Some (serious) thoughts on what is different about the UK news market and maybe why there is a high number of Brit execs and editors in top news posts at the moment. First what British editors *really* think about US journalism 1/ They admire its quality but often think it is too slow, too ponderous, and lacks urgency. The number of bylines on longer pieces from the NYT raises eyebrows. Also it lacks a competitiveness baked into the UK structure 2/

Twitter vs not Twitter isn't a simple binary, particularly not for news journalism. The 24 hour global connectivity has changed almost everything about workflows in newsrooms and even for freelance journalists. It changes commissioning, newsgathering, sourcing, verification... No everything is wholly good, but everything is wholly changed. As @EliotHiggins points out about @bellingcat, the network makes possible new types of work and to some extent breaks the hegemony of dominant news providers.

Messages like this increasingly make me thing of the rogue property developer model of Twitter. Over 15 years Twitter has been the ‘street’ a lot of communities meet on 1/

https://twitter.com/marleematlin/status/1593334136969666560

Every morning you walk down the street and see familiar faces, people you ‘know’ talking about things of interest in your ‘neighborhood’, be it academic Twitter, Black Twitter, journo Twitter etc.,

Alito’s draft heavily references English legal precedent, including that of famed jurist Sir Matthew Hale who, it should be noted, had at least two women executed for witchcraft and wrote a treatise supporting marital rape digitalcommons.law.ggu.edu/cgi/viewconten… for those interested in why Sir Matthew Hale’s views on abortion are suddenly relevant

Interesting piece from ⁦@jbenton⁩ - all an excellent read - half of it I agree with, but the key premise, that the News Media Bargaining Code is a terrible policy, needs further scrutiny 1/ niemanlab.org/2022/02/austra… First - the policy itself has holes. And the origin of it might well represent a bad faith stitch-up between News Corp and the Scott Morrison government . But there are parts of the code that can be built upon and improved by other legislation elsewhere.

A mind-boggling case in Montana of how disinformation is a new playbook at local level. The thinned down local newspaper is no match for a barrage of nonsense on the Internet nytimes.com/2021/10/24/us/… The recession in local journalism, the growth of campaigning Facebook groups; any wedge issue can turn an electorate if swaddled in enough untruths

NYT : 10pc of material below political posts on FB were about election fraud after November election ….and yet nytimes.com/2021/10/22/tec…

Final thought ordering on the FB/Aus issue.
1. Facebook is entirely within its rights to remove any /all links and pages from its platform so it doesn’t have to pay a link tax on news.(Even though it already does exactly this for news tab, which is ad hoc and discretionary) 2. But the manner and timing of the removal was potentially damaging, and reckless. It removed many items that were not news (like healthcare sites, community pages) and news that is a long way outside the corporate media - eg half all pages in First Nation media network

Here is where the rubber hits the road for @facebook and it’s civic intentions. (Forget the Oversight Board for one minute). It won’t comply with a democratic government law which it doesn’t agree with which costs it money - and removes all accredited publishers including PSBs This hurts publishers - sure. But it also hurts Australian Facebook users in terms of their quick access to news information . There is NO ‘connecting people for a better world’ in this behaviour or hesitancy over possible harms. Just a ‘fuck you and your legislation’ . Okay.

Suspension of accounts is step one, step two is implementing a policy which reflects the fact that powerful individuals need more restrictions, and *more* scrutiny from platforms ...rather than less Take for instance the fact that executives and others cannot tweet or share certain market -moving information on social media without falling foul of the SEC . But shareholders it seems, get more protection than citizens in this regard

Here ⁦@TowCenter⁩ - we’ve been looking into the perennial problem of ‘what is a news organisation?’ . It’s an area where platforms need to up their game ....Google and Facebook Have a News Labeling Problem - ⁦@CJR⁩ cjr.org/analysis/googl…

Google’s extension of $1bn to the news industry (maybe) over 3 years represents c 3x it’s current rate of global expenditure on supporting the news industry. Or lobbying against regulation depending on how you see it The glaring issue often ignored by those funded by Google (in the press and academic research), is how these interventions potentially make very little difference to long term sustainability for newsrooms, but a lot of difference to the progress - or not - of regulation

#coronavirus for journalists, short thread : Here’s what we know about the importance of reporting during epidemics. First, repetitive, reliable reporting can change behaviour . There are a number if papers on this - here is one sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/… Important that news organisations update figures, practical information and news about the spread with calm unsensational regularity *in the same place* . Liveblogs are great for those following, but poor for those encountering the story at different points.

Initial thoughts about the #BBC. It is not just another crisis. The closest parallel is Thatcher + Peacock committee in 1986, where Checkland and Birt had to secure the future of the corporation (amid much internal opposition to their culture and methods). This is worse 1/ The biggest challenge is dealing with a PM who is personally entangled with commercial media, makes policy announcements on Facebook Live and leads an administration openly hostile to the BBC. Public support for the BBC matters less and is weaker than previously 2/

Thread - (short). Nobody would like to see technology companies reform to help revitalize local journalism more than me (seriously). However the direct ungoverned relationship of a platform like Facebook (or Google) to news organizations is troubling on a number of levels 1/ Conflict of interest being the most obvious. Today as Zuckerberg answered @AOC asking what she would or would not be allowed to advertise on Facebook we saw repeated mentions of @factchecknet set up as the ‘arbiter of truth’ (which it can never be, it is a service provider) 2/

The issue of #Google and the news industry is this: Google is a massive advertising company. They are part of a live experiment in changing communications and publishing systems, and doing it without much understanding of what will happen as a result of their actions 1/x Along with other advertising companies (notably Facebook) that use mass data aggregation to reengineer and make the advertising business far more efficient, they have changed the economics of content production and monetization 2/x