrepreneur almost complete control over the fate of a $100-billion company is a good thing or not. In terms of what is called “corporate governance,” multiple-voting shares are seen as a large risk factor, in part because of what some corporate raiders like Conrad Black have done to their companies by controlling them so completely.

Is giving the CEO ultimate control good or bad?

In Silicon Valley in particular, where entrepreneurs are seen as a special breed, retaining control over your company is viewed as a positive thing. Zuckerberg has been congratulated by many insiders for managing to keep an iron grip on the company through multiple rounds of financing. And this perspective is understandable for entrepreneurs, many of whom are afraid that their successful company will be taken over by VCs or others who don’t have its best interests at heart, as Apple was early in its history.

But when you are a public company, retaining that much control not just only the votes but also over the board of directors — Zuckerberg has the right to nominate a majority of the board as a result of voting agreements with other shareholders and founders — can be a dangerous thing. Although Steve Jobs didn’t control his board in the same way Zuckerberg does, Apple’s board of directors was criticized for keeping the details of Jobs’ illness hidden from investors and also for approving the repricing of options in a way that arguably went against the interests of common shareholders.

Did the kind of control that Steve Jobs wielded over Apple ultimately result in some incredible, world-changing products? Sure it did. And shareholders who have seen their investment multiply a hundredfold are likely unconcerned about any of the board or option irregularities. But does the end always justify the means?

Selling shares to the public is supposed to come with a certain amount of responsibility to those shareholders, and they should have the ability to hold a CEO and a board accountable if decisions are made that go against their interests. But controlling almost 60 percent of the votes and a majority of the board means Zuckerberg gets to fundamentally do whatever he wants with Facebook — and public shareholders are just along for the ride. Investors should be aware of that before they decide to buy a ticket.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Faramarz Hashemi

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There is a lot to take in when it comes to the much-anticipated Facebook IPO filing: the company’s massive user base of 845 million (more than half of whom log on at least once a day), the $1 billion in net income it made last year, the almost $4 billion in revenue and so on. And it is pretty obvious that co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to extend his social network beyond that, to reach as many human beings on the planet as possible. But in the letter to shareholders that is included in the filing, Zuckerberg makes it clear that his vision goes beyond even that: He wants to fundamentally rewire the way the world works, from interpersonal interactions to commerce to even government.

In the note, which founders and CEOs typically include in their securities filings as a way of introducing themselves and their vision to investors (Google introduced the phrase it is probably best known for, “Don’t be evil”), Zuckerberg says he believes the social connections Facebook allows users to create are more than just a way for friends to stay in touch. He says they can help to change the world:

By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph — a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date.

We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring. We have already helped more than 800 million people map out more than 100 billion connections so far, and our goal is to help this rewiring accelerate.

Think about that for a moment. It is fairly common for mission statements in IPO filings to be grandiose, but even so, Zuckerberg’s vision is fairly massive: He is saying he believes social connections will rewire the entire structure of society, that it will become more like a network graph, with multiple connections among points, instead of a top-down hierarchy. He says that a more open and connected world will “help create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services,” because as people share their opinions, it makes it easier to “improve the quality and efficiency of their lives.”

A more networked world — and one company at the center

Not only that, but Zuckerberg says social tools — experienced through Facebook, obviously — can “bring a more honest and transparent dialogue around government” that could help empower people and make officials more accountable:

By giving people the power to share, we are starting to see people make their voices heard on a different scale from what has historically been possible. These voices will increase in number and volume. They cannot be ignored. Over time, we expect governments will become more responsive to issues and concerns raised directly by all their people rather than through intermediaries controlled by a select few.

This view of a networked world isn’t something the Facebook CEO came up with all by himself. Academics and social theorists such as Yochai Benkler — the author of the book The Wealth of Networks — and others have been discussing the impact of network theory for some time and the value of what sociologist Mark Granovetter called “weak ties” among individuals (as opposed to the strong ties of religion, culture, etc.). And we have already seen how powerful Facebook connections can be during events like the Arab Spring in Egypt.

But Zuckerberg isn’t just another social-networking theorist. He is the CEO of a company that touches close to a billion people in one way or another, with a market value in the $100 billion range. And he doesn’t just want to enable these changes in society; on a fairly fundamental level, he wants to control them. Whether (and for how long) Facebook can manage to walk the line between enabling and controlling social change remains to be seen.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Richard Engel, NBC

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Updated: If there’s one thing that has been sucking most of the oxygen out of Silicon Valley — and Wall Street too — over the past few months, it’s the growing frenzy over Facebook’s IPO filing, which is rumored to be taking place as early as today, and is expected to put a price tag as high as $100 billion on the giant social network (Update: The Facebook S-1 prospectus is here). But apart from the rampant speculation about the company’s ultimate valuation and who will benefit the most, the bigger question about the offering is whether it marks the beginning of a new era of growth for Facebook. Or is it just a massive cashing-out exercise, and a sign that this generation’s version of AOL has finally peaked?

The fact that Facebook’s stock issue is expected to be one of the largest technology offerings of all time — as much as five times the size of Google’s $1.7-billion initial share issue in 2004 — reinforces that this is a company that is already a behemoth in terms of its market power and sheer size. Not only does it have close to a billion active users, but it has more than 3,000 employees, and revenues that are estimated to be in the $4-billion range. The company already controls almost 30 percent of the display advertising business, giving it almost three times the share that Yahoo has.

Facebook doesn’t really need to go public at all

For many technology companies that go public, the IPO is a necessary step on the road to scaling the business — an injection of financing that allows the company to grow, move into new markets, hire staff, etc. But Facebook has no real need for this kind of financing, if it ever did: The company has already raised several billion dollars worth of funding from Goldman Sachs, Russia’s Yuri Milner, China’s Li Ka-shing, and various syndicates of private venture capitalists, and is widely traded on private stock exchanges such as SecondMarket. It could certainly continue to do this without any trouble, given its ongoing growth, and at one point it looked like Facebook might never go public at all.

More than anything, what the Facebook IPO seems to represent is an opportunity for all of those initial backers — and many of the company’s own employees — to cash out. While many public stock offerings are orchestrated to allow this to happen, the sheer scale of Facebook’s IPO puts it in a category all by itself. And if the thousands of millionaires and dozens of billionaires who are created by the offering eventually put some of that windfall back into the startup scene, perhaps it will be worth it.

But surely some investors will stick with the company, to watch it grow even further? Undoubtedly some will — but that raises the $100-billion question for investors of any kind looking at this offering: How much bigger can Facebook possibly get? It already has a committed user base of close to one billion people, and it controls a massive chunk of the online display advertising market. Yes, both of those numbers are still growing, as users in other countries discover the network, and advertisers move their campaigns to Facebook in an attempt to benefit from social activity there. But how much growth is left?

Already, there are anecdotal signs that some are giving up on the network because it is simply too noisy. Younger users are said to be leaving for newer platforms like Twitter and Tumblr, in part because they want to avoid their parents — who are all on Facebook.

Where does Facebook look for growth now?

The biggest single challenge for Facebook is to find a way to generate more and more revenue from those billion users. Social games are well-established thanks to Zynga and others, so there is little likelihood of a major moon shot coming from that segment of the market that will propel Facebook’s growth into the stratosphere. Could it become a bank, by building on and expanding its virtual currency, Facebook Credits? Perhaps. But the most obvious route to growth is to grab a larger share of the advertising market, and that’s what its “frictionless sharing” apps are designed to do.

Many advertisers, however, seem to be unconvinced — at least so far — that Facebook’s social advertising is worth paying very much for. The social network has a large share of the market, but its click-through rates and other metrics of engagement are still relatively low, and that is likely keeping a lot of money on the sidelines. Facebook has to prove that the benefits of targeting users through their social activity is worth more than their existing ads, and there are still skeptics who believe users who are sharing personal thoughts and behavior are fundamentally not interested in or receptive to traditional advertising.

All that comes on top of continued competition from Google, which already has a massive advertising base and the algorithms to parse search and behavior with equal precision — and is busy building a social platform that will give it both activity information on millions of users and a built-in identity structure for keeping those users in place. By comparison, Facebook’s walled garden could start looking even more like AOL than some believe it already does, and we all know how that movie ends.

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As an artist who probably makes a substantial income from licensing his music, you might think Neil Young would frown on piracy and file-sharing, but that appears not to be the case, according to an interview he gave at the Dive Into Media conference in Los Angeles. Instead of railing against file-sharers, Young called piracy “the new radio” because it’s “how music gets around.” The musician’s comment puts a lot of the hysteria about copyright infringement into perspective — as we’ve pointed out before, file-sharing and monetization aren’t mutually exclusive, and in many cases a certain amount of so-called “piracy” can actually be good for business, as authors, musicians and even game developers have come to realize.

Comparing piracy to radio is a smart way of looking at the issue: in the early days of the music business, when live performances and record sales were the main revenue generator for artists and publishers, radio itself was seen as a form of piracy (as sheet music was before that). Musicians fulminated about radio stations playing their music for free, and some record labels made their acts sign waivers saying they would not appear on the radio. In the end, of course, radio became a huge revenue driver for music — although it did so in part because record labels and publishers pushed for licensing fees.

Radio was seen as piracy too, but became a publicity engine

But more than just being a source of fees, radio was also a huge publicity engine for music, and eventually this became so obvious that at one point record labels were giving radio stations and disc jockeys “payola” under the table to promote their music. And now we have come full circle with Neil Young’s comment:

I look at the internet as the new radio. I look at the radio as gone. [...] Piracy is the new radio. That’s how music gets around.

This idea of piracy as being “how content gets around” doesn’t just apply to music either. In a videotaped comment last year about piracy, British author Neil Gaiman — who I interviewed recently about his opposition to the proposed federal anti-piracy bills SOPA and PIPA — said that he used to be irate about people pirating his work, but eventually came to realize that he was actually selling more copies of his physical books in those countries where piracy was the highest. Brazilian author Paulo Coelho found the same thing, and actually started uploading his own work to files-sharing sites without telling his publisher.

Some game developers — the digital-era equivalent of songwriters and authors, in many ways — have also come to see piracy as being a necessary evil, and in many cases a positive force. Markus Persson, the Swedish developer of the massively popular game Minecraft, has said that he came to see piracy of his game as a form of marketing. And at a recent music-industry conference in Europe, the CEO of superstar game company Rovio (creator of Angry Birds) said that piracy “may not be a bad thing” because it increases demand for the official version of the company’s products.

If you make it easy to get and pay for, piracy isn’t an issue

Even Microsoft CEO Bill Gates has been known to see the virtues of a little piracy, especially in developing markets like China. The Microsoft founder reportedly said of that market: “As long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.” Gates clearly saw pirating as a kind of loss leader, creating eventual market demand.

We’ve described before how one of the reasons why users engage in copyright infringement is that distributors make it too cumbersome to get the official version of whatever the content is, as venture capitalist Fred Wilson complained in a recent post, admitting that he pirated a livestream of a basketball game. But the example of comedian Louis CK — who allowed anyone to download his comedy special for just $5 with no copyright protection, and made over $1 million in less than a week — shows that there is still room for creators to monetize their content, if they make it as easy as possible.

As Andrew Weissman of Union Square Ventures noted in a recent post, information wants to be free — not necessarily free meaning it costs nothing, but free in the sense of being friction-free to access. And if you don’t make it easy for your music or writing or other content to “get around,” as Neil Young puts it, then piracy will take care of that for you.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons and Flickr user Paul Sapiano

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At the Dive Into Media conference on Monday, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said the company doesn’t see itself as a media entity, although he admited it is in the media business. It’s not surprising Twitter wouldn’t want to come right out and call itself a media company, since a growing part of its business is working with traditional media companies — including television networks and movie studios — to promote their content through its network. But in most of the ways that matter, Twitter definitely qualifies as a media entity, which is why its decision to selectively censor the user-generated content that flows through its network is so important.

In fact, the criticism Twitter got after its announcement that it would start selectively blocking tweets (if requested to do so by a government or court order) is just more confirmation it is a media company. Its decision drew attention for the same reason that people reacted suspiciously when Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal invested so heavily in the company — a reaction almost identical to the response many had when News Corp. billionaire Rupert Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal.

It may be handled well, but censorship is still censorship

When you’re a media company, the question of who ultimately controls the levers that distribute content is a crucial issue. How would readers of the New York Times  respond if the newspaper said it planned to black out certain pages or remove certain articles if requested to do so by a government edict? Probably very much like some Twitter users have responded to the company’s recent announcement (although the NYT and other newspapers don’t print stories if they are subject to a publication ban by the courts, which some might argue is roughly analogous to Twitter’s new policy).

Is it safe to say that #Twitter is selling us out? blog.twitter.com/2012/01/tweets… what if the content provider is from the country oppressing him?—
Mahmoud Salem (@Sandmonkey) January 27, 2012

As a number of smart observers like Jillian York of the Electronic Freedom Foundation and sociologist Zeynep Tufekci have pointed out since the censorship furor began, there is actually a lot to like about the company’s new policy. For one thing, it’s going to be transparent about these demands, and says it will try hard to resist government attempts to block certain topics during events like the “Arab Spring” revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia. It’s also relatively easy to get around the country-specific blocking, and the Twitter API would probably make it easy to re-route tweets as well.

That said, however, there is still a lot that remains unclear about how this will work in practice. The company’s approach to such requests in a foreign dictatorship like Egypt or Libya might be obvious, but what happens when the authorities in a place like Britain try to force the company to remove tweets that breach one of its sweeping “super-injunctions” — which prevent anyone from even mentioning that there is a publication ban on information about a certain legal case? How will that work?

What kind of media company does Twitter want to be?

Dick Costolo may want to avoid calling Twitter a media entity, in part because he doesn’t want to jeopardize any relationships with existing media companies like Disney or NBC.And he is right in the sense that Twitter doesn’t create any of its own content in the same way a TV network or a newspaper does. But YouTube doesn’t create a lot of its own content either — does that mean it isn’t a media entity? Hardly. In fact, the filtering and curation and surfacing of relevant content is arguably an even more important media function than it has ever been, and that seems to be the direction in which Twitter is going.

Google also likes to strenuously deny it’s a media company, but it is a media entity, whether it wants to be one or not, and so is Twitter. They may be a different kind of media company — one whose business consists primarily of distributing other people’s content, filtering and curating it, then monetizing the attention around that — but they are members of the media nevertheless. And as Peter Kafka pointed out during his interview with Costolo at the Dive Into Media conference, the fact that Twitter relies primarily on advertising revenue is just another sign of that.

There’s an existing category of media company that looks a lot like Twitter in many ways, and that is the newswire provider — a company like Associated Press, for example. While it also has a lot of staff who create their own content, the bulk of its actual business consists of distributing content from other media entities to various customers. And as I’ve pointed out in the past, when it comes to distribution of real-time breaking news, Twitter has become the newswire for many users.

Because of the way it’s structured, there has always been tension between AP’s interests as a business — including the monetization of the content it distributes — and those of its member newspapers. In a similar way, there is a tension between Twitter’s business interests and those of its content creators: its users. Twitter has its own reasons for making the decisions it does, and the new censorship policy may or may not be the best solution to a bad situation, but that doesn’t change the fact that its users are the ones who ultimately create all that content — and if Twitter’s interests and those of its users get too far apart, it may find it has a lot less content to distribute.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users George Kelly and Petteri Sulonen

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In a piece in the New York Times on the weekend, media writer David Carr took a look at News Corp. billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s use of Twitter, and how the media mogul has used it as both a bully pulpit and a soapbox. Carr’s fellow media writer Brian Stelter, however, has a somewhat different view: at a conference on social media at Columbia University, Stelter said that “sources going direct,” as Murdoch has done with Twitter, is one of most disruptive changes that have hit journalism in the digital age, and the thing that “keeps me up at night.” Stelter is right to be concerned — it is clearly a paradigm shift. But is it good for journalism?

As Carr’s story points out, even though the News Corp. founder has only been on Twitter for a relatively short time, Murdoch’s tweets have already provided a huge amount of enjoyment (and ammunition) for media buffs, Murdoch-haters and everyone in between — including media reporters like Carr and Stelter. From his typo-laden missives about Barack Obama caving in to anti-piracy activists over SOPA and PIPA to his Google-bashing and attacks on Governor Cuomo, the combative mogul has made things a lot more interesting. He’s even apologized for the failure of MySpace:

Many questions and jokes about My Space.simple answer – we screwed up in every way possible, learned lots of valuable expensive lessons.—
Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) January 13, 2012

First blogs, now Twitter and Google Hangouts

Murdoch’s ranting on Twitter seems harmless enough. So why does this kind of activity keep Brian Stelter up at night? Because it is just another example of the “sources going direct” — to use a phrase that blogging pioneer Dave Winer coined some time ago to describe what happens when those who are directly involved in the news have the ability to publish their own thoughts, and reach readers and viewers directly. First, that ability came through blogging, and now it has been amplified even further with Twitter and other social tools. It’s all part of what Om has called the “democratization of distribution.”

In addition to saying it keeps him up at night, Stelter said that this ability for sources to go direct is “the generational issue of our time for journalists.” He didn’t elaborate on why he thinks this, but I have a few ideas: for one thing, it removes the need for the journalist as middleman or information gatekeeper. In the past, a journalist could have made a pretty good name for themselves by simply getting access to Rupert Murdoch and quoting his thoughts on Barack Obama or Google — but now, he is providing those himself.

Murdoch is only the latest example of this phenomenon, of course. It arguably began with blogging, which allowed other prominent newsmakers like billionaire sports-team owner Mark Cuban to reach a broad audience directly (Cuban even published his own email interviews with journalists, so he could correct the record). It has continued with early adopters like basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal, who announced the news of his retirement on Twitter through a service called Tout. Celebrities have also made use of it to get their own stories out to their fans — or to simply rant, Courtney Love-style.

In the end, this should be good for serious journalism

Over the past year, we have seen this phenomenon accelerate to the point where the White House is doing live discussions on YouTube, taking questions from Twitter during a “town hall,” and now is doing Google+ “hangouts” where the president responds to citizens with concerns about the country. This has gone so far beyond the fireside radio chats that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt used to communicate his message that it’s almost hard to fathom how much has changed in just a few decades:

So what is the job of a media or sports or political reporter now? There’s no question that we still need them, and in fact we may need them even more — but now we need them to filter and make sense of what is out there, and to probe beneath the surface for the real meaning behind what Murdoch says on Twitter or what a basketball star says about themselves or their career. In other words, we need less of a focus on “scoops” that are three sentences long and have a half-life of five minutes, and more smart analysis. So the reality is that all of those reporting jobs have gotten a lot harder.

In the end, however, that is probably a good thing for journalism — and for consumers of journalism as well. Those who only wish to be distracted by the 140-character rantings of a billionaire now have a source for that, and those who want a little more depth will hopefully get some of that as well. For media companies whose focus is solely on those micro-scoops and quotes from celebrities, however, the future doesn’t look so bright.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Sandy Honig and See-ming Lee

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Planning to make a joke on Twitter about bombing something? You might want to reconsider: according to a report from Britain, two British tourists were detained and then denied entry into the U.S. recently after they joked about destroying America and digging up Marilyn Monroe. The fact that the Department of Homeland Security and other authorities — including the FBI — are monitoring social media like Twitter and Facebook isn’t that surprising. But the fact that Homeland Security is willing to detain people based on what is clearly a harmless joke raises questions about what the impact of all that monitoring will be.

Leigh Van Bryan, a 26-year-old bar manager from Coventry, told The Sun that he and friend Emily Bunting were stopped by border guards when they arrived at Los Angeles International Airport and questioned for five hours about messages that Van Bryan had posted on Twitter saying he planned to “destroy America.” After the questioning, during which the Irish traveller said that Homeland Security threatened the two, they were put in a van and taken to a holding cell overnight, along with some illegal immigrants. After being held overnight, they said they were forced to take a plane back to England.

According to a report in The Daily Mail, the Homeland Security officers gave Van Bryan a document that detailed why he was refused admission to the United States, and it reads like a bad joke itself, saying:

He had posted on his Tweeter website account that he was coming to the United States to dig up the grave of Marilyn Monroe… Also on his tweeter account Mr Bryan posted that he was coming to destroy America.

Van Bryan told the newspaper that he tried to explain to Homeland Security officials that the term “destroy” was British slang referring to a party, and that his comments about “digging up Marilyn Monroe” were an attempt at humor, but that the officers didn’t listen. The authorities even searched their luggage looking for shovels and other tools, he said.

Monitoring social media makes sense — within reason

This isn’t the first time that someone has gotten in trouble for making a joke on Twitter: a British businessman named Paul Chambers was arrested under the Terrorism Act and questioned for more than seven hours in 2010 after making a joke on Twitter about blowing up an airport, a joke he said he made because he was frustrated about the airport being closed due to bad weather. He was tried and found guilty and fined a thousand pounds, and eventually lost his job as a result of the publicity.

The fact that Homeland Security is monitoring social networks like Twitter and Facebook for certain keywords isn’t that surprising: the department said during a security review earlier this year that it has been monitoring those networks and a list of blogs and other sources (including WikiLeaks) for information about potential security hazards and what it called “situational awareness.” The Federal Bureau of Investigation also recently revealed that it is trying to develop a service that can monitor social-media sources and automatically create alerts based on the information it finds there.

To me, it makes perfect sense for security officials to be monitoring social networks and even blogs. This is all public information that could contain useful signals about real terrorism or threats to national security of some kind, and it should obviously be part of the normal intelligence process. But doing this properly also requires some sense of proportion about what constitutes a real threat and what is clearly a joke. Did Homeland Security really think that a 26-year-old bar manager was a serious threat?

We all know that we are likely being monitored in even more ways now than we have ever been, whether it’s by security cameras or algorithms that comb through tweets and Facebook posts. But that’s not the scary part — the scary part is what can happen when that information gets misinterpreted and it escalates into a major crisis for no reason.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Stefan and Rosaura Ochoa

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