There’s a pattern you might be forgiven for having missed: most technological developments on the web have been driven by these industries. Think online casinos. Think credit card usage. Think video. Think VR. Users demand greater financial and data privacy — after all, who wants to admit they’re signing up for porn or gambling sites? – and better bang for their buck — a streaming video better be a lot better quality than any of the millions of free sites out there to be worth signing up for, all of which pushes these industries tothe bleeding edge of innovation. Buried in early versions of the Bitcoin software – the cryptocurrency that offers a future of transactions beyond the gaze of banks and governments — are hints of a gambling connection, after all. WebRTC is now no different.

So first off, what is WebRTC, and why should you care? WebRTC is an open source project that embeds real-time voice, texts, and video communications capabilities in web browsers. The technology enables peer-to-peer communication (P2P) among browsers. It does not require specialized software applications or browser plugins for communication. In essence, it’s the engine that powers a lot of the messaging that goes on between apps — think video, audio. The RTC bit in it, after all, stands for Real Time Communication. The Web bit is because the standard at least started life as a way to make using video and audio to communicate through a web browser as easy as using text, without any plug-ins. But it has moved beyond that, and can now sit within apps on mobile phones and elsewhere.

That may seem like quite a modest goal. But it’s only recently, with Apple’s decision to include WebRTC in its Safari browser (from version 11 and in the iOS browser in version 12), that a years-long battle to agree that WebRTC is the standard everyone can agree on is more or less won. Now, you can use a host of services to do Skype-like video and audio chatting via your browser without having to

1. a) register with any service
2. b) install any software
3. c) worry about what kind of browser you’re using.

(Of course, there are still caveats.)

This is quite a feat, if you think about it. Not because you’ve been dying to do this, exactly, but because it means that this kind of capability — real time voice and/or video communication, in real time — can be added to any web page. This means, for example, that you can now stream directly from whatever news event your reporters are covering, or direct from your newsroom, or hold a Q&A with readers, without them having to worry about plug-ins, browser versions, etc. etc.

Beyond the browser

And it doesn’t stop there. WebRTC obviously started with the web, and the browser, but that was because that was where we spent most of our time back then. Now things are mobile, they’re often app-based, and the way we communicate, and the way we consume video, has changed a lot.

WebRTC has ended up being a way for the industry to agree on a bunch of standards which have enabled all sorts of things to happen more quickly and seamlessly than they might have done had WebRTC standards groups not been working away in the background. Varun Singh, CEO of callstats.io, which measures quality of experience of live and real-time media, explained that by agreeing on this standard suite of protocols, WebRTC has quickly wormed its way into pretty much every messaging app, from Snapchat to Facebook Messenger.

And it’s not just there. Dean Bubley, a consultant who has been watching WebRTC since 2009, believes “it’s still lacking in recognition in some quarters; there are many more applications that could benefit from it.” In a white paper funded and published by callstats.io, he explored how real-time communications are becoming embedded into devices and applications, into different formats, into processing (think AI) and more platforms. As users become more accustomed to accepting of voice and video technologies (would you have imagined we would have allowed listening robots called Alexa and Siri into our homes as easily as we have five or ten years ago, or been as comfortable taking selfies or video-ing ourselves?) So these technologies are likely to continue to evolve and, of course, become more commonplace in every day life

“In other words, society is now much more amenable to new use-cases for RTC,” concludes Dean. “There is familiarity with many of the UI tools, and less self-consciousness in front of cameras. This,in turn, means that the “cognitive load” on users’ brains is lower, meaning that the interactions are more natural – and more productive.”

It’s only in media, I suspect, that we’re still a little stuck with old formats: the newsreader, the correspondent talking to the camera, the interviewee stuck in a studio somewhere, or on Skype with a picture of a horse in the background. I strongly believe we have an opportunity to have a chance to break away from this.

In media

I see the opportunities here as at least initially more modest.

Firstly, internally: I have long been frustrated at how internal newsroom discussions can be starved of creative oxygen as much by poor technology decisions as by poor leadership. Reliance on dialling in to a conference call number seems both archaic and wasteful use of resources. More often than not the more creative thinkers on the call are drowned out by the noisier ones. A simple WebRTC link in the browser should solve that, using simple tools like talky.io which require no plugins.

Then there’s content. Varun of callstats.io says WebRTC offers content creators the chance to make content simply, just with a camera, which users can access from the news organisation’s website directly — bypassing YouTube or Twitter. Think webinars, game shows, he says: “it’s fairly trivial, say $50 to set something up, and have it viewed an unlimited number of times.”

So where does porn, gambling and auctioning come into it?

Well, I think the future of WebRTC for media lies in the ability to seamlessly stream events to users as if you were a professional broadcaster. It’s one thing to be able to record or stream a few jerky minutes of a demonstration, but soon enough it will be possible — even expected — that any media organisation, large or small, can, with little preparation, livecast an event with little or no lag.

Alexandre Gouaillard, CTO of a company called Millicast, says these industries are the ones pushing for this. With Adobe no longer supporting the Flash plugin, the mainstay for such industries, there’s a demand for low latency video but at scale: Millicast promises broadcast across the globe in less than 500 milliseconds. The packages range from 10 concurrent viewers (free) to 5,000 ($1,500 a month.)

This may be lower latency than required, but it’s a glimpse, I believe, of the future. I think we’ve been held back from using video in part because of its awkwardness in setting up, and the glitchiness, that makes interactions painful. Those days are coming to a close, mainly because of WebRTC.

You don’t have to be into interactive porn to imagine the possibilities of having people seamlessly integrated by a video connection, wherever they are: if your reporter can walk around with a smartphone mounted on a $150 gimbal, confident that every shot is being beamed to every user; or a Q&A with an editor accompanied by graphics and whiteboard is crystal clear to all 5,000 viewers in a monthly editorial catch-up, then perhaps in a year or two an augmented reality- or virtual reality-, or 360-degree- broadcast from a sports game or political rally — then we’ll be able to thank a porn star or a gambler for marking the way for us, once .

Tech trends are fickle things. Back in 2004, if you were starting a media business online, or thinking of expanding your offline media business, one direction seemed obvious: adopt RSS, or really simple syndication, so users can get a feed of your content easily, without signing up for newsletters. The term ‘RSS’ overtook ‘newsletter’ as a search term on Google in July of that year.

A year or so later, and your crack team of tech advisors would have told you you need to get into podcasts. Everyone has an iPod, they’d tell you, and everyone is listening to this stuff. Indeed, by early 2006 ‘podcast’ had overtaken ‘RSS’ as a search term on Google. Ditto MySpace — you would have been told to get your business on this impressive social networking site — whatever that is, you would have been forgiven for thinking back then. So you start work on that.

Then, in 2009, the Amazon Kindle e-reader swept out of nothing to make electronic publishing the wave of the future, overtaking both ‘podcast’ and ‘RSS’. And then, of course, there was Facebook. And Twitter.

You get the picture: sometimes inexorable trends aren’t what they seem. RSS, it turns out, was great for delivering information to people but was too fiddly for most folk. Google, whose RSS reader had pushed most other players out of the business, closed down in 2013, citing declining use. Meanwhile newsletters, those unsexy throwbacks, are still doing fine.

So what about podcasts? Were the advisors right? Well, yes and no.

True, interest in podcasting (as a search term on Google, as reliable an indicator as any) peaked in early 2006. Interest continued to decline until the launch in late 2014 of Serial, whose first season explored a murder in Baltimore in 1999, singlehandedly pushed the podcasting niche into the mainstream. In short, podcasts are that rare breed among tech trends: they’re getting a second wind.

So what is driving this, and are podcasts worth doing?

Well, it’s true that Serial jumpstarted a fresh wave of interest. The appeal of podcasts is that they time-shift — users play them when they want, in the order they want, where they want. This may seem obvious, but Serial added a key ingredient: the serialized approach, where the story was being shaped as it went. This invited audience participation, suspense and a feeling that it was unclear where it was going.

All these elements helped differentiate podcasts from other forms of entertainment. At the same time, those coming in late could easily download old episodes: ‘Bingeable listens’ is even a category on iTunes, still the epicentre of podcasting.

The data all point to a growing market. Most figures are U.S.-centric so let’s look at another market: Australia. Recent surveys there suggest that nearly 9 million people will be listening to podcasts by 2022 — a third of the projected population.

Big players are taking note. Apple is improving its metrics, and applying some standards to podcasts it accepts for its iTunes platform and podcasting app. After leaving the field alone for years, Google is jumping in with its own Android app. Amazon has tried to add to its Audible audiobook service with some original programming, although it’s not clear how well that’s going.

Investors are interested: Luminary Media secured $40 million in venture capital funding for its subscription-based service. And of course Spotify has added NPR’s backcatalogue to its subscription service. Companies like Audible and Spotify are already in a sweet spot because they have already convinced users to subscribe. Most podcasts are free, and it’s hard to change users’ minds, as we’ve found to our cost in online journalism.

But of course, as we’ve learned from the past: trends can be reversed, even when they’re enjoying a second life. So will podcasts wither too?

Here’s how I see it for media players. Don’t do podcasts as an afterthought; it’s your brand and if you mess it up listeners might not come back. But do see how much you can do without having to create content afresh. If you’re in the spoken word business already, then package up 10 of your best programs and see, after a year, which ones are gaining a following.

And despite the talk of growing investment and advertising interest, don’t do it for the money. The industry is still too young and unstructured, the hits too unpredictable. The Interactive Advertising Bureau has released two sets of proposals to regulate advertising metrics across the industry, and uptake has grown. But some podcasters are nervous because their reported download numbers would inevitably take a knock, at least in the short term.

Then there’s the problem of the elephants on the grass. Apple dominates the space because no podcast can afford to not be on its platform. Google is now serious about podcasts, which could be good news for podcasters in Android-heavy markets. But the app is still pretty raw, and of course will only work on Android devices, leaving those cross-platform podcast players like Overcast more appealing to many.

These big players all seek to control the choke-points in the system. They can, like Apple’s AppStore, create markets, but they can also trample them.

And there are lots of pieces missing, another sign of a wild west. The technology of inserting ads, for example is still not quite there. The Washington Post last month (eds: July) felt it necessary to develop its own internal technology, Rhapsocord, for inserting ads into podcasts. This reminds me of the early days of the web, when everything was so new we didn’t even think of calling it an ‘ecosystem.’ Only a handful of companies survived that.

It is possible to cover costs, and attract advertisers, and should soon be possible to weave podcasts into broader subscriptions. But right now it’s probably better to think of honing your podcasting skills and ideas than of viewing it as a revenue stream in its own right.

The bane of any reporter’s life is returning from an interview and then having to transcribe the recording of it. Text reporters can get away with some shorthand and a few notes, as they probably only need a quote or two. But radio and tv journalists, and those seeking to squeeze a little more out of an interview, are stuck with the painstaking process of going over the recording and either correcting their notes or typing out the transcript afresh. It’s not fun.

Technology has been promising to fix this for a while. There have been products like Nuance’s Dragon NaturallySpeaking, which since the late 1990s has been chipping away at speech recognition, but this required training the software to be familiar with your voice, didn’t work well with other people’s and was, at least for me, a little too error prone to be genuinely useful.

But there are now options.

I’ve been testing a couple — Trint (trint.com) and Descript (descript.com) — which do an excellent job of automatically turning an interview recording into a transcript you can work with. And they’re relatively cheap: expect to pay about $15 for an hour’s worth of audio. It’ll take about five minutes for the transcript to be ready, and then both provide pretty good editors (Descript in app form, Trint in a web app) where you can tidy up the text and fix errors. The underlying audio is mapped to the text, so editing text and moving through the audio is painless. Keystrokes allow you to switch quickly between listening and editing. Descript even lets you edit the audio, so you could prepare an interview for broadcast or podcast.

I would say on the whole you save yourself a couple of hours per hour of audio. For a journalist this means you can the semblance of a transcript to work off within minutes of the interview finishing. If you’re under time pressure that’s a serious time saver.

There are several other apps offering something similar: Otter is an app from AISense that is in essence a voice recorder that automatically transcribes whatever is being recorded. In real time. Temi and Scribie are also worth checking out.

So how does this work? And why now? Well, as with a lot of tech advances it has to do with algorithms, cloud computing and data. The algorithm comes first, because that is the part that says ‘this sound is someone saying hello. So type ‘hello.” In the early days — before cloud computing came along — that algorithm would have to be very efficient: it needed to be good because it had to work on a personal computer, or mobile device.

Cloud computing helped change that, because then the companies trying to do this were not constrained by hardware. In the cloud they could throw as much computing power as they wanted at it. But it doesn’t mean that computers are doing all the work — the algorithms still need something to work from, examples they can learn from. So a lot of the advances have come from a hybrid approach: humans do some of the work and train the computer algorithms to get better.

And now, at least in the case of the ones I have played with, the job has now been handed over to algorithms entirely. (And with each bit that we correct in their app, they learn a little bit more.) These example-driven algorithms have replaced the old classical ones which must be trained precisely. These algorithms teach themselves; you simply give them a bunch of data, and tell them: ‘this is how people have transcribed it, now go away and figure out how to do that.’

This means I have to add a few caveats. This kind of machine translation is not trying to perfectly transcribe each utterance. It is applying what it has learned from previous transcripts, so if those transcripts aren’t great, the results won’t be great. This can be good: Trint, for example, leaves out a lot of the verbal tics we use in speech — ers, ahs, ums — because human transcribers would naturally do that. But it also can mistranscribe whole sentences which make sense, but bear no relation to what the speaker said. So whereas in usual transcriptions you might be scanning for the odd misheard word or mis-spelling, you need to keep an eye out for entirely incorrect phrases. This could be fatal if you end up using a quote in a story!

There’s a bigger caveat too: accents can easily put these services off. Trint can cope with most European languages but in one case it could not handle someone speaking English with a Middle Eastern accent despite their grammar and syntax being excellent. Likewise, when I used Trint’s option of selecting an Australian accent (over a North American or British one, the other options) for the transcription, the Australian interviewee appeared to be talking about crocodiles, tucker, barbies and tinnies, and other Australiana, whereas in reality he talked about nothing of the sort. The training data was used to such terms and must have applied higher probabilities to him using those words than what he actually said.

This means that I would not be confident recommending any of these services to situations where non-European languages are being spoken, but also those when a accent is used. This is largely because of a lack of freely available training data. Academics are working to fix at least some of these problems: I’ve seen recent papers addressing indigenous South African languages, as well as those where speakers switch between languages, such Frisian-Dutch.

Give these apps a chance if you haven’t already. Behind this is a big step into the future where computers can more readily understand what we say, and what we say can easily be transcribed and stored. It has both exciting and scary implications. But for journalism it helps ease a significant bottleneck in getting what people are saying into our stories.

I’ve been a nomad worker for some time. And I’m shocked at how few journalists seem to be prepared for mobile working. So I thought I’d offer a few tips.

If you can afford it, buy your own equipment.

I’ve been buying my own laptop for nearly 30 years, and while it brings pain to my pocket, I’d never dream of relying on my company’s equipment. In the old days it was because they were too slow and cumbersome, but nowadays it’s mainly because of compliance issues: restrictions on what software you can put on your laptop, as well as what the company is allowed to do and view on its hardware. I would rather retain control over how I organise my information and what apps I use.

Buy your own software.

I’m admittedly a bit of a software addict. (I think it’s probably a thing, I haven’t checked.) But there’s a reason for it: we spend most of our day at our computers, so it makes sense to find the software that best helps you. And with journalists, that’s a broad array of tasks: if you’re a freelance, you want to be measuring your word count and timing how long you’re spending on something. If you’re writing a lot then you want an app that looks aesthetically pleasing (I can’t stand Microsoft Word, and hate it when I see journalists writing stories in it, but that’s me). Then there’s how you collect and store information, be it from the net or from interviews. It needs to go somewhere and it needs to be easily retrievable when you want to write. More on this another time.

Get a decent mouse.

There’s a guy in my co-working space that still uses his Macbook touchpad, that rectangle near the keyboard, to move the mouse around. Very few people are adept at this, so it’s painful to watch guys like my co-worker waste hours a day scrambling around. Buy a mouse. Really. They’re cheap — you can even get a bluetooth one for less than $50 these days, so you don’t even need to take up a USB port. I guarantee it will save you an hour a day.

Save your own neck.

Mobile journalism can mean standing up, moving around, but most of the time it means bringing enough equipment with you to be able to work away from the office — a hotel room, a conference centre, or whatever. This is where I see far too many people hunched over a laptop, looking like Scrooge on Boxing Day. The problem with laptops is they weren’t designed for posture. But you can fix that, with a $20 stand. These are light, foldable, and lift the screen up to a height closer to eye level, which is where it should be. You’ll need to bring an external keyboard with you, but they’re cheap and light too, and your chiropractor will thank you.

While you’re at it get a second screen.

Here’s another tip: Laptop screens are too small to store more than what you’re writing on. If all your source mverkkorahaterial is also stored on your computer, then you’ll need a second screen. You likely have dual monitors in the office, so just because you’re on the road, why should you deny yourself that luxury? There are some good cheap monitors that don’t even require a power supply — plug them into your USB port and they’ll draw the power from there. For several years I had a AOC monitor, which was basic but did the job. I recently upgraded to an Asus monitor which is a beauty, and has made me much more productive and the envy of my co-workers — even the guy fiddling around with the touchpad.

A word of warning to Mac users: recent updates to their operating system have broken the drivers necessary to get the most out of these second screens, but there is a workaround that half fixes it. Email me if you need help.

Be safe.

Being mobile with cool equipment does leave you vulnerable to theft, either financially or politically motivated. Don’t take your main laptop with you to places like China. Have a cheap backup laptop with just the bare essentials on it. Always put your laptop in the room safe, and, if you want to be super clever, buy a small external USB drive to store any sensitive data on, and keep that in your pocket. Samsung do some nice, SSD (solid state, and hence smaller, faster) drives, the latest called T3. I attach mine to the laptop with velcro and then remove it and put it in my pocket when I’m heading off to dinner.

Stay connected.

Don’t trust other people’s wifi. Bring your own. I have a wifi modem, still 3G, which does me fine. Buy a local data SIM card and fire it up. Everyone in your team now has internet access — and the bad guys sniffing the free hotel or coffee shop wireless network will be frustrated.

Finally, stay cool.

By far the most popular thing in my mobile toolkit is a USB fan. Most conference venues are either too hot or too cold, and it’s amazing what a $2 fan can do.

Quartz, which is owned by Atlantic Media, prides itself on its originality in delivering news – its pioneering daily email newsletter has nearly 200,000 subscribers – and its newest innovation doesn’t disappoint.

Writing in Techcrunch, Jon Russell says that “using a clear and clean design aesthetic, the Quartz bot interacts with you, offering up news stories which you can choose to get more information about or move on to the next.” A simple chat interface lets users decide on the level of detail – if you want, more just ask for it. The app has been rolled out for iPhones, with Android to follow soon.

For Mathew Ingram, writing in Fortune, “it looks and feels dramatically unlike almost every other news app available.” Its simplicity is its appeal, and the experience of using it is like a personal conversation. “There’s no front-page style list of headlines and images, there isn’t even a time-sorted feed of stories. There’s just what looks like a friend texting you, asking you in speech bubbles (complete with emojis) what you are interested in reading about.” You navigate by replying with simple phrases like ‘tell me more’ or ‘what’s next’. Another bonus is that it’s ad-free, except for a sponsor’s message at the end.

Writing in imediaconnection, Tom Edwards is ‘incredibly impressed’ by the app the “that gives the user the illusion that they are in control of the content experience“. There are three aspects that he particularly likes:

• Conversational flow: it creates an immediate bond with users because it’s so familiar.
• User-controlled experience: With an option to direct the experience by clicking on emojis, it makes you feel like you’re in control – it’s more conversational than disruptive.
• Conversational advertising: Over time, it will be possible to build a robust profile of users based on their interactions and integrate advertising as part of a conversation.

Edwards finishes by saying: “Kudos to the Quartz team for delivering a highly conversational approach to information overload and understanding the importance of empowering the consumer.” High praise indeed.

The logical next step for Quartz is to go native, according to Isabelle Niu in fusion.net – “getting on existing messaging apps and learning to become another person I talk to about current events, latest trends or viral videos.”

But as she points out, in China this is already an everyday reality. “Without the competition of Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, a monstrosity called WeChat dominates the social media scene in the world’s largest smartphone market. WeChat incorporates some features of most western social networks, but it started out as a messaging app, and messaging is still at its heart.”

More than half a billion people a day log in to WeChat. Public accounts, which are like blogs, are integrated into the chat experience and many have distinctive personalities that enable an interchange between users and publishers. “It’s a bit like having a private messaging thread with the writer you like.”

Niu wonders whether this type of exchange could point to the future of news in an age of information overload. “We-media consumers generally tune in to only a couple of publishers, who must carefully time and choose what they want to say in order to stay at the party. The future of publishing is to become one of those publishers.”

The Quartz app for iPhone can be downloaded here.

Well, no. Publishers are finding themselves at the wrong end of an uneven, unhealthy bargain, which is bad news for both news business economics and quality, pluralistic information.

“This is a really depressing, dystopian way to think about publishers and platforms. It only really makes sense if you view writing as a fungible commodity,” says John West in Quartz. For the synergy logic to work, a piece of journalism must be viewed as an ad unit, its value being no more and no less than how many clicks it generates. Even more depressing for West is that Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat and all other platforms view journalism in this way – they can see the cost (or potential revenues) of quality content, but not the value – and “that’s going to smother journalistic independence and the open web”.

The platforms have created such seamlessly efficient ways to deliver content that news publishers will soon have no need even to have a website. Facebook’s Instant Articles, Apple News, Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages, Twitter’s Moments, Snapchat – they provide comfortable, contained experiences, perfectly tailored for mobile, which is the direction audiences are headed. While the bare audience numbers make sense in the short term, warns West, “it will cost you”.

By granting control of content to Facebook and its like, publishers are turning platforms into the world’s gatekeepers to information, and these risk-averse megacorps already have a less than glittering track record of speaking truth to power and promoting diverse views.

It also means that publishers become ever more reliant on clicks: they only have worth to the platform if they bring in the traffic. The implication for quality is clear: as publishers become wire services for platforms, they lose their unique voice, their identity and their connection with their own audience. Editorial output has to match the platform’s audience, so publishers are incentivized to create bland, populist or clickbait brand of news. This means that a publisher’s traditional audience trusts them less and, with the context removed (knowing that an article was produced by The Guardian or The New Republic is an important part of the reading experience), an article has less meaning.

West also laments that “we’re also losing the organic and open shape of the web. It’s becoming something much more rigid and more hierarchical.”

“The answer is simple, but it isn’t easy,” he concludes. “We need to stop pretending that content is free. Publications need to ask readers to pay for their content directly, and readers need to be willing to give up money, as opposed to their privacy and attention. This means that publications will have to abandon the rapid-growth business models driven by display ads, which have driven them to rely on Facebook for millions of pageviews a month.”

John Herman in The Awl take a look at another aspect of the unfolding battle between publishers and platforms. Platforms like Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook and Google are creating their own editorial spaces and, in some cases, standalone apps, but are wrestling with what content to put there. With the platforms not having a clear content plan or even what audiences they want to serve, it leaves publishers with the headache of having to ask: “What do these platforms want from us? What will they then want for themselves? What will be left for the partners?” This is an uncomfortable place for publishers to be.

Herman points out that over the past few years, publishers have been providing platforms like Facebook with huge volumes of free content in exchange for big audiences and, occasionally, revenues. However, he warns that Facebook is simultaneously intent on destroying this same advertising system.

Platforms are sucking in the ad revenues that used to go to web advertising that helped support publishers. “These new in-house editorial projects located at the center of the platform, rather than at its edges, will succeed or fail based on how they assist in that project—not according to how well they replicate or replace or improve on publications supported by a model they’re in the process of destroying.”

Publishers be warned.

For Michael Wolff, writing in MIT Technology Review, the acceptance of Instant Articles by major players who have signed up to provide content through the feature provided yet another example of bad decision-making by the news industry. As he points out: “Netflix will pay approximately $3 billion in licensing and production fees this year to the television and film industry; Hulu is paying $192 million to license South Park; Spotify pays out 70 percent of its gross revenues to the music labels that hold the underlying rights to Spotify’s catalogue. Now here’s what Facebook is guaranteeing a variety of publishers, including the New York Times, BuzzFeed, and the Atlantic, which are posting articles in its new “instant articles” feature: $0.”

He accuses news publishers of giving away their content for free, while at the same time losing control of their branding and valuable usage data. In the Facebook deal, publishers can sell ads on their articles and keep all of the revenue, or have Facebook sell ads in exchange for 30 percent.

“In the case of these new platform distribution deals—while they all involve slightly different plays—they each mimic a standard publishing business model: syndication. That is, a publisher with access to a different audience redistributes the content of another publisher—of course paying the content owner a fair fee. In some sense, this is the basis of the media business … Content is valuable–otherwise why distribute it?”

This leads Wolff to wonder whether “republishing initiatives are digging a deeper hole for publishers or helping them get out of the one they are already in”. He sees no reason to think things will turn out well: “…publishers have largely found themselves in this dismal situation because of their past bad decisions—accepting the general free ethos, bowing to a vast catchall of casual and formal sharing and re-posting agreements, and failing to challenge an ever-expanding interpretation of fair use. It seems only logical to doubt the business acumen of people who have been singularly inept when it comes to protecting their interests in the world of digital distribution.”

Facebook’s rationale for publishers to support Instant Articles is that it will provide a better user experience and deliver bigger audiences. While true, Wolff says that publishers will lose sustainable brand-building opportunities; it’s a model that better suits content that maximizes revenue potential, in particular ‘native content’, and will further push down digital ad prices.

According to Wolff, this type of syndication arrangement represents “another step closer toward what Ken Doctor, an analyst and journalist who has closely covered the demise of the news business, calls “off news site” reading. In this, publishers effectively give up their own channels and become suppliers of content to more efficient distribution channels … In effect, the New York Times becomes a wire service–the AP, except where the AP gets paid huge licensing fees, the Times does not.”

With the collapse of traditional ad revenues, publishers have justified pushing forward with digital experimentation because others were and because they couldn’t afford not to, even though they don’t fully understand the technology. “The ultimate result was a disastrous, sheep-to-slaughter endgame scenario, in which the new, digitally focused publishers are a fraction of their analog size. And now, in the prevalent view, there is simply no turning back.”

Meanwhile, dollars are flowing into the coffers of TV, movie and sports content creators. Even music, is fighting to win back control of – or at least payment for – its product. Wolff concludes that while there are differences between entertainment and news publishing that may explain why the old rules don’t apply in the new world, “perhaps publishers are just shamefully bad businessmen”.

In Mobile Marketing Daily, Steve Smith reviews the Apple News app and what it means for the news business. He concludes that in user experience terms it’s similar to Flipboard and Zeit – aggregating content from news sites and blogs in an attractive, easy-to-use way – but his diagnosis for the publishing industry makes for grim reading: “The legitimate worry of course is that media brands further lose control of their audience, data, context – and potentially, of their advertisers. I would say “Alert the media,” but in this scenario the media are already dead men walking.”

Writing for Fast Company, Joel Johnson points out that Apple and Facebook are just giving users what they want: a faster, less cluttered experience, compared to the slow load times and multitude of ad forms assaulting users on the sites of news publishers, who are forced into maximizing revenue by any means possible. Aggregators may provide a better – though banal – experience, “but it is unclear if most publications will be able to survive on only the revenue granted by these platform companies alone.” Apple’s attitude that “advertising is always unwelcome, unless it happens to be advertising that Apple itself lords over” is also a serious concern. “With small-to-midsize publishers already dropping like flies, things are looking perilous for readers and writers alike.”

An article in The Wall Street Journal claims that desktop usage isn’t decreasing, as is often claimed. Jack Marshall explains that while the share of the market enjoyed by mobile internet access is growing fast, the total time spent online from desktops isn’t falling and might even be increasing.

However, Thad McIlroy on the Future of Publishing blog says this interpretation is misleading. The data The Wall Street Journal bases its findings on “encompasses all desktop computer usage, the majority of which relates to the Microsoft and Adobe application suites as well as email”.

“The real story is not that the PC usage is up, but that simultaneous device use — usually called ‘multi-platform’ — has changed the device landscape.” McIlroy says that data from another comScore report, The U.S. Digital Future in Focus 2015, shows that the number of people only using desktops to access the internet is declining sharply in all age groups, even the 55+ segment, and that across all ages the amount of mobile-only users is also growing fast.

This interpretation of the data – that mobile is growing at the expense of desktop – seems to be backed up by Google, which recently confirmed that it’s now serving more Google searches on smartphones than desktops in 10 counties, including the US and Japan. To respond to changing demands, Google is “rolling out new, smartphone-optimized ad formats that give users more reason to tap than its traditional AdWords. These include picture-heavy automobile ads that show users a gallery of their dream ride before directing them to dealerships, and hotel ads that sandwich together availability, prices, user reviews, and pictures into a compact mobile format.”

However, while the amount of mobile access might be outstripping desktop, an Outbrain study in the Asia-Pacific region shows that people consuming content on desktop are much more likely to engage with content compared to mobile, especially when it comes to paid content, reports Trak.in.

“In fact, if we compare desktop vs mobile, then engagement level falls drastically to 36% in Australia; and 9% in India. This means that if an Indian accesses a piece of content on mobile, then there is 9% less chance of his engagement compared to accessing content on desktop. Engagement here means sharing, commenting, liking the post or following the author/publication on social media.”

Of course mobile and desktop are both heavily used to access email. Yesware Enterprise examined more than 14 million messages sent by its users earlier this year to produce a detailed pattern of when and on what device people use to read their emails. This slideshow gives an insight into their findings.

Ingram explains that some critics say that Sullivan’s retirement signals the death of blogging, while others claim that it actually died a long time ago. BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith has argued that blogging disappeared when people like himself started to use it as a tool to power their own career. “Ben is saying that some bloggers stopped thinking as much about being part of a larger ecosystem — one in which they linked to and sent traffic to other bloggers, and in turn relied on their resources and links — and started thinking about becoming their own independent media entities instead. In effect, they turned inwards, and became more concerned with creating their own content and building up their readership, and turning that into a business.”

Ezra Klein, co-founder of Vox, thinks that the rise of the social web forced blogging to change. The niche, specialist nature of blogs that linked to other blogs, creating community and conversation, has been replaced by the search for virality through Facebook and Twitter.

In Ingram’s opinion, the truth is that blogging hasn’t died; it has changed. In fact, we are now surrounded by it. When it started, blogging was the quickest way to publish your voice, to share your thoughts and listen to what others were saying. Now, with Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook, all the elements that we used to think of as blogging are everywhere, immediately available to us all, easier to use than traditional platforms, and providing far larger audiences.

“Clinging to a specific form like blogging is an anachronism,” he says. What newspapers like the New York Times have done is to get rid of their blogs as separate entities, and incorporate that content into the rest of the paper.

Big Data is “an umbrella term for a variety of strategies and tactics that involve massive data sets, and technologies that make sense out of these mindboggling reams of data”. The report explains that the media industry can think of Big Data as “the Four Vs, including:

• volume of data;
• velocity of data, meaning it needs to be analysed quickly;
• in a variety of structured and increasingly unstructured data formats;
• which all have potential value in terms of high quality journalism and business insights and revenue.”

Media companies can use Big Data analysis to improve many aspects of their business performance, such as understanding their audience and better targeting customers, crunching huge data sets to uncover stories, directing campaigns, improving decision-making and creating business efficiencies.

The report provides detailed examples from several leading media companies using Big Data to develop their audience and business, including:

• Huffington Post, which “uses Big Data to optimise content, authenticate comments, ensure efficacy of native advertising, regulate advertising placement and create passive personalisation”.
• BuzzFeed, which uses Big Data pre-publication to predict the virality of articles by identifying “characteristics with predictive relationship to virality”, and post-publication to “optimise the article’s promotion”.
• The Financial Times, which uses registration data collected through its metered paywall “to serve the customer better, create targeted advertising campaigns and create new products based on information collected on background and areas of interest to its readers”.

The report also examines training data journalists and data-driven automation in journalism, as well as lessons from beyond the media sector.