Blog

Sean Hannity cut an interview short with Democratic Rep. Keith Ellison on Tuesday night after an onscreen exchange so tense it could have been cut with a knife.

The conservative talk show host had invited Ellison on to discuss the upcoming sequester and President Obama’s decision to travel around the country to give various speeches regarding his plans. After calling Obama “President Panic”, Hannity asked Ellison about his opinion on whether he thought Obama was spreading needless fear among Americans, and Ellison immediately made it known that he had no patience for the host’s reporting style. Though he smiled politely when the cameras were trained on him, he quickly got to the core of his issues with the host.

“Quite frankly, you are the worst excuse for a journalist I’ve ever seen. It’s absurd that you — the worst. What you just displayed was not journalism, it was yellow journalism. It wasn’t anything close to trying to tell the American people what’s really going on and it’s just shocking…every journalistic ethic I have ever heard of was just violated by you,” Ellison said.

The longer the exchange went on, the angrier Ellison became; he and Hannity were obviously never going to find their way out of an impasse, so Hannity cut the interview short.

Watch the full, uncomfortable exchange below.

In what sounds like a completely sensible partnership, The New York Times has announced that readers will have free access to content that’s normally behind the paywall, as long as they’re reading it at Starbucks.

Starbucks customers who are logged in to the Starbucks Digital Network can now access up to 15 articles per day.

It’s a bit more complicated than that, however. Customers are forced into three articles per day from each of these four categories: Top News, Business, Technology and Most E-Mailed. The final three articles per day comes from a rotating section that changes every day:

Sports (Monday); Science (Tuesday); Dining (Wednesday); Styles (Thursday); Weekend (Friday); The Magazine (Saturday); and Sunday Review (Sunday)

Anyone can log into the Starbucks Digital Network via Starbucks’ free Wi-Fi. But the NYT access is only applicable to U.S. stores that offer AT&T Wi-Fi.

Starbucks first launched SDN back in 2010, and has continued to add content to it every year. Starbucks Digital Network features content from ESPN, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, USA Today, and Yahoo.

“Starbucks is the ideal setting for The Times to offer enhanced digital access,” said Yasmin Namini, senior vice president, marketing and circulation, The New York Times. “Customers on SDN will discover a diverse selection of Times content updated in real-time, from the day’s top stories to more in-depth features and opinion.”

So, next time you’re grabbing a caramel macchiato, you can catch up on what the New York Times has to offer – for free.

On Feb. 13, 2013 Rep. Cynthia Lummis cited the Institute for Energy Research’s recent study on the effects of increasing oil and gas production on federal lands.

Today Microsoft reminded rank-and-file customers that the productivity suite cloud isn’t just an option for consumers. New Office 365 SKUs are now available, bringing the focus back to businesses. Kurt Delbene made the announcement, claiming that “Microsoft’s most complete Office cloud service to date has new features and offerings tailored to the needs and budgets of small, medium-size and large organizations”.

The updates start with Office 365 ProPlus. This is surprisingly similar to the new home version. It includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher, and Access, though adds InfoPath, which is an app designed for creating, distributing, filling and submitting electronic forms, and Lync. Like its consumer brethren, ProPlus can be used on up to five devices. However, Delbene points out that “IT departments also get the controls they need, including the ability to run Office 365 ProPlus side-by-side with other versions of Office and tools to streamline and manage updates for their users”. This will be available as a standalone offering for $144 per user for an annual subscription.

Next up is Office 365 Midsize Business, which targets businesses with anywhere from 10 to 250 employees. In addition to the ProPlus features, this one provides access to online versions of Exchange Lync and SharePoint, along with what Microsoft describes as “simplified IT tools they need to maintain control while reducing complexity. Active Directory integration, a Web-based administration console and business-hours phone support are also included”. Pricing for this model is set at $15 per user, per month or $180 per user annually if businesses prefer to go that route.

Finally, there is Office 365 Small Business Premium. This is for the organization that employs 10 people or less. Besides all of the traditional Office apps, it includes business-grade email, shared calendars, website tools and HD videoconferencing capability. Pricing for this level of service comes in at $12.50 per user, per month or $150 per user, per year.

Debene states: “With today’s general availability of Office 365 for all businesses, the new Office is now fully available to businesses, academic institutions and consumers”. But he makes an off-hand, dig against Google Apps: “This release unlocks new scenarios and delivers capabilities that far surpass anything available in browser-only solutions”.

For many businesses, browser-based solution might just be enough. For example, Google Apps for Business is $5 per user per month. There is no desktop software, but how many people work disconnected these days? That option includes 25GB email storage and 5GB Google Drive per user, plus calendar, contacts and chat, among other features. A $10 per-user, per-month option adds data archiving and discovery.

Google’s solution costs considerably less — $70 versus $150 for Small Business Premium — but does it offer more? The answer as much as anything depends on how much more value Office 365 subscribers see in having the productivity suite running on their PCs and that of using a more familiar and tested product. Other benefits, like anytime, anywhere, on-anything access, are similar for Google and Microsoft cloud suites.

Microsoft recently scored some big wins, bringing its Office 365 platform to governments like the city of Chicago, as well as institutions and non-profit organizations.

Photo Credits: James Thew/Shutterstock

In the Fall of 2012, shortly before the most well-known creativity index in Germany was about to be published (Manager Magazine Kreativ Index), two leading advertising agencies in Germany, Jung von Matt and Scholz & Friends, announced that they would not participate in any creative or advertising award competitions in 2013.

This was not sour grapes. Jung von Matt had taken first place in the index six years in a row and Scholz & Friends were ranked fourth.

What’s more, creativity matters a lot to these people. If an agency or a creative professional had to choose from all possible value adding aspects of their business, chances are that the one they would rate highest would be their ability to come up with original, novel and creative advertising campaigns. The underlying idea is that outstanding creative campaigns will deliver outstanding business results to the client.

You can see, therefore, why most agencies take creative awards seriously. Winning one makes their creative potential visible and tangible to their clients. And when agencies ask newly won accounts why they were invited to pitch, the usual answer clients give is that the selection was made on the basis of rankings in the usual competitions.

Creative individuals also love the competition with their peers. The national and international creative professional pecking order is determined to a large degree by the results from award competitions. Moreover, agency bosses see award competitions as a key motivational tool. It’s like the Olympic games — if they didn’t exist, no one would ever have run the 100m dash in under ten seconds.

So what inspired the decision to pull out of creative award competitions? At least two reasons come to mind. First, a growing large number of submissions to competitions consists of so-called ‘gold-ideas’ — or less flattering — ‘zombie creations’. These are campaigns whose explicit objective is to win an award but not to run on prime time TV. The objective is to push up the agency in creative rankings rather than sell a product. If this is true, then the clients in question are basically being ripped off.

But the bigger question is whether creative award success really is a good measure of an agency’s creative potential. Our view here is that there are more rigorous metrics for assessing success in advertising.

A metric that we have applied is originally based on the famous Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT). We compared 437 ad campaigns from 90 leading brands in 10 different FMCG categories in Germany. Using an advertising creativity scale developed from communications researchers at Indiana University in 2007 we evaluated and indexed each campaign’s creativity levels.

Specifically, we measured five dimensions of advertising creativity: (1) originality (was the ad original, rare, surprising, unique?); (2) flexibility (does the ad link the product to different ideas, concepts, or subjects?); (3) elaboration (does the ad contain intricate or numerous details?); (4) synthesis (does the ad blend normally unrelated objects or ideas?); and (5) artistic value (does the ad excel visually, verbally, or graphically?).

Controlling for the spending of each brand, we used a statistical sales response model to link campaign creativity, ad spending, pricing, competitive ad spending and pricing to the sales performance of the advertised brands over time.

We found that creativity made a big difference. Typically, a 1% increase in advertising spend translates into a 0.2% increase in purchases but for the more creative ads (by our measure) we found that the purchase responsiveness approached 0.3%.

The big lesson from this is that the effectiveness of creativity can be measured quite precisely. Once the business world starts to realize this and researchers find ways to refine the measures and models we can use, we’ll find out a lot more about what types of creativity work best in what context. And then we can consign all those plaques and statuettes to the boxroom.

The Future of Advertising
An HBR Insight Center

• Be Funny (But Not Too Funny) In Your Ad Campaign
• Invest in Your Customers More Than Your Brand
• The Decline and Fall of Product Placement
• Martin Sorrell on What’s Next

To mark African American History Month, as well as the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, we talked with White House Curator Bill Allman about a painting called Watch Meeting–Dec. 31st 1862–Waiting for the Hour that hangs near the Oval Office in the West Wing.

The painting, completed in 1863 by William Carlton, shows a group of African American men, women and children waiting for the clock to strike midnight — the hour the Emancipation Proclamation would go into effect. 

Check it out, and learn why President Obama chose this painting to hang in the West Wing. 

read more

According to Strategy Analytics, more than a sixth of the people in the world have a smartphone. Today’s consumer expects nothing less than flawless performance in tapping bandwidth-intensive activities such as gaming and HD video conferencing on his phones and tablets. No buffering, no spinning wheel of death, no nonsense. To meet this need, high-speed LTE networks have become the norm.

But migrating to an LTE network can raise a host of challenges, especially as mobile operators strive to deliver uninterrupted service amid the transition. Juniper Networks’ rich customer experience with LTE migration has shown that there are three considerations service providers need to bear in mind as they make the leap to LTE:

1. Rethink security. The all-IP nature of LTE opens up security threats not present in 3G networks and requires new measures to protect private data. Juniper’s new SRX line cards fortify network entry points to protect data packets without requiring network downtime.

2. LTE needs to scale on a dime to meet data demands. Juniper allows network elements to scale independently, growing proportionally to the number of new devices accessing the network. This approach gives carriers the flexibility to adjust when, for instance, the latest viral video hits.

3. Invest for the future, not to keep up. Monetization opportunities, such as Juniper’s JunosVApp Engine, have shown through customer use cases it’s easier to deliver new revenue-generating services, from parental controls to on-demand video streaming.

For more information on Juniper’s latest LTE solutions click here.

After teasing gamers with previews of the game for months, Capcom today finally announced a release date for Remember Me. The game will launch in North America on June 4 and in Europe on June 7. It will be released for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC, which has, as of now, the same release date as the console versions.

Remember Me is an upcoming cyberpunk game set in a futuristic Neo-Paris, the year 2084. Players will take on the role of Nilin, a “memory hunter” who can break into people’s minds and steal or alter memories. The game will also feature some tall building climbing and combat against a varied assortment of enemies. The combat show seems to resemble the Batman: Arkham style of third-person fighting, but the game also features a “Combo Lab” where Nilin’s combos can be altered to suit particular play styles.

The new release date trailer unveiled by Capcom today shows many of these details, along with a hint of what the game’s story will contain:

An illustration of the design for a new General Motors data center in Warren, Michigan. The company has announced plans to build a similar facility in Milford, Mich.

General Motors is hoping to build a $258 million data center at a research facility it owns in Milford, Michigan. The company is seeking tax abatements for the project at the Milford Proving Ground, which would feature a 100,000 square foot data center and employ about 20 workers.

“GM is developing a business case regarding a possible future investment to construct and equip a consolidated GM information technology data center facility in Milford, Mich., on the GM Proving Ground campus,” the company told the Detroit Free Press.

The Milford site appears to be the second data center to be built as part of a huge data center consolidation at GM that would centralize its IT infrastructure, consolidating from 23 sizable data centers worldwide to just two facilities in Michigan. Last June, GM announced that the first of the new data hubs would be a $130 million facility located in Warren, Mich.  As part of that process, the company will refresh its server and storage gear to bring higher levels of automation and efficiency to its infrastructure.

The consolidation is part of a GM initiative to drastically reduce its reliance upon third-party outsourcing firms. The automaker currently outsources about 90 percent of its IT services to systems integrators including HP/EDS, IBM, Capgemini, and Wipro.

GM is requesting a 50 percent tax abatement on real property and personal property for 15 years in Milford, township officials said. The GM Milford Proving Ground was the industry’s first dedicated automobile testing facility when it opened in 1924, and covers 4,000 acres.

I hate Darth Vader and it has nothing to do with the cruel acts that he perpetrated against the good folk of the galaxy while leading the military arm of the Empire or to his earlier life as the brat Anakin Skywalker.

I hate The Sith because, in his full black suit of armor and wielding a lightsaber, he destroyed enough of my balls on the Empire Strikes Back … (read more)

Kim Kardashian is, as we all know, about to become a first-time mom, and has decided to document the pregnancy along the way with a “mommy blog“. The first post was put up on Monday and has been well-received by her fans so far.

The entry concerns maternity-wear, which is of particular interest to those who are familiar with Kardashian’s style of late. Rather than give up her racy clothes, she’s just sort of found a way to drape them around the baby belly (think leather pants and see-through tops). But she says she’s found a pair of jeans that are perfect for accommodating a growing bump and recommends them to all her readers.

“So I love sharing my favorite products and beauty and fashion tips with you all and I wanted to do my first mommy blog today to tell you about these new J Brand jeans I received,” she wrote. “They are these super comfy maternity jeans with soft, stretchy side panels in the front and they are absolutely amazing! I feel like I’m back to my old self and I’m so happy! With this being my first pregnancy I’ve been finding it really difficult to find clothes that are comfortable and fit me well, but these are great. Are there any other moms to be out there who have tried these? I’d love to hear you pregnancy tips too!! ”

So far the blog seems to be a hit with Kardashian’s fans and has received about 45 comments so far.

Virus Bulletin has put out a report saying that its own data supports recent security claims made by Google about Gmail.

Last week, Google put out a blog post claiming to have substantially reduced the amount of compromised accounts. The company said hit has reduced the number by 99.7% since 2011.

Google security engineer Mike Hearn wrote:

Every time you sign in to Google, whether via your web browser once a month or an email program that checks for new mail every five minutes, our system performs a complex risk analysis to determine how likely it is that the sign-in really comes from you. In fact, there are more than 120 variables that can factor into how a decision is made.

If a sign-in is deemed suspicious or risky for some reason—maybe it’s coming from a country oceans away from your last sign-in—we ask some simple questions about your account. For example, we may ask for the phone number associated with your account, or for the answer to your security question. These questions are normally hard for a hijacker to solve, but are easy for the real owner. Using security measures like these, we’ve dramatically reduced the number of compromised accounts by 99.7 percent since the peak of these hijacking attempts in 2011.

According to Virus Bulletin this “could be the case,” but “Yahoo!, and to a lesser extent Hotmail (now Outlook.com), has a real problem.”

Google’s Matt Cutts tweeted a link to the report, calling it “some external validation that Google has radically reduced email spam from hijacked Gmail accounts”.

Follow @mattcutts

Matt Cutts
@mattcutts

Some external validation that Google has radically reduced email spam from hijacked Gmail accounts: http://t.co/S1fqM1F3pe

 Reply  ·  Retweet  ·  Favorite
11 hours ago via Tweet Button · powered by @socialditto

The report itself says:

The legitimate feeds we use do receive the occasional spam email – usually from compromised accounts and typically sent to addresses contained in the compromised accounts’ address books. We have noticed a few emails from compromised Gmail accounts among these spam emails, but noticed that Yahoo! emails are far more prevalent. We were initially hesitant to draw conclusions from this: it is well possible that the feeds we receive are skewed towards certain email providers.

Indeed, they are skewed, but towards Gmail, whose messages are far more prevalent among the legitimate feeds. This makes the situation a lot worse for Yahoo!: over the last eight months of testing we have found that, in the legitimate email feeds, about one in 115 emails from the Sunnyvale-based company were spam, compared with fewer than one in 4,800 from Gmail. Hotmail, Microsoft’s free webmail service (now Outlook.com), isn’t doing particularly well either, with almost 1 in 325 emails being spam.

Not good news for Yahoo, which recently revamped its email service, and is currently facing a lot of user complaints about a homepage redesign. Nor is it great news for Microsoft who is heavily campaigning for Gmail users to switch to Outlook.com based on the notion that Google is somehow violating their privacy by algorithmically serving them ads as it has for nearly a decade.

IBM has come up with a new way to present its social content, and engage with customers. IBM Voices is a real-time data service that showcases live social feeds from across the company.

It aggregates blogs, tweets, videos and photos, and presents them on a single page, along with a search box, a word cloud showing trending topics, and the ability to connect with the company via LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and IBM Communities.

What’s rather unusual is as well as corporate blogs, official Twitter posts and Pinterest product boards, IBM Voices also includes personal feeds of IBM experts from around the planet, covering a diverse range of topics ranging from big data, the cloud, and cognitive computing, to social business, and mobile. The result, the firm says, is a “single snapshot into the collective wisdom of IBM”.

Voices currently showcases a total of 150 feeds, but IBM expects this to have grown tenfold by the end of 2013.

Discussing Voices, Ethan McCarty, IBM’s Director of Enterprise Social Strategy, says the showcase is primed for today’s era of data transparency. “On this new social playing field, the organizations that win will be those where employees can improve the culture by embodying their company’s character to the world at large. Social brand strategists need to create intentional systems of engagement that allow employees to convey and ultimately shape the brand experience. That’s especially important for a business-to-business company such as mine”.

Photo Credit: ollyy/Shutterstock

At this week’s Mobile World Congress, Mozilla announced that it had secured four hardware partners for its first run of Firefox OS handsets. Those four partners – Alcatel, LG, ZTE and Huawei – represent a pretty diverse chunk of OEMs. The platform won’t be supported, however, by one of the largest OEMs in the world.

CNET reports that Samsung won’t be making any Firefox OS smartphones for the time being. It’s not entirely surprising, but it’s still disappointing that Firefox OS won’t be seeing powerful hardware from Samsung in the future.

There are a number of reasons that we may not be seeing a Samsung, or any other major OEM, supporting Firefox OS in the near future. For one, Firefox OS is targeted at emerging markets. Samsung does make entry level phones, but its primary focus is on the consumer market in developed countries with devices like the Galaxy S III and Galaxy Note.

Besides, Samsung already has it hands full with the upcoming launch of Tizen, it’s own open source mobile OS. Supporting Firefox OS on top of Android, Windows Phone and Tizen would be too much for any OEM.

For now, Firefox OS will have to do with its current stable of hardware partners. LG has proven it can build a great phone with its Nexus 4 for Google so a Firefox OS-powered LG phone could be rather attractive. Of course, we won’t know for certain until top level Firefox OS hardware hits after the initial launch of entry level devices.

Revelytix, a big data software provider, has a background in working with government agencies on big data sets.

Big data software and tools provider Revelytix announced early access availability of Loom Dataset Management for Hadoop which makes it easier for data scientists to work with Hadoop and easier for their organizations to manage the huge challenges of big data files created with Hadoop.  Loom tracks the lineage and provenance of all registered HDFS data and offers query execution using SQL, SPARQL or HiveQL, as well as integration with R.

Dataset Management for Hadoop

“Loom makes it easy for data scientists and IT to build more analytics faster with easy-to-use interfaces that simplify getting the right data for the job quickly and managing datasets efficiently over time with proper tracking and data auditing,” said Revelytix CEO

Mike Lang.  Loom includes dataset lineage so you know where a dataset came from, Active Scan to dynamically profile datasets, Lab Bench for finding, transforming, and analyzing data in Hadoop and Hive; data suitability, and open APIs.

Based on nearly a decade of designing and building big data fabrics and solutions for the U.S. Department of Defense, the leading intelligence organizations in the United States and major pharmaceutical, financial services and life sciences companies, Loom is the product of deep big data experience. Because Hadoop makes practical so many new analytics and datasets, Loom’s tracking and management capabilities are fundamental to managing datasets in Hadoop.

Relationship with U.S. DoD Expanded

Revelytix also announced that it will provide big data software and services for the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) during 2013, deepening the multi-year big data relationship already in place. The DOD has relied on Revelytix for three years to create its data architecture and provide support to allow it to establish common architecture and semantics across all military service branches.

“The management team at Revelytix has been working on complex data processing and data management problems for the federal government for the past 12 years,” Lang said. ”Our first company, Metamatrix, now part of Red Hat, produced data processing software used in the intelligence community and the DOD. Revelytix has been working for the DOD for the past four years specifically on the problem of processing and managing highly distributed sets of data. The resulting Revelytix technology is now in full production.”

Back in May of 2012, PayPal and Coinstar partnered for a small test of some new types of kiosks. The initial test took place in the Dallas metropolitan area. Today, PayPal is announcing that the PayPal-powered Coinstar kiosks are coming to a few more areas.

PayPal and Coinstar are expanding the program to Northern California, Ohio, and other parts of Texas.

The new Coinstar kiosks allow users to add coins and paper money directly to their PayPal accounts, as well as withdraw funds from their accounts. The kiosks also allow for fund transfers between separate PayPal accounts.

PayPal says that this is just the beginning of a rollout process, one that will continue throughout the year.

The expansion of the program can be attributed to the kiosks’ success in Dallas. PayPal says that 40% of users who used the PayPal feature on the kiosks went back to use it again twice a month, on average.

“This is just another example of how we’re bringing the convenience and security of PayPal to consumers not just online but everywhere in today’s multi-channel shopping environment,” says PayPal head of financial innovations Dan Schatt.

For PayPal, it’s all about moving the payment option outside of the realm of the internet and making it a ubiquitous presence in more real-life scenarios. A couple of weeks before Christmas, PayPal unveiled new prepaid cards. PayPal also recently partnered with Discover to make PayPal a payment option in millions of stores in the U.S.

Tina Fey may seem like the perfect choice to host the 2014 Academy Awards after her much-talked about and adored stint at the Golden Globes (with partner in crime Amy Poehler), but she says it’s just not going to happen.

Whether it’s the pressure of having the eyes of the world judging or the fact that Seth MacFarlane got blasted by just about every major–and minor–media source after his hosting gig this past weekend, Fey isn’t saying. But she has made it clear she doesn’t want the job, no matter what William Shatner thinks.

“It’s an honor to be ‘Shatnered’, but I just feel like that gig is so hard,” she said. “Especially for, like, a woman — the amount of months that would be spent trying on dresses alone . . . No way.”

Indeed, no matter how funny or likable a host may be, they do have to abide by Academy rules when it comes to the night’s jokes, something MacFarlane learned this year. And even though they approved his bits, he got quite a bit of backlash for the opening number, “We Saw Your Boobs”, and several sexist comments he made about various females in the audience throughout the night.

For now, there’s no word on just who will be hosting next year’s show, but let’s hope for Oscar’s sake that it’s someone good, like Will Ferrell. The show certainly could use an injection of energy and silly fun that’s actually funny.

Google announced the launch of a new game under the Chrome Experiments label. It’s called Chrome Super Sync Sports, and lets up to four people compete in running, swimming and cycling on a shared computer screen, using their smartphones or tablets as the game controllers.

The game takes advantage of HTML5 features like WebSockets, Canvas and CSS3.

To play, just go to the Super Sync Sports page on your computer, choose a game and select the number of players. From there, visit g.co/super in Chrome on your smartphone or tablet, and type in the code that is displayed on the computer. This syncs the devices, and puts you in gameplay mode.

“Use the arrow pad on your smartphone or tablet to select one of 50 athletes and prepare yourself for the competition,” says Steve Vranakis, Executive Creative Director, Google Creative Lab. “The motions you make on your mobile touchscreen will move your athlete on your computer screen. To move your athlete forward and win the race, you need to make the correct gestures as quickly as possible. The better you are, the higher your chances of making it to the global leaderboard.”

The game is available for Chrome v15 and up, and for Android 4.0+ and iOS 4.3+ devices.

If the rise of social media — and specifically the explosion of “viral” content on networks like Facebook and Twitter — has done nothing else, it has certainly given mainstream media plenty of “user-generated content” to add to their dwindling repertoire of journalism. Almost every newscast seems to include a video of cute animals or some other clip that is making the rounds on the social web. Unfortunately, no one seems to care much whether any of these videos are real or not, and that is a very real problem.

The New York Times has written about one recent example of user-generated content gone bad: namely, a video clip of a baby pig “rescuing” a hapless baby goat who is trapped in the pond at a petting zoo. Within hours of the clip being posted to YouTube last fall and subsequently shared on Reddit, it had appeared on The Today Show, NBC’s Nightly News, Good Morning America and dozens of other channels — and why not? It was incredibly cute, and had a feel-good message of the kind that morning shows in particular enjoy.

Of course, the video turned out to be a clip from a new TV show, which the creators manufactured and then uploaded as a kind of viral-marketing ploy. Not only did the baby pig not “rescue” the baby goat, but the producers of the show had to spend hours building an underwater track to even get the pig anywhere near the animal — and in the end they had to use a trained pig, after the one they were originally planning to use showed no intention of going into the pond.

Does it matter whether these clips are real?

As the NYT piece notes, when NBC Nightly News host Brian Williams introduced the video clip, he said he “felt duty bound to share this” with the audience, and added that he didn’t know whether it was real or not. Is that enough of a disclaimer to absolve a media outlet of responsibility for figuring out whether something can be verified or not? Many would argue that it is not. Kelly McBride of the Poynter Institute compared it to “a form of malpractice” for journalists (McBride has more on that in a blog post about the incident at Poynter).

@mathewi No. Even though it may seem trivial because it's a pig video, it's embarrassing and adds to distrust of the media.

—
Liz Heron (@lheron) February 27, 2013

Obviously, part of what shows like Good Morning America do is pure entertainment — in other words, not journalism by any stretch. But clips like the baby goat rescue show up on programs like The Nightly News as well, and the hosts rarely say anything about whether a clip is real or not. In some cases, these videos come right after a news report about something serious. How are audiences to know when something is “just entertainment” and therefore hasn’t been checked?

In another recent incident, a video purporting to show a golden eagle snatching a small child from a park went “viral” on the social web and showed up on a number of media outlets. It too turned out to be fake — the creation of some hard-working students in a computer-generated imagery course at a school in Montreal. The students deliberately chose something that seemed almost believable, based on “urban legends” of such incidents in the past.

We need to be careful what we amplify

Interestingly enough, the clip was debunked within hours of being uploaded, by another young programmer with some expertise in computer-generated imaging (as well as by other outlets such as Gawker, which pointed out obvious signs others could have noticed). But as with many corrections in a digital age, it took longer for the truth to propagate than it did the original video — and many of the outlets that shared the original didn’t bother to update their audience with the facts.

Om wrote recently about how one of the key responsibilities of journalists in this new age of “democratized distribution” of information is to pay attention to what they choose to amplify and what they don’t, and incidents like the baby goat video bring that home with a vengeance.

If all a media outlet is doing is sharing the latest video from Reddit or a tweet from a celebrity, how is that adding anything meaningful to what viewers can get elsewhere? It isn’t. And if traditional media continue to imitate their online competitors like BuzzFeed or Reddit without adding anything of value, then they will likely find that audiences are happy to go to the original source of that content rather than relying on the TV news to find it for them.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Shutterstock / Donskarpo

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Content Farms: The Players, The Benefits, The Risks
• How Media Companies Can Compete Online
• As TV Comes Online, Can Content Providers Sell ‘Premium’?