Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

If trend lines are to be drawn into the future from recent events, the death of the news brand is coming. The clock started not with the rise of the Internet, or the writing of ad-blocking code, but with the philosophy and construction of Web 2.0.

If we go back to 2004, we first see people talking about the Web in new ways. What was once fixed content, placed in fixed locations, became content and context that were separated. What this mean was that websites became a series of frames that could pull content from other places. Pages were dynamic, not fixed, and content could come from anywhere.

Weather sites became portals pulling weather data from other providers, while stock price sites dynamically changed based on data suppliers.The most obvious culmination of this trend was  the app.

What this form of construction has done is reward the topmost layer, the “customer interface.” Kayak sells an incredible volume of hotel, car rental and flight inventory merely by owning the interface between service providers and customers, Zilllow does the same with real estate, Seamless with food. Open table, Fandango, Instacart, Uber, Alibaba — the list goes on. The provision of services becomes commoditized, a dumb pipe, while the interface and aggregation layer is the thin surface,  scaling fast, and where much of the profit lies....

New media companies -- from Gawker to Buzzfeed -- have sprung up to feed every niche (and then some). Which are actually profitable?

FORTUNE -- The web has given rise to a number of notable digital publishers serving almost everyone's tastes, from straightforward news to guilty pleasures. For every Pulitzer-winning 10-part series on wounded war veterans, there are just as many frothy posts like the "10 funniest cat GIFs of the week." What about earnings? Some like The Awl have been profitable from the outset; others like Vox Media predict they'll be in the black soon. Here's a snapshot of just several new media businesses and how they're doing....

Automated journalism is here to stay, according to a new report from Columbia’s Tow Center and research fellow Andreas Graefe. But what are the most efficient uses of this technology, and what are its limitations? What is it good for that news organizations might not have considered yet? How do readers respond to automated articles? How does the spread of automated journalism affect the way human journalists do their jobs?

The report explores some of those issues in depth, presenting several case studies (and allaying some fears of a robot takeover).

I don’t know what The Washington Post will look like in 2018, but I guarantee it will be in a business or two (or three) that no one could have predicted today.

Few people think that Bezos will defend the purity of journalism; his stewardship of Amazon offers clues that he’s comfortable wading into the gray area in exchange for revenue. The Amazon Vine program serves as a good Exhibit A....

...Turns out that what we have now are a lot of ethics codes and policies, but very little accountability.To make sense of this, here’s the kind of lapse I’m talking about, none of which seems to have been addressed.

1. NBC selectively edited a video and badly misrepresented a guy in a real ugly case. Not clear if they’ve come clean about it yet.Suggestion: News outlets should make the full recording available, perhaps via a discreet rapid-response accountability team.

2. Sometimes a news outlet might broadcast a public figure lying, even when they know it’s a lie. This is what Jon Stewart calls the “CNN leaves it there” problem.Suggestion: Reporters are smart — if they know they’re being lied to, don’t broadcast it. If they smell a lie but they’re not sure, do a good faith fact-check....