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Image: CNN/Alex Wellen

By Jason Abbruzzese2015-03-10 00:05:25 UTC

If you buy an Apple Watch, National Public Radio, CNN, The New York Times and ESPN hope to get a little bit more of your time.

Wearables have been seen as a a bit of a conundrum for media organizations. They're a new form of media distribution but the amount of information you can distribute is extremely limited.

This has left media companies looking for ways to provide users with information in smaller, personalized doses that can then be elaborated upon by request. That translates to a focus on notifications and personalization for CNN's new app., said CNN Chief Product Officer Alex Wellen. "When you design something, it's about looking at the canvas you have," he said. "We knew that there was nothing more personal, as Tim Cook said, than a device that's right up against your skin."

CNN's app allows users to personalize 12 categories that control what news and notifications appear on the watch. The app is also meant to be a gateway to CNN's content online and on television. Users will be able to explore news topics that start as a watch notification and continue onto their smartphones for richer content like live video, Wellen said.

It would seem that for now no organization is publishing full stories to the watch, opting instead for short snippets. The New York Times noted in its app description that Apple Watch users will be able to scroll through photos and a lead-in to each story. Each app appears to want to drive users to their smartphones for longer text and video.

Ryan Spoon, ESPN's head of product development, echoed Wellen's thoughts. The company's app will also prominently feature notifications and personalization, he said.

This is not new territory for ESPN. The sports media giant already sends billions of notifications a month, Spoon noted, and features personalization in its apps that allow users to quickly access scores of their favorite teams.

The rest is here:
Media on the Apple Watch: Personalization, notifications and intimacy

Yemen #39;s warring factions fight over media control
maximsnewsnetwork: ( ) 12 June 2012: UNTV: United Nations, New York - Welcoming the United Nations Security Council resolution adop... As the conflict betwee...

By: News House

Excerpt from:
Yemen's warring factions fight over media control - Video

Four years ago, I wrote about a toolcalled Drund,which at the time aspired to be a web application management system, a virtual desktop that would cut through the clutter of your daily life. This month, Drund is going to launch for the public again, but this time instead ofmanaging web systems, the company is betting on managing social systems.

The social media sites we think about most often Facebook, Twitter Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest have found their business model works best in a system of dispersed control and either publicness or semi-privacy. It makes sense, especially when you consider the word most important during the rise of those companies: Scale. Its hard (impossible?) to scale when there is a central control system.

The problem for a lot of groups think school districts, leadership teams, private clubs is that dispersed control can mean putting out too many fires. For these groups,scale is not the goal but identity might be. There are ways to be pretty private on Facebook, for instance, but its a little harder to filter a conversation before it has started and its even less likely you can build a social brand that doesnt feel like Facebook.

Drund has a different way to approaching these needs. The slogan does a nice job of explaining it: Real ownership, easy to use controls and the tools you need to get the results you want from your community. Scale is not the goal for Drund, at least not for any one social site. They are building sites that have dense value, or enough value to the group that they are willing to pay for the ownership, privacy and control. These group decides whether its site will have ads (Drund does not sell data) they willearn revenue from the sales. These sites might allow for unfiltered posting, but they could change that later. Some aspects of the content might go public, some might never see past the walls.

Founder Lee Yi has been the driving force behind both launches and he says hes learned a lot in the past four years, but the lessons have encompassed less about technology and more about human nature in digital spaces. So when he launchesthe new product this month, dont expect a turnkey experience. Yi wants to train users how to create this kind of community, because he says the technology is only the beginning of the process.

It has been my goal the past few years to avoid talking to leaders about their products, and focus instead on users. I dont claim to know whether Drund isa solution for real ownership of social media, but in our conversation, Yisinsights into a shifting social media foundationwere too valuable to pass up. In this Q&A (developed iteratively on a shared document) we discuss the difficulties of building a community, how different needs shape technology and vice versa and what success looks like early in an entrepreneurial endeavor.

You mentioned in our talk that building a community is extremely difficult and I wonder if you could talk about what the main barriers are to that.

We learned that building communities meant dealing with groups of people not individuals. That means a lot of different motivations, passive and active resistance, agendas, timelines, personalities, levels of technology comfort, and cultures. One of our first large communities was a public K-12 school district, where you have many different cultures within one organization. Public schools have so many different responsibilities and influences that it is very hard to provide a single solution for so many different needs. They have a complex and difficult communication environment because they are dealing with other peoples children, diverse economic and cultural backgrounds, tax levies & budget issues, federal and state mandates and many other issues. Public education communities presented us with a significant challenge because building one district level community to centralize all of the different locations, cultures and people while working with limited time availability was extremely difficult.

Read the original:
Invite-Only: Drund Sees A Future In Social Media 'Ownership'

INDIAN NEWS MEDIA From Observer to Participant Usha M Rodrigues and Maya Ranganathan Sage Publications; 240 pages; Rs 895

The trouble with this book begins with its title - Indian News Media: From Observer to Participant.

I asked myself, has Indian news media ever been an "observer"? The first newspapers in India were born to aid, abet, participate and exhort others to participate in the fight for freedom from Britain. Their whole purpose was to needle, rile and irritate our British rulers. That is why newspapers set shop and shut down with such speed. Ram Mohan Roy started the first Indian-owned English daily Bengal Gazette in 1816. When that shut down, he launched Sambad Kaumudi, which shut shop in 1823. Before that, in 1822, he started the Persian weekly Mirut-Ul-Akhbar (Mirror of News). This, too, closed eventually. Many of the top publications today, Malayala Manorama, The Times of India (TOI), Mumbai Samachar, Ananda Bazar Patrika (ABP) and The Hindu, among others, are all survivors of the Indian freedom struggle.

And that is where my disagreement with this book begins. Usha M Rodrigues's and Maya Ranganathan's tome is noble in intention - "to examine the role and performance of Indian news media at macro and micro levels". It looks largely at television news media only. That is not surprising considering that India has a world-beating 135 news channels. This has helped spread access to information far and wide, but it has also led to a downward spiral in quality. This trend has triggered a huge amount of largely ill-informed debate on the role, ownership, nature and content of television news media in India. So a book like this is welcome.

But its fundamental argument that news media is now an active participant, thanks to sting operations, political ownership and all the other issues is the one that is flawed. That legacy of righteous, judgemental, hyper-involved reporting was encouraged when news media was born in India. It reduced a little after independence, but re-surfaced after the Emergency. And it has been encouraged by successive governments and their failings, a Press Council of India that had no control over its members, editors who failed to institutionalise systems and processes to protect the freedom of its journalists, and, most of all, by media owners who, till the media was making losses, didn't care. Once the economy opened up, many owners decided that the brands they owned were wonderful tools of influence.

If we wanted to have a news media that knew what good journalism and processes were, we should have insisted that it be neutral even when the English were ruling us. As things stand, Indian news media is genetically coded to fight, argue and question. This is a good thing in general. But a large part of the media does this without enough knowledge, training or resources. That explains why the quality of public debate is so abysmal in India.

This brings me to the second flaw with the book. It completely ignores the industry structure within which news broadcasting operates, in India or globally. In India, too much news television has meant a loss-making industry. Only four news broadcasters manage to keep their heads above water. Across the world, unless it is bundled with entertainment, news is a difficult area in which to make money. What, then, can finance an array of reporters and editors, marketing and ad sales staff that can keep a healthy, good-quality news organisation going? All the blah-blah on liberalisation in the book makes no sense till you know that the financial heart and muscle of the news business is weak. And however much left-liberals may say that "news cannot be a business", the fact is it takes money to gather news. And someone has to fund it. And whoever does that will demand his pound of flesh.

There is a way out, though. The best quality news it seems usually comes from a not-for-profit body, like the BBC, which is funded by the licence fees paid by British taxpayers, or The Guardian, which is run by The Scott Trust. The trust was formed in 1936 in order to "protect the liberal editorial line of the Guardian from interference by future proprietors". There are very few news brands that have this luxury - Al Jazeera, funded by the ruling family of Qatar, is the only other brand one can think of.

A couple of strong not-for-profit news brands, like the BBC, are great benchmarks to keep the entire private news industry in line. In India, unfortunately, the state has played a negative role in the development of an independent news industry by keeping Prasar Bharati, which runs All India Radio and Doordarshan, beholden to the central government. Much of the taxpayer subsidy that goes into running Prasar Bharati is simply wasted in bridging losses and not in creating a world-class news organisation. Globally, evolving democracies with insufficient experience of media freedom need a strong state-brand that is not ruled by favour or fear, to set the tone. That is the big lesson that one can learn from the good news brands.

The third reason the book is a difficult read is unwieldy material. The book has some nice examples, like the one on Sun TV down south or on the Indian and Tamil media's coverage of the Tamil conflict in Sri Lanka. But almost every paragraph has a citation or reference making for a laborious read. Some deft editing and better writing would certainly have helped.

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The argumentative Indian media

Companies are starting to embrace social media as a viable disclosure channel for product recalls, with the goal of limiting and repairing damage to the firms' reputation. Using a sample of 405 consumer product recalls between 2000 and 2012, researchers found that corporate social media, in general, lessens negative price reactions to product recall announcements. However, as social media evolved from less to more interactive channels, firms have lost complete control over the content appearing on their corporate social media, and the benefits of social media have lessened.

As reported in a Journal of Accounting Research study, the investigators also found that increased frequency of tweets by other users exacerbates negative market reactions as disgruntled users interject negative sentiment into the online dialogue, while increased frequency of tweets by the firm lessens negative market reactions.

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How social media can help and hurt companies during product recalls