First Reddit and now Twitter have had to confront issues related to freedom of speech recently, and decide which way they are going to go when it comes to protecting it. As social media becomes more mainstream, such battles will likely become more frequent. Read more at GigaOM »
A new app called Circa, from Cheezburger Network CEO Ben Huh, wants to make reading news on mobile devices easier by breaking down the traditional story format into its component parts. Co-founder Matt Galligan says the company is trying to rethink how we consume news. Read more at GigaOM »
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo says the most powerful feature of Twitter is the way it can show us what others watching the same event are thinking, and that the best use of this feature is as a companion to a televised event like the Olympics. Read more at GigaOM »
Media companies and publishers of all kinds spend a lot of time measuring their online traffic patterns using analytics that track where readers come from — but Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic argues that they are overlooking a huge contributing factor that he calls “Dark Social” traffic. Read more at GigaOM »
In addition to occasional acts of journalism, Reddit is also known for its less savory content, including a page featuring creepy photos of women taken without their permission — and the controversy over that kind of content says a lot about the nature of the community. Read more at GigaOM »
A federal court has found that scanning books for search — which Google was doing for a university project called the Hathi Trust — is clearly covered by the “fair use” principle in copyright law, which could help Google in its own lawsuit with the Authors Guild. Read more at GigaOM »
In an effort to reveal the extent of political ad spending that occurs in key television markets, ProPublica has put together one of the most ambitious crowdsourcing projects in recent memory, and learned a thing or two about how to encourage crowd participation. Read more at GigaOM »
A Columbia Journalism Review columnist argues that a free or advertising-supported news model inevitably leads to lower-quality journalism. But there is no reason why ads can’t co-exist with high-quality reporting just as easily as they can subsidize pageview-driven clickbait, despite the CJR’s claims to the contrary. Read more at GigaOM »
As the traditional media industry continues to struggle with the disruption caused by the web, some sceptics argue that a “digital first” approach isn’t the answer — but the reality is that focusing on digital is the only hope the industry has. Read more at GigaOM »
Critics say user-generated networks like Bleacher Report are just SEO-driven content farms that generate “clickbait” posts designed to drive low-quality traffic — but they also provide the opportunity for writers to show their abilities without having to work their way through the traditional media ecosystem. Read more at GigaOM »
After seven years of legal battles, Google has finally reached an agreement with American book publishers that will let it scan and digitize books. The deal stands to make things better for readers and publishers — although Amazon is probably not happy about it. Read more at GigaOM »
The debate between President Obama and Mitt Romney was the most tweeted-about event in U.S. political history — but is the kind of real-time commentary and instant analysis that Twitter provides a good thing or a bad thing for the political process or society as a whole? Read more at GigaOM »
Many newspapers and media outlets are implementing paywalls in a desperate attempt to generate revenue, but some players — including the political blog network Talking Points Memo — are offering their readers a membership-with-benefits experience instead. It’s an approach that more media players should probably consider. Read more at GigaOM »
Prismatic founder Bradford Cross doesn’t come from a traditional media background — he is a data scientist who specializes in machine learning — but what he is doing with content recommendations says a lot about how the media business is evolving and what the future might look like. Read more at GigaOM »
Open-source principles have helped create a host of useful software, including the Linux operating system and the crowd-powered resource that is Wikipedia — but could the same approach be used to open up the process of producing government legislation? Clay Shirky argues that it could. Read more at GigaOM »
New research from the Pew Center into news consumption habits shows that the impact of mobile and social continues to grow. Almost twice as many users got news from a mobile device compared with 2010, and almost three times as many got news from a social network. Read more at GigaOM »
While it has gotten attention recently for the launch of its new online business offering, Atlantic Media has been making a lot of innovative and interesting moves in transforming its business from print to digital — moves that other media companies would do well to emulate. Read more at GigaOM »
In the latest episode of journalistic plagiarism, a Canadian newspaper columnist has been accused of taking content from others without credit. The response from the newspaper and the editors involved speaks volumes about how much traditional media outlets have to learn about how the web operates. Read more at GigaOM »
An editor at the Guardian argues that newspapers should be funded by a tax on internet service providers, because public journalism needs to be supported. But there are a host of flaws with the idea, including the fact that large newspapers are not synonymous with journalism. Read more at GigaOM »
The ability to distribute real-time information through social networks like Twitter is a powerful thing, but a new study points out that one of the downsides of this phenomenon is the fact that much of the content that gets linked to eventually disappears. Read more at GigaOM »
News-filtering service Prismatic has just launched a new “friend following” feature. Although this may look like a social-networking copycat move, founder Brad Cross says it is all about increasing the amount of data the service has about its users so that it can make relevant recommendations. Read more at GigaOM »
Twitter has argued that it doesn’t own a user’s tweets, but at the same time the company wants to control what users do with their content so that it can monetize the network. There’s an inherent conflict there that is becoming increasingly difficult for Twitter to avoid. Read more at GigaOM »
Some proponents of newspaper paywalls — including a columnist in the Columbia Journalism Review — argue that charging readers for content results in better journalism than the free and advertising-supported model used by many digital publishers. But the evidence for this assertion is dubious at best. Read more at GigaOM »
Despite all the gloom in the newspaper business, which he says will likely still have to suffer more pain and possible bankruptcies, New York Times media writer David Carr says he believes that thanks to the internet we are living in a “golden age for journalism.” Read more at GigaOM »
Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams has launched a news-filtering service called Nuzzel that is powered by social-networking activity. But while his previous ventures have been early to the market, his new offering suffers from the opposite problem — the market is already saturated with similar services. Read more at GigaOM »
Google says it blocked viewers in Egypt and Libya from seeing a controversial video clip on YouTube, after the video was allegedly linked to violence in both of those countries. But should Google be censoring content without even a request from a government or court? Read more at GigaOM »
The new “public editor” for the New York Times has been getting good reviews for the way she is handling the job of being a go-between for readers and editors. But wouldn’t it be better if every NYT writer and editor did that for themselves? Read more at GigaOM »
Evan Williams, the co-founder of Twitter and the company’s former CEO during the beginning of its evolution from a side project into a major social-media entity, says that the influence of the network’s ecosystem has been overstated. But is that true? Read more at GigaOM »
The Journal Register newspaper chain has filed for bankruptcy for a second time, which some say means its “digital first” vision is flawed. But all it really means is that the kind of transformation required for the newspaper business will be measured in decades. Read more at GigaOM »
Twitter’s ongoing moves to control more of its network — in order to monetize it — is an attempt to turn back the clock and undo some of the openness it started out with. But will it also rob the service of what made it so powerful? Read more at GigaOM »
Reddit has grown to become one of the most high-profile online communities, one that has even played a journalistic role in some recent cases. Among the things that newspapers and other media entities could learn from Reddit are the benefits of a strong and engaged community. Read more at GigaOM »
Twitter’s ongoing evolution from open platform to global media company has all kinds of ramifications for the social-media industry and for businesses, but it also has implications for users. This is my attempt to look at why I have a love-hate relationship with the service. Read more at GigaOM »
Yahoo fired its former Washington bureau chief on Wednesday for a joking comment he made during a video broadcast from the Republican convention. Isn’t it about time we admitted that journalists have emotions and opinions, rather than expecting them to be impartial robots? Read more at GigaOM »
There has been a rush of fact-checking of recent comments made by Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan, but does this mean the traditional media’s obsession with objectivity and the “view from nowhere” has changed? Not really — which is why more alternative sources are necessary. Read more at GigaOM »
As Twitter continues to expand its control over the content that runs through its network, even as it forms partnerships with large TV networks like NBC, media entities of all kinds are going to have to ask whether their reliance on the service is wise. Read more at GigaOM »
Although the ad-driven business model behind Facebook looks similar to that of a newspaper, the crucial difference is that the social network knows a lot more about its users. The more focus that newspapers put on doing the same, the better off they will be. Read more at GigaOM »
The rise of social media tools such as blogs and Twitter have changed the political landscape, in part by speeding up the news cycle and broadening the range of sources that are available. But are these developments good or bad for the practice of political journalism? Read more at GigaOM »
The implications of Apple’s recent billion-dollar victory over Samsung in a patent-infringement case go beyond the specifics of this particular battle — the reality is the war over software and design patents is bad not just for individual companies but arguably for society as a whole. Read more at GigaOM »
Most of the recent attention around WikiLeaks has been focused on the legal issues surrounding its controversial founder, Julian Assange. But we shouldn’t let that blind us to what the organization has accomplished and the critical role it plays as a “stateless news organization.” Read more at GigaOM »
As Twitter shuts off the access that services like Instagram and Tumblr used to have to its valuable “follower graph,” it is also promoting the new relationships it has with media players like NBC. Between them, those two moves speak volumes about the company’s future. Read more at GigaOM »
