I tried to help answer that question in my post from last year: Amplification and the changing role of media. The gist of that post was that “as more sources of news start to go direct by posting their thoughts to their blogs, Twitter and Facebook pages, a journalist’s role becomes more about deciding what to amplify and what to ignore.”

…the rise of the social web, that has changed. Blogs, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other such platforms have made it easy for news makers to go direct to their constituents. So what is the role of today’s media person? In addition to reporting news, I think picking things to amplify is also important. Back in the day, news people made a choice by deciding which stories to write. Today, we have to adopt a similar rigor about what we choose to share and amplify. In sharing (on Twitter or even re-blogging) we are sending the same message as doing an original news report.

The big media outlets still have one thing that they can leverage: attention. By leveraging that attention and highlighting things worth highlighting, they can continue to bring the news to their constituents and at the same time add veracity to it — and thereby add the kind of value that makes them worth keeping around.

If you’re unfamiliar with Branch, which will be part of the startup showcase at our paidContent Live media conference in New York on April 18, the point of the site is to make online discussions feel like the ones that take place around the kitchen table. It does this by allowing you to start a chat from anywhere on the internet, or transport an existing discussion (or screaming match) taking place on Twitter or elsewhere and continue it in on Branch. By clicking “Take it to Branch,” you transform a discussion into an invite-only forum that anyone can read but that requires the moderator’s permission to join.

Branch’s new features are intended to make the site feel more social by showing what the people you are connected to online are talking about — which will, presumably, encourage people to ask to join more conversations. Likewise, the “profile cards” may serve to make the people you see on Branch feel more accessible.

“Now you can click anyone’s name and hop around between the branches they’ve participated in and people they’ve talked to. They’re intended to help you explore the pockets of communities on Branch, not represent the user’s identity,” explained Branch founder Josh Miller by email (emphasis his). As an example, here’s the Branch “card” for my colleague, Mathew Ingram:

So what will all this do for Branch’s popularity? It’s hard to say. So far, the company has received a lot of attention because of Miller’s reputation as a wunderkind (he came up with the idea while working for Senator Diane Feinstein and dropped out of Princeton to pursue it) and because Branch is backed by the founders of Twitter and by tech media star Jonah Peretti. But it’s still not clear if Branch can break through to widespread adoption; as Ingram noted this spring, “closed” conversations reduce flame wars and trolling but also lack the freewheeling feel of the internet. Without easier on-ramps to the Branch discussions, the site may find it hard to appeal to a broader base than tech and media insiders.

One area where Branch does appear to have the potential to take off is as a forum for people to discuss sports or TV. For example, here’s a Branch discussion about the show Homeland that got a lot of traction.

On Tuesday, AllThingsD’s Peter Kafka reported that the startup has hired longtime ad vet Trevor Kaufman as CEO and pulled in $1.25 million in seed funding.

Startup Tinypass’s core customers have been hundreds of small-fry news and music publishers who use its services to provide “metered browsing” or ad-free upgrades to readers. In January, however, the company got a big boost when star blogger Andrew Sullivan said he was using the platform to charge readers for his $19.99 annual subscription service.

The new funding and Sullivan’s star power could help Tinypass nip at the heels of the big player in the paywall space – Press+, which was launched by publishing vets Gordon Crovitz and Steve Brill.

Like Press+, Tinypass takes a cut of the paywall revenue (two to ten percent, depending on volume) but also differs as it does not charge a start-up fee.

Although increased competition could lower the prices that Tinypass and Press+ can charge, the good news for the companies is that the overall paywall pie is getting bigger. According to a recent report by news analyst Ken Doctor, it will soon be rare to find a news outlet in North America or northern Europe that doesn’t charge for content in one form or another. Others, like my colleague Mathew Ingram, remain skeptical that restricting reader access is a good idea (see a recent debate over the issue here).

The news, in case you missed it, is that Congress this week sent President Obama a bill that will update a 1988 law that prevents video companies from sharing rental histories unless a customer gives them permission to do so. This law prevents Netflix from tapping into the “frictionless sharing” feature on Facebook that can tell all your friends every time you read an article or listen to a song. For instance, my Facebook friends might see a story like “Jeff listened to the Backstreet Boys on Spotify.”

Netflix wants to share movie viewing in the same way and, this week, it finally got its wish (the news was overshadowed by an unrelated part of the bill related to email privacy). So how big a deal is it that Netflix can be on Facebook too?

The answer is that, despite Netflix’s big lobbying push, its victory in Congress may not matter much at all. This is because, in the 15 months since Facebook launched frictionless sharing, companies and users are taking a very different view of its value.

As my colleague Mathew Ingram reported this month, media outlets like the Guardian and the Washington Post are backing away from Facebook as a way to distribute their content. Likewise, Om just pointed to the Poke debacle to call BS on Facebook’s power of influence:

This quick decline in downloads raises some questions about Facebook’s ability to be kingmaker. It may have helped Zynga when social games and Facebook’s platform were brand new phenomena. Remember how their frictionless sharing was going to change everything, especially for media companies? Well, it didn’t change a lick.

Perhaps, things work differently in the movie space. Maybe, the power of Facebook will let Netflix transform the video-watching habits of tens of millions of people. And, just maybe, users will come to love spamming their friends with news that they’re watching the Princess Bride or Debbie does Dallas.

A more likely conclusion is that Netflix’s big effort to change an outdated law, while a good thing, will do little to help the company’s own business.

(Image by ollyy via Shutterstock)

It appears to work. My colleague and prolific tweeter, Mathew Ingram, reports that he was able to download his 65,000(!) tweets from 2007 in less than two minutes and that the archive only took up 16MB.

So, what does it mean to unlock babble from long ago? For now, the Twitter archive is a way to indulge in personal nostalgia much like Facebook’s Timeline. But in the long term, these archives will come to be indispensable tools for scholars, statisticians and cultural historians — consider how Twitter feeds have already become analogous to newspapers and diaries.

For now, the archives are available only to the respective user. But to get a feel of the cultural impact of old tweets, check out BuzzFeed’s “The Lost Tweets of the Tech Elite” which features early musings from the likes of David Pogue, Walt Mossberg and a certain Om Malik.

(Image by Gl0ck via Shutterstock)

What will next year bring? Everyone loves to look into their crystal ball, and we’re no different. So here are our collective predictions for 2013, from books and video to newspapers and advertising.

This is one of a handful of pieces over the next week that looks at what’s coming down the road next year in the various sectors we cover.

Laura Owen

Jeff Roberts

Robert Andrews

Janko Roettgers

Mathew Ingram

Go to page 2 (of 6) on paidContent .

You only have to look around you and see that the power of a lie is stronger than ever — in politics, in propaganda or anywhere else. And forget the shoes: some days it seems as if the truth hasn’t even found its pants on by the time a lie is racking up the air miles.

Just take the case of Lord McAlpine, once one of the most powerful politicians in Britain, who was taken by surprise when the internet launched a virulent — and completely misguided — campaign to label him a child rapist.

Just in case you haven’t been watching this mess exploding across the British media over the last few weeks, let me recap briefly. At the start of November, the BBC’s Newsnight program — already under fire for not running a story about allegations of pedophilia against a now-deceased BBC presenter — decided to prove its mettle by running a report claiming that a senior politician from the 1980s was, in fact, a child abuser.

While the report did not name the individual, speculation (inevitably) spilled out onto the net and the culprit hinted at in the report was widely identified: McAlpine, the man who helped finance Margaret Thatcher’s decade in power. Except it turned out the BBC had the wrong man, in a genuine case of mistaken identity that was blown up to mammoth, excruciating proportions by a series of basic journalistic failures.

Ouch.

Heads rolled: big ones. The BBC’s new boss George Entwistle (pictured) resigned, sending the corporation even deeper into turmoil and leaving some — including our own Mathew Ingram — to even question the validity of its role as a state-sanctioned broadcaster at all.

It is, as they say around these parts, a right old mess.

But how do you fix it? How can you make the truth more powerful than a falsehood?

McAlpine and his lawyers have decided to take recourse to the law and hold the internet accountable, by chasing “a very long list” of people who mentioned McAlpine’s name on Twitter and elsewhere. Here’s what they said:

“We know who you are; we know exactly the extent what you have done and it’s easier to come forward and apologise and arrange to settle us because this is cheaper’.”

I can’t fault McAlpine for wanting to recover his reputation. Who wouldn’t? But however many legal actions he launches, it is not the courts — or the threat of the courts — that will correct the wrong done against him. McAlpine — a millionaire who lives in Italy — doesn’t need the money. And the apologies don’t carry much weight really, since they come from people he has not met and never carry as far or as loud as accusations.

Not exactly free speech

British courts have found one, drastic way to try and curtail social media abuses. Over the last few months, we’ve seen a rash of court cases and even imprisonment resulting from offensive messages on social media: for racist comments about a sick sportsman, joking about a missing 5-year-old, saying soldiers should ‘go to hell’.

McAlpine’s fake accusers are unlikely to see a prison cell, since these would be civil actions — though you can never be sure the UK’s legislators won’t try and find a way to make it so: they wanted to shut down Facebook and Twitter after last year’s summer riots, after all, despite no evidence that they were used to incite violence.

In fact, however, the truth is that the fix has already been identified and deployed, because the lie has become news in and of its own right. The fact that McAlpine was wrongly implicated has, in fact, become a much bigger deal than the original report ever was. But it is only successful because of the very specific context (that it happened within the BBC, which everyone has an opinion about) and the severity of the response (that it led to the Beeb’s newly-installed boss performing a sudden act of seppuku).

The information network that so readily slandered him has stepped in to take action action because the fact the slander was wrong became more interesting. What the network taketh away, the network giveth, so to speak.

Unfortunately, while this may work for Lord McAlpine, but it won’t work for everyone. The trouble is that information is not self-correcting unless the truth is more interesting than the untruth. There are very few times that happens, and usually it’s because the lie is so big and dangerous that the blowback is violent.

The fact is, there aren’t many lessons in this mess. Perhaps if you want your indiscretions to get corrected, make them drastic enough that they can’t be ignored. Or, if you want a big lie to get skewered, make sure an international broadcaster is there to take the blame.

In the end, though, these are pretty tough conditions to replicate. And until you manage to do that, Mark Twain looks more and more right as each day passes.

Like Google and Facebook before it, Twitter is disrupting how we communicate and interact. The difference is that, unlike the other companies, Twitter’s identity and ambitions are hard to discern. Is it a passive platform for users? Or a full-blown media company?

A Freedom Fighter

To get a better idea of what makes Twitter tick, I sat down last month with its head lawyer, Alex Macgillivray, in the company’s newly-finished San Francisco office.

Twitter’s new digs are on a still-seedy stretch of Market street that carries an aura of the bad old days when tech money had yet to flood into the surrounding SoMa neighborhood. Inside Twitter, of course, the feeling is different. The office has lots of wood, posh fixtures and big windows that pour in lots of light.

Macgillivray, the former Googler who everyone calls Amac, has grey flecks in his hair but still looks like a preppy law student. Since he joined Twitter in 2009, the young company has clashed with the federal government over Wikileaks and with New York prosecutors over access to the account of an Occupy Wall Street protestor. On the day I met Macgillivray, Twitter was in the news again for pushing back against NYPD security demands.

One obvious question for Macgillivray is why does Twitter keep taking up legal fights that it could simply duck in the first place?  After all, its compatriots in the tech sector routinely shovel customer data to authorities at the drop of a hat.

“One of our core values is ‘defend and respect the users voice’ and we think about that in the context of our business and our product,” says Macgillivray. He explains that helping people express themselves is a central part of working at Twitter.

“No one wants a pen that has an opinion about what you write. Everyone wants a pen that will write what you tell it to write”

Just Another Technology Company?

Twitter’s advocacy for privacy and free speech makes it an outlier among technology companies. But its campaigns do have much in common with famous media brands — from the New York Times to Fox News — that regularly defend free expression.

My colleague Mathew Ingram has argued persuasively that Twitter is in fact a media company itself. To makes his case, Ingram points to Twitter’s introduction of content-rich “expanded tweets” and its partnerships with NASCAR and other corporate advertisers. Macgillivray, however, disagrees with the media thesis.

“I haven’t actually seen anything that would back up that stuff. I haven’t heard of anyone stopping delivery of the New York Times because they’re avid Twitter users.”

Macgillivray, who is married to a reporter, does acknowledge that journalism and Twitter share a similar goal of uniting users with the issues that are most meaningful to them. But he maintains that outsiders’ speculation about Twitter’s emergence as a media power doesn’t resonate within the company.

“It’s such a weird question. We don’t think about it all. I always think of us as a technology company because that’s what the vast majority of people here do.” Macgillivray added, though, that Twitter’s CEO might hold a broader view.

“Dick [Costolo] has a more nuanced and interesting way of thinking about it.”

Whatever the future might hold, Macgillivray says that for now Twitter has no plans to hire writers or to follow Google’s lead in acquiring content. He adds that, unlike potential competitors, Twitter is still plenty satisfied to explore all the possibilities of 140 characters (the maximum length of a tweet).

“It’s an interesting mistake a lot of copycats make when they copy Twitter. They’re like ‘right, we’re going to have something exactly like Twitter but the first thing we’ll do is get rid of that pesky 140 character limit’.”

Overall, Macgillivray portrays Twitter as a company that simply wants to tinker with tech while making a great user experience. That’s all very well. But Twitter, ready or not, is facing mounting scrutiny from outsiders who don’t buy the line that it’s just another tech company.

Defining the Soul of Twitter

There comes a time when internet companies outgrow their plucky start-up schtick: Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” sheen wore off years ago while The Social Network stripped whatever aura of innocence still floated about Facebook.

Twitter’s own baptism as a behemoth came this summer. In August, it announced that it would rip out the feeding tube of tweets it offers to other companies unless they abide by diktats that state how Twitter material can be displayed. This means that some websites who rely on Twitter’s raw material could be left high and dry.

Twitter’s behavior has rattled some in the tech community who have called it a bully and a traitor to the communal ethos of the internet. (A pragmatist might respond that Twitter has to tighten control of its product if it wants to woo major advertisers.)

Twitter’s policy changes have caused a flap. But that uproar pales in comparison to the end-of-innocence moment that Twitter experienced weeks earlier.

The moment occurred during the London Olympics when Twitter snuffed the account of a British journalist who had issued a series of tweets critical of its partner, NBC.

The optics were horrendous. The world’s media outlets blasted Twitter for appearing to have taken reprisal against a journalist on behalf of a powerful corporation. Twitter didn’t help its case by staying silent for nearly 24 hours.

When Twitter finally did respond to the PR crisis, it was through a blog post by Macgillivray. The post offered a frank apology and explained that someone within Twitter had alerted NBC that the journalist had published the email address of one of its executives — a violation of Twitter’s privacy policies. NBC, in turn, reported the alleged violation to Twitter’s Trust and Safety team.  The team — never aware that the complaint originated within Twitter — independently suspended the journalist’s account in accordance with internal protocol.

This explanation is logical and suggests that Twitter was not engaging in deliberate censorship — even if parts of the explanation are unsatisfying (why did Twitter not just suspend the offending tweet rather than the entire account? Why did it treat an obviously corporate email address as private?).

For Macgillivray, who chairs the Trust and Safety team, the episode is part of an ongoing learning curve.

“A lot has been made of that moment. We realized we made a mistake, we came clean about that mistake while fixing it and apologized to the person … I hope we’ll continue to behave that way — to realize our mistakes and to fix them.”

He added that the NBC incident was a mistake but that it also reflected the effectiveness of the church-state division between the trust and safety team and the rest of the company. Macgillivray remains proud of the team’s advocacy for users and says it’s an important reason that people come to work at Twitter.

The Ethics of Engineers

Twitter’s corporate ethics also serve as a strategic recruiting tool. While companies could once lure engineers with good pay and lavish cafeterias, Mcgillivray says, they must now offer something extra.

“We want to be the best place in world for engineers to work. What are things engineers want?” He points to two things Twitter can offer: power over patents and open source code.

In the case of patents, Twitter has crafted an “Innovators Agreement” that promises engineers that the company won’t use their work to spur the ruinous patent lawsuits that are engulfing the tech sector. Macgillivray explained the idea was a nod to the values of its engineers but also reflected Twitter’s own experience with patent trolls (shell companies that don’t make anything but use patents to squeeze companies that do.)

“We had seen some stuff as a company that we thought wasn’t great. You can look at the game theory about what to do when sued. We studied it with some pretty smart people and it seems the only thing you can do is defend it as vigorously as you can and beat the shit out of these players.”

As for open source code, Macgillivray says that it empowers engineers by letting them show off their work and to take it with them from company to company.

Amac’s Newsstand

Macgillivray is a lawyer by training but his reading list resembles that of a public intellectual. Right now, he’s immersed in a book by Daniel Kahneman, a behavioral psychologist whose work explores biases inherent to human decision making. Macgillivray’s also been revisiting ideas by essayist, investor and Y-Combinator founder Paul Graham.

Online, his reading tastes include the New York Times, Ars Technica and “a bunch of blogs.” And, of course, Twitter.

So who are some people worth following? Macgillivray proposes the academic and “Why Women Can’t Have It All” author, Anne-Marie Slaughter, and the writer and activist Jillian York.

His Twitter stream also includes news from his native Canada and from prominent American conservatives like John Boehner and Michelle Malkin.

Macgillivray thinks the froth of voices in his Twitter stream refutes popular hand-wringing about a “filter bubble” in which people seek out media that reinforces their existing opinion.

“That takes a dim view of humanity,” he says. “We’ve always wanted to hear opinions that are not our own and that’s why we talk to other people. Twitter is a wonderful way to get opinions from people you might not otherwise bump into at a cocktail party.”

The answer: scientific research.

More specifically, large amounts of scientific work is funded by government agencies — yet the results end up hidden behind paywalls. Money from the public purse is used to pay academics to undertake investigation and write up the results, before academic journals take over copyright and sell access to the work for profit. Citizens are effectively being asked to pay twice for any information: first to fund the research, then to access it.

Over the last few years, a growing movement has been pointing out this illogical situation and campaigning for what’s known as “open access”: unfettered availability to research that’s funded by the public purse. And on Monday that movement appears to have won a significant victory, with the British government announcing that it would make open access a condition of any public funding in future.

Science minister David Willetts said in an announcement that the new system would be implemented by 2014, meaning that any research that uses public money could no longer be locked away.

“Removing paywalls that surround taxpayer funded research will have real economic and social benefits. It will allow academics and businesses to develop and commercialise their research more easily and herald a new era of academic discovery. This development will provide exciting new opportunities and keep the UK at the forefront of global research to drive innovation and growth.”

This may be one of the most significant victories for the open movement so far — and advocates will certainly be hoping that other governments, including the U.S., follow suit sooner rather than later.

It’s all part of a sea change happening in science towards openness, a move that’s taking place in large part because of the internet.

Just as the net has disrupted other industries, so it’s starting to make science more collaborative, more accessible and more democratic. My colleague Mathew Ingram has documented much of this conversation, and I’ve written about it before too, talking to startups like ResearchGate, which is trying to turn the stuffy world of research upside down by helping scientists collaborate.

And last year I covered the story of open science, talking about the work of Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge who has been one of the lightning rods for openness.

There are many interpretations of what open science means, with different motivations across different disciplines. Some are driven by the backlash against corporate-funded science, with its profit-driven research agenda. Others are internet radicals who take the “information wants to be free” slogan literally. Others want to make important discoveries more likely to happen. But for all their differences, the ambition remains roughly the same: to try and revolutionise the way research is performed by unlocking it and making it more public.

Gowers later led a boycott against the publisher Elsevier which drew in some 12,000 academics, who all objected to the company’s approach.

So, after all that, a victory — if a relatively small one.

Before anyone gets too excited, however, it’s also worth noting that this change is not without pain. As The Guardian notes, this process itself doesn’t come free — and may eat into already-strapped science budgets.

Though many academics will welcome the announcement, some scientists contacted by the Guardian were dismayed that the cost of the transition, which could reach £50m a year, must be covered by the existing science budget and that no new money would be found to fund the process. That could lead to less research and fewer valuable papers being published.

Disclosure: Reed Elsevier, the parent company of science publisher Elsevier, is an investor in GigaOmniMedia, the company that publishes GigaOM.

Scientist photograph copyright Shutterstock / damicoangie

But while paidContent 2012: At the Crossroads is over as a live event, the conversation is just beginning. And, of course, coverage and analysis of the digital content business across platforms is a 365-days-a-year job at paidContent — not a one-off event.

Join us in our comments, on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+. Keep sharing ideas with us, and with each other.

Thank you to our great cast of speakers and moderators for giving us a lot to think about, to everyone who asked a question or shared an idea, to our new combined team for making it all happen, and to our sponsors for their support.

We’ve archived all the videos from the day, but if you want a taste of what the day was like, watch this video of Union Square Venture’s Fred Wilson in conversation with our own Mathew Ingram — in which Wilson said media companies wouldn’t be threatened by technology if they opened up more.

Live-blogged stories from the event:

• Content, not hardware, have made tablets the current king
• The new digital newsstand: Enabling “pass-along” — and saying no sometimes
• Digital story-telling and the rise of the new publishers
• Fred Wilson: Content owners, don’t fear the future
• New ‘radically simplified’ WordPress is on the way
• HTML5 is a newspaper’s best friend – even if it has a mobile app
• Conde Nast’s Sauerberg: Get busy innovating, or get busy dying
• Don’t think of it as content, think of it as information
• For discoverability, traditional tools still dominate
• Does social beat search, or does “peacocking” get in the way?
• Financial Times exec: iOS apps don’t work for publishers
• Jon Miller: Hulu still essential to broadcasters
• Social media doesn’t speed up the news cycle — it kills it
• Richard Russo: Amazon puts great young writers in “particular peril”
• Is a vast video library worth the time and money?
• Harry Potter’s publishing wand can tame Amazon, pirates