Reports indicate last minute changes to the text also included a requirement for platforms to provide fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory conditions of access to news publishers as well as an arbitration mechanism to resolve disputes. We urge the U.S. Congress to follow suit and pass similar legislation, the “American Innovation and Choice Online Act” and the “Journalism Competition and Preservation Act,” that would accomplish many of the same objectives.

The post Europe Adopts Rules Similar to the U.S. JCPA and Self-Preferencing Bill appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

Brown wasn’t the only one who questioned Facebook’s “disruption” of the news industry. Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) was also suspicious of the platform’s impact on the news media, asking Facebook representative and Libra co-creator David Marcus if the platform was actually replacing news with “bullshit.” See Sen. Kennedy’s question below:

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During last week’s hearing, a bold assertion was made by Matthew Schruers of the Computer and Communications Industry Association (CCIA), a representative of the major tech platforms, who stated that news publishers make a 70 percent and higher share of digital ad revenue delivered through tech platforms.

That would certainly come as a surprise to news publishers! The assertion isn’t supported by studies by The Guardian, the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission, the French Competition Authority, or the UK House of Lords. And even the cited — and admittedly idealized and optimistic — Cairncross Review doesn’t get there (see pages 60-61).

The Syracuse (New York) Post-Standard noted in a recent editorial that they and fellow publishers often see nowhere close to the CCIA-cited 70 percent share.

Mr. Schruers is just doing his job. But it should be obvious to everyone that, as currently structured, the digital ad marketplace doesn’t work for news publishing and doesn’t support quality journalism. Pretending that it is somehow actually a boon for publishing not only isn’t credible, but is really just another way of not talking about the real problems.

The post Tech Spokesman Says Publishers Keep 70% of Digital Ad Revenue — Which Doesn’t Seem to Reflect Anyone’s Actual Experience appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

Washington Post writer Jonathan Capehart (left) moderates a discussion of the “Journalism Competition and Preservation Act” between Reps. David Cicilline (center) and Doug Collins (right)

On April 4, House Antitrust Chairman David Cicilline (D-RI) and Representative Doug Collins (R-GA), Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, were part of a panel at The Washington Post‘s #PostLive event, “Protecting Local News.” The Congressmen spoke with Post writer Jonathan Capehart about the the “Journalism Competition and Preservation Act,” which the pair had introduced in the House on April 3.

You can watch the discussion between Capehart, Cicilline and Collins below, and view other panels from the event here.

The post View from the Hill: Collins and Cicilline Discuss Journalism Safe Harbor Bill at #PostLive appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

The European Union took a massive leap forward in protecting news content on March 26, when the European Parliament voted to adopt the long-awaited Copyright Directive. The Directive includes a provision that grants European news publishers an independent right to protect their content online against unauthorized uses by online platforms. The Publishers’ Right marks a major positive development for news publishers and the sustainability of high-quality journalism in Europe for two main reasons.

First, European news publishers are currently unable to effectively protect their content online. Though other content industries, such as music and film studios, have certain rights that allow them to protect their works and negotiate deals with companies, news publishers in Europe have never enjoyed these rights. The new Copyright Directive grants news publishers similar rights to those enjoyed for years by other content producers.

Second, the Directive levels the playing field between news publishers and the online platforms, who regularly use – and sell advertising against – publishers’ news content without paying them. While “individual words” and “very short extracts” are still free for anyone to use, online platforms and news aggregators – such as Google News – can no longer simply rely on being able to exploit news publishers’ content, unless the publisher decides to waive its right to demand compensation. The Directive provides a market-based approach that forces tech companies to find mutually beneficial arrangements with news publishers, thereby protecting the financial future of news publishers in the EU.

And there lies the crux of the Publishers’ Right. The Directive is about more than adding to publishers’ bottom lines; it is about receiving equitable compensation for their work and making sure the online ecosystem works for all. Under this Directive, European communities will continue to receive high-quality reporting from news outlets they trust. Without it, the online platforms would continue to go unchecked and the future of quality journalism would remain uncertain.

The Directive is narrowly drafted to only affect those who aim to financially benefit from news content. In addition, all parties have rights under the Directive – publishers are not required to license their news or demand compensation for its use, and tech companies don’t have to publish certain content if they choose not to. Private and non-commercial users don’t need licensing agreements to share content, and hyperlinks remain free for all. The Directive simply protects against the most flagrant abuses of online content.

News publishers are at a crossroads: for news publishers to provide readers with the trustworthy and relevant information they expect, the online ecosystem must change to provide equitable compensation for those investing in quality journalism. The Copyright Directive is a massive step in the right direction. The Council of the European Union must still officially adopt it in April, and then, the member states will have two years to implement it nationally. But once it is implemented, news publishers in Europe will be better equipped to respond to the challenges facing them, hopefully serving as an example for the rest of the world.

The post European Union Leads the Way in Protecting High-Quality Journalism appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

The news media industry saw a lot of changes and challenges in 2018. We faced new battles on Capitol Hill, like the fight against newsprint tariffs and the push for an anti-trust safe harbor for news publishers. At the same time, we had to contend with an extremely hostile political environment and a digital ecosystem that continues to favor dominant giants and disfavor quality content.

But looking forward to 2019, I think it is pretty easy to see that it is shaping up to be an absolutely pivotal year that may well determine the strategic landscape for news publishing for many years to come.

First, 2019 is going to be a year of new technological “solutions” for the news business – with proposed debuts of the “new” Texture app from Apple, Jim McKelvey’s new advertising and payment system Invisibly, and subscription products from Facebook and Google, to name a few. While it would be nice for one of them to be The Answer, publishers will instead have to wrestle with how these technologies interact and whether some materially change how the public consumes and pays for journalism. The two questions that will always be asked are (1) does the new technological solution produce significant revenue to fund news operations, and (2) over the long-term, will it increase (or decrease) a reader’s attachment to our news brands? We will need both revenue and brand equity if we hope to maintain sustainable, independent digital news businesses.

2019 will also be a big year for major mergers and acquisitions in the industry. It is easy to anticipate that several big publishers and media chains will change hands throughout the year. We’ve already seen major shifts in ownership in 2018, from the Los Angeles Times’s sale to Patrick Soon-Shiong, to TIME magazine’s sale by Meredith Corp., to tronc taking bids from competitors like McClatchy this fall. As we move into 2019, we’ll see M&A accelerate and reveal a wide range of different strategic choices within the industry.

Finally, I expect that in 2019 will begin to see rapid consolidation in digital publishing systems – like The Washington Post’s Arc, New York Media’s Clay and new products from WordPress – with just a handful emerging as the engines that drive all publishers into the future. There has already been talk this year of the need for a smaller number of digital publishing tools, with some suggesting that having just one digital publishing platform with an integrated advertising marketplace could create a strong counterweight to Facebook and Google. In 2019, we’ll find out which platforms can best serve the needs of publishers and deliver the kind of digital experiences that readers really value.

What I’m most anticipating for the new year, however, is more opportunities to work with our news media members to find solutions to the industry’s problems and answers to the many new challenges that pop up every day. I know that while 2019 will be full of difficulties, it will also bring many new opportunities for our industry, and I look forward to seeing how our members take advantage of each one that comes along.

The post CEO Column: Will 2019 Determine News Media’s Strategic Landscape? appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

The news industry has been in a state of flux for quite some time. In an attempt to quantify and understand the change, Senior Research Fellow at the Reuters Institute of Journalism at the University of Oxford Julie Posetti recently investigated how innovation in the industry has been impacted by the relentless pace of technological and audience change. Her study, “Time to step away from the ‘bright, shiny things’? Towards a sustainable model of journalism innovation in an era of perpetual change,” raises a warning call to organizations that are focusing on constant evolution rather than identifying and committing to their own strengths, stating that “relentless, high-speed pursuit of technology-driven innovation could be almost as dangerous as stagnation.”

The report is not anti-innovation or anti-technology, but calls for “more critical reflective practice and research-informed approaches to developing integrated journalism innovation strategies that help sustain news publishing.”

For the study, Posetti examined existing research and interviewed 39 journalism experts – including international editors, CEOs, product managers, practitioners, academic experts and digital media consultants – about how digital journalism is evolving. The report identifies three key themes:

1. The risks of ‘Shiny Things Syndrome’ and the impacts of ‘innovation fatigue’ in an era of perpetual change;
2. Audiences: starting (again) with the end user;
3. The need for a ‘user-led’ approach to researching journalism innovation and developing foundational frameworks to support it.

The report raised the need for a consensus definition of “innovation,” as it impacts journalists and the business side of news alike. The Institute has developed a “Journalism Innovation Wheel” that shows the many areas where organizations can innovate, including audience engagement, storytelling and reporting, distribution and others.

The report discusses a number of topics that keep news leaders awake at night. Publishers are unsure whether new technological developments will help them succeed and are reluctant to invest the time in answering those questions, but they also fear missing out on trends. Business pressures also impact how innovations can be assessed and their worth to companies in a changing market.

One potential solution to innovation fatigue is creating a “north star” for innovation. In the report, the needs of audiences emerged as one potential strategic focus. The report states that “innovations in audience engagement and development are more important than technological innovations (although the two are usually interrelated in digital contexts).” The audience’s needs vary greatly by publication and geography and are also related to audience polarization and trust.

Given the wide range of experiences and needs reflected in the research, collaboration and communication among news organizations is key.

The post New Study Explores Why Tech Isn’t Always the Answer to News Media’s Problems appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

We’ve talked before about how to use the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to get better information for your beats, but now that you have all that information, what happens next? That’s where Logikcull comes in, an automated document search and discovery tool that helps unearth the particular information you’re looking for, so you can get on with your story.

Logikcull began as eDiscovery software for legal teams, but it was found to be useful for those digging through FOIA documents, too. “The public needs to know things sooner rather than later, and yet journalists can’t get those stories out faster because of the inefficiencies in the story discovery process,” says Logikcull cofounder Andy Wilson. “That’s bad for journalism and it’s bad for democracy.”

FOIA requests can often be duds, with the majority of pages redacted. But there are also plenty of requests that result in real information being released; MuckRock has tracked more than 2 million pages of FOIA-released information. Logikcull makes the job of sifting through all those pages easier by making every document searchable — from basic Word documents to PDFs, handwritten notes and images with text.

“Sometimes governments will dump a lot of data or make it really unusable to try to slow you down,” Wilson says. “It’s no different from the litigation tactic where you drown your adversaries in so much information that you delay the action or force them to settle because they can’t get through the information as fast as they need to.”

Logikcull seeks to make the grueling process of reviewing faster, easier and affordable.

The first major story that Logikcull helped break came when Eric Lipton of The New York Times received a cache of files about the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) following a FOIA request by the Sierra Club. Lipton used Logikcull to pore through the files and dig up the most relevant emails for his story.

Since Lipton’s story broke, Wilson says he’s seen more interest in Logikcull from other journalists, and he’s hopeful that they’ll be able to use his company’s software to expose even more stories through FOIA.

Journalists can sign up and use Logikcull for free — but with a limited amount of upload data. In return, the company just asks that, when appropriate, journalists credit Logikcull for its help in unearthing stories.

The post Logikcull Makes FOIA Deep Dives Surprisingly Simple appeared first on News/Media Alliance.

Brian Manzullo is in charge of social media as Social, Search & Audience Editor at the Detroit Free Press. He oversees the social strategy with the help of the digital staff. On social, he manages the Free Press brand accounts and writes the manual messaging. We caught up with Brian for an Alliance 5 Answers, to learn how the Free Press’ social media balances breaking news and nuanced snark.

Is there a vetting process for tweets?

Sometimes, especially for our bigger stories, we’ll run tweets by each other on the web desk and workshop them to perfection – it’s me, our senior news director for digital Anjanette Delgado, senior digital planner Pat Byrne and a team of web editors. But there are also many cases where I just tweet things out and see where it goes, particularly if I know it’s not going to be controversial. We take somewhat of a “ask for forgiveness rather than permission” approach to social media, though we certainly don’t look to cross the line. More often than not, we find readers really appreciate the added voice and, if we run into a situation where we need to backtrack and/or apologize, we try to be as transparent as possible, though that hasn’t happened often at all. Here’s a great example of that transparency from late 2014, via our @freepsports account.

The other half of this is we do automate many of our tweets on @freep and @freepsports using dlvr.it; stories that post on our website are added to a queue for auto-posting on our Twitter accounts, with the headline of the story. That way, we’re able to keep populating our Twitter accounts regardless of the time of day or week, and it allows us to think more creatively about what we’re posting manually rather than inundating ourselves with hand-crafting dozens if not hundreds of tweets a day.

What are the social media guidelines to follow?

We have an engagement-first strategy on social media. Our goal is to surprise, inform and engage our readers day in and day out, whether they’re finding our content and commentary on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or elsewhere. There’s so much noise on these platforms coming from so many directions, we want to stand out in some way, and showing personality and voice on a platform like Twitter is a great way to do that. We have a distinct way of connecting to our readership in metro Detroit and around the state of Michigan with the way we communicate on these platforms, whether it’s funny tweets, videos, GIFs or even memes. This also works to our advantage because each of these social platforms want engagement and use it as a major factor in their algorithms, which only helps us in terms of surfacing our content in front of more readers.

We translate this strategy to Facebook quite well, where we have one of the highest interaction rates among American newspapers on that platform, according to CrowdTangle, and we do it with a mix of social-optimized content, videos and photos/memes. (More examples here and here and here)

It’s really important to note that the success we have in the social space isn’t possible without outstanding content to begin with, and not just from our writers and editors; our photo and video team is among the best in the country and provides us with exceptional visuals for us to work with on a regular basis. That’s critical.

How do you describe the voice of the handle?

 We try to be fun, light-hearted, conversational and sometimes snarky on @freep, but also serious, informative and clear when we need to be. We want to show there’s a human being behind the account, one that’s committed to delivering the news like everyone expects of us, but also someone who isn’t afraid to engage readers in fun, quirky ways that make sense with our audiences.

 What was the decision to have the handle engage and be so personable and “hip”?

 This actually started several years ago with the @freepsports Twitter account, as a way of giving it a “kick in the pants,” and readers loved it. We were able to grow that account exponentially thanks to that, and it was an easy realm to do it in because sports tends to be on the entertainment side and less serious than, say, politics.

When I moved to the news side in 2016 (I started as sports web editor in 2012), we thought over ways of how we could translate that to @freep. We knew we had to be more careful with it, given the size of the account and the seriousness of the news, but figured we could fine-tune it in a way that better connects to our audiences and doesn’t make us seem so much like a “grandpa in the nightclub,” so to speak. And we aren’t afraid to respond to trolls, as long as we have an appropriately tactful response.

How do your followers react to the tweets?

They love it! Or at least 95 percent of them do (that’s a pure estimation). Understandably, when you put voice behind a brand account, you’re going to have a small bit of polarization, but we’ve managed to limit the number of detractors and those who suggest we should only “report the news.” The truth is we still do that, but we also want to surprise and engage because we know that’s what readers want on these platforms, and that has led to growth in audience, both on our Twitter account and ultimately to the number of readers that come to our website from Twitter.

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