Media Library (76)

SIIA Joins Joint Industry Statement Regarding a Workable EU Cybersecurity Certification Scheme for Cloud Services

by Policy

We call on policymakers in EU Member State governments, EU institutions and the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) to firmly reject the proposed sovereignty requirements in the EU Cloud Services Certification (EUCS) with a view to a swift adoption of a workable and non-discriminatory EUCS.

We understand that a new draft of the EUCS was recently shared with Member States. According to accessible reports and information, the new EUCS draft from May 2023 maintains non-technical requirements – including absence of effective control from non-EU entities, independence from non-EU law and strict data localisation requirements – while the scope of application remains overly broad and unclear. In this context, we would like to reiterate the following concerns:

  1. Limited transparency and lack of stakeholder engagement
  2. Inclusion of ‘digital sovereignty’ requirements
  3. Conflicting Member States’ views
  4. Legal confusion and uncertainty caused by the interplay with other EU legislation
  5. Compliance with a World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules

The European Commission must swiftly adopt the EUCS by resolving the political deadlock and decide not to conflate legal and cybersecurity considerations in a technical instrument as we, and so many other stakeholders, have been publicly urging for since 20218. Any EU cybersecurity certification scheme should focus on technical measures to strengthen security and resiliency and, it should rely on and be aligned with consensus-based international standards that have proven to be efficient by way of broad industry adoption. There are options that enable a workable solution which does not include challenging requirements. These should be explored in a separate political process detached from the speedy implementation of the cybersecurity scheme. Members of the ECCG, ENISA and the Commission should proactively inform stakeholders on the status of the draft scheme in order to allow them to meaningfully contribute to the discussion before its submission.

Read Full Letter Here
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An AMPLIFY 2023 Quiz Previews an Expert-Studded Agenda Filled with ‘Learning’ and Value

by AMPLIFY 2023Media

It was the great Alex Trebek who said, “I think what makes ‘Jeopardy!’ special is that, among all the quiz and game shows out there, ours tends to encourage learning.” In the spirit of Jeopardy then, here’s a quiz—based on our upcoming AMPLIFY 2023 Content & Marketing Summit, June 27-28 in Washington, D.C.—designed to give you some key information and learning about the publishing industry.

Test your publishing knowledge with this quiz, based on sessions at our upcoming AMPLIFY Content & Marketing Summit (featured in italics after the questions). Answers and scoring appear at the bottom.

In a Knight Foundation survey last year, what percentage of Americans said they’ve paid money to a news organization or paid to access news.
a. 51%
b. 43%
c. 32%
d. 26%

The opening Main Stage session is The Fast-Evolving Guide to Audience Engagement with Davide Savenije, editor in chief, and Sondra Hadden, senior director of audience growth marketing & retention.

2. Which three social platforms are publishers most investing in to drive content discovery (with most being first)?
a. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook
b. LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook
c. LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram
d. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook

SEO for Editors: How to Optimize Your Content for Search Engines and Your Audience Content. Erin Hallstrom, associate director of SEO strategy, Endeavor Business Media.

3. Asked by UK’s Association of Online Publishers (AOP) where they see the most potential for growth in the next three years, B2B publishers placed what subject first at 28%?
a. Lead generation
b. Events
c. Digital advertising
d. Subscriptions

What Publishers Need to Know About Business Development in 2023: Carolyn Shomali, publisher, Professionals for Association Revenue; Marcus Maleck, director of global business partnerships, Society for Clinical Research Sites

4. Sustainability, DEI and climate change are all huge issues today, particularly for young people—what percentage of millennials say it’s important that companies they buy from also align with their values?
a. 65%
b. 47%
c. 94%
d. 83%

Measuring IMPACT: How Money Media Is Moving the Needle on Diversity: Hannah Glover, editor-in-chief, Money-Media; Sabrina J. Ashwell, senior copyeditor, Chemical & Engineering News, American Chemical Society; Racquel Jemison, program manager, American Chemical Society

5. According to new research from Acast, what percentage of U.S. listeners have taken action in response to podcast advertising, and that rises to what percentage for frequent listeners?
a. 65%, 67%
b. 75%, 77%
c. 85%, 87%
d. 95%, 97%

Leveraging a Podcast Program for Any Size Organization: Meredith Landry, content manager, GLC; Jen Hajigeorgiou, director of content strategy, National Association of REALTORS; Matt Ausloos, manager of publishing, American Health Law Association; Henry Howard, deputy director/media and communications, The American Legion

6. The Press Gazette reported on a Yougov poll that surveyed American readers to see what makes them pay for a subscription. This won out at 42%, followed by ad-free browsing (33%), exclusive content (26%), group subscription (23%) and better user experience (22%).
a. Lower price
b. Buy one, get one free
c. Peer pressure
d. A free gift with a subscription

Build a Content-First Culture to Engage Members Any Time, Anywhere: Hilary Marsh, president & chief strategist, Content Company, Inc.

7. In a 2023 B2B Marketing Benchmark Survey of more than 320 respondents from Endeavor Business Media, this was reported as the biggest challenge?
a. Not enough internal resources
b. Producing engaging content
c. Budget
d. Developing a strategy

Mapping Content to Your Marketing Funnel: Reach the Right Target at the Right Time: Randy Ford, First Story Strategies; Veronica Purvis, executive director, Journalism Education Association; Morgan Mulgrew, HighRoad Solutions

Answers

1.d Just 26%. The age group 27-41 was the highest at 30% and 18-26 the lowest at 20%. Young people are more likely to pay for movie and television streaming services that are likely to include access to some form of news content (57%) than to pay for news directly (28%).

2.c 44% of B2B publishers said LinkedIn, followed by Twitter at 19% and Instagram at 15%.

3.a Lead generation followed by events (22%), sponsorships (20%) and subscriptions (17%). Display advertising came in at just 9% of expected revenues in the AOP report while audio/podcasts/internet radio came in at just 2%.

4. d 83%. Other ages aren’t that far behind though. 73% of 35-54 year olds and 60% of 55+ year olds agree.

5. d 95%, 97%. Podcast fans are willing to listen to advertising to support their favorite shows—82% in the U.S. feel that way and 66% in Canada. And 82% of US and 67% of Canadians follow a podcaster on social media.

6. a Lower price. Factors that would make readers less likely to pay for a subscription include: high price (60%); too many ads (52%), poor user experience (45%) and lack of exclusive content (29%)

7. c Budget. Next came not enough internal resources, developing a strategy, producing engaging content, producing enough content, measuring success/ROI, leadership does not understand the value and need for technical writers.

Scores
1-3 right – Attending AMPLIFY will give you a perfect score
4-5 right – Attending AMPLIFY will fill you in on those missing bits of knowledge
6-7 right – We need more people like you at AMPLIFY!

 

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‘Lean In. Test These Things Out.’ A Lot Is Being Written by and About AI; Here’s Some Help

by Media

In March CEO Nicholas Thompson wrote a note to his Atlantic business-side staff about AI. “The first point I want to make is that we should all be curious. Lean in. Test these things out. We will be getting some company subscriptions to GPT-4… Secondly, I want us to experiment.” Joe Amditis, who has written a publishers ChatGPT guide, said, “If we don’t pay attention to this… we’re going to get tricked ourselves, and we’re going to lose credibility with our audiences.” It’s a lot to navigate right now.

I just looked at an impressive, though a bit impersonal, video posted on LinkedIn by Jeremiah Owyang. He gave this prompt to AI: “Write a short story, in first person, about a girl moves to the big city, launches a business, overcomes challenges, and finally succeeds. 300 words.”

He then spent a brief time selecting video clips and music. “I wrote zero of the script. I estimate it would have taken me 20-30 hours to create; it took 15 minutes.”

Reactions ranged from: You can now add to it (drop it into munch or opus, then use Midjourney to create an avatar and ChatGPT for the description); to outrage (“We are going to be flooded with fake human experiences!”); to it’s crazy what we can now do.

Flooded is probably the right word for where we are now in AI-land. At our Editorial Council meeting in April we heard from one editorial director who’s all in on letting AI create stories and another who, for now, is committed just to tasks such as ideating and reading through gobs of text to come up with questions. Others are learning and much more wary of potential accuracy, ethical and bias problems.

(I’m planning for the next Editorial Council meeting to take place on June 22 about editorial uses for AI. Stay tuned.)

Meanwhile, here are five resources that I’ve come across:

Experiment. Join the waiting list for Bard, wrote The Atlantic’s Thompson. Try Poe and Bing. Read about Anthropic. See if you can get human hands to look good in MidJourney five. Learn how to be a good prompt engineer… We’re already trying to use these systems to help tag stories. Next, maybe we can build a bot to help us onboard new subscribers. Maybe we can build a bot that helps guide people to the archives. Maybe we can create a more efficient and personalized recommendation engine…”

A full-on test case. On NiemanLab last week, new staff writer Sophie Culpepper wrote this excellent story: “Can AI help local newsrooms streamline their newsletters? ARLnow tests the waters.” Scott Brodbeck is the founder of Virginia-based media company Local News Now. He already had an automated afternoon newsletter but wanted “a morning email with more voice. [He] began experimenting with a completely automated weekday morning newsletter comprising an AI-written introduction and AI summaries of human-written stories. Using tools like Zapier, Airtable, and RSS, ARLnow can create and send the newsletter without any human intervention.” Now he wants to do a daily update on YouTube and is “experimenting with using AI to look for typos and other errors in newly published articles; categorize articles into positive, neutral and negative buckets for potential social media purposes; and drive a chatbot to help clients write sponsored articles.”

An AI for Editorial handbook. Joe Amditis, an assistant director for products and events at the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University, has put out the “Beginner’s prompt handbook: ChatGPT for local news publishers.” The guide takes users through creating the best prompts; talks technology terms; tells how to clean up transcripts and create outlines to “red-team” your story ideas. It also advises how to use AI as institutional memory for your newsroom. “Picture this,” Amditis writes in an article on Medium. “An AI model trained on your newsroom’s archives and its entire body of work, along with any of the other community- or org-specific reports, information, documentation, and data you can find and upload. By analyzing this vast trove of data, an LLM could identify patterns and connections that might not be immediately apparent to human analysts.”

Hugging Face? Why not. Earlier this month, Team Twipe put out this article: “Navigating the AI Dust Storm: A guide for publishers.” There are full definitions of concepts and tools like Hugging Face, which “allows you to locally download multiple LLM models and provides datasets to train them​. It also provides courses and educational materials​.” And it had this tidbit: “OpenAI has recently introduced a new function called ‘Code Interpreter’ that allows users to upload and download files such as tables or code and use GPT-4 to evaluate, modify, and save them locally…”

Tests show inconsistency. On The Atlantic site, Ian Bogost wrote this article: “We Programmed ChatGPT Into This Article. It’s Weird. Please don’t embarrass us, robots.” “So I started testing some ideas on ChatGPT (the website) to explore how we might integrate ChatGPT (the API),” he writes. “One idea: a simple search engine that would surface Atlantic stories about a requested topic… In some of my tests, ChatGPT’s responses were coherent, incorporating ideas nimbly. In others, they were hackneyed or incoherent. There’s no telling which variety will appear above. If you refresh the page a few times, you’ll see what I mean.” One thing is for sure, Bogost writes, “You can no longer assume that any of the words you see were created by a human being.”

Media Library (71)

SIIA Statement on Twitter v Taamneh and Gonzalez v Google Supreme Court Decisions

by Policy

In response to today’s Supreme Court decision on Twitter v Taamneh and Gonzalez v Google, Chris Mohr, President, Software & Information Industry Association issues the following statement.

“Today was a good day for the open Internet and the business of information.  The Supreme Court, in its decisions in Twitter v Taamneh and Gonzalez v Google, preserved the ability of responsible platforms to both operate at scale and engage in robust content moderation. We are pleased with the result.”

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You Need to ‘Understand Your Audience’; Industry Dive Leaders Preview AMPLIFY Talk

by AMPLIFY 2023Media

“What Industry Dive has been good at is never putting all our eggs in one basket, especially for reaching people and growing our audience,” said Sondra Hadden, their senior director of audience growth marketing. “But how you do that feels very different these days than it did 10 years ago.” Hadden and editor in chief Davide Savenije will wax audience-centric on June 27 at our AMPLIFY event in Washington, D.C. Here’s a preview.

“The most effective way to reach your audience goals is to collaborate cross-functionally,” Savenije told my colleague Kathryn Deen recently. “One of the things I really like about Industry Dive is how we’ve set up the collaboration between audience and editorial to integrate the audience function into the newsroom workflow and vice versa, as opposed to being siloed, which is the case in a lot of B2B media companies.

“If you’re on your own, there’s a lot of missed opportunities in understanding your audience, where to meet them, and how to expose them to your brand and get them to convert, whatever your model may be.”

Savenije and Hadden will present a Main Stage session titled, The Fast-Evolving Guide to Audience Engagement, June 27 at AMPLIFY 2023—AM&P Network’s Content & Marketing Summit—at the National Housing Center here in Washington, D.C. (The event runs June 27-28. See the agenda here and registration information here.)

Industry Dive continues to hum along with a newsroom of about 140 journalists, many of them mid-career, putting out 30-plus business publications. Their latest new daily edition, Facilities Dive, focusing on building operations, will land in inboxes on June 5. It’s the fourth newsletter Industry Dive has launched in 2023, following Fashion Dive, Hotel Dive and Packaging Dive. (B2B giant Informa purchased Industry Dive last year for $530 million.)

“Audience engagement is always incredibly important, so understanding your audience—having that strong relationship with them and the content you produce—is key,” said Savenije, who has been with Industry Dive for 11 years, six of those as editor in chief. “One of the reasons to do this session now is that there’s so much changing in the world and the business and media landscape at a rapid rate. So you really have to stay on top of change and how you evolve and meet people where they are in the communities you’re trying to reach.”

Hadden, who has been with Industry Dive for two years—she previously worked at the American Chemical Society and the Biotechnology Industry Organization—leads a team of five that manages paid and organic media campaigns. “We work very closely with Davide, as well as design and product, so we’re a cross-departmental team,” she told Deen.

“My team supports all the publications, so we have to drive growth and retention across the board. It’s perfect to have an asset like the newsroom that can tell you so much about each audience they’re writing for. Then there’s the next step of how you get your readers to do something; that’s where the marketing expertise comes in. It’s the perfect relationship.”

Industry Dive was one of the first media organizations to use accessible dashboards to share insights company-wide—enabling editors and marketers to make informed decisions that drive growth. They also made sure to help editorial people how to interpret those dashboards.

“It is about how you position yourself, how you maintain that philosophy of understanding your audience, listening to your audience, meeting them where they are, bringing them into your ecosystem, and developing that relationship,” Savenije said. “We hope people can come out of this session with some helpful insights into defining your vision and strategy, and then fitting your tactics into that.”

Added Hadden: “It boils down to having the conversation between the teams: Who are you trying to reach? Has it changed? Why? How? It’s about getting all your stakeholders in the room and not thinking of these departments as separate. We’ll provide examples of what Industry Dive has done to accomplish this, but whether you’re a small association or a larger company, there will be pieces that you can pull into your own goals.”

AMPLIFY 2023 takes place June 27-28 at the National Housing Center in Washington, D.C. This is one event not to be missed!