My Weekly Digest #2.2022

Market Trends

Journalism, media, and technology trends and predictions 2022 The most important points publishers need to pay attention to this year’s predictions by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism based on a survey of 246 media leaders in 52 countries. 59% say revenue grew in 2021 and 47% worry subscription models may be excluding less affluent audiences. Many look for a mixed model with display (73 per cent) and native (59 per cent) advertising, events and sponsored activities from platforms www.journalism.co.uk  •  

Podcasting Hasn’t Produced A New Hit in Years While the overall audience for podcasting expands, the audience for individual new shows is shrinking across the board. None of the 10 most popular podcasts in the U.S. last year debuted in the last couple years, according to Edison Research. They are an average of more than 7 years old, and three of the top five are more than a decade old. This trend vexes executives and producers across the podcasting industry, who worry they are wasting a lot of money on new shows. Fragmentation is happening across media. Discovering new shows is harder than ever as a result. We rely on recommendations, algorithms and word of mouth to guide us. www.bloomberg.com  •  

The Programmatic Poop Funnel Adtech was created to make the buying and selling of online advertising so much more efficient. Today, about $350 billion dollars is spent on online advertising. 70%+ of it is bought programmatically. It turns out it has been wonderfully efficient for the lads and lassies in the adtech industry. Not so efficient for the end-publishers. createsend.com  •  

Five predictions for media and journalism in 2022 Top five predictions for 2022 by Chris Waiting, CEO The Conversation: Data and research will be critical for news reporting | Academics will play an important role as media spokespeople | Trust in journalism will slowly increase | Nearly every journalist will become a climate change journalist | Podcasting will continue to grow. www.editorandpublisher.com  •  

Why publishers should pay attention to Pinterest Although Pinterest has been around for more than a decade, it has been largely ignored by publishers. Maybe we are missing a trick though - with more active monthly users than Twitter, the visual search platform may be an untapped reservoir of audience and revenue growth. www.journalism.co.uk  •  

Don’t Break Up Big Tech, Says Antitrust Enforcer Who Fought Facebook Rod Sims, Australia’s chief antitrust official, was the architect of that precedent-setting faceoff. And the big-tech gadfly has made Australia a model for other countries looking to rein in dominant companies without discouraging innovation. But as he nears the end of his run atop the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Sims has a possibly surprising warning for fellow antitrust regulators: Don’t break up big tech. www.theinformation.com  •  

8 things marketers should know from CES 2022 Despite the lack of ceremony – or a crowd – at CES this year, marketers should still be paying attention to the trade show. www.thedrum.com  •  

Weekly cyberattacks jumped by 50% in 2021, with a peak in December Cybercriminals enjoyed a banner year in 2021; good news for them but bad news for their victims. For 2021 as a whole, the number of cyberattacks against corporate networks soared by 50% from the previous year, cyber threat intelligence provider Check Point Research said in a report released on Monday. www.techrepublic.com  •  

5 Ransomware Predictions for 2022 The new year on the calendar is not going to end the disruptions to business operations. The 2021 attacks were massively successful and profitable, predicting an ugly trend: Ransomware is going to get worse before it gets better.  www.dataversity.net  •  

Business Insights

New cohort of media start-ups focus on paying readers, not page clicks This generation of start-ups is different from its predecessor, who was obsessed with pageviews in the mid-2010s, which provided readers with a free story to reach a large audience. californianewstimes.com  •  

The death of news has been greatly exaggerated Many news organizations don’t have the culture of serving users rather than advertisers. That’s a big change. There are success stories. When an organization is committed to a digital culture, and a change in processes and practices, it’s possible. An interview with José Luis Orihuela, professor of communication at the University of Navarra in Spain. thefix.media  •  

New report series released: Digital Advertising Sales and Success for Traditional Media A lot of people have thought they need to hire more resources to create a dedicated team of digital-specific sellers–and it’s false. Any current advertising sales person can train and get comfortable with these new products. After all, don’t you want your teams and sellers to always advance their knowledge and get better at what they’re doing localmedia.org  •  

Fanpage: the Italian website that went from gossip to award-winning scoops What started as a Facebook page is now an investigative news operation with millions of readers a day. www.theguardian.com  •  

How Stuff aims to become New Zealand’s most trusted platform New Zealand’s largest media org, NZStuff , has transitioned from a traditional publisher model to a platform business for the country’s creators & consumers. wan-ifra.org  • 

LinkedIn is on a hiring spree for journalists as it strives to get more people talking about news on its platform LinkedIn is also expanding its editorial efforts beyond news with a 40-person team for creators. www.businessinsider.com  •  

LinkedIn is launching interactive, Clubhouse-style audio events this month in beta; a video version will come this spring LinkedIn is rolling out a new events platform, where it will be listing, hosting and marketing interactive, virtual live events. It is starting out first with an audio-only product that it will be launching this month in beta, followed by a video version that it will launch in the spring, initially targeting Creators that use LinkedIn as organizers and hosts. techcrunch.com  •  

Cartel Office is examining Google proposals - and what that has to do with ancillary copyright law. The German Federal Cartel Office is examining Google’s suggestions that the search engine giant made to the competition watchdogs after their competition concerns and asked the publishers about them. First of all, it’s only about the Google news section “News Showcase” - but at the same time also about ancillary copyrights. (German content) www.horizont.net  •  

The Power of Data

“Traffic whoring” or simply optimizing? Finding the boundaries between clean and dirty metrics Research finds journalists consider some uses of metrics “clean”, like those used for a story’s promotion, while using metrics to determine content is “dirty”. This essay is adapted from All the News That’s Fit to Click: How Metrics Are Transforming the Work of Journalists, which was recently published by Princeton University Press. www.niemanlab.org  •  

When Data Needs a Specific Domain for the Regulator Technology generates more and more data, regulators need to exercise more and more control, digital transformation is advancing, and traditional firms are changing and need to respond quickly to the new demands of regulators – not only to avoid sanctions but also to guard their processes and avoid security breaches and inconsistencies in their information assets.  www.dataversity.net  •  

6 Data Science Trends That Will Shape 2022 It’s a new year for the data industry too. We are already looking at 463 exabytes of data to be generated each day by people as of 2025. In the ever-expanding technological world of today, with exponentially increasing data created each day, it is the need of the hour for businesses to value data and its outcomes. towardsdatascience.com  •  

Top 10 Predictions for Data Product Leaders in 2022 Below are ten 2022 predictions for data product leaders and organizations trying to leverage ML and analytics in their software, tools, apps, and services. From the lens of a consulting product designer towardsdatascience.com  • 

Trends that shaped the Modern Data Stack in 2021 Data Integration 2.0, Data Mesh, Data warehouse performance, and Data Observability. It’s been a rich year for Data & Analytics. towardsdatascience.com  • 

DeepMind Is Now the Undisputed Leader in Language AI with Gopher (280B) Given the unparalleled history of DeepMind’s AI developments, it was surprising they hadn’t made an appearance in the flourishing area of large language models (LLMs). This changed late last year when the company published a series of papers on the topic. towardsdatascience.com  •  

The Craft of News

Reimagining how we think about local news in 2022 As we move into 2022, there’s space to think more broadly about human relationships and civic engagement, and the unique and complicated role local news can play in both. It will require a lot of specificity, plenty of good questions, and vigorous reimagination if we want to build a system that doesn’t just survive, but flourishes. www.cjr.org  • 

Innovating Online Journalism: New Ways of Storytelling This report suggest a series of new “prototypes” of online news storytelling tested with a wide range of audiences. Building on earlier work, the authors found that linear forms of storytelling - rarely used in news - are more effective in transferring knowledge to news consumers and are seen as more engaging, convenient and useful than the traditional inverted pyramid. They then identified key principles that should underlie a more user-focussed approach to narratives in online news. www.tandfonline.com  •  

Modi's BJP uses the Tek Fog app to harass journalists The Wire investigates claims behind the use of ‘Tek Fog’, a highly sophisticated app used by online operatives to hijack major social media and encrypted messaging platforms and amplify right-wing propaganda to a domestic audience. Modi’s BJP uses the Tek Fog app to harass journalists: of 4.6M Twitter replies received by 280 women journalists, 18% were from accounts managed by Tek Fog. thewire.in  •  

Addressing the latest wave of coronavirus misinformation Fact-checking and research tools for journalists covering COVID-19. rjionline.org  •  

How the Los Angeles Times refreshed a newspaper staple Letters to the editor are a newspaper staple. Members of the community get 200 or 300 words to share their perspectives and experiences. Then, an editor selects and publishes them, and the process repeats itself. But a new project from the Los Angeles Times gives those letters a lot more time and space. Hear Me Out is a twice-monthly video series that takes a letter to the editor and turns it into a video that digs deeper and gets more personal that the traditional feature allows. www.poynter.org  •  

WAN-IFRA Press Corner

WAN-IFRA, FIPP, EMMA, & ENPA condemn the cyber-attack on Portuguese media company, Impresa WAN-IFRA, FIPP, EMMA and ENPA strongly condemn the cyber-attack on Portuguese media company, Impresa, which has taken offline both the Expresso weekly newspaper site and SIC TV on January 3, 2022. wan-ifra.org  •  

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