Why digital networks are ruling the world

For the last few years, the name Manuel Castells kept popping up in things I read about digital media, social networks, and mass communications. He is a Spanish sociologist who spent much of his career at UC Berkeley.

Recently I have been reading his "The Rise of the Network Society," the first of three volumes in a series "The Information Age." He wrote them two decades ago, but he seems to have predicted many of the trends we are living through now.

The free flow of money, information, and power through global networks means those networks, not nations, are the source of power, he wrote. Institutions, societies, and ethnic groups with rigid structures that cannot take advantage of these flows will be left behind.

He wrote a new preface for the 2010 edition, before the Arab Spring, before the Syrian civil war, before Brexit, before Trump. He pointed out that structural changes were taking place in society because large sections of the world's population were being excluded from the global networks that accumulate knowledge and wealth.

Highly educated elites from financial and technological centers were profiting from the flow of money and power, while the rest of the world was being left behind.

Is Facebook swallowing journalism? Embrace it, says Washington Post's digital chief

Emilio Garcia-Ruiz speaks to the press in Huesca. Photo by EFE

HUESCA, Spain -- Yes, it’s good to have a billionaire owner with patience, but it’s even better to have a billionaire owner with a vision.

And the vision of Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos is that a news organization has to make its work available free, everywhere.

Bezos is urging the publication's journalists to adopt the principles of retail sales that he has learned over the years in running Amazon, America's largest online retailer of practically everything.

And the man who is putting that vision into practice is Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, the Post's managing editor for digital.

Versión en español

A fundamental concept in retail strategy is the sales funnel, Garcia-Ruiz said in his keynote address March 10 at the Digital Journalism Conference in Huesca, Spain. The idea is to get as many people as possible to sample your product (in journalism, it's through sharing in social networks), get them to pay for a product, and then make them repeat buyers for higher-value products. At each stage the pool of customers is smaller but spending more.

The key in a business sense, said Garcia-Ruiz, is to keep expanding that pool at the top of the funnel, just as Amazon has done in retail. And from a journalism perspective, the key is to merge the best journalism with the best technology to keep people coming back for more.

'Communities are more important than the media' -- Jose Luis Orihuela

Jose Luis Orihuela has been writing about digital media for almost 30 years. So I have been enjoying his new book, "The Media Since the Internet" (“Los medios después de Internet”), which is a compilation of his columns for newspapers in Spain and Latin America in 2011-2013. (His 159,000 Twitter followers around the world know him as @jlori.)

Orihuela, a professor and colleague of mine at the Universidad de Navarra in Spain, takes us on his intellectual voyage and shows us the courage and vision we need to navigate this sometimes scary new world of the Internet.

Versión en español

Each of these columns in the book is a like an entry in the logbook of a voyage of discovery through the uncharted waters that the new media environment represents.

Like the explorers of the 15th century, Orihuela observes, processes, analyzes, speculates, and makes recommendations based on his investigations. He drops some marker buoys to help us follow his path. The result is a guide that is valuable for students, professors, businesspeople, and ordinary citizens who want to understand this new media world.

At the outset, he says his purpose has been to communicate the idea that "to understand the transformations in the media (new and old), we have to put ourselves in the place of the users and rethink communication based on their practices and ways of using it."

Reader loyalty gains strength as a news metric

Michael McCutcheon of Mic.com

As the publisher of a business newspaper in Baltimore, I used to tell advertisers confidently that no other news medium could duplicate our audience of CEOs, business owners, and high-income decision makers.

First Yahoo Finance undermined us. With their user database, they could deliver advertisers the same people who were reading our newspaper, plus many with that profile who were not.

(Versión en español)

Now social networks like Facebook are using their data to do the same thing. They can promise to deliver that same targeted audience a lot cheaper.

This is bad news for news publishers, especially since they have become more dependent on Facebook and other social networks for their Internet traffic. Publishers have a harder time establishing the value of their brand to advertisers.

Pew Research reported in 2014 that 30 percent of U.S. adults get news from Facebook. That percentage has been growing, and other social networks, such as LinkedIn, are trying to become publishers, not just platforms, as Mathew Ingram of Gigaom has reported.

10 entrepreneurs test new style of learning

Tenth in a series on teaching entrepreneurial journalism. Parts of this post are adapted from an article originally published in Revista Mexicana de Comunicación.

Latin American journalists have a great thirst for establishing independent media. Many of them are tired of working for low pay at media outlets that protect the friends and punish the enemies of the owners. 

They want to cover topics neglected by the mainstream media, such as education, health, environment, human rights and indigenous culture. They want to expose incompetence and corruption in government.

More than a dozen digital news entrepreneurs described how they are overcoming financial obstacles to sustain independent journalism during the Ibero-American Colloquium on Digital Journalism this spring sponsored by the Knight Center for Digital Journalism in the Americas. 

WeChat as social media strategy for news

Once again I find myself learning new things from my students here in China. The social media marketing strategies they proposed in class included techniques and platforms I was ignorant of.

Their assignment was to recommend a strategy for a news organization or business that they would like to work for. They chose, among others, the Wall Street Journal, China Daily, Xinhua News Agency, Financial Times, Economic Observer, Tanzania Broadcasting Corp., Ikea, Whirlpool appliances, and Elle magazine.

Several of the marketing plans included WeChat, which is a free text- and voice-message service for cellphones. WeChat allows its 300 million users worldwide to connect with anyone in their phone's address book. It has added 100 million users since September.

Social media challenge Google for news distribution

The importance of search engines to traffic on news sites spawned an industry of consultants on search engine optimization (SEO). But now social media may be challenging the dominance of "Google juice."

The percentage of Americans getting their news via social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Google+ has risen to 19 percent, more than double what it was just two years ago, according to a Pew study of news consumption habits. 

The data point that should get the attention of newspaper publishers is that almost as many  Americans (19 percent) are getting news through social networks as from print editions of newspapers (23 percent). (Note: In both cases, the survey asked people where they got news yesterday.)

Social media are transforming Chinese journalism

The Tsinghua University School of Journalism and Communication recently celebrated its 10th anniversary with a conference on international journalism curriculum for an audience of
200 journalism professionals, deans and professors from China and around the world. Some highlights:

• Qu Yingpu, deputy editor-in-chief of the state-controlled China Daily, noted that social media are spreading news so rapidly that is no longer possible to control the flow of information. The response of China Daily has been to provide more information to more audiences, with editions targeted for Africa, Asia and Europe, among others. 
• Shi Anbin, associate dean of Tsinghua's school, said digital journalists should learn from Andy Carvin's one-man newsroom at National Public Radio in the United States. Carvin covered the Middle East during the Arab Spring upheavals in 2011 by relying on numerous local activists, bloggers and reporters through social networks such as Twitter.

Guardian's Facebook app challenges Google

A new Facebook app launched by The Guardian in England could signal a major challenge to Google’s dominance of referral traffic to news websites.

Google used to drive 40 percent of The Guardian’s traffic, but social networks referred more than search several times in February, said Tanya Cordrey, director of digital development at Guardian News and Media.

In the U.S., Google refers a third of the traffic to news websites, four times more than Facebook, according to The State of the News Media 2012.

Nifty new app

Much of The Guardian’s Facebook traffic is attributed to an app that has been downloaded 8 million times since its launch in September, according to Journalism.co.uk.

“The ‘frictionless sharing’ app works by readers opting in to share all articles they read with their Facebook friends, generating more traffic for the news site with ‘no editorial curation’,” the site reported. 

It is not clear how this app might be different from or better than those used by other news organizations. But if something similar were adopted at U.S. media, Facebook could become more of an ally of news organizations instead of just a competitor for readers’ time.


Related:

Google takes magic out of advertising sales process
Social media challenge Google for news distribution
Facebook to overtake Yahoo in display advertising
Total users and pageviews are misleading measures of web traffic
Robert Niles: How to Make Money Publishing Community News Online
Making money Part I: Advice from Mark Briggs
You don't need all the skills to get started
How much to charge advertisers? As much as possible
More paywalls won't save journalists' jobs

Archives have great potential for traffic, debate, manipulation

A news story from the 2005 archives in which a psychology professor called homosexuality a disease recently rocketed to the top of the most-read list of El Pais, one of Spain's leading newspapers.

The strange incident demonstrated several things: what you produce on the Internet never goes away; in social networks the readers, not the editors, choose what's interesting; ruthless political operatives can manipulate these popularity measures for their own use; and newspapers themselves should more actively control and promote archived stories.

Never sleep: best social network strategy

Versión en español aquí.

Not long ago the Wall Street Journal, which thrives inside its paywall fortress, recognized the importance of opening the gates a crack with its new Facebook application, WSJ Social.  

“You can’t rely on users coming to you anymore,” said Maya Baratz, head of new products for the Journal, in an interview with Nieman Lab. This change in attitude shows the increasing role of the audience in distributing and curating content for publishers. 

Don’t dump your email account for Facebook -- yet

Versión en español aquí.

I was suprised and delighted to read today that the New York Times studied its readers’ habits for sharing articles and found that they prefer email over social networks.

The implication for web designers is that they should make email sharing a prominent tool on their websites or they might miss a big potential source of traffic.

For some reason, I still like managing my online life through email. Daily calendar alerts remind me of appointments. I subscribe to maybe two dozen newsletters so I don’t forget to follow developments in digital journalism or the business of media.

5 ways social networks generate revenue for news sites

 The owner of a news site recently asked me about how to monetize the traffic he is generating through Twitter and Facebook.

While he likes the traffic, he is frustrated to see Facebook selling ads against his content and taking all the revenue.