About authors:

Clémence Petit-Perrot is the Children’s Radio Foundation’s Learning and Innovation Director. She oversees the development all new initiatives within the organisation. Part of her portfolio includes piloting technological solutions like WhatsApp to increase listeners engagement and measure the radio shows’ impact. Before joining CRF, she was the Southern Africa correspondent for Radio France Internationale (RFI). She also worked for the South African production company DOXA, producing social documentary films and leading a digitisation project of anti-Apartheid audiovisual archives.

Linda Daniels is a journalist by training and has worked in print, digital and broadcast media. She has reported on a range of issues, which include climate change, Intellectual Property and South African politics. Her work has appeared in local and international publications. Between 2013 and 2018, she worked at the Children’s Radio Foundation as the Radio Capacity Building Associate and managed the WhatsApp Integration project.

Please download and share the guide. We would love to hear from you – send any comments or suggestions to us at mas@mdif.org.

[pdf-embedder url=”https://www.kbridge.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/WhatsApp-for-Radio-Toolkit.pdf” title=”Guide #6: WhatsApp for Radio Toolkit by Clémence Petit-Perrot and Linda Daniels”]

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.

Case Studies to Guide #2: Paywall Implementation at Gazeta Wyborzca and Malaysiakini, by Marius Dragomir, Dumitrita Holdis and Ian M. Cook.

[pdf-embedder url=”https://www.kbridge.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Guide-2-Case-studies-appendices.pdf” title=”Case Studies to Guide #2: Paywall Implementation at Gazeta Wyborzca and Malaysiakini”]

Please download and share the guide. We would love to hear from you – send any comments or suggestions to us at mas@mdif.org.

Authors: Marius Dragomir, Dumitrita Holdis and Ian M. Cook – Center for Media, Data and Society (CMDS) at Central European University (CEU) School of Public Policy (SPP).

Guide #2 – Launching a paywall: What you and your team need to know, by Tomáš Bella.

Please download and share the guide. We would love to hear from you – send any comments or suggestions to us at mas@mdif.org.

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About author: Tomáš Bella is co-founder and web director of an independent Slovak daily newspaper: Denník N (dennikn.sk), which also develops open-source software for publishers REMP (remp2020). Previously, he was Editor-in-Chief of the largest provider of Slovak web journalism, sme.sk, and co-founder and first director of Piano, now the world’s largest company offering publishers paywall software.

Facts and discourses can be verified across borders, since most information is searchable globally. Data-crunching software can enable a journalist to spot a criminal pattern or abusive commercial practices in minutes. The possibility of classifying and extracting information from massive sets of leaked documents in coordinated global investigative journalism efforts, have made it possible for reporters to provide evidence on  shady dealings on a global scale. Social networks, transparent government practices, public databases, image recognition, mapping, geo-location and open source tools – most of them free – have grown exponentially. They provide an opportunity to any citizen with a computer or a smartphone, special training and good intuition to expose lies behind wars. And free applications and software make it easy for reporters investigating a public interest issue to link a name with a phone in many places of the world, or track criminals’ movements by connecting their usernames and locations.

Of course, journalists still have to do the tedious digging and street reporting, cultivating sources, and clinging on to stories until they make sense. They must have the courage to resist powerful pressures to give up, even when these seem unbearable. But to be a true investigative reporter today; to be able to cope and respond to challenges posed by globalised and sophisticated trends of crime, corruption and environmental depredation, among other evils, it is indispensable to fine-tune the old philosophy with three new practices: be Open, Systematic and Safe.

To be ‘Open’ means to look beyond the borders of your country. While it is true that most people prefer local stories, finding the links to the outside world would probably make them better, as facts can be widely verified and contrasted. Hence, if a reporter finds a corporation polluting a river in her country, she can go to international resources, such as Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project’s (OCCRP) Investigative Dashboard, or to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism’s Corporate Watch. She may find that this same company is owned by an industrial group with equally poor environmental practices elsewhere.

Sometimes a story is too dangerous or too complex for a reporter to cover it alone. So to be “Open” also means to collaborate, sometimes even with media competitors. Moreover, it implies that investigative reporters need to work with experts of other professions, which is partly what, for instance,  Finance Uncovered and Thompson-Reuters’ Reporting on illicit finance in Africa attempt to do in their cross-border investigations.

To be ‘Systematic’ entails a proficient use of tools and software to scrape data and clean it; to organise and visualise it so that the numbers can tell the story. This is what India Spend does so well to explain, for example, the magnitude of pre-trial detention in India, or what the Philippines Center for Investigative Journalism did to profile this year’s candidates in the general elections. The Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN) has, among many other resources for investigative journalists, a complete list of tools to get anyone started on data journalism.

There is another side to practising a systematic investigative journalism. It means to look for information in an efficient way, for example, having at hand a template to continuously request public information and even inviting your readers to use it, like Atlatszo.hu does.  Investigative journalism of this kind can also mean systematically encouraging the public at large to help you complete investigations with data, documents, photos, like the OCCRP does with its OCCRP Leaks. Finally, reporters must be systematic in doing their searches. There are sites that help a reporter to connect a domain with a name; or see social media activity underway in a given place. These and many other tools and resources are explained by Paul Myers in his Research Clinic.

The third condition that an investigative journalist must include in their daily routines is Safety: physical, legal and digital. Watching out for yourself, your data and your sources in the digital environment is mandatory and there are many easy to use tools and tutorials – such as Tactical Tech’s resource-packed website – that can guide journalists. Physical security and legal protection are vitally important habits and below is a list of resources and organizations, which provide security advice and support to journalists.

The search tools, the global reach, and the efficient management of huge databases surely make today’s investigative journalist capable of going wider and deeper when fighting more complex and invisible abuses. Indeed, to take advantage of this potential, they must master new tools and make them part of their everyday journalistic practice. But, beware: for all the ingenuity of new digital tools at our disposal, investigative journalism is still about the story, getting it right, making it fair and uncovering wrongs to the public good that some prefer to keep hidden. And that has not gotten any easier!

This story originally appeared in https://medium.com/@OSFJournalism of the Open Society Foundation’s Program on Independent Journalism and is reprinted with permission.

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This explains why in many countries, digital journalistic enterprises launched when social media was already mature rapidly run ahead of legacy newspapers, even those that made big cash injections into their digital operations. Of course, successful digital media must produce good journalism, but their true secret is creating a conversation around it.  They are open to their public and easily let them know who they are. In one example in Eastern Europe, despite the traditional formality of many East European media, a new digital outlet had no problem sending a video to their audience of the editor sitting in her kitchen apologising saying she was sorry for a boring newsletter they had sent. In Latin America, new digital outlets have also successfully broken with the formal, ceremonial tone so characteristic of serious media there. Reporters tell the stories behind their best stories; introduce themselves with slang, as if to friends; constantly correct their mistakes; and when they have a conflict of interest about an issue, are candid about it. They let their public know that the media is only human.

These journalists offer their audiences a new, more transparent, and freer horizontal culture. However, sometimes, even those passionate journalists forget it takes two to tango. They want to tell their readers a lot about themselves, but do not care to listen.  Recently I saw journalists from Central America and the Middle East marvel at how little they knew about their readers after taking an intensive “read your analytics” course.  They said that knowing their Google stats and monitoring their following on social media makes a big difference to knowing how their stories are received.

But they, along with other media, including the largest US newspapers, have been realizing that tracking graphs and trends is not the same as talking with your public. (“We can count the world’s best-informed and most influential people among our readers”, said the New York Time’s 2014 innovation report. “Yet we haven’t cracked the code for engaging with them in a way that makes our report richer”).

Media in digital era know now they should invite readers to discover the world with them: open doors so that their audience can check the public discourse with them (like many of the 100+ fact-checking outlets around the globe are doing today); know the experts among their readers so that they bring insight into their news; call upon those with a generous heart to help them go through the millions of documents they just got from a source and build a database; ask the furious and the bullies, who write insults under their articles, where does their anger come from and, listen; open a space to let readers decide which reportage they should do; invite first-hand witnesses to document a problem they are investigating… the list of how much they can enrich their journalism is endless.

For those journalists with blinders who believe that engagement with audience is the business of marketers, Monica Guzman in her great guide about audience engagement  published this year with the American Press Institute proves them wrong. It is not about delivering a product, it is about making sure your readers know you respect and value them, she says, “showing them that together, they have important things to teach each other.”

Around the world independent journalism becomes stronger on the shoulders of the communities they serve.  Eldiario in Spain and Mada Masr in Egypt define themselves as a culture, a way of being, a clique, an idea of the society they want to be. And they build this dream together with a community that feels invited to be part of their world, well-treated, partaker, equal, like in any really good conversation. The “talky” public is here to stay and those journalists who fail to see their luck in this new era are likely to fade away.

This story originally appeared in https://medium.com/@OSFJournalism of the Open Society Foundation’s Program on Independent Journalism and is reprinted with permission.

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What these pioneers understand well is that this is not just about getting the money; it is about creating a faithful community of readers. In a way, they are searching for the lost group of loyal subscribers of the traditional newspapers who would call the newsroom in times of crisis as if journalists were family. The new fragmented audiences of digital outlets no longer gather around news-producers but around social networks, and no longer see why quality journalism has to be paid, nor how these payments help their guarantee the media true independence.

Crowd-funding helps journalism-producing outlets build a reliable community around a way of being.

Hungarians fund Atlatzo; Salvadoreans, El Faro; or inhabitants of Hong Kong, Factwire because they think good information is indispensable to survive as citizens. They know that if they support quality, well-verified stories, they will know what is really going on, and they will not be deceived with slanted or special-interest driven information.

There are however, cultural nuances in crowd-funding. In many places in the world it is still seen as a request for charity; as if the journalists were requesting a personal favor. And people may give them small change, like giving donations in church. Fortunately, this culture is changing. More citizens seem to understand that crowd-funding for journalism is a profoundly egalitarian exercise. They are growingly conscious that, as with food, they cannot only consume “junk” information.

If citizens only access information from contaminated sources, they will be unable to hold government or corporations accountable; unable to know when their interests are being harmed.

Crowd-funding is also a democratizing force because it gives power to its audiences. If they pay for the stories, they will follow them up and demand quality. Sure, the old business model that supported journalism was working, but in many parts of the world, it had been perverted by the excessive power it gave advertisers (including state advertising) over editorial content. It also left too much room for journalists to cosy-up to power. Now if citizens voluntarily fund a journalistic project, they expect something more than lazy journalism and they can speak more strongly to the journalists they fund.

Finally, crowd-funding can be a shield for journalism under attack. These same crowds that gave a journalism site money because they are convinced they need “organic journalism” made of healthy sources and verified ingredients to have a better life, could be the ones that go out of their way to defend it when under attack. For example, when there have been attempts to censor or intimidate Malaysiakini, a renowned independent media in Kuala Lumpur, its audience, who gave them half a million dollars for their new building, marched in the streets to protest. Also, as you will see in the examples below, crowds have helped pay for the defense of trusted journalists when these suffer legal abuse because they feel they stories they are telling are important and worth defending.

This story originally appeared in the May 2016 newsletter of the Open Society Foundation’s Program on Independent Journalism and is reprinted with permission.
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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.”