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(Updated) Instagram’s new terms of service should trouble media outlets, photojournalists

December 18, 2012 in General Media, social media

UPDATE (5 pm CST 12-18-12): Instagram has posted a blog post declaring that they are going to be revising the revised TOS. “Our intention in updating the terms was to communicate that we’d like to experiment with innovative advertising that feels appropriate on Instagram. Instead it was interpreted by many that we were going to sell your photos to others without any compensation. This is not true and it is our mistake that this language is confusing. To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos. We are working on updated language in the terms to make sure this is clear.”

Yesterday, Instagram announced some new terms of service, and the social media/journalism commentariat is abuzz with some of the changes. Among the changes that should trouble student media outlets is this one which has professional photographers and privacy rights activists alike worried:

“You agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you,”

This even applies to minors:

If you are under the age of eighteen (18), or under any other applicable age of majority, you represent that at least one of your parents or legal guardians has also agreed to this provision (and the use of your name, likeness, username, and/or photos (along with any associated metadata)) on your behalf.

Seriously, every 14-year-old’s parents reads the TOS on every app on his/her iPod Touch. /eyeroll.

I am not a lawyer, but I don’t think anyone should be comfortable with signing over a blanket personal model release to a company to sell your image or personal photographs. Wil Wheaton outlined some of the troubling aspects of this in a blog post: regarding instagram’s new Terms of Service.

Here’s what I’m wondering: if Kaley Cuoco uses Instagram to share a photo of her and Melissa Rauch doing something silly, does that mean that Instagram can take that photo and use it to advertise for something silly without compensating them for what becomes a use of their likeness for commercial purposes? I can see that being a pretty serious shitstorm if it happens. I’m not a big enough celebrity for it to personally affect me, but I know a lot of people who are. If someone Instagrams a photo of Seth Green walking through an Urban Outfitters, does that mean Urban Outfitters can take that image and use it to create an implied endorsement by Seth? What if the picture is taken by a complete stranger? Who gets final say in how the image is used? The subject, the photographer, or Instagram?

For college media outlets, the problem is different. Your photographers are out covering events, taking photographs that are important to your news operation and your brand. Do you want some company using your photographs without permission or payment to promote their products? I don’t.

In the past, I’ve recommended that college media outlets get on the social network of Instagram to share breaking news photos and other images within the network (I’ve recommended similar things about Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc.), but I’m reconsidering that recommendation until more and better information about this change is forthcoming.

I’m not sure how this will play out. Facebook (who owns Instagram) has a history of trying stupid stuff with their privacy policies only to walk them back when users pushed back. Maybe that will be the case with Instagram as well. For now, the new TOS go into effect Jan. 16, 2013. If you use the service after that, you’re agreeing to those terms.

For those who are concerned about this, here’s a post at Wired about how to download your photos from Instagram and cancel your account. Also, I’d suggest taking another look at Flickr. They just released a new iOS app with filters that are pretty comparable to Instagram’s, and more importantly, they give you a way to control how your content is used. Here’s a post from 2011 where the company (owned by Yahoo!) reiterated their policy: At Flickr, your photos are always yours.

See below for some of the media coverage of this change.

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Spinning songs and sharing music, digitally with Spotify

December 17, 2012 in College Media, ideas, innovation, online software, social media

Editor’s Note: We are happy to welcome Allison Bennett Dyche, Assistant Director of Student Media at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in Savannah, Ga., as a new contributor to the blog.

If you’re still waiting for new CDs to arrive via postal mail, either for use at your radio station or to review for your newspaper or magazine’s A&E section, it’s time to get with the program.

Spotify came to the United States during the summer of 2011. If you’ve never heard of it before, or aren’t sure how to make best use of it, now’s the time to check it out.

You may remember the wonder of Napster when it first debuted in the late 1990s (and the following depression when old Napster officially went under in the early 2000s). Apple’s iTunes, launched in the early 2000s, has been the go-to for years now, allowing users to input their own existing music libraries and purchase new music, one song or album at a time.

Enter European digital streaming music service Spotify. The application allows users to input their own libraries of music, and also listen to a massive catalogue of music (reportedly more than 20 million songs) available at their fingertips. The biggest differences between iTunes and Spotify are the cost and the social media aspect. Spotify is available for free (with commercials) or for a small monthly subscription fee (with no commercials and availability on additional platforms, rather than paying by song or album).

And unlike Pandora, rather than just typing in the name of a couple of artists that you like and letting the site’s Music Genome Project algorithm handle the rest, you can build your own playlists, and share them with your social networks and the Spotify community. Making your playlists public will also allow for others to subscribe to your playlists, allowing you to share your music tastes with friends and strangers alike. But Spotify also offers an algorithm-based music suggestion feed through Spotify Radio. Listeners can choose a song they enjoy, and the application will choose and play similar music and artists.

For college radio station DJs, having a paid subscription to Spotify is a good way to not only build playlists for shows without having to fumble with CDs and vinyl, but also to be able to share it with the audience after the show is over. Sharing playlists on social media allows for a broader listening base to get a taste of the music played on your station during your shows, and allows those from outside your listening area to also support your station.

New albums and singles are available under the New Releases section under the “What’s New” tab, so your student media operation can start playing or reviewing new music it as soon as it drops.

Barack Obama's campaign playlist

• CBS This Morning songs from the shows

• Victoria’s Secret store playlist

• Snoop Dogg’s mixtape

So how can your student media operation get started with Spotify? Start off easy by building some playlists.

• Create playlists documenting their top songs of 2012, their top songs of fall semester, etc.

• Create playlists that include a sampling of the kind of music listeners can hear on your college radio station.

• With students traveling home, create an ultimate road trip mix, or have students put together a playlist of songs representing the cities/states where they’ll spend their breaks.

• Create an anti-holiday music playlist for when you just cannot take another rendition of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”

Some playlists related to college:

The Daily Emerald at the University of Oregon started building and sharing weekly playlists on their site during fall semester.

Seventeen magazine shared an ultimate list of music to cram for college finals.

With more than 20 million songs at your fingertips and the ability to create and share as many playlists as you want, there are endless possibilities for how to incorporate Spotify into student media.

Stay tuned for a follow-up post in 2013 about new features Spotify is launching, and examples of how national and international media outlets are using Spotify apps.

Allison Bennett Dyche is the Assistant Director of Student Media at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in Savannah, Ga. She advises the online news organization District, the literary arts journal Port City Review and the SCAD chapter of the Society for Collegiate Journalists, and DJs a weekly show on SCAD Radio.

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Numbers without context mean nothing

September 7, 2012 in General Media, social media

Sometimes it takes humor to get a point across. Here, Stephen Colbert skewers the talk about how many Tweets were flying during First Lady Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention.

This is something I’d call the “Wordle Effect.” Wordle makes pretty word clouds based on how often a word is used in a text. The most used words are not placed in any sort of order, or their relevance to other words noted. The graphic has no greater meaning than that, really. The same could be said for statistics about how many Tweets (or Facebook posts) were flying during a political speech. It’s interesting trivia, but nothing more.

Via AdAge Campaign Trail Blog

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Expectations are there for new hires and social media

February 29, 2012 in career talk, social media

I know you’ve probably heard it here plenty of times, but the drumbeat for online journalism skills continues to grow louder from every professional journalist I’ve spoken to or listened to at a conference or workshop this year.

When I was at the Mid-America Press Institute’s “Managing Change” workshop recently, one quote brought this back to mind. It was from Alan Herzberger, digital managing editor of The Oklahoman.

Here’s what I tweeted at the time:

Herzberger said the Oklahoman expects new hires to be active on Facebook and Twitter, and to have some followers (for more on the Oklahoman’s social media strategy, read the story at mpinews.org, along with others from the workshop).

That dovetails with something Steve Yelvington wrote recently that I though deserved some attention: The new baseline skill set, which includes this skill:

Be prepared to use social networking to further your job goals. This includes listening, engaging and promoting your work.

There are a lot of web sites out there that will give you advice about how to achieve success in social media these days. My only advice is this: Get to it!

If you’re not using social media to connect with other journalists, with potential readers, with industry sources, you’re flailing at your journalistic responsibility.

When we started this blog, one of the things we talked about early on was that news is now a conversation (that’s not my terminology, but it describes the way news has evolved). It’s more true now than ever.

 

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Facebook’s changes and college media: appification on the way?

September 23, 2011 in College Media, industry news, social media

Some of the biggest news in social media the past two days has been the announcement by Facebook of a whole passel of new features, changes to their interface, and ways for news media to interact with the Facebook mob of users (now around 700 million).

There’s more coverage in the tech blogging/press universe than I could possibly link to, although I’m including some links at the bottom of this post if you’re interested.

photo via GigaOm

The big change for users will be the Timeline. But for media operations, the big change is in the application space. Several large media outlets – Washington Post and the Guardian UK among them – debuted new “social reading” applications. These applications allow you to read articles within the Facebook interface and then notify your Facebook acquaintances as to what you’ve been reading.

Now why do I think this is going to be important for college media? Perhaps an illustration is in order. I’ll pick on a large media outlet like The State News at Michigan State.

Let’s say they develop a Facebook app like the ones listed above. Facebook users can then allow that app to hop into their newsfeed (or whatever they’re calling it this week at Facebook). When one of The State News’ readers reads an article in Facebook, a link to that article will be shared with that user’s friends, which may push more readers into The State News app, and bring in a wider connection to the paper’s online content.

From what I’ve read, the media outlets are able to sell advertising in the app outside Facebook’s advertising platform (from the Guardian story above), so there’s added value for online advertisers.

And as much as I talk about developing web sites, it’s pretty obvious that a huge number of college students spend a lot of time in Facebook. And getting content in front of college students’ eyes (especially online) is always a challenge when college newspaper readership remains committed to the print edition.

Will college media outlets do this? It’s too early to tell. I’m aware of some outlets that have been using Facebook pages for a social media presence. This is a slightly different paradigm, and totally new on the radar. But I’ve already seen information on my FB page about what articles people are reading on the Washington Post Social Reader. It’s worth experimenting with, at least, as a way to expand the reach of your digital footprint.

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Google+ invites still available

August 23, 2011 in social media

googleplusI’ve used Google+ once for a “hangout” to talk to two different interview subjects at the same time. Otherwise, I’m following other journalism leaders and posting links to the blog on there. If anyone reading this doesn’t have a Google+ account yet and needs an invite, drop a comment below, or e-mail me.

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Managing in the Digital Age

February 12, 2011 in management, social media, Training

I’m tweeting from the Mid-America Press Institute workshop “Managing in the Digital Age” today and tomorrow.

There’s going to be a lot of talk about social media, analytics, and mobile journalism, and a discussion about app development with folks from stltoday.

You can find details about the workshop here, and follow the tweets using the hashtag #mpinews

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Gregory’s Twitter Tips for journalists

September 8, 2010 in social media, Student voices, Twitter

Sara Gregory, community manager for the Daily Tar Heel, created a slide show for fellow student journalists about how to use Twitter responsibly as a journalist. Worth a look. (via Erica Perel on the CMA Listserv).

Twitter tips

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One way not to do online comments (rant)

July 16, 2010 in Community, ethics, industry news, management, social media

Credit cards
Image via Wikipedia

Over the life of this blog, and in my studies of the online news business since 2001, I have seen so many efforts to rein in online comments that my eyes roll when I see a new round of pearl-clutching from news editors and publishers about how nasty commenters are on their web sites.

But of all the efforts, this effort by the Sun Chronicle in Massachusetts has got to be the prize-winner for ways to kill off a commenting community. The SC not only wants readers to register to comment using their real names and addresses, they want users to give up credit card information and pay a one-time fee of 99 cents for the privilege!

The opportunity to post comments on stories on Sun Chronicle websites will be restored this week, Publisher Oreste P. D’Arconte announced today, with posters required to use their real names.

To enforce this change, all posters will be required to register their name, address, phone number and a legitimate credit card number.

The credit card will be charged a one-time fee of 99 cents to activate the account.

Look, I can understand the desire to have a well-functioning, civil community of readers commenting on your web site. I can even understand the desire to have people use their real names when commenting (although I disagree). But demanding that readers give up sensitive financial information and then billing them just to leave a comment on a web site is … well, I can’t use the words I’m considering right now on a family web site.

Of course, if the Sun Chronicle were serious about wanting comments, they could use Facebook Connect. It’s not 100 percent foolproof, but it would tie a comment to a user’s online identity in a more meaningful way and discourage or eliminate “anonymous” comments (pro-tip: when a user puts a name – even a made-up name – in a comment box, it’s not technically “anonymous,” but “pseudonymous”).

More likely, this change will drop the Sun Chronicle’s commenting community to near zero. And if I were an enterprising web denizen in one of the paper’s communities, I’d be busy putting up a web site that allows users to comment on SC-related articles without registering. Just provide headline links to SC stories in blog posts and allow comments on those posts. No need to steal content.

I’ve often gotten the vibe that a vast number of news media professionals hate comments, and would rather not deal with them at all. After all, people on the Internet can be real jackasses when their name is not associated with what they write.

But shutting off comments on your site – or trying to get people to pay to do so – is no real solution. It just drives people to other places on the Internet where they can comment without fearing for their jobs, or their social status, or whatever.

Last year, Va. Tech’s Collegiate Times student newspaper went through a similar type of situation. A campus committee was dismayed that there were racist comments showing up in the comments on the Collegiate Times’ web site. So the committee’s solution was to try to get the news org. to stop allowing anonymous comments by cutting off university funding.

Brilliant!

No mention of, you know, actually dealing with the disgusting underbelly of racism that brings these comments out. Just sweep the problem under the rug so the campus community looks pristine.

The truth of the matter is that managing an online community of commenters is work. It’s like tending a garden. If you don’t put in the work to root out the weeds (abusive commenters), you won’t get the vegetables (cogent commenters) to flourish.

The Sun Chronicle‘s recently announced policy roots out the weeds by digging up the entire garden.

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Site matters: new plug-ins added

June 16, 2010 in CICM shop talk, Twitter, Wordpress

I’ve added three new plug-ins to the site based on some browsing through the CoPress WordPress plug-in wiki page recommendations. I hope these plug-ins will add to the usability of the site. Please leave a comment or send me some feedback if you like or dislike them.

Expanding Text: This is a plug-in that uses Javascript to hide certain content on the front page, and allow you to click and show the content if you want to read the full content of the post. The key here is that the plug-in expands the post on the front page, so the browser doesn’t have to load a whole new page with the full text of the post.

Print Friendly: This plug-in allows you to reformat the text in a format that doesn’t waste paper when you want to print out a blog post for future reference or handouts or whatever. Often, when I print out a blog post on someone’s blog, the header, footer and sidebars get printed as well as the actual content. This wastes paper with stuff you don’t need or want in the printed version. The button is at the bottom of the post.

Twitter Tools: I’m trying this one out to see how it works. This is supposed to integrate Twitter into your admin area of a WordPress site, so Twitter will be updated when you publish new content. It also shortens URLs using bit.ly, adds hashtags, and excludes categories.

Finally, just a reminder: At the bottom of each post is this button:

badge

This button allows you to suggest edits, grammar and spelling corrections to the post author using Editz (formerly known as GooseGrade). Feel free to use it if I make a mistake. I will regret the error. :)

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