Rethinking and redesigning news for the 21st Century PLUS A review of legislation and regulation to make platforms pay for news

July 11, 2022

I realised a few years ago that I'm a product person. My real passion is identifying the problems that people have and then going about solving them. Most of my career has been focused on how to solve the problems in journalism, and that is why I really was curious about Amanda Ripley's piece in the Washington Post. She admitted that she was part of the 42% of Americans who are now avoiding the news. That's not a small number, and she breaks down issues with the product. She thinks that journalism needs to provide hope, agency and dignity instead of a constant stream of doom scrolling. This is especially true as this pandemic grinds on. There are a few things that she points to as potential product changes such as using tools like Hearken to find out what your audiences want to know and solutions journalism, which goes beyond highlighting problems to looking at various solutions.

The Center for International Media Assistance looks at legislation around the world that seeks licencing fees from tech platforms for the links that they or their users share. It looks not only at the legislation in Australia but also efforts across Europe. The idea is even gaining some traction in the US where most of the global Big Tech platforms are.

PLUS:

  • Twitter launches a CoTweets feature allowing you and a friend to tweet together.

  • How big is online social video?

  • A deep data science article from Spotify on how they built the infrastructure to conduct user forecasts.

  • Jillian York was already a sceptic about NFTs and then "one stole my face".

  • How to be a better product communicator.

  • A great product comparison - Apple vs Google Maps

Today’s news, even high-quality print news, is not designed for humans. How do we fix it?

The job is to not only figure out how to reach new audiences now, but in the future when there could be platforms that haven’t even been invented yet.

As policymakers around the world consider how to rebalance the relationship between Big Tech and the news industry, it is imperative that they take a global view and consider the implications for independent news outlets in developing and low-income countries. Pioneering laws and policies like Australia’s 2021 News Media Bargaining Code and the European Union’s 2021 Digital Copyright Directive, which compel platforms to pay for the news they use, have inspired publishers globally and spurred other countries to pursue similar policies. This report examines three types of policy interventions: taxing digital advertising, empowering news media to collectively bargain with Big Tech, and requiring tech platforms to pay licensing fees for using news content. It finds that implementing any of these approaches is not just about political will, but also about institutional design, legitimacy, and trust.

Twitter has started testing a new CoTweets feature for a limited time. CoTweets lets two accounts co-author a tweet, and testing with users started this week.

Social Media Today

Spotify’s official technology blog

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