July 2012

Founded in 2005 and owned by Google since 2007, YouTube today contains multitudes: 72 hours of video are uploaded onto the service every minute. For some, it is an infinite museum of moving images: Patti Smith singing “You Light Up My Life” on a 1970s kids’ show; Mike Wallace puffing Luckys through an interview with Salvador Dalí; forgotten teenage dance shows. For others, this is the medium of the one-off “viral” video — the often accidentally funny home movie or blooper that is e-mailed, linked and tweeted into collective consciousness. There is also an endless variety of produced material: “supercut” mash-ups, TED Talks, book trailers, brand campaigns.

Then there are the YouTube stars — people like Ray William Johnson, Mystery Guitar Man, Smosh, Michelle Phan, the ShayTards, Jenna Marbles, Freddie Wong, What the Buck or Philip DeFranco. If these names mean nothing to you, trust me: these are famous, successful YouTubers. Their videos get millions of views, and because they get a share of the resulting ad revenue, they are almost certainly among the “hundreds” that the company says earn six figures or better from their videos.

After getting picked for Google Fiber, Kansas City (Kansas and Missouri) is grappling with a far more complex challenge: What to do with it?

In the most optimistic scenarios, Google Fiber -- which will be one of the world's fastest broadband networks with speeds of 1 gigabit, more than 100 times as fast as the average broadband connection -- has the potential to make the two Kansas Cities the most entrepreneurial place in the world, the center of a health care revolution, and a leader in education reform. But along with frustration over delays in the launch, the project has also bred anxiety that it will widen the digital divide or overwhelm the cities with a flood of new high-tech immigrants who drive up the cost of living. Perhaps the greatest fear, though, is that Google Fiber will change nothing, that somehow the two cities will squander this moment, when the eyes of the world are watching, to invent the future. Google hopes the project will spur efforts to find ways to bring more people online, as well as to build such networks across the country. Kansas City understands that if that happens, then the window in which the cities have an advantage over the rest of the world could close quickly.

"This is the question that keeps me up every night," said Cameron Cushman, manager in the entrepreneurship program at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, one of the cities' largest philanthropic organizations. "Great, we're going to have an advantage on every other city in the world. Now, how do we make Kansas City the most entrepreneurial place in the world?"

A national radio report revealing that hyperlocal content provider Journatic used false bylines in several stories that ran in TribLocal online has prompted an investigation by the Chicago Tribune.

Journatic, brought in to run part of the Tribune's community news operation, has acknowledged its mistake and said it would discontinue the practice. "This American Life," which is produced by Chicago public radio station WBEZ-FM, included a 23-minute segment focusing on Journatic's use of low-paid Filipino freelancers to cull and format information for stories, some of which were published under aliases. In interviews this weekend with the Tribune, Journatic co-founder and CEO Brian Timpone said altered bylines were commonly used for its Blockshopper.com real estate stories, a separate enterprise from its newspaper content service. Timpone said some of its newspaper clients, including TribLocal, had asked to republish those stories on their hyperlocal sites, which Journatic allowed. But the company neglected to remove the altered bylines.

[Commentary] During his nine-month public inquiry into press standards, Lord Justice Leveson has heard many witnesses air legitimate complaints about the misconduct of the media. Now he must turn his mind to what to do about it.

How should Britain’s free press be regulated? The inquiry has set out sensible criteria for future regulation: whatever system is chosen must be effective, cheap, cover all “newspapers”, preserve media freedom and be a free service that protects the vulnerable. But finding a mechanism that delivers all this will not be simple. The primary purpose of regulation must be to protect the public – especially those without recourse to costly lawyers – from unfair treatment at the media’s hands. The existing system, in the form of the Press Complaints Commission, has palpably failed. While the PCC does much good work mediating in disputes between newspapers and the public, it is too close to those that it regulates and too weak to hold them to account. The best solution would be to move to a system of “independent regulation”. This would fall short of formal state regulation or licensing of journalists – both of which could expose the press to political interference. Independent laymen, appointed by a credible mechanism free from state control, would be in a majority on the new regulatory body. This would dispel the impression of a magic circle of editors or newspaper executives sitting in judgment on itself.