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Splice News Trends: YouTube rapped over kids, Google takes swipe at Amazon and NYT cuts free articles

As a leading light of the commentariat in Asia, newsroom consultant and former alumnus of Yahoo, CNBC and Bloomberg, Alan Soon knows a thing or two about the media. Here is his roundup of developments inside the bubble this week

Platforms

YouTube will increase the number of people working on content moderation and reviews to protect its users (like kids) from inappropriate content. The company has been hit by criticism that it isn’t doing enough to stop people from gaming its algos. YouTube says it’s going to use the same machine learning that was used to track down extremist videos on the network to curb exploitative ones.

Too young for Facebook? The company launched a Messenger product just for kids. Some people hate it. “Inviting a notification-filled interruption machine like Messenger Kids into the lives of children impairs their ability to focus and think at the exact time when they are building critical skills.”

News Corp’s Robert Thompson – ‘delusional’

News Corp CEO Robert Thomson took a swipe at Facebook and Google. “If you took our quality content and the content of other newspapers and content creators from those sites they’d be pretty barren wastelands.” He’s delusional. People don’t go to Facebook to get news. That’s not the intent when you fire up your app. News is simply incidental on Facebook — it’s dangerous to assume otherwise.

Australia’s competition regulator is launching an investigation into Facebook and Google’s effect on the media and advertising industry. “We will examine whether platforms are exercising market power in commercial dealings to the detriment of consumers, media content creators and advertisers.” A preliminary report is expected in December 2018. A lot can happen before then.

How does Naver pay publishers on its platform? The “Google of South Korea” pays its “in-link partners” a fee to have them on the portal. But is $40 million among 124 outlets enough?

Transformations

Myanmar is set to launch five new free-to-air TV channels early next year, bringing the total in the country to 16. Can the nascent advertising market support that many?

This is what digital swagger looks like. The New York Times cut the number of free paywalled articles to five. This is their biggest change to the pay model since 2012 and is a sign of growing confidence about their brand. Investors are pretty bullish about the company as well — shares of Time Co. are up about 40% this year.

As transformation sweeps Malaysia’s newsrooms, millennial-focussed R.AGE has found a surprising niche: investigative journalism. This is how they’re doing it.

Malaysia’s newest investigative journalism bureau

Layoffs, re-structurings and pivots to digital were the hallmarks of Singapore’s media in 2017Don’t hold your breath. 2018 isn’t much better.

Trends

You won’t be surprised by this, but marketing companies have been bribing journalists for coverage in prominent publications like the New York Times, Business Insider and Forbes. The prices reflect the prestige of the publisher — NYT, for example, costs $5,000. This problem however is especially bad at Forbes with its contributor network.

Google pulled YouTube from Amazon’s Echo devices. When giants fight, consumers lose.

If you’re looking for ways to deal with publishers of fake news, check out some good lessons from the ad-tech world, which has been in a parallel fight against fraud. Dis-incentives matter.

Media start-ups

There were recent two pieces on Bored Panda (in NYT and Wired) discussing how the small startup in Lithuania managed to take the second spot of NewsWhip’s list of most engaged Facebook pages. The viral publisher expects to make $30 million in revenue this year — and doesn’t quite know what to do with all that cash. VCs started calling. You wouldn’t believe what happened next. (The founders said no.)

Talent

Sad week for the folks at Mashable Asia in Singapore. Packing up, closing down. The decision came by email to the team at 3 am Singapore time. Classy work, Mashable HQ.

Dow Jones is looking to hire a social media editor in Beijing. They want “a magician who can transform hardcore journalism into social media stories that can go viral.”

Quote of the Week

“In human history, humans invented tools, and then had to learn how to use them. In the future, devices will need to learn human.” 

— Robin Li, Baidu’s founder and CEO. Unlike rivals Tencent or Alibaba, Baidu missed the shift the mobile. So now they’re betting on AI to catch up.

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