Here are some media stories of note for Thursday, December 5, 2013:
We've heard it repeatedly: Television is dead, people will use their laptops, tablets and smartphones now to watch video. Well, not exactly. In fact, not at all. Television (at least in the U.S.) is hot, except that it's hot in a timed-oven kind of hot, with personal video recorders delaying the viewing. Once you look at the PVR-delayed consumption, and video-on-demand consumption, television viewing is up. Live-TV viewing is slightly down, but delayed-TV viewing is well up. Peter Kafka of AllThingsDigital notes that the numbers don't necessarily serve television's industry well (advertisers have yet to pay well for those time-delayed viewers), but it's clear TV is liked. It's just on our timetable now, he says.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission's workshop Wednesday on native advertising was touted as a watershed event in which government would put on the table its concerns about the blurry lines between editorial and advertising. But the FTC chair, Edith Ramirez, didn't suggest new regulations were coming. She did say, though, that some forms of sponsored content have transgressed appropriate boundaries and misled consumers they are editorial and not advertising content. She promised continued vigilance on the issue. AdAge noted the vigorous defence by the advertising agencies and online sites about their practices.
Ivan Verstyuk, a senior editor at the RBC news agency in Ukraine, writes about the deeply troubled media business in his country. Paid-for news is routine and business interests are advanced without sufficiently critical faculties applied.
Countries feature different approaches to journalistic expression, as we know, but Foreign Policy outlines the distinction between two countries that we might think would be pretty aligned and congruent. The U.S. and U.K., though, are tackling the leaks of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in radically different ways, and it is possible the U.K. could charge The Guardian for sharing its non-redacted files with The New York Times. It isn't what it published, but what it shared.
We've heard it repeatedly: Television is dead, people will use their laptops, tablets and smartphones now to watch video. Well, not exactly. In fact, not at all. Television (at least in the U.S.) is hot, except that it's hot in a timed-oven kind of hot, with personal video recorders delaying the viewing. Once you look at the PVR-delayed consumption, and video-on-demand consumption, television viewing is up. Live-TV viewing is slightly down, but delayed-TV viewing is well up. Peter Kafka of AllThingsDigital notes that the numbers don't necessarily serve television's industry well (advertisers have yet to pay well for those time-delayed viewers), but it's clear TV is liked. It's just on our timetable now, he says.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission's workshop Wednesday on native advertising was touted as a watershed event in which government would put on the table its concerns about the blurry lines between editorial and advertising. But the FTC chair, Edith Ramirez, didn't suggest new regulations were coming. She did say, though, that some forms of sponsored content have transgressed appropriate boundaries and misled consumers they are editorial and not advertising content. She promised continued vigilance on the issue. AdAge noted the vigorous defence by the advertising agencies and online sites about their practices.
Ivan Verstyuk, a senior editor at the RBC news agency in Ukraine, writes about the deeply troubled media business in his country. Paid-for news is routine and business interests are advanced without sufficiently critical faculties applied.
Countries feature different approaches to journalistic expression, as we know, but Foreign Policy outlines the distinction between two countries that we might think would be pretty aligned and congruent. The U.S. and U.K., though, are tackling the leaks of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in radically different ways, and it is possible the U.K. could charge The Guardian for sharing its non-redacted files with The New York Times. It isn't what it published, but what it shared.
