media | digital | tech
The digital Holy Grail promised by the tech giants to media was a huge, big, failure, but it is impossible to imagine the news industry thriving again without technology help.
The "new-new journalism" won't come out of a posh NY newsroom, but from the unexciting news trenches of everywhere. We need to start the search for it immediately.
The time to enforce the data industry to obey principles that protect society is past due. The sector and investors should see it gladly and embrace the idea.
The news ecosystem must re-learn the tricks of the trade with the mindset that anything that works only for posh global multi-million news brands doesn't work at all.
The debate is dead and will remain so until "liberals" call back to the table an old foe: centre-right reasonable conservatives.
Whatever Amazon does, it's big. That's why their enterprise in sports rights sends chills to the industry current incumbents.
The EU has a lot of problems and its privacy law as well, but standing up against it is suspicious.
These are tough times for Facebook. The company has suffered many small upsets in the past two years but kept growing, which for the whole trade meant they were doing everything alright. Now that the Cambridge Analytica scandal not only came to the surface but also gave unequivocal proof that it’s just the tip of the iceberg, the Palo Alto behemoth should conclude that the last two years were delightful compared to the scrutiny, pressure and financial loss Facebook should experience from now on. But outside Palo Alto, one question that the whole trade should be doing itself is: is it surprising that an industry that lives and dies for the goals set by marketing and sales departments rips off any regulation and break rules that can restrict potential revenues?
These days, the general feeling among the digital media observers in the world is a mix of fear, uncertainty and commiseration. The industry as we know is plainly sinking. Digital journalists are replacing the number of traditional media jobs at a scale of 20 to 1. The wages are plummeting (in America far less than anywhere else). Tech companies are showing signs that they are also set to jump away from the journalism boat after spending their entire existence pledging loyalty to “quality journalism”, whatever this may mean. Following this trend, the once media-darling digital-born operations are letting the mask fall and biting the dust with everyone else. Any schadenfreude is allowed here (although it is difficult to consider a loser someone who leaves richer than before). The technomodernpress was a disease with a staggering price.
“In a dark time, the eye begins to see”
Theodore Roethke
Every week, tech companies and their extensions announce the rollout of a new resource, something that will bring great benefits for society, something that will bring back lot revenues and relevance for publishers, something that journalists have long been waiting for and will return them to their role of caretakers of society and guardians of the democracy. The media and its adjacencies were taken for years by kind of a sebastianism, an irrational wait for the return of something that decayed a long ago. Journalism needs to mature and leave a state of denial that it can survive with the help of the Facebooks and Googles of the moment. It’s time to get over and stop pretending that display advertisement, subscriptions and patronage will make dead flowers rise again.
“Quando o Facebook estava começando e alguém me dizia que não estava lá, eu dizia ‘Ok, você sabe que estará’. Eu não tinha ideia das consequências do que eu estava falando. [O Facebook] muda tudo na sua relação com a sociedade, com as pessoas. Interfere na produtividade em modos bizarros. Sabe Deus o que isso não faz com o cérebro das crianças”.
