Study Hall Digest 3/11/2019

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

Facebook Pivots to Privacy??

Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday laid out a “privacy-focused vision for social networking,”his plan to overhaul Facebook’s model by shifting from an emphasis on public sharing to private messaging. Here’s the basic rundown:

• The plan stems from the company’s observation that users are increasingly drawn to private over public sharing, said Zuckerberg, who noted in his post that, “private messaging, ephemeral stories, and small groups are by far the fastest growing areas of online communication.” This is the future of social networking, as he sees it.
• According to Zuck’s post, Facebook will rebuild its services around the principles: Private interaction, encryption (messages will undergo end-to-end encryption), reducing permanence (so an emphasis on ephemeral content like Instagram stories), safety, secure data storage (so not storing data in countries with poor track records when it comes to privacy and freedom), and interoperability (hence the integration of Facebook Messenger with WhatsApp and Instagram, making it easier for users to share content across the platforms).
• One of the major questions arising from this announcement seems to be: How will this new approach co-exist with Facebook’s current business model of harvesting data for targeted ads? Zuckerberg told Wired it will be harder this way, but didn’t exactly lay out a plan, instead arguing that giving consumers what they want will lead to success.
• Some have expressed concern over whether the move could worsen the spread of misinformation across the platform, and whether this is in fact a strategy to shrug off responsibility for what is shared through its services.

The announcement is a smart move on Zuckerberg’s part, and one I think people are right to treat skeptically. Facebook is in crisis, weathering a string of revelations about abuses of user privacy and its role in spreading false information, and that has taken a toll on its numbers. Roughly 15 million users in the United States have dropped the platform since 2017. Zuckerberg sees this, and he sees the growing popularity of private messaging services — it makes sense to adapt one’s public-facing mission accordingly.

But there’s the public-facing mission and then there’s the execution, and what its impact will be on Facebook and social media as a whole. It has been pointed out that this is almost certainly a self-serving move by Zuckerberg to further dominate social networking by trouncing competing private messaging services, like WeChat, Signal and Google Hangouts. “Crushing all those apps, along with email and old-fashioned phone calls, would be a major step toward becoming the operating system of our lives,” wrote Siva Vaidhyanathan in The Guardian. Facebook has already dominated public sharing, and there’s no indication that model will die out entirely; now it’s onto the private realm.

This seems like a superficial antidote to the deeper problems plaguing Facebook. Facebook has gotten a lot of flack for sharing user data, but more broadly speaking, it’s inextricable from the whole toxic culture of oversharing and misinformation. Facebook is superficially addressing these things, but will it really stop harvesting user data? Will bad actors stop spreading lies on the platform when it’s still profitable to do so? I’m not holding my breath.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth Warren has put out a plan to break up big tech, a plan that would include severing Facebook from Instagram. Even if Warren doesn’t win the presidency in 2020 (and let’s be honest, she likely won’t), I wouldn’t be surprised to see other politicians jump aboard — fear of Facebook is pretty universal right about now.

The New York Times Reveals its J School Bias

This past week, the New York Times director of internships Theodore Kim tweeted out his rankings of the journalism schools that turn out “the most consistently productive candidates,” and it was, predictably, a rundown of prohibitively expensive elite schools. Media Twitter was not having it!

The continued glorification of these elite institutions serves to keep places like the Times exclusive to the few and the independently wealthy, as many pointed out. At a time when the industry at large is flailing and jobs aren’t even a sure thing, such a statement seems sketchy at best. Kim later backtracked a bit, apologizing “if I sounded elitist and narrow” and saying he values a journalist’s work above all. But we all know that’s only true to an extent. The attitude he expressed really belies an attitude among many media gatekeepers that limits the sorts of voices that can become employed at the Times. Would love to know just how many Metro interns come straight from New England Ivy Leagues. Surprise: those interns are also the most likely to get hired into staff positions! Lol.

The controversy sparked a broader discussion about the value of journalism schools. I myself did not go to one. I learned how to report on the job at a local newspaper. But I was lucky to find employment at an entry-level position among editors willing to train utterly inexperienced young reporters, and I wonder if there are an insufficient amount of jobs like that that can serve as launchpads. The main benefit of J School might not be basic reporting skills but buying connections.

The Bible is a Lifestyle Brand

Ever read The Bible? Me neither, that shit is boring. An intimidating density of words? Ultra-thin pages? No thanks. There may very well be some good stuff in there but I’ll never know, because God sucks at branding strategy.

Fortunately, Los Angeles-based startup Alabaster does not! Founder Brian Chung, inspired by his failed first attempts to make it through the religious text after first converting to Christianity, set out to make the holy book “millennial-friendly” by packaging it in Kinfolk-esque magazines format with lots of negative space and Instagram-worthy photos of flower crowns.

These glossies start at around $30, so if they churn out every book of the Bible at that price point it would come out to $1,980. Negative space isn’t cheap!! It may seem a little crude to market what you believe to be the literal WORD OF GOD as a hip (and pricey) lifestyle brand, but this is the logical next step in the well-documented hipsterization of Christianity which has been championed by celebrities and helped along by the advent of social media. Anyway, I’m excited to read some of the bloodier passages from the Book of Judges alongside a soothing nature photograph or perhaps a minimalist shot of some paint brushes.

Civil is Back!!!

After an initial failed round of funding, the cryptocurrency-based startup is giving its launch another shot — founder Matthew Iles announced in a blog post the company will again attempt to sell its Civil tokens, but this time there will be no minimum fundraising goal required to trigger the launch.

Still, it’s difficult to see how the controversial project has worked through the baggage that sank its first attempt — frankly, we still don’t understand blockchain tech itself, let alone how it applies to media. And Civil hasn’t really done a good job at explaining itself, even though it’s been asked to repeatedly (including by us). Who would buy something if they don’t even understand how it works? As Rick Edmonds at Poynter pointed out, there are a lot of news organizations struggling to survive, and “a finite pool of foundation funding and individual contributions” — it seems unlikely Civil is welcoming enough to seriously compete.

Longread of the Week: I was enraptured by this Vox deep-dive from Rebecca Jennings on the coffee scene and why decaf hasn’t taken off along with the wellness movement. Hint: It’s linked to hustle culture!!

Study Hall Comic Edition

By Aude White 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

EVERYTHING ELSE

— More than 1,400 towns have lost local newspapers in the last 15 years, and they are suffering as a result, according to an Associated Press study. Without the watchdogs, local governments are more likely to engage in wasteful spending, and the problems that impact real peoples’ lives escape investigation. Maybe that’s why West Virginia lawmakers just got away with allowing Dow Chemical to poison everyone in the state because they’re heavy and dehydrated???

— Media Matters for America dug up audio of Tucker Carlson saying disgusting shit on a radio show, including shrugging off child rape as marriage to an underage girl and wondering whether it’s possible for sex workers to be assaulted. But can someone like Tucker Carlson be cancelled? Fox News would have to care, and in order for them to care their viewers would have to care, so…

— Remember Glenn Thrush? Facing sexual misconduct allegations, he was moved from covering the White House for the New York Times to…covering poverty and the social safety net for the New York Times. But Anna Merlan at Jezebel noticed he seemed to be inching back into his old beat, first covering trade then Congress, and more recently he seems to have changed his Twitter bio to “DC Correspondent.” He was already getting a slap on the wrist, and now it seems that slap has been downgraded to barely-noticeable tap.

— BuzzFeed, the cash-strapped operation  that a few months ago fired upwards of 200 employees, pulled a cute publicity stunt and published a print newspaper that was distributed at Manhattan subway stations. The newspaper itself was fun, sure, but former employees were not pleased with the questionable use of funds. Pivot to print alt-weekly? Meanwhile, they’re back on their stealing-content-game, including from employees they just fired (upside down smiley emoji face).

— Stephen Elliott’s lawsuit against Shitty Media Men List creator Moira Donegan is going about as well as expected. A federal judge in Brooklyn recently ruled that Elliott cannot sue Donegan for inflicting emotional distress, and shot down claims from Elliott’s lawyers that Donegan’s alleged tweets (which cannot be found on Twitter) about hating men and loving the “witch-hunt” are relevant to the suit. Elliott can still sue for defamation, but the judge said he’d have to better prove Donegan reaches the “actual malice” standard.