Are publishers kicking the can down the road when it comes to user privacy?

Privacy has been a thorny issue for publishers since the Web began. Most dealt with it in a simple way: get the lawyers to do a privacy policy, make sure not to use personally identifiable information and regularly point out the direct-mail industry is the one that should get the real scrutiny.

That lasted until it didn’t. The threat of Do Not Track legislation spurred the industry into action on the self-regulation front in order to head off government rules. The problems of protecting consumer privacy in the modern digital world is fiendishly complex. You can forgive many publishers for believing this is an issue that shouldn’t even involve them very much.

“The biggest issue for most publishers is aggressive third-party ad networks who collect data about a publisher’s readers without the publisher knowing,” said BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti.

“I think the battle ground of privacy isn’t happening around content properties,” added Troy Young, president of Say Media. “It’s way more to do with Facebook in particular. There’s user-experience issues that pertain to privacy; when you customize experience based on someone’s social graph, it needs to be explained to users.”

But, interestingly, this trend did not hold up in the “one Pinocchio” category, in which Democrats predominated (forty versus twenty-six). In other words, although the Post flagged Democrats for a lot of minor sins, the more egregious falsehoods were clustered among Republicans. (In checking one of President Obama’s statements, Kessler acknowledged it was such a minor infraction that it might deserve a “half-Pinocchio,” if there were such a thing.)

The music industry has a love-hate relationship with digital media. On the one hand, the Internet obliterated the music industry’s business model. But, on the other, digital has proven an amazing tool for artists to spread their work and connect with fans. Digiday spoke with Russell Wallach, president of Live Nation, about the future of music in a digital world.

Has the transition from analog to digital been a net positive for musicians?
From a pure ticket-sales perspective, music has never been more popular. We sell 80-plus percent of our tickets online. We’re seeing explosive growth in the sale of tickets via the mobile device. Combine that with social media, we continue to see great opportunities for new and innovative ways to market shows via online, mobile and social, and new and innovative ways for fans to purchase tickets. To me, that equals long-term, creating revenue for the artist. For mobile technology, fans will have the opportunity to purchase merchandise from their seat. Before the show, purchase content and other products of the artist — clearly the new social and e-commerce are providing new ways for bands to generate revenue.

Click through to read the rest of the interview with Live Nation’s president, Russell Wallach.

TV is social. That much we know. What’s unclear is what will form the social backbone that enables it to come to life easily and seamlessly for viewers.

The obvious answer is Twitter and Facebook. There are new, dedicated social TV apps like GetGlue and Miso. But you can bet that the content creators, which have poured so much money into creating the content that binds this audience, want to have its piece of the action. That’s one way to read the news yesterday that CBS launched its own social platform, CBS Connect, as a way to tap into the social sphere and harness the conversations around its entertainment lineup.

According to Marc DeBevoise, gm of CBS Interactive Entertainment, the idea for a social hub grew out of its exploration with other social toe-dipping events, most notably its Tweet Week (where CBS talent would tweet back and forth with their followers) and Social Sweep Week (where stars would post and share videos, and video chat with select viewers) events. After seeing the success of these two experiments, The Eye Network placed its chips on a centralized location.

“The concept is aggregating social conversations — Facebook and Twitter — into one place around all of our shows, enabling people to slice and dice the conversations they want by show, character and actor,” DeBevoise said.

I got a peek behind the curtain:

Inside The New York Times building, there’s always a hum. And it’s not solely emanating from the multi-floor newsroom. It comes from the 28th floor, where Michael Zimbalist and his team of roughly a dozen staffers of the New York Times R&D Lab are sequestered from the rest of the The Gray Lady’s reporters, executives and staff. The NYT R&D Lab has the vital task of looking around corners and finding the future of how news and information will be delivered and consumed. Zimbalist and his team wanted to be in the building with the rest of the company but also wanted a distinctive space that would make it clear that the R&D folks are not part of the normal operations.

The R&D Lab looks at what the intersection of news information, consumer behavior and technology will be like in the next three to five years. There are some out-of-the-box projects, like its Surfacereader (a table-top news reader) and an in-progress database of New York Times content. The lab, up and running since 2006, would seem a curious luxury in an era of austerity in newsrooms, even at the Times. In fact, the company recently laid off 50 non-newsroom people. What’s more, it’s not as if the R&D unit hasn’t had any breakout successes in its seven years of existence.  It has.  But, according to Zimbalist, the goal of R&D is to understand how news may be consumed in the future and to push new ideas inward (rather than product development).

Contrary to popular belief, journalism is alive and well. The business model, well, that’s a different story. Part of it has to do with all the different ways we get our information. Part of it has to do with media sticking its collective head in the sand when it comes to adapting to the changing landscape.

That could start to change. One ambitious startup, Circa, wants to rethink the news model. It’s not yet launched, but Circa has attracted big-name backers, including Tumblr’s David Karp, Techstars’ David Cohen and David Tisch, and former Barbarian Group exec Rick Webb. The startup was cofounded by Cheezeburger CEO Ben Hunh, a journalism student turned savvy proprietor of shareable, fun Web content, and Matt Galligan, an entrepreneur who founded social aggregator Socialthing.

“I’d love to be pure digital, a printed newspaper is still by far the best way to consume news on the go,” said Webb. “The Internet hasn’t come close to cracking it yet. $149 a year is too much to read just the first two pages of The Economist. RSS is broken and my foray into aggregating a bajillion feeds to try and keep up didn’t work. But more than all of those, I think Ben and Matt have amazing insights into why all of this is broken, and what can be done about it.

In this week’s edition of Battle of the Brands, we take a look at two American icons and innovators: Fender and Gibson Guitars. Music is as social as it is personal, so which one hits the right notes and strikes the right chords on the social media stage?

I spoke with The AP’s social media editor, Eric Carvin, about the news organization’s social media strategies. 

In the spring of 1845, five New York daily newspapers made journalism history when they founded the New York Associated Press to help incur the costs to deliver news from Texas during the Mexican-American War. After some legal issues between it and the Western Associated Press, which led to the downfall of the NYAP, the Western Associated Press became the Associated Press in 1892 and over the next 150-plus years, has become one of the most important news services in the world.

Beyond delivering news to its 1,700 newspaper and 5,000 television and radio partners, the AP historically sat at the front of news technology innovation. Whether it was introducing the rotary press to speed up printing, bringing in teletypewriters (a printer connected to a telegraph) or launching the WirePhoto Network (ability to send images over phone lines), the AP offered new ways of information distribution. Now it’s confronted with the rise of social media.

Broadly speaking, the AP uses social media in two ways: gathering and disseminating information. The AP approaches each social network differently; what it does on Facebook is different that what it does on Twitter.

“Part of what we’re doing is sharing content in a curated way,” Eric Carvin, the AP’s social media editor said. “It helps as news gathering; if we’re looking to find someone who has amateur video, we put out a call and a good chance we’ll hear back from people.”

Should media brands engage/communicate/@ reply its followers on Twitter?

What do The New Yorker, People Magazine, Rolling Stone, Health Magazine and National Geographic have in common? Each magazine has eclipsed 1 million followers on Twitter. While numbers aren’t as important — anyone can buy followers — a look at how these publications reached and then maintained those high numbers reveals an interesting paradox: If social media is about engagement, why do these top magazine brands succeed in gaining followers when all they do is pump out its own content?

All outlets are not created equal, but social networks have proven to be somewhat of an equalizer for media brands. The iconic Time with its 3.4 million Twitter followers is put in the same category as celebrity rag People, which sits at 3.6 million followers. Interestingly, four of the five most followed magazines are Time Inc. publications: People, Time, InStyle and Entertainment Weekly. Women’s Wear Daily rounds out the top five.

What they have in common is that they use Twitter, for the most part, as a glorified RSS feed, pumping out stories from the outlet. There is little of the conversational aspect from their feeds. The closest they come to veering from the headline-and-links formula is using their accounts to promote writers.

We’re in the era of data everywhere. As the Web becomes more social (not there yet — see below), publishers have to look at even more touch points. We spoke with Sachin Kamdar, CEO of social analytics company Parse.ly, about some of the hurdles publishers keep tripping over.

What is biggest issue facing publishers when it comes to understanding social data?
The biggest issue is being able to aggregate other metrics with social data. What publishers do right now is think about social as its own silo. How many shares on Twitter, how many shares on Facebook? How does it intersect with the audience? They need to use pieces of data to come up with a social strategy moving forward. There’s a data problem now, as they aggregate across other data areas of their property. There needs to be one data stream. It’s about being able to surface those intersections for the publishers. Is my social audience different than the standard reader that visits? If so, how do I get them to stay and then share and comment and engage with them?

What are some mistakes that publishers make when looking social data?
The mistake is not going far enough; people treat social as a linear one-off thing — dropping a few social buttons on my site will be enough to get content viral. The other thing is that they just tweet out their own articles. Many publishers will treat social as an RSS feed and link to every post they have. This is not a way to engage with audience. Some digital companies don’t realize it’s not a one-way street. Content is your property; people are talking about it, so engage with them.

So it sounds like publishers need to look at themselves as brands?
I would take it a step further. Not only are publishers brands but so are the content creators themselves. They (reporters) should have all the data transparent to them to understand what audience is resonating with them from a social perspective and leverage that data to grow the audience.

But do publishers have resources to do this?
It takes technology to do it. When you think about this, they have to quickly pull in information from social networks into an interface for someone to understand how the data intersects. It would take someone sitting there and listening to what’s happening. There are free tools that can do an OK job; Google Analytics is a good way to start and may have to use that. But it’s more about letting content creators have their conversations about content and engage audiences in a multidirectional fashion, as opposed just posting on the site and waiting for comments.

Has the Internet fully moved from an SEO model to a social model?
Not yet. Search still very much accounts for a good portion of traffic. If you look at growth between the two, social is edging up where search was. Search is sort of flat; someone searches for something, you might now know their keyword. With social, you know the audience and brand and all the things that are interactive with social. It presents an opportunity to build an audience and engage with them. Publishers should leverage the fact that content is sharable; use it to your advantage as a publisher. When you think about social vs. search, SEO is almost commoditized to a certain extent in terms of practices, and in another sense, Google is always changing its algorithm, so it’s tough to optimize without spending a lot of money. The best bet is social where you have the ability to engage and optimize, and don’t need to spend money on an SEO tool or consultant. If you have important things to say, great content, you can use social to augment and push that so content reaches the potential you have instead of relying on search to drive traffic. It can be proactive instead of reactive.

When ESPN launched in 1979, there was no way to know that it would become the worldwide leader in sports. Three decades later, the Bristol, Conn.-based company dominates all aspect of sports coverage because of one simple philosophy: serve sports fans anytime, anywhere. The anywhere part has evolved to go beyond physical location, as the sports giant has figured out how to publish across the myriad platforms its audience uses to consume sports information.

Publishing across platforms isn’t as simple as taking content from one medium and placing it on another. Audiences use different devices and platforms in different ways. How you consume content on TV is different than how you consume content on a desktop or on a phone or on a tablet. ESPN understands this exceptionally well and has been on the cutting edge — with some fails along the way — of delivering content to its audience.