Author: Mathew Ingram

In a post earlier today, I took a look at what the new owners of the Orange County Register have been doing to try and revive the newspaper, based on a long interview I had with co-owner Eric Spitz — a list that includes the hardest of all paywalls, killing off most of the paper’s blogs, and doubling down on print as a source of revenue. Even though I disagree with their approach in almost every case, Spitz and his partner Aaron Kushner deserve some credit for putting their money (a substantial amount of it) where their mouths are.

I confess I’ve been rather fascinated with the Register ever since Spitz and his partner Aaron Kushner acquired it last year and almost immediately started implementing some fairly dramatic changes. Unlike some newspaper owners, they didn’t just start cutting costs to try and save money — the way Advance Publications has with newspapers like the Times-Picayune in New Orleans, for example (media analyst Ken Doctor has called Kushner the “anti-Advance”).

Serve your readers — everything else is secondary

Instead, Kushner and Spitz started spending money on the newspaper, pouring tens of millions of dollars into the Register newsroom — which is now a staggering 50 percent larger than it used to be — hiring reporters and editors, and launching almost a dozen new sections.

However you look at it, that’s a substantial commitment to the principle Spitz and Kushner operate on, which is that serving subscribers is the only thing that matters — not advertisers, not free readers on the web, not the “social conversation” around their content. Just readers who pay. In a sense, it’s a more extreme version of the philosophy that led Andrew Sullivan to launch a subscription-based site with no advertising (although Sullivan, who will be at our paidContent Live conference on April 17, allows for casual web reading).

As a number of media observers — including me — have pointed out, if you are going to put up a paywall, your content had better be exceptionally good. Spitz says he and Kushner are trying to boost the value they are offering to readers by putting resources into the paper (although whether enough people see that value in the same way remains to be seen).

A strong commitment to a vision

If you think of the media industry’s approach to the web as a spectrum, the Daily Mail is at one end, with a totally web-native and non-paywalled strategy: like BuzzFeed or any number of other web properties, the Mail is going to live or die based on viral content, millions of readers and digital advertising. The Orange County Register is at the complete opposite end: no free content whatsoever, a hard paywall and no interest in viral content or social media (readers can always email Register writers if they have something to say, Spitz told me).

To be clear, I think the anti-social aspects of what the Register is doing are bad — not just for the newspaper, but for society as a whole, since discussion around news events has public value, and engaging with readers has journalistic value. And I’m not sure I buy the argument that print-advertising revenue will rebound and even grow if the Register puts more money into the paper. I think the advertising industry is being disrupted just like the media industry is, and I’m not convinced the genie will go back in the bottle quite so easily.

That said, however, at least the Register isn’t trying to suck and blow at the same time, the way so many other newspapers are. Spitz and Kushner aren’t trying a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and hoping that they can be both web-native and print-focused at the same time — they are unabashedly committed to their view, and they are pouring everything they have into it, and that deserves some respect.

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The new owners of the Orange County Register don’t have a background in newspapers or journalism: between them, Aaron Kushner and his partner Eric Spitz have built a number of online businesses, including a greeting-card company and one that sells used computer equipment. Despite that — or possibly because of it — they believe they have the solution to the industry’s financial woes. But it’s about more than just putting up a paywall like the one the Register launched on Tuesday, Spitz said in an interview: it’s about fundamentally rethinking the financial model that newspapers have been based on for much of their modern history.

A hard paywall is a cornerstone of that model, said Spitz — who along with Kushner acquired the Register and various associated local papers last year. While many publishers have put up walls that are somewhat “leaky,” in the sense that readers can get in via social-media links and also get a certain number of free articles per month, the Register‘s paywall will be about as hard as they get — non-paying readers get nothing (although they can pay $2 for a 24-hour pass if they don’t want to sign up for a full membership). Says Spitz:

“I fundamentally don’t agree that a newspaper should be in the business of giving away its content to everyone who wants it, regardless of whether they are paying for it — McDonald’s doesn’t give away its burgers, and Boeing doesn’t give away airplanes. When it comes to life and death matters (fires, floods, earthquakes) we have built a mechanism where we can unlock any article and any section, and we will do that as a public service. But do I believe as the owner of a newspaper company that I have a public duty to give my content away for free? I absolutely do not.”

Content is for paying customers only

As part of its commitment to charging for all of its content, the Register has also cut back dramatically on the number of blogs written by reporters or editors on various topics: according to Spitz, the paper used to have over 100 and it killed all but 10 of the most popular ones, a move that at least some of the paper’s writers don’t seem all that pleased with. But the Register executive said it is part of the fundamental focus the paper’s owners have — which is that the only thing that matters is the subscriber, not the advertiser or the larger social “conversation” around the news.

But doesn’t blogging and using social media to engage with readers have value apart from just driving traffic to the website? Doesn’t that have value for journalism and the media in general as well? Spitz says he isn’t convinced:

“If you’re asking me whether I’m a big fan of crowdsourcing and open interaction between the writer and the audience, I wouldn’t say it’s the best thing in the world. Journalists get their information from lots of different places, but do those conversations need to be out in the open through what we call social media? I’m not convinced… I don’t know that I get a whole lot of value from one of our reporters tweeting something so that someone can read our stuff who is not a subscriber.”

Investing in the product is crucial

Unlike a number of newspapers that seem to have thrown up paywalls more out of desperation than anything else, without investing much in the content, Spitz says he and Kushner believe that in order to justify charging for their content they have to make it worth paying for — so the pair have invested tens of millions of dollars in hiring new reporters and editors, launching over a dozen new sections for the paper (both online and print) and adding other features. Spitz says the head count at the Register has increased by more than 300 people — or close to 50 percent since the pair acquired the company last summer — and the number kf newsroom staff has increased by close to 60 percent.

“Our fundamental insight is that the business itself in the newspaper space has been operated for 75-plus years as an advertiser-first, subscriber-second business. We think that’s incorrect, and that they should be run as a subscriber-first, advertiser-second business — and when you make that shift, you see that a lot of other decisions fall from it. The last thing you want to do is cut off more eyeballs if you’re in an ad business. But if you change that foundation and say it is really a subscriber business, then the first thing and the second thing and the third thing you think about every morning is how do I deliver more value to subscribers.”

Spitz and Kushner have also launched a number of features aimed at making their subscribers — whether in print or online — feel special. So in December, every subscriber got an envelope containing a check for $100, which they could donate to whatever charity or interest group they wanted in exchange for free advertising in the paper. Spitz says that move alone cost the company $12.5 million.

If there is value, advertisers will see it

But doesn’t relying more and more on subscriber revenue mean that a newspaper like the Register is doomed to shrink, since advertising revenue — both in print and online — continues to decline? Not necessarily, says Spitz. Unlike the vast majority of industry insiders and observers, the Register‘s owners believe that not only can the decline in print advertising revenue be arrested but revenue from print ads can actually increase, provided advertisers see the kind of engagement they want from readers who are paying for the product.

“Fundamentally, we don’t agree that it is the natural course for print revenue to decline, in fact we think that is at the heart of the problems in the industry… we are modelling for significant increases in print revenue for 2013, and we’re on budget for that for January and February… we believe that as you have more and more engaged subscribers, advertising becomes more valuable.”

Spitz admits that to some extent the Register is unique, since it is one of the few large-scale regional newspapers that doesn’t have much competition from local TV networks and other sources. And he says the model that the paper is relying on also might not work for national newspapers and other outlets, since there are so many free sources of similar content such as CNN. “While I’m a hard paywall advocate, I think it’s smart for USA Today not to go to a paywall — their content is just not differentiated enough,” Spitz said.

It’s more than a little ironic that the two men who seem to be the biggest fans of print and the biggest proponents of making people pay for news aren’t even from the industry, and have never worked for nor run a newspaper. But can they fight the forces that have driven many of their newspaper-owning colleagues into despair, and in some cases financial ruin?

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When Business Insider founder Henry Blodget opened up about his website’s traffic and business model a few months ago, we noted that he didn’t reveal the most important thing about it — namely, whether it was profitable or not. And now we know why: a recent profile of the former Wall Street analyst by New Yorker writer Ken Auletta says the site lost $3 million in 2012, or about a quarter of the revenue it pulled in, most of which came from online advertising. If there is a recipe for how to create a profitable online publisher, Blodget doesn’t seem to have discovered it yet.

Much of what Blodget says about his business also appeared in the slide presentation he published as part of his experiment in “opening the kimono,” as he described it at the time. The site has about 24 million unique monthly visitors, according to Google Analytics, which puts it ahead of traditional outlets like the Financial Times and BusinessWeek — although comScore says it only has 9 million (Blodget says the discrepancy stems from BI’s large non-U.S. audience).

On Twitter, Blodget called the $3 million worth of red ink that Business Insider racked up in 2012 an “investment” rather than a loss. According to the New Yorker piece, the site has only spent about half of the $13 million it has raised in financing, which came from investors like Kevin Ryan (Business Insider’s chairman and co-founder of the Gilt Groupe) as well as IVP and Marc Andreessen. Ryan tells Auletta that for $7 million “we’ve created the new Wall Street Journal.”

Although Blodget mentioned in his recent presentation that programmatic ad buying and other forces are putting increasing pressure on advertising returns for publishers, the New Yorker piece says about 85 percent of Business Insider’s revenue still comes from ads, with the rest coming from conferences and its proprietary research arm. The site has also been experimenting with various forms of “sponsored content,” including sponsor-focused slideshows.

Not "lost!" Invested! And, yes, about to fill out AARP card RT @emilybell @pkafka… BI lost $3m last yr, HB is 47. allthingsd.com/20130331/henry…

—
Henry Blodget (@hblodget) April 01, 2013

Blodget describes the site’s approach — which focuses primarily on short, newsy pieces that often feature salacious details about and/or slideshows of celebrities — as being “halfway between broadcast and print,” and tells Auletta that it is designed to be “conversational.” He also argues that the model of aggregating content from other sites is sharing rather than stealing, although others have disagreed about that interpretation rather strongly.

And what does the future hold for Business Insider? An unidentified board member tells Auletta that he expects the site to be acquired, and Blodget says it “either will become part of a larger enterprise or become the larger enterprise.”

Bonus fact: Blodget, who played tennis while at the upscale Phillips Exeter Academy, plays doubles with his father — a successful banker — and the two were recently ranked nationally in the Super-Senior Father/Son Tournament.

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Every now and then, there’s a truly heart-warming story about crowdfunding, like the case of the school-bus monitor who was tormented by kids on her bus and wound up with a windfall of $700,000. This week there was another story that seemed just as inspirational, when a mother set up a campaign so her 9-year-old daughter could go to computer camp and design a video game to prove to her brothers that she was smart — a plea that has so far raised more than $20,000. After some evidence appeared that showed the woman to be wealthy, however, the attitude towards her project quickly changed.

The original story, as told in first person on the Kickstarter page, is a great feel-good tale: Mackenzie Wilson talks about how she boasted to her older brothers that she could design a video game, and they didn’t believe her. So she asked her mother Susan if she could go to a STEM camp (which stands for science, technology, engineering and mathematics) at a local university, where she would be able to study computer games and eventually design one of her own. The original goal for the campaign was just $829.

An inspiring story that turned sour

After the campaign got picked up on Twitter and elsewhere, Mackenzie and her mother raised more than $10,000 in less than 24 hours, and that figure quickly grew to more than $22,000. As with the bus-monitor story, many people seemed inspired to donate far more than was required because they wanted to support the girl and her desire to do something positive. But what happened next shows just how quickly the attitude towards such crowdfunding efforts can reverse itself.

As reported by the Daily Dot, a member of Reddit raised red flags about the campaign with a post about Mackenzie’s mother — including the fact that she was a self-declared multimillionaire entrepreneur who sold a company she co-founded to Kinkos for $100 million, was an entrepreneur-in-residence at Georgetown University, and ran several different businesses, including one that helps banks get money back from customers who default on their loan payments.

The post also included screenshots of a series of identical tweets asking celebrities such as Lady Gaga to promote her daughter’s campaign, something that is against Kickstarter rules.

Wilson told the Huffington Post that she didn’t expect this kind of reaction, and that she never claimed the family couldn’t afford to send her daughter to computer camp — she said that she viewed it as a way of encouraging Mackenzie to stand up for herself and raise her own money for things, like a lemonade stand might have in the past. She also pointed out that there is nothing in the Kickstarter rules that says it is only for people who can’t afford the thing they are raising money for, saying: “I don’t think it’s a need-based system.”

As the Reddit campaign against her picked up speed, Wilson said she was the target of death threats and offensive comments, and that she was afraid to let her daughter find out about how much anger her campaign had caused. In the comments on the Kickstarter page, she said: “I wish I could find a way to make this stop. I’m tired of fighting.”

Crowdfunding campaigns rely on trust

What’s fascinating to look at is how the tone of the comments on the Kickstarter campaign changes over time: at first, they are resoundingly positive, cheering for Mackenzie and her mother for encouraging her to do this. Then after the information about Wilson’s background gets posted, they turn more negative — but there are still lots of people telling she is doing the right thing. Over time, however, the number of negative responses increases, and some commenters start to question whether it was even Mackenzie’s idea, and criticize Wilson for saying she plans to identify her attackers.

For me at least, this episode feels a lot like what happened to musician Amanda Palmer when she raised more than $1 million from her fans in less than two weeks for a new album and tour. Even though she detailed exactly how she would be using the money, there were still questions raised when she started to invite musicians to play with her for free as part of the tour, and she eventually had to respond to those criticisms publicly and repeatedly, and pay the musicians the standard rate.

The lesson from both of these incidents is the same, I think. If you are going to appeal to the crowd for support, then you are essentially striking a bargain with them: they provide money, but you have to do more than just provide whatever the end product is — you have to be as open and transparent as possible, and do whatever you can to maintain the trust of those supporters, and that changes the dynamics of the situation completely. And once that trust is lost, the game is effectively over.

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He may not have the same kind of public profile as the teenaged founder who sold his company to Yahoo for $30 million, or the founders of hot apps like SnapChat or Instagram, but Dave Winer has done a lot more for the world of online media and publishing than many people realize, including pioneering both blogging and podcasting, as well as the development of RSS. So it’s worth paying attention when he comes up with something new, even if it’s not immediately obvious how that service fits into our lives — because it probably will.

So when he announced earlier this week that he was launching a new company called Small Picture and had a new product called Little Outliner, I was interested, even though I didn’t really understand what it was. So I called Winer up and asked him to describe what Little Outliner is and what it is designed to do — and there is a clear thread that connects this new service to the other things he has championed: namely, the idea of having control over one’s content, and of being fully open.

A browser-based notepad, but also much more

In a nutshell, Little Outliner is a kind of notepad, and it runs in a browser window so no software has to be installed, and it allows a user to keep notes or text content of any kind — but also allows them to structure that content in a number of ways, so that it becomes a kind of brainstorming tool. Says Winer:

“It’s basically a note-taking tool that becomes a writing tool. So if you’re a reporter, as you’re putting together a story, you might talk to a few people and take notes while you’re doing that, and maybe you do a little research and gather some quotes and put that in your outline — but the structure is malleable, it’s fluid, things just flow into it and you don’t have to worry about where you put them because where they are is easily changed.”

This kind of thing comes naturally to Winer, because he said he has been using some form of outliner ever since he first became a programmer. “People think, ‘Oh he’s the guy who started RSS, podcasting or blogging,’ but that’s not really what I do,” Winer said. “What I really do is outlining. It was my entry into the tech industry — I wasn’t even a programmer until I realized computers could be used for these things, and it’s still what I do to this day.”

In addition to being used as an organizational tool while programming (which Winer says he does with his new partner, Small Picture co-founder Kyle Shank), one potential use for Little Outliner is as a blogging tool, the former Weblogs.com founder says. The product as it currently exists is just an entry-level thing, Winer said — with more features to be added later, as users discover new uses for it. And one of those features will likely be integration with blogging platforms like WordPress (please see the disclosure statement below).

“I have a really incredible blogging system, far in advance of what anybody else uses, I’m pretty sure of that, and this gives me a way to deliver that to people on the terms that they want it. They want it in the browser, so now it’s in the browser — and now it’s about hooking it up in very simple ways to things that can take advantage of it, like WordPress. I want to integrate — that’s my religion: interoperability.”

Open standards and interoperability

While Little Outliner may seem competitive with other tools such as Evernote or Google’s new Keep service, Winer said it differs from these in two specific ways — the first being that it incorporates structure into the notes or content being saved. The second is that Winer is dedicated to keeping it as open as possible, in part so that users don’t suffer the same fate they did when Google shut down Google Reader. That’s why the content is stored locally on a user’s computer (although web sharing is coming) and it is based on OPML, an open standard.

“For some people, Keep will probably be a wonderful tool to use. If it were my type of tool, the questions I would ask would be the obvious ones in light of the Google Reader thing — what does the future look like, how open is it — if things were open, if you could replace them and their data was accessible to other pieces of software, then it wouldn’t matter if they withdrew. But if you have to worry about them dropping the product and they don’t make the data accessible to other pieces of software, you really don’t have any upside.”

Whether Little Outliner becomes a must-use product for millions or not, Winer’s dedication to open standards — which has included promoting the idea of a distributed version of Twitter, rather than relying on a proprietary platform owned by a single company — means that those who prefer open and interoperable web tools will always have an alternative.

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

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“Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges! I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ badges!” — Gold Hat, Treasure of the Sierra Madre

As newspapers around the world rush to erect paywalls to bolster their declining revenue — with Britain’s Telegraph and Sun papers just the latest to join the parade, along with the Washington Post — there are a few holdouts who insist on generating revenue the old-fashioned way: namely, through advertising. One of the most prominent proponents of this model is the Daily Mail, which has become one of the world’s largest news websites. The Mail’s approach may not be for everyone, but according to the paper it is working extremely well, thank you very much.

The data behind that boast comes from an investor presentation that Media Briefing sat in on recently by the paper’s parent company, DMG Media, in which the company projected that its digital revenue could soon exceed its print revenue — a transition that few newspapers could even think about realistically at this point, let alone forecast for the near future. And the Mail says this isn’t happening as a result of declining revenue overall, as it is with some newspapers.

So what accounts for this kind of success? Critics would argue that it is the Mail‘s somewhat lackadaisical approach to accuracy, since a number of the newspaper’s most popular stories consist of rumors or salacious tidbits that in some cases turn out not to be true. But is this any different from any number of tabloid newspapers before the web came along? It may not be the course that the New York Times or Washington Post want to take, but there is no arguing with the results.

In a nutshell, the Mail‘s approach is to give the web what it wants — interesting stories, many of them about celebrities or odd events, and plenty of variety: the paper says it updates the home page every 30 minutes at least, which it believes is part of the reason it gets over 100 million unique visitors a month. And the engagement levels aren’t just orders of magnitude larger than other newspapers, but impressive even compared to sites such as Yahoo:

Obviously, not everyone can be (or wants to be) the Daily Mail. But whatever its flaws, the paper has done a pretty good job of being web-native, not just recreating a paper experience online. It’s the same approach that digital-only content publishers like BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post have taken, and while it may not produce as much revenue as print advertising does, the Mail has shown that it is possible to grow that business.

And what about a paywall? Editorial director Michael Clarke said during the presentation: “We’re not throwing in the towel because we don’t have to. We don’t feel at the moment that’s the way to go… We have scale, engagement and growth.” (Note: We are going to be discussing different models for monetization at our paidContent Live conference in New York on April 17).

Post and thumbnail image courtesy of Shutterstock / kak2s, slides courtesy of Media Briefing

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Whether it’s being used as a communications tool for dissidents during the Arab Spring uprisings or a real-time newswire about events like the mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school, Twitter has become a crucial platform for speech of all kinds — and in many cases that speech is unpleasant and even offensive. That may be taken for granted in the United States, but it doesn’t go over well in other countries with different views about speech, and that is making things increasingly difficult for Twitter. For now at least — to its credit — it seems determined to remain the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party.”

Last fall, a Twitter hashtag — #UnBonJuif, or A Good Jew — resulted in a number of anti-Semitic posts. Although Twitter removed the offending tweets after a complaint by the Union of Jewish French Students (UEJF), the group was not satisfied and sued to force the service to reveal the identities of those who posted the messages. A French court eventually agreed to this demand, since anti-Semitic comments and other “hate speech” are illegal in that country.

So far, Twitter has not complied with the court order — it is appealing the judgement, arguing that since it is a U.S. company it only has to comply with such demands from U.S. courts and other authorities. Meanwhile, the UEJF said it plans to file a second lawsuit in criminal court, seeking damages of $50 million for Twitter’s failure to provide the data.

A private company, but a platform for public speech

Twitter has revealed user data in several cases after being forced to do so by U.S. courts, including personal data related to several users who were supporters of WikiLeaks, such as Icelandic MP Birgitta Jonsdottir and hacker Jacob Appelbaum. Twitter also handed over tweets by two members of the Occupy Wall Street movement, after being forced to do so by a court order, although it fought against both of these decisions — and also made the request for the Occupy supporter’s data public even though it was asked not to do so.

What makes these kinds of cases so difficult is that Twitter is a private corporation with a proprietary platform, and yet it is being used as a public communications vehicle around the world, and one whose free-speech aspects are becoming increasingly important. And while we may all agree that certain types of speech are offensive, the idea that governments or courts can force Twitter to reveal the identities of those users is troubling in the extreme.

While Facebook and to some extent Google are also being used in this kind of context, Twitter is unique in the sense that it explicitly allows people to use pseudonyms. Facebook has a firm policy on the use of “real” or verified names, and while Google somewhat grudgingly allowed users to add pseudonyms to their Google+ accounts after what some called the “nym wars,” the service is still designed primarily for “real” names. Twitter is one of the only communications platforms of its size and reach that freely allows users to be known by pseudonyms.

As sociologist Zeynep Tufekci and Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (among others) have argued, anonymity or pseudonymity may allow for all kinds of offensive behavior — including the anti-Semitic comments in France and racist tweets posted by a number of users following the re-election of President Barack Obama — but protecting users’ identities is also a crucial factor that allows Twitter to be used as a communications tool by all kinds of disadvantaged groups, including political dissidents.

The free-speech wing of the free-speech party

The pressure on Twitter to resist demands like the one from France stems in part from this, and also from repeated comments from the company’s chief legal counsel, Alex Macgillivray, and CEO Dick Costolo that they are committed to being the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party.” The company may get criticized by some (including us) for the way it has shut down parts of its ecosystem, but its commitment to the rights of users remains.

The problem for Twitter is that as it becomes more global, it is running into country-specific demands like the one from France — or the one from Germany that led Twitter to block access to certain neo-Nazi tweets, since that kind of speech is also against the law. The risk here is that the network could easily fall victim to every government’s demands for user identities or censorship in even the most ridiculous cases, such as Turkey’s prohibition on comments that “insult Turkishness.”

If Twitter backs down on the French order, what is to stop Syria from forcing it to reveal the identities of dissidents, or Iran from forcing it to reveal who is posting anti-Muslim comments — or Britain from forcing it to identify those who were involved in the London riots, or those who post about cases covered by the country’s bizarre “super-injunctions”? Almost every country seems to have certain things that it prohibits people from saying publicly and is willing to go to court over.

But the bottom line is that freedom of speech — however offensive that speech might be — is a principle that needs all the help it can get, and Twitter deserves some credit for sticking to its guns, despite the obvious pressures it must be feeling.

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Flipboard, one of the leading magazine-style news apps, released an update on Tuesday with a number of interesting features, all of which are designed to make it easy for users to curate content with the app and create their own custom magazines. There was a lot of press about the launch, but I think most of the coverage missed a couple of crucial aspects of the new features and how disruptive they could be — not just to traditional media but to all kinds of media.

As we tried to point out in our post, Flipboard’s new version is more than just an evolution, it’s a significant departure from what the service was all about. Until now, it has been about making it easy to discover and consume content from multiple sources, but the new features are all about turning readers into publishers — by giving them curation tools like those used by Flipboard’s own editors.

When advertisers become publishers

Flipboard’s move may seem like an obvious step, and one which combines some of the appeal of services like Pinterest or Tumblr. But depending on how Flipboard decides to proceed with these features, they could be very disruptive indeed. Here’s a couple of ways they could do that:

1) Advertising: Flipboard’s curation and publishing tools are not just for individual users, but corporations, existing publishers and brands — and one overlooked element of the launch is that Flipboard is building e-commerce functionality into the app. Chief technology officer Eric Feng said some advertisers are already creating their own magazines using both their own ads and content from other sources. Those magazines could then be selected and highlighted by Flipboard’s algorithms just like any other effort by a Flipboard user.

We’ve written a lot about the phenomenon of “native” advertising (and will be talking more about it at our paidContent Live conference on April 17 in New York) as well as related concepts like sponsored content and what some call “brand journalism.” The idea is that brands and advertisers now have all of the same tools that traditional publishers used to have a monopoly on — that is, the ability to create and distribute interesting content and reach audiences directly. If a brand can curate content itself, and have its own ads with e-commerce features built in, why does it need a traditional magazine?

Revenue sharing with curators

2) Revenue: Flipboard already has some partnerships with media companies in which it gets to use more of their content directly in the app (instead of showing just short excerpts and then a “web view” in a browser) in return for a share of advertising revenue. When I asked Eric Feng whether Flipboard might consider doing a revenue share with individual users if they create compelling magazines from curated content, he said “that is something we are thinking about doing at some point in the future.” That’s not a promise, but it’s still an interesting idea, and potentially very disruptive in a number of ways.

If Flipboard provides the content and the tools, and the users who curate that content are generating a lot of value in terms of pageviews or “likes,” or whatever metric you want to use, shouldn’t those users get some benefit? Where this gets problematic is how Flipboard decides who gets what share of the revenue. If the ads come from a traditional media outlet, do they get the largest share or does Flipboard? And if media companies don’t want to play ball, does Flipboard just monetize their content anyway, the way Huffington Post and other aggregators do?

The idea that advertisers now have many of the same tools as publishers and traditional media companies do, and that readers and consumers of content also have much more power over that content than they used to, are two pretty inescapable facts about the new media landscape — and Flipboard has just staked a claim to some significant territory on both of those fronts.

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Flipboard has carved out a niche as one of the leading news and content-consumption apps for mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, with its digital-magazine look and easy user interface. Now the company wants to turn all of those content consumers into publishers as well: a new version of the app will be released today that gives users the tools to create their own topic-specific magazines. It’s a little like Pinterest merged with Tumblr, crossed with a better-looking and more social version of Google Reader.

Chief technology officer Eric Feng said in an interview prior to the launch of the new version that this is much more than just an evolution of Flipboard — it’s a major push into a whole new area, namely curation and publishing of content by individual users. “It’s one of the most ambitious efforts we have ever undertaken,” said the former CTO of Hulu. “It’s been more than 18 months since the inception of the idea, so this is a pretty big deal for us. We were originally focused on discovery and filtering of content, but now we are moving into curation in a big way.”

Flipboard has always had curated topics such as technology and sports, where the service uses a combination of human editors and algorithms — based on frequency of sharing and other metrics — to highlight specific content. In effect, the new tools allow any Flipboard user to take on the same role as an editor and create their own magazine around a topic, and share it with other users.

Reader magazines get promoted in Flipboard

In a nutshell, users with the new features (which are available only for iPhone and iPad currently, but will appear in an Android version soon, according to the company) can simply click a “plus” sign next to a blog post or article they are reading — as well as any video or audio content that appears in their stream — and add that piece of content or “flip it into” to a magazine, which will then be available to them or any other user who searches for that topic.

And Flipboard isn’t just giving users that ability within the app: the service is also launching a bookmarklet that will allow users to pull in content from anywhere on the web — whether it’s a blog post, a news website or Twitter and Facebook — and add it to their custom-created magazine. In a sense, Flipboard is trying to capitalize on the same curatorial impulse that makes people create collections about specific topics on Pinterest or re-blog photos on Tumblr, and in many ways this move is a shot across the bow of those other services.

It’s also clearly a threat to the existing publishing industry, since a Flipboard user can now create their own custom publication using the content that comes from dozens of different magazines, blogs, websites and other sources. So Flipboard is trying to bring publishers in as well and get them to create their own custom magazines — such as a magazine about the Beatles created with archival content from Rolling Stone. It has even built e-commerce functionality into the app so users can click and buy directly from within an article or ad.

But the most subversive aspect of the new features from a media-industry point of view is that they can be used by anyone — including advertisers. If an advertiser can create their own magazine by pulling in their own editorial content as well as content from other sources, and build e-commerce functionality into it, then it gives new meaning to the idea of brands as publishers and media entities.

Bringing users into the editorial process

The new version of the app will have a section called “By Our Readers” in the table of contents, which will include a mix of magazines that have been created by users on a variety of topics — a small group of beta testers (including GigaOM) have had access to this function for several months. As with the other Flipboard sections, some of the magazines that are highlighted will be chosen based on the number of times they have been shared, and others will be chosen by editors.

Like most news-aggregation and recommendation apps such as Pulse and Zite (which is owned by CNN), Flipboard users have always had the ability to share specific stories or items, but the new magazine-creation features effectively allow a user to spend some time creating a collection of content they can then share all at once. Feng used the example of an editor who is getting married soon and created an entire magazine with content about weddings.

In a way, the new version of the app also picks up where Google Reader and other RSS services left off. Instead of just passively consuming text and photos in a chronological timeline or series of folders, Flipboard turns everything into part of a magazine-style experience. According to Feng, many users have already imported their Google Reader feeds into the app, and those feeds will be available once Google sunsets the service in July.

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While some traditional journalists may not like the term, we’ve seen a growing number of examples of “citizen journalism” emerge that make it obvious how powerful that phenomenon has become — from the Pakistani programmer who live-tweeted the Osama bin Laden raid and the network of Twitter followers Andy Carvin of NPR used as a real-time newsroom to Reddit’s reporting on a mass shooting in Colorado. Now we have another to add to the list: a British blogger who goes by the name Brown Moses, who has quickly become the go-to source for information on weapons being used by terrorists in Syria.

A recent piece in The Guardian describes how the blogger — whose real name is Eliot Higgins — is able to quickly identify different forms of rockets and bombs, and how this encyclopedic knowledge has made him a crucial source not just for those who are following the news but for human-rights agencies that are documenting the strife in Syria, and even for traditional journalists like C.J. Chivers of the New York Times, a former Marine who is now an investigative reporter.

In fact, Chivers based an article he wrote for the Times earlier this year on information that was originally uncovered by Brown Moses, and gave him credit both in the NYT piece and on his own blog, saying:

“For weeks we had been watching the spread through the civil war in Syria of weapons made in the former Yugoslavia, and been admiring the work of Eliot Higgins (a.ka. Brown Moses) as he tried mapping their appearances in the videos of varied and far-flung armed groups. Thank you, Eliot, for your patience, and your fine eye, and for creating an opportunity for merging new and old forms of reporting.”

Unlike Chivers, the British blogger has no background in the military, nor did he have any expertise in munitions or military weaponry before he started following what was happening during the Arab Spring. He’s actually a 34-year-old father of one who lives in a suburb of Leicester, and was laid off from his job with a financial company in October (his wife works at the local post office).

Much like NPR’s Carvin, Higgins has spent hours building a network of bloggers and social-media users in the region, and essentially acts as a filter or curator of the content they produce — mostly YouTube videos of exploded munitions, which he then identifies using the knowledge he has built up himself as well as that of his social network. Every night, he combs through more than 450 YouTube channels.

Higgins’ obvious commitment to this task, even though he isn’t being paid, and his commitment to being as accurate as possible (“You have to be first and you have to be right,” he tells the Guardian) makes him a good example of citizen journalism at work. And his partnership with Chivers shows that this kind of journalism can be a great supplement to — not necessarily a replacement for — traditional reporting.

Post and thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user Petteri Sulonen

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While in New York this week for a GigaOM event, I had coffee and lunch with a number of media-industry insiders and observers, including Jay Rosen and Clay Shirky – two people I think are among the smartest media analysts in the business. And one thing that kept coming up is what I have chosen to call the “barbell problem” for media, and specifically for newspapers: in other words, the feeling that while both ends of the journalism spectrum are probably going to be fine, the middle is getting squeezed to the point where its future is uncertain at best.

So the New York Times, for example, is going through the same kind of uncertainty and upheaval as the rest of the industry – having to lay off staff, cutting costs, selling assets. But while the paper’s paywall and other measures may not totally fill the gap caused by erosion of advertising revenue, the NYT has enough resources to not only survive but do well. Likewise, the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal will probably survive and prosper, along with some other large brands.

Some prominent journalism brands will likely be fine

This is exactly why Shirky and his coauthors on the recent “Post-Industrial Journalism” report from Columbia specifically excluded any discussion of the Times from their analysis of the future of journalism. As Shirky described it, it’s like the average driver measuring themselves by looking at someone who races on the Formula One circuit. Practically speaking, there are very few meaningful lessons other newspapers can learn from the New York Times.

That’s one end of the barbell. The other end is the ultra-small, hyper-local newspaper – the daily or even weekly broadsheet that serves a small town or region, where the disruptive forces of the Web haven’t made themselves felt as strongly and local shopping flyers are probably still a pretty good business. This is the kind of newspaper that billionaire Warren Buffett is buying up – the kind that still has a lock on a local market. Paywalls may work well here because of the lack of compelling alternatives.

And what’s in the middle? Everything else – medium-sized papers like the Miami Herald or the San Francisco Chronicle or the Boston Globe, as well as most of the larger metro papers like the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. What does their future look like?

Many of these papers have been trying to make paywalls work, but for most the results appear to be fairly lackluster at best – even the Boston Globe, which is far from the worst newspaper in a medium sized market, has attracted just 28,000 subscribers after more than a year. Its owner the New York Times has put it up for sale and may get less than $100 million for it, and that’s after removing the single most damaging part of the business from the equation – namely, the paper’s $200 million or so in pension obligations.

What happens to the news that doesn’t pay?

Those pension obligations are one of the biggest mill-stones around the neck of traditional media entities. And the bottom line is that even with some reader support, as Rosen and I discussed, these papers are going to have to shrink dramatically or come up with new forms of revenue, which is why the Washington Post is experimenting with what has come to be known as “sponsored content” (something we’ll be talking about more at paidContent Live on April 17)

In a recent post at Slate, writer Matt Yglesias responded to the somewhat fatalistic tone of coverage around the recent Pew report on the state of the media by arguing that as news consumers, we are better off now than we have ever been, thanks to social media and other forces. And it is easy to see how that is the case for certain topics and certain parts of the world – but as Dan Mitchell pointed out in a rebuttal to Yglesias, it isn’t the case for much local coverage of things like municipal affairs and public-policy topics.

So what happens to that kind of coverage as newspapers shrink and even die? If all the things that have subsidized that kind of journalism have been removed – the car ads and travel writing and so on – all these papers are left with is the kind of content that advertisers aren’t interested in and readers don’t want to pay for. What then? ProPublica and the Texas Tribune are interesting publicly supported models, but how scalable are they? Is every state or region going to have one?

Will some form of “citizen journalism” be able to fill this gap – whether it’s local bloggers or some kind of automated Twitter feed etc.? Perhaps. Will newspapers use outsourced services like Journatic or even robot journalists like Narrative Science? In all likelihood it will be a combination of all of these, and possibly other things we haven’t even thought of yet. At this point, the answers are a whole lot murkier than the questions.

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In its recent analysis of the state of the media industry, the Pew Center noted how large numbers of newspaper publishers had put up paywalls or subscription barriers around their content — a group that will soon include one prominent former holdout, the Washington Post, which announced that it is launching a paywall this year. At the same time, the report also described how many publishers are experimenting with new forms of advertising such as sponsored content and “native” advertising.

The driving force behind both of these phenomena should be fairly obvious: the media industry is desperate to find new sources of revenue.

That the Washington Post has finally seen fit to erect a paywall — albeit a very leaky one, as my colleague Jeff Roberts has pointed out — makes this point better than almost any other, since the newspaper’s chairman and CEO Don Graham has been vocal in the past about his opposition to such an idea, and so has the paper’s publisher, his niece Katharine Weymouth. As the Columbia Journalism Review has noted, however, the Post’s business is disintegrating fairly rapidly, giving it relatively few options.

Everyone is searching for new revenue options

This isn’t unique to the Washington Post, by any means. It’s a dilemma that almost every media entity, large or small — both digital and non-digital — is struggling with, as advertising continues to decline and no new source of revenue has emerged to take its place. And that’s one of the key questions were are going to be discussing at paidContent Live in New York on April 17, through a variety of panels. What is the best way (if there is a single best way) for publishers to monetize their content?

Is it better to erect a paywall and base your future on a reader-driven subscription model, as many newspapers are doing — and as some individuals such as Andrew Sullivan are also doing? Or should publishers rely on what has always been the core of their business model, namely advertising, and find new ways of delivering that value to brands?

Newer digital-native publishers such as BuzzFeed are pinning their revenue hopes on sponsored content and other forms of “native” advertising, in which the site creates content that is indistinguishable from its regular content (apart from the name of the brand sponsoring it). While this seems to work well for an entertainment-focused site like BuzzFeed — which is introducing its own sponsored-content advertising network for other sites, according to a report in Ad Week — it has been a somewhat rockier road for more traditional publishers such as The Atlantic.

On one of our panels at paidContent Live, we have News Corp. executive Raju Narisetti — who not only works for the owner of one of the premier examples of a paywall in action, the Wall Street Journal, but previously worked for the Washington Post, and has also spoken in the past about his enthusiasm for what he calls a “reverse paywall” approach, in which loyal readers are given rewards for their loyalty instead of being asked to pay more for the privilege, which is the way that most paywalls typically work.

What is the best monetization method?

We also have Justin Smith, president of Atlantic Media, which publishes a magazine with a 160-year history, but has also been at the forefront of experimentation with new revenue models online — including real-world events, as well as sponsored content. A recent episode involving a sponsored piece about Scientology, however, led to a firestorm of criticism, including a comment from widely-followed media theorist Clay Shirky that “we don’t trust The Atlantic as much as we used to.” The company later changed its policies around how it handles such content as a result of the uproar.

Major League Baseball CEO Bob Bowman will also be joining us, since the MLB is a company that has become a powerful content producer in its own right — and in fact was earlier to the digital evolution of content than many content companies — and has used a paywall and mobile apps to great success as a way of monetizing that content. Are there lessons baseball can teach other content companies? We’re going to find out.

No one can claim to have all the answers to the future of the media business — not the largest traditional media player, nor the smallest and most innovative startup. All we really have are some very interesting questions, and we hope some of you can join us in that discussion on April 17 in New York. You can find more details about paidContent Live, including a link to register, on our event page.

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The U.S. intelligence community has plenty of information about the countries and regions where its adversaries operate, but it needs more than that — it needs better ways to understand the context of that information, and how it changes over time, Samantha Ravich told attendees at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference in New York on Thursday. Ravich, the co-chair of the National Commission for the Review of Research and Development in the Intelligence Community, said intelligence analysts need to work hand-in-hand with technologists and data scientists to find those new ways of understanding context.

Ravich used the example of Tunisian fruit vendor Mohammed Bouazizi, who set himself on fire two-and-a-half years ago as a way of protesting police brutality and corruption in his country and triggered a series of events that resulted in what many now call the “Arab Spring” — revolutions and uprisings in Egypt, Syria and other countries, and the toppling of dictators like Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Libya’s Muammar Ghadafi. These events have fundamentally changed the political picture in the region, she said, but how they happened and why is still poorly understood by intelligence analysts.

Most intelligence, Ravich said, is still much more like a snapshot in time — a photograph rather than a video, or a snippet of conversation — and so it doesn’t provide the kind of understanding of the shifting flow of events that could help analysts see such events coming more easily, or even influence them.

The intelligence strategist also used a poem to illustrate her point, one that referred to a man in the water waving his arm — a man who turned out to be drowning, rather than just enjoying a swim. A photo of that man would make it virtually impossible to determine that he was drowning and not just waving, Ravich said, but if we could see him in motion, and put him in some kind of context, then we might have a better chance of figuring out whether to send rescue or simply wave back.

In order to solve those kinds of problems, she said, technologists and data scientists need to work together to come up with better tools that can take the vast quantities of information the world is constantly generating, and put that into some kind of context so that threats and potential courses of action become more obvious.

Check out the rest of our Structure:Data 2013 live coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

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Thanks to spy movies and other entertainment fare, we all have our own picture of what the Central Intelligence Agency is like — but the agency’s chief technology officer, Ira “Gus” Hunt, told attendees at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference that just like any other company, the intelligence division has to somehow find the signal in an ever-increasing volume of noise. And that problem is getting harder and harder all the time.

For the CIA, Hunt said, there are three lines of “business” that are required: to collect information on America’s adversaries, to produce timely analysis, and to conduct covert action based on that analysis. All three of these jobs rely on understanding and interpreting increasing volumes of data, he said — not just from human beings and the vast quantities of social data that come from Facebook or Twitter or YouTube, but also from devices and the growing field of smart machines and sensors.

As all of those forces combine to generate more information, the CIA’s analysts not only have to sort through it all somehow, but they need to be able to combine data in ways that they may not even know they require until the moment arrives where they need a specific kind of information, said Hunt. That means the agency needs to develop algorithms and tools that have some intelligence of their own built into them, so that analysts can sort through data in the same way they build an Excel spreadsheet.

That day isn’t here yet, the CIA official said, but it is coming. And just as Google and other companies are trying to find smarter and smarter ways of filtering the world’s information, so is the CIA, using many of the same tools and technologies — it is just doing so for a different purpose.

Check out the rest of our Structure:Data 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

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If you’ve been following the media industry over the past year, you probably don’t need anyone to tell you the waves of disruption continue to increase in both height and frequency — so the news that widespread cutbacks have caused dissatisfied readers to flee won’t come as much of a surprise. But while those waves have swamped some traditional players, other parts of the industry have been able to ride the tide, and non-traditional sources continue to play a growing role in how people get their news — although whether that is good or bad is still open for debate.

All of that and more is contained in the latest State of the Media report from the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, which was released on Monday morning (Note: We will be discussing many of these issues and more at our paidContent conference in New York on April 17). There’s a lot to take in, but here are what I believe to be some of the key takeaways:

The Bad News:

• Cutbacks continue, and consumers are leaving: Close to one-third of U.S. adults say they have stopped using a news outlet because of dissatisfaction over the content — in other words, because they weren’t getting the news they wanted, or the news they expected to get. Survey respondents mentioned both fewer stories in general and less complete reporting, and while it’s impossible to know whether this phenomenon is related to the repeated rounds of cutbacks and job losses, it seems likely.



• No one cares about the industry’s financial problems: One interesting aspect of Pew’s research is that only a small number of respondents were even aware of the financial woes of the media industry — and even worse, those who were the most aware of the situation were also the most likely to have stopped using a traditional news outlet. Are some readers choosing to desert what they see as a sinking journalistic ship? It certainly looks that way.
• The disruption of advertising is accelerating: Although digital advertising rose by 17 percent last year, that was not nearly enough to make up for the ongoing decline of print advertising, Pew said. In 2012, approximately $16 in print revenue was lost for every $1 in digital revenue — an even worse ratio than the already dismal 10-to-1 relationship that existed in 2011. And much of the growth in digital is benefiting Google and Facebook.
• It’s not just newspapers any more: The Pew research shows that local television is also being decimated by the disruption in both viewership and advertising revenue — to the point where viewers have started to notice the difference. Whether because of cutbacks or a desire to appeal to more viewers, Pew says that local TV news is also focusing more on sports and entertainment, and less time on crime and political coverage.

The Good News:

• Demand for news is growing, not shrinking: Although it may be coming at the expense of some traditional players, there is clearly a large and growing appetite for news, since the top news sites saw traffic increase by 7 percent in 2012, according to Pew. And the impact of social media seems to be clearly positive, in the sense that those who have heard about news from friends and family through such channels show a stronger interest in finding out more.
• Some outlets are having success with subscriptions: In the wake of the success of the New York Times paywall, many newspapers have erected their own subscription walls, and this is generating some reader-provided revenue that has helped to stanch the bleeding for some publishers (although even for the NYT and the Financial Times, this has not filled the gap entirely).
• The sources are going direct: This is probably one of the most contentious aspects of the disruption in media — namely, the fact that social tools such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other platforms produce a “democratization of distribution” that allows everyone from celebrities to politicians, and even brands and companies themselves, to reach an audience directly. Is that good or bad for journalism? The debate on that question continues to rage.
• New forms of advertising are emerging: This is another contentious topic in media — that is, the rise of what some choose to call “native advertising,” or sponsored content, and in some cases “brand journalism.” To detractors such as political blogger Andrew Sullivan it is ethically dubious, and to many traditional journalists such as former NYT executive editor Bill Keller it is a “slippery slope,” but new media entities like BuzzFeed and even The Atlantic are using it to some success.

Is the glass half full or half empty?

As with any overview of the media business, there will be those who see this picture as a glass half-empty, and those who see it as a glass half-full — and perhaps a growing number who have completely lost interest in the glass because they are already getting their water elsewhere. As Emily Bell of Columbia and her fellow authors Clay Shirky and Chris Anderson pointed out in their recent report on “Post-Industrial Journalism” and author Clay Christensen noted in a recent interview at Harvard, upheaval is the order of the day in the media business and will likely be so for some time.

Shirky said in an essay in 2011 that we as a society actually need the media business to be chaotic, as unpleasant as that may be, because we literally don’t have any idea what the future of the industry will look like. Even now there are new entities being born, and new models being applied — like the Forbes “BrandVoice” model, or Sullivan’s direct-to-readers model — that could either be the savior of the industry or a dangerous distraction. If you like bumpy rides with an uncertain ending, the media industry is definitely the place for you.

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There’s been a lot of virtual ink spilled this week about Google’s decision to “sunset” its Google Reader RSS service, including a post from my paidContent colleague Laura Owen about how much she relies on her feeds — a sentiment I know Om shares. Unlike a lot of my fellow news junkies, however, I’m not really that concerned about Google’s decision, mostly because I stopped using my RSS feeds several years ago and haven’t looked back. For me, socially-powered news from Twitter and other services like Prismatic has not only taken the place of my feed reader but improved on it.

I should note that this isn’t the only reason I’m relatively unconcerned about Google’s decision: I also think there will be plenty of alternatives for those who wish to continue using RSS feeds as their main information diet, including Feedly — which says it has cloned the Reader API and created its own back-end for other services to use — as well as NewsBlur, and a proposed reader client that the new managers of Digg say they are working on for release later this year. Instapaper founder Marco Arment says he remains optimistic about the future of the RSS reader market for much the same reason.

An RSS reader is no longer enough

For me personally, however, the reality is that RSS feeds have ceased to play a key role in my news consumption. I still think RSS is a crucial part of the plumbing that underlies the web — and I hope the death of Google Reader isn’t the beginning of an attack on RSS, as some suspect — but for me it lacks a certain something, and that something is the element of social interaction.

For me Google Reader has been dead since 2009. Here's a post I wrote back then: scobleizer.posterous.com/why-i-dont-use… Social killed it.

—
Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer) March 14, 2013

Like Laura, I used to have hundreds of RSS feeds from different blogs, websites and traditional news sources in my Google Reader, and I used apps like Reeder and Feedly as a front-end for those subscriptions, and also imported them into Flipboard and other apps when that was available. But as I built up a number of Twitter lists — separated into different topics and focused on both blog sources, news feeds and individual users in those subject areas — I found I was spending less and less time in my RSS feeds.

The key difference, as New York Times editor Patrick Laforge (and others) have mentioned, is that social news distributed via Twitter and other networks is just that — social. It has a human element that automated RSS feeds simply can’t duplicate (at least not yet). This isn’t just a touch-feely thing either: From a purely informational point of view, social news carries a ton of meta-data along with it, by virtue of the fact that a specific human being chose to tweet a link, or re-tweet one, or comment on one.

A problem with Google Reader is that it won’t read and evaluate the articles for me the way Twitter users do. People are still > robots.

—
Patrick LaForge, NYT (@palafo) March 14, 2013

That social element makes a link more valuable

The nature of my relationship with each of the hundreds of people who are in my Twitter lists is almost impossible to quantify — although I’m sure that data scientists like Prismatic founder Bradford Cross are desperately trying to do so. But my knowledge of them and their interests, and their background or behavior, and the activity in their Twitter stream, all combines to make a single tweet from them with a link in it far more valuable to me than a simple RSS feed.

So it’s not just that Twitter is good at delivering real-time news — where it is, in my experience, as good or better than an RSS reader. It is also particularly good at attaching meaning to that news, by the combination of people who tweet or re-tweet a link or a piece of information. That does as much to help me appreciate the significance of a story as a single post or scoop, and likely more.

That’s why services like Prismatic, which uses the social graph I have developed in Twitter and elsewhere as a foundation for news recommendations, are so much more powerful than my old RSS reader — because they show me things that I didn’t already know I was interested in, and that is the holy grail of information consumption. And it’s why, despite my love-hate relationship with Twitter as a platform, I continue to rely so heavily on it.

Images courtesy of Shutterstock / Promesa Art Studio and Arvind Grover

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