Content Aware media news: September 15, 2022

Royal coverage, Google fines, and big love for magazines  - all in this week's Content Aware media news highlights.

Published: 08:35, 16 September 2022

A blueprint for history
The day after the death of Queen Elizabeth II, there were more than 420 pages of national UK coverage newspaper dedicated to the event, with some truly impressive editions made overnight. You can't do that without having plans in place, and this brilliant piece from 2017 does a great job of outlining quite how extensive those plans were. There is an audio version of the original article here.
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Press Gazette rounds up the media effect
The team at Press Gazette have been flat out counting and canvassing UK and global media to get a measure of things like quite how big the passing of the Queen was for their newsrooms, and also for their audiences. Some quite astonishing figures give an indication of how quite big the Big Story was for readers.
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Corbidge comments... on the AI of the beholder
As AI now seeps into assessing the trustworthiness of news, how good is it, and where can it m iss the point to the detriment of the problem it is trying to solve?
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It's all fine (again)
Remember the giant €4.3 billion fine levied by the EU against Google in 2018, alleging the twisting of phonemaker's arms to pre-install Google products on Android phones? After a legal battle, the company's appeal has been rejected by the bloc's General Court - though it did slightly reduce the fine by €200m.
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If you thought that was big
If the EU mega fine above wasn't enough, a Belgian legal firm is pursuing up to €25bn of damages for European publishers from Google, alleging anti-competitive conduct in the search giant's ad sales arm.
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Chirpy cheap cheap
Underinvestment, poor security, agents on the payroll, spam accounts, and outdated technology and practices - all claims levelled at Twitter by its former head of security in a whistleblower investigation taking place in the US. Sounds like an old CMS project!
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It's not namedropping when they are friends
Magazine founders and staff probably enjoy some of the most privileged access to the stars of their respective fields - and it's hard to think of a much bigger field than music. The founder of the iconic The Rolling Stone liberally sprinkles the big names as he speaks of his new memoirs.
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YouTube testing more ads
FIVE unskippable ads? Yup.
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It's official: Readers love mags
We're double dipping on Press Gazette this week, after it commissioned research into what modern reading habits are, and looked at what makes a reader actively choose digital or print.
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And our other survey said...
The American Press Institute and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research have also been conducting readership surveys, this time on the habits of younger audiences. They consume news, but don't much like what they are seeing - probably to do with the nature of the actual news, rather than how it's delivered. A bit like being angry at the sea for being cold and wet.
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