The plan in which 10 columnists received $2,000 to $36,000 each to write about Malaysia was carried out by Joshua Trevino, an opinion writer and the operation’s bagman. Trevino himself, who was a columnist for the Guardian until the paper dropped him in 2012 over conflict-of-interest issues, received $389,724 from the government of Malaysia.

The Malaysian government’s goal was to discredit Anwar Ibrahim, an opposition leader and the target of a politically charged sodomy trial that was decried by human rights groups.

The upshot is that prominent American media outlets printed propaganda from a semi-totalitarian foreign government. While the scheme is disturbing, it is not entirely new; nasty regimes have long used Washington PR firms to spread disinformation.

What is new, however, is how much easier it’s become to place such propaganda thanks to online journalism’s insatiable appetite for content. Today, publications of every stripe are eagerly sucking up outside contributions to fill their websites. The contributions are tarted up with a variety of names — such as “expert opinions” or “guest voices” — but they amount to the same thing: additional content that is often free.

But in their rush to pump up their content, sites may be dropping their screening standards. Unlike like the New York Times, which has long had strict systems to prevent conflicts of interest, many online publications may not have the time or the energy to rigorously watch for bad apples.

In response to an email query, the Huffington Post offered the following statement: ”This is a clear violation of HuffPost’s blogging policy that requires disclosure of payments and conflicts of interest. As soon as we learned of this conflict, we removed the posts from our site. In addition to a very clear policy, we have a team of blog editors who are trained to spot potential conflicts as they review each blog that gets submitted. Posts are routinely declined.”

Jack Fowler, the publisher of National Review, declined to provide an immediate comment; he has since provided a response in the comments below.

While after-the-fact measures may mitigate the damage, it doesn’t change the fact that, in this wild-west clamor for content, it’s become easier for the likes of Malaysia’s leaders to ooze their voice into American media. (Likewise, some companies have succumbed to the temptation of hiring sock-puppet journalists to shill for their side.)

Overall, it’s perhaps inevitable that more content has brought more corruption to the media. The good news, however, is that the growth of online media outlets also affords the opportunity for more whistle blowers; my colleague, Mathew Ingram, in the case of social media sites like Twitter, likens the process to a self-cleaning oven.

The Malaysia episode also reflects an other example of how BuzzFeed, best known for cat photos and titillating viral fare, is rapidly climbing the serious media firmament.

(Disclosure: the Guardian News & Media is an investor in paidContent’s owner, Giga Omni Media).

(Image by Straight 8 Photography via Shutterstock)

Atwood, who left Stack Exchange — the company that manages Stack Overflow and a number of other similar sites — about a year ago, launched his new venture on Tuesday with a blog post in which he lamented the fact that commenting and user forums have not changed much in the past decade. The vast majority of these platforms, he says, still fail to capture real conversation and are too difficult or expensive to implement.

Figuring out who to trust is the holy grail

The Stack Overflow founder says his new platform, which is known as Discourse, differs from other commenting systems in a number of ways — including the fact that it is fully open source. Atwood used the blog-publishing platform WordPress as a model (see disclosure below), and says the company will rely on selling hosting, support and other services for revenue.

Discourse has raised funding from a group of venture backers including Greylock and SV Angel, although Atwood wouldn’t say how much (another hosted commenting solution, Livefyre, also just closed a round of financing).

In addition to some other innovations, such as links that automatically expand within a comment (in the same way Twitter’s “expanded tweets” do), Atwood says he is trying to build a reputation system that will grant users new abilities based on the level of trust the platform has in them. Although he doesn’t provide a lot of detail, in a comment on a Hacker News discussion thread he suggests that it will be based on behavior such as flagging abusive posts.

Measuring trust and rewarding good behavior is something online communities have been trying to do for years, with mixed success. Some believe that sites like Slashdot — which has a moderation platform that awards “karma points” for certain behavior and appoints moderators automatically — have a good solution to the usual problems of trolling and flame wars, while others argue that these systems are almost always fatally flawed. Metafilter (which charges users $5 to become members) has many fans, but it is also a relatively small community. Branch is another attempt to reinvent user forums and discussion as invitation-only hosted conversations.

Trust takes effort, not just algorithms

Atwood says he wants to use a badge system for rewards (something Huffington Post also uses), but Gawker founder Nick Denton said in an interview last year that a similar reward system his sites used was a “terrible mistake,” because it was easily gamed and encouraged the wrong kinds of behavior. Denton has since completely revamped Gawker’s commenting system in an attempt to make reader comments the centerpiece, as well as a potential business model.

As my colleague Jeff Roberts noted in a recent post, the Huffington Post has also launched what it hopes will be a new feature called Conversations, which allows popular comments to become full-fledged blog posts of their own. The Verge — a tech blog run by Vox Media — is doing something similar with its site, in order to try and encourage more discussion and community. But both take a lot of manual effort.

Veteran blogger Anil Dash pointed out in an insightful post in 2011 that one of the only ways to maintain and encourage a healthy conversation — regardless of what platform you use — is to be involved in those discussions yourself as much as possible (a point Bora Zivkovic of Scientific American also made recently). Unfortunately for publishers looking for a quick or inexpensive fix, that kind of engagement is almost impossible to automate.

Disclosure: Automattic, the maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Sam72 and Yan Arief Purwanto

David Leonhardt — who oversees the newspaper’s journalists in Washington and used to write the Economic Scene column for the Times — offered himself up to Redditors to talk about anything related to his job, although he said he mostly wanted to talk about the election and the recent debt negotiations. While those and other topics did come up, Leonhardt also took on some questions about journalism itself, including one about why newspapers like the NYT don’t challenge statements by politicians more, instead of defaulting to what Jay Rosen has called “the view from nowhere.”

Leonhardt: “It’s fairly easy for us to deal with an opinion, like ‘This policy should pass Congress;’ we also quote someone who says it shouldn’t. But the gray area is harder. And yet I think we need to deal with it: we sometimes need to look for ways to say which side in a debate has more claim on the available evidence.”

The Washington bureau chief was also asked whether he thought the rise of the web and social media — and the shift from print to web-based journalism — was a good thing for journalism as a whole, or whether it was leading to lower standards:

Leonhardt: “I think the Web has created a more responsible press, with higher standards. Think how much easier it is for readers to point out flaws (or perceived flaws!) in a story today than in the past. You don’t have to rely on our Letters to the Editor page or our Corrections process. You can write your own blog post or get the attention of a media critic (including our public editor, a job that didn’t exist until a decade ago). Such criticism isn’t always enjoyable — and we don’t always agree with it — but there is little question that it makes us better at our jobs.”

And Leonhardt also responded to a young would-be journalist who asked him what the future might hold for the practice, and whether social media and the web were not taking a lot of the life out of print-based media and the journalism industry:

Leonhardt: “The future of journalism is assured, I think. Journalism — facts and narration — predates newspapers and will outlast newspapers. The future of the printed word — that is, newspapers as we know them today — seems less certain. As a reader, I would be terribly sad not to wake up to printed copies of the NYT and Washington Post, among other papers. As a writer and editor, I don’t have a preference about whether people are reading our journalism on paper or a screen.”

What makes this comment from the NYT bureau chief so sensible is that it’s not a sweeping pro- or anti-web viewpoint, it’s just a realistic view of what the future probably holds — and what the past can teach us: namely, that print is probably in decline as a method of delivering news, that some people feel an emotional attachment to newspapers in print, and that as a writer and editor it doesn’t really matter where people are reading your work, so long as they are reading it. And journalism will survive, even if newspapers don’t.

Note: The New York Times has published a full transcript of the interview.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock/Donscarpo

A quick but important preface: This story isn’t based on any rumors, and it’s definitely not meant to start one. To be honest, I don’t think Netflix is in the market of buying up companies like Spotify, especially after last year’s Quickster debacle. Netflix’s stock currently trades at $66.73, down from a high of $304.79 last summer. Endeavoring on an online music adventure would be suicide at this point.

The soundtrack to your favorite movie

Instead, this story is purely meant as an academic exercise, albeit prompted by real-world conversations. A few weeks ago, I met with Michael Aragon, Vice President & General Manager, Global Digital Video and Music Services at Sony, who showed me some of the things his company has been doing in the music subscription space. One of the things that particularly caught my interest was that Sony is going to put a bigger emphasis on the possible synergy effects between its music service, its transactional VOD offering and its gaming business.

One example Aragon ran by me went something like this: Imagine you’re watching a movie, and your music subscription service automatically compiles a playlist with all the songs that are part of the soundtrack. Sony could obviously take this even further by adding games to the mix, but there’s also plenty of potential for synergy just between a music and a video service. Which made me think: Maybe there are actually some very good reasons for a company like Netflix to hook up with a company like Spotify. Reasons like these:

• Media recommendations. Subscription businesses like Netflix and Spotify generate tons of data. Combine them, and you’re likely to get even better recommendations. Some of these use cases are pretty straightforward: Viewers of Glee may want to be reminded of all the original songs that were covered in the latest episode they watched. Other linkages may be much more subtle – but if Netflix has shown anything, then it’s that it is very good at making sense of lots and lots of data.
• Device footprint. Spotify’s biggest asset in its quest to convert free users to paying customers are its mobile and connected device apps. However, the company hasn’t exactly been quick to expand in this realm. We waited forever for its iPad app, and the number of connected devices with Spotify on board can still be counted on one hand. Netflix on the other hand is now available on over 800 different devices, including virtually any connected TV and Blu-ray player. Tapping into that expertise could help Spotify to get a lot more paying users.
• International expansion. Netflix has halted its international expansion until its return to global profitability, and its foray into South America has been below expectations. Spotify on the other hand has been adding new markets at breathless pace. Seems like Netflix could actually learn something from the smaller company here – and of course use some of its office space around the world as it resumes its own expansion plans.
• Business models. Netflix is on the road to recovery, but there is no profitability in sight for Spotify. Some even claim that the company will never be profitable – at least not as long as record companies, who are also shareholders, dictate huge licensing fees. If Netflix has shown anything, it’s that it can get deals with media companies done, and Spotify could use some of that expertise to figure out deals that work for both sides.
• Network infrastructure. Netflix recently unveiled its own CDN, and it only makes only to use that kind of infrastructure for other services as well. Spotify on the other hand has been using P2P to offload some of its network costs, which could be an interesting model for Netflix, if only as a threat in its talks with operators that complain about too much traffic coming from Netflix’s network.

As I said, this is really just a thought experiment, but I think it’s an interesting one. Media subscription businesses have a lot of similarities. In theory, it makes a lot of sense for companies like Netflix and Spotify to join forces. Of course, both businesses also come with huge risks – and combining risks those might be more than either can stomach.

That growth indicates “a tremendous amount of innovation,” said Luma Partners CEO and founder Terence Kawaja. But he asked: “Is that a situation that can continue or does it need to change?”

In a presentation on digital advertising’s “state of the state” during Federated Media’s Conversational Marketing Summit Monday, he said that there are 1,400 companies featured across his company’s eight sector-specific slides. Each of those companies, or at least the bigger ones, are building their own sales teams, business development plans and technology, to each sell their own unique solution that isn’t operable with others, Kawaja continued.

While the industry wouldn’t want to quash the innovation, he floated the idea of addressing what he called the “rationalization” issue through standardization. Just like mobile technology has its Android and iOS platforms, Kawaja said, digital advertising could have its own operating system.

“Many other industries have benefited greatly by having an operating system, a common platform upon which other companies can build their tools,” he said.

Another potential solution to this problem could come through consolidation. Over the past few years, merger and acquisition activity hasn’t only picked up, it’s attracted interest from a wider group of potential buyers. Google, Microsoft and Yahoo used to be the “usual suspects” in driving M&A in online media. But as the field has become more data-driven and scientific, it’s started to include new players from marketing, technology and commerce, he said.

Facebook’s upcoming IPO, he added, will “fundamentally change this industry from the perspective of M&A, rationalization and consolidation.” Not that Facebook itself is going to quickly pick off a bunch of new companies, Kawaja said, “but just their presence, their currency, their ability to grow organically.”

In addition to rationalization, he highlighted two other key themes: big data and automation. In 2009, programmatic media buying didn’t even in exist, he noted. But, according to IDC, in 2010 companies spent $352 million on real-time bidding. By the end of 2012, that is expected to reach $1.975 million and, in 2015, it’s projected to hit about $5 billion.

As for his highly-cited Lumascape slide, Kawaja said it’s been cited in six books and a Harvard Business School case study (not to mention countless conference presentations and sales decks). It’s also received more than 350,000 views online, from people in 116 countries.

Over the past couple of months, Gawker Media founder Nick Denton has made it clear that he doesn’t like blog comments very much, and that includes the ones on his own sites such as Gizmodo and Jezebel. He said so during an interview at South by Southwest, where he called the long-held idea that comments could somehow capture the intelligence of a site’s readership “a joke.” So Gawker is remaking comments from the ground up, Denton told GigaOM in an interview in his SoHo office on Wednesday — and the vision behind the changes that will be rolling out soon is nothing less than a reinvention of what the company is about, and also an attempt to literally flip the world of online content on its head.

This isn’t the first time Gawker has tried to fix commenting: the site got a lot of attention several years ago for launching an ambitious new commenting system that was supposed to offer readers an incentive system to encourage good behavior — a little like the membership model that other sites, including the New York Times, have adopted, which awards readers benefits for posting good comments. But Denton says now that this system actually turned out to be a massive mistake, and that all it did was encourage social-media gurus and professional commenters to game the system in order to get rewards:

It was a terrible mistake. It doesn’t work because people game it — and the people who game it are the people with time and social-media expertise, and those are not the people with information or insight. What person who actually has a job and a reputation… would give a f*** about getting some little badge like they’re in high school? It’s patronizing.

Everyone becomes a moderator of their own comments

So what is Gawker’s solution? The new commenting system, which Denton has hinted about but not revealed the details of, is designed to give everyone their own platform for commentary and discussion, one in which they control who they listen to or who they dismiss. And that includes the sources involved in a story at Gawker or Gizmodo or any of the other sites. That, Denton hopes, will appeal to people who don’t currently comment on blogs because doing so feels like “asking someone to go down to Occupy Wall Street and plunge into the mob and start shouting. No reasonable person is going to do that.”

In particular, Denton hopes that handling comments in this way will encourage the subjects of stories to become involved in rebutting these reports directly on the site, instead of calling him to rant at him about them. “I want to take all of those people and I want to have them in the discussion,” he says. “I want to see the story evolve and see the rebuttal, and the rebuttal to the rebuttal.” Not only does that produce drama — something Denton admits he has a fondness for — but he believes it could also help to get at the truth, broadly speaking.

Now I can say: your rebuttal will be given as much prominence as the original piece — we will respect you, we will protect you from the mob and we will let you say your piece. It’s great because it adds drama, and it keeps our writers honest.

Denton wants to reinvent how online media works

But Denton doesn’t just want to reinvent commenting; he wants these changes to be part of reinventing online journalism itself, by turning the traditional story model on its head. While many outlets treat comments and the discussion around a story as an afterthought, something that gets tacked on once the story is finished, Denton said he sees it not only as as the beginning of the story — but as the most important part. He said he even wants to take the discussion around a story that editors at Gawker engage in via private IMs and chats and make all of that public, as a way of sparking discussion.

This was actually the original vision behind Gawker: Denton said he noticed the discussion and gossip around a story in the newsroom or at the bar when he worked at the Financial Times was often far more interesting than the story itself — and he wanted to turn that discussion into its own form of media. In a similar way, the commenting changes are designed to make discussion among writers (who he said will be encouraged to spend far more time in the comments section) and readers and sources far more prominent, in some cases to the point where they become the story.

What’s interesting about Denton’s vision is that plenty of media sites both traditional and digital-only talk about how the “conversation” is the important thing, and how engaging the reader is a valuable tool for uncovering the truth, something that has been accepted wisdom since The Cluetrain Manifesto was published over a decade ago — but very few sites actually follow through on this promise.

Can Nick Denton manage to make Gawker into a poster child for that principle, and not only save comments and internet discourse but pave the way for the future of online media? And will anyone actually take him up on his offer to spend their day at Gawker moderating their own discussion? Stay tuned.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Jeremy King