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Back in 2017 Chicago was the first major U.S. city to pass a tax on ride-hail to fund transit infrastructure, paving the way for peer cities to follow suit. Today we pioneered another initiative to help mitigate the harmful effects of Uber and Lyft on urban transportation, with a new fee structure designed to convert more solo trips to shared ones and boost CTA ridership, which is also likely to set a precedent for other towns.The City Council passed Mayor Lori Lightfoots $11.65 billion budget, including the new ride-hail tax, by a 39 to 11 margin, with several aldermen referring to it as a sensible and progressive measure.

Currently Chicago has a flat total tax of $0.72 per Uber or Lyft trip, whether its a blue-collar worker taking an Uber Pool ride home from their local L station at 3 a.m., or a CEO taking a traffic-clogging private trip many miles downtown during the morning rush. Under the new system, the tax on a shared ride in the neighborhoods drops to $0.65, while the fee on a private one goes up to $1.25. Downtown shared trips during peak hours (weekdays from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m.) will be taxed at $1.25, while private downtown peak-hour trips will be assigned a full $3 fee.

The new structure should encourage more people to take advantage of already-cheaper Uber Pool and Lyft Line rates instead of taking private trips by providing a $0.60 tax savings in the neighborhoods. It should also make many people think twice about using ride-hail downtown, where there are plentiful transit options. That should ease congestion, speed up bus service, boost CTA ridership, and help prevent service cuts and fare hikes due to ride-hail cannibalizing transit use. The new tax is projected to raise $40 million a year, with most of that going to plug Chicagos $838 million budget hole, but $2 million earmarked for projects to improve bus service, such as dedicated lanes.

Needless to say, the ride-hail companies, particularly Uber, fought Lightfoots initiative tooth-and-nail. Their main strategy was to argue that the new fees would disproportionately impact poor and working people on the South and West sides, with Uber enlisting 35 Black ministers to bolster their claim that the tax would hurt African Americans. (Last spring all 35 clergy members helped the corporation make the same argument about the citys deal with Lyft to expand the Divvy bike-share system citywide, part of a propaganda campaign that also involved Uber buying sympathetic news coverage in local Black media.) For example, Reverend William Hall claimed that the mayors plan would balance the budget on the backs of low-income communities.

However, numbers from a recent city of Chicago report on ride-hail data show that wont be the case. As it stands, most trips hailed on the South and West sides are shared, non-downtown trips, which will be cheaper under the new structure, while 70 percent of rides requested downtown and on the more affluent North Side are private. Therefore, as you can see from the map below by the Center for Neighborhood Technology, the vast amount of the new revenue will come from higher-income communities. Meanwhile, lower-income Chicagoans, who are more likely to depend on transit, particularly buses, will disproportionately benefit from the enhanced CTA service.

As such, several transportation advocates of color who prioritize racial justice told me they were in favor of the fee structure (although some said they would like to see more of the revenue go towards transit, particularly in Black and Brown communities.) We applaud Mayor Lightfoot moving us toward a more equitable [ride-hail] tax, said Christian Mariano Diaz of the Logan Square Neighborhood Association, which fights housing displacement.

People have definitely been getting misinformation from the pastors who are Uber supporters, said Lesl Honor, director of Washington Park-based KLEO Community Family Life Center, which focuses on violence prevention through strengthening families. So helping our clients understand that was inaccurate and showing them the data from the city has been really important.

A New Yorker who gave me a heads-up that Uber was sending its two top NYC PR flacks to our city told me that the two staffers dont give a s about poor people in Chicago. In any case, the companys hypocrisy in claiming that its main opposition to Lightfoots plan was that it would hurt lower-income Chicagoans, when its primary concern was its own bottom line, was laid bare today. A Reuters analysis of Chicago ride-hail datapublished this morning revealed that the fares UberPool rates, which are disproportionately taken by residents who need to save money, have gone up significantly overthe past year while private UberX fares stayed flat.

During the speeches by aldermen at todays Council meeting, a few of the politicians who mentioned the ride-hail tax plan praised it as a smart, forward-thing measure. Michael Rodriguez (22nd) called it equitable, Leslie Hairston (5th) described it as a progressive measure, and Scott Waguespack (32nd) said it would make ride-hail pay its fair share and also reduce congestion in the Central Business District.

Aldermen who spoke out against the new fees included Andre Vasquez (40th) and Raymond Lopez (15). Lopez grandstanded against the plan at a Finance committee hearing last week, arguing that the city should have instead accepted an Uber counterproposal that would have generally lowered the fees, and therefore had little impact on congestion but was somehow supposed to simultaneously raise an extra $10 million.

After the meeting, Lincoln Square alderman Matt Martin (47th), who voted against Lightfoots budget, told me he still supported the ride-hail fees, which he called a good first move towards addressing traffic jams. I think its a step in the right direction when you look at our revenue issues and getting the conversation going around congestion. Part of what it pays for is a broader congestion [pricing] study, which we need to look at, not just ride-share but [private cars] and trucks vehicles in the larger central business district as well.

Streetsblog Chicago published about a dozen articles on the ride-hail tax, including debunking every single ill-informed or misleading op-ed and editorial in the mainstream media claiming that the measure would hurt poor people or wreck the local economy, so Id like to think that we made a significant difference in getting the initiative approved. If you appreciate our advocacy on the issue, please consider clicking the link below and donating to help us win a $50,000 challenge grant from the Chicago Community Trust so that we can keep doing this work next year. Thanks for your support.

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Once again Chicago leads the way, passing a tax to help get Uber and Lyft under control - Streetsblog Chicago

The streaming video advertising market remains a work in progress. Audiences have already shifted to streaming in droves, and advertisers have accelerated their pursuit. However, advertisers find themselves migrating to a market still under development, with measurement holes and overlapping ad sellers.

Despite these setbacks, companies recognize they cannot afford to sit back and wait for the market to mature. Brand and agency execs gathered at the Digiday Video Advertising Summit in Palm Springs, California, last week to discuss the challenges they face and the opportunities they have found in navigating the converging TV and digital video ad market. Heres what we learned:

TV-and-video ad measurement is a messMeasurement remains the primary problem advertisers face across the TV and digital video ad market. The shift to streaming may eventually smooth things out, as all programming and ads become delivered over the internet, but for now the measurement picture is rudimentary at best. Traditional providers like Nielsen are able to monitor streaming impressions, but not equally across all environments. Meanwhile, the lack of a universal identifier makes it hard to measure ad exposures against individual people or households. Even marketers unconcerned with traditional reach-and-frequency metrics can struggle to ascertain performance marks, like tying product sales to ad exposures, because multi-touch attribution can be too costly or complicated for many marketers to implement effectively.

Bottom line: Measuring ads across TV and streaming is imprecise, but advertisers must make do with what they can measure and use those measurements to project what they cant.

Connected TV ad buying has become overly complicatedConnected TV advertising would appear to combine the best of TV (fully viewable ads on the biggest screen in peoples homes) and the best of digital (fine-tuned targeting and dynamic delivery). But the combination of TV and digital has also complicated the connected TV ad market. Advertisers can buy inventory from TV networks for shows syndicated on streaming services. But those streaming services can also sell inventory to the same advertisers, who can also buy ads on those services from the connected TV platforms carrying the streamers as well as ad tech firms plugging into them. There are some guardrails in place, like being able to block Hulu from running ads against specific programs. However, not all sellers are able to provide advertisers with that level of control for the inventory they aggregate; they require extra attention to detail on the part of ad buyers to mitigate inventory overlap.

Bottom line: Advertisers and agencies need to give themselves as clear a view of the inventory they are buying as they can and communicate that across their buying teams.

Creative is becoming more data-drivenData access is no longer solely the domain of advertisers and agencies media teams. While using data has proven valuable for targeting audiences and tracking ads effectiveness, it is also emerging as an opportunity to ensure that the right ads are being created and run. A targeted ad is less effective when the ad itself is not crafted to appeal to that particular audience. Marketers are beginning to put media strategists, analysts, copywriters and art directors in the same room to work on campaigns and ensure the data guiding the media plan also informs the creative strategy. However, there are challenges in applying data to creative. For starters, creative teams need to be open to using data. Additionally, organizations need to make sure the data is made available to creative teams and structured in a way to be easily interpreted.

Bottom line: Targeted ad campaigns can only be as effective as the specificity of their creative content.

Speaker highlights:Deutschs Lauren Tetuan detailed the limitations in streaming video advertising. Her key points:

Common Thread Collectives Savannah Sanchez gave an overview of how Facebooks automation tools can free up ad buyers to focus on creative. Her key points:

Portal As Nate Houghteling outlined how traditional celebrities are becoming YouTube stars. His key points:

Overheard:In terms of brand safety, TV and connected TV gets away with a lot more than digital because people arent taking screenshots of it.

Last year when we worked with Roku, they didnt have the capability of filtering Sling to make it brand-safe. Or Pluto. You had to blacklist at a channel level. Thats a big scale issue.

If you are going to direct, including NBC or CBS, they can blacklist programs for you. They can do that internally because it is their inventory. When youre looking at aggregators, thats where it gets tricky with blacklisting.

An exclusive, inside look at whats actually happening in the video industry, including original reporting, analysis of important stories and interviews with interesting executives and other newsmakers.

We see value in some direct deals because you dont need to pay all the tech fees and if you negotiate well they throw in a lot of added value such as brand studies, conversion lifts. Theres the discussion around how valuable is their data. Weve found it to be very valuable.

Sellers have so much control in the connected TV. We recently shot a commercial with a celebrity and wanted to buy shows that celebrity was in on ABC. We wanted to give them a big, fat check just for those shows, and they said we could only do 25% of our buy within those shows specifically and everything else would be run of [prime time].

Sellers are obstinate because they know theyre going to sell that inventory, so theyre not really worried about it.

If [NBCUniversal ad sales chief] Linda Yaccarino were here, shed say yes in all the right ways to all of us around programmatic and making content available. But she still has a sales staff with quarterly sales goals and bonuses, and theyre going to push against making things programmatic and making more content available for data-driven targeting. So when does the fight end for them?

When you look at the breakout of impressions for over the top, the majority of them are on smart TV. But Nielsen, these assholes I dont think theyre sponsoring this theyre only able to measure Roku and Hulu [for] in-demo impressions. Then your clients are all about, Wheres my Nielsen-validated in-demo impressions for OTT because of the cord-cutting with linear?

The pressure is on [Nielsen], but theres an undeniable opportunity inside of OTT. Pulling budgets out of it is just going to be shooting ourselves in the foot.

Frequency management is a measurement problem. You cant get an ID. You cant get enough measurement to understand whether this is the same person or the same household.

We need to start shifting to more universal ways of tracking. Lauren Tetuan, head of media at Deutsch

Our job is to grow as much first-party data as possibleFirst-party data is currency. Andrew Eklund, founder and CEO of Ciceron

The return on investment [for an organic video series that Under Armour distributed on YouTube], as measured by watch time, was so much higher because it cost the same to get in front of [viewers] as a 15- or 30-second ad but averaged seven minutes. Jason Mitchell, CEO of Movement Strategy

The Disney bundle [of Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+] came out for $12.99, so theyre driving the rate of the bundles down so much. How long are the others like Netflix going to be able to keep up with a subscription at that low of a rate without allowing advertising?

I dont think weve seen [the increase in ad-free streaming options] impact media budgets associated with video up to this point, but I still think its early days.

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'The pressure is on': Insights from the Digiday Video Advertising Summit - Digiday

Madonna has been accused of failing to credit and pay a songwriter on her 2019 album Madame X.

Casey Spooner, a member of the recently disbanded electronic pop group Fischerspooner, wrote on Instagram that he was co-writer of the track God Control. I have had enough Ive gotten no credit and no compensation while youre galavanting around on stage Im completely broke in Berlin. Robbed, ignored and delayed.

Spooner said he had been offered first $10,000, then $25,000 as an advance against future publishing royalties, but argued he should instead be paid 1% of touring profits There is no money in record sales. Period. Not even for Madonna. In a later Instagram post, he said: They are trying to intimidate me its not easy fighting giants.

Spooner says he worked with God Control producer Mirwais in 2017, for the latters solo album, which was later shelved. Elements of their work together later appeared in the Madonna track without his knowledge. He posted a demo version of God Control that he worked on, which features the same lyrics and melody as the Madonna track.

Madonna has not commented on the accusations. The Guardian has requested comment via her UK representatives.

God Control, a dance-pop track that confronts gun control in the US, has already provoked controversy. Its violent music video depicted an attack similar to the one on Orlandos Pulse nightclub in June 2016 that left 49 people dead, and was criticised as horrible by Parkland shooting survivor Emma Gonzalez.

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Madonna accused of failing to credit songwriter on Madame X album - The Guardian

Mozilla intends to block the DigiTrust consortium from tracking users in its Firefox browser, a blow for the IAB-led effort to create a standardized online user ID thats designed to reduce the online ad industrys reliance on third-party cookies.

DigiTrust, a non-profit acquired by the IAB Tech Lab last year, is working to create a universal, persistent and anonymized user ID. Member companiesinclude prominent ad tech players MediaMath, OpenX, LiveRamp and others. Buy-side DigiTrust members pay a monthly fee to participate, while publisher participants access the service for free.

Similar to other shared identity solutions, DigiTrust offers a pseudonymous and encrypted identifier that can be stored in a first-party cookie provided by the publisher. Other participants can utilize the same identifier on subsequent bid requests and user visits to that publishers site via the browser, instead of needing to submit third-party network requests each time a person loads a publishers webpage.

Theoretically, shared IDs using first-party cookies offer multiple benefits, such as quicker page-load times due to less third-party cookie-syncing behind the scenes. They can also mitigate the risk of data leaks in the bid-stream (a big concern as it relates to Europes General Data Protection Regulation.) Meanwhile, third-party cookies are increasingly being throttled by browsers.

The immediate impact of Firefoxs move to block DigiTrust isnt clear. Firefox only has a 4% share of the global browser market, according to Statcounter. Thats behind leading browsers, Googles Chrome (65%) and Apples Safari (16%), latter of which has sophisticated tracker prevention features. Still, its a setback on the quest toward a common ID solution.

IAB Tech LAB svp of Membership and Operations Jordan Mitchell said in an emailed statement that Firefoxs decision did not come as a surprise.

We know certain companies take the position that there is no sufficient consumer value to justify tracking anonymous audience recognition of any kind, not even for use in communicating privacy choices, Mitchell said. They believe no third party can be trusted. We take a different position: that trust should be established directly between consumers and the brands, and publishers they trust, and with the third parties that those brands and publishers trust.

He added, IAB Tech Lab will continue to work on improving mechanics for privacy and trust, through consumer privacy choices and system-level, industrywide accountability and we think theres value for DigiTrust as a shared resource and utility in this context.

An exclusive, inside look at whats actually happening in the video industry, including original reporting, analysis of important stories and interviews with interesting executives and other newsmakers.

Mozilla leans on an open-source list of trackers compiled by privacy software company Disconnect to inform its Enhanced Tracking Prevention feature, which was introduced in September.

On Nov. 11, John Wilander, an Apple WebKit engineer who works on Safaris ITP, filed an issue on Mozillas Bugzilla forum asking why Firefox did not treat the Digitru.st domain as a tracker. (Apple, which relies on machine learning rather than block lists, already prevents DigiTrust cross-site tracking on Safari.) The same day, Mozilla privacy engineer Steven Englehardtraised an issue on Disconnects developer forumasking whether DigiTrust should be added to the list.

We reviewed this issue in the normal course of business beginning that week and determined that although DigiTrusts service may not track users directly, which is why they were not previously blocked, they clearly enable other services to track, and therefore we updated our definition of tracking to encompass this type of behavior, which we see as a growing threat to consumer privacy, said Casey Oppenheim, Disconnect co-founder.

A Mozilla spokeswoman confirmed that cookie-based tracking for DigiTrust will be blocked in a future version of Firefox.

DigiTrust isnt the only player pushing for the adoption of a universal ID. LiveRamp and The Trade Desk are among the other organizations offering ID solutions. The Trade Desk and LiveRamp domains are also on Disconnects blocklist although LiveRamps ID solution doesnt rely on cookies.

Regulation could prove the bigger roadblock to universal ID solutions. The California Consumer Privacy Act takes effect in January and there is still a level of uncertainty in the ad tech industry as to exactly how the privacy law will apply to third-party cookies used for advertising. The U.K. data regulator has warned that the current real-time-bidding ad tech landscape is not compliant with the European Unions General Data Protection Regulation.

The industry seems to think there is a basic industry right for tracking and targeting of users for advertising purposes, but I dont see the regulators following this logic at all, said Ruben Schreurs, CEO of consulting firm Digital Decisions.

Meanwhile, Google is set to make an announcement in February about how it will treat third-party cookies in Chrome.

David Kohl, CEO of ad tech company TrustX, a member of DigiTrust, said the entire cookie-based advertising infrastructure needs a rethink that involves prioritizing consumer interests, rather than ad techs commercial interests.

We need to start again with a clean sheet and say, how do we create a capability for consumers to understand what identity means on the internet, how its used, and how to control it, Kohl said.

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Firefox browser will block the IABs DigiTrust universal ID - Digiday

For observers of the media, there are few spectacles more dispiriting than the way the press covers presidential campaigns. Rather than digging into what really matters, such as the candidates experience, leadership ability and positions on important issues, reporters focus on controversies, attacks on one another, gotcha moments and, of course, polls, polls and more polls.

Now a study conducted by the School of Journalism at Northeastern University has quantified just how bad things are. Looking at about 10,000 news articles from 28 ideologically diverse news outlets published between March and October, my colleagues and I found that coverage of the Democratic candidates tracks with the ebbs and flows of scandals, viral moments and news items.

Our findings were posted last week at Storybench, a vertical published by the School of Journalism that covers media innovation. The data analysis was performed by Aleszu Bajak with an assist from John Wihbey. Among the key points in our report:

The televised debates have driven some of the issues-based coverage. For instance, mentions of the candidates positions on immigration and health care increased during and immediately after the debates but then quickly subsided.

Kirsten Gillibrand made reproductive choice one of her signature issues and after she dropped out of the race, that issue faded from media coverage. Similarly, coverage of gun control was tied mainly to Beto ORourkes now-defunct campaign. LGBTQ rights and climate change have been virtually ignored.

The Ukraine story has dominated recently coverage of the Democratic candidates, with much of it focused on President Trumps false accusations that Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden acted corruptly.

Of course, to some extent the media cant help but be reactive. It would be irresponsible not to cover what the candidates are saying about themselves and each other. But the press urge to chase controversies at the expense of more substantive matters shows that little has been learned since its disastrous performance four years ago.

As Thomas Patterson of Harvards Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy wrote in an analysis of the 2016 campaign, coverage of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was unrelentingly negative, creating the impression that the controversy over Clintons emails was somehow equivalent to massive corruption at Trumps charitable foundation, his racist remarks and his boasting about sexual assault as revealed on the infamous Access Hollywood tape.

The real bias of the press is not that its liberal, Patterson wrote. Its bias is a decided preference for the negative.

It doesnt have to be that way. Earlier this year, New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen proposed campaign coverage built around a citizens agenda. Rosen proposed that news organizations should identify their audience, listen to what they believe the candidates should be focusing on, and cover the race accordingly.

Given a chance to ask questions of the people competing for office, you can turn to the citizens agenda, Rosen wrote on his influential blog, Press Think. And if you need a way of declining the controversy of the day, there it is. The agenda you got by listening to voters helps you hold to mission when temptation is to ride the latest media storm.

Some coverage of presidential politics has been quite good. Quality news organizations such as The New York Times and The Washington Post have published in-depth articles on challenges the candidates have overcome and how that helps shape their approach to governing. The Boston Globe has been running a series called Back to the Battleground in which it has reported on four key states that unexpectedly went with Trump in 2016. Reports aimed at making sense of the Ukraine story, explaining Elizabeth Warrens Medicare for All plan and the like are worthy examples of campaign journalism aimed at informing the public. But such efforts tend to be overshadowed by day-to-day horse-race coverage.

The latest poll-driven narrative is the rise of Pete Buttigieg, whos emerged as the clear frontrunner in Iowa, according to a Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom survey. You can be sure that hell be watched closely at this weeks televised debate. Will his rivals attack him? Will he fight back? Can he take the heat?

Little of it will have much to do with what kind of president Buttigieg or any of the other candidates would be. The horse race is paramount. Whos up, whos down and the latest controversies are what matter to the political press.

The data my Northeastern colleagues have compiled provides a measurement of how badly political coverage has run off the rails. Whats needed is a commitment on the part of the media to do a better job of serving the public interest.

WGBH News contributor Dan Kennedys blog, Media Nation, is online at dankennedy.net.

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A Northeastern Study Takes The Measure Of Our Controversy-Driven, Poll-Obsessed Political Coverage - wgbh.org