Happy Good Friday and a hello to our new subs from FT, U.S. State Department, New York Times, American Press Institute, and The Lead.

It’s 12 days to Splice Beta, our first media festival in Asia. It’s all coming together and the demand has been phenomenal (we’ve had to raise our ticket ceiling twice now). I’m especially thankful for all the messages that have come in from people who can’t join us there but just wanted us to know they’re rooting for us. 

A big thank you to our friends at Konrad Adenauer Stiftung who have stepped up to help bring freelancers out to Beta because, like us, they believe that we need to create opportunities for all of us to grow. 

We had two Cambodian freelancers who wanted so badly to get to Beta that they were about to buy 23-hour bus tickets to get from Phnom Penh to Chiang Mai. KAS is helping them with flights now. 

It’s not just KAS. IMS, Google, Nordot, Facebook, Civil, MDIF, the U.S. State Department, have all made it possible for freelancers and startups to get to Splice Beta. Thank you for paying it forward for media in Asia.

Here’s your weekly intelligence report on the biggest trends, threats, and tools in media. 

— Alan Soon

PLATFORMS

What happens when you have a major global breaking news event, and people flock to YouTube to watch live news? The Notre-Dame Cathedral fire apparently confused the YouTube algo. 

Got fire?
Got plumes of smoke?
Got mass traffic on news?
Got back-to-back coverage on all global live news channels?

YT’s response: This must be a terror attack! Cue up those 9/11 information panels! Those panels, which appear under the live stream, were actually meant to provide a counterpoint to misinformation… except this time, it created it by implying a 9/11-style terrorist attack was underway. 

AI (or let’s just call it automation) is great at spotting trends. It does A + B = C with stunning accuracy. But it still takes humans to understand a WTF situation that knows no precedent.

The NYT has a timely profile of Susan Wojcicki, the CEO of YouTube. “Wojcicki presents as exceedingly normal, bordering on boring, even as elements of her digital realm burst into the real world in forms that are increasingly grotesque and sometimes dangerous.” How is it that someone so powerful doesn’t share the accountability we expect from Zuck, Sandberg, Bezos, or Dorsey?

Facebook is tweaking Watch so that it’s more like, er, YouTube. Well, kinda. It’s going to merge its Watch Show Page into the Video Page template. It’ll be a good thing for publishers — you don’t have to create new pages for every show.

Twitter is going to try something interesting. It’ll let you hide replies in a conversation that you feel aren’t helpful. So you — yes, you — will get to tuck away anything that doesn’t contribute to the convo. Crazy? To be fair, you can still click to reveal those comments, but still. I know a bunch of governments who would like that.


GOVERNMENTS

An Indian state court banned TikTok, prohibiting its distribution on Google and Apple app stores in the country. Politicians have been asking the federal government to ban TikTok, saying it encourages pornography and makes it easy for predators to target children. This is a major blow for the Bytedance app, which has registered 240 million downloads in the country. TikTok was famously blocked in Indonesia for a week over the same concerns last year, forcing the company to agree to censor negative content.

Myanmar’s civilian government is clamping down on political satire. Thangyat, a traditional satirical poetry performed on the streets around the new year holiday, was banned during the years of military rule only to resurface in recent years. Thangyat acts now have to submit their lyrics ahead of their performance. And just this week, four members from a troupe were arrested after live-streaming their act on Facebook.

Automated racism is a thing in China (and I’m sure the rest aren’t far off). The government is using AI to track its Uighur population solely based on their appearance. Much of this work is done by startups. One of them boasted that it has the tech to recognize “sensitive groups of people.”

ADVERTISING SECTION

It's 12 days to Splice Beta. If you're coming, there's some stuff you need to know. Like the fact that it's super hot. 40º C hot. Time to hit your nearest Uniqlo for classy shorts. We have other FAQs here.

And hey, there are still a handful of tickets if you want to hang out at the hottest media festival in Asia. (It's not Fyre.)

REPORTING

Reporters Without Borders put out its annual World Press Freedom Index. You won’t be surprised — it’s a shitty year for journalism and journalists are paying with their lives. “The hostility towards journalists expressed by political leaders in many countries has incited increasingly serious and frequent acts of violence that have fuelled an unprecedented level of fear and danger for journalists.”

Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. The two Reuters reporters are serving seven years in prison for “exposing state secrets” in their reporting of the government’s campaign to eradicate the Rohingya in Rakhine state.


TRANSFORMATIONS

60 of Quartz’s employees have unionized. “We believe the best method of ensuring that future is by bargaining collectively.” They’ve been working on this plan for two years.


PEOPLE

I had the good fortune of meeting Craig Newmark recently while waiting for a glass of wine at a bar. The service was crap, but that gave me more time to chat with Craig, who might be one of the most unassuming people I’ve ever met. Never mind that he just happens to make the biggest, most significant donations in media. Just don’t ask him if Craigslist killed newspapers (maybe after a few drinks). Check out this profile. 


TOOLS

I’ve recently discovered Noa — News Over Audio. It’s not new, but I’ve only just stumbled on it. It’s an interesting premise: You don’t have time to read articles, so why not have them read to you — by humans? Audiobooks for news. Noa has The Economist, NYT, Telegraph, and Bloomberg Businessweek among its many titles. 


NOTABLES

How crazy awesome is the optical zoom on Huawei P30? Enough to be a privacy nightmare.

FROM OUR PARTNERS

Our friends at e27 are putting on their spectacular Echelon conference in Singapore at the end of May. They’ve parked 10 complimentary tickets under Splice. Just hit reply and we’ll send you the promo code.

The GEN Summit comes to Athens, June 13-15. Some seriously cool speakers like Amy Webb (Future Today Institute), Krishna Bharat (the founder of Google News), and Katherine Viner (the editor-in-chief at The Guardian) will be talking about voice, visual journalism, and verification. Splice readers get a discounted ticket price of €890 with the promo code GEN_SPLICE19 valid till April 30. 

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