March 23, 2016

How To Save The News

Try hovering your mouse over bracketed superscript text, you’ll like what you see.

This week has been interesting in regards to news.^[test] From the U.S. launch of news aggregator Blendle, to the launch of Microsoft’s A.I. Tay (an A.I. mind meant to act like your typical American 18-24 year old), there has been a spike of news related to media publishing and new methods of communication and interaction.

Originally I was planning to write the inaugural post of Aspires on the topic of news media and the evolution of media transmission (for a Journalism and Media Communications major, this fascinates me) specifically focusing on the struggle of modern media and news corporations to turn a profit in a world of online content and ad blockers. Now however, I feel compelled to write about the future of news media and turning profits in the rapidly greying area of online publications. An unavoidable area for any company that wants to keep up with the youth of today.

Pay As You Go News

As I read, what companies like Blendle – which for the record already has near 650,000 readers in Holland and Germany^[1] – are trying to create is a pay as you read method of journalism. Charging between the price of $00.09-$00.47 cents per article a Blendle user is able to avoid ads on particular stories, and through Blendle’s algorithm be on the receiving end of story after story picked to fit the user’s specific reading tastes and interests. The cut of profits for media companies is excellent, and consumer protections are clear. Allowing any reader to receive an immediate refund if they claim to have opened an article accidentally, the article is too short for the readers liking, or even if the journalistic scope of the article in question does not fit the reader’s tastes. This consumer protection leaves a gap in an otherwise solid business plan. What is to stop a reader from denying payment to an article’s publisher based merely on disdain from an articles content? The truth is, nothing. Publishers won’t paywall their wonder articles, and an user can gather as much media as desired by said user for free outside of the wall. Where there is a desire, there is a supplier.

The Problem

The problem with this method of payment, much like the current problem with the App Store, is that paying for downloaded content up front has increasingly led to less downloads of said content^[2]. Unlike movies, books, and music (all of which can be streamed in debatably successful business models). News cannot be rewatched, reread, or rediscovered in the same way. Yesterday’s news is literally old news, and the fresher the news is the more value can be placed on it.

The Solution

The Practical Solution

News as it stands, is in crisis mode. Financially the media industry is struggling. Traditional newspapers are all but being slaughtered by more popular online publications created by companies such as Buzzfeed, Vox Media and Advance Publications. These online companies struggle to churn a steady and dependable revenue stream as the tried and true method of advertisements is coming under attack from ad-blockers.^[2.5] Sites like Wired and companies like Google have both tried to implement different programs that allow users to view their site, or sites that use their ad programs, without seeing advertisements. Usually through a small monthly or weekly fee or by restraining the content you can view if you are detected using an ad-blocker. Though the latter method coerced me into turning off my ad-blocker on Wired.com, this method is something undesired. Nobody want’s to restrict the reach of journalism simply because of a lack in monetary stability and dependable revenue. Ads are a double edged sword. They allow us to access great content and entertainment for free! Ads also collect our data and sell it to the highest bidder and can be argued as inappropriate, annoying, or immoral. The solution to this problem, at least the practical one, lays somewhere in the middle. Between the streaming interface of Blendle’s core business, and the current web built upon ads.

Subscriptions

Spotify, Netflix, Birchbox, TrunkClub. It seems that there is a subscription service for nearly every aspect of our lives. Admittedly, being able to have unlimited music and a near inexhaustible supply of movies and television shows makes up for the small monthly fee each one of these services charges. Just remember, when it comes to setting the price for your news articles and written media, charging as much as Spotify is a mistake. A new song, an album, a movie are not published by the same creator every day. Daft Punk doesn’t release a single by 4:30pm every weekday. Many news pieces on the other hand are published every day and throughout the day. By charging a small fee per user to read a site, something to the tune of $0.50 per week with an increase in price to a dollar after a month or two, a company can generate a more solid foundation for revenue. Along with less invasive advertisements, this can spell fortunes for a company. This path is a better solution than the aforementioned sponsored post. Without bringing into question a sites journalistic integrity, a site can generate a stronger website and a more desirable destination for visitation; convincing a user to spend more time on the site, leading to more revenue. However, we’re met with yet another obstacle. This one closely resembles the problem with purchasing individual articles. How can you guarantee your readers will pay for your content, when there will be other, cheaper options for news? The internet has famously been unhappy when companies start charging for a service they had previously been distributing for free. This in itself may push away readers who have been reading a publication that has been primarily free for as long as they remember. This alone puts subscriptions out of the running. What method is guaranteed revenue, and doesn’t piss off as many people as possible?

The Solution That You Can’t Implement Now, But Maybe In A Few Years

AI. This is where Tay comes in. As AI becomes more personal, so does the amount of information we share. Imagine a future where programs such as Facebook M and Magic become the social norm. We use them every day to complete our tasks. The subtle movements of our fingers and clicks of buttons to swap apps all but vanishes as we are reduced to the bare essentials. Universal assistants that cater to our every whim, any hour, any way we desire. News, of course will be something well within the grasp of these assistants. To be collected at the whim and word of an A.I.‘s master.

A Brief Interjection of a Personal Tangent

I promise that I’ll return to the subject of making money in the media business eventually. Writing about A.I. has inspired me to make a detour.

Remember when Cleverbot was the most breathtaking thing on the internet? It was revolutionary; a program that you could talk to, and it would reply as if it were a human! It was so freaky that when my mother found about it, she forbade me from using it. She was convinced that it was not a program, but a human. Of course, Cleverbot is a program, a rather clever^[4] one at that. Building its responses off the responses its users generate and input into the program. Much like Google’s recent AlphaGo program, cognitive function bots, or any bot that is designed to imitate humanity and improve upon it can observe a data pool of humanity. Gathering information and using what it learns to respond and improve upon itself. The dangers of this are not lost on scientist and engineers, a great piece on the subject by Tim Urban goes into depth about A.I. and its dangers.

To give a general synopsis, the dangerous part of A.I. is not its intelligence, or even the speed of which it will outpace humanity. The real danger in A.I. is not being able to program it to follow humanities desires. How do you program humanity into a computer? Imagine that you were to command an A.I. to protect Humanity, to keep us alive. How would it do that? Well imagine that I asked you the same original question. Perhaps you’d state that you’d reduce wars, increase research towards medicine, maybe even go off the deep end and create a*(n)* ~~Dystopia~~Utopia. You probably didn’t even think of putting all of humanity into a medically induced coma, while feeding the population in underground sealed bunkers. That’s too much work actually. How will the A.I. protect humanity from random occurrences, biology is not perfect. We break down all the time. What about genetic diseases? What about death? What about anything?! Why not simply kill humanity and prevent any harm from ever befalling it again? A Small sacrifice to accomplish the end goal. There’s no sense of morality in machinery, no right or wrong. Just efficiency, and as humans we tend to get in the way of efficiency. The problem lies in us. Can be secure in holding the key to ultimate power, and our total destruction in our hand?

When I write about Facebook M, I don’t mean to say that we have to worry about any of this right now at all. Facebook M is a smarter than your average bear, but in all reality it’s an intern in the cloud. Unpaid, overworked, and will get you your coffee with minimal effort on your part. A.I. is becoming a growing piece in the infrastructure of humanity. From smart homes, to smart cars, A.I. will play a massive part in every aspect of our interconnected lives. It will have access to data on every aspect of our existence. This interconnectivity will serve as a well of data for any company or person that has access. Everything that we do will one day be categorized, advertised, and sold to the highest bidder. Data has value, it’s the new gold, the new platinum and those who hold it hold the real wealth in the world.

— edit: The day after I wrote this segment the news came out that Tay had turned into a racist misogynist with a particular fascination of Hitler. This development was sprung from the bot’s absorbance of online culture. It become a broadcast of what it saw from our online interactions, and most of the tweets at it contained loaded language to inspire this type of behavior. As I’ve already stated, bots are far from perfect, this just is another example of that imperfection.—

My brief interjection is now over! Continue on!

A.I. is the future of data collection, information about the products you use, how you use them, and the way you live can lead to great insights about what content you’ll enjoy reading. This information, for obvious reasons is invaluable to any company who operates on your favor. Is there a way to remain morally sound while using this information, and more importantly, what can be done tomorrow instead of at an unknown point in the future?The truth is, there is no easy way of having a morally sound method of revenue in the media business that guarantees profit. This ideal amount of data is something unavailable at the current date, advertisements are failing and sponsored posts cause issues of journalistic integrity and morality. The sad fact is, we live in a data world. The only way to survive is by using it. That’s the market we’ve locked ourselves into. That is, if you’re not willing to accept handouts.

The Finale

If you are in anyway a frequent user of the complex internet, such as if you delve into its culture, you are familiar with sites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Crowdfunding websites of the highest caliber, these websites allow individuals to suddenly invest in all sorts of products. Individuals can easily become micro-investors and use their money to support the products the like and want. In a similar strain lies the company Patreon. A fan funded site, Patreon allows anybody to support their favorite artists and content creators. This model is highly successful, allowing many creators to make a living off of the goodwill of their fans. The solution for any media company, lies in the midst of all the options suggested in this article. Using the data gathered and bot intelligence mixed with plans of fan support offering rewards and incentives for pledging a company can generate a solid profit base without loosing its integrity and keeping journalism free. Remaining a company free of fan service, is up to the strength of said companies editors. The future is ours right now, we’re in a time of transition. It is our choices that affect our future.

Kudos