The Old Reader

08 Jan 06:57

Tricky Phish Angles for Persistence, Not Passwords

by BrianKrebs

Late last year saw the re-emergence of a nasty phishing tactic that allows the attacker to gain full access to a user’s data stored in the cloud without actually stealing the account password. The phishing lure starts with a link that leads to the real login page for a cloud email and/or file storage service. Anyone who takes the bait will inadvertently forward a digital token to the attackers that gives them indefinite access to the victim’s email, files and contacts — even after the victim has changed their password.

Before delving into the details, it’s important to note two things. First, while the most recent versions of this stealthy phish targeted corporate users of Microsoft’s Office 365 service, the same approach could be leveraged to ensnare users of many other cloud providers. Second, this attack is not exactly new: In 2017, for instance, phishers used a similar technique to plunder accounts at Google’s Gmail service.

Still, this phishing tactic is worth highlighting because recent examples of it received relatively little press coverage. Also, the resulting compromise is quite persistent and sidesteps two-factor authentication, and it seems likely we will see this approach exploited more frequently in the future.

In early December, security experts at PhishLabs detailed a sophisticated phishing scheme targeting Office 365 users that used a malicious link which took people who clicked to an official Office 365 login page — login.microsoftonline.com. Anyone suspicious about the link would have seen nothing immediately amiss in their browser’s address bar, and could quite easily verify that the link indeed took them to Microsoft’s real login page:

This phishing link asks users to log in at Microsoft’s real Office 365 portal (login.microsoftonline.com).

Only by copying and pasting the link or by scrolling far to the right in the URL bar can we detect that something isn’t quite right:

Notice this section of the URL (obscured off-page and visible only by scrolling to the right quite a bit) attempts to grant a malicious app hosted at officesuited.com full access to read the victim’s email and files stored at Microsoft’s Office 365 service.

As we can see from the URL in the image directly above, the link tells Microsoft to forward the authorization token produced by a successful login to the domain officesuited[.]com. From there, the user will be presented with a prompt that says an app is requesting permissions to read your email, contacts, OneNote notebooks, access your files, read/write to your mailbox settings, sign you in, read your profile, and maintain access to that data.

Image: PhishLabs

According to PhishLabs, the app that generates this request was created using information apparently stolen from a legitimate organization. The domain hosting the malicious app pictured above — officemtr[.]com — is different from the one I saw in late December, but it was hosted at the same Internet address as officesuited[.]com and likely signed using the same legitimate company’s credentials.

PhishLabs says the attackers are exploiting a feature of Outlook known as “add-ins,” which are applications built by third-party developers that can be installed either from a file or URL from the Office store.

“By default, any user can apply add-ins to their outlook application,” wrote PhishLabs’ Michael Tyler. “Additionally, Microsoft allows Office 365 add-ins and apps to be installed via side loading without going through the Office Store, and thereby avoiding any review process.”

In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, Tyler said he views this attack method more like malware than traditional phishing, which tries to trick someone into giving their password to the scammers.

“The difference here is instead of handing off credentials to someone, they are allowing an outside application to start interacting with their Office 365 environment directly,” he said.

Many readers at this point may be thinking that they would hesitate before approving such powerful permissions as those requested by this malicious application. But Tyler said this assumes the user somehow understands that there is a malicious third-party involved in the transaction.

“We can look at the reason phishing is still around, and it’s because people are making decisions they shouldn’t be making or shouldn’t be able to make,” he said. “Even employees who are trained on security are trained to make sure it’s a legitimate site before entering their credentials. Well, in this attack the site is legitimate, and at that point their guard is down. I look at this and think, would I be more likely to type my password into a box or more likely to click a button that says ‘okay’?”

The scary part about this attack is that once a user grants the malicious app permissions to read their files and emails, the attackers can maintain access to the account even after the user changes his password. What’s more, Tyler said the malicious app they tested was not visible as an add-in at the individual user level; only system administrators responsible for managing user accounts could see that the app had been approved.

Furthermore, even if an organization requires multi-factor authentication at sign-in, recall that this phish’s login process takes place on Microsoft’s own Web site. That means having two-factor enabled for an account would do nothing to prevent a malicious app that has already been approved by the user from accessing their emails or files.

Once given permission to access the user’s email and files, the app will retain that access until one of two things happen: Microsoft discovers and disables the malicious app, or an administrator on the victim user’s domain removes the program from the user’s account.

Expecting swift action from Microsoft might not be ideal: From my testing, Microsoft appears to have disabled the malicious app being served from officesuited[.]com sometime around Dec. 19 — roughly one week after it went live.

In a statement provided to KrebsOnSecurity, Microsoft Senior Director Jeff Jones said the company continues to monitor for potential new variations of this malicious activity and will take action to disable applications as they are identified.

“The technique described relies on a sophisticated phishing campaign that invites users to permit a malicious Azure Active Directory Application,” Jones said. “We’ve notified impacted customers and worked with them to help remediate their environments.”

Microsoft’s instructions for detecting and removing illicit consent grants in Office 365 are here. Microsoft says administrators can enable a setting that blocks users from installing third-party apps into Office 365, but it calls this a “drastic step” that “isn’t strongly recommended as it severely impairs your users’ ability to be productive with third-party applications.”

PhishLabs’ Tyler said he disagrees with Microsoft here, and encourages Office 365 administrators to block users from installing apps altogether — or at the very least restrict them to apps from the official Microsoft store.

Apart from that, he said, it’s important for Office 365 administrators to periodically look for suspicious apps installed on their Office 365 environment.

“If an organization were to fall prey to this, your traditional methods of eradicating things involve activating two-factor authentication, clearing the user’s sessions, and so on, but that won’t do anything here,” he said. “It’s important that response teams know about this tactic so they can look for problems. If you can’t or don’t want to do that, at least make sure you have security logging turned on so it’s generating an alert when people are introducing new software into your infrastructure.”

Pelle Sten likes this

07 Jan 14:38

Why Private Equity Should Not Exist

Hi,

Welcome to Big, a newsletter about the politics of monopoly. If you’d like to sign up, you can do so here. Or just read on…

Today I’m going to discuss address the nascent political attack on private equity, the financial model in commerce which more than any other defines the Western political landscape. The most important signal of this attack is in the Democratic Presidential campaign, where candidates are being pressured on what they will do about PE. Sure enough, Senator Elizabeth Warren, the standard bearer for sophisticated policy thinking, recently announced a plan to rein in PE. And Bernie Sanders is leading protests against PE acquisitions. Perhaps as important are rumblings on the right; Republican Senator Marco Rubio’s released a report in March attacking the control of the economy by financiers.

In other words, PE is starting to face some of the same headwinds that big tech is experiencing. I’m going to explain what private equity is and why it is facing these attacks. I’ll also go into a bit of history, how private equity, which used to be called the leveraged buy-out industry (LBO), was started by a Nixon administration official who oversaw the both the bankruptcy of New York City and the intellectual attack on antitrust in the 1970s. Finally I’ll also discuss what it would mean to eliminate PE from our economy and politics.

Here’s the man who originated the model, William Simon.

But first…

News Update

(1) Facebook’s Libra: Mark Zuckerberg is still going ahead with Libra. Few noticed this tidbit on Facebook’s earnings call, but it sounds like FB has reoriented its strategy, and is going to start its project building what is effectively a better version of Paypal. Here’s the transcript.

We're very focused on Payments with fiat currencies as well and making it so that when you pay in one service, whether it's WhatsApp or Instagram Shopping or Marketplace, your credentials can be shared and there is a shared payment system across all those things….

And then across the payments landscape, helping people do Payments in existing currencies and also trying some newer approaches that can hopefully bring down the costs of doing payments around the world. We're just very excited about everything in this area, and it's one of the biggest areas that we're focused on for the next several years.

Seems like Zuckerberg will stage the roll-out of his currency differently, starting with a basic money transfer service and then building out a private monetary system.

(2) Boeing Customers In Trouble Until Boeing “Gets Its Shit Together:” Low cost Irish airline Ryanair CEO had choice words for Boeing:

Ryanair has 135 of the 737 Max models on order, the first five of which are due for delivery in the autumn, but they will not be able to fly until regulators have declared the plane safe.

O’Leary warned that Ryanair may not have any of the planes ready by next summer unless Boeing “gets its shit together” in making upgrades required for regulators to allow the plane to fly.

I don’t think anyone in power recognizes just how much trouble Boeing is in. The leadership has no idea what to do because they don’t actually know how to build safe planes. The CEO was hired for his political prowess in covering up problems, not solving them.

(3) Details about the Facebook Settlement: FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra was on MSNBC on Sunday to talk about the Facebook settlement. Chopra, along with the other Democratic commissioner, dissented from the settlement. He pointed out that the FTC didn’t bother to complete the investigation and that the FTC didn’t get documents from Mark Zuckerberg, in return for which Facebook paid a $5 billion fine. It’s a very ugly situation in what looks like a corrupt deal, Facebook buys a liability release and the FTC gets a headline with $5 billion in it.

Here’s the segment. It’s ten minutes long, and though it’s on cable news, you won’t actually get dumber if you watch it. Then again, I already gave you the summary.

And now…

Earlier this month, a former Toys “R” Us employee named Sarah Woodhams confronted Democratic Presidential candidate Julian Castro. Woodhams told Castro about her experience at the corporation. She worked there for seven years, and then was laid off with no severance because a set of private equity firms bought the company and looted it. What she described is not an isolated instance, but an increasingly common one in America. Woodhams told Castro that “dozens of retail companies controlled by Wall Street have gone into bankruptcy, including RadioShack, Payless, and Kmart,” with 15,000 jobs alone in Pennsylvania having disappeared.

“Billionaires buy up these companies, make huge profits on our backs, and get away with it because there’s no financial regulation,” Sarah Woodhams explained. “As president, what will you do to hold private equity firms and hedge funds accountable for the destruction of our communities and livelihoods?”

Partly because of organizing by workers like Woodhams, partly because of the scale of the industry, private equity is becoming an important part of the political dialogue. Millions of workers working for companies controlled by PE funds. As I noted above, the debate is now hot; Elizabeth Warren released a plan specifically on private equity, paralleled by a report on financial power by Republican Marco Rubio in March. More importantly, Castro was confronted by an activist. Castro was embarrassed because he did not seem to know what PE was, so you can be sure the other Presidential candidates are preparing talking points on PE for their bosses. That’s a big deal, when even the mediocre politicians start to get it.

So what is private equity? In one sense, it’s a simple question to answer. A private equity fund is a large unregulated pool of money run by financiers who use that money to invest in and/or buy companies and restructure them. They seek to recoup gains through dividend pay-outs or later sales of the companies to strategic acquirers or back to the public markets through initial public offerings. But that doesn’t capture the scale of the model. There are also private equity-like businesses who scour the landscape for companies, buy them, and then use extractive techniques such as price gouging or legalized forms of complex fraud to generate cash by moving debt and assets like real estate among shell companies. PE funds also lend money and act as brokers, and are morphing into investment bank-like institutions. Some of them are public companies.

While the movement is couched in the language of business, using terms like strategy, business models returns of equity, innovation, and so forth, and proponents refer to it as an industry, private equity is not business. On a deeper level, private equity is the ultimate example of the collapse of the enlightenment concept of what ownership means. Ownership used to mean dominion over a resource, and responsibility for caretaking that resource. PE is a political movement whose goal is extend deep managerial controls from a small group of financiers over the producers in the economy. Private equity transforms corporations from institutions that house people and capital for the purpose of production into extractive institutions designed solely to shift cash to owners and leave the rest behind as trash. Like much of our political economy, the ideas behind it were developed in the 1970s and the actual implementation was operationalized during the Reagan era.

Now what I just described is of course not the rationale that private equity guys give for their model. According to them, PE takes underperforming companies and restructures them, delivering needed innovation for the economy. PE can also invest in early stages, helping to build new businesses with risky capital. There is some merit to the argument. Pools of capital can invest to improve companies, and many funds have built a company here and there. But only small-scale funds really do that, or such examples are exceptions to the rule or involve building highly financialized scalable businesses, like chain stores that roll up an industry (such as Staples, financed by Bain in the 1980s). At some level, having a pool of funds means being able to invest in anything, including building good businesses in a dynamic economy where creative destruction leads to better products and services. Unfortunately, these days PE emphasizes the “destruction” part of creative destruction.

The takeover of Toys “R” Us is a good example of what private equity really does. Bain Capital, KKR, and Vornado Realty Trust bought the public company in 2005, loading it up with debt. By 2007, though Toys “R” Us was still an immensely popular toy store, the company was spending 97% of its operating profit on debt service. Bain, KKR, and Vornado were technically the ‘owners’ of Toys “R” Us, but they were not liable for any of the debts of the company, or the pensions. Periodically, Toys “R” Us would pay fees to Bain and company, roughly $500 million in total. The toy store stopped innovating, stopped taking care of its stores, and cut costs as aggressively as possible so it could continue the payout. In 2017, the company finally went under, liquidating its stores and firing all of its workers without severance. A lot of people assume Amazon or Walmart killed Toys “R” Us, but it was selling massive numbers of toys until the very end (and toy suppliers are going to suffer as the market concentrates). What destroyed the company were financiers, and public policies that allowed the divorcing of ownership from responsibility.

The Origins of the Model: Building a “Counter-intelligentsia”

If there is a father to the private equity industry, it is a man named William Simon. Simon is perhaps one of the most important American political figures of the 1970s and early 1980s, a brilliant innovator in politics, financial, and in how ideas are produced in American politics. Simon was an accountant, a nerd, but also an apocalyptically oriented conservative financier who was a bond trader and top executive at Salomon Brothers in the 1960s and 1970s. Beyond ruthless, Simon believed in ruthlessness as a moral philosophy. He was, according to a friend, “a mean, nasty, tough bond trader who took no BS from anyone,” and would apparently wake up his children on weekend mornings with buckets of cold water. He was such a difficult person that he was invited onto the Citibank board of directors, and shortly thereafter, essentially kicked off.

In the early 1970s, Simon went into politics, a leader at the Treasury Department under Nixon and Ford. He oversaw not just Treasury but became the the ‘Energy Czar’ in charge of the oil crisis, and a key player in rejecting New York City’s 1975 request for funds to ward off bankruptcy. Simon, along with a few others like Pete Peterson, came out of the Nixon administration with a better reputation than he had going in, perceived as a neutral and competent technocrat. Simon saw both prosperity and poison in Nixon and Ford. He supported the attacks on New York City’s and the forced austerity by the Federal government, but he also despised Nixon’s attempted economy-wide price controls to deal with inflation.

After his time at the Treasury, Simon turned to intellectual organizing, because he believed that the Republicans were soft. Simon though Republicans, even when they had power, as Nixon or Ford of Governors like Nelson Rockefeller of New York, were still liberal, operating as conservative Phyllis Schafly put it, merely “an echo” of the Democrats. So he sought to finance thinkers in academia to restructure how elites did policy, or as he put it, a “counter-intelligentsia.” He became the President of the Olin Foundation, the key conservative foundation providing money to the nascent law and economics movement, the conservative intellectual backlash against New Deal controls on finance and corporate power. Law and economics wasn’t perceived of as a right-wing institutional framework, but a scientific one. Olin gave to Harvard Law to build out a law and economics program, and financial supremacy over corporations was accepted quickly in liberal citadels.

The law and economics movement helped build the intellectual edifice for PE, a model designed to restructure the American economy from the very beginning. In 1965, Henry Manne, a law and economics organizer, wrote about the “market for corporate control,” putting forth financial markets where corporations were bought and sold as the essential mechanisms for firing inefficient managers and replacing them with ones who would look out for the owners.

In 1965, Manne was ahead of his time, because most people thought American businesses were well-run. But in the 1970s, in an inflationary environment and as foreign imports began coming into the U.S. in force, this belief collapsed. In 1970, Milton Friedman put forward the shareholder value of the firm, a theory that the only reason for the corporation to exist is to maximize shareholder value. In 1976, Michael Jensen, the intellectual patron saint of PE, refined these concepts into a paper titled “Theory of the firm: Managerial behavior, agency costs and ownership structure,” arguing that loading up firms with debt would discipline wasteful management, and that placing ownership in the hands of a few would force managers to be attentive to efficient operation of the corporation.

The increasingly widespread belief that American corporations were mismanaged, inflationary chaos, and a crisis of confidence among liberals combined into what was a political revolution in commerce. William Simon was both both a participant in and a moral light for this revolution. In the mid-1970s, he (or his ghostwriter) put pen to paper, and wrote a book popular among members of “the new right” as the large class of 1978 Congressional Republicans (which included a young Newt Gingrich) was known. His book was called A Time for Truth, and along with Robert Bork’s Antitrust Paradox, it gave the New Right a language to marry morality and political economics. Reagan would run on New Right themes in 1980.

A Time for Truth reflected Simon’s hardcore attitude. It was a jeremiad, with terms tossed around like ‘economic dictatorship’, charges of Communism and fascism, and a screed about the perils of government. The book was introduced by the intellectual godfather of the right-wing, the Austrian economist, F.A. Hayek, who lauded it as “a brilliant and passionate book by a brilliant and passionate man.” Simon popularized the pseudo-scientific term, ‘capital shortage,’ or the the idea that businesses simply didn’t have the incentive to invest in factories because of government rules or fear of inflation. This led to inflation, lower productivity, and stagnation. The solution would be simple: cut capital gains taxes, cut government spending, reduce antitrust enforcement, and stop regulating through public institutions.

The Carter administration and Congressional Democrats took Simon’s advice, and slashed capital gains taxes, cutting the maximum rate to 28% from 49% in 1978. They deregulated trucking, finance, airplanes, and railroads. In addition, changes in pension laws enabled American retirement savings to flood into new vehicles, like venture capital and its cousin, what would first be known as leveraged buy-outs and then private equity. The Reagan administration’s further deregulation of finance enabled a long bull market in the 1980s as speculators took control of the economy. Shareholders no longer were content to leave their money in stocks that paid dividends, because they could now keep most of their capital gains. And the chaos unleashed by deregulation opened up the door to corporate restructuring of corporations who had been tightly controlled by public rules, but were now free to enter and exit new businesses.

In 1982, William Simon turned into a leader of the financial revolution. He pulled off the first large scale leveraged buyout, of a company called Gibson Greeting cards, a deal that shocked Wall Street. He and his partner paid $80 million for Gibson, buying the company from the struggling conglomerate RCA. The key was that they didn’t use their own money to buy the company, instead using Simon’s political credibility and connections to borrow much of the necessary $79 million from Barclays Bank and General Electric, only putting down $330,000 apiece. They immediately paid themselves a $900,000 special dividend from Gibson, made $4 million selling the company’s real estate assets, and gave 20% of the shares to the managers of the company as an incentive to keep the stock price in mind. Eighteen months later, they took Gibson public in a bull market, selling the company at $270 million. Simon cleared $70 million personally in a year and a half off an investment of $330,000, an insanely great return on such a small investment. Eyes popped all over Wall Street, and Gibson became the starting gun for the mergers and acquisitions PE craze of the 1980s.

Another business trend intersected with changes in policy encouraging financial dominance: the rise of management consulting. Like law and economics, management consultants rose in the late 1960s with pseudo-scientific theories about business, and they began treating corporations as financial portfolios, with subsidiaries of assets. Many of the organizers of private equity firms in the 1980s came from management consulting firms like the Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey. Mitt Romney was an early innovator around PE. He came from Bain, which was a consulting firm. To give you a sense of what that meant in terms of the philosophy of commerce, here's Bain Consulting today, helping companies find ways to innovate around raising prices instead of productive techniques.

PE firms serve as transmitters of information across businesses, sort of disease vectors for price gouging and legal arbitrage. If a certain kind of price gouging strategy works in a pharmaceutical company, a private equity company can roll through the industry, buying up every possible candidate and quickly forcing the price gouging everywhere. In the defense sector, Transdigm serves this role, buying up aerospace spare parts makers with pricing power and jacking up prices, in effect spreading corrupt contracting arbitrage against the Pentagon much more rapidly than it would have spread otherwise.

More fundamentally, private equity was about getting rid of the slack that American managers had to look out for the long-term, slack that allowed them to fund research and experiment with productive techniques. PE replaced slack with brutal debt schedules and massive upside for higher stock prices, and no downside for the owner-financiers should the company fail. The goal is to eliminate production in favor of scalable profitable things like brands, patents, and tax loopholes, because producers - engineers, artists, workers - are cost centers. Production can also be eliminated by fissuring the workplace, such as the mass move to offshore production to lower cost countries in the 1980s onward. When I reported on the problem of financialization destroying our national security capacity, one of the manufacturers I talked to told me about how the “LBO boys” - or Leveraged Buy Out Boys - took apart factories in the midwest and shipped them to China.

There hasn’t been a lot of analysis of just how profitable private equity really is for investors or lenders, and I’m only touching on part of what is a very complex phenomenon. There are ways PE funds organize fees against pension funds, there’s self-dealing among banks and middlemen, and at this point large PE firms are buying insurance companies and dedicating their insurance portfolios to PE deals. But I found this paper by Brian Ayash and Mahdi Rastad quite useful. What Ayash and Rastad noted is that companies bought by private equity are ten times more likely than comparable companies to go bankrupt. And this makes sense. The goal in PE isn’t to create or to make a company more efficient, it is to find legal loopholes that allow the organizers of the fund to maximize their return and shift the risk to someone else, as quickly as possible. Bankruptcies are a natural result if you load up on risk, and because the bankruptcy code is complex, bankruptcy can even be an opportunity for the financier to restructure his/her investment and push the cost onto employees by seizing the pension.

Elizabeth Warren just put forward a fairly reasonable plan to address the problem. Under her plan, private equity funds who buy companies would themselves responsible for any debt those companies borrow, as well as the pension funds of their subsidiaries. PE firms could no longer pay themselves special fees and dividends, they would lose their special advantages in bankruptcy and in the tax code, and would have to disclose what they charge to investors. Effectively she reunifies ownership with responsibility. Investing would basically become once again about taking modest risks and reaping modest returns, rather than pillaging good companies. (I’d propose a couple of other changes as well, like raising capital gains taxes quite radically, and gutting golden parachutes. We also need to replace capital provided by PE with small business lending by government, as Marco Rubio is organizing. But I don’t want to demand too many policy changes. After all no sense in getting… greedy.)

Warren’s plan has generated some backlash, because she’s making a philosophical point about what kind of society we want to live in. I’ll focus on two quotes from Warren critics.

Steven Pearlstein in the Washington Post noted:

"Unfortunately, Warren’s fixes for these problems... would pretty much guarantee that nobody invests in or lends to private equity firms."

Aaron Brown in Bloomberg said:

A 100% tax on fees doesn’t mean PE funds will work for free; in fact, they won’t work at all… If you strip doctors of all assets if a patient dies, you won’t improve healthcare; you’ll make surgeons and oncologists switch to cosmetic dermatology."

Of course, Pearlstein and Brown are both in one sense right. Warren’s plan will largely eliminate private equity, or at least that which is based on legal arbitrage, which is nearly all of it. In another sense they are entirely missing the point. Brown calls PE firms doctors saving patients. But private equity, for Warren, is bad, a form of legalized fraud shifting money from the pockets of investors and workers to the pockets of financiers. It is also, as she knows, the model that best represents the destructive direction of American political economy over the past four decades.

And though it is not really on stage that often, private equity is an important part of our political debate, though the supporters of private equity in politics are so far quiet. And that is because private equity funds are important vectors for political donations.

In the second quarter, Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg, and Kamala Harris have all received donations from one or both of the leaders of the country’s top two private-equity firms, Blackstone and the Carlyle Group. Buttigieg received max donations from 11 high-level Blackstone employees, as well as money from Bain Capital and Neuberger Berman. Biden, Booker, and Gillibrand nabbed donations from employees at at least three of the top 15 private-equity firms.

PE funds are job sinecures for out of power elite Democrats and Republicans, a sort of shadow government of financiers who actually do the managing of American corporations while the government futzes around, paralyzed by the corruption PE barons organize.

What critics of PE are proposing is a profound restructuring of the philosophy of the American political economy, a return to excellence in production as the goal instead of excellence in manipulation. If critics succeeds, those who make and create will have their bargaining power increase radically, which will mean wage growth across the bottom and middle tier. Swaths of elite powerful people will lose power. It'll be really jarring, because we aren't used to a producer-focused economic order anymore. But it is what we need to do.

There’s a lot more to discuss about private equity. There’s a whole financing angle, which in itself is ridiculously complicated and fascinating. There are many financiers who aren’t technically private equity funds, but are effectively the same kinds of vectors of fraud and monopolization.

I’m also leaving out one of the most important parts of the stories, which is the 1980s rise of the financing channels for mergers and acquisitions, and how the social world of Wall Street in the 1980s helped create the modern Democratic Party. But that one’s for my book, Goliath: The Hundred Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy, which you can pre-order here.

Thanks for reading, and if you enjoy this newsletter, please share it on social media, forward it to your friends, or just sign up here.

cheers,

Matt Stoller

Pelle Sten likes this

07 Jan 14:37

What is private equity, and why is it killing everything you love?

Taylor Swift on stage at the 2019 AMAs surrounded by other performers and dancers. — Taylor Swift performing at the 2019 American Music Awards. Prior to the show, she fought with a private equity-backed record company to be allowed to perform much of her own music at the show.
Emma McIntyre/AMA2019/Getty Images for dcp

In July 2010, Doug Lowenstein, CEO of lobbying group the Private Equity Council, wrote a letter to PBS NewsHour after a segment it had aired on the private equity industry. He noted some “concerns” the group had with the show’s piece, including that it had ignored “hundreds of examples of PE success stories.” His chosen example: Toys R Us, which had been bought out by a trio of firms in 2005.

“[Y]ou don’t report that Toys ‘R Us was saved from likely bankruptcy by PE owners, that it has more employees working for it than it did before it was acquired, and that it is on the verge of returning to the public equity market,” he wrote.

Toys R Us never went public; it went bankrupt seven years later, in 2017. And all those employees? They lost their jobs.

The Private Equity Council, now rebranded as the American Investment Council, kept trucking along. So did the three firms that bought up Toys R Us — and, eventually, saw it go under.

The private equity industry has been under public scrutiny for years, but lately, it seems like it’s been in the headlines more. Private equity was involved in the downfalls of Payless Shoes, Deadspin, Shopko, and RadioShack. Taylor Swift has placed blame on the “unregulated world of private equity” for a battle over her music. Surprise medical bills? A private equity link. The Hollywood writers’ gripes? Same thing. Politicians are taking notice as well.

Is private equity a giant money monster that eats up companies and spits them out as the husks of what they once were, prioritizing short-term gains over creating long-term value and doing a ton of damage to everyday Americans in the process? Or does it, as some in the industry would suggest, just have a PR problem? Their argument: Sure, sometimes things go wrong, but private equity wouldn’t be in business — and have the money invested it does — if it didn’t often succeed as well. Industry advocates argue they’re taking on risk a lot of other investors would eschew, and it’s only fair they be rewarded.

Is private equity a giant money monster that eats up companies and spits them out as the husks of what they once were?

An AIC spokesperson said in a statement said that private equity firms worked “for years to strengthen and save” Toys R Us and blamed a “challenging retail and e-commerce environment” on its demise. The more cynical read: Maybe Toys R Us would have had a better chance at adapting if it hadn’t been saddled with private equity-induced debt. But of course, we’ll never know.

“Most of the time, private equity firms I do not believe are trying to drive the companies into bankruptcy, but it is what happens enough of the time to be disturbing,” said Josh Kosman, author of The Buyout of America and an expert who appeared in that PBS NewsHour segment back in 2010. “And they certainly aren’t protecting their companies from a rainy day.”

Private equity’s business model hinges on debt. A lot of it.

The term private equity can encompass a lot of different types of firms, including venture capital firms and hedge funds. But for the purposes of this story, and what you’re often hearing about in high-profile cases, we’re talking mainly about leveraged buyouts, where private equity firms buy companies basically by loading them up with debt. (Some of Vox Media’s investors may do leveraged buyouts, but Vox is not a leveraged buyout play.)

Private equity firms are, as their name suggests, private — meaning they’re owned by their founders, managers, or a limited group of investors — and not public — as in traded on the stock market. These organizations buy companies that are struggling or have growth potential and then try to repackage them, speed up their growth, and — theoretically — make them work better. Then, they sell them to another firm, take them public, or find some other way to offload them.

Generally, an ordinary investor isn’t putting their money directly into a private equity fund. Instead, private equity’s investors are institutional ones — meaning pension funds, sovereign governments, and endowments — or accredited investors who meet a certain set of criteria that allow them to make riskier bets (i.e., rich people).

You’ve probably heard of some big-name examples, such as the Carlyle Group (called out by Taylor Swift), Bain Capital (where Mitt Romney spent part of his career, and which was involved in the Toys R Us bankruptcy), KKR (which was reportedly considering taking over Walgreens and was also involved in Toys R Us), and the Blackstone Group (run by Donald Trump ally Stephen Schwarzman). If private equity firms get big enough, they sometimes start to issue stock that’s publicly traded on the broader market — shares of Blackstone, for example, have been trading on the New York Stock Exchange since 2007.

Mitt Romney, when he was chief executive of Bain Capital, a firm he helped start and led for much of the ‘80s and ‘90s.
Boston Globe via Getty Images

To explain leveraged buyouts in easier-to-understand terms, let’s say you buy a house. Under normal circumstances, if you can’t pay for the mortgage, you would be in trouble. But by the LBO rules, you’re only responsible for a portion. If you pay for 30 percent of the house, the other 70 percent of the asking price is debt placed on the house. The house owes that money to the bank or creditor who lent it, not you. Of course, a house can’t owe money. But under the private equity model, it does, and its assets — its factories, stores, equipment, etc. — are collateral.

The idea, in theory, behind private equity is that the endeavor will be worth it — for both you and the house. “There are many companies that, if not for private equity, would not be able to get access to the kind of capital they need to scale, to transform, to turn around, and to have succession planning,” said one industry source, who requested anonymity to speak candidly for this story.

But because of the debt companies end up owing creditors as part of a deal, they sometimes find themselves with such high interest payments that they can’t make the investments necessary to be competitive or even stay afloat. Plus, companies often take out additional loans to pay private equity investors dividends, and then they pay a fee if and when they are sold. If they can’t pay off the debt, the companies are on the hook, and their employees and customers are the ones to suffer the consequences.

And private equity’s No. 1 priority isn’t the long-term health of the companies it buys — it’s to make money, and as is the case in so many facets of investing today, to make money fast.

“Some of the larger private equity firms, they’re not retaining investments in the long-term. They are designed to produce short-term returns, and if there is nothing left of the company at the end, that’s okay,” said Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) in an interview.

Porter represents a district the AIC touts as a success case for private equity creating jobs and making investments. She believes its methodology for calculating job creation is “highly suspect,” and it still doesn’t mean the leveraged buyout model is good: “Some of the companies they work for are owned by private equity, but that doesn’t tell us whether their family would be better off if it was on the public markets.”

“They are designed to produce short-term returns, and if there is nothing left of the company at the end, that’s okay.”

The retail industry has arguably been one of the most high-profile case studies for private equity in recent years, and you can see this setup play out again and again. People within the industry will tell you that companies such as Payless, Sears, and Toys R Us struggled because of competition from Amazon and Walmart.

But critics note that because private equity-owned companies are saddled with such a huge amount of debt, they often can’t even attempt to make the investments they need to try to keep up. Private equity’s objective, in theory, is that the company will earn enough and grow fast enough to pay down the debt to a healthy amount. But a lot of that time, that’s not what happens.

“Yes, the markets are changing. Yes, competition is difficult. But if you can retain your own resources and make the necessary investments, yes, you can compete,” said Eileen Appelbaum, a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and an expert on private equity.

In an article for the American Prospect in 2018, Appelbaum and fellow researcher Rosemary Batt compared grocery chains Albertsons, which is held by private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management, and Kroger, which has a more conventional structure. Their findings: Kroger has been able to weather the current economic landscape better than Albertsons because it has less debt. At least Albertsons is still afloat — the pair notes that tens of thousands of jobs have been lost on account of private equity-owned grocery bankruptcies in recent years.

“If you can retain your own resources and make the necessary investments, yes, you can compete.”

The controversy surrounding private equity is that whatever happens to the company acquired, private equity makes money anyway. Firms generally have a 2-20 fee structure, which means they get a 2 percent management fee from their investors and then a 20 percent performance fee on the money they make from their deals. Basically, if an investment goes well, they get 20 percent of that. But regardless of what happens, they get 2 percent of the money they’re managing altogether, which is a lot. According to data from consultancy firm McKinsey, the global private equity industry’s asset value has grown to nearly $6 trillion.

Moreover, private equity firms can take out additional loans through their leveraged companies to pay dividends to themselves and their investors, and the companies are on the hook for those loans too. The share of profits private equity managers earn, carried interest, gets special tax treatment, and is taxed at a lower rate than regular income.

It’s heads I win, tails you lose.

Private equity isn’t always bad, but when it fails, it often fails big

Those within the industry will tell you that private equity’s goal is not to bankrupt companies or to do harm. But sometimes, that’s just what happens: Researchers at California Polytechnic State University recently found that about 20 percent of public companies that go private through leveraged buyouts go bankrupt within 10 years, compared to a control group’s 2 percent bankruptcy rate over the same time period.

Moody’s found that after the financial crisis, from 2008 to 2013, companies owned by top private equity firms defaulted on their loans at about the same rate as other companies. However, in megadeals where more than $10 billion of debt was involved, private equity-backed companies performed much worse.

Even an industry-friendly study out of the University of Chicago found that employment shrinks by 4.4 percent two years after companies are bought by private equity, and worker wages fall by 1.7 percent. The type of company matters as well — employment shrinks by 13 percent when a publicly traded company is bought by private equity, but it increases by the same percentage if the company is already private. The researchers found that labor productivity increases by 8 percent over two years.

Protesters from the Sensata Technologies plant in Freeport, Illinois, outside the offices of Bain Capital.
Scott Olson/Getty Images

That it is sometimes harmful to the companies it buys and, by extension, the people who work there doesn’t mean it’s not lucrative. After all, there’s a reason so many investors are parking their money in these firms. “If it were such a terrible thing, it wouldn’t have grown so big,” said Steve Kaplan, a professor and private equity expert at the University of Chicago. Blackstone, for example, made $14 billion from its investment in Hilton.

But a good deal for investors does not always translate to a good deal for other stakeholders, including employees and consumers.

Take a look at Deadspin, the sports blog that flamed out in spectacular fashion this fall just months after its parent company, Gizmodo Media Group, was acquired by private equity firm Great Hill Partners in April.

Megan Greenwell, the site’s former editor-in-chief, told me that initially the firm gave employees the impression that they were only concerned about the business side, “which had been decimated,” and didn’t plan on touching editorial.

But soon it became clear that was not the case. She said the site’s new owners didn’t appear to have much of an interest in learning about what they did or what, historically, had and hadn’t worked. “The extent to which nobody could ever articulate what their plan was ... they wanted to just cut and cut and cut, which can work up to a point, but where the growth in revenue was going to come from was unclear,” she said.

Greenwell left Deadspin in August. After the site’s new managers instructed writers to “stick to sports” in an October memo, the staff resigned en masse. Deadspin stopped publishing new stories on November 4. A screenshot I viewed of Deadspin’s mid-morning traffic on December 4 showed about 400 people were currently viewing the site. Before, that number would generally be in the 10,000 to 20,000 range.

“The extent to which nobody could ever articulate what their plan was... they wanted to just cut and cut and cut.”

Representatives of Great Hill and G/O Media did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

What happened with Deadspin is emblematic of what is often a flaw in private equity, especially when it comes to big firms: They can get involved in businesses they’re not well-versed in. The Carlyle Group and other investors probably didn’t know what they were getting into when they helped producer Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings buy Taylor Swift’s catalog. A decade ago, private equity firm Terra Firma learned a hard lesson when it took over music group EMI, dropped a bunch of artists to try to save money, and saw that deal turn into a disaster.

“The big private equity firms that have no idea about the particular industries in which they are investing, they think they can have this cookie-cutter model and make money. That’s where we’re seeing these terrible models happen,” Appelbaum said.

Great Hill Partners, for example, is also an investor in Bombas socks and online test proctoring company Examity.

This isn’t to say that all private equity deals and firms are bad. A lot of even the bigger firms are split into verticals by industry in the hopes of lending expertise to the companies they acquire. And there are plenty of small private equity firms out there that specialize in specific fields and make investments in relatively small companies where there is a lot of room for improvement. But those types of deals generally aren’t publicized. Small deals are “the bulk of the deals, but that’s not the bulk of the money,” Appelbaum said. Or where most workers are employed.

“Whether you’re big or small now, almost all of them are organized by industry, so when they invest, they ought to know what they’re investing in. Whether they do or not is a question,” Kaplan said.

Washington is taking notice of this, including the human cost — but it’s not clear what, if anything, will happen

Attention on the private equity industry from lawmakers has ebbed and flowed over the years, and right now, it’s under the microscope.

In July, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) rolled out a plan and accompanying legislation — the Stop Wall Street Looting Act of 2019 — taking direct aim at the sector. Her proposal would overhaul how private equity collects fees, who’s responsible for an acquired company’s debt, and how stakeholders are paid in the event a company does go bankrupt. It would also close the carried interest loophole that keeps private equity’s taxes so low. While Warren’s bill wouldn’t end private equity, it would change incentives and force firms to have more skin in the game.

Warren and other members of Congress have called out the private equity industry over its activities in a wide range of sectors in recent months, including election technology, deforestation, and nursing homes. The House Financial Services Committee, headed by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), held a hearing on private equity in November.

One private equity associate told me that at an industry conference he had recently attended, presenters framed Warren’s criticism and broader critiques of the sector as a public relations problem. He said the idea of investors being on the hook for a company’s debt was a “laugh line,” but there was an acknowledgment of the optics. “To the extent that this is what people’s view of private equity is, that’s not good for the industry or for the investors,” he said.

Emily Mendell, managing director at the Institutional Limited Partners Association (ILPA), a trade association for private equity investors, told me that it’s happened often over the years that certain headline or political events — such as the Toys R Us bankruptcy or Warren’s plan — have shined a light on the industry that is “accentuated due to the news nature of that event.” And it’s not always easy to push back. “It’s hard to tell a positive story when the negative stories — the few negative stories — will get all the press,” she said. “Private equity can’t counter what Elizabeth Warren says on the back of a bumper sticker.”

“To the extent that this is what people’s view of private equity is, that’s not good for the industry or for the investors.”

That doesn’t mean they’re not trying.

The American Investment Council (that private equity lobbying group that touted Toys R Us) has been taking out ads and writing op-eds pegged to the super-popular Popeyes chicken sandwich and pointing out the restaurant’s private equity ties. It also commissioned a report from consultancy Ernst & Young on private equity’s economic contributions that says the sector created 8.8 million jobs and its workers make on average $71,000 a year. Critics note that the $71,000 average includes people at the very top who make millions of dollars a year.

Private equity doesn’t want Congress looking too closely at their industry, but some firms are willing to quietly lobby to advantage themselves. In August, Porter, the California representative, received a mailer to her home encouraging her constituents to call her to tell her to vote against bipartisan legislation aimed at stopping surprise medical billing. It framed the bill as “rate setting” and was from a benign-sounding group called Doctor Patient Unity. It was later revealed that the group funded by two private-equity-backed companies that would lose money if the bill were passed.

A mailer sent to Rep. Katie Porter’s home in Orange County, California, from Doctor Patient Unity, a private equity-backed group.
Courtesy of the office of Rep. Katie Porter

Private equity sources I spoke with acknowledge that the industry has a bad reputation and that there are some bad actors — but they tend to insist that they, specifically, are doing things right, or at least trying. “In how the industry has been described, it has been painted with a very broad brush,” one of the industry sources said.

While people in the private equity industry may be complaining that it’s been unfairly caricatured, they’re not the victims. The victims are the workers who are collateral damage in deals gone bad. All those Deadspin writers who walked away from their jobs in solidarity are entering an extremely tough journalism environment right now. Just ask anyone who ever dreamed of working in local media.

More than 30,000 Toys R Us employees lost their jobs when it went bankrupt. Initially, they weren’t paid severance, even when the private equity firms walked away with millions. After months of protest, two of the investors — Bain and KKR — gave a combined $20 million to an employee severance fund, but the third investor, Vornado, abstained. According to one recent study, US retailers owned by private equity firms and hedge funds have laid off nearly 600,000 workers over the past 10 years alone.

Private equity may not be the boogeyman it’s made out to be, but it can certainly do some harm.

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07 Jan 13:35

Engage your audience with constructive journalism

Credit: Mousetrap Media/Christina Jansen

How can news organisations inspire positive change when the public is so saturated with negative news, that a third of us are avoiding it altogether?

News avoidance makes it difficult for journalism to be heard, and it is only made harder today when you add new platforms into the mix, each with another set of algorithms and filter bubbles to contend with.

These struggles, amongst others, are what the Constructive Journalism Network (CJN) seeks to answer, according to its co-founder Cathrine Gyldensted, who delivered a workshop at the 25th Newsrewired conference.

Constructive journalism is increasingly being used as a way to engage and grow audiences. News organisations such as The New York Times, De Correspondent, Die Zeit and The Guardian are now all giving it a go. In her workshop, Gyldensted introduced journalists to a few constructive approaches to bring into their newsroom.

'If it bleeds, it leads'

To compete with virality, journalists must first understand what makes a story go viral. Viral stories are provocative and make use of intense emotions; negatives ones such as anger or fear, as well as positive ones like awe and hope. The problem is that it is the negative emotions which dominate the news cycle and cause audiences to switch off.

Appealing to populist outrage is nothing new; TV news' most well-known saying is 'If it bleeds, it leads'. But what has happened in recent years is that the internet has exacerbated its effect.

We see this in action online, as readers are quick to click and share content which plays into these emotions. The media, however, is often blind to the consequences of this negativity bias. It can paralyse our audiences or justify their worst impulses.

Identify your own negativity bias

However, Gyldensted provided an alternative: in groups of four or five, we thought about stories which we or our colleagues had written, and were guilty of playing into these negative emotions.

My mind ran immediately to my home country of Australia, where a friend of mine was busy putting together an article about the New South Wales Government’s (NSW) under-funding of the Rural Fire Service and its devastating consequences.

The piece described a systemic reduction in capital expenditure budgets over many years and laid bare the aftermath of the devastating 2019 bushfires. Its appeal lay in a portrait of government failure, hoping to tap into anger, fear, and grief to find an audience. It was, in short, deeply negative.

Flip the narrative

Then, we were invited to turn the piece of its head. Gyldensted encouraged us to apply the principles of constructive journalism to reframe the article from something emphasising victimhood and tragedy, to focusing on solutions and reconstruction.

As an example, she cited the case of Finnish broadcaster Yle. Having run a story on negligence in elderly care, a series of pieces followed where they consulted with elderly care professionals and viewers nationwide on how to improve the system going forward. Then, they ran an additional piece asking: 'Is it possible to completely transform a nursing home in four months?'

This became the foundation for a reality television series where they tried to do just that, following three coaches who attempted to reform the practices and goals of a nursing home, eventually succeeding, and using the experience as an example for wider reform across elderly care in Finland.

The central question Yle seemed to be asking themselves, at every point, was: 'How could we make this story best serve the social good?'

This changed their coverage entirely. Instead of exposing wrongdoing, it became about repairing its ill-effects. Instead of fuelling outrage, it encouraged a way forward collaboratively.

Cover the other half of the story

In the case of the Australian bushfires, we determined that the angle originally presented (funding cuts by the NSW government) was only half the story. The second half should focus on fixing the problem, like Yle did.

Are there ways to show where funds and equipment were most needed, like with a map or visualisation? Could the piece outline ways to aid the Rural Fire Service both as a donor and as a volunteer?

Importantly, I learned that outrage is not counter-intuitive to constructive journalism, so long as it has a vision. Constructive journalism is optimistic, but it does not have to be happy. It needs an action point at the end of the article which signals better times ahead, even the current outlook is bleak. Acknowledging the problem is often the starting point.

Could we determine which budget constraints and specific bills caused the problem, and how your local representative voted on these crucial decisions? Had we done this from the beginning, could we have paved the way to prevent similar outbreaks?

Take ownership of the problem

It is journalists, ultimately, who give sensational journalism the needed oxygen to go viral - but as we said at the beginning, both negative and positive emotions have the potential to make stories go viral. Indeed, solutions-based reporting can be some of the most sought-after content, and much healthier for our readers.

At the same conference where Gyldensted introduced me to constructive journalism, mobile journalist Yusuf Omar said: “If the pen was mightier than the sword, then the mobile phone is our atomic agent of change.”

The comparison should give us pause, and make us think about the importance for journalists and publishers be heard at a time of news avoidance and the abundance of social media platforms. But also because of our responsibility to hold power to account. it seems like constructive journalism, with a focus on building bridges and finding solutions, is something audiences are listening to.

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07 Jan 12:38

How the remnants of About.com are stealthily taking over the internet

by Aaron Cohen

On Bagel Thursdays, Dotdash convenes its weekly growth meeting in a conference room overlooking Times Square. At 9 o’clock on a bright September morning, a dozen or so editors, an analytics guru, and the company’s top two operating executives discuss plans to enhance Dotdash’s vast content archive of more than 250,000 “super articles,” company parlance for stories that synthesize prose, videos, images, and illustrations about a panoply of American obsessions, including investment strategy, home decorating, personal finance, and medical information. The meeting is a brisk rundown of challenges and milestones.

Maybe you’ve never even heard of Dotdash, but its service content reaches about 90 million Americans a month.

At a time when digital media companies are faltering, Dotdash is growing: in audience, head count, and revenue. The company oversees a collection of nearly a dozen lifestyle-focused websites that cover such evergreen topics as tech (Lifewire), health (Verywell), travel (TripSavvy), and personal finance and investing (The Balance, Investopedia). Collectively, Dotdash’s sites have increased traffic by 44% year over year in Q3 2019. Driven by advertising and e-commerce, the company’s annual revenue grew by 44% in 2018 and 34% as reported in Q3 2019 earnings. While other media companies are shuttering sites and titles, Dotdash has been expanding, scooping up Byrdie (beauty) and MyDomaine (home) from Clique Media in January before taking the legendary Brides brand off Condé Nast’s hands in May and buying the cocktail-focused Liquor.com in October from founder Kit Codik.

This is a surprising shopping spree—given that Dotdash only exists because four years ago its owners decided to pull the plug on its once-popular precursor.

That site was About.com, founded (originally as the Mining Company) in 1996 by digital media pioneer Scott Kurnit, whose big bet—that search engines would propel distribution—proved prescient with the arrival of Google a couple of years later. Kurnit hired a team of editors and built a network of contributors to craft articles on a wide range of popular topics, tailoring content long before the phrase “search engine optimization” even existed.
The site thrived through two sales—to Primedia in 2000 and to the New York Times Company in 2005—until the Great Recession, changes in Google’s algorithms, and the rise of Facebook wreaked havoc on digital media. Focused on saving its core business, the Times sold About.com to Barry Diller’s digital media conglomerate, IAC, in 2012.

Joey Levin was the IAC executive who greenlit the acquisition. He knew the perfect candidate to revitalize About.com – Neil Vogel. A native Philadelphian and Wharton alum, Vogel began his career as an investment banker before joining the first wave of Internet entrepreneurs. He had early success in both e-commerce and media and later founded Recognition Media, which develops and produces awards shows, including The Webby awards.

Optimizing About.com’s deep archive of carefully crafted articles on a wide range of subjects intrigued Vogel because it ran counter to the trends of the social- and video-besotted digital media industry.”

Vogel was initially wary of the pitch. Historically, he knew, declining internet companies fail. But the opportunity – optimizing About.com’s deep archive of carefully crafted articles on a wide range of subjects – intrigued Vogel because it ran counter to the trends of the social- and video-besotted digital media industry. After accepting Levin’s offer, Vogel immediately recruited two former colleagues, CFO Tim Quinn, an American Express veteran and COO Alex Ellerson, formerly of Yahoo and Google. “I needed a certain DNA that had grit and resilience,” Vogel says. “Tim and Alex could attract people with the right attitude. We wanted people who were fearless and thought saving this company would be fun.”

Vogel’s team rebuilt the technology, redesigned content, hired, fired, and launched countless experiments to stanch About.com’s declining audience. Yet traffic continued to plummet and revenue tanked. The company missed its forecasts for nine straight quarters.

“About was no longer of service to Internet users,” Ellerson concluded.

In the fall of 2015, the Dotdash leadership sat across from Levin, who by then had ascended to the role of CEO at IAC, and pitched their new plan: sunset the About.com portal, redesign more than one million articles that would be redirected into vertically focused brands. Vogel wanted Dotdash to reemerge as a modern Condé Nast.

Levin was skeptical. “I told them the URL [about.com] was the best asset we owned,” he recalled. “But I had hired Neil in part for his passion. Plus, what did we have to lose? The content had value and, as a company, we don’t like to give up.” Vogel asked for $35 million and six months to radically relaunch as Dotdash.

This transformation led to something extraordinary in digital media—a turnaround. While other independent media companies were engineering their coverage around social media, video, and trending topics, Dotdash doubled down on text-based articles about enduring topics and avoided cluttering them with ads—a strategy that Daniel Kurnos, an analyst at the investment bank Benchmark, credits with boosting Dotdash content in search results. (He calls IAC an “algorithmically elite” company for its deep understanding of how to infiltrate search engines.)

“People call us a tech company, but the reality is we are a publisher,” says Vogel. Dotdash developed a formula that Vogel has turned into a corporate mantra: the freshest content on the fastest sites with the fewest ads.

By focusing on text rather than 24/7 social responsiveness or expensive video production, the company keeps its costs down. More than 1,000 remote, part-time contributors across the brands use tools built by Ellerson’s team to help identify story ideas that resonate with audiences. Traffic to the sites has increased from 45 million visitors per month in 2016 to more than 90 million in August of last year, according to Vogel. Dotdash sites run fewer ads, with no pop-ups or takeovers, and because the ads are relevant to each article, they perform better. At a time when digital ad rates have continued to crater for most online publishers, Vogel says the company’s ad rates have increased nearly 20 percent each year since 2016, and 25 percent of 2019 revenue came from affiliate marketing fees (bonuses paid to the publisher after Dotdash visitors made purchases via ads on the sites.)

The sites load very quickly, and the company’s proprietary content management system is designed for efficiency: Designers and editors can choose from fast-loading templates that include images, video, and interactive applications. And there’s an emphasis on creating the kinds of detailed, informative articles that turn up in search results. At Verywell, for example, each article is updated at least once every nine months and reviewed by medical professionals.

Dotdash’s emphasis on human-created content makes it almost the anti-Google. Everything is designed to empower the content creators. “The work we do at Dotdash is highly specialized, requiring a subjective understanding of quality and substantial subject matter expertise,” Ellerson says. This emphasis on quality editorial, Dotdash executives say, has powered the turnaround.

The company will not disclose what it pays writers although it does not pay by the word as is traditional for publishing. Advertisements on Jobvite, Media Bistro and Facebook quote rates for writers “that generally meet or exceed 10 cents per word,” and hourly rates in the $15-$25 range for editors. Hardly Conde Nast-level compensation (during print’s heyday, magazine writers frequently commanded fees in excess of a dollar per word), but on par with typical current rates for digital editorial talent. Most of its contributors are not journalists but rather professionals or subject matter experts moonlighting as content creators and promoting the work they do for Dotdash to burnish their reputations. The sites all share design, technology and sales resources. Dotdash claims to have spent $100mm on content since the turnaround began, including $35 million in 2019.

We are taking a Netflix approach to content creation. We are spending more money on service-based articles than any other media company.”

Neil Vogel, CEO, Dotdash

“We are taking a Netflix approach to content creation,” says Vogel, sitting in his office situated midway between the great 20th-century magazine companies Conde Nast and Hearst. “We are spending more money on service-based articles than any other media company.”

Vogel has returned to his roots as a dealmaker and the media industry has plenty of distressed assets. Last May, Dotdash bought CondeNast’s Brides magazine, shuttered the print version, absorbed the separate editorial team, imported the articles into their content management system, and relaunched on the Dotdash platform.

“Dotdash is the only growing, profitable, digital publisher I can think of,” says Levin. IAC says DotDash would nearly double revenue ($170 million) and EBITDA ($40 million) in 2019.

Media companies beholden to Facebook and Google for distribution remain vulnerable because one algorithmic twitch can destroy your traffic. What if Google started showing large snippets of its content inside the search results and this triggered a decline in traffic? Vogel hears this criticism multiple times a week, but he thinks digital executives should focus on good content and traffic will follow.

“Our job is to make great content that loads quickly with relevant non-intrusive advertising,” he insists. “If we execute, the search results will be fine.” His critics call this naive, but Vogel is trying to build a billion-dollar publishing business, not a search colossus. He’s betting that Google will drive traffic to the best content.

The 20th-century magazine houses built iconic brands – Time, Vogue, Cosmopolitan – that monetized through their shaping of the cultural zeitgeist. Rachel Berman, the vice president and general manager of Dotdash’s most successful vertical, the health-focused Verywell, regularly attends dinner parties where the guests are impressed if not stunned that her site reaches 10 percent of Americans and they’ve never heard of it. But they know WebMD.

For Vogel, this is the next frontier for growth. “Today our traffic substantially outpaces our brand awareness,” he admits. “We have nearly 100 million in our audience, and it’s doubled in the past three years, and people still don’t know our brands. We have so much room to grow.”

On the media

The seeds for Dotdash’s success were sown 20 years ago.

1994: Yahoo launches

1996: The Mining Company is founded.

1996: Slate is founded.

1998: Google debuts.

1999: The Mining Company rebrands as About.com.

2000: About.com is acquired by Primedia for $690 million in stock.

2000: The dotcom bubble bursts.

2002: Gawker is founded.

2004: TheFacebook launches.

2005: The New York Times Company purchases About.com from Primedia for $410 million.

2006: Twitter goes live; BuzzFeed launches.

2008: The Great Recession begins.

2010: Instagram debuts.

2011: Snapchat launches.

2012: IAC acquires About.com for $300 million.

2013: Neil Vogel becomes CEO of About.com.

2014: Vox News and Gimlet Media are founded.

2016: Verizon acquires Yahoo; Gawker folds.

2017: About.com is rebranded Dotdash, launching five different verticals.

2018: IAC folds Investopedia under Dotdash, laying off a third of Investopedia’s staff.

2018: Meredith Corp. buys Time Inc.

2019: Dotdash acquires Brides from Condé Nast, shuttering the print title.

A version of this article appeared in the Winter 2019/2020 issue of Fast Company magazine.

View attached file (p-1-how-iac-transformed-a-dying-site-into-a-thriving-media-company.jpg, image/jpeg)

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07 Jan 10:46

Dining out in 2019: The world came to Tokyo, and the city answered

The Christmas trees are packed away and the New Year kadomatsu decorations are now in place. The city is winding down for the holidays, to rest and recharge for the year ahead. But before we leave 2019 behind, there’s just time to look back on the past 12 months of dining out in Tokyo. And to wish all The Japan Times’ readers good luck, good health and good eating in the year ahead.

A major highlight of 2019 has been the remarkable Cook Japan Project in Nihonbashi. Housed in the erstwhile premises of Sant Pau, this revolving series of premium pop-ups has brought in some of the world’s finest chefs, including Yannick Alleno (Paris), Alex Atala (Sao Paulo) and Dani Garcia (Marbella, Spain).

The world's best are Tokyo-bound: Three-Michelin-star chef Mauro Colagreco held a sold-out residency in Tokyo in December for Cook Japan Project. | COURTESY OF COOK JAPAN PROJECT — The world’s best are Tokyo-bound: Three-Michelin-star chef Mauro Colagreco held a sold-out residency in Tokyo in December for Cook Japan Project. | COURTESY OF COOK JAPAN PROJECT

It reached a memorable crescendo this month with a sold-out, six-day residency by Mauro Colagreco from Restaurant Mirazur (Menton, southeast France), which won its third Michelin star this year and topped the annual World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. But it’s not over yet: Before closing in late January, it will host Vladimir Mukhin (Moscow), Virgilio Martinez (Lima) and a one-night-only final appearance by the legendary founder of Sant Pau, Carme Ruscalleda (Catalonia).

When it comes to new restaurants, there have been too many to keep track of. Media focus has been on the high-rise malls mushrooming in Shibuya: first Shibuya Scramble Square; then Shibuya Parco; and lastly the reborn Tokyu Plaza, which features (among others) a new branch of Akomeya Kitchen, here called Akomeya Shokudo, and an open-air viewing platform complete with a sleek, modern bao bar by Singapore’s Ce La Vie.

Other notable openings include three standouts: Sushi Shin by Miyakawa (in Nihonbashi), Sushi Wakon (Hibiya) and Sushi M (Omotesando/Aoyama). The new ShinoiS in Shirokanedai features contemporary Cantonese cuisine by chef Hiroyuki Shinohara, formerly at Lohotoi in Hiroo and Hei Fung Terrace. And fans of South Indian cooking will be happy to know that Nirvanam now has a branch in Ginza.

In March, tonkatsu (pork cutlet) master Seizo Mitani closed Narikura, his hugely popular basement in Takadanobaba, resurfacing in July in residential Minamiasagaya. His premium pork cutlets are pricier now, and you need to book online ahead of time, which has eliminated the long waiting times. The original Narikura has since reopened under one of Mitani’s apprentices, now with a first-come first-served ticket queue system, which has made the lines more manageable.

Can't keep a good oden down: Otafuku's oden master, Sakae Funadaiku | ROBBIE SWINNERTON — Can’t keep a good oden down: Otafuku’s oden master, Sakae Funadaiku | ROBBIE SWINNERTON

Meanwhile, century-old oden specialist Otafuku has finally returned home, after over two years in temporary digs. The good news is that the beautiful copper simmering pans are back where they belong; the sad news is that the classic, timeless atmosphere of the old place is lost forever.

There was plenty of movement by more big-ticket names, too. Sant Pau marked its 15th anniversary by relocating to the gleaming new Kitano Hotel (near Nagatacho), and held on to its two Michelin stars. Chef Kotaro Meguro did likewise with his French seafood cuisine at Abysse, retaining his star despite his move to a plusher setting in the Ebisu/Daikanyama area.

This year saw the end of many favorites: Since Esquisse Cinq closed its doors, award-winning patissier Kazutoshi Narita has been working at the La Liste-topping Sugalabo in Kamiyacho. Moving down-market, many a glass was raised in sayonara to the classic no-frills standing bar Fujiya Honten and its Grill Bar, as it finally fell victim to Shibuya’s relentless redevelopment. Pappon Kitchen‘s excellent home-style Thai cooking has also gone, replaced by Fuku-Daitouryou’s fiery pork vindaloo.

Anticipated openings: Atsuki Kuroda will open Caveman in February 2020 — watch this space | ROBBIE SWINNERTON

Tokyo also said farewell to two legendary characters with massive legacies. Following chef Kenichiro Nishi’s passing in the summer, Kyoaji (Shinbashi) has now served its last meal. Natural wine advocate Shinsaku Katsuyama will also be sadly missed, but fans will be reassured to know his life’s work lives on at his pioneering wine bar Shonzui (Roppongi).

Looking ahead, 2020 promises to be another busy year, with several major projects on their way. In Harajuku, the Gyre building will open a beautiful new dining floor. Chef Kan Morieda has parted from Salmon & Trout, but we’ll be seeing plenty from him in the new year. And patissier Natsuko Shoji has just moved her tiny, exclusive restaurant Ete to a smarter and slightly larger space in Shibuya.

In another exciting project, a refurbished old financial building in Nihonbashi’s Kabutocho area will become home to a number of new bars and restaurants. Look out for Caveman, a spinoff of Kabi with Atsuki Kuroda (ex-Maaemo in Oslo) at the helm. Opening in February, it’s going to be great.

GET THE BEST OF THE JAPAN TIMES IN FIVE EASY PIECES WITH TAKE 5

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07 Jan 08:02

Iran Has Already Hacked the U.S. At Least 4 Times — and Could Do It Again

by David Gilbert

In 2014, Tehran hackers crippled the casinos of outspoken billionaire conservative and big-time President Trump donor Sheldon Adelson after he suggested the U.S. nuke Iran.

Now, in the wake of Trump’s decision to assassinate the man widely seen as the country’s second most powerful leader, experts fear Iran is set to retaliate once again in cyberspace.

The assassination of General Qassem Soleimani in a U.S. drone strike last week has led to an outpouring of grief and dire warnings of “forceful revenge” from Tehran.

Iran knows that it cannot stand toe-to-toe with the U.S. when it comes to military might, but Tehran has a long history of successfully attacking American targets in cyberspace and has spent the last decade honing its skills and making preparations for a major cyberattack against critical U.S. infrastructure.

"They probe American infrastructure routinely, so if they'd make up their mind that this is what they want to do, they could do something," James Lewis, senior vice president and director of the technology policy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told VICE News. “They will look for vulnerable targets, that will be the smaller agencies the smaller companies.”

Iran’s decision to boost its cyber capabilities was sparked by the Stuxnet attack on its Natanz uranium enrichment facility in 2007, an attack jointly conducted by the U.S. and Israel.

The sophisticated malware infected the plant’s control systems forcing up to 1,000 of its centrifuges to spin out of control, hindering the ability to produce uranium for weapons.

Since then Iran’s government has put significant resources into developing its own cyber army, who have shown themselves to be innovative and adept at conducting campaigns across the globe

Here’s where they’ve struck the U.S. before:

2010-2011: In the wake of the Stuxnet attack, Iranian hackers responded by launching a series of distributed denial of service attacks that wreaked havoc on JP Morgan, Bank of America, and Capital One, leaving hundreds of thousands of customers unable to access their accounts for hours-long stretches over multiple days. The attacks also affected the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq.
2013: Iranian hackers remotely took control of the command-and-control network of a dam just outside New York. The access would have allowed the hackers to remotely release water from the dam, but the sluice gate had been manually disconnected at the time for maintenance. Seven Iranians were charged with the intrusion in 2016.
2014: Iranian hackers were behind an attack on one of Sheldon Adelson’s Las Vegas casinos, crippling IT systems, knocking phone systems offline and rendering computers and servers unusable. The outspoken conservative billionaire, who was a major supporter of President Trump’s election campaign, was targeted after he advocated for the use of nuclear weapons against Iran.
2018: Iranian hackers were blamed for crippling the city of Atlanta with SamSam ransomware, and costing the city millions to clean-up. The attack on Atlanta was one of just hundreds perpetrated by Iranian hackers against U.S. targets. Two Iranians were indicted by the Department of Justice in 2018 but remain at large.

READ: Here’s Everything You Need to Know About the Situation in Iran Right Now

Iran may not be on the same level as China, Russia or the U.S. when it comes to offensive cyber skills, but these efforts have shown that it can be a highly capable and destructive force willing to attack targets on U.S. soil.

In recent years, Iran’s cyberattacks have for the most part been focused on adversaries in the Middle East, including Saudi Aramco, which was hit with a massively destructive wiper attack that destroyed the data stored on 30,000 computers.

But more recent discoveries point to moves by Tehran to position itself to strike at the very heart of the U.S. by targeting critical national infrastructure, including power grids and government agencies. Now, the death of Soleimani could be the trigger to launch this attack.

Probing networks

A trio of reports in June last year highlighted that an Iranian government-sponsored hacking group known as APT33 (also known as Refined Kitten, Holmium, or Elfin) has been targeting the U.S. government agencies and private companies with targeted spear-phishing attacks.

Among the targets for this campaign was the Department of Energy and U.S. national labs.

READ: Here's what war with Iran would actually look like

Then, in November, Microsoft revealed that the same hacking group had been targeting companies who build industrial control systems, the computers that are used to control and monitor critical national infrastructures such as power grids and nuclear power plants.

"They‘re trying to find the downstream customer, to find out how they work and who uses them,” Ned Moran, a Microsoft security researcher, told Wired at the time. “They’re looking to inflict some pain on someone’s critical infrastructure that makes use of these control systems.”

As a result, when Soulemiani was killed on Friday, the U.S. government immediately re-upped a warning it first issued last year about the threat from Iranian hackers.

So far, no attacks have been detected. Michael Daniel, president and CEO of the Cyber Threat Alliance, an umbrella group that brings together experts in the field to try and combat common threats, said none of his members are reporting an uptick in hacking activity.

“That doesn't necessarily mean there isn't activity; it could be that we haven't seen it yet, it's still not at a broad enough scale to be detected, or defenders haven't attributed the activity yet,” said Daniel, who also served as President Obama’s cybersecurity coordinator.

READ: Young Iraqis aren’t sad Soleimani is dead. But they worry they’ll pay the price

While there has been some speculation that Iran could infiltrate major government agencies, knock out large swathes of the power grid or take phone networks offline, the reality is that the agencies and companies operating these networks have put in place relatively robust defenses in recent years that Iranian hackers would find almost impossible to breach.

But there are plenty of other targets for Tehran to focus on:

“The big companies are probably too well defended now for the Iranians,” Lewis said. “But that doesn't mean they aren't lots of targets out there and that could include government agencies because there are dozens of government agencies — and the Department of Defence has hundreds of individual networks — and some of them are not going to be in good shape.”

Cover: Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (left 6), Iranian President Hassan Rouhani (left 5), Soleimani's long-time lieutenant and the new leader of Quds Force Gen. Esmail Qaani (left 7), Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Hossein Salami (left 3) and Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani (left 4) attend the funeral ceremony of Qasem Soleimani, commander of Iranian Revolutionary Guards' Quds Forces, who was killed in a U.S. drone airstrike in Iraq, in Tehran, Iran on January 06, 2019. (Photo by Iranian Leader Press Office / Handout/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

View attached file (1578336885446-soleimani-funeral.jpeg, image/jpeg)

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07 Jan 07:36

The last tracker was just removed from Basecamp.com

by DHH

Can you believe we used to willingly tell Google about every single visitor to basecamp.com by way of Google Analytics? Letting them collect every last byte of information possible through the spying eye of their tracking pixel. Ugh.

But 2020 isn’t 2010. Our naiveté around data, who captures it, and what they do with it has collectively been brought to shame. Most people now sit with basic understanding that using the internet leaves behind a data trail, and quite a few people have begun to question just how deep that trail should be, and who should have the right to follow it.

In this new world, it feels like an obligation to make sure we’re not aiding and abetting those who seek to exploit our data. Those who hoard every little clue in order to piece of together a puzzle that’ll ultimately reveal all our weakest points and moments, then sell that picture to the highest bidder.

The internet needs to know less about us, not more. Just because it’s possible to track someone doesn’t mean we should.

That’s the ethos we’re trying to live at Basecamp. It’s not a straight path. Two decades of just doing as you did takes a while to unwind. But we’re here for that work.

Every request is now served from our own domains

Last year we stopped using pixel trackers in our Basecamp emails. This year we’re celebrating the start of a new decade by dropping the last third-party tracking pixel on basecamp.com. Now when you visit our marketing page, you only have to trust that we won’t abuse that data – not a laundry list of third parties you have no reasonable chance of vetting.

We still track that someone visited our page, but it’s really only the basics that interest us. How many people visited the page? Did a new pitch work better than the old? How many people signed up? Basic stuff like that. And basic stuff doesn’t require overly sophisticated tooling, so it’s fine that our homegrown package isn’t nearly as fancy or as piercing as offerings like Google Analytics. It doesn’t need to be.

We still aren’t entirely free of Google’s long data arm, though. You can still sign-in with Google, though we’d encourage you to switch to our new two-factor authenticated, WebAuth-capable in-house system. We’ll be deprecating the Sign-In With Google path entirely soon enough.

We also still use a variety of other data processors, like Customer.io, for onboarding emails. But going forward, the analysis for when that makes sense has absolutely changed. It’s no longer enough for something to be slightly more convenient or slightly cheaper for us to send data out of the house. Fewer dependencies, fewer processors, fewer eyes on our data and that of our customers is a powerful consideration all of its own.

Untangling yourself from the old paradigm of data is neither quick, easy, nor free. But it’s worth doing, even if you can only do it one step at the time. Think about what steps you could take in 2020.

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07 Jan 07:34

Guide To Using Reverse Image Search For Investigations

Reverse image search is one of the most well-known and easiest digital investigative techniques, with two-click functionality of choosing “Search Google for image” in many web browsers. This method has also seen widespread use in popular culture, perhaps most notably in the MTV show Catfish, which exposes people in online relationships who use stolen photographs on their social media.

However, if you only use Google for reverse image searching, you will be disappointed more often than not. Limiting your search process to uploading a photograph in its original form to just images.google.com may give you useful results for the most obviously stolen or popular images, but for most any sophisticated research project, you need additional sites at your disposal — along with a lot of creativity.

This guide will walk through detailed strategies to use reverse image search in digital investigations, with an eye towards identifying people and locations, along with determining an image’s progeny. After detailing the core differences between the search engines, Yandex, Bing, and Google are tested on five test images showing different objects and from various regions of the world.

Beyond Google

The first and most important piece of advice on this topic cannot be stressed enough: Google reverse image search isn’t very good.

As of this guide’s publication date, the undisputed leader of reverse image search is the Russian site Yandex. After Yandex, the runners-up are Microsoft’s Bing and Google. A fourth service that could also be used in investigations is TinEye, but this site specializes in intellectual property violations and looks for exact duplicates of images.

Yandex

Yandex is by far the best reverse image search engine, with a scary-powerful ability to recognize faces, landscapes, and objects. This Russian site draws heavily upon user-generated content, such as tourist review sites (e.g. FourSquare and TripAdvisor) and social networks (e.g. dating sites), for remarkably accurate results with facial and landscape recognition queries.

Its strengths lie in photographs taken in a European or former-Soviet context. While photographs from North America, Africa, and other places may still return useful results on Yandex, you may find yourself frustrated by scrolling through results mostly from Russia, Ukraine, and eastern Europe rather than the country of your target images.

To use Yandex, go to images.yandex.com, then choose the camera icon on the right.

From there, you can either upload a saved image or type in the URL of one hosted online.

If you get stuck with the Russian user interface, look out for Выберите файл (Choose file), Введите адрес картинки (Enter image address), and Найти (Search). After searching, look out for Похожие картинки (Similar images), and Ещё похожие (More similar).

The facial recognition algorithms used by Yandex are shockingly good. Not only will Yandex look for photographs that look similar to the one that has a face in it, but it will also look for other photographs of the same person (determined through matching facial similarities) with completely different lighting, background colors, and positions. While Google and Bing may just look for other photographs showing a person with similar clothes and general facial features, Yandex will search for those matches, and also other photographs of a facial match. Below, you can see how the three services searched the face of Sergey Dubinsky, a Russian suspect in the downing of MH17. Yandex found numerous photographs of Dubinsky from various sources (only two of the top results had unrelated people), with the result differing from the original image but showing the same person. Google had no luck at all, while Bing had a single result (fifth image, second row) that also showed Dubinsky.

Yandex is, obviously, a Russian service, and there are worries and suspicions of its ties (or potential future ties) to the Kremlin. While we at Bellingcat constantly use Yandex for its search capabilities, you may be a bit more paranoid than us. Use Yandex at your own risk, especially if you are also worried about using VK and other Russian services. If you aren’t particularly paranoid, try searching an un-indexed photograph of yourself or someone you know in Yandex, and see if it can find yourself or your doppelganger online.

Bing

Over the past few years, Bing has caught up to Google in its reverse image search capabilities, but is still limited. Bing’s “Visual Search”, found at images.bing.com, is very easy to use, and offers a few interesting features not found elsewhere.

Within an image search, Bing allows you to crop a photograph (button below the source image) to focus on a specific element in said photograph, as seen below. The results with the cropped image will exclude the extraneous elements, focusing on the user-defined box. However, if the selected portion of the image is small, it is worth it to manually crop the photograph yourself and increase the resolution — low-resolution images (below 200×200) bring back poor results.

Below, a Google Street View image of a man walking a couple of pugs was cropped to focus on just the pooches, leading to Bing to suggest the breed of dog visible in the photograph (the “Looks like” feature), along with visually similar results. These results mostly included pairs of dogs being walked, matching the source image, but did not always only include pugs, as French bulldogs, English bulldogs, mastiffs, and others are mixed in.

Google

By far the most popular reverse image search engine, at images.google.com, Google is fine for most rudimentary reverse image searches. Some of these relatively simple queries include identifying well-known people in photographs, finding the source of images that have been shared quite a bit online, determining the name and creator of a piece of art, and so on. However, if you want to locate images that are not close to an exact copy of the one you are researching, you may be disappointed.

For example, when searching for the face of a man who tried to attack a BBC journalist at a Trump rally, Google can find the source of the cropped image, but cannot find any additional images of him, or even someone who bears a passing resemblance to him.

While Google was not very strong in finding other instances of this man’s face or similar-looking people, it still found the original, un-cropped version of the photograph the screenshot was taken from, showing some utility.

Five Test Cases

For testing out different reverse image search techniques and engines, a handful of images representing different types of investigations are used, including both original photographs (not previously uploaded online) and recycled ones. Due to the fact that these photographs are included in this guide, it is likely that these test cases will not work as intended in the future, as search engines will index these photographs and integrate them into their results. Thus, screenshots of the results as they appeared when this guide was being written are included.

These test photographs include a number of different geographic regions to test the strength of search engines for source material in western Europe, eastern Europe, South America, southeast Asia, and the United States. With each of these photographs, I have also highlighted discrete objects within the image to test out the strengths and weaknesses for each search engine.

Feel free to download these photographs (every image in this guide is hyperlinked directly to a JPEG file) and run them through search engines yourself to test out your skills.

Olisov Palace In Nizhny Novgord, Russia (Original, not previously uploaded online)

Isolated: White SUV in Nizhny Novgorod

Isolated: Trailer in Nizhny Novgorod

Cityscape In Cebu, Philippines (Original, not previously uploaded online)

Isolated: Condominium complex, “The Padgett Place“

Isolated: “Waterfront Hotel“

Students From Bloomberg 2020 Ad (Screenshot from video)

Isolated: Student

Av. do Café In São Paulo, Brazil (Screenshot from Google Street View)

Isolated: Toca do Açaí

Isolated: Estacionamento (Parking)

Amsterdam Canal (Original, not previously uploaded online)

Isolated: Grey Heron

Isolated: Dutch Flag (also rotated 90 degrees clockwise)

Results

Each of these photographs were chosen in order to demonstrate the capabilities and limitations of the three search engines. While Yandex in particular may seem like it is working digital black magic at times, it is far from infallible and can struggle with some types of searches. For some ways to possibly overcome these limitations, I’ve detailed some creative search strategies at the end of this guide.

Novgorod’s Olisov Palace

Predictably, Yandex had no trouble identifying this Russian building. Along with photographs from a similar angle to our source photograph, Yandex also found images from other perspectives, including 90 degrees counter-clockwise (see the first two images in the third row) from the vantage point of the source image.

Yandex also had no trouble identifying the white SUV in the foreground of the photograph as a Nissan Juke.

Lastly, in the most challenging isolated search for this image, Yandex was unsuccessful in identifying the non-descript grey trailer in front of the building. A number of the results look like the one from the source image, but none are an actual match.

Bing had no success in identifying this structure. Nearly all of its results were from the United States and western Europe, showing houses with white/grey masonry or siding and brown roofs.

Likewise, Bing could not determine that the white SUV was a Nissan Juke, instead focusing on an array of other white SUVs and cars.

Lastly, Bing failed in identifying the grey trailer, focusing more on RVs and larger, grey campers.

Google‘s results for the full photograph are comically bad, looking to the House television show and images with very little visual similarity.

Google successfully identified the white SUV as a Nissan Juke, even noting it in the text field search. As seen with Yandex, feeding the search engine an image from a similar perspective as popular reference materials — a side view of a car that resembles that of most advertisements — will best allow reverse image algorithms to work their magic.

Lastly, Google recognized what the grey trailer was (travel trailer / camper), but its “visually similar images” were far from it.

Scorecard: Yandex 2/3; Bing 0/3; Google 1/3

Cebu

Yandex was technically able to identify the cityscape as that of Cebu in the Philippines, but perhaps only by accident. The fourth result in the first row and the fourth result in the second row are of Cebu, but only the second photograph shows any of the same buildings as in the source image. Many of the results were also from southeast Asia (especially Thailand, which is a popular destination for Russian tourists), noting similar architectural styles, but none are from the same perspective as the source.

Of the two buildings isolated from the search (the Padgett Palace and Waterfront Hotel), Yandex was able to identify the latter, but not the former. The Padgett Palace building is a relatively unremarkable high-rise building filled with condos, while the Waterfront Hotel also has a casino inside, leading to an array of tourist photographs showing its more distinct architecture.

Bing did not have any results that were even in southeast Asia when searching for the Cebu cityscape, showing a severe geographic limitation to its indexed results.

Like Yandex, Bing was unable to identify the building on the left part of the source image.

Bing was unable to find the Waterfront Hotel, both when using Bing’s cropping function (bringing back only low-resolution photographs) and manually cropping and increasing the resolution of the building from the source image. It is worth noting that the results from these two versions of the image, which were identical outside of the resolution, brought back dramatically different results.

As with Yandex, Google brought back a photograph of Cebu in its results, but without a strong resemblance to the source image. While Cebu was not in the thumbnails for the initial results, following through to “Visually similar images” will fetch an image of Cebu’s skyline as the eleventh result (third image in the second row below).

As with Yandex and Bing, Google was unable to identify the high-rise condo building on the left part of the source image. Google also had no success with the Waterfront Hotel image.

Scorecard: Yandex 4/6; Bing 0/6; Google 2/6

Bloomberg 2020 Student

Yandex found the source image from this Bloomberg campaign advertisement — a Getty Images stock photo. Along with this, Yandex also found versions of the photograph with filters applied (second result, first row) and additional photographs from the same stock photo series. Also, for some reason, porn, as seen in the blurred results below.

When isolating just the face of the stock photo model, Yandex brought back a handful of other shots of the same guy (see last image in first row), plus images of the same stock photo set in the classroom (see the fourth image in the first row).

Bing had an interesting search result: it found the exact match of the stock photograph, and then brought back “Similar images” of other men in blue shirts. The “Pages with this” tab of the result provides a handy list of duplicate versions of this same image across the web.

Focusing on just the face of the stock photo model does not bring back any useful results, or provide the source image that it was taken from.

Google recognizes that the image used by the Bloomberg campaign is a stock photo, bringing back an exact result. Google will also provide other stock photos of people in blue shirts in class.

In isolating the student, Google will again return the source of the stock photo, but its visually similar images do not show the stock photo model, rather an array of other men with similar facial hair. We’ll count this as a half-win in finding the original image, but not showing any information on the specific model, as Yandex did.

Scorecard: Yandex 6/8; Bing 1/8; Google 3.5/8

Brazilian Street View

Yandex could not figure out that this image was snapped in Brazil, instead focusing on urban landscapes in Russia.

For Toca do Açaí, for some reason, Yandex mostly brought back porn as results. These images were blurred, and you can click here to see the results. However, despite the blurred smut, two of the results did correctly identify the logo.

For the parking sign [Estacionamento], Yandex did not even come close.

Bing did not know that this street view image was taken in Brazil.

…nor did Bing recognize the parking sign…

…or the Toca do Açaí logo.

Despite the fact that the image was directly taken from Google’s Street View, Google reverse image search did not recognize a photograph uploaded onto its own service.

Just as Bing and Yandex, Google could not recognize the Portuguese parking sign.

Lastly, Google did not come close to identifying the Toca do Açaí logo, instead focusing on various types of wooden panels, showing how it focused on the backdrop of the image rather than the logo and words.

Scorecard: Yandex 7/11; Bing 1/11; Google 3.5/11

Amsterdam Canal

Yandex knew exactly where this photograph was taken in Amsterdam, finding other photographs taken in central Amsterdam, and even including ones with various types of birds in the frame.

Yandex correctly identified bird in the foreground of the photograph as a grey heron (серая цапля), also bringing back an array of images of grey herons in a similar position and posture as the source image.

However, Yandex flunked the test of identifying the Dutch flag hanging in the background of the photograph. When rotating the image 90 degrees clockwise to present the flag in its normal pattern, Yandex was able to figure out that it was a flag, but did not return any Dutch flags in its results.

Bing only recognized that this image shows an urban landscape with water, with no results from Amsterdam.

Though Bing struggled with identifying an urban landscape, it correctly identified the bird as a grey heron, including a specialized “Looks like” result going to a page describing the bird.

However, like with Yandex, the Dutch flag was too confusing for Bing, both in its original and rotated forms.

Google noted that there was a reflection in the canal of the image, but went no further than this, focusing on various paved paths in cities and nothing from Amsterdam.

Google was close in the bird identification exercise, but just barely missed it — it is a grey, not great blue, heron.

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07 Jan 07:17

The books and translations about Japan to watch out for in 2020 | The Japan Times

The new decade starts in a minor key for the publishing of Japanese literature in translation as Haikasoru — publisher of Hideo Furukawa and Taiyo Fujii among many others — goes on hiatus. A great champion of science fiction, fantasy and horror, the hole it leaves behind will not easily be filled. Let’s hope the hiatus is brief.

Despite this sad news, 2020 promises to be another spectacular year for translations and books about Japan with some familiar names and some newcomers gracing the stage in the 12 months ahead.

Following on from the international success of “Convenience Store Woman,” Granta is bringing Sayaka Murata’s “Earthlings” to English for the first time. Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori, it tells the story of two children who believe themselves to be from another planet. When they are separated by their parents, their will to be reunited leads to, in Granta’s words, “spectacular and violent consequences.” This is one that should be on everyone’s wish list.

New Directions Publishing is also striking while Hiroko Oyamada’s iron is hot. October 2019 saw the publication in English of the much-acclaimed “The Factory,” and hot on its heels comes her Akutagawa Prize-winning story “The Hole,” translated by David Boyd. A 30-year-old woman quits her job and moves to the countryside, where she meets some strange people and falls into a hole. It wouldn’t be a year in Japanese literature without a dose of weirdness, and reviews of the Japanese original mention magical realism, esotericism and Kafka, words which tick a lot of the right boxes.

2020 may be the year of Seishi Yokomizo, who has two novels in translation out from Pushkin Vertigo within a few months of each other. “The Honjin Murders” (translated by Louise Heal Kawai) and “The Inugami Curse” (translated by Yumiko Yamazaki) are murder mysteries solved (presumably) by detective Kosuke Kindaichi. Both set in the late 1930s/early 1940s, they promise to be atmospheric, exciting and knotty whodunits. The covers alone are enough to get any fan of the genre salivating.

Another title from Pushkin Press in 2020 is Naoki Matayoshi’s “Spark,” translated by Alison Watts. Aspiring comedian Tokunaga teams up with mentor Kamiya for a hilarious drunken romp around the world of manzai comedy. The original has already been adapted into the hit series “Hibana: Spark” by Netflix Japan.

Moving away from translation, the prolific Suzanne Kamata returns with “Pop Flies, Robo-Pets and Other Disasters” (One Elm Books). It is aimed at younger readers and explores the experiences of a returnee from America to a Japanese junior high school through the highs and lows of a baseball team.

Rebecca Otowa’s “The Mad Kyoto Shoe Swapper and Other Short Stories From Japan” (Tuttle Publishing) promises tales of Japanese experiences from both Japanese and foreign perspectives, and the enticing title suggests these don’t dwell too much on the everyday.

Speaking of short stories, Red Circle Authors continues its series of minis with “The Chronicles of Lord Asunaro” by Kanji Hanawa (translated by Meredith McKinney) and “The Refugees’ Daughter” by Takuji Ichikawa (translated by Emily Balistrieri). Red Circle has quickly filled a niche few recognized existed with these one-story shorts, and hopefully the series will continue its run through this year and on.

“When Can We Go Back to America?” by Susan H. Kamei and Barry Denenberg (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers) delves into the internment of Japanese in the U.S. during World War II. The press release describes it as a “novel that narrates the oral history of Japanese incarceration during the war, from the perspective of the young people affected.” The parallels between internment and the contemporary detention of immigrants in the U.S. hardly need to be spelled out, making this a timely and relevant publication.

Also of the moment is Michael Booth’s “Three Tigers, One Mountain” (Jonathan Cape). Based on the Chinese proverb that two tigers cannot share one mountain, Booth explores the history of Chinese-Japanese-Korean relations through anthropology, history, politics and travel, visiting all three countries before ending his journey in Taiwan.

Winding the geopolitical clock back a century or so, the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) marked the first time a modern Asian nation had defeated a European one, and ushered in an era of conflict. It also marked the end of the golden age of combat correspondence, according to Michael S. Sweeney and Natascha Toft Roelsgaard. Their new book, “Journalism and the Russo-Japanese War,” (Lexington Books) argues that the template for relations between the press and the military were laid down in this war and are still adhered to today.

And finally, “The Only Gaijin in the Village: A Year Living in Rural Japan” (Polygon) by, well, me, is out in March. A memoir about living in rural Japan, it is “intelligent, warm-hearted, down-to-earth and often very funny” according to poet and novelist Alan Spence. Do, please, check that out as well.

As always, this is only a small sample of the translations and books about Japan hitting the shelves in 2020. Why not tell us what you’re looking forward to on our social media streams?

GET THE BEST OF THE JAPAN TIMES IN FIVE EASY PIECES WITH TAKE 5

Pelle Sten likes this

02 Jan 11:14

Kassetthouse 2019

by rasmus

Traditionen måste fortsätta, efter listorna med tips på kassettsläpp som här på bloggen har fått avsluta åren 2016, 2017 och 2018. Som vanligt rymmer listan mer än bara housemusik, men det finns ändå en avgränsning till det mer eller mindre dansanta. Men bara kassetter som jag själv rent fysiskt har lyckats lägga vantarna på, vilket bidrar till en europeisk slagsida då beställning av kassetter från världen utanför EU numera medför risken för en momssmäll. Men jag tror ändå att listan antyder något om hur global scenen är. Tänkte återkomma om några dagar med en lista på ytterligare kassettutgåvor från andra musikspektra, som jag gärna vill uppmärksamma.

Tre-noll-treenigheten by Bottenvikens Silverkyrka

Bottenvikens Silverkyrka – Tre-noll-treenigheten

Lamour | Discogs | Bandcamp
Börjar med att tipsa om denna generösa samling av acid-techno på väckelsetema från Umeåduon som slog igenom för något år sedan med en acidremix på Carolas kommunistiska hymn “Säg mig var du står” och som i år nominerades till nåt fint pris av P3.

VA – The Blaq Bunch Vol.3 (BLAQTAPES007) by Blaq Numbers

The Blaq Bunch Vol.3

Blaq Numbers | Bandcamp
Tack vare den här samlingskassetten stiftade jag bekantskap med bolaget Blaq Numbers som jag verkligen gillar. Kanske årets trevligaste housekassett som hunnit rulla många varv. Med bland andra DJ Psychiatre som dyker upp lite här och var i dessa sammanhang.

2XM – Astral Lakes EP incl. Remixes from Explorer Of The Humankind & DJ Psychiatre (BLAQTAPES006) by Blaq Numbers

2XM – Astral Lakes

Blaq Numbers | Discogs | Bandcamp
Ännu en kassett från Blaq Numbers, med brittiska duon 2XM och remixer av bland andra DJ Psychiatre. Lite kortare speltid än föregående, men stabilt bra kassetthouse.

The Finspång Sound – Exodus (95-97) by Tobohäxan

The Finspång Sound: Exodus (95-97)

Kronofonika
Fortsättningen på en kassett som tipsades om i fjol och bygger vidare på samma ursprungsmyt (upphittade inspelningar från en mycket lokal bruksortsscen på 1990-talet). Är även musikaliskt ett återbesök i det senare 1990-talets post-acid ambient.

IS by ISSHU

ISSHU – IS

Seagrave | Discogs | Bandcamp
ISSHU fortsätter att representera den typiskt dekonstruktiva inriktningen i musiken från brittiska Seagrave (som kombinerar kassettmusik med graffiti). Även här råder ganska starka nittiotalsvibbar.

Binary Dreams Collapsed by Charles Taciturn

Charles Taciturn – Binary Dreams Collapsed

Xenonyms | Bandcamp
Ännu mer a melankolisk dansmusik. Vet inte varifrån den kommer, bara att den syftar till att fånga känslan av att befinna sig mellan två platser. Rekommenderas till alla som gillar Burial även om det inte låter särskilt likt.

Spellbound! by DJ Sabrina The Teenage DJ

DJ Sabrina The Teenage DJ – Spellbound!

Bandcamp
Sabrina är tillbaka med sin euforiska och lätt infantila musik, en sorts lo-fi house som ständigt byter skepnad, blir till funkpop och rentav collegerock. Måste erkänna att jag fortfarande inte kan stå emot det. Medan jag skriver detta upptäckter jag att hon nu i december har hunnit släppa ännu en kassett som jag genast klickar hem.

LI$015 by Isabella

Isabella – LI$015

low income $quad | Discogs | Bandcamp
Energisk, kantig och obekväm blandning av “rave stabs, chopped up vocals, gabber kicks and angelic choirs”. Med andra ord så kallad “deconstructed club”. Isabella Koen har bland annat spelat på Norberg, Herrensauna och Room4Resistance, gett ut en split med Bergsonist på Börft, och så vidare, men hennes senaste kassett är släppt på ett sympatiskt kassettbolag från Kroatien.

Careful by BOY HARSHER

Boy Harsher – Careful

Discogs | Bandcamp
Sorgsen dansmusik som tydligt följer i spåren av coldwave och gotisk syntpop. Utgiven på eget bolag och har under året även remixats av företrädare för en kyligare techno, som Silent Servant, Minimal Violence och Marcel Dettman, så sångerskans släpiga stämma ekar en del i mytomspunna kraftverkshallar och dylika ställen. Såvitt jag kunnat märka har Boy Harsher även blivit ganska uppmärksammade av popjournalister.

STI Vol.2 by DJ SKR

DJ SKR – STI Vol.2

Eclipse Tribez | Discogs | Bandcamp
Ett redigt ravetape, tänkt som en hyllning till klassiska (brittiska) hardcore/jungle-scenen. Ingenting unikt och syftet är knappast heller att vara det, utan snarare ett visitkort från klubbarrangörer som vill visa omvärlden hur det kan låta på deras dansgolv i Bryssel.

Rave Tuga Vol. IV by Unknown

Rave Tuga Vol. IV

Rave Tuga | Bandcamp
Ravetape från Lissabon med en hel del bra acid/techno som får en att ana någonting om hur stadens ravescen kan låta i dag.

Lost Armor — Счастливые Дни by Raw Russian

Lost Armor — Счастливые Дни

Raw Russian | Discogs | Bandcamp
Raw Russian (som drivs av Nikita Villeneuve i Moskva) har under året varit väldigt aktiva i sin utgivning, som spänt över ett brett spektra mellan ambient och techno, via breakbeats och smutsiga houseremixer av gammal rysk pop, allting omsorgsfullt inlindat i myten om det stora ryska vemodet.

Тихий Куст – Растения / Razteniya by Raw Russian

Тихий Куст – Растения

Raw Russian | | Bandcamp
Enligt uppgift spelades detta – som i huvudsak utgörs av någon sorts atmosfärisk jungle – in redan 1998, av en viss Sergej Terentjev som kanske (men troligen inte) är identisk med den i Ryssland hyfsat kände hårdrocksmusikern Sergej Vladimirovitj Terentjev.

Modern Life by amnfx

Åmnfx – Modern Life

Discogs | Bandcamp
Vasilij Skobejev är en producent från Moskva som jag upptäckte genom hans kassett på 100 % Silk som tipsades om här för tre år sedan och som lät klart mjukare än den här kassetten som är mer åt det kärva technohållet. Det känns som att Åmnfx under 2020 kommer att göra mer väsen av sig i övriga Europa.

Potboiler No. 3: Cailín – In My Soul by Cailín

Cailín ‎– In My Soul

Wheretimegoes | Discogs | Bandcamp
Känslomättat halvmelodisk techno från södra Irland. Cailín kommer sannolikt, precis som Åmnfx, att göra mer väsen av sig i Europa framöver.

alpine funk classics vol.2 by 𝓼𝓱𝓸𝓰𝓪𝓷𝓪𝓲

Alpine Funk Classics vol.2

Shoganai | Bandcamp
Samlingskassett från den franska alpstaden Grenoble, med tio spår av olika producenter därifrån. Köpte den mest på grund av titeln och gillar att lyssna på det även om jag inte får så bra grepp om stilriktningen, fast det är snarare acid och techno än renodlad funk, om man säger så.

Rough Cuts Vol.1 by Too Rough 4 Radio

Rough Cuts Vol.1

Too Rough 4 Radio | Discogs | Bandcamp
Samlingskassett från TR4R som likt Blaq Numbers är en ny upptäckt jag har gjort på kassettscenen i år och som kan ha att göra med att DJ Psychiatre dyker upp även här. En lagom spretig mix där house bryts i breakbeats och acidutflykter.

Pelle Sten likes this

27 Dec 13:04

Guide To Using Reverse Image Search For Investigations

Beyond Google

The first and most important piece of advice on this topic cannot be stressed enough: Google reverse image search isn’t very good.

Yandex

To use Yandex, go to images.yandex.com, then choose the camera icon on the right.

From there, you can either upload a saved image or type in the URL of one hosted online.

Bing

Google

Five Test Cases

Feel free to download these photographs (every image in this guide is hyperlinked directly to a JPEG file) and run them through search engines yourself to test out your skills.

Olisov Palace In Nizhny Novgord, Russia (Original, not previously uploaded online)

Isolated: White SUV in Nizhny Novgorod

Isolated: Trailer in Nizhny Novgorod

Cityscape In Cebu, Philippines (Original, not previously uploaded online)

Isolated: Condominium complex, “The Padgett Place“

Isolated: “Waterfront Hotel“

Students From Bloomberg 2020 Ad (Screenshot from video)

Isolated: Student

Av. do Café In São Paulo, Brazil (Screenshot from Google Street View)

Isolated: Toca do Açaí

Isolated: Estacionamento (Parking)

Amsterdam Canal (Original, not previously uploaded online)

Isolated: Grey Heron

Isolated: Dutch Flag (also rotated 90 degrees clockwise)

Results

Novgorod’s Olisov Palace

Yandex also had no trouble identifying the white SUV in the foreground of the photograph as a Nissan Juke.

Bing had no success in identifying this structure. Nearly all of its results were from the United States and western Europe, showing houses with white/grey masonry or siding and brown roofs.

Likewise, Bing could not determine that the white SUV was a Nissan Juke, instead focusing on an array of other white SUVs and cars.

Lastly, Bing failed in identifying the grey trailer, focusing more on RVs and larger, grey campers.

Google‘s results for the full photograph are comically bad, looking to the House television show and images with very little visual similarity.

Lastly, Google recognized what the grey trailer was (travel trailer / camper), but its “visually similar images” were far from it.

Scorecard: Yandex 2/3; Bing 0/3; Google 1/3

Cebu

Bing did not have any results that were even in southeast Asia when searching for the Cebu cityscape, showing a severe geographic limitation to its indexed results.

Like Yandex, Bing was unable to identify the building on the left part of the source image.

As with Yandex and Bing, Google was unable to identify the high-rise condo building on the left part of the source image. Google also had no success with the Waterfront Hotel image.

Scorecard: Yandex 4/6; Bing 0/6; Google 2/6

Bloomberg 2020 Student

Focusing on just the face of the stock photo model does not bring back any useful results, or provide the source image that it was taken from.

Google recognizes that the image used by the Bloomberg campaign is a stock photo, bringing back an exact result. Google will also provide other stock photos of people in blue shirts in class.

Scorecard: Yandex 6/8; Bing 1/8; Google 3.5/8

Brazilian Street View

Yandex could not figure out that this image was snapped in Brazil, instead focusing on urban landscapes in Russia.

For the parking sign [Estacionamento], Yandex did not even come close.

Bing did not know that this street view image was taken in Brazil.

…nor did Bing recognize the parking sign…

…or the Toca do Açaí logo.

Despite the fact that the image was directly taken from Google’s Street View, Google reverse image search did not recognize a photograph uploaded onto its own service.

Just as Bing and Yandex, Google could not recognize the Portuguese parking sign.

Scorecard: Yandex 7/11; Bing 1/11; Google 3.5/11

Amsterdam Canal

Yandex knew exactly where this photograph was taken in Amsterdam, finding other photographs taken in central Amsterdam, and even including ones with various types of birds in the frame.

Bing only recognized that this image shows an urban landscape with water, with no results from Amsterdam.

Though Bing struggled with identifying an urban landscape, it correctly identified the bird as a grey heron, including a specialized “Looks like” result going to a page describing the bird.

However, like with Yandex, the Dutch flag was too confusing for Bing, both in its original and rotated forms.

Google noted that there was a reflection in the canal of the image, but went no further than this, focusing on various paved paths in cities and nothing from Amsterdam.

Google was close in the bird identification exercise, but just barely missed it — it is a grey, not great blue, heron.

Pelle Sten likes this

19 Dec 11:15

Hur jag skriver

by Hexmaster

I färd med ännu en bok (återkommer om detaljerna) så kanske det kan intressera hur jag lägger upp skrivarbetet generellt. Skönlitteratur har jag aldrig ägnat mig åt och har inte en aning om hur de författarna gör – mer än att det finns otaliga metoder. När det gäller facklitteratur finns det naturligtvis också otaliga metoder för att fylla arken med nedslag. Här är den som jag använder.

Det mesta jag skrivit kan ses som artiklar, om inte annat så kan jag se dem som sådana: Texter på några få tusen nedslag upp till kanske 30 000, som handlar om ett specifikt ämne. Det var det format som jag först blev publicerad i, och som jag sedan vant mig vid. Om det ska vara betydligt längre så delar jag upp ämnet i bitar lagoma för artikel-långa texter.

Sedan vidtar insamlande av stoff. Jag läser in mig, analogt som digitalt, tittar på filmer, frågar folk, besöker platser ... Jag upprättar också ett kladd-dokument. När jag hittar något intressant, drar någon slutsats, kommer på något jag vill undersöka närmare, eller på annat sätt vill lägga något på minnet, så skriver jag upp det i kladden. Där skriver jag också sammanfattningar, formulerar frågeställningar, etc. Så småningom börjar jag att behandla kladden mer och mer som ett utkast, där påbörjade stycken med skriven text läggs in bland citat och lösryckta snuttar.

Förr eller senare kommer en struktur att börja kristalliseras i kladden – den har åtminstone gjort det hittills ... Jag kan komma underfund med vilka frågor jag vill ta upp, i vilken ordning de ska komma, hur inledning och avslutning ska se ut, illustrationer som ska vara med, och så vidare.

När jag börjar kunna se den färdiga texten framför mig så tar jag nästa steg: Jag börjar från början. Ett nytt rent dokument upprättas där artikeln skrivs ned. Kladden utgör nu ett skafferi från vilket jag kan hämta utvalt material, textsnuttar i olika längder, påbörjade eller kanske färdigslipade formuleringar. Dessa redigeras ihop och kompletteras med nya texter.

Det finns en god regel som säger att skrivande och redigerande är helt olika sysslor, två olika sätt att tänka, och som därför ska separeras så långt det är möjligt. Det är en god regel som jag ibland följer.

En ännu bättre regel säger att när skribenten anser sig vara "färdig" med en text, så ska den läggas undan en tid; allra minst några dagar, gärna några veckor. När man sedan återkommer till texten så kommer man att se bemängder med fel och brister. Felen och bristerna har naturligtvis funnits där länge men man har vant sig vid dem; efter ett tillräckligt långt uppehåll ser man texten med nya ögon, och då blir de desto tydligare. En annan metod för att komma runt denna irriterande "hemmablindhet" är att då och då byta typsnitt och grad; när ord- och textbilder blir annorlunda så kan dittills osynliga fel och brister plötsligt bli nog så synliga. Ännu en metod för att se texten på ett nytt sätt, och som dessutom har andra fördelar, är att skriva ut texten och gå igenom den manuellt. Gäller det lite viktigare texter är det steget obligatoriskt.

Pelle Sten likes this

16 Dec 15:30

Both sides

On Saturday night, Donald Trump complained about the next morning’s TV schedule. “Hard to believe that @FoxNews will be interviewing sleazebag & totally discredited former FBI Director James Comey, & also corrupt politician Adam ‘Shifty’ Schiff,” Trump tweeted; the network, he added, is trying “sooo hard to be politically correct” that it risks going the same way as “Commiecast MSNBC & Fake News CNN.” Yesterday, Chris Wallace—host of the offending show, Fox News Sunday—raised the viewer feedback with Pam Bondi, a Trump adviser. “Does the president understand that it’s the duty of a free and fair press to cover both sides of the story?” Wallace asked. Bondi said she, personally, was glad Wallace was grilling Comey and Schiff, and pivoted to attacking them. “Thank you very much for the promo,” Wallace joked. “Please come back and we’ll have some more tough questions for you.”

The exchange spoke to Wallace’s reputation as a redoubt of integrity (and sanity) at Fox. But not everyone watching will have agreed with his assessment that it’s the media’s duty to “cover both sides of the story.” In the Trump era, “both sides” (or “bothsidesism”) has become shorthand for a journalistic philosophy that many media critics consider to be broken, especially in its Democrat v. Republican iteration; its rules, critics say, make things that aren’t the same seem the same, and allow bad actors to launder disinformation. Yesterday, Dan Froomkin, editor of Press Watch, put it well, with specific reference to the New York Times: “If you’d asked NYT editors five years ago whether people who deny basic facts, traffic in conspiracy theories, demonize immigrants, and otherwise fight against a pluralistic society should be given equal (or more than equal) time in their news columns, they would have said no.”

ICYMI: Why a lot of critics are wrong about Rachel Maddow

As impeachment has progressed, attacks on the “both sides” approach—and the Times, in particular—have intensified. Over the weekend, critics trained their ire on an article in the paper, headlined “The Breach Widens as Congress Nears a Partisan Impeachment,” about a debate in the Judiciary Committee. Nate Silver, of FiveThirtyEight, noted that the actual words “both sides” appeared four times in the piece. (One of these was in a quotation.) Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU, listed 12 more snippets from the article as evidence of the Times’s inability to handle what he calls “asymmetrical polarization.” They included “the different impeachment realities that the two parties are living in,” “both sides engaged in a kind of mutually assured destruction,” and “the two parties could not even agree on a basic set of facts in front of them.”

Rosen is right that this sort of language is inadequate: Democrats, for the most part, are engaging with the factual record; Republicans, for the most part, are not. These positions are manifestly not equivalent. Treating them as such does not serve any useful concept of fairness; instead, it rebounds clearly to the advantage of the one side (Republicans) for whom nonsense being taken seriously is a victory in itself. The Times is far from the only culprit. The structure of some TV news shows, in particular, has bothsidesism hardwired into it: a Democrat and a Republican are given equal time to make their unequal impeachment cases, and both face hard questions, to contrive a sense of balance. The questions lobbed at Democrats are often fair, but often pale into triviality when a Republican follows them on and starts sowing conspiracy theories.

Some coverage, it seems, can’t even do bothsidesism properly. Yesterday, Meet the Press courted online criticism of its own, after it aired clips from a roundtable discussion on impeachment with six voters in Kent County, Michigan, a competitive area of a competitive state. Every one of the voters was a Republican; they all appeared to be white. Host Chuck Todd disclosed their partisan affiliation, but not before he’d introduced them as “voters beyond the Beltway.” The soundbites they gave were entirely predictable: “Have you recorded a football game but found out the final score before you watched it, and you just don’t even care?”; “I think a lot of people see it more as an infomercial, politically”; “Both sides…” Nor were they fully representative of public opinion. Jamil Smith, of Rolling Stone, noted on Twitter that “Nonwhite, liberal voters who also live outside of DC are hardly ever on these panels.” Marcy Wheeler, a national-security blogger who lives in the area Meet the Press visited, said the roundtable didn’t even reflect white opinion in Kent County. (Wheeler says she visited the brewery where the segment was filmed and also interviewed six people there, at random. All six supported impeachment.)

When it comes to much impeachment coverage, bothsidesism isn’t the beginning and end of the problem, but part of our broader reflex to frame contentious political stories around the concept of partisanship. In parts of the press, a set of party-oriented impeachment narratives has taken hold that contains some truth, but also rests on a selective interpretation of available evidence. Entrenched partisanship—in Congress and the country—is real, and newsworthy, as is the role that our fragmented information ecosystem has played in stoking and reinforcing division. And yet it does not follow, as some journalists and pundits seem to have surmised, that impeachment has been a waste of time. At the beginning of his show yesterday, Todd said the “national response” to impeachment has been “whatever.” And yet, as I wrote earlier this month, support for impeaching Trump, while recently static, is historically high. (A Fox News poll out yesterday reinforced that finding.) Six Republicans in Michigan are not the country.

The media’s job, done properly, is multidirectional: it holds power to account, and communicates matters of public interest to news consumers. On impeachment, too much coverage seems to have got stuck in a feedback loop: we’re telling the public that politicians aren’t budging from their partisan siloes, and vice versa, with the facts of what Trump actually did getting lost somewhere in the cycle. The cult of “both sides” is integral to this dynamic, and it’s serving the impeachment story poorly. Now, more than ever, our top duty should be to fight for the truth.

Below, more on impeachment:

One side: Over the weekend, the editorial board of the Times backed Trump’s impeachment; his actions, it wrote, are the “textbook example of an impeachable offense, as the nation’s framers envisioned it.” More than a dozen newspaper editorial boards have now backed impeachment, including those of the Washington Post, USA Today, and the LA Times. Politico’s Michael Calderone reminds us, however, that the number doesn’t come close to the 115 newspaper editorial boards that backed Bill Clinton’s impeachment in the late 1990s.
Impeachment fatigue: According to data from NewsWhip, reader engagement on stories about impeachment appears to have declined since the process started in September, Axios’s Neal Rothschild reports. “In an era of extreme polarization, facts must be addressed by both sides, but arguments and interpretations fall into predictable patterns of partisanship where each side will shut out the other,” Rothschild writes.
Crossing the floor: Jeff Van Drew, a Congressman who represents a conservative-leaning district in New Jersey, is set to quit the Democratic Party and join the Republicans. Aside from Rep. Collin Peterson, of Minnesota, Van Drew was the only Democratic lawmaker to vote against formalizing the impeachment inquiry into Trump.
“Equal-opportunity skeptic”: As Bombshell, a movie about Roger Ailes’s downfall at Fox News, opens, Michael M. Grynbaum and John Koblin, of the Times, ask what Megyn Kelly, who is a central character in the film, is up to these days. Sources close to Kelly say she is eyeing a comeback, and believes that “she can find a niche as an equal-opportunity skeptic amid a divided news media.”

Other notable stories:

On Friday, the seven candidates who qualified for this week’s Democratic presidential primary debate threatened to skip it—workers at Loyola Marymount University in LA, which is hosting the debate, are locked in a labor dispute, and the candidates vowed not to cross any picket line. The seven candidates all also signed a letter—circulated by the campaign of Cory Booker, who did not qualify for the debate—asking the Democratic National Committee to loosen its rules for qualification; Booker says the existing thresholds favor billionaires, and make the debate stage less diverse. (Julián Castro also signed the letter.) But Tom Perez, the DNC chair, says the rules won’t change just yet.
In other news about presidential candidates, Bernie Sanders endorsed Cenk Uygur, of left-wing news platform The Young Turks, for a US House seat in California, then retracted his endorsement following blowback about Uygur’s past comments on women and minorities. (Uygur said he will no longer be accepting any endorsements.) And sources at CityLab told Mother Jones that Bloomberg Media, which is owned by Michael Bloomberg, will only take seven of CityLab’s 16 employees when it buys the site from The Atlantic later this month; the rest will be laid off. Last month, Bloomberg News barred its reporters from investigating Bloomberg or any of his Democratic presidential rivals for the duration of his campaign. It’s unclear if the same rules will apply to CityLab.
Powerful people often face uncomfortable questions at the Doha Forum in Qatar—but when Ivanka Trump appeared, she was interviewed by Morgan Ortagus, a former Fox News contributor who currently works as a spokesperson for Trump’s father’s government. According to Otillia Steadman, of BuzzFeed, Ortagus “pitched Trump a series of softball questions” about her women’s economic empowerment initiative.
The Wall Street Journal’s Rachael Levy reports on Status Labs, a “reputation management” firm that helps high-profile people bury negative news stories, including by planting positive stories on websites masquerading as independent news outlets. Clients have included the financier Jacob Gottlieb and Betsy DeVos, the education secretary.
CJR’s Amanda Darrach spoke with Dan Moldea, an investigative journalist who says The Irishman—Martin Scorsese’s new movie theorizing on the death of union boss Jimmy Hoffa—is “terrific cinema, but terrible history.” Moldea has conducted decades of research on Hoffa’s death. “I am Ahab and the Hoffa case is my white whale,” he says.
Controversy continues to swirl around Richard Jewell—Clint Eastwood’s new movie about a man wrongly accused of bombing the 1996 Olympics—in which Kathy Scruggs, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter, is shown trading sex for information. The attorney who helped Jewell sue the AJC slammed the plot point, and Olivia Wilde, who plays Scruggs, weighed in, too. (In any case, the film has flopped at the box office.)
Police in Savannah, Georgia, arrested Thomas Callaway, who slapped the bottom of Alex Bozarjian, a reporter with WSAV-TV, while she was covering a run live on air last week. Callaway gave a televised apology—but said he was only trying to pat Bozarjian on the back. Bozarjian said Callaway “violated, objectified, and embarrassed” her.
For CJR, Nicholas Diakopoulos writes that as newsrooms increasingly use their own algorithms to curate stories, they have a chance to wrest control of news distribution from big tech companies. Outlets’ own curation algorithms, Diakopoulos writes, can build on editorial values such as diversity, transparency, accuracy, and independence.
And Emily Atkin, author of the climate newsletter HEATED, is launching an Instagram page, @FossilFuelAds, to chart the proliferation of fossil fuel advertisements in the news media, and is asking readers to help her keep track.

RECENTLY: The tragic story behind a Harper’s article shows the dirty truth about fact-checking

Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.

a Thursday, Dec 12th, 2019

The bloodsport of Red vs. Blue party politics drives the US media. But the polarization of Blue vs. Bluer is just as striking. And there’s no better symbol of the schism than MSNBC’s most popular anchor, the pen-tapping, eyebrow-waggling, Russia-obsessed...

Weekly highlights

Subscribe to the best of CJR, compiled by the editors every Thursday.

Pelle Sten likes this

16 Dec 12:43

Looking Forward to 2020, Here are 10 Themes for News

Pelle Sten
”In getting people the information they need and want, we need to think about how information fits into the bigger picture.”

Everywhere people turn, there are curated lists and carefully tweaked algorithms telling them what to read, watch or listen to. It can feel like there’s a never-ending list of recommendations to sort through. In a hyper-connected world where time can feel like it’s in short supply, people want to know that their time will be well-spent. They don’t want recommendations that simply replicate what they have previously consumed, they want to discover new things. While algorithms can offer interesting suggestions, nothing beats the recommendations from co-workers, family and friends. Personal recommendations, which are the product of ongoing personal conversations, allow for the discovery of new content to feel seamless and nuanced.

Scheduled programming fosters ritual and connection.

Content that is available on-demand means people can watch and listen to whatever they want whenever they want it. But there’s something lost by the fragmented nature of how people now consume that content. If everyone is watching or listening to something different, connection over shared experience can be harder to achieve.

When people watch or engage with scheduled content, the experience becomes a ritual and the content becomes a cultural touchpoint. We see this when people join thousands of others for live Peloton rides, or when people check their favorite music streaming service for new music every Friday. And who can forget those few weeks in April and May when it seemed like everyone was talking about the final season of “Game of Thrones”? The conversations about the content often feel as valuable as the content itself. Consistent programming facilitates these conversations — and ultimately fosters a sense of connection — by turning that scheduled content into an event.

**People want stories with a clear beginning, middle and, most importantly, end.**

At a time when turning on the news or scrolling through Twitter feels like a firehose of information, the desire for contained stories is particularly acute. In what feels like a relentless and never-ending news cycle, people are hungry for a sense that they have reached the end of a story or that they have caught up on a topic. People are looking for content that has an endpoint, if not a succinct resolution. This is particularly true with developing news stories: people feel like they are often thrown into the middle of the story, without context of what has already happened.

Through our research, we heard that people flock to true crime stories for just this very reason. Whether they listen to podcasts or watch shows such as “Dateline,” people said they enjoy the contained nature of the content: they know that that the mystery will be solved by the end. When it comes to news, people want that feeling of accomplishment, as well.

People are tired of the “push.”

In the United States, we heard from person after person who said they have turned off push notifications, exhausted by the constant demand for their attention. Many users are turning to voice assistant technology, like smart speakers, because it allows them to get the information they need without ever having to look at a screen. Notifications can feel intrusive and disruptive, but asking a smart speaker for a news alert allows individuals to get information on their own terms.

Disconnecting from social media doesn’t mean fleeing it entirely.

The Americans we spoke to said they are setting boundaries in order to mediate the influence that social media has in their lives. People — particularly young people — told us they have deleted social media apps from their phones, but in reality, they have not totally abandoned these platforms. They might delete the Facebook app from their phone and check it in a web browser, or they might remove the Instagram app during the week and indulge only on the weekends. To the people we spoke to, this self-imposed friction feels like an attempt to regain and maintain control.

Time of day influences content selection.

During interviews, we often asked people to walk us through a typical day so we could learn how they consume news. We saw that the majority of people prefer to consume hard news in the morning, and less demanding content, such as a true crime or pop culture podcast, in the evenings. In the morning, they’re more willing to engage with the news that make them feel prepared for the day. But then the day unfolds with work meetings, child care, errands and seemingly infinite list of decisions to be made; People’s daily lives demand a lot of them. By the end of the day, they want content that is relaxing.

Rarely do media organization take time of day and the cognitive load of their users into account when publishing content. But if organizations acknowledged these behaviors and surface content accordingly, they can meet users where they are.

People crave transparency.

Similar to the shift we’ve seen in the farm-to-table movement around food sourcing and production, people want to know what goes into news production. In dozens of conversations with people around the world, we heard that people want more than just the story: they want to know why it’s being told, who is telling it and how it came together. News consumers want to pull back the curtain to understand why a headline was written a certain way, or why a particular story was featured over another on a home page. They want to know that specific information was verified by multiple sources, or that reporters pored over thousands of pages of documents for a particular story.

The public hears claims of “fake news” just as often as people who work in media. When people understand the process and people involved in telling a story, they are more likely to trust it.

People want more dynamic and nourishing social spaces.

People are looking for avenues where they can have more intimate conversations. They want spaces where they can truly connect with people, rather than passively follow people. The people we spoke to talked about moving away from “posts on the grid,” in places like Instagram, and status updates on Facebook in favor of one-on-one and small group conversations.

The professionalization of social media, where it feels like everyone has to cultivate a personal brand, is less appealing for many of the people we spoke to. They are instead looking to Instagram stories and group texts because they feel like they can be more vulnerable and honest there. Most importantly, stories and texts are an invitation to participate in dynamic, real-time communication with other people in a way that static posts are not. Our research participants told us that receiving a private reply to an Instagram story feels more meaningful than a like on a post. To many people, what makes a platform social is not that it allows people to broadcast their opinions to the world, it’s that it enables intimate conversations among people they trust.

Every space feels like a political space.

As we talked to people in the United States, a common refrain we heard was that politics and morality feel so intertwined that people feel obligated not only to stay informed, but to have an opinion. In fact, people told us that the lack of an opinion — by celebrities, brands and news organizations — actually implies a political stance. Despite the rise of political discussion, people on both sides fear seeming out of their depth or being attacked for sharing a political viewpoint. People want to have those conversations privately with the people they trust. Group texts in messaging platforms like WhatsApp, Slack, iMessage and Instagram Messenger feel like far safer spaces to have nuanced political conversations.

The most recent information is not always the most relevant.

News consumers and news producers aren’t always aligned when it comes to how to surface content. Sometimes readers are interested in the most current information or the latest events, and sometimes they are seeking out a specific topic which may lead to more evergreen content. News organizations tend to surface the most recent content, but that often gets people only some of the information they’re looking for. This emphasis on the latest information puts more weight on what’s just been published and less weight on content that might help readers contextualize and make sense of an issue. In getting people the information they need and want, we need to think about how information fits into the bigger picture.

Pelle Sten likes this

16 Dec 12:22

The best science fiction and fantasy books of 2019

The last year in science fiction and fantasy novels saw a welcome mix of debut voices and returning favorites. While genre fiction is often seen as an escapist form of literature (something that’s understandably needed in 2019), the best stories often address real-world concerns and anxieties.

As such, if there is any overarching theme linking this year’s books together, it’s a hope that people can remake or rebuild worlds: whether it’s by building towards a better future, exploring far-off places, or standing up to oppressors and hatred. Many of the books on our year-end list imagine better futures and alternate paths that could take us there, and with a speculative twist.

With that in mind, here are our favorite reads of 2019.

The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders

On a distant, tidally-locked world called January, a young woman named Sophia is inadvertently branded a dissident and exiled to a city on the planet’s dark side. After saved the native lifeforms, the Gelet (called Crocodiles by the humans), save her life, Sophia, her friend Bianca, and their companions set out to change the world and humanity itself.

Charlie Jane Anders’ latest is a deeply compassionate and complicated read that interrogates privilege, love, and what it means to be human. The breathtaking adventure reminded me more than a little of Ursula K. Le Guin’s best stories.

Famous Men Who Never Lived book cover with giant letters in front of apartment buildings

Famous Men Who Never Lived by K. Chess

Alternate histories are often a way to juxtapose reality against what might have been; change one thing, and see how events in the world might have played out. K. Chess puts a spin on that trope with her debut novel Famous Men Who Never Lived. In our real-world New York City, refugees from an alternate dimension come through enmasse when a nuclear disaster befalls their world.

Hel is one such refugee, who Chess follows on her quest to memorialize the world that they’ve lost, starting with a copy of a popular science fiction novel from her own world, The Pyronauts. When it goes missing, she goes on a desperate search to track down the copy. Her story is a powerful, relevant story about what people will do to hold onto the worlds that they’ve lost, and how they move forward.

Exhalation cover set against a starry background

Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang

Ted Chiang is responsible for some of the best written science fiction in recent years, and his latest collection — the first since 2002’s The Story of Your Life and Others — brings together his latest, mind-blowing repertoire.

The nine-story collection includes the likes of “The Lifecycle of Software Objects”, a brilliant story about artificial intelligence, and “Exhalation,” about a scientist’s observations of the universe. The entire book is eye-opening, thoughtful, and some of the best that science fiction has to offer.

tiamat’s wrath cover with letters in front of a starship construction site

Tiamat’s Wrath by James S.A. Corey

In their penultimate volume of the Expanse series, James S.A. Corey’s heroes find themselves in a dark place. The Laconians — a fascist colonial world of former Martians — have taken over the solar system and human-settled space, and hold Captain James Holden captive. They have plans to investigate some anomalies that they’ve observed around some of the remnants of a long-dead alien civilization that built a vast ring network, and their explorations seem to be triggering a cataclysmic response.

As Corey wraps up their epic space opera series, they’re running on all cylinders, playing with epic consequences for humanity, and showing that none of their long-running characters are safe from what could come. But they also put together a story that seems all-too-relevant in this day and age: a warning of the dangers that fascism and totalitarianism bring.

magic for liars cover red with a crossed fingers upside and an eye on the wrist

Magic for Liars by Sarah Gailey

At the Osthorne Academy of Young Mages, a magical high school in California, the school’s faculty discover one of their own brutally killed in the library. When the initial investigation goes nowhere, the school’s headmaster hires a private investigator, Ivy Gamble. She reluctantly accepts the case (her estranged, twin sister is an instructor there), and delves into a world of magical secrets and high school drama to try and figure out who was behind the act.

Gailey deftly weaves together tightly wound mystery and family drama, set against the backdrop of an engrossing fantasy world. Ivy works to reconnect with her sister and discovers a devastating secret at the heart of her family’s story.

empress of forever cover with a woman obscured by a pointy helmet

Empress of Forever by Max Gladstone

Max Gladstone is best-known for his fantasy Craft Sequence novels, but Empress of Forever turns over to space opera. In the near future, a tech billionaire named Vivian Liao is on the verge of taking over the world when she’s abruptly transported away from Earth to the end of the universe, summoned by a far-future Empress who wants to ensure her own power by stamping out any potential threat.

Gladstone’s novel is a fast, enthralling space opera yarn that addresses the dangers of power and how it’s used in the hands of an individual, and it makes for a good commentary on the excesses of Silicon Valley.

The Ten Thousand Doors of January cover black and rimmed with flowers

The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow

A young girl named January grows up alone along the coast of Lake Champlain in Vermont, the ward of Mr. Locke, a wealthy benefactor who employs her father to collect strange artifacts from around the world. When her father goes missing and is presumed dead, January discovers a strange book, which leads her on a journey to uncover the true nature of her father’s work, only to discover that he’s the key to her own mysterious story.

Part portal fantasy, part coming-of-age adventure, and part meditation on the power and importance of storytelling, The Ten Thousand Doors of January quickly became one of my favorite novels — ever. It’s a powerful, heart-wrenching adventure of a young woman trying to figure out who she is, and how she can save the world.

the light brigade cover with a masked soldier looking up into the light

The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

Kameron Hurley’s latest is a riff on military science fiction classics like Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers or Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War. Humanity is engaged in a war against Mars, and one soldier, Dietz, is caught in the middle when they join a corporate military force, which can teleport soldiers onto the battlefield in a beam of light.

As they join the fight as part of the Light Brigade, time begins working differently for them: they become unstuck, and experience events out of order. The book is a scathing indictment on the nature of warfare and corporate feudalism, and it comes with a wonderful, recursive plot that glued me to my seat.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James

Marlon James is best known for winning the 2015 Man Booker prize for his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings. After that book’s publication, he noted that he wanted to turn his attention to fantasy, and a long-standing complaint that he had: that the genre often ignored or erased people of color from their narratives. The result was Black Leopard, Red Wolf, an epic fantasy that drew its inspiration from the African diaspora.

In the book, a man named Tracker is tasked with a mission: to track down a missing boy. As he embarks on his quest, he encounters other strange figures, and is forced to confront his own mysterious past. Set in the phenomenal world, it’s a strange, complicated, and thoughtful alternative to Game of Thrones.

Supernova Era by Cixin Liu, translated by Joel Martinsen

Chinese author Cixin Liu is best known for his novel The Three-Body Problem, the first major science-fiction novel to be translated into English. It kicked off a flurry of interest in the country’s science fiction scene (which has included other novels by Liu, as well as a major film adaptation, The Wandering Earth). In his latest, Supernova Era, Earth’s adult population is wiped out after a nearby star goes supernova, leaving the children of the world to take their place.

Like Liu’s other novels, it’s a book about big, grand ideas. He looks at what the impact of such a cataclysmic event might have on humanity, and how people and institutions move on to figure out how to rebuild the world anew — and that it’s not just enough to survive, but how to build a future that’s fulfilling and productive.

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine

In the distant future, Teixcalaanli Empire works to extends its reach to new star systems. When the ambassador of the fiercely independent Lsel Station dies unexpectedly, Ambassador Mahit Dzmare is sent to replace him, only to discover that his death was part of a conspiracy, tied to her home’s particular technological advances.

Arkady Martine, an author and historian, draws inspiration from the Byzantine Empire, and uses the novel to examine how a society’s institutional memory shapes its culture and future. It’s an engrossing look at colonialism and what’s lost when one culture subsumes another.

Luna: Moon Rising by Ian McDonald

The Moon is the perfect, clean-slate environment for science fiction authors to use as a setting for alternative, political societies. Ian McDonald thrives with those types of stories, and brings his epic Luna trilogy to a close with Luna: Moon Rising.

In the preceding novels, Luna: New Moon and Luna: Wolf Moon, McDonald explores the pitfalls of a feudal, capitalistic world where corporate families (called Dragons) dominate the Moon and its inhabitants as they mine its surface for precious resources. When the Mackenzie family decimates the Cortas, Lucas Corta goes into hiding, plotting his revenge. In Moon Rising, he returns to retake control of the Moon, and McDonald examines what the cost the entire endeavor has taken on all involved, and what type of future should we build when we eventually do colonize the Moon?

Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir

In Tamsyn Muir’s pulpy debut, Gideon the Ninth, her titular hero has grown up in the Ninth House, training to become a swordswoman and spending years trying to escape its grim walls. When the Emperor invites representatives from all of the houses to compete in a trial, Gideon is selected by her nemesis, the Ninth House’s Reverend Daughter and necromancer Harrowhark Nonagesimus, to accompany her.

The premise of this novel is essentially “lesbian necromancers in space,” and it’s a rollicking blend of pulp science fiction and horror, with plenty of sarcasm, swordplay, romance, and adventure.

The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz

Time travel and alternate universes are well-used genre tropes, with countless authors exploring all the ways that travellers work to change — or preserve — the past in order to keep the future as it is. Annalee Newitz takes a slightly different approach in their latest novel, The Future of Another Timeline, telling a story about factions of time travellers battling to make edits and change the future for the better.

Jumping between the Paleozoic, the 1800s, 1990s, 2022 and other times, time travel is a known thing in Newitz’s world: historians and activists jump back and forth in time to study the past. Editing the past isn’t easy to do, but she realizes that there is a dangerous group of travellers working to create a timeline where women will be completely oppressed, and with her companions, works to counter their edits, and it proves to be a timely novel that’s all too relevant in 2019.

Pelle Sten likes this

16 Dec 08:21

Shopping Sucks Now

If I look up “gloves” on Amazon with the goal of buying gloves, the site returns over 100,000 listings. Even Amazon cannot bring itself to communicate the exact, unconscionable number of the kinds of gloves it has for sale.

If I look in my heart, what I’d really like is a lined leather glove, because I aspire to be classy and refined, like a lady about town. Looking up “lined leather gloves” yields 40,000 results. On the first page, there are two different gloves listed, one for $17 and one for $60, that look exactly identical and come in the exact same colors. Both have the same exact star rating (4.5/5) and hundreds of positive reviews.

I’d love to only spend $17 except there is no way 17-dollar leather gloves won’t be fake and off color and smell of gasoline when they arrive, and after only a few wears the lining will pill or develop holes. I’d love to just buy the $60 gloves except that seems like a pretty large amount of money to spend on non-weatherproof gloves, and how can I, when there are identical $17 gloves right there. I could buy both, except then I’d have to return one, which would involve repacking them in a box, locating a printer where I can print off a shipping label, going to a physical UPS store or, worse, a post office, and waiting in line to deliver myself of these gloves I just had to see for myself.

After many more hours of online research, I decide it’s impractical to own only a lined leather glove living in the Northeast, so after conducting some research, I decide to invest in some real outdoor gloves. I go to any number of shopping digest sites, which tell me one or a few of the best things of a particular category to buy, in this case, gloves. But The Strategist’s list of, I don’t know, 21 Best Gloves Loved by Northeastern Moms, has endorsements like “these are great for playing with my kids in the snow,” which does not help me at all.

After yet more hours of research, I finally isolate the perfect pair for me. I don’t want to buy them and have to online-return them—and they are sold out online anyway, due to having been recommended by most of the online shopping digest sites on Earth—so I find out they are sold in-store at a particular big box store in the city, supposedly in my size.

I arrive at the store and locate the glove section and the type of glove I’m looking for, only to find several completely empty racks, except for one pair in size XXXXL, and in a children’s version, with one glove inexplicably missing. Having again reached my tolerance for feeling like an ineffectual idiot unable to buy a simple pair of gloves, I give up and walk home gloveless, my hands freezing in the wind.

For a long time, our problem was there were not enough things to choose from. Then with big box stores, followed by the internet, there were too many things to choose from. Now there are still too many things to choose from, but also a seemingly infinite number of ways to choose, or seemingly infinite steps to figuring out how to choose. The longer I spend trying to choose, the higher the premium becomes on choosing correctly, which means I go on not choosing something I need pretty badly, coping with the lack of it or an awful hacked-together solution (in the case of gloves, it’s “trying to pull my sleeves over my hands but they are too short for this”) for way, way too long, and sometimes forever.

The degree to which you feel this problem definitely depends on your income, or at least, being in the privileged position of not having to make do with the only thing you can afford. But for people with even a limited ability to make an investment purchase, if it’s worth it, there’s even more pressure to get it right. Knowing you wasted a big chunk of money on a cheaper, worse thing that falls apart when you could have spent a little more money on a thing that is good and lasts feels like failure. You’ve then wasted your money, wasted your time, you’ve contributed to global warming, and now you have to start the entire thing over again and hope you don’t somehow end up making the exact same mistake.

Figuring out how to choose used to be part of my job when I was an editor at Wirecutter, a site that publishes guides to the best products of a given category (vacuums, computers, even gloves). We had to figure out what was important about any given object, then how important those important things were to the imagined person who needed help choosing this kind of object. Wirecutter has caught a lot of guff recently, for its referral link model and for not being able to pick single objects that work for absolutely everyone (ironically, this criticism comes from outlets that each exist but for the grace of extremely wealthy Silicon Valley benefactors). But even Wirecutter, as much as I love and use it, often manifests imperfectly: people frequently complain the chosen models are too expensive, especially since the New York Times took ownership, and often the items are chosen to appease enthusiasts, not normals. The best gloves for someone who needs to plow snow every day are not the same, at least in the world we live in now, as the best gloves for someone who just needs to be able to walk to work every day. The ideal guide-writing process is figuring out who needs the most help with investing in a particular object, which is not the same person who needs to use it once a year. That leaves many people bereft, forced to execute their own Wirecutter winnowing process, if they simply have the time and patience.

If big box stores represented the problem of the “tyranny of choice,” the problem is that now, somewhat suddenly, perfect knowledge of the perfect glove, for you specifically, exists, if you simply do enough research. Now instead of tyranny of choice, we have the tyranny of perfect information. And this is actually a two-part problem: It takes x-approaches-infinity amount of time to achieve this level of knowledge; theoretically, as much as you ever wanted to know about gloves, the internet, (and by extension anyone who might ever offer you yet more info on what makes a good glove) can teach you. Then this all has to be refracted through what makes the perfect glove for you, and how much of that is the same as the platonic ideal of a glove. How waterproof? How warm? How thick? How dexterous? Should it be touch screen compatible? Should it be leather, nylon, wool, nylon lined with wool, leather lined with fleece, Goretex lined with cashmere? Are all of these things stupid and it should just be a polyester job you throw out and buy a new one of next year? But isn’t that terrible for the environment?

But then, if you did, somehow, against all odds, achieve perfect knowledge of the best glove, you’d find that it probably doesn’t exist, or it exists but almost certainly costs more money than you would want to spend. And then you are faced with the choice of, do you spend $90 on an optimal glove? Or do you spend less than that on a less-optimal glove, knowing at some point in the future you will realize its shortcomings and wish you had just spent the $20 or $40 or $70 extra to get the glove that would have at least worked better than this?

I'm realizing what I actually want is not the perfect glove; what I want is for the world to be small again. This infinite-market stuff was all well and good when being able to buy almost anything was an opportunity, but now that I can consider everything in the interest of saving time and money on buying subpar stuff, it’s an obligation I can’t ignore. But then I inevitably end up wasting a lot of time and money trying to save that time and money, making everything about this my fault.

If I don’t write this article and get immediately accosted by some Instagram drop-ship company pushing a Single Perfect Glove ad campaign, it will happen next winter. They will either be shockingly under- or overpriced, and either way they'll be of shitty quality, but millions of my peers will buy them because they, too, just want the glove problem to be over, and it will be, until the glove falls apart and we all learn it is not, in fact, the one perfect glove, but just a glove like most of the other gloves.

Pelle Sten likes this

12 Dec 09:17

INMA: Newsday marries newsletters, audience data to increase subscriptions, engagement

At Newsday, we’ve driven subscriptions and increased user engagement through newsletters by using audience data to identify high-interest topics among users.

Local politics, in particular our political corruption coverage, is of high interest to our audience. In March 2018, a trial of one of the most powerful politicians on Long Island began. So we started Power on Trial, a narrative pop-up newsletter authored by political columnist Joye Brown that gave users her unique inside-the-courtroom analysis.

The results were impressive. More than 5,000 people signed up for the newsletter within 10 days. More than 1,100 of those e-mails were new to the system — a KPI in all newsletters we launch. The first newsletter had a 60% open rate — more than double the open rate of any other editorial newsletter. Over the three-month trial, the newsletter averaged a 50% open rate — the highest we’ve seen since we began tracking newsletter metrics.

We didn’t have a subscription offer in it and that was a missed opportunity. When the trial of another high-level politician started in early November, we brought Power on Trial back and made it subscriber-only. Since the bulk of those who initially signed up in 2018 were non-subscribers, we’ve been experimenting with a paywall within the newsletter to drive conversions.

Though narrative-form newsletters have successfully increased engagement when centered around a high-interest topic, we’ve also seen success packaging content spread across verticals into a curated newsletter experience.

For example, during the summer on Long Island, many people — including celebrities — head to the eastern end of the island known as The Hamptons. Audience data showed a high user interest in Hamptons content, in particular lifestyle and entertainment content highlighting the eastern end of Long Island.

Leading up to the Fourth of July, we created Points East, a once-a-week summer newsletter dedicated to everything Hamptons, which included everything from celebrity sightings to recommendations on where to shop, dine, and vacation. It was mainly driven by strong art and headlines — unlike Power on Trial, which was mostly strong writing and analysis — but the results were similar.

We finished the 12-week campaign with an average 40% open rate and 7% click-through rate, which were among the highest we’ve ever seen. Without a dedicated subscription offer, it drove three total conversions, which reinforced what we learned with Power on Trial: Every newsletter needs a subscription.

We also wanted to find a way to highlight our most impactful journalism to non-subscribers and subscribers with declining engagement who may be at risk of cancelling. We created two editions of In Case You Missed It, a data-driven, weekly curated newsletter that we populate with the stories that have high engagement scores and the most paths to conversion over the past week.

In the first two months after launch, the non-subscriber edition averaged a 25% open rate and has led to more than 30 conversions. For our subscribers with declining engagement, the engagement levels have increased from 5% to 7%.

Pelle Sten likes this

11 Dec 08:32

Gustav Möllers förslösade skattekrona

by Hexmaster

Se här ett välkänt citat:

"Every wasted krona should be regarded as a theft from the people," Gustav Möller, the legendary Social Democrat and minister of social affairs, famously quipped. This quote has been regularly dusted off by politicians from across the political spectrum.

- 'Every wasted krona amounts to theft', The Local 18 mars 2010

Men vi ser det oftast på svenska:

Uttrycket ”varje förslösad skattekrona är en stöld från folket” myntades av den socialdemokratiske ministern Gustav Möller på 1940-talet.

- Skattebetalarnas Förening: Om oss

Gjorde han verkligen det? I så fall är det märkligt att det idag så populära citatet inte börjar dyka upp förrän långt senare. Faktiskt först efter att den mångårige socialministern och tunga socialdemokraten i allmänhet 1970 lämnade arbetarrörelse och jordeliv. Vilket öppnar för tvivel om det alls var Möller som myntade citatet.

Här är en efterlysning från 2005 som i skrivande stund, fjorton år efteråt, ännu inte fått något svar:

Jag har hittat minst 20 andra varianter på detta citat och har inte en susning om vilket som är det rätta. Snälla hjälp mig!!!

- Magnus Ljungkvist: Vad sa Möller egentligen? bloggen Magnus tankar den 18 maj 2005

Hans varianter skulle kunna sammanfattas så här: Varje (felanvänd | förslösad | ineffektivt använd | slösad) skattekrona (som förslösas) är en stöld (från | av) (folket | de (sjuka och) fattiga).

Det första belägget jag hittat där citatet tillskrivs Möller är GT den 22 september 1989. Formuleringen som används där är för övrigt "varje ineffektivt använd skattekrona är en stöld från de fattiga".

Den pregnanta formuleringen "förslösad skattekrona" är den överlägset mest populära, och det var länge den som jag fokuserade mina slagningar på. Det visade sig vara en fälla. För andra formuleringar, som är såväl modernare som, i mitt tycke, sämre – som "varje krona av skattemedel som används ineffektivt är en stöld från folket" – visade sig vara äldre än den fina och till synes gammalmodiga "förslösad skattekrona".

Man kan fråga sig hur mycket man kan variera ett citat innan det blir ett annat citat. I detta fallet ska tripletten illa använd skatt + stöld + enkelt folk vara med, tänker jag. Till exempel är det mycket spridda påståendet "skatt är stöld" något annat, likaså att skattefusk är "en stöld från de hederliga skattebetalarna" (för att citera Einar Eriksson (s) i första kammaren den 26 januari 1960).

Citatet, i någon form, har också tillskrivits finansminister Ernst Wigforss (s), men han är betydligt mindre vanlig än Möller – vilket känns lite egendomligt med tanke på att Wigforss torde vara mer allmänt känd. Än märkligare är det att superkändisen Gunnar Sträng inte verkar ha förekommit alls. Hur som helst.

Här är det tidigaste belägget jag hittat för citatet med "förslösad skattekrona", med eller utan koppling till vem som helst:

Varje förslösad skattekrona är en stöld från folket.

- Carin Lundberg (s), riksdagens protokoll 2004/05:99 6 april

Sedan skulle det dröja några år innan citatet började tillskrivas Möller. Men då fick det också status och därmed vingar, enligt den lag* som säger att vi vill ha våra faktoider förknippade med kända företeelser och personer.

Gustav Möller är idag praktiskt taget enbart känd för ett citat som han, såvitt jag hittills funnit, inte myntat. Det vore ett ironiskt öde som han delar med många.

Tipstack till Johan Jönsson @JohanJ och Carl Winbäck @giffengrabber som lockade in mig i detta kaninhål.

* Formulerad av mig själv, för säkerhets skull: Hexmasters faktoida attraktionslag

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10 Dec 07:38

With Tasty, BuzzFeed has a multi-revenue stream model

by Deanna Ting

BuzzFeed launched Tasty as an experiment in figuring out how to crack Facebook video in July 2015. Today, that experiment has become one of BuzzFeed’s most successful franchises, expanding beyond hands-in-pans videos and into licensed products, a creators program and both long-form and short-form videos and productions.

Today, Tasty has more than 100 million followers on Facebook and has sold 800,000 copies of its first three cookbooks. A fourth was published just last month. BuzzFeed declined to disclose exact revenue numbers but a spokesperson said BuzzFeed, overall, has been profitable for the back half of 2019, “and Tasty continues to be a key driver of that growth with a strong advertising business and a wide range of consumer products through its fast-growing licensing business.”

In 2018, BuzzFeed reported revenues of a little more than $300 million and earlier this year, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti said in an internal memo that a third of those revenues came from entirely new revenue sources, in line with Peretti’s “Nine Boxes” multi-revenue model for BuzzFeed. In that same memo, Peretti noted that most of Tasty’s revenue derives from revenue streams “we’ve needed to create on our own.”

“What Tasty really did was reveal the ways people ingest cooking content,” said Hannah Williams, Tasty’s executive producer. Williams noted that the addition of six new members to the Tasty Talent Program, part of BuzzFeed’s larger Creators Program, represents “a huge expansion of Tasty.” There are now a total of 14 Tasty Creators.

“We’re adding faces behind the hands, showcasing internal talent and integrating into the real-life cooking world with chefs and leaning into the entertainment aspects of food,” Williams said. “We know the role Tasty serves in our viewers’ kitchens. What can we do outside of kitchens and not neglect what works and what people come to us for?”

The new Tasty Creators, three of whom are Tasty producers and three of whom are fixtures in the dining world, were recruited with diversity and audience engagement in mind to develop what Williams described as “identity-driven content.”

Ellen Bennett, one of Tasty’s newest creators, has her own line of culinary workwear, called Hedley & Bennett.

“We love having creators with those very specific identities and creators who are super successful in their own line of work,” Williams said. “That was a huge draw for us, that she has this brand she’s built and established and seen some success.”

Williams said Tasty will be doing even more original series and shows in 2020, based off of the reception newer shows like Chef Out of Water; I Draw, You Cook; and Making It Big have received.

Licensing is also very central to BuzzFeed’s revenue efforts, and Tasty is at the center of that strategy. This year, BuzzFeed anticipates generating $260 million in sales of BuzzFeed-branded products in retail, which is double what the company reportedly made in 2018, according to License Global, a trade publication that covers the licensing industry.

Today, you can buy Tasty-branded cookware at Walmart, as well as Tasty-branded food products from your local grocery store, including collaborations with Nestle and McCormick on lines of ice cream and spices, respectively. The kitchenware at Walmart launched with 90 SKUs in March 2018 and has sold more than 5 million units to date.

“Licensing is mostly done by established brands who have been in the market for a long time, but BuzzFeed sped that process up. They understood they have a strong fan base, and they wanted to differentiate themselves,” said Steven Ekstract, brand director of Global Licensing Group, which publishes trade publication License Global.

Those licensing partnerships are also extending into Tasty’s content production, too. Tasty is also getting into interactive video programming with Walmart backed Eko, and has developed choose-your-own-adventure styles recipe-based videos that promote products that can be purchased at Walmart. Williams said Tasty plans to make more Eko videos in 2020.

Tasty’s brand collaborations that include media, custom content, shopper marketing, which launched in March 2018 with Scotch-Brite, creator deals and events are also driving revenues. It even did a hot-dog themed wedding with Oscar Meyer.

“They’re building tremendous brand equity and loyalty,” Ekstract said. “I wish more digitally native brands would wake up to this. They are a case study for successful brand extensions for a digitally native brand.”

If there’s one thing BuzzFeed can learn from Tasty’s success, it’s how to apply this multi-revenue model to its other brands like Nifty for home and Goodful for health and wellness, something Peretti noted back in 2017, and something the company must focus on to remain profitable.

Editor’s Note: This article was updated to reflect that BuzzFeed has been profitable for the back half of 2019 and that more than 5 million, not 4 million, units of Tasty-branded products have been sold at Wal-Mart.

The post With Tasty, BuzzFeed has a multi-revenue stream model appeared first on Digiday.

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24 Jun 11:44

Above Avalon: Apple's Product Strategy Is Changing

by ablaze

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16 Apr 10:35

Work harder or the communists will win!

by DHH

It’s desperate times for those still clinging to their workaholic, exploitive ways. From Japan to China to even the US, there’s a growing understanding that working 70-80-90 or 130 hours per week is not glorious. Not virtuous. Not healthy.

So what’s a whoever-works-the-most-wins advocate to do? Sidestep the question of efficiency, of health, of sustainability, of course. Just press the pedal on fear and competition. Here’s your host of terror, Jason Calacanis:

The harsh truth is America is in a war with people who want *it* more than Americans do.

We can choose to become a retirement community like Europe, with negative growth, or we can step up & compete.

What's at stake isn't just money, it's democracy vs. communism.
— 🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄 (@Jason) April 15, 2019

Yeah, that’s it. Those who reject the wisdom of overwork is really helping the ENEMY. This is democracy vs communism!! What is this, 1950? Whatever year it is, it’s stupid.

Rather than support a grassroots rejection of the exploitive abuse of the Chinese workers under the 996 regime, Calanis is doubling down on the premise that to “beat” the Chinese, you must submit to their worst work practices. What?

This is at best a lateral move from “work harder or the kitten gets it”. A trope that’s meant to be a punchline, not a policy recommendation.

Besides being imperial paranoia, urging American companies to adopt Chinese abuses, lest they be left behind in the chase of growth uber alles, is the furthest away you could get from winning. Accepting the terms of engagement by your so-called opponent is a basic, rookie mistake in any form of strategic out-maneuvering.

You’re not going to “beat” the Chinese by one-upping 996 with 997. You’re not going to top Jack Ma’s calls for sacrifice by injecting nationalist fervor and clash-of-civilizations rhetoric into these base pleas for a deeper grind. This is madness.

If you define winning solely as “who has the greater growth”, you’ve already lost. If you dismiss the standard of living enjoyed in Europe – one without medical bankruptcies, crushing college debts, or falling life expectancies – as a “retirement society”, you’re the one who deserves to be dismissed.

The ideological underpinnings of capitalism are already in an advanced state of ethical decay. You don’t save the good parts of said capitalism by doubling down on the worst, most exploitive parts. Racing to the bottom just gets you there faster.

Pelle Sten likes this

10 Apr 08:36

Om elefantöl

by Hexmaster

A propos en lördagsfråga nyligen ... Det är inte länge sedan som elefantöl var allmänkunskap, ett självklart begrepp bland alla utom möjligen de allra yngsta och/eller alkoholfriaste. I decennier visste varenda människa med minsta koll vad elefantöl var. Men så hände något – och Carlsbergs elefant försvann ur det allmänna medvetandet. Hur gick det till?

Kjeld Nielsens fina blåa reklamelefant har undertecknad aldrig sett förrän nu. Den bild som jag, och förmodligen de flesta andra svenskar som inte är alltför unga och/eller torrlagda, har av elefantöl är Carlsbergs gröna burk med minst en elefant på. Elefanten kommer från Elefantporten, där fyra elefanter sedan 1901 bär upp ett torn i entrén till Carlsbergs bryggeriområde. (Kuriosa: Elefanterna är afrikanska till fysionomin men indiska till öronen. Hakkors förekommer vilket var en helt annan grej 1901 än lite senare. Inspirationen till elefantporten kommer från Rom, där Berninis elefant sedan 1667 bär en egyptisk obelisk.)

För att vara ett så välkänt märke i ett så välkänt företag är elefantölen tämligen ung:

1955 exporterades lagerölet Carlsberg Export till ett flertal olika länder.

- Carlsberg Elefantöl firar 50 år, pressmeddelande från Carlsberg 5 november 2009

Varför namnges inte de "olika länder" som nämns i det officiella pressmeddelandet? Kanske det beror på den uppmärksamhet bryggeriet senare fått med sin oblyga marknadsföring i afrikanska länder med svag alkohollagstiftning? Eller den förskingring som förekommit? Här är hur som helst de allra första länderna som begåvades med elefantöl:

År 1955 lanserade bryggeriet den extra starka Export Lager Beer med elefantetiketten, i Ghana, Guldkusten [närmare bestämt blev Guldkusten Ghana 1957], Nigeria och Malawi. Fyra år senare lanserades den som Elefantöl i Danmark och bryggs än idag i Köpenhamn, för export världen över.

- Nicklas Cederqvist: Elefantdöd -inte elefantöl- och skandaler på Lauritz och Bruun Rasmussen, bloggen Antikmonologen 6 september 2013

Så kommer vi till huvudfrågan för denna bloggpost: Varför var elefantöl en "grej" bland svenskarna? Länge sålde Systembolaget inte starkare öl än 5,6 % (säger volymprocent, eller 4,5 viktprocent). Den gränsen uteslöt ofantligt många sorter, även långt bättre än Carlsbergs Elefant på 7,2 % volymprocent. Men istället hamnade Carlsbergs elefantöl på svenska färjor, såväl Viking som Stena och vad de nu hette. Exakt hur det gick till är en öppen fråga, men jag gissar vilt att det snarare berodde på gott insäljande än kvalitet. Recensioner av elefantöl går från okej ljus lager med extra styrka till spetsad folköl, men när det begav sig var smaken ointressant. Så länge det var någorlunda drickbart var alkoholhalten det primära (starkare än något på systemet!), därefter APK (alkohol per krona).

Poängen var att elefantöl var den starkaste ölen på färjorna. När svensken lämnade hemlandet och begav sig ut på havet så var en ritual i sammanhanget att öppna en elefantöl. Den ritualen kunde dessutom upprepas hemmavid, med burkar som icke kunde införskaffas på systemet utan var exklusivare än så.

Systembolaget justerade sin ölgräns 1994. Därefter kunde all världens ölsorter, svagare som starkare, konkurrera på den svenska marknaden. Det var då och därför, tänker jag mig, som Carlsbergs elefant gick till sin kyrkogård. Åtminstone vad Sverige beträffar. Idag finns den inte ens i systemets ordinarie sortiment utan får beställas, eller köpas utrikes. Men den mycket speciella magi som fanns en gång i tiden går inte att upprepa.

Pelle Sten likes this

06 Mar 12:22

How to design the end of a studio’s life

by Katharine Schwab

When the independent design studio Hawraf burst onto the New York scene in 2016, its partners–all alums of Google’s Creative Lab–aimed to transform the design studio model by being more transparent and doing ambitious, engaging design work that pushed the boundaries of how people interact online. As the studio began to get work from real clients, like independent artists, the Brooklyn Symphony Orchestra, and Google, it had less freedom to be publicly transparent about what it was working on. So last month, when the studio announced it was shutting down after only a few years in business, the four partners decided that their final act would be to live up to that initial idealism: They scrubbed their internal documents of client names and published them in a public Google Drive folder.

Google CL5, 2016. [Image: courtesy HAWRAF]

“Hopefully by putting it out there, it makes it easier for someone else starting out and gives them confidence,” says Carly Ayres, one of Hawraf’s partners. “Like, these are just shitty Google Docs, I could do this, too.”

An excerpt from a document on company culture. [Image: courtesy HAWRAF]

The documents range from the more cultural elements of running a studio, like the founders’ values, to the hard numbers, including spreadsheets detailing all of Hawraf’s profits and losses. One particularly intriguing document, especially for other studios or designers looking to start their own studios, shows how much Hawraf was paid for every single project the studio took on. Another spreadsheet lays out the studio’s formula for deciding which companies might be good potential clients.

Intriguingly, the spreadsheets reveal a small business that was profitable and growing quickly. Hawraf didn’t shut down over money problems; instead, the partners realized that they were no longer aligned on the studio’s future.

A pricing strategy spreadsheet. [Image: courtesy HAWRAF]

Partner Andrew Herzog uses a boat metaphor to explain what happened. He says that the team devoted the first year and a half of the studio’s existence to figuring how to run the business–or make the “boat” float.

Then, “we started getting the projects we thought we could do and were good for and money started to make sense, we started getting paid adequately,” he says. “The boat [started] moving, and it [became] time for everyone to start paddling the boat. That’s where we looked up for the first time in a while and realized we maybe had differing ambitions in terms of the business, where it could go now that we knew how to make it float.”

Herzog himself is interested in learning how to run a studio on his own, while Ayres wants to focus more on creating the kinds of environments that will help creative people do their best work (she already runs the freelance design community 100s Under 100). Partner Pedro Sanches is looking for more work flexibility so he can spend more time visiting family in Brazil.

So instead of trying to continue the studio, the partners foresaw that each of them would end up leaving eventually for these different reasons–plus, they wanted to stay friends and end on good terms. “We just saw a lot of studios and companies that maybe never addressed that and end up in a space where the partners don’t speak to each other,” Herzog says.

To set each partner up for their next endeavor, Hawraf will be paying for their health insurance through the end of 2019. The studio’s profits have already been distributed among the four partners. “It’s kind of like firing yourself from your own job with severance,” Ayres says.

A clock, from the A-Z 26 briefs in 26 hours challenge. [Image: courtesy HAWRAF]

When I asked about a project the partners are most proud of, Herzog reminisced about the studio’s first project, where the designers tackled 26 briefs in 26 hours as a way of finding their creative voice. It set a precedent for what the studio wanted to do in terms of transparency and radical creativity. The public Google Drive is a continuation of a similar ambition, passing on the studio’s knowledge to the rest of the design community.

“It’s nice to see those two projects bookend all this other great amazing design work, but maybe more than anything . . . transcend design for design’s sake and speak more to access and the ability for people to do things and work creatively and make a life out of that,” Herzog says. You can check out the Google Drive here.

View attached file (p-1-90315699-how-this-independent-design-studio-designed-its-end.jpg, image/jpeg)

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06 Mar 08:09

‘We’ve made a huge mistake’: European publishers sound off on subscriptions and tech talent shortages

by Lucinda Southern

The climate is tough for publishers. Digital ad revenues continue to be swallowed up by big tech giants, while publishers still need to rely somewhat on platforms for reach. Yet publishers have an air of realism despite the challenging conditions and looking to non-ad revenue streams like subscriptions and commerce to protect their businesses.

In Milan, Italy, 150 publishers gathered at Digiday’s Publishing Summit Europe this week to discuss their growing reader revenue strategies, difficulties with attracting and keeping talent and the changing programmatic landscape. Focus groups and town hall sessions were conducted under Chatham House Rule. Highlights below.

How to convince readers to pay
“As premium publishers, we’ve made a huge mistake in allowing consumers to believe they can consume content for free. I can have the biggest brand but still be competing with all the content for free online. Two years ago, we gave away content on Facebook Instant Articles; it increased traffic but revenue was significantly cannibalized.”

“As a subscriber what can we give you that is special? Sometimes that’s early access. It’s about keeping premium, premium.”

“It doesn’t matter how cheap it is, €1 or £1; if you’re not using it there’s no value. Subscriptions sound more transactional; memberships are more inclusive.”

“Reconciling members versus subscriptions, some of our sites have really hardcore tech readers, that can lead to a level of toxicity. We need to balance subscribers and members and building a community people want to engage in.”

“There are hard paywalls and soft paywalls, but there are culturally different approaches and reading habits across Europe.”

“Spotify for news can’t be done. There’s too much free-to-air news; it’s too fragmented. Effectively we have moved away from nano payments with newspapers.”

“There’s still a premium niche. There are people interested in not just eating the sausage but how the sausage is made. There’s a niche in the behind-the-scenes.”

“It’s tough moving revenue generation from advertising to subscriptions.”

“For us, of course, the challenge is conversion. What kind of content is working? A lot of it is free; it’s hard to find what readers need and where to get that content from.”

“Our coverage is B2B and B2C. B2C relies on reach, and we have to watch out we don’t lose reach in subscriptions.”

Getting tech talent to stick
“We aren’t the Googles of the world. We’re publishers. Keeping talented tech people is a challenge. I hear the story all the time: How can we be innovative in publisher technology? But you can’t keep people just with money alone.”

“For us, it helped giving more senior people more control and management over the product, so it’s not just the editorial team who have the final say. Younger people will fly away easily.”

“We create great media; we can still be cutting-edge and focus on those great aspects of our creativity; that’s what we should be seeing them on.”

Programmatic revenue struggles to fill the void
“Planning cycles at agencies are not translating into a $50,000 IO. There’s a sequence of events on the agency side that doesn’t translate to the pipes being connected and you suddenly being higher up the hierarchy if you were in a private market place. Programmatic direct is the closest thing to direct, but anything beyond that, even by the agencies’ own admission, is that they are not joined up enough because there are too many people involved in the process that it doesn’t translate to the same meaningful revenues.”

“In the old days, people would phone you up saying, ‘I’ve bought some digital stuff from you; here’s another massive IO because we like you.’ Those days don’t exist anymore, and management believe they should. You still want to continue to grow digital, but the scale of how we do that is proving more difficult than it used to be.”

“You need a balance of open, PMP, PG and direct to have competition; it’s direct buys that are pushing yields up, not just the competition between demand sources.”

“The challenge a lot of us have is you’ve got salespeople selling print and those same guys selling digital, and they’ll always go down the path of least resistance, so you have to try and upscale them to go and sell a PMP. At the end of that month, somebody’s only bought 500,000 impressions with you because they’ve bought with loads of other people as well.”

“We aren’t very good at joining up the direct part of the business and the programmatic part. We think of them as two separate revenue sources, but we’re all selling the same thing. I don’t think we have the right skills in house to take that message to the market.”

The post ‘We’ve made a huge mistake’: European publishers sound off on subscriptions and tech talent shortages appeared first on Digiday.

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01 Mar 08:34

Momo is basically 2019’s answer to viral chain mail

by Cale Guthrie Weissman

Have you heard about Momo? Odds are you have, if you’ve ever perused this awful place we call the internet. For the serenely unaware, the “Momo Challenge” is purported to be a series of viral online videos that young kids around the world have been sharing that instruct them to do dangerous–even deadly–things. The videos supposedly feature the terrifying face of a girl with giant circular eyes and a dark ghoulish grin–like a comic book version of the demon girl from The Ring.

According to one viral tweet that sparked the latest online outrage, Momo is sweeping the globe and all parents need to make sure their kids aren’t watching videos of creepy longhaired hell-children and heeding their advice. But, as the Atlantic‘s Taylor Lorenz explains, Momo is a hoax. It began about a year ago, after a local news outlet referenced a deadly viral video on WhatsApp. But, Lorenz writes:

The Momo challenge wasn’t real then and it isn’t real now. YouTube confirmed that, contrary to press reports, it hasn’t seen any evidence of videos showing or promoting the “Momo challenge” on its platform. If the videos did exist, a spokesperson for YouTube said, they would be removed instantly for violating the platform’s policies. Additionally, there have been zero corroborated reports of any child ever taking his or her own life after participating in this phony challenge.

So it’s not real, yet people keep sharing it. The tweet in question has over 23,000 retweets, and numerous outlets keep writing about it. Even Kim Kardashian put a call-out to her 129 million Instagram followers to stop these not-real viral videos from spreading. Yes, it’s all very odd. It’s also extremely familiar.

Viral hoaxes have been around for as long as people could communicate–and for as long as they’ve enjoyed the dopamine jolt of duping other people. I could go through a litany of historical fake situations–the Hitler Diaries, Paul McCartney being dead, etc. But the tone of Momo, and other recent “challenges” with a similar cadence, share distinct characteristics with a specific form of misinformation that plagued the early internet: chain email.

For those of you old enough to remember time pre-Gmail, or even the early days of the Google service, you were likely bombarded with chain emails. This was before Facebook, so the only way to connect with others was to send them emails. And boy did people do that. They would forward to hundreds of their contacts the stupidest and most obscure messages around–usually promising good luck to those who paid the message forward.

But in these emails were also a great many hoaxes, some described as warnings. For instance, in the late ’90s, a piece of popular mail was making the rounds warning travelers about a group of marauding gangs harvesting tourists’ organs. The word spread so wide that the New Orleans police issued a statement assuring travelers that the kidney-stealing claims were false.

I could name others. Who could forget the one that claimed Bill Gates was going to give people $5,000, or the one that claimed Hotmail was shutting down. I myself went through my own email archives and found a few chain mail gems–most of grammatically erroneous motivational messages–all with the same urge to share! share! share!

In fact, those email chains had their roots in old-fashioned snail mail. In the days before the internet, chain letters would show up in your mailbox, promising good fortune to those who physically copied the letters and sent them to their friends and family, and warning of bad luck to those who didn’t comply. Like Momo, these letters preyed on superstition and fear in the service of viral messages. And just like Momo, people fell for it.

Which is to say that concepts like Momo are anything but new–the only thing that’s evolved is the sharing apparatus. A Mediashift blog post from 2009 looked into viral email hoaxes, and pondered its impact on social media. “Viral marketing scientist Dan Zarella offers a number of alternative theories for the spread of urban legends that can also apply to other sorts of forwards: a desire to warn friends of unknown dangers, a need to fit in, or simply as a form of recreation.” Sounds familiar, no?

Apps like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Twitter are supposedly more advanced than email, and yet they continue to allow for this kind of unfettered content flow. It’s an interesting situation, especially when you think about Momo, specifically: Hundreds of thousands of parents are sharing the same hysterical message asking them to be more mindful about the content their kids are consuming, and yet they are unable to transfer that logic to their own online actions.

Memes–be they videos on YouTube, posts on Facebook, or tweets–may seem like a dangerous new form of misinformation. This is correct. But the messages they spread aren’t new. It’s simply that the platforms allowing for them are much more powerful than ever before.

Which is to say that Momo is absolutely fake, but the problem it highlights will be with us for a long time.

View attached file (p-1-how-momo-became-2019and8217s-answer-to-viral-chainmail.jpg, image/jpeg)

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28 Feb 06:41

Irem, staden (?) som kanske aldrig funnits

by Hexmaster

Illustration av den mångbegåvade Jens Heimdahl, använd med benäget tillstånd

[Abdul Alhazred] claimed to have seen fabulous Irem, or City of Pillars ...

- H. P. Lovecraft, History of the Necronomicon

Irem appears in diverse contexts in Cthulhu mythos. Lovecraft places the city in the Crimson Desert. It is claimed that "pillar" is the code name for "elder" or "old one", which translates "Irem of Pillars" as "Irem of the Old Ones". Also Abdul Alhazred is said to have visited Irem, where he found manuscripts with ancient forgotten knowledge.

- Asenath Mason, Necronomicon Gnosis: A Practical Introduction (2007)

Lovecrafts berättelser är fulla med påhittade platser, städer och områden. Men åtminstone en stad har en viss koppling till verkligheten. "Viss", eftersom det inte är säkert vad namnet syftar på, eller ens om det som avses alls funnits. (Det finns olika stavningar och varianter, jag föredrar Lovecrafts Irem eftersom det är den jag är mest bekant med.)

Iram indeed is gone with all his Rose,
And Jamshyd's Sev'n-ring'd Cup where no one knows;
But still a Ruby kindles in the Vine,
And many a Garden by the Water blows.

- Omar Khayyams Rubaiyat

Måhända är det hädiskt att ifrågasätta att det varit en verklig stad:

Har du inte sett hur din Herre gick till väga mot [stammen] Aad? Och mot Iram, [de tusen] pelarnas [stad], vars like aldrig har återskapats på jorden

- Koranen, eller åtminstone Koranens budskap i svensk tolkning av Mohammed Knut Bernström, sura 89:6-8

Enligt artikeln på Wikipedia har man föreslagit att ett verkligt Irem var en stad, eller en region eller en stam (sistnämnda är ett försök att tolka en mycket knapp uppgift från Ptolemaios).

Some see this as a geographic location, either a city or an area, others as the name of a tribe. Those identifying it as a city have made various suggestions as to where or what city it was, ranging from Alexandria or Damascus to a city which actually moved or a city called Ubar. As an area it has been identified with the biblical Aram, son of Shem and the biblical region known as Aram. It has also been identified as a tribe, possibly the tribe of 'Ad, with the pillars referring to tent pillars.

- Wikipedia: Iram of the Pillars

Det har lanserats såväl naturliga som övernaturliga förklaringar till dess försvinnande. En av de senare berättar om en kung som ignorerade en profets varningar, varpå Allah lät staden försvinna i ökensanden. Givetvis har sådana historier à la Sodom (stillsammare men lika effektiva) fått fantasifulla att tänka på Atlantis. Kanske Irem är lika mycket påhitt som Atlantis, men att omnämnandet i en helig bok gett det en status som inte ens Platon kan tävla med.

Se även Jason Colavito, Exploring Iram of the Pillars' Influence on Lovecraft's "Nameless City" där uppgifter (som kan vara ytterst kortfattade) jämförs från Koranen och Tusen och en natt (som gjorde mycket för att sprida namnet bland sekulära västerlänningar).

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27 Feb 12:15

Rotten Tomatoes strikes back at review-bombing trolls

by Michael Grothaus

Film review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes has announced it will no longer show a “Want to See” score or allow comments on an upcoming film before its release. The Want to See score is an aggregated score showing how many people are interested in seeing a movie, which lets Rotten Tomatoes users tell how excited the general public is about a film. A high Want to See score can help spur more online ticket sales, thus boosting a film’s box office.

Unfortunately, in recent years the Want to See score has been abused by trolls who want to sabotage a film’s reputation before it even hits theaters–a trend known as “review-bombing.” Review-bombing is usually perpetrated against films that have strong female leads or leads or casts primarily made up of ethnic minorities.

Review-bombing came to prominence with Star Wars: The Last Jedi, which featured a diverse cast with several strong female leads. Review-bombing was also orchestrated against Marvel’s Black Panther due to that film’s mostly black cast. Most recently, review-bombing has targeted another Marvel film, Captain Marvel, after the film’s lead, Brie Larson, spoke out about the importance of diversity and inclusivity when it comes to film reviewers, the majority of whom are white males.

Now, however, Rotten Tomatoes has had enough of insecure, misogynistic, and racist trolls. In a blog post, the site said:

As of February 25, we will no longer show the ‘Want to See’ percentage score for a movie during its pre-release period. Why you might ask? We’ve found that the ‘Want to See’ percentage score is often times confused with the ‘Audience Score’ percentage number. (The ‘Audience Score’ percentage, for those who haven’t been following, is the percentage of all users who have rated the movie or TV show positively–that is, given it a star rating of 3.5 or higher–and is only shown once the movie or TV show is released.) . . .

What else are we doing? We are disabling the comment function prior to a movie’s release date. Unfortunately, we have seen an uptick in non-constructive input, sometimes bordering on trolling, which we believe is a disservice to our general readership. We have decided that turning off this feature for now is the best course of action. Don’t worry though, fans will still get to have their say: Once a movie is released, audiences can leave a user rating and comments as they always have.

On behalf of true film lovers everywhere: thank you, Rotten Tomatoes.

View attached file (null, unknown)

Pelle Sten likes this

26 Feb 10:14

Vad byråkratspråk egentligen är

by Jonas

”Honliga exemplar av domesticerade former av Gallus kan trots grav visuell funktionsnedsättning normalt prestera problemfritt i lokaliserandet av små enheter av ett cerealt födoämne.”

Så lyder en ofta använd komisk illustration till hur ”byråkratspråk” är – eller påstås vara. Onödigt långa och ovanliga ord får ersätta de enkla ord som egentligen betyder … just det, ”En blind höna hittar också ett korn”.

Kul – och det finns fler exempel på hur gamla ordspråk kan förvandlas till obegriplighet på samma sätt.

Men det stämmer inte särskilt bra. I praktiken är det inte det där vi möter särskilt ofta, när vi tycker något är krångligt. Det är faktiskt inte den mekanismen som sätter in när en handläggare eller tjänsteman ska beskriva sitt ärende eller ett beslut på en webb eller på ett intranät.

Vad som typiskt gör även enkla saker jobbiga att ta in för läsaren, är däremot att skribenterna drabbas av en drift att vara så uttömmande som möjligt. En rädsla att någon ska anmärka på att någon viss detalj, någon förutsättning eller bakgrundsinformation saknas.
De långa ord som finns är ofta till för att markera ens korrekta ställning i vissa aktuella frågor. Det brukar också finnas högtidliga hänvisningar till höga principer eller allmänna värden – kanske organisationens ”värdeord”. Samtidigt använder man passiva satser för att frikoppla sig från ett detaljerat ansvar.

Så om Byköpings kommun skulle berätta att om den blinda hönan, skulle det förmodligen i stället se ut ungefär så här:

Byköpings kommun erbjuder god tillgång till en väl utbyggd och högkvalitativ veterinärverksamhet, i syfte att trygga såväl livsmedelsförsörjningen för kommunens invånare som djurens eget välbefinnande.
Den första veterinärstationen startades redan 1931. Idag styrs verksamhetens av lagarna om djurskydd och djurhållning och står under länsstyrelsens inspektion.
Trots detta kan i enstaka fall enstaka djur drabbas av skador eller funktionsnedsättningar. Dessa kan ibland förefalla allvarliga, men varje åtgärd vidtages i sådana fall för att säkerställa att funktionsvariationen inte ska hämma djurets möjlighet att bibehålla sina väsentliga och artunika beteenden. Man tillser till exempel att djuret har förmåga att skaffa sitt foder, och kan därigenom trygga en hög livskvalitet för djuret.

Pelle Sten likes this

26 Feb 08:56

Cheap TVs and Exorbitant Education, Modern America in One Chart

by Jason Kottke

Economist Mark Perry has updated for 2018 his chart of price changes of selected goods over the past two decades.

Price Changes Graph

This graphic has been referred to a “the Chart of the Century” because it explains a lot about the socioeconomic life in the United States in just a quick glance.

During the most recent 21-year period from January 1998 to December 2018, the CPI for All Items increased by exactly 56.0% and the chart displays the relative price increases over that time period for 14 selected consumer goods and services, and for average hourly earnings (wages). Seven of those goods and services have increased more than average inflation, led by hospital services (+211%), college tuition (+183.8%), and college textbooks (+183.6%). Average wages have also increased more than average inflation since January 1998, by 80.2%, indicating an increase in real wages over the last several decades.

The other seven price series have declined since January 1998, led by TVs (-97%), toys (-74%), software (-68%) and cell phone service (-53%). The CPI series for new cars, household furnishings (furniture, appliances, window coverings, lamps, dishes, etc.) and clothing have remained relatively flat for the last 21 years while average prices have increased by 56% and wages increased 80.2%.

As various parties have noted, the goods & services that have gotten more expensive tend to be things that people need, aren’t subject to international competition, and are subject to more government regulation. The goods & services that have gotten cheaper tend to be things that people want, are subject to international competition, and are less regulated.

If healthcare & education costs had dropped as much in the last two decades as the price of TVs, toys, and software has, we’d be all set! As it is…

Tags: economics infoviz Mark Perry

Merijn, Pelle Sten and one other like this

Pelle Sten

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