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"Tell the chef, the beer is on me."
Welcome to the 36th episode of "The Mediatwits," the weekly audio podcast from MediaShift. The co-hosts are MediaShift's Mark Glaser and Dorian Benkoil, who is filling in for Rafat Ali. It's been a crazy week in media + tech, with Google privacy concerns, Amazon falling short in earnings, and much more. But the dominant news was Facebook filing for an IPO, with demand to read its S-1 crashing the SEC's servers. The startup had $3.7 billion in revenues, with $1 billion in profits last year, and showed tremendous growth in users and advertising. Can anything slow down the juggernaut on the way to raising $5 billion in a public offering? We talked to special guest Nick O'Neill, founder of AllFacebook.com, who was impressed with the user engagement on the social networking site.
This week was also the "Dive into Media" conference put on by AllThingsD in Laguna Niguel, Calif. Special guest Peter Kafka programmed the show and interviewed many of the top execs on stage. He told us about the challenge of interviewing Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, a former improv comedian, as well as the mix of old and new media at the show. Finally, Columbia University's Journalism School and Stanford University's Engineering School received a $30 million gift from Helen Gurley Brown to create a new Institute for Media Innovation, marking the largest gift in the history of Columbia's J-School. Has digital media now arrived? Has the revolution been institutionalized?
Check it out!
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Intro and outro music by 3 Feet Up; mid-podcast music by Autumn Eyes via Mevio's Music Alley.
Here are some highlighted topics from the show:
Intro and roundup
1:30: Questions about Google combining privacy policies
4:00: Google, Amazon fall short in earnings
5:50: Rundown of topics on the podcast
Facebook IPO fever
7:00: Special guest Nick O'Neill of AllFacebook.com
10:00: Dorian: Each Facebook employee bringing in $1 million in revenues
11:35: O'Neill: Probably more than 60% of ad revenues from self-serving ad system
14:00: 12% of Facebook's revenues coming from Zynga
16:00: Special guest Peter Kafka
18:20: Advertisers still not sure about ROI on Facebook
D: Dive into Media
21:00: D conference tries out a niche conference for media + tech
22:45: Kafka: Twitter CEO Dick Costolo can zing you if you're not careful
23:45: Great insights from Hulu, YouTube execs
$30 million gift to Columbia/Stanford
28:10: Attempt to bring data and journalism worlds together
31:00: Bill Campbell, "The Coach," is an adviser on the project
32:45: Dorian: Era of digital media is here
Microsoft Attacks Google Privacy Policy With Ads, Gmail Man at TPMIdeaLab
Facebook's IPO Filing is Here at Business Insider
Sean Parker, Chris Hughes And Eduardo Saverin Dumped Their Facebook Shares at AllFacebook
Well, Now We Know What Facebook's Worth--And It's Not $100 Billion at Business Insider
Facebook's Ad Business Is a $3 Billion Mystery at AllThingsD
Reminder: The $5 Billion Facebook IPO Won't Make You Rich at Gizmodo
Facebook's $5 Billion IPO, By The Numbers [CHARTS] at MarketingLand
The Facebook IPO: billion-user ambition at a $1bn price at Comment Is Free
Facebook and Don Graham Have Been Very Good to Each Other at Forbes
Dive into Media coverage at AllThingsD
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo: We're Not a Media Company. We're in the Media Business. at AllThingsD
Hulu Boss Jason Kilar: Who You Callin' Clown Co.? at AllThingsD
Columbia J-School and Stanford Eng Nab $30M Joint Gift for Media Innovation From Helen Gurley Brown at AllThingsD
Don't forget to vote in our weekly poll, this time prognosticating what you think Facebook will be worth:
What do you think Facebook's value will be in 5 years?
Mark Glaser is executive editor of MediaShift and Idea Lab. He also writes the bi-weekly OPA Intelligence Report email newsletter for the Online Publishers Association. He lives in San Francisco with his son Julian. You can follow him on Twitter @mediatwit. and Circle him on Google+
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BetaBeat :: Henry Blodget is a tech blogger at Business Insider. He pointed out what he saw as a suspicious series of events. Groupon, which has filed for an IPO, has been taking a lot of heat from both the press and the SEC over its unique accounting methods. Because of the SEC’s “quiet period”, which prohibits companies who have filed for IPO from promoting themselves, Groupon cannot defend itself publicly.
[Henry Blodget, Business Insider:] The clever method Groupon is using to try to get around the SEC’s quiet period rule is writing a detailed public communication in the form of a CEO “letter to employees” that Groupon has then distributed publicly with the help of a trusted media outlet.
The media outlet in question is All Things D and the reporter is Kara Swisher.
[Kara Swisher, AllThingsD:] Henry never called me to ask how I got the email, as is his usual practice. I would not have commented I guess, but a call would have been nice before writing that out of thin air. So not sure how to respond, except that he always seems to publish nearly each and every memo I manage to get, in any case. ...
Continue to read Ben Popper, www.betabeat.com
Original piece written by Henry Blodget www.buinessinsider.com
Changing technology is changing journalism in more ways than we can probably even understand. One of those changes concerns the definitions of “journalist” and “journalism” themselves, the question of who’s permitted to make or contest those definitions, and the other question of whether those lines are fair to draw in the first place.
This is one story about an instance of this argument that’s unusual for at least four reasons:
The focus of this particular argument was Michael Arrington. Arrington was an angel investor in technology startups before he founded TechCrunch, one of the biggest and most influential technology and tech business news sites on the web. For a few years, he was an investor and a publisher too.
In March 2009, in a post titled “The Rules Apply To Everyone,” he announced that he was going to discontinue investments to avoid any appearance of a conflict of interest. Then on April 27 of this year — some time after TechCrunch and then the Huffington Post had been acquired by AOL — he wrote “An Update to My Investment Policy,” announcing that he was investing in companies again, including companies and industries covered by TechCrunch.
Arrington acknowledged that from time to time, this would create conflicts of interest in his coverage, but promised he would disclose those whenever possible. He also wrote: “Other tech press will make hay out of this because they don’t like the fact that we are, simply, a lot better than them.”
The next day, AllThingsD‘s Kara Swisher wrote “Godspeed on That Investing Thing, Yertle–But I Still Have Some Questions for Your Boss, Arianna.”
Swisher wasn’t exactly polite to Arrington — the Yertle the Turtle comparison, and all — and said his post and policy were “vaguely icky.” But the thrust was directed not at Arrington or TechCrunch, but at Ariana Huffington, who is newly ranked above Arrington on AOL’s organizational chart:
Would it surprise you to know that BoomTown doesn’t really care anymore if TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington sidelines as a blogger while he makes investments in tech companies his tech news site covers? ….
[W]hile I kind of understand where Arrington is coming from, what I don’t understand is how this kind of convenient and on-the-fly rule-making can govern a much larger company whose strongly and repeatedly stated goal by Huffington herself is to create quality journalism….
Simply put, does AOL, which is touting itself as a 21st-century media company, need to have 21st-century rules of the road? Or perhaps not so much?
These questions are contentious and much-contended. They also often obscure what might be a more meaningful inquiry into what makes for best journalism practices in this new world. How much do writers need to tell readers about themselves? Is a tweet a story? Now that journalists have more means to address each other and each other’s work directly, what’s the most appropriate way to do it?
When professional journalism organizations had a near-monopoly on publishing and broadcasting tools, they were largely able to dictate the codes of the trade among themselves. It’s easy to overstate how homogeneous those were, especially at different points in history. But it’s definitely true that as new publishing tools and new media companies are disrupting established businesses, they’re disrupting those codes, too.
The technology press is arguably at the head of this disruption. Tech blogs and media companies were (and are) among the first and most successful competitors to print and broadcast journalism. Because tech outlets also usually cover media-producing and media-consuming technology, they’re among the most reflective on their own tools.
They have also been the most entrepreneurial, partly mirroring the industries they cover. That’s how TechCrunch works, and also how AllThingsD works. Those outlets both put together big technology conferences. They both work very hard for the bottom line. They’re both 21st-century media companies.
On May 7, Arrington responded to Swisher and other writers who’d questioned his new policy, in a blistering (even for Arrington) post titled “The Tech Press: Screw Them All.” In particular, he called out Swisher, her parent company AllThingsD, and her employee Liz Gannes, accusing them of being equally conflicted and much more evasive about their conflicts:
AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher, the chief whiner about our policy, is married to a Google executive. This is disclosed by her, but I certainly don’t see it as any less of a conflict than when I invest in a startup. And yet she whines. One of her writers, Liz Gannes, is married to a Facebook consultant. She covers the company and its competitors regularly. She discloses it as well, but it isn’t clear whether or not her husband has stock in Facebook. That’s something as a reader I’d like to know. And regardless, it’s a huge conflict of interest. I think someone will think twice before slamming a company and then going to sleep next to an employee of that company. Certain adjectives, for example, might be softened in the hopes of marital harmony….
Why do the people who complain the most about TechCrunch have these vague conflicts of interest themselves? Why aren’t they more forthcoming in their disclosures? How do they justify their hypocrisy, even to themselves? Seriously, how?
Aaaannnd this is where we jump to Twitter.
[View the story "Kara Swisher, Michael Arrington, and Me" on Storify]
Meanwhile, Columbia’s Emily Bell hit on one of the few really good ideas to come out of this whole mess:
[View the story "A new beat: accountability in tech press" on Storify]
Dave Winer — who would go on to discuss the idea in more detail with Jay Rosen — may have put the best coda on the whole affair with his post, “Journalist or not? Wrong question“:
[F]ights over who’s a journalist or not are pointless.
However, there is a line that is not pointless: Are you an insider or a user?
Insiders get access to execs for interviews and background info. Leaks and gossip. Vendor sports. Early versions of products. Embargoed news. Extra oomph on social networks. Favors that will be curtailed or withdrawn if you get too close to telling truths they don’t want told.
All the people participating in the “journalist or not” debate are insiders. They are all compromised. Whether or not they disclose some of these conflicts, none of them disclose the ones that are central to what they will and will not say.
That’s where we’re left. Are you in or are you out?
Image by Joi Ito used under a Creative Commons license.
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