North Carolina Implements Stricter Data Security Standards for Student Information: What Third-Party Vendors Need to Know

by Uncategorized

For much of the past decade, states have been implementing new laws and policies to protect the privacy and safety of student data.  Most recently, the state of North Carolina’s Department of Public Instruction (NCDPI) launched new data security standards for any technology or system that receives student information from a state system.  Going into effect on August 1, 2023, this statewide policy design and intent is to ensure that public school units (PSU) have the resources they need to adequately evaluate the security readiness of vendor partners. In an effort to prevent cybersecurity threats in ed tech platforms and tools, NCDPI implemented a new process that impacts third-party vendors at a PSU.  In short, third-party vendors will be required do the following: 

  • Sign the DPI Data Confidentiality and Security Agreement, with no modifications.
  • Articulate which statewide systems they will connect to, data fields requested and rational for collection, and how that data will be restricted to users who have a legitimate business need, and a description of any data written back to a statewide system.
  • Submit security documentation including a vendor readiness assessment report, a third-party conducted assessment report (FedRAMP authorization, ISO 27001 certification, or others) no less than 12 months old, and alignment against the NC DIT Statewide Information Security Manual.
  • Provide additional documentation if not in compliance with the Statewide Information Security Manual. 

Third-party vendors that are contracted or renewed after August 1, 2023 will have to be evaluated with the aforementioned steps, before it can be integrated in the PSU. Vendors that do not comply with the security requirements for integration will not be allowed to receive student data from the PSU.  

SIIA raised concerns with the new policy and requested additional guidance via a letter on  Jun 20, 2023. We received a response on Jul 12, 2023 with direct answers to our questions. We are posting these answers for the broader public in case they are of assistance. Further, SIIA participated in a public meeting/call with NCDPI on Jun 22, 2023, however, there is no recording of that call.  There is still much confusion on this and we look forward to working with our members and the state of North Carolina to make sure student data is protected.  

If you have any additional questions, please contact our education policy team at education@siia.net.

 

To view the letter and response, please click here.  

 

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SIIA Urges CFPB to Protect Data Brokers and First Amendment Rights

by Policy

The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) has expressed concerns to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) regarding regulations on “data brokers.” SIIA, representing over 450 companies in the information business, cautions against regulations that hinder productive data use or infringe on First Amendment rights. They argue that data brokers play a crucial role in providing information for various purposes such as law enforcement, combating money laundering and terrorism, child support enforcement, insurance, product safety, tax compliance, fraud prevention, and news publishing. These activities rely on publicly-available data and contribute to consumer security and convenience. SIIA asserts that there is a legislative and regulatory consensus that data brokering is protected by the First Amendment. They also argue that restrictions on publicly-available data or its derivatives would violate the First Amendment. While regulations on private data may be appropriate, they emphasize the importance of protecting the public domain and maintaining the availability of information for positive societal endeavors.

Read Full Letter Here

‘This AI Is Something We Can Interact With Easily’; AI Snapshots From the Content World

by Media

Jim VandeHei, co-founder of Axios, recently wrote that the improved search results people get with ChatGPT-like technologies will “force publishers to tighten our direct relationship with you, the customer/consumer.” He also predicts that “newsletters will rise in importance, as Microsoft and Google make emailing magically easy by helping you write, answer and sort emails.”

Engineers are creating AI reporters that can participate in and cover meetings—though still a bit “hallucinatory”—illustrate them like Monet, and write sponsored content. But that type of transformation, according to VandeHei, should make publishers only want to be more trustful.

“AI will rain a hellfire of fake and doctored content on the world, starting now,” VandeHei wrote. “That’ll push readers to seek safer and trusted sources of news—directly instead of through the side door of social media.”

That’s interesting because the Reuters Digital News Report that I wrote about earlier in the week talks about all the traffic now going through those side doors.

VandeHei also predicts that “advertisers will shift to safer, well-lit spaces, creating a healthy incentive for some publishers to get rid of the litter you see on their sites today. That shift is already happening.”

“Everything we’re seeing right now is a progression over time,” said Dray McFarlane of Tasio at our recent AMPLIFY summit. “The difference is this AI is something we can interact with easily—ChatGPT gets people involved.”

Here are 6 AI snapshots from the content frontlines:

Create AI reporters. Mark Talkington, publisher of The Palm Springs Post and another Coachella Valley publication, has been developing an artificial reporter named Paul, writes Sophie Culpepper in NiemanLab. “It’s just software that works in the background and listens in and acts as a reporter,” Talkington said. “It can sit there and it can draw pictures that look like Monet based on…what people are saying, but we don’t need any of that. All we need is a short summary of what happened during this [local town] meeting.”

Summarize meetings.Talkington’s friend, former Microsoft VP Peter Loforte, also created an AI, nicknamed Maria, who can participate in and accurately summarize meetings, Culpepper reported. “Both Maria and Paul ‘are built using a collection of publicly available models and AIs that I fine-tune, chain together, and customize in novel ways leveraging Python code,’ Loforte said. Interestingly, during the development, he found inspiration in the adaptability of non Gamstop casinos UK, which operate outside traditional regulations yet manage to thrive by leveraging innovative technology. He has mostly relied on the library LangChain, ‘which enables developers to build all sorts of LLM-based solutions leveraging any number of models… I’ve never seen progress move so quickly. It is the Wild West right now.’”

Generate messaging. ChatGPT can help generate safety messaging content to be distributed to the community or help to educate community members, wrote Rachel Engel of Lexipol. Consider how the chatbot can assist with preparations for certain events, such as our daily EMS Week themes, by creating digestible information in lay terms that can be customized by age. For example: “Explain to a 5-year-old what paramedics do.”

Send an automated newsletter. Scott Brodbeck, founder of Virginia-based media company Local News Now, began experimenting with a completely automated weekday morning newsletter comprising an AI-written introduction and summaries of human-written stories, Culpepper wrote. Using tools like Zapier, Airtable, and RSS, ARLnow can create and send the newsletter without any human intervention. Next 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.”

Experiment. In a TV interview at the end of last year, Brodbeck said that they “were having fun with AI.” They had it write stories on a peppermint mocha shortage and paranormal activity at a county civic meeting—and “sing the praises of a potential Rosslyn to Georgetown gondola. It liked that. Then we asked it to talk nicely about Arlington in general and the AI came up on its own with the Air Force Memorial, Tomb of the Unknowns and the Iwo Jima Memorial.”

Work with transcripts. “You can take a transcript, or maybe even a series of minutes that someone’s typed up and reformat them, putting them into bulleted lists—adding Markdown formatting,” Joe Amditis, assistant director for products and events at the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State (NJ) University, told me. “If you have a set of instructions on how you’d like to format something, you can set up those instructions through Zapier. The bot will take the text—whether through a Google form, or even a Slack message with a certain tag or in a certain channel. It’ll make decisions on how to label things, and once you iterate and tweak that process and give it a good run through to make sure that it’s consistent.”

‘What Problem Are You Trying to Solve?’ The Importance of Surveys, Job Titles and Pushing the Hot Buttons

by Media

“We think about strategy,” said Jen Hajigeorgiou, who oversees content development and management for the National Association of Realtors publications, during a session on podcasts at our recent AMPLIFY summit. “What are you doing with [that podcast]? What problem are you trying to solve? I try to address every new product we’re launching with a clear understanding of what it is we’re trying to do and why.”

Hajigeorgiou has just one good job title of the many who were at AMPLIFY. Others included: deputy executive director, strategic initiatives; podcast producer; marketing and brand manager; senior vice president for content strategy and development; client engagement director; and digital marketing and engagement manager.

Job titles can be important in a few ways. When the topic of first-party data came up in her AMPLIFY Main Stage talk, Sondra Hadden, senior director of audience growth marketing for Industry Dive, said: “We want to know about job title,” giving an example of a group that uses WhatsApp for messaging. “What do our ads look like [for them]? Do we need to speak to [that group] differently because that’s where they spend their time?”

For Industry Dive, having the right audience—with the right job titles—means everything. It reminded me of a story that Elizabeth Petersen of Simplify Compliance told a few years back, when they launched the National Association of Healthcare Revenue Integrity (NAHRI).

“We were looking at registrations for events, and one of my product people noticed, ‘There’s a new title popping up and we had never seen this title before’—it was revenue integrity specialist,” said Petersen. “We started picking up the phone and calling customers, [asking], ‘What does that mean?'”

“I don’t really know,” came the answer. “I’m isolated. I’ve been given this title. There’s nobody else who does this in my organization.”

“So we sent out a survey,” Petersen said. “‘Are there revenue integrity specialists at your organization?’ We started doing focus groups and shadowing, and after a year we said these guys need an association. Getting folks to truly opt into something these days is very difficult. The first month that we offered a free resource, 2500 signed up for an e-newsletter. And in the first month and a half we had 400 people signed up for an association that didn’t exist. It would not have come about… without talking to people.”

Okay, Instagram Threads it isn’t. But NAHRI just completed its sixth annual Revenue Integrity Week and remains a very successful group. (More on the idea of having a special week for your niche next week.)

Surveying and strategizing.

There was another key word in Petersen’s story: survey. “There’s more data than ever out there on your audience,” said Davide Savenije, editor in chief of Industry Dive, who presented with Hadden. “How do your readers really feel about your publication? There’s no perfect picture from the data. It’s a little fallacy that the data tells us everything. Be disciplined in what you measure. Reader surveys help us fill in those blind spots.”

Another thing a survey can accomplish is to give you hot-button topics. For the National Association of Realtors, a podcast helped to do that.

“At the base of our strategy is finding impactful and engaging content,” said NAR’s Hajigeorgiou. “What was missing was we didn’t have a podcast. So we identified the need, fast tracked it forward, connected with a vendor to help us make that happen quickly—and in 2022 we created Drive with NAR. It’s been very successful with 3,000 listeners on average and expanding. One episode drew 12,000 listeners—it concerned the safety of Realtors, focusing on two women being stalked. This year they’ll do a 12-part series on safety.

“During that [strategy-developing] time is when you’re going to be talking what are the expectations of this [product],” Hajigeorgiou added. “[In this case,] what does the organization want from this podcast?”

And what if that hot-button topic—like safety—is a little too hot, it was asked at a later session? “It’s important for us to strike a balance,” said Laetitia Clayton of the National Association of Social Workers. “When leadership isn’t behind us, [we have to tell them] that it’s really important that we talk about this topic. If we don’t, it looks bad. We have a great membership team that helps us craft responses.”

“You want to be on the right side of this,” added Sarah Gaydos of Graphek who spoke with Clayton.

Seeking ‘News That Feels More Relevant’; Reuters Report Offers ‘Routes’ to Growth

by Media

“Audiences are ambivalent about algorithms, but [more importantly] they are still not convinced that journalists and news organizations can do any better [than side doors – see below] in curating or summarizing the most important developments,” the new Reuters report tells us. This is where B2B journalism should have an advantage, knowing their topics and audience so well. Or will AI come up with even better answers?

On Crain Communications’ engaging Instagram page, we see the following:
– an invite to join POWER Breakfasts in Cleveland, Detroit, Grand Rapids and New York;
– photos from their Automobilwoche’s Women’s Leadership Day in Munich;
– photos of Crain Neal Award winners to amplify their brands;
– CEO KC Crain interviewing Mark Cuban at the Mackinac Policy Conference

And much more, of course. According to the annual Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2023 (available here), only around a fifth of respondents (22%) now say they prefer to start their news journeys with a website or app—that’s down 10 percentage points since 2018. “Younger groups everywhere are showing a weaker connection with news brands’ own websites and apps than previous cohorts—preferring to access news via side-door routes such as social media, search, or mobile aggregators.”

Exploring the impact of various digital platforms on our media consumption habits is always an enlightening endeavor. It’s fascinating to note, for instance, how a platform like beste deutsche onlyfans has woven itself into the fabric of social media engagement, particularly among the younger demographic. This service isn’t just about individual creators; it’s indicative of a broader shift towards niche communities and direct patronage in the digital age. The latest report underlines this trend, showing that while direct engagement remains strong, the diverse side-door routes such as specialized content platforms are increasingly carving out significant space in our online interactions. It’s a testament to the evolving landscape of digital content consumption, where personalized experiences are valued.

In Part 2 of our look at this report, here are five more takeaways:

Look for relevancy and context. The majority still prefer to read the news (57%), rather than watch (30%) or listen (13%). It’s clear that “most consumers are looking not for more news, but news that feels more relevant, and helps them make sense of the complex issues facing us all.” I recall a quote from ALM CEO Bill Carter: “We have to provide context and insight, data and analysis, forums and events that allow our customers to excel as practitioners as well as business professionals.” The report states that “given lower satisfaction with some algorithmic selection, it is not surprising to find that around 65% of under-35s and 55% of over-35s have tried to influence story selection by following or unfollowing, muting or blocking, or changing other settings.

Bundle creatively. The report found that people “do not want to be ‘tied down’ by one subscription. Instead, they want to access multiple brands with little or no friction for a fair price.” DCN reported earlier this year that The Weather Company had developed a platform that enables bundling across media portfolios. “We are striving to disrupt the subscription economy by going across media companies that aren’t traditionally connected,” said CEO Sheri Bachstein. The strategy is to align with brands [such as Consumer Reports] that help people make more informed decisions in their daily planning.

Offer subscription options. According to the report, 23% say they have cancelled at least one of their ongoing news publications, while a similar number say they have negotiated a cheaper price. At the same time, others have taken up new subscriptions, often using a cheap trial offer. “FT recently launched ‘The Edit’—an iOS app that gives readers access to 8 articles, every weekday—for just £4.99 per month (compared to the £35 per month standard digital subscription),” Tara Lajumoke, managing director of FT Strategies, wrote this week. “This allows the FT to onboard new readers or save existing subscribers, without devaluing the brand or value perception.” Among those cancelling their subscription in the last year, the cost of living or the high price was cited most often as a reason.

Be content distinct. Across markets, the most important stated reason to subscribe is to get access to better quality or more distinctive journalism (65% in the U.S.) than can be obtained for free. Second (47%) is identifying with the brand and in its journalists—either a long-standing relationship or the sense that the outlet speaks to them for them. A fourth of respondents say that games, puzzles and non-news features are important factors for them.

Continue with video and audio. Across all markets, almost two-thirds (62%) consumed video via social media in the previous week and just 28% when browsing a news website or app. Facebook and YouTube remain the biggest outlets for online video with Instagram not far behind. A third (34%) access a podcast monthly. Just under a third (29%) say they have spent more time listening to podcasts this year, with 19% saying they have listened less.