Portside

• Verizon and Facebook Agree: Content Is King Again – Matt Rosoff (Business Insider)
• The Next Tech Bubble Is About to Burst – Joe Kukura (Kernel)
• The Computers Are Listening – Dan Froomkin (The Intercept)
• Social Media Helps Dictators, Not Just Protesters – Seva Gunitsky (Washington Post)
• How One Locally Owned TV Station Does Statehouse Coverage Right – Corey Hutchins (Columbia Journalism Review)

Verizon and Facebook Agree: Content Is King Again
By Matt Rosoff
May 17, 2015
Business Insider

There are only a few things that people want to really do online. Buy and sell. Communicate. Play. And look at content — news articles, TV shows, games, cat videos, porn, and so on.
Mobile devices have replaced the PC-based web browser as the No. 1 place where people consume content online, and tech companies are making sure they are poised to profit from that habit.
With Verizon's $4 billion purchase of AOL, and Facebook's new Instant Articles initiative, which embeds content from other media sources directly into Facebook, it looks like it's back in vogue.

The Next Tech Bubble Is About to Burst
By Joe Kukura
April 19, 2015
Kernel

While Silicon Valley and New York City are paying larger-than-ever salaries, the U.S. median income has dropped by a couple percentage points. Still, most top tech firms insist on doing their business within a certain, select few-dozen ZIP codes contained entirely in Northern California and New York City.
In these select areas, money-losing tech firms drive up the price of everything from housing to a loaf of bread. This cost-of-living overvaluation not only causes displacement and gentrification, it inflates other bubbles—in corporate office space, in the cost of housing and rental units, in salaries, and in the overall employment market. When the tech bubble bursts, it won’t hurt just tech workers: It’ll affect cooks, custodians, assistants, TaskRabbit rabbits, and Uber drivers. Even if you don’t enjoy the startup spoils, you’ll feel the sting when this cash stops flowing.

The Computers Are Listening
By Dan Froomkin
May 5, 2015
The Intercept

Top-secret documents from the archive of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden show the National Security Agency can now automatically recognize the content within phone calls by creating rough transcripts and phonetic representations that can be easily searched and stored.
Though perfect transcription of natural conversation apparently remains the Intelligence Community’s “holy grail,” the Snowden documents describe extensive use of keyword searching as well as computer programs designed to analyze and “extract” the content of voice conversations, and even use sophisticated algorithms to flag conversations of interest.

Social Media Helps Dictators, Not Just Protesters
By Seva Gunitsky
March 30, 2015
Washington Post

The role of social media as a way to foster democracy, which first came to the fore in the Arab Spring, has followed a similar painful trajectory. Initially welcomed as a democratic panacea, social media has increasingly come to be seen as a mixed blessing – a potentially useful tool that can nevertheless be blocked and sidelined by clever tyrants. The most recent research suggests that in some cases, social media may actually help dictators, so long as they put up sufficient barriers to contrary views.

How One Locally Owned TV Station Does Statehouse Coverage Right
By Corey Hutchins
May 8, 2015
Columbia Journalism Review

Late last month, a North Carolina news outlet unveiled a new feature on its website: Hover over the name of a sitting state lawmaker mentioned in any story, and you’ll see the top five donors to the legislator’s most recent campaign.
The tech tool, called Donor Reveal, was inspired by a browser plug-in developed by a teenager to track donations to Congress and draws on data from the National Institute on Money in State Politics. It’s not necessarily earth-shattering, but it’s a nice example of the way political journalists can weave transparency and campaign-finance themes into their work in the digital age