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Category: Digital News

  • olive magazine launches online shop

    olive magazine launches online shop

    The olive shop’s selection is from some of the UK’s finest small businesses, which are normally only available direct from the suppliers.

    For Christmas, olive magazine has launched its very own branded hampers for stress-free gifting. They’re filled with artisan products all chosen by the olive magazine team including Sussex cheese, cheese pairings from Bath, Bermondsey gin, London’s first bean to bar chocolate maker, Lucocoa, Norfolk chocolate truffles, Horsham buttery biscuits, and Yorkshire speciality coffee.

    Alex Crossley, Digital Editor adds “We’ve had a great response to our launch from consumers who value artisan ingredients. Our olive team of experts provide insider knowledge to elevate every meal, so you can enjoy the best food experiences at home and beyond. The olive shop takes this to the next level and helps our readers on that journey by enabling them to source quality ingredients all in one place. Our experience in product reviews helps us find the best of the best for readers to buy, and now we’ve curated our very own gift hampers, perfect for the festive season.”

    The olive shop is part of olivemagazine.com which offers thousands of thoroughly tested recipes, kitchen inspiration and insider guides to travel, restaurants, health and drinks including wine, cocktails and coffee. The olive shop helps readers enjoy the best food experiences at home.

  • Ofcom has found US tech firms increasingly shape the news stories that people in the UK see and read

    Ofcom has found US tech firms increasingly shape the news stories that people in the UK see and read

    The Chief Executive of Ofcom, Melanie Dawes, told the Financial Times that preliminary research carried out by the regulator revealed social media platforms are driving polarisation among users. Part of a forthcoming Ofcom investigation will examine algorithms that “amplify emotional reaction” to news and potentially lead users “into an echo chamber”.

    Ofcom has therefore launched a broader review into its media plurality regime, examining whether this should expand to cover the role of tech platforms role in hosting news – a move which would mark a further expansion of Ofcom’s already very broad remit.

    Over the coming months, Ofcom will be engaging with industry and interested parties, with a view to developing formal recommendations for consideration by the UK Government. A further, “more intrusive” approach being considered is the creation of statutory obligations for online to put in place measures to “support the visibility and discovery of a range of high-quality journalism on [their platforms]”.

    However, Ofcom notes that any such policy would need to be carefully designed so as to proportionately remedy the “identified harms to media plurality” and to avoid unintended consequences for the industry.

    PPA has previously engaged with the Ofcom Media Plurality team and have requested a meeting to better understand the regulator’s intentions. We will also look to issue a formal response to the questions posed in the study, so please do get in touch (sebastian.cuttill@ppa.co.uk) if you would like to discuss the report and recommendations in greater detail.

    We are keen that the role of specialist titles in providing trusted news is properly accounted for in any policy proposals resulting from the forthcoming investigation, creating a level playing field with “core news” organisations online.

  • Government commits to bringing forward Digital Markets Unit legislation, and Online Sales Tax abandoned

    Government commits to bringing forward Digital Markets Unit legislation, and Online Sales Tax abandoned

    This legislation will not only support specialist publishers and the creative industries to build thriving online businesses, but will also save millions of consumers money. We will now work with government to ensure that the detail of the legislation is as effective as possible, and with the DMU itself to develop codes of conduct that will go to the root of big tech’s anticompetitive practices.

    To note, this legislation will also bring in new regulations on the selling of subscription contracts. PPA has been successful in having several measures that would have had a highly detrimental impact on subscriptions ‘churn’ removed. We are now looking to facilitate engagement between experts within our membership and government in order that civil servants have a proper understanding of how subscriptions businesses work in practice.

    In another key announcement, the government has decided not to introduce an Online Sales Tax (OST), an idea put forward by certain stakeholders in the context of Business Rates reform. The government’s decision reflects concerns raised about an OST’s complexity and the risk of creating unintended distortion or unfair outcomes between different business models.

    An OST would have reduced publishers’ subscriptions revenues and created huge complexity in the process, so it is good to see that these concerns have been acknowledged and the policy abandoned.

  • Online Safety Bill to return without ‘legal but harmful’ content protections

    Online Safety Bill to return without ‘legal but harmful’ content protections

    Under the original plans, Category 1 services (larger user-to-user services such as Twitter and Facebook) would have to set out in their terms and conditions how they would deal with ‘legal but harmful’ content appearing on their platforms. The removal of this content category will leave illegal content and content that is harmful to children as the Bill’s key focuses.

    Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has brought tensions between free speech and platform regulation into focus. Musk tweeted “the bird is freed” following his acquisition, with EU Commissioner Thierry Breton responding: “in Europe, the bird will fly by our rules”.

    PPA continues to hold concerns that independently regulated specialist publishers are not given equal protections to those of current affairs-focused titles. “Recognised news publishers” will now be given stronger protections than a more general (and ill-defined) category of journalistic content, making it all the more critical that specialist titles that adhere to the same journalistic standards as newspapers are given equal protection. Our position was echoed by the Joint Committee which scrutinised the draft Bill, and senior SNP and Labour MPs put forward amendments to rectify the oversight in the Public Bill Committee.

    We will continue to work with Government and legislators to ensure that UK citizens are not denied access to quality journalism from PPA members.