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National governments remain the single largest source of revenue for news organisations in Africa. In Rwanda, for example, a staggering 85-90% of advertising revenue comes from the public sector.

In Kenya, its estimated that 30% of newspaper revenue comes from government advertising. In 2013, the government spent Ksh40-million in two weeks just to publish congratulatory messages for the new President Uhuru Kenyatta.

But with a general election coming up this year in August, the Kenyan government has decided to stop advertising in local commercial media.

In a memo, reportedly sent to all government accounting officers, the directive was given that state departments and agencies would only advertise in My.Gov a government newspaper and online portal.

Electronic advertising would only be aired on the state broadcaster the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation.

Its difficult not to characterise the withdrawal of state advertising from commercial media as punitive. Without this revenue stream newspapers are likely to fold.

Worse still, efforts to withdraw government advertising from commercial media can be interpreted as a worrying way to undermine the freedom of expression.

Starving news media of revenue is a means of indirect state control. This has been the case in countries such as Serbia, Hungary, Namibia, Lesotho and Swaziland.

But to fully understand the link between government spend on advertising and media freedom its important to take a historical perspective.

How did we get here?

The 1990s saw the adoption of multi-party politics in many African countries. This led to relatively liberal constitutions in South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana among others.

Since then, most African governments have grown anxious about their inability to control the local news agenda, much less articulate government policy.

For governments in countries such as Ethiopia, Uganda, Zimbabwe and more recently Tanzania, controlling the news agenda is seen as a means to stay in power. Views that compete with the state position are often cast as legitimising the opposition agenda.

This is part of a much broader strategy for political control which Africanist historians and political scientists have called the ideology of order. This is based on the premise that dissent is a threat to nationbuilding and must therefore be diminished.

The narrative was popularised by most post-independence African governments and emphasized through incessant calls for what they liked to call unity.

In Kenya, former president Daniel Moi even coined his own political philosophy of peace, love and unity. Citizens were expected to accept this narrative unequivocally. Dissenting views were undermined through state-controlled media such as Kenya Broadcasting Corporation and newspapers such as the Kenya Times.

From the 1960s 1980s, African governments conveniently used the nation-building argument to suppress legitimate dissent. Opposition was punished by imprisonment, forced exile and even death. This was common practice in Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, and in West Africa more generally.

The current political climate on the continent is premised on constitutional safeguards including the protection of free speech which make these kinds of punishments unlikely in the present day.

Many countries now have institutional safeguards including fairly robust judicial systems capable of withstanding the tyranny of naked state repression.

As a result, the media is controlled in subtler ways and its violence is softer. Its against this background that I interpret the withdrawal of government adverts from the commercial media in Kenya.

Controlling media budgets

In Kenya, the decision followed a special cabinet meeting which agreed that a new newspaper would be launched to articulate the government agenda more accurately.

The government also argued that the move was part of an initiative to curb runaway spending by lowering advert spend in Kenyas mainstream media and directing all the money to the new title.

A similar move was made in South Africa last year when the governments communications arm announced that it would scale down government advertising in local commercial media.

Instead, advertisements would be carried in the government newspaper Vukuzenzele. The decision withdrew an estimated $30-million from the countrys commercial newspaper industry.

The South African government also claimed that the move was made to reduce government spending. But critics have argued that the decision was made to punish a media outlet thats been particularly critical of President Jacob Zumas presidency.

In both countries the decisions have hit at a particularly hard time for the media industry, providing governments with the perfect tool with which to control the press.

Will a free press survive

Commercial news media is going through a period of unprecedented crisis. The old business models are unable to sustain media operations as audiences adopt new ways of consuming news.

More than that, mass audiences are growing ever smaller. Newspapers particularly havent been able to adapt to the changing profile of the old versus the new newspaper reader.

The effect has been that newspapers are no longer as attractive to advertisers. As such, they have to rely a lot more on state money and patronage for survival.

To sidestep state control commercial media in Africa must rethink their business models and diversify their revenue streams.

It wont be an easy road but non-state media must also work hard to disrupt this re-emerging narrative of order. Nation states cannot revert to the dark days when government policy was singular and alternative viewpoints were silenced or delegitimised.

The Conversation

See original here:
How African governments use advertising as a weapon against ... - Rand Daily Mail (registration)

Russia's media regulator says Twitter has agreed to store some of its users' data inside Russia, a move that would comply with domestic law but stoke further fears about user privacy and surveillance.

The agency, known as Roskomnadzor, said on April 19 that Twitter is in the process of determining "what information about Russian citizens and organizations in commercial relations with Twitter in Russia can be stored in the Russian Federation."

"We expect we will be able to send this commercial data to Russia by the middle of 2018 and notify you of this at that time," the agency quoted a Twitter public policy and communications official, Sinead McSweeney, as saying.

The California-based company refused to comment.

The reported decision by Twitter comes two years after a law took effect requiring Russian and foreign companies to store data for customers who are Russian citizens on servers housed on Russian territory.

The law has sparked wide concerns among privacy advocates who feared it would further restrict speech in Russia, where the Internet has served as a freewheeling and largely unhindered forum for public debate, particularly compared with traditional media outlets that are state controlled.

The measure reflected a marked tightening of control over media and the Internet by the Kremlin. President Vladimir Putin has publicly called the Internet a "CIA project."

Regulators have also adopted increasingly strict regulations on bloggers, requiring them to register if they reach a certain threshold of readerships or followers.

Companies that don't comply with the new Russian law are to be included in a blacklist, under court order by Roskomnadzor, and subject to a fine of up to 300,000 rubles, or about $5,000.

Blocking Violators

Roskomnadzor can also order Internet providers to block access to violators.

Many of the world's biggest and best known Internet companies have taken a quiet approach in determining whether to comply with the law.

But Roskomnadzor in November ordered the professional social networking site, LinkedIn, to be blocked from Russian Internet service providers for not complying with the new regulations.

In Russia, authorities have also moved to outright censor some material deemed politically sensitive.

Late in March, the Russian Prosecutor-General's Office asked Roskomnadzor to block access to webpages and videos posted on YouTube, the popular blogging site Live Journal, and the social networking site VKontakte, that were promoting unauthorized political demonstrations tied to anticorruption crusader Aleksei Navalny.

Continued here:
Media Regulator Says Twitter Will Comply With Law, Locate User Data In Russia - RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty

Rex Tillerson has made it clear that he likes the media about as much or even less than President Donald Trump. While Trump has relied on the press to make him the center of attention, Tillerson relies less on it and as the head of the State Department, which is supposed to provide policy for the U.S, he has been very determined to keep his distance. As Blasting News has reported, Tillerson has gone out of his way to not engage with anyone at the Department and on a flight to Beijing over the last few months, he took with him just one reporter to be interviewed where he revealed just how little he tries to rely on the press. Blasting News even reported on mass firings of officials left over from the previous administration, weakening the opposition, and the Department's function.

During his trip last week to Russia, it was reported that Russian president Vladimir Putin was upset enough about the United States' attack against the Assad regime that he initially refused to meet with Trump's Secretary of State. What was scheduled and reported on was his meeting with his counterpart Sergei Lavrov. But the Washington Post reported that after his meeting with Lavrov, the Secretary ditched reporters before he met with Putin at the Kremlin. Originally, it was the Associated Press (AP) which first tweeted that a Kremlin spokesman was the original source, that they were the ones who said Tillerson was meeting with Putin. The Post's article is titled: "We are relying on China and Russia to tell us what Trump and Tillerson discussed with their leaders."

The Washington Post said that it was surprising that Putin's team and not Tillerson's was the source. The contrast here is with the fact that according to the Post he, allowed U.S. journalists to accompany him to the Osobnyak Guest House in Moscow for the meeting with Lavrov. What's more, their article said that Russian #State Media pushed out a steady stream of information and that the State Department couldn't match it, and that they too had to rely on that information. Prior to the Donald Trump's presidency, the U.S. has largely believed and even now accuse the Russian government of disinformation from its media channels.

The Post refers to the differences in the perception of reporting by Russian state media and the Associated Press via Twitter where the AP said at 1:45 pm Eastern that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov says Moscow and Washington have agreed on the need for the United Nations to investigate the use of chemical weapons in Syria. This was clearly during the meeting that was on Tillerson's itinerary. But then at 3:28, the AP reports differently on not only the topic of agreement, but from the view of who is disputing the agreement: The United States is disputing that it has agreed with Russia on the need for a United Nations investigation into a chemical weapons attack in Syria.

The article says that the stream of disinformation was allowed to go unchecked by the State Department for an hour and 45 minutes. Prior to becoming Secretary, Tillerson was the CEO of Exxon Mobile who considered his relationship with Putin to be good enough to award Rex Tillerson with a Friendship Award which is considered Russia's highest honor bestowed to foreign citizens. During his confirmation hearing, it was suspected that he would try to help lift sanctions on Russia since he was against them as Exxon CEO because it hurt their bottom line.

During his hearing, Tillerson was also cornered for not saying whether he believed that Putin had assassinated people who opposed him. In an exchange between he and Sen. Marco Rubio during his hearing, he refused to conclude that Putin was a war criminal and that under his review, he would only side with what was already in the public record after looking at it more thoroughly, which would indicate that negative coverage on the Russian president or the West's decades old conclusion that Putin was a war criminal was simply not enough to go by.

It's assumed that Tillerson might also be taking his cues from the #White House. In the mentioned Blasting News article (at the beginning of this one) it referred to the fact that Trump has aides monitoring members of his cabinet throughout the government to keep them in line. In a similar way of controlling the message, the Post also makes the comparison with Chinese state media where the White House had little to nothing to say about the discussion between Trump and Xi other than that it was good. The Chinese government provided a far more descriptive and detailed account and what America has to rely on for transparency. #propaganda

More:
Trump government allows foreign state media to control narrative - Blasting News

For all the hype behind fancy products like VR, AI and bots, one would think that something as seemingly low tech as getting a page to load quickly would be a concern of the past. But the reality is that latency remains a persistent painthat publishers have to constantly monitorif they want to avoid alienating users.

Vice Media has fought this headache by ramping up its own tech stack so that it can control and isolate tags that are slowing things down, pressing back on slow vendors and reducing its dependency on open-exchange bidders.By doing these things, Vice claims it has reduced its average page-load time by about 50 percent and its average ad-load time by about 80 percent.

Speed improvements that matter are all nerdy stuff like this, and you have to get under the hood to really understand speed optimization, said Drake Martinet, vp of product.

Many publishers simply do not have a sophisticated-enough tech stack to identify and block the ad units that cause the most latency. But Vices growth as a company has led to more investment in creating a beefier tech stack. About two years ago, Vice had fewer than 10 engineers, but the company now has more than 50. A bigger engineering team has allowed Vice to develop its own proprietary CMS and video player.

Since the company developed much of its own stack, its engineers have better control over how the systems work on the back end, which means they have more available options to make speed tweaks. Vice utilizes this control by programming a series of microservices directly into its systems, which focus on very specific tasks.

For example, an engineer will set up one microservice to automatically resize ads if they come in at the wrong size, while another microservice will monitor how long that particular ad takes to load. By keeping the code for each of these processes lightweight and hosting the code on the companys servers, engineers can compartmentalize the plethora of variables that contribute to latency, which allows them to more easily isolate problem areas to make incremental adjustments.

A Vice spokesperson said theaverage load time for one of its verticals was a little over a second before thecompanys proprietary tech stack was made available to the vertical. After getting access to getting access to the tech stack, page loads quickly dropped to around half a second. Website speed tester Pingdom gave Vice URLs a B in performance, which is the same grade it gives to The New York Times. Google speed tests rate Vice URLs in the low 60s out of 100, which is lower than the ratings it gives to the Times. But these ratings should be taken with a grain of salt given that Google rated a CNN article that killed by browser an 87 out of 100 in desktop speed.

Another latency headache for many pubs is the proliferation of ad tech middlemen since each additional vendor places more tags on-page, which slows down loading times. To mitigate vendors impact on speed, Vice seeks vendors that have the least amount of third-party code, said Andrew Smith, vp of digital.

Vice also pushes back if it notices that a vendor is the cause of latency.

We will tell them, We really value your service, but we notice that it is slowing our page down, so we are going to pause on using [the vendor] until you get it back under control, Smith said.

An analysis of latency in 2017 wouldnt be complete without discussing how a publisher handles the selling of its programmatic inventory. Because a major criticism of header bidding the process by which publishers offer inventory to multiple ad exchanges simultaneously before making calls to their ad servers is that it can really slow down page loads.

Vice alleviates the pangs of programmatic in a few ways. It places bidders in a wrapper, which reduces latency by collecting and centrally hosting ad tech tags in an external cloud service. Vice has also increased its private marketplace deals, which reduces middlemen by connecting advertisers directly to publishers.

Regarding the fight against latency, Martinet emphasized that vigilance is as important as a publishers tech capabilities.

Half of it is the technology, he said. But the other half is the desire.

Photo via Vice

Link:
How Vice Media cut page-load time by 50 percent in six months - Digiday

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) Googles new fact-checking program is a bid tocontrol the news bythe old and increasingly discredited corporate-owned media establishment.

"I see this asan effort tocontrol news inthe new digital age," Executive Intelligence Review senior editor Jeff Steinberg told Sputnik.

The international fact-checking community currently consists of115 organizations, according toGoogle.

AP Photo/ Virginia Mayo, File

"The ability ofmainstream media toabsolutely control how people think and what facts they take asvalid is much more challenging thanwhen there were three TV networks and a few major daily newspapers [in the United States," he pointed out.

Steinberg expressed skepticism that the so-called "international fact-checking community" Google relied uponwas truly independent and unbiased.

"I am leery aboutthe international fact-check community withoutgetting a better idea ofwhich groups they are. I know the case ofWikipedia and their fact checkers are neocon ideologues who scrub content foranything that deeply critiques their ideology and boosts their enemies list," he said.

Steinberg cited an example a recent website that claimed toidentify "fake news" outlets.

"They noted that the only trustworthy sources of facts are the BBC [British Broadcasting Corporation], the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and NPR [National Public Radio]," Steinberg added.

University ofLouvain Professor Jean Bricmont, an eminent philosopher and author agreed that Google was likely touse the New York Times and other major establishment outlets todiscredit facts and interpretations presented byother sources and thereby severely limit freedom ofexpression.

REUTERS/ Goran Tomasevic/Files

The Western media establishment tried toclaim it was incorruptible and unbiased, Bricmont noted.

"This is all based onthe prejudice that mainstream media do not lie, do not make mistakes, do not select information, only alternative media do. This makes this fact checking a tool ofpropaganda ofcourse," he said.

However, Bricmont predicted that the fact-checking plan would fail withthe public.

"I doubt that this sort ofsoft censorship will induce them toregain faith inthe MSM [mainstream media] People do not ingeneral liketo be told what toread and people who trust alternative sites do so because they have lost trust inthe MSM," he said.

Bricmont expressed skepticism that the new Google policy would succeed instrengthening the hegemony ofthe mainstream media.

The rest is here:
Google's Fact-Checker Deemed to Give Corporate Media Power to Control News - Sputnik International