I am going to give you some RSS items and you will process it as follows:
1. Extract the title of the RSS item.
2. Extract the URL from the item, not the
Here is an example input item:
Tags: creativity, innovation, management, top3pods, original
originals are not the people with the deepest expertise. They're people with the broadest experience... really good at questioning the status quo...
And here is how I'd like you to process it: Originals | Hidden Brain : NPR https://www.npr.org/2018/08/20/640216385/you-2-0-originals In his new book, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World, Adam investigates who comes up with great ideas, how, and what we can do to have more of them.... originals are not the people with the deepest expertise. They're people with the broadest experience... really good at questioning the status quo...
And now here is the first content I want you to process:
Tags: eu, publicsphere, bloggingportal, eurosceptic Imported from the Blogactiv.eu blogging platform, closed without warning in 2021. Links, images and embeds not guaranteed, and comments not displayed. Is primetime TV advertising the right way to connect citizens to the EU? Last week I saw and commented on an interesting blog post by Iveta Kazoka exploring one of the 'broken channels' which are supposed to link interested citizens to EU decision-making: The report does not cover all EU countries. If this has not been studied consistently across all Member States, it should be. Why? Because in every country where the above statement is true, people interested in a policy area can only conclude that the EU is out of touch and beyond their democratic control whenever EU legislation falls from the sky. Iveta also mentions that those few CSOs that do participate: As I commented, back in 2011 I thought the yellow card procedure, brought in alongside ECIs, would help. However, as Iveta pointed in her reply, that does depend on whether the national parliament actually bothers with it. As far as I know, noone is even tracking this. More to the point, it illustrates a fundamental problem. Almost all EU communications campaigns run from Brussels are framed to communicate a specific policy or programme, which is fine. But what's missing is a long-term effort to improve the infrastructure to support healthy, multi-directional conversations across Europe. This infrastructure - the EU Public Sphere - would give those individual, policy-specific campaigns some sort of context, and allow EU-level debates to become transparent to interested people across the EU, not just those that know how to search EUR-LEX and tune into EuroParlTV. Of course I'm simplifying - there is an infrastructure - but rather than reinforcing and deepening it, last week the emphasis appears to have shifted to putting 30 second ads on primetime TV: Original link It is surprising to see the EU do something so traditional. TV ads became mainstream in the 1950s, when Americans were captive to a handful of TV stations in their living rooms. While still a staple part of marketing, they have to compete in a very different landscape today. The EU could be telling true stories rather than obviously fictional ones, and could be experimenting with the huge variety of techniques, ranging from content marketing through to interactive data visualisation, developed over the past few years. But it's easy to sneer, so I won't - I'm not the audience targeted by these ads, so maybe this is the right thing to do. The data will tell, presumably. So I'll leave the last words to my teenage, Belgian kids, who presumably are amongst the audiences targeted here. But what is it they are they trying to sell?, they asked me, and Why isn't this money being spent on the projects? — See also: storytelling (34 posts) on my TumblrHub public library. Tags: storytelling, eu, advertising, propaganda, publicsphere Imported from the Blogactiv.eu blogging platform, closed without warning in 2021. Links, images and embeds not guaranteed, and comments not displayed. If you care about EU democracy you need to care about European media, particularly as the upcoming US media invasion gets underway. They'll be pushing on an open door when they get to Brussels. Anyone interested in the Internet and/or media and/or democracy should have followed the development of media business models since at least the late 1990s, when newspapers saw their classified advertising start drying up. The following decade saw a lot of thrashing around as revenue stream after revenue stream got hit (banner advertising? already bad, about to get worse. Subscriptions & paywalls? only for the few). It's only in the past couple of years that the business of journalism has seen any serious investment at all (see From longform renaissance to Big Internet disenchantment). However, that's largely been by US venture capitalists. The problem is that last time VCs invested in online media they gave us social media platforms where the product on sale was us. The result of this was put best - at least recently - by Quinn Norton, one of many to write about the impending launch of the advertising-free Ello social platform: Which is ironic, given that Ello took venture capital and don't mention it anywhere: The voracity of VC is why social media platforms are constantly tweaking their algorithms to keep you clicking, clicking, clicking. With every click they give you a little dopamine rush, and in return get a little piece of you to sell to advertisers. And they want their investments to sell more of you every year. The twin pressures of declining newspaper revenues and exploding social media platforms gave us a media landscape of: And native advertising, it seems, may not just be the Next Big Thing, it may actually work... at least from one perspective. However, there are two perspectives at play here: a) "it's the end of the world as we know it!": Seriously, watch it - it's hilarious. b) "Goddamn it, native ads will be the only thing keeping the lights on in 3 years", as told by NYTimes' Meredith Kopit Levien, lampooned in the above video. With existing media weakened, and a corporate journalism / native advertising business model which finally makes sense to them, a new wave of VC-funded, American news media are expanding globally, including Mashable, BuzzFeed, Vice Media and Business Insider (hat tip: Poynter) and, of course, "PoliticoEU", the Politico/Springer tie-up setting up here in Brussels. And the many more startups recently infused with venture capital will be right behind them, from Circa to Gawker. VCs are voracious, right? Keeping growth up will inevitably mean expanding beyond the US - it's just a question of time. Of course, any investment in media is to be welcomed, and many of these outfits are actually betting against trends like clickbait and redefining the paradigm of what digital news is, as well as pushing forward news publishing technology. But many seem based on corporate journalism and native advertising, with many of the rest focused on free-riding on journalism - even one of my favoruite sites, longform, is in on the act with their latest mobile app: Translation: we'll make money by sucking journalists' work into our app, where users can read it without being bothered by those pesky ads. Which pay the journalists salary. What could go wrong? Is it any wonder that journalism is embracing native advertising? In general, European media have been pretty slow to react to these trends, but the new arrivals will only accelerate change. Here in Brussels, moreover, they'll be pushing on an open door. With a struggling media sector and an overabundance of lobbyists and PR firms, it is no wonder that corporate journalism and native advertising is already alive and well. Take a look, for example, at this EurActiv special report, as shared on LinkedIn: OK, I don't get a content strategy revolving around what looks like a PDF report either, but if you assume that's a given, it's a pretty good use of Slideshare and LinkedIn. Above, the LinkedIn update provides an image (albeit the publication front page), and cites the author - a good example of a media putting its journalists forward via social media. The update of the "sharer" (Rick) provides an intriguing, curiosity-inducing quote (maybe I have diabetes!). The actual summary text, however, is much less compelling (page numbers on social media content?). Clicking on the media, below, opens a Slideshare popup (LinkedIn bought Slideshare a while back), making the content easier to read (once you go fullscreen), framed with comments: It took me a minute or two to spot the corporate sponsorship, in the upper right corner, and I used to work at EurActiv, where sponsorship has been part of the business model since launch. Before you think I'm being critical, I'm not. They are, after all, one of the few survivors of the very first dotcom news bubble, 15 years ago. Surviving sure beats going under, particularly in a sector - EU media - where most have failed (see the exhaustive list by founder Christophe Leclerq). But until recently I was sort of hoping that EurActiv's business model was the growing pains of a new EU media sector, that would one day be able to afford a proper Chinese wall between journalism and advertising. Modern journalism, after all, developed out of 19th century media practices that would turn your hair white if you read it today. But with the US model now in full export mode, it turns out that EurActiv was a premonition of more to come. Is it a problem? I'll leave the last word to Christophe, who seems to criticise "US PR-style ‘native advertising', ie ‘sponsored articles’" in contrast to "transparent, general support for broader coverage, practiced for EurActiv’s policy sections". I'm not sure the above example is aligned with that policy, but I'm happy to be corrected. What I am pretty sure that media needs to survive, and that, in the end, this mess is our fault because we're not paying for quality journalism. You only get what you pay for. -------- Most of my writing is inspired by and sourced from the stuff I put on my TumblrHub public library every day. Most relevant tags: native advertising, corporate journalism, PoliticoEU, algorithm, ello. See also longform, news, media, clickbait. Tags: social media, media, publicsphere, native advertising, lobby, corporate journalism, public-affairs"The report uncovered an uncomfortable truth: few civic society organisations are capable of participating in shaping the national positions at a stage when the European Commission has already come up with a draft….”
"... tend to struggle... it is usually a challenge to find a list of EU issues where the national government is elaborating its national position [and] some governments ... tend to view the draft national positions as confidential"
As the young actor says at the end of each video, Wow. (To those who don't watch Belgian TV, several of these ads are currently playing in primetime, just before and after the evening news. Go watch one). Further reading
Enter US venture capital
"venture capitalists... are a much worse deal than most people realize...you have to make stratospheric amounts of money, or you have to die. You can’t be moderately successful, you can’t build a sustainable business... When the CEOs of Facebook and Twitter signed up for that money, they signed away any chance of building privacy for their users.... Big social networks seek an impossible level of total user engagement. The more they have you, and the more they have on you, the more they can feed their demons." - Quinn Norton, What Does Ethical Social Networking Software Look Like?
"When you take venture capital, it is not a matter of if you’re going to sell your users, you already have... In the myopic and upside-down world of venture capital, exits precede the building of the actual thing itself. It would be a comedy if the repercussions of this toxic system were not so tragic... It is the opposite of a long-term, sustainable business." - Ello, Goodbye. Aral Balkan
"Two-thirds of respondents said that they’ve felt deceived upon realizing that an article or video was sponsored by a brand" - Study: Sponsored Content Has a Trust Problem, Contently
Native advertising
"The best way to preserve editorially independent, high quality journalism is to preserve the business model. And I think the idea of branded content that shares a form factor with editorial is a great first step.”
- Going native at the Times , Capital New YorkSo here they come
"And what about the publishers who produce the content that will fill the Longform app? They will get pageviews, as articles in the app will default to a "Web" version when clicked on—though most users will likely opt for the "Read" version, which is just a tap away and is far more aesthetically pleasing." - Journalism curator Longform launching first iPhone app
Pushing on an open door
Premonitions, not growing pains
Relevant reading
Here are the processed RSS items you provided:
Main Content: "Q. Is it realistic to think that a European public sphere could ever be created? TGA: My view is that we should try, but we shouldn’t ever kid ourselves that this is going to be like a national public sphere. Apart from anything else, we speak different languages, which is a huge barrier. The key for me, in continuing to make the argument for Europe, is what national politicians, national intellectuals, journalists, academics and opinion formers say in their national debates in their own national languages. That’s where we currently have a problem.... The real key for enthusing people about the EU again is what it does."
Is primetime TV advertising the right way to connect citizens to the EU?
Main Content: "Imported from the Blogactiv.eu blogging platform, closed without warning in 2021. Links, images and embeds not guaranteed, and comments not displayed." "Is primetime TV advertising the right way to connect citizens to the EU? Last week I saw and commented on an interesting blog post by Iveta Kazoka exploring one of the 'broken channels' which are supposed to link interested citizens to EU decision-making: 'The report uncovered an uncomfortable truth: few civic society organisations are capable of participating in shaping the national positions at a stage when the European Commission has already come up with a draft….' The report does not cover all EU countries. If this has not been studied consistently across all Member States, it should be. Why? Because in every country where the above statement is true, people interested in a policy area can only conclude that the EU is out of touch and beyond their democratic control whenever EU legislation falls from the sky. Iveta also mentions that those few CSOs that do participate: '... tend to struggle... it is usually a challenge to find a list of EU issues where the national government is elaborating its national position [and] some governments ... tend to view the draft national positions as confidential' As I commented, back in 2011 I thought the yellow card procedure, brought in alongside ECIs, would help. However, as Iveta pointed in her reply, that does depend on whether the national parliament actually bothers with it. As far as I know, noone is even tracking this. More to the point, it illustrates a fundamental problem. Almost all EU communications campaigns run from Brussels are framed to communicate a specific policy or programme, which is fine. But what's missing is a long-term effort to improve the infrastructure to support healthy, multi-directional conversations across Europe. This infrastructure - the EU Public Sphere - would give those individual, policy-specific campaigns some sort of context, and allow EU-level debates to become transparent to interested people across the EU, not just those that know how to search EUR-LEX and tune into EuroParlTV. Of course I'm simplifying - there is an infrastructure - but rather than reinforcing and deepening it, last week the emphasis appears to have shifted to putting 30 second ads on primetime TV: It is surprising to see the EU do something so traditional. TV ads became mainstream in the 1950s, when Americans were captive to a handful of TV stations in their living rooms. While still a staple part of marketing, they have to compete in a very different landscape today. The EU could be telling true stories rather than obviously fictional ones, and could be experimenting with the huge variety of techniques, ranging from content marketing through to interactive data visualisation, developed over the past few years. But it's easy to sneer, so I won't - I'm not the audience targeted by these ads, so maybe this is the right thing to do. The data will tell, presumably. So I'll leave the last words to my teenage, Belgian kids, who presumably are amongst the audiences targeted here. 'But what is it they are they trying to sell?', they asked me, and 'Why isn't this money being spent on the projects?'"
Venture-backed US media: over-funded & over here?
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