via usatoday:
Over the past decade, the news business has endured a bloodbath, with tens of thousands of journalists losing their jobs amid mass layoffs.
The irony is, more people than ever are consuming news. There’s never been a greater need for factual reporting, from the White House down to the local school board.
Why the disconnect? Look no further than a new study by the News Media Alliance, which found that in 2018, Google made $4.7 billion off of news content — almost as much as every news organization in America combined made from digital ads last year. Yet Google paid a grand total of zero for the privilege. News industry revenue, meanwhile, has plunged.
Nice work if you can finagle it.
CALVINBALL: Google CEO: YouTube Will Begin Targeting ‘Content Which Doesn’t Exactly Violate Policies.’
A day after acknowledging that his videos did not violate its policies, YouTube decided to demonetize all of conservative comedian and commentator Steven Crowder’s videos in response to a left-wing Vox employee complaining that Crowder repeatedly made fun of him because of his identity. On the same day, YouTube announced a mass ban on all content promoting one group as superior to another “in order to justify discrimination, segregation or exclusion based on qualities like age, gender, race, caste, religion, sexual orientation or veteran status.”
In an interview with Axios published Sunday but filmed before YouTube’s unveling of its new policy last week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai signaled YouTube’s crackdown and its plans to expand the ban to include “borderline content.”
“Look, we aren’t quite where we want to be,” Pichai told “Axios on HBO.” While YouTube is improving on eliminating content it deems problematic, he suggested, they are still working toward even more extensive content-controlling measures.
Google, said Pichai, “rank[s] content based on quality.” They plan to apply that same approach to YouTube. “And so we are bringing that same notion and approach to YouTube so that we can rank higher quality stuff better and really prevent borderline content,” he said.
THIS IS JUST DUMB: Google Protecting Jussie Smollett From ‘Disparaging’ Searches. “Search-engine’s autocomplete feature filters out hate crime related searches.”
h/t SG