Clean RSS item extraction
You:
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:
originals are not the people with the deepest expertise. They're people with the broadest experience... really good at questioning the status quo...
Tags: creativity, innovation, management, top3pods, original
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 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:
Original link
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).
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?
—
Further reading
- An alternative overarching EU communication strategy?
- Of technocrats, journalistic balance and telling EU stories
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).
Enter US venture capital
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:
"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?
Which is ironic, given that Ello took venture capital and don't mention it anywhere:
"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
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:
- clickbait: content created to be shared (let's just ignore the fact that noone's actually reading it);
- corporate journalism: why bother with journalists when you can pass your PR off as journalism?
- native advertising: let's pay those desperate hacks to write our advertising copy for us - as a bonus, they'll blend our paid-for articles so well into their 'real' journalism that a majority of readers can't tell the difference.
"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
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!":
ChatGPT:
Here are the processed RSS items you provided:
- Five minutes with Timothy Garton Ash: “We’re far more European in the UK than we think we are” | British Politics and Policy at LSE
- URL: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/five-minutes-with-timothy-garton-ash-were-far-more-european-in-the-uk-than-we-think-we-are/
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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?
- URL: https://myhub.ai/items/wow-has-it-come-to-this
-
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?
- URL: https://myhub.ai/items/venture-backed-us-media-over-funded-over-here-2
- Main Content: "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). Enter US venture capital 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: '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? Which is ironic, given that Ello took venture capital and don't mention it anywhere: '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 The problem with much current journalism, particularly online journalism, is that it's beholden to the attention economy: 'You see, advertising is the opposite of art... Art is about the needs of the audience. Advertising is about the needs of the advertiser. I work in technology to try and make a sustainable business that puts art first... The opposite of surveillance is user-centered design and strong, principled design is the only way we can compete with the invasion of US start-ups that want to do to us what they did to the Arab Spring in Syria. For the past few years, the European Commission has been quite interested in what it calls the digital single market. It makes a lot of sense: one set of rules for a unified space could make it easier for the likes of Google and Facebook to grow their dominant positions...but, surely, also for ethical alternatives to grow as well? US company gets 30% of the eyeballs. Without getting into policy issues around e.g. net neutrality or copyright, it's clear that one advantage of a European player would be that their ambitions in EU space would be subject to the full range of EU competition rules. A company from Silicon Valley would also be subject to EU rules, of course, but I think there is a risk that it would be somewhat easier for a US-based company to go running to the US government for protection, using any actions by the EU as part of a narrative of EU bullying. Maybe I'm wrong. If you think I am, please explain to me why. So, I was excited to read that Spotify, backed by another big VC, was planning to launch in 100 countries at once (EU single market: here's looking at you!). But I was puzzled by the statement in Spotify’s news release: 'In each new market, we will work with local creators and partners to expand our music offering and deliver a Spotify experience that meets the unique needs of each market...' Does this mean there will be an actual product difference between markets, or is it just a neat way of saying 'our lawyers have ensured that our contracts with rights holders vary slightly across 100 countries'? Moreover, why launch in 100 countries? There may be some economies of scale in negotiating licensing rights, but surely not in launching marketing campaigns. Was Spotify looking for a single, media-friendly, launch date? My thinking was that it would be great to see Spotify succeed. Its deal with Uber is a great example of how artists and digital companies could work together (if they were both European). Even if I'm not much of a fan of much of Spotify's content, I think it's a useful service and I'd be happy for it to succeed in the marketplace. In part because I think Apple's acquisition of Beats will lead to a lot of innovation (not least on pricing and how we're all locked into ever-shorter proprietary media ecosystems), but also because I believe that the eventual home of Spotify's many competitors will be media platforms such as Amazon or Apple. I think an overfunded Spotify will continue to create the markets that will enable those more profitable acquisitions. And that would be a great outcome. But only if Spotify doesn't follow the usual Silicon Valley script. I'm going to remain optimistic. And my optimism is bolstered by Daniel Ek's own call for Spotify to rebrand itself as an infrastructure company. If that's true then the music marketplaces of Amazon, Apple, Google etc. will need Spotify as a partner. And that changes the balance of power in content markets considerably. It means that even these giants will be dependent on one particular distribution channel. Or, to put it in non-jargon, these companies won't be able to get their stuff to us if we stop using Spotify's infrastructure. That's potentially an epic shift. The key question for democracy advocates is how far Spotify's rebranding goes: Is it looking to monetise just its backend, or is it looking to mediate the market by e.g. making its playlists and recommendations the standard across all platforms?... Now back to Brussels... The Brussels media space, if we can still call it that, is in a state of crisis. We may now be getting to the stage where it's hard for democracy to function because there is no journalism. I don't know if it's reversible, but I do know that it will be very difficult to reverse without attention and resources. One of the reasons it's so important is that, despite all the attention on the problems of creating a European public sphere, little attention has been paid to the fact that the EU, compared to the US and the developing world, is underserved by media. (I could be wrong. If so, please let me know.) The other problem is that the EU is hard to cover. It's complicated, and you can't just parachute in to do a story on [insert famous place here]. You've got to learn the EU. Even EU Correspondents tend to be national correspondents covering the EU on the side. So here's the first part of my list of what to look for: If we want to find out whether Spotify is looking to change the EU media marketplace, I think it's going to look more like partnerships than traditional launches: Daniel Ek and Spotify will be looking for media companies with the largest, most interesting, audiences and trying to work out how to reach them through Spotify's tech. If that's right, then I don't know how anyone can possibly suggest the outcome will be a worse media marketplace than the current one: it's hard to see how new entrants could make the marketplace less diverse or European journalism less innovative."
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