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 »
Prismatic, a news-filtering service, has launched an iPhone app that founder Bradford Cross says makes the experience of reading news on a mobile device appealing for the first time, because it strips away all of the clutter that tends to slow down mobile news sites. Read more at GigaOM »
As more newspapers roll out metered paywalls and subscription plans, trying to duplicate the success of the New York Times, some journalists hope that being funded by readers will help stop the ad-driven pageview race and save quality journalism. But this argument is fundamentally flawed. Read more at GigaOM »
As more and more breaking news comes to us through social media, the task of determining what is true and what isn’t becomes exponentially harder. Storyful says that crowdsourcing is the best way to do this, and so it has opened up its professional verification process. Read more at GigaOM »
Critics of a Newsweek cover story by historian Niall Ferguson say the piece should never have been published because of the errors and flawed logic it contains. But isn’t it better if those kinds of mistakes are corrected in public view instead of behind closed doors? Read more at GigaOM »
As newspapers try and re-engineer their businesses to adapt to the disruption caused by the web and social media, they will have to confront a crucial question: How can they measure the effectiveness of the journalism they are producing — or is pleasing advertisers enough? Read more at GigaOM »
If Fareed Zakaria and Jonah Lehrer had spent more time linking to the original sources of content they used in their writing, they wouldn’t have faced accusations of plagiarism. Their cases and a recent defamation lawsuit against Gawker Media help reinforce the value of the hyperlink. Read more at GigaOM »
A memo written by the managing editor of the Washington Post in 1992 says a lot about how much of the future of media was obvious even then, but it also misses the most disruptive force the industry has seen — namely, the rise of social media. Read more at GigaOM »
Twitter is in the midst of a strategic transformation, from being an open information network or real-time data utility to being an ad-driven media entity, and that evolution raises a host of questions about the future of the service and its impact on users. Read more at GigaOM »
The reaction to Twitter’s restrictions on its API has focused mostly on whether the moves are unfair to third-party developers and apps. But what about the impact they will have on users? Twitter seems to care more about monetizing its network than what users want. Read more at GigaOM »
Is offering your readers membership benefits a better approach to revenue generation than putting up a hard paywall? The tech commentary site Techdirt thinks so, and has launched some interesting new features that other traditional media companies might want to pay attention to. Read more at GigaOM »
As we consume more and more content via real-time streams that come to us through Twitter and Facebook and newer platforms, how does that affect advertising? Everyone wants their ads to look like just another form of content, but that’s a lot harder than it sounds. Read more at GigaOM »
Evan Williams and Biz Stone have launched a new web-publishing platform called Medium that they hope will be part of a reinvention of digital content. But apart from founders with a great pedigree, it’s not immediately clear what Medium offers that other services don’t. Read more at GigaOM »
The New York Times has chosen former BBC director Mark Thompson to be its new CEO. But is a man who has spent his entire career with a government-funded broadcaster the right person to reinvent the legendary newspaper at a time of almost unprecedented upheaval? Read more at GigaOM »
Most critics of Dalton Caldwell’s App.net project seem to see it as a replacement for Twitter, only with users paying for the service rather than advertisers. But what the service really wants to be is a central messaging bus and open ecosystem for the social web. Read more at GigaOM »
An incident in which an e-book lending site was shut down by a horde of angry authors with takedown notices — most of whom misunderstood the site’s purpose — is another example of how the publishing industry is fighting the same battles as the music industry. Read more at GigaOM »
This week marks the 21st anniversary of the world’s first website, and as new social-web platforms like Twitter and Facebook spend more and more of their energy trying to control and monetize their networks, it’s worth remembering some of the choices that the web’s creator made. Read more at GigaOM »
As Twitter pushes for more control over the platform in order to monetize the content flowing through it, some prominent critics of this move argue the company is making a big mistake by focusing on the needs of advertisers rather than the needs of users. Read more at GigaOM »
The purchase of the sports-blogging site Bleacher Report by Turner Broadcasting unit fills a content hole for the Time Warner unit, but it is also a validation of the user-generated-content model behind the sports-blogging network, and a sign of the disruptive effects that model can have. Read more at GigaOM »
