Diller, of course, is doing all he can to help that along by investing in projects like Aereo, which has the established broadcasters running to the courtroom in an effort to get it shut down. Aereo allows people to purchase a digital antenna and receive over-the-air television shows, and as we’ve covered extensively, broadcasters are not happy that Aereo isn’t paying them for that right.

“Cable is a great closed system where the masses, now 100 million subscribers of cable, support ESPN that is only watched by 10 percent. That’s a great little plot so long as you can keep everybody inside the closed circle,” Diller said. “We’re out to get the centricity moved to the internet.”

Several days after Diller’s comments, an ESPN spokeswoman reached out in hopes of contradicting his statement on viewership. “Based on 4th Quarter 2012 data for five measured ESPN networks: 88% of households that can receive ESPN networks tune in to one or more of the networks. In 4th Quarter 2012, ESPN networks reached 89 million households and over 200M persons 2+ in those households – about two-thirds of the U.S. population,” the spokeswoman said in a statement, citing data from Nielsen and including viewership of ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNNEWS, ESPNU, and ESPN Deportes.

CNN’s Jeff Zucker, who was billed as a joint speaker alongside Diller but wound up playing second fiddle to questions for Diller, agreed that a shift will take place but wasn’t totally sure, as might be expected given the company that pays his bills, that it would happen all that quickly. Still, “at the end of the day we don’t care which platform you get your information from,” he said, emphasizing CNN’s digital products.

Younger folks are the ones who are going to make this happen, according to Diller. “I think that young people that don’t now subscribe to cable are maybe going to think of Aereo as an alternative because they don’t want to pay 100 bucks a month for cable,” he said.

Which tech companies will make this happen? Diller listed Apple (“I don’t think it’s some big secret that they’ve been working for years on trying to solve television”), Amazon and Microsoft.

This post was updated June 3rd after an ESPN spokeswoman sought to clarify Diller’s remarks.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Sector RoadMap: Content personalization in 2013
• Frenemy mine: The pros and cons of social partnerships for online media companies
• Content monetization: News licensing and syndication still need marketplaces and infrastructure

The deal, which was reported by the Wall Street Journal, will see BuzzFeed invest a low “eight figure sum” over the next two years to build up the platform.

Update: BuzzFeed followed up the CNN news by announcing it will “aggressively expand” its video operations under web video pioneer, Ze Frank, and that it will “build a social video studio, designed to create news and entertainment video content exclusively for YouTube.”

The first CNN video to appear on the site appeared Tuesday morning and features a mash-up of dramatic or heart-tugging clips drawn from famous rescues that have appeared on TV in recent years — Chilean miners, children in wells and so on:

The clip, which is hosted on a new BuzzFeed vertical called CNNBuzzFeed, includes ponderous voiceovers extolling the human spirit. It has yet to appear on CNN’s website.

The partnership appears to be an effort to bring some viral energy to CNN while allowing BuzzFeed to stake out more ground amidst mainstream media outlets. In the last year, the site, which was first known for cat videos, has broken several major news stories and formed partnerships with the likes of the New York Times.

CNN and BuzzFeed have not described the revenue angles of the deal, though it is worth noting that the conclusion of the “Rescue” video brings up invitations to watch clips other YouTube channels such as the Young Turks.

Here is how BuzzFeed described the nature of the YouTube partnership:

Production will be headquartered in a newly constructed social video studio in Los Angeles which will have a coffee shop and store where influencers, thinkers and celebrities will be able create informal videos made for the social web. The team will grow to over 30 people in the coming months. BuzzFeed Video will have a dedicated, prominent placement on the BuzzFeed homepage that will bring new forms of social content to the site’s 60MM unique visitors. Expansion plans include creating new channels, including recreating a video news format that is shareable.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

There’s no question that some of the reaction to the company’s job posting has strained the bounds of credulity: media gadfly and failed media entrepreneur Michael Wolff, for example, wrote about how the person who became Twitter’s head of news and journalism would have a job “more important than Jeff Zucker’s at CNN,” one that would be like “running a network news division in the 1970s or 80s, the biggest job that there has ever been in news.”

“Given the choice between being the executive editor of the New York Times or being the first Twitter news chief, you’d be well advised to think twice.”

Twitter says it isn’t a media operation

Wolff’s description is more than a little hyperbolic — but at the same time, not entirely untrue. Emily Bell, head of the Tow Center at Columbia University and former head of digital operations at The Guardian, described Twitter recently as “the most significant invention for journalism since the telephone,” and her opinion is shared by many in the media and outside it. For all its flaws, the service that started as a simple messaging app with a weird name has become a critical piece of the real-time information and journalistic infrastructure.

In his interview with PBS MediaShift, Luckie — who got his start doing social media for the Washington Post and was hired by Twitter last year to be part of their growing media-outreach team — downplayed the company’s media ambitions, saying the service wants to be a partner for media companies, and has no intentions of hiring reporters or editors, creating content or doing any of the other things that traditional media entities typically do.

“Twitter doesn’t have ambitions to be a news operation. Because Twitter is so central to what a lot of newsrooms are doing, naturally there’s a lot of hype around this position. No, Twitter has no editorial team. We’re not out there curating news, or saying, “here’s the source that you have to go to.” We’re not writing stories. We’re simply providing a platform for other people to do so.”

But I think Luckie’s response — while perhaps being technically true — misses the much larger point about what we mean when we say “digital-media entity,” and the increasingly powerful role that Twitter and other tools and services are playing in that ecosystem. In a nutshell, much of the power that used to reside with the creators of content has been moving to those who have platforms to disseminate it.

Where does the power lie in media?

The reality is that hiring journalists and creating content, as valuable as those things are (and I would like to stipulate that they are hugely valuable, before any traditional media fans get out the tar and feathers) is only part of what constitutes a media entity in the digital age. The other factor that is almost as valuable — and perhaps even more so, depending on your perspective — is the ability to aggregate, filter, distribute and monetize that content.

For a long time, traditional media entities like newspapers and TV networks owned both of these aspects of the media ecosystem, but that is no longer the case. Now, the most powerful platforms for distributing — and potentially monetizing — journalism and other kinds of content are not made of paper or TV tubes or coaxial cable, and they are not owned by family-run media conglomerates. They are companies like Twitter and YouTube and Facebook.

It’s true that Twitter in particular has focused on selling itself as a partner for media companies, rather than a competitor, which is one of the reasons why CEO Dick Costolo has tried hard to resist any attempt to paint the service as a media entity. Instead — as with Luckie’s interview — the company would much rather describe how it works hand-in-hand with media outlets, the benefits that accrue from having a strong Twitter presence, etc.

Twitter is a partner, but also a competitor

At the same time, however, blog pioneer and digital-media entrepreneur Dave Winer has a point when he repeatedly warns media companies that Twitter is not their friend: in a very real sense, as I’ve tried to argue before, Twitter has built a powerful media company without having to create any of its own content — and every TV network “crawl” that features tweets, and every newspaper story that mentions a reporter’s Twitter handle subtly reinforces that position.

Even the use of Twitter Cards or “expanded tweets” is what I’ve described as a double-edged sword for media companies: it promotes their content, but it also shows an excerpt that might be enough to satisfy many readers — in exactly the same way that Google does with Google News, something that many media companies have criticized and even required payment for.

I am in full agreement with Emily Bell and others who say Twitter is one of the best tools for journalism and media that we have ever seen, and there is no question that it has changed the media environment for the better in a whole range of ways. But let’s not kid ourselves about whether it is a media company or not — it obviously is, in almost all of the ways that really matter, and other media players need to be as clear-eyed about that as possible.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Shutterstock / noporn and Flickr users Socialsidekick

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Frenemy mine: The pros and cons of social partnerships for online media companies
• Building a better paywall: strategies for monetizing news content
• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Key highlights in this report include:

• For publishers, the first step to monetizing something is to be able to measure it. The analytics tools now available make it possible to track the spread of content on social platforms closely.

• Until now there has not been a marketplace where those potential buyers and sellers of content could meet. Nor were there adequate tools to enable verifiable transactions between them. Tools like Cascade and Ricochet are helping put the foundations of such a market in place.

• Both publishers and licensees will need to seize the sort of ad hoc syndication opportunities that arise online and on social media networks. One of the major tasks facing publishers over the next three to five years will be to structure their repositories of content so they can be searched, sorted, customized, repackaged, and accessed in real time via standardized APIs.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Frenemy mine: The pros and cons of social partnerships for online media companies
• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated

[UPDATE: The news became official Thursday morning:

“I am thrilled,” says ex-NBC Universal chief and next #CNN president Jeff Zucker. on.cnn.com/Ya29uK

— CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) November 29, 2012

The choice of Zucker, whose impending hiring was first reported today by the LA Times and then by the NY Times, to lead CNN seems at first blush to be a strange choice by parent company Time Warner.

Although he presided over the long-running success of the Today show, Zucker has been away from the news business for a decade and away from NBC for two years. At a time when TV is being disrupted by new platforms and social media, Zucker very much fits the mold of an old-line TV executive — such as his new boss at Time Warner, Jeff Bewkes, who has repeatedly downplayed the threat of so-called cord-cutters to the business.

This doesn’t mean Zucker will not succeed. It just means he will have to navigate waves of disruptive technology while also finding an identity for CNN.

The network has floundered in recent years and can only pull in an audience for brief spurts during a major news event like a war or presidential election. In the meantime, rivals like Fox and MSNBC have carved out a role as partisan squawk boxes for liberals or conservatives. Here’s some Twitter reaction:

My Old Boss is my New Boss RT @brianstelter Jeff Zucker new president of CNN Worldwide, people close to him & CNN say nyti.ms/WXBxf4

— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) November 28, 2012

CNN overall has its most profitable year, despite disaster of its US flagship nyti.ms/U1ywTZ I love CNNi & CNN.com

— Rosental(@Rosental) November 28, 2012

“They don’t want to be Fox and they don’t want to be MSNBC. Fine. But neither nor is not an identity.” –@jayrosen_nyunyti.ms/Tl6PWU

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) November 28, 2012

(Image by Katherine Welles via Shutterstock)

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Frenemy mine: The pros and cons of social partnerships for online media companies
• How to win the TV iPad app battle
• Report: The Live-Stream Video Market

Social media, once thought of as a tool for bored nerds and marketing gurus, has taken on a whole new role it seems — one that could stand to change the face of modern warfare forever. As BuzzFeed notes in its round-up of Twitter posts from the Israeli army (a sentence I never would have imagined typing even a few years ago), the IDF actually warned Hamas guerillas not to show themselves on the Gaza strip or risk being killed in the attacks that began Wednesday morning, and the official Hamas account responded:

@idfspokesperson Our blessed hands will reach your leaders and soldiers wherever they are (You Opened Hell Gates on Yourselves)

—
Alqassam Brigades (@AlqassamBrigade) November 14, 2012

In the hours that followed, videos of rocket attacks on Hamas strongholds were uploaded to YouTube, and the IDF blog carried a minute-by-minute breakdown of what was happening — how many Hamas rockets it intercepted, a strike by the Israeli Navy, and so on. It looked very much like the New York Times live-blog The Lede, except that it was being published by a military force: the front of the website even looks like a traditional news blog or breaking news site, complete with the usual social-media buttons for sharing content on Twitter, Facebook and other networks.

Not that long ago, CNN was the archetype of war reporting with its real-time video of the war in Iraq. More recently it has become the province of breaking-news blogs like The Lede from the Times, with minute-by-minute updates — or of National Public Radio editor Andy Carvin, sifting through live reports from civilians in Tahrir Square in Egypt and using his Twitter stream like a crowdsourced newsroom. Now, we have to add to that the army as a media entity, as symbolized by the IDF’s official live blog, Twitter stream and YouTube videos. What more could a publisher want? There are even infographics and a hashtag.

Blogging pioneer Dave Winer has written about how social media allows “the sources to go direct,” and we have seen the power that can have when a newsmaker adopts Twitter or a blog, the way News Corp. billionaire Rupert Murdoch has or the Pakistani resident who live-tweeted the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. But there is perhaps no better example of taking that principle to its logical — if unpleasant — conclusion than what the Israeli Defense Forces did on Wednesday. How does that change the way that wars are waged, or experienced, or covered by journalists? It is certain to do all three.

In print, this looks like extremists. On Twitter, this looks mainstream. Dangerous how diff platforms lead to diff conclusions.

—
Andrew Katz (@katz) November 14, 2012

Governments and armies have always tried to influence the way their battles are perceived, whether by “embedding” journalists or by creating their own mouthpieces — people like Tokyo Rose and Axis Sally, who broadcast favorable messages as a way of destabilizing the enemy or turning the tide of public opinion (or both). But now, commanders and their political chiefs have tools at their disposal that would have been almost unthinkable even a decade ago: all the same tools that a newspaper or a TV network has, and probably more. Their message now lives or dies by the same principles.

As more than one observer has pointed out, the main issue when armies become media entities is how to sort out the truth from the marketing spin — and how to ensure that the other side gets fair treatment, even though it may not have as powerful a marketing department. Just as NYT media reporter Brian Stelter has said that having Rupert Murdoch on Twitter makes his job a lot harder, the advent of military publishers will likely force traditional war correspondents to up their game as well — and it will put even more emphasis on crowdsourced efforts like Andy Carvin’s Twitter newsroom.

@mathewi Feels like a watershed moment.

—
Jim Roberts (@nytjim) November 14, 2012

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Petteri Sulonen

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Frenemy mine: The pros and cons of social partnerships for online media companies
• Content monetization: News licensing and syndication still need marketplaces and infrastructure
• Sector RoadMap: Social customer service in 2013

The company set up its monitoring service to track performance and availability of NBC, ABC, CBS News, Fox News, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Politico, C-SPAN and other news sites as well as Twitter and Facebook from the Friday before election day onward. The monitors ran IE9 to mimic end-user experience from a half-dozen North American cities. The monitor visited each site every 5 minutes and recorded what a person would have experienced if she had been clicking on the site at that time. The monitors captured and logged HTTP errors, connection failures and “excessively slow” page load times, according to a Yottaa blog post.

And boy, some of those load times got extremely and excessively slow as election day wore on. From 7 pm ET until Wednesday 2 am ET, most of the news sites “came to a halt,” according to Yottaa. Some “consistently took as long as 50 seconds to 60 seconds to load.”

I can attest to that. Passing through the Charlotte, NC airport at around 9 pm, I was unable to get updated news from any of the major web sites, including CNN, the New York Times and Washington Post. In fact, I ended up relying on text updates from friends who were glued to their sets in Boston. (The other alternative would have been to belly up to the bar and watch Fox News, but we all have our limits.)

The election took its toll on Twitter and Facebook as well. These pages usually load in less than 5 seconds but on Tuesday night, President Obama’s Facebook page’s load times slowed to 25 seconds after 11 pm ET and didn’t recover till after 1 am ET.

Really poor showing by major news sites

For the five days up to and including election day, the monitor found 3,800 total errors — things like HTTP errors, connection time outs etc — 80 percent of those occurred on Tuesday. The average increase in errors across all sites from Monday to Tuesday was more than 500 percent, but the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Fox News each showed increases of more than 1,500 percent.

And the winners are …

Based on its monitors, Yottaa deemed C-SPAN and CNN as the most consistent and reliable sites across the board. Each had its share of errors and performance issues but they paled in comparison to those of other media sites.

Of course, I’m sure Cambridge, Mass.-based Yottaa, which offers web site performance optimization services would love to sell them some technology to correct these issues.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Sector RoadMap: Content personalization in 2013
• A near-term outlook for big data
• Infrastructure Q2: Big data and PaaS gain more momentum

Last month, the blog Newsbusters discovered that a large chunk of a piece that Zakaria wrote for Time magazine about gun control was almost identical to sections from a New Yorker piece on the same topic, written by Jill Lepore. Zakaria was subsequently suspended by both Time and CNN (although he has recently been reinstated after both entities said they found no evidence of further plagiarism). Lehrer, meanwhile — a high-profile author — was fired by resigned from the New Yorker after it was discovered that he had duplicated information from a number of sources.

Plagiarism is just inefficient hyperlinking

One of the themes that has been brought up repeatedly in stories about both Zakaria and Lehrer is the idea that they have been overworked as a result of media multi-tasking. Stories about the Lehrer incident, for example, note that he was writing books and had a packed public-speaking schedule while also trying to write a blog for the New Yorker, and Zakaria made the same link by saying he plans to cut down on his responsibilities — implying that this was to blame for him mixing up his notes from the New Yorker piece with his own writing (he also said he recently hired an assistant).

But I think Box.net CEO Aaron Levie put his finger on a big part of the problem in a tweet he posted recently, in which he said plagiarism “is just really inefficient hyperlinking.”

Plagiarism is just really inefficient hyperlinking.

—
Aaron Levie (@levie) August 10, 2012

Although he probably just intended to be witty, I think Levie makes a good point. Plagiarism is defined as the attempt to “steal and pass off the ideas or words of another as one’s own,” and it is the last part of that definition that is the most important one. It isn’t so much that a writer like Lehrer or Zakaria takes information from someone else and uses it in a column — plenty of writers do that, and as the media world has exploded thanks to social tools such as blogs and Twitter, this phenomenon has only become more commonplace. But neither of them gave credit to the source of the content they used, and that was the real crime.

This is exactly the same kind of argument that gets made about news aggregators or blogs that do a poor job of crediting the source of the content they are aggregating. As Jeff Jarvis has argued in a series of recent posts, since copying is rampant on the internet, we should be more focused on ways of giving credit to the source or creator of that content. And what better way to give credit than by linking prominently to its originator? This is just another reason why links are the lifeblood of the internet, as I argued in a recent post about the back-and-forth between bloggers and the traditional media over the latter never giving credit to the former.

Linking also provides a great defence

If either Zakaria or Lehrer had been more devoted to the idea of linking to sources, they might have spent more time making note of where the information they were using came from, so that they could include a link — in the same way that academics routinely cite footnotes to back up their claims. Would they still have tried to pass those sections off as their own? Perhaps. As my paidContent colleague Laura Owen has noted about Lehrer, some of his behavior was likely a result of the pressure to be a public intellectual. But if either one is sincere about how their plagiarism was an honest mistake, paying more attention to linking might help.

And if anyone needs evidence of how a consistent policy of linking to sources can be a positive thing, they should look no further than the Gawker case: the blog network was sued by a company for defamation, based on a piece that the tech blog Gizmodo wrote about its products. In a decision that acquitted the media company of this charge, the court said that part of the rationale for its ruling came from the use of links in the Gizmodo piece, which provided ample evidence of what the post was referring to. As the court decision put it:

“Having ready access to the same facts as the authors, readers were put in a position to draw their own conclusions about Redmond and his ventures and technologies… Statements are generally considered to be nonactionable opinion when the facts supporting the opinion are disclosed.”

David Weinberger, co-author of the seminal book The Cluetrain Manifesto and a fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society, argued in a post about the journalistic principle of objectivity that “Objectivity is a trust mechanism you rely on when your medium can’t do links.” In other words, when you have the ability to link to information that supports your conclusions, it’s easier to get away with being subjective, because readers are able to follow the links and decide for themselves whether you are credible.

I think the same principle applies to plagiarism: it is something that occurs when a medium doesn’t allow — or at least doesn’t encourage — links to original sources. The internet may make it more likely that someone copies content from another, but it also makes it easier to fix.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user skedonk

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Frenemy mine: The pros and cons of social partnerships for online media companies
• Sector RoadMap: Content personalization in 2013
• Content monetization: News licensing and syndication still need marketplaces and infrastructure