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.

US tech and media consultant Alan Mutter highlights the rise of Google and the collapse of US newspaper advertising

In the early phase of any media transition, we rely on what we know and try to adapt the thinking of the current medium to the new media. In the early days of television news, broadcasts were often little more than a radio newsreader sitting in front of a camera. It took time for us to understand how TV was different and how best to use this new visual medium.

The changes in thinking needed to effectively adapt to a new medium are not just editorial but also commercial. Alan Mutter, who has worked in newspapers and in digital media start-ups, has succinctly summarised the changes that digital media has brought to advertising as a matter of the traditional media model of ‘reach’ versus the targeted digital model of ‘each’.

Pre-digital advertising relied on reaching as many people as possible, while not being as concerned with targeting specific audiences or consumers. To the extent that it was possible to reach specific consumers, it was done with special sections in newspapers or magazine content. Digital advertising allows much greater targeting, and Google’s commercial breakthrough was to deliver ads based on what people are searching for. The logic goes that if someone is looking for a holiday flight then they might also be looking for a hotel or rental car. Print media were woefully late in grasping this key difference in advertising strategies. While Mutter is discussing the US market, the changes in digital advertising are universal and relevant to any market. In fact, in some markets in the early stages of the digital transition, his insights are in some ways even more relevant and could help news businesses to avoid the strategic blunders made by the US newspaper industry.

As we’ve discussed a number of times here on Knowledge Bridge, one of the biggest challenges in the digital transition is that news organisations face a new class of competitors for digital ad revenue, and one of the biggest mistakes that newspapers, in particular, made is that they continued to view their competition as other newspapers or other news media, instead of appreciating the competitive threat posed by new digital competitors such as search engines and social networks. Looking at more than a decade of data, Mutter lays out the dire consequences of this miscalculation:

 In less than a dozen years, this upstart start-up built a $46 billion advertising business that was twice as large last year as the combined print and digital ad sales of all of the 1,382 daily newspapers in the land.

He produced a graph, looking at newspaper print and digital ad revenue versus Google’s ad revenue. In dramatic terms, the graph shows how US print advertising has utterly collapsed since its peak in 2005, while Google’s advertising revenue was 15 times greater than all US newspapers digital ad revenue in 2012, Mutter says, based on figures from the Newspaper Association of America.

Mutter accuses the newspaper industry of a lack of imagination and says that it simply tried to apply the traditional advertising model to digital, while completely failing to understand that a different advertising model based on harnessing user data to deliver highly relevant, targeted and efficient ads was dominant in digital. Mutter says:

Newspapers (along with magazines, billboards and broadcasters) represent the traditional but inefficient “reach” model of advertising, which depends on spreading a commercial message to as large an audience as possible in hopes of connecting with qualified customers who happen at the moment to be receptive to it.  Google, on the other hand, represents the highly efficient “each” model of advertising, which lets marketers put customized commercial messages next to only the results of searches containing specific keywords they have selected to target their ads. The Google system not only enables marketers to target exactly the right prospect at the right moment but also makes it remarkably easy to monitor response rates and, thus, measure an ad’s return on investment in real time.

The key question for publishers and media executives is how to respond to this competitive threat. Mutter gives some advice.

• Know your audience. Invest in technology that allows you not just to know how many unique visitors you have on your site but also as much as possible about what they are reading, who they are and what are their interests.
• Invest in ad targeting technology. Companies such as Crowd Science provide ad targeting services that will help you deliver much more relevant, and therefore, better performing advertising.
• Use specialist or niche content to sell ads relevant to that content. It isn’t a digital innovation that if you have a food section that you sell ads for restaurants, grocers or other food-related businesses. If you have a fashion section, again, you’ll want to make sure that your clothing and other fashion-related clients know about the opportunity to reach interested members of your audience.

Understanding this key shift from ‘reach’ to ‘each’ advertising will help you develop strategies that more effectively compete against new digital competitors as you seek to grow your digital advertising revenue. The game has changed, and you need to grasp these changes if you want to win.

You’ve probably seen unbelievable images, like the one above, race past on Facebook, Twitter or vKontakte during a breaking news event. Such images spread rapidly, virally, because the images are so gripping and seem to encapsulate what’s happening. Unfortunately, some of the images are hoaxes, others are recycled from previous events.

As a journalist, it is important to make sure you don’t get overwhelmed during the heat of the moment and share or publish something before checking it out. We’re professional sceptics, and many modern journalists have found that a few seconds of scepticism have saved their credibility. We’ll look at some advanced image search techniques and services that will help you find the photos that you need in the deluge of UGC images during a big news event and also to uncover the fakes.

Using Google image search for verification

As Superstorm Sandy bore down on New York, the image above was shared by many of my friends on Facebook. I was sceptical. My first job as a journalist was in Kansas, in a region often referred to as Tornado Alley, and these clouds looked more like clouds from the thunderstorms I saw there rather than the type of storm that Sandy was.

I saved the image from Facebook so that I could use Google Image Search to see where else online it might have appeared. Google Image Search allows you to search by keyword, but you can also do a visual search, searching for images that are visually similar to another image. To do this kind of search, click on the camera icon in the search form.

This will bring up options to either paste in the URL, or web address, of the image that you want to search for, or to upload an image. In this case, the search quickly led me to the original photo, which was taken in 2004 by storm chaser Mike Hollingshead in the state of Nebraska.

Snopes.com, a site that debunks internet myths, said that this wasn’t the first time the photo had been used incorrectly.

The original storm photo is a familiar one on these pages, as it (along with other examples of Mike Hollingshead’s work) has been circulated on the Internet numerous occasions as depicting a variety of different storms throughout the world, including Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The other value of a search like this is that it can show the other places where the photo has appeared. This can be valuable for verification and, as this example shows, help you locate the source of a photo as well. This will not only help you uncover faked photos, but can also help you find the original photographer if you want to use the photo. Also, as we saw in looking for Creative Commons images on Flickr, you can find out if a person is passing off a photo as their own.

Tineye: Another image search service

Tineye is another image search tool that news organisations are using to help find out where images are used, both to verify and to source images. Tineye works in a very similar way to Google Image Search. You can either upload an image, add a page URL or the URL of the specific image or simply drag and drop an image file on the page.

Based on my experience with Tineye, it is best to upload an image or add the URL of the image, rather than the URL of the page.

If we upload our Statue of Liberty storm image, TinEye finds 181 examples of pages where the image appears. It is pretty clear from these results that the photo is fake, with the second image being named “very-fake-hurricane-pic.jpg”.

TinEye also has a range of browser plugins, for Chrome, Firefox and Safari, so that you can right click on an image and it will allow you to search for that photo. For instance, on this story looking at sifting fake photos from real, and identifying photos that have been heavily edited, we can search for the photo that looks like a diver swimming through a New York subway station.

The story from The Atlantic was one of many sorting fact from fiction, and it was one of the best examples of the kind because it provided sourcing information to back up its fact checking.

Advanced search techniques

There are a number of advanced techniques that you can use with both TinEye and Google Image Search to help you find photos, including photos with Creative Commons licences that you can use to illustrate your stories.

Like all Google search services, Google Image search has a number of advanced options, many of which are available by clicking on the Search tools button after you’ve entered your search keywords. You can search by image size, by image colour, by time and even by type of image such as photo, images with faces, clip art images or animated images.

There are other advanced search options which you can access by clicking on the gear icon in the upper right hand side of the page. Some of the additional options include being able to restrict your search to a region or to a specific website. One of the most useful options is the ability to search for Creative Commons licenced photos (the last choice in the advanced image search options).

Google breaks down the Creative Commons licence into plain language. You’ll want to use the licences that allow for commercial use. Most of the images that the search will find will be on Flickr, due to its large collection of Creative Commons licenced photos, but Google will also find Creative Commons licenced photos elsewhere as well.

TinEye has a clever feature that will search Creative Commons photos by colour. You can choose up to five colours for your search, and it will show you previews of the images it finds. One thing to note though, you’ll have to click through to the photos to find the licencing terms to make sure that they have the appropriate Creative Commons licence.

Image search has rapidly developed in the past few years, and now you can search not only by keywords but also by the image itself. It can be a great tool to help in verifying and tracing images. And advanced search tools such as Google Image Search and TinEye can also help expand Creative Commons searches beyond Flickr.

Of course, one of the benefits of the survey is that you can collect contact information for those who took part. Journalists on staff can look through the responses for interesting leads, and if the leads left contact details, they can follow up with those members of your audience.

As you collect information, you can view a summary of the responses, to quickly get a sense of trends in your survey. From the spreadsheet, where your responses will be collected, you can access this summary from the Form option in the menu. The number in parentheses will show you how many responses you have.

Select “Show summary of responses” to see charts and an overview of the responses thus far.

You won’t want to run the survey indefinitely. When you have collected the responses that you want, you can uncheck the menu item “Accepting responses” from the Form menu. This will close the form to submissions.

Mapping your survey responses

There are a number of services that you can use to map information, including services such as BatchGeo and ZeeMaps. In addition to these general, global services, there are specialist services that focus on specific countries such as 2gis.ru for Russia.

For this example, we’ll look at another service from Google, Google Fusion Tables. It has recently been integrated into Google Drive, but if you have a Google Drive corporate account, you might have to ask your administrator to add Fusion Tables to your service.

Fusion Tables is a powerful application to analyse large amounts of data, but while it is very powerful, it is also relatively simple. Google has collected a number of ways that news organisations, governments and others are using the service to map, chart and visualise information. The reason why we’re focusing on Fusion Tables is because the service is particularly good at mapping data, and as long as you have the city and state or region, it is relatively reliable in accurately mapping locations.

The first step is to create a new Fusion Table. To do this, go to Create and click on More, which will show you the option to create a new Fusion Table.

This will give you four options

1. To upload a dataset from your computer.
2. To use an existing Google spreadsheet.
3. To create an empty table.
4. To search publicly available datasets uploaded to Fusion Tables. The search form is in the lower, right hand side of the window rather than the three other options to the upper left.

You will want to use the existing Google spreadsheet that has your survey data. When you select this option, you will see a list of spreadsheets that you have in Google Drive including the spreadsheet that has your form and responses. When you select your spreadsheet, it will give you a preview of how your data will look when it is imported into Fusion Tables so you can make sure that the import has worked correctly. You can also choose the row which has the labels for your data. This will almost always be the first row when you import a spreadsheet based on a form.

If the spreadsheet looks correct, simply click the next button. The next screen will ask you some information about the data that you are uploading, including the source of the data. News organisations frequently have uploaded public information to Google Fusion Tables, and this allows journalists to post some information on the source of the data. In this case, you have collected your own data, and you should enter the address of your own news website.

Now your survey data will be in Google Fusion Tables. It will look similar to your spreadsheet but without the gridlines.

Fusion Tables is simple to use because it is focused on only a few types of data: Text, number, data/time or location. In some instances, if you have a column of place names, it will automatically detect that this is location information, but if Fusion Tables doesn’t automatically identify the location, you can tell the service which column or columns contain location information. To change the data type for your columns, go to Edit menu and selection Modify columns. This will bring up a window that tells you the data type of your columns. You can choose the data type, and if you have longitude and latitude data rather than city and state or region, you can use a two-column location format and set which columns contain the relevant information.

From this window, you can also delete the columns containing the time stamp and the contact information. You won’t need these for your map, and in the case of the contact details, you don’t want to make this public. To delete a column, simply select the name of the column. It will show you up and down arrows and an X. Click on the X to delete the column, and then hit the save button at the bottom of the Configure columns window.

After you change the data type of your column with information, you’ll notice the change because the information in that column will not be highlighted in yellow. If you hover your mouse pointer over your locations, two icons will appear. The first, a stylised blue sphere, is the Google Earth logo and the second allows you to leave a comment in your table. If you click on the blue sphere, it will bring up a map and show you where it believes the location is. If this is incorrect, you can change it by typing in new location information using a search form. You can correct the location by clicking on the green map pin of the right location from your search.

To map your survey responses, simply go to the Visualise menu option and select Map. The first time you create your map, you will see a progress bar as the service geo-codes, or maps, your locations. After it is finished, you should see pins that relate to your survey responses. Sometimes, you will need to click once on the map to force it to refresh and show your locations.

Above the map, you will see a number of options, including Configure info window, Configure styles, Download KML, Download KML link and Get embeddable link. The first one allows you to choose what information is included in the pop-up window when a user clicks on a map pin. For instance, you might not want to include the Timestamp information. To prevent this from being displayed, simply click on the Configure info window link and uncheck the box before Timestamp.

Also notice at the top of the window that there are two tabs, the second one being Custom. This allows you to make some basic modifications to the style of  the text.

The Configure styles window allows you to change the style of the pin that you use including using custom icons.  This window also allows you to use different colour icons based on the data in your survey. For instance, if you asked people to respond to a scale question, possibly asking them on a scale of 1 to 5 how they approved about government response to an issue, you could colour the pins differently based on the response to that question. That is possible with the option called “Buckets”, which we will cover in greater depth in another post.

The last three links allow you to take your map data to other mapping services or simply to embed the map on your site. Download the KML or the KML link allow you to use other map services that use Google’s open-source mapping data format, KML. To embed the map in your own website, click on Get embeddable link. This will open a window with a simple link and also the HTML embed to embed it in your site. You can also customise the height and width so that it fits into your story column width.

Note the message highlighted in yellow that says that the table is private and will not be visible. Just like all documents in Google Drive, every document in Fusion Tables has sharing and privacy options. By default, you only have access to the table, but to make the map visible, you will have to make the table public. Click on the link to change visibility. After clicking on this link, the options for privacy and sharing will open. You want to change the table from being private to being public in order to embed it in your website.

Now you can use the embed code, and your map will appear in your website. You can do a lot more with Fusion Tables including quickly analysing a large amount of data and also creating maps with special boundaries such as political districts or even to show how different areas might be affected by a flood or major storm. You can even highlight road conditions as was done after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan in 2011. It’s a powerful but simple tool. If you have any questions, let us know in the comments, and we’ll do our best to answer them.

• The music industry is about half the size of its peak in 2000.
• In just five years, Amazon increased its global sales from $10.72bn to $44.1bn in 2011, according to Retail Week.
• In the US, newspaper advertising has been cut in half since it peaked in 2005.

Digital media consultant and ex-newspaperman Alan Mutter says that the digital disruption of retail didn’t just coincide with the decline in newspaper advertising but is linked. He sees the next threat to newspaper revenue coming from a potential in “preprint advertising”. Preprint ads are glossy advertising inserts produced by major national retailers in the US, and according to one source quoted by Mutter, they account for, on average, 70% of advertising revenue at US newspapers. Over the past five years, preprint advertising has grown to become a larger percentage of advertising for US newspapers. However, that much needed source of revenue is now under threat by changes in retail. Mutter says preprint revenue is under threat because:

The digital revolution, which is (a) unraveling the business models of many of the big-box retailers who historically have been the biggest buyers of preprint advertising and (b) encouraging even healthy bricks-and-mortar retailers to shift from high-priced print advertising to targeted and inexpensive digital formats.

Some retailers are even foregoing traditional advertising and going directly to consumers via their own websites, email offers and social media, Mutter ads. He adds:

Even thriving bricks-and-mortar retailers today are trying to improve the efficiency of their marketing by seeking low-cost and highly targeted advertising options.

This is why advertisers and advertising revenue has shifted to innovative new advertisers such as search-based advertising and social networks. As the Economist noted last year, in 2000, Google only captured 1 percent of advertising spending, but now it captures almost half. Google now earns more than the entire US newspaper industry. Facebook is in the process of rolling out a new advertising service that will allow companies to “target their ads to existing customers based on their phone numbers and e-mail addresses”, according to technology news site CNET.

Disrupt your own business before others do

Over the last five years, many news organisations have done a good job of delivering editorial innovation, but they still lag behind digital competitors in terms of delivering advertising innovation. One key lesson is that it is better to disrupt your own business before others do.

Some news groups, such as Scandinavia’s Schibsted, noticed the trends in other markets early, and moved to invest in digital advertising solutions. Newspapers in the US blame online classified service Craigslist of killing their classified business, but Schibsted used them as inspiration. Craigslist launched in 1995, and to compete with online classifieds in their own market, Schibsted launched classifieds site Finn.no, even though it went head-to-head with the group’s newspapers. Finn.no was spun off in March 2000. In a 2010 interview with Businessweek, Schibsted’s Chief Executive Officer Rolv Erik Ryssdal said

We weren’t afraid to cannibalize ourselves

Schibsted bought Blocket.se in 2003, and it is now one of the five largest sites in Sweden. In 1997, the company launched another classified sites focused on car sales. The site, Bytbil.com, is now used by 95% of all car dealers in Sweden. The company has classified advertising sites in 20 countries in Europe, Asia and Latin America, and in 2010, its classified business was the third largest globally, trailing only Craigslist and eBay.

Schibsted realised early on that digital advertisers are looking for ads that perform, and if you don’t deliver that, someone else will.

Data: Delivering better editorial and more revenue from advertising

Digital technology also allows you to know who your audiences are. That’s good for editorial staff in that they can better serve the needs and interests of their market, but data is also extremely important in delivering relevant audiences and higher performance to advertisers. Advertisers want to send very targeted messages, but you can’t help them achieve that if you don’t know who your content reaches. It is essential to invest in technology and market research so that you know your audience better. In September, we’ll be looking at how to generate higher returns via advertising and data-driven techniques to get better ad performance.

The key is that you need to focus your digital innovation efforts and resources not just on delivering editorial innovation but also advertising and revenue innovation. In digital media, you’re not just competing against other news organisations for audiences, but also social networks and search engines for ad revenue.

The threat

Several high-profile attacks have targeted journalists in the past few years.

• In 2009 and again in 2011, Google revealed that hackers had been targeting journalists and their assistants in China, often gaining access to their Gmail accounts. These were not random attacks but targeted attempts to gain information from government officials, human rights campaigners, journalists and those who had worked with journalists.

• More recently, the Mamfakinch.com citizen media project in Morocco saw an attempt to infect its computers with  sophisticated spyware normally used by governments and law-enforcement agencies. Staff received an email that claimed to have information about a political scandal but the document contained a “hidden file that was designed to download a Trojan that could secretly take screenshots, intercept e-mail, record Skype chats, and covertly capture data using a computer’s microphone and webcam, all while bypassing virus detection”, according to US news site Slate.

• Individual journalists are not the only targets and, as cyber-attacks become more common around major stories such as Syria, large news organisations are also facing attacks. Reuters recently saw its Twitter account compromised as well as its WordPress blogging platform twice hacked, resulting in the posting of false articles. A group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army, which supports the government of Bashar al-Assad, has claimed responsibility for a number of similar attacks, but the BBC reports that it is unclear who was behind the attacks on Reuters.

These attacks are getting increasingly sophisticated, using malware designed to evade anti-virus applications. Instead of mass email campaigns used by criminals to con the unwary into handing over their bank details, these hackers are using ‘spear phishing’ techniques which target specific people using a range of psychological tricks to get you to click on infected attachments or links to infected sites which can download malware onto your computer without your knowledge.

It’s definitely time to sharpen your and your employees’ digital security skills, and not leave security to your IT department.

Securing your email

IJNet recently had an excellent article on how journalists can keep themselves safe online, based on a two-hour webinar by data privacy expert Robert Guerra.

After Google uncovered the attacks on Gmail users it has implemented a number of tools to help you keep your email safe. These include enabling secure connections between you and Google using SSL, or ‘secure socket layer’, the same technology you use when you connect to your bank or an e-commerce site. In most browsers, you’ll know if you’re using this secure connection by seeing the web address change from HTTP to HTTPS. Many browsers also have a key or lock icon either in the address bar of your browser or in the lower right hand corner in the status bar. Beware websites which only show you a lock icon on the web page itself, because that is no guarantee that they have implemented proper security measures.

Google has enabled HTTPS connections to Gmail by default and now also offers a two-step verification process that requires not only your password but also a verification code in order for you to access your email. That can either be sent to your mobile phone or, if you don’t have mobile phone access, they give you a list of codes to print out. You can also generate specific passwords for applications that use your Google user credentials but which are not set up to allow you to enter the verification code. The initial set-up can be time consuming, as can the constant re-authentication that you had to do every thirty days, but Google now allows you to set up trusted access on your personal computer so that, on that machine only, you don’t have to keep logging in. To set up two-step access, go to your Google Account settings and click on the Security link on the left side of the page. While you are there, you might also want to take a look at the Privacy settings, which allow you to control how you appear in search results and manage your personal data.

Securing your social media

Many of the major social media services have, like Google, also provided the option to secure their sites with HTTPS. In Twitter for instance, you’ll need to go to your account settings, accessible by clicking on the profile link in the upper right-hand corner, next to the search box. Then look for the option always use HTTPS and make sure that this box is ticked.

Facebook has a number of options to keep you and your news organisation secure. Go to your account settings and the options you need are the second group of security settings. To enable HTTPS, enable what Facebook calls Secure Browsing. Facebook can also alert you when a login attempt is made on a device that hasn’t been used before, under the option Login Notification, and also provides two-step authentication, which can be accessed under login approval. If you are using a public computer, you can also request a one-time password by sending a text message with “otp” to a short code in your country or the country where you’re travelling. A list of short-codes is available on Facebook.

Securing your browsing

As we saw in example of the citizen media project attacked in Morocco, security agencies or groups attacking journalists are also looking to collect a wide range of information. Spyware can collect your surfing habits, usernames and passwords, but in cyber-cafés and via public wi-fi hotspots, you can also be prone to surveillance. If you are using your own computer, you can install a secure browsing tool like “HTTPS Everywhere” which encrypts all of your web traffic, not just access to specific sites such as Gmail, Facebook or Twitter. As IJNet explains, this is only available for the Firefox and Chrome browsers.

Travelling journalists often find themselves using public wifi. If you’re using a Windows computer, make sure you choose the Public network option when connecting to public wifi, as that helps protect your computer. However, it is worth consider using a virtual private network, or VPN, via software such as HotSpot Shield to protect your connection.

Securing your mobile phone 

Journalists are increasingly using smartphones or mobile phones for their work. It’s important to have a lock-code on your device so that if it is lost or stolen, your contacts are still safe. For iOS devices such as iPhones and iPods, consider turning off the simple passcode, which is only a four-digit number, and enabling a longer password. The setting is under the General system settings, under passcode lock. You can also have the device erase all data if more than 10 failed attempts are made to access your device.

Android devices have a number of options to secure the phone. Many people prefer to use pattern unlock app, rather than a passcode or password, and PCWorld has this bit of sound advice when creating a pattern: “If you decide to go with the pattern unlock, create a complex one that crosses over itself, or someone might deduce your pattern from the repeated smudge marks on your screen.”

Taking security precautions can seem like a bit of a hassle, but it is nothing like the problems that can be caused if your security or the security of your organisation is compromised. Journalists are now the targets of increasingly sophisticated and directed attacks by governments, government-aligned groups and hackers-for-hire who do a brisk trade in secrets. Taking these precautions is the first step towards preventing more hassles later and they will help ensure that you, your colleagues and your sources stay safe.

Now, five years after the launch of the iPhone, the promise of mobile web seems to have been realised. Credit partially goes to Steve Jobs at Apple, who believed that people expected the same kind of web experience on their smartphone as they had on their computers, but it should also go to advances in fundamental web technologies. HTML5, the latest version of the underlying code that creates web pages, makes it far easier to create web content for a myriad of devices. Now, open-source web browser maker Mozilla, the organisation behind Firefox, is launching not just a new mobile browser but an entire mobile operating system based on HTML5.

Attempts at open mobile platforms have been stymied in the past by a lack of industry backing, but with the high-profile of Firefox and also a desire by phone carriers to wrest power back from Google and Apple, major industry players are showing their support.  According to technology site The Register, web tools maker Adobe, mobile chipmaker Qualcomm and carriers Deutsche Telekom, Etisalat, Smart, US-based Sprint, Telecom Italia, Telefonica and Telenor are all backing this new competitor in the smartphone OS market. Chinese handset makers ZTE and TCL Communications Technology will start producing handsets using Firefox OS, and Telefonica is expected to start selling handsets using this OS in Brazil next year. Information Week, on the other hand, is skeptical about the level of support from other carriers until they too agree to begin shipping handsets with Firefox’s mobile operating system.

What it means for consumers

For the average mobile user, Firefox OS promises smartphone features on handsets that will cost much less than smartphones currently on the market, according to Nancy Messieh at technology site The Next Web. Smartphones only overtook lower cost and less capable handsets in the US in March of this year. These low-cost handsets, often referred to as feature phones in the industry, still dominate in most emerging markets. They are also becoming more and more capable, so that in many cases, feature phones would be indistinguishable to smartphones for most users. Smartphones still only accounted for slightly more than a quarter of all mobile phones, according to global figures from VisionMobile. In Latin America, Africa and the Asia-Pacific region, smartphones account for only about 20% of all handsets being sold.

Chinese manufacturers Huawei and ZTE are flooding the market with low-cost smartphones based on Google’s Android OS, but even these “low-cost” smartphones are priced at around US$100. According to Reuters, without operator subsidies, Firefox phones could cost around $50. Bringing down the cost of devices that have smartphone features could open the smartphone revolution to millions of more customers.

What it means for publishers

While it’s no longer necessary to consider hundreds of mobile web browsers when developing a mobile website, current web technology still requires quite a bit of customisation for the myriad of digital platforms on the market. HTML5 promises to make it easier to write once and publish everywhere.  And with the launch of projects like Firefox OS, it builds momentum behind HTML5 as a standard for creating not only next-generation websites but also web applications. If you want to see some of the web applications available, Firefox will soon be opening their web app store, the Mozilla Marketplace, in conjunction with the launch of its mobile OS.

Firefox is not the only organisation throwing its support behind HTML5 as the platform of the future. Google has its own web-based operating system, Chrome OS, which also leverages the power of web-based apps and HTML5, and Microsoft has thrown its support behind HTML5 as well. Microsoft says that HTML5 will form part of the basis for apps in its upcoming flagship OS, Windows 8. Windows 8 is intended to work not only on desktops but also include many features for tablet-based computers, and the Metro interface for Windows 8 is taken from Microsoft’s mobile OS.

We are not yet in the glorious future where digital content can be written once and then be easily adapted for multiple digital platforms, but with HTML5 gaining such widespread adoption even before it is finalised, and new initiatives like Firefox OS gaining industry support and HTML5 web browsers being adding to smart TV platforms as well as mobile devices, publishers will find it much easier to distribute their digital content in the future.

The seminar presented the following topics:

• “Trends in Online Business Development”. An overview of new international online media developments with a focus on online products and services, which specifically deliver local audiences and markets. In particular, the seminar looked at specialized directories, local aggregation and specialized social media developments as opportunities for new online product development.
• “Search Engine Optimization”. An overview of the fundamentals of SEO for both Google and Yandex.
• “Social Media Marketing”. An overview of the fundamentals of leading social media platforms Twitter and Facebook including step-by-step instructions around how to establish a social media profile, how to post to the profile and a discussion of the benefits of social media to traffic growth.
• “Measuring Success – Google Analytics”. An overview of the fundamentals of using Google Analytics to measure traffic growth and understand basic audience demographics and behavior.
• “Planning & Financing Your Business”. A discussion of the key inputs to a business plan including estimating audience, revenue and expenses.

The goal of the seminar was to provide senior executives and media managers with the fundamentals to understand the opportunities available and the techniques required to capture the local online media opportunity.

Location: Moscow, Russia
Dates: 19-20 March 2012
Attending: Russian and Ukrainian media executives