The times are tough for you in the Press. Let me ask you something: what are you fighting for?

What does a crisis mean? In tough times it is easy to forget what is important. You go back to the basics. You survive day to day. You think about the next meal, not the one after that.

You measure the immediate satisfaction you have just produced, because that is what you are paid for. You optimize to maximize it.

You still believe you fight for good, but you cannot quite explain what good is.

The fight has made you anxious and bitter. You don't see it yourself, but everyone who sees you knows that you have slipped to the dark side.

You no longer fight for people, against the evil corporations and corrupt governments. You fight with the corporations and governments because you don't know what is wrong anymore; the fight is so intense you don't have time to find that out.

You laugh at opinion polls, because you have data to prove them wrong. Your data shows that there is a mass of men who does not want to be educated, who do not want to hear about the wrongdoings of those responsible, who do not care; they want to be drown into an endless stream of entertainment and if your data shows that that is what they want, that is what you will deliver.

You don't understand that your actions have impact to the metrics you use: you create the change you think comes outside.

What could save you? Who could bring you back?

I can think of two candidates for this heroic task.

Either someone brave could demonstrate the value of impact based measuring in economic terms to those who coordinate and lead your operations; Or the audience moves faster and faster to grassroots media and the new balance is with short term, vanishing small media. These small media operations cannot maintain a market position but when one falls, two are ready to take the place. They are unsustainable in economic terms but are still able to take care of the democratic fourth estate function of the Press.

Or not. Maybe the battle is already lost. Maybe there is no one willing to wear the bat suit anymore.

Welcome to Gotham City.

Social media is chaotic and loud, but it helps us to get to the next level. Ubiquitous, human-centric aware web is here.

We need security. We need friends and social identity that is accepted and respected.

Fulfilling these needs is a path towards greater self-enlightenment.

The social web supports our social needs. We construct our social identity by sharing the items that mirror the image that we want to create. We keep up with friends.

However, the Web has potential to help us with even higher needs.

Think Scoopinion. It is not a social service. And as a discovery tool, it does not deliver the pieces you have to know. Thus, it does not fulfill the need for security.

Instead, you can discover enlightening pieces that others have found insightful enough to spend time on. Scoopinion offers awareness. It's a tool for learning about the world, and yourself. The latter is especially true after we launch the profile page.

I welcome you to the aware web.

Social web is a bazaar. Aware web is a mountain

Everybody is shouting. You smell the taste of the spices and sweat. Small girl is looking at a hairy goat. Olives, meat, sneakers, people, people everywhere. Hats and hair and open mouths.

This is the social web. We go there because everyone is there and we have fun and smile and chat and laugh.

The amount of detail makes you feel tired. You leave the bazaar.

Finally home. Close the door.

Sit on the carpet. It's raining outside, and the small droplets of water play with the metal in the windowsill.

Open a magazine and read. The story makes you forget where you are. You read, immersed. You don't think about it, but small details from the story are colliding with your memories.

It's the aware web.

Your mind wanders: you remember the chats you had in the bazaar. An idea comes up, combining the details of the day. Slowly, you begin to meditate. Under your conscious thoughts, your mind is working. You don't think about it, but you are learning.

The aware web.

You get an idea. Open a notebook to write it down. The pen resonates with the flow of your mind and you write and you write and you can't slow down. But your mind is slow and in peace.

In the aware web, you don't have to worry and you don't have to be somebody. The web takes care of you, finding you the knowledge you desire from your past and from the actions of others, gently directing you to the paths you want to take.

For a moment, you can relax. Aware web is here to help you.

Because healthy journalism is directly linked to healthy society, I believe that content providers have a responsibility for making long form journalism profitable.

There are two ways to reach that goal.

1. By increasing the number of readers in long form stories OR
2. By increasing the revenue per reader in long form stories.

Scoopinion helps content producers in both.

1. More readers to long form stories

At Scoopinion, we have developed a technology that uses the behavior of crowds to automatically rate articles.

When you read NY Times, the Guardian or any other major news site or blog with Scoopinion installed, your scrolling gestures and reading speeds are tracked. I want to emphasize: we measure the actual reading behavior instead of clicks, likes, shares or up votes.

Thus, we get a lot of data about how articles are read, all the time.

We then use this dataset to find the most well-read pieces for our readers, aggregating more traffic to the most well-read long form stories.

The aggregation provides more readers for the stories that deserve it.

2. More revenue per reader

As you can see, we have a lot of data about reading preferences and styles, industry wide. Because of Scoopinion we know that NY Times articles are read 10 seconds longer on average than articles at the Guardian.

To our users, we give this data back in the form of a private profile page (launching soon!). To magazines and advertisers we can offer information about the actual exposure times of ads on different sites to point out the benefits of cost per second and onscreen advertising. This is to create more revenue from the most engaging stories of the web.

Scoopinion means more sustainable structures in journalism

To conclude, Scoopinion means more readers to stories that deserve it. It is a way to verify and develop better pricing metrics for ads. Thus, it means more sustainable structures in journalism.

The media's addiction to social media is getting out of hand. Each media competes to maximize attention to their products, but almost everyone is doing it wrong. It's time for a moment of enlightenment: We need to slow down.

And no, you are not too busy to read this, now or later.

We, the media consumers, are addicted to a fast-paced media environment. But just like a drug dealer high on her own crystal meth, media companies have also became obsessed with real-time and addicted with social.

notes in his well-thought-out essay that the problem with media's social media addiction is over-reliance, obsession and over-dependency of social networks. He writes that the media has forgotten what journalism is about, they cannot see beyond their immediate social bubble (not everyone is in Twitter), the pace in the media is too fast, there is a feeling of loss of control and the competition is too fierce.

I believe that the last three points Kanalley makes are actually symptoms of the same disease. Further, I believe that over-reliance, obsession and over-dependency of social networks are also symptoms of the same disease.

The disease? A psychological disorder called the Media Burnout.

What is the Media Burnout?

A famous Finnish advertising slogan from the 90s said: I want to be everywhere, with everyone, all the time. This is a sentiment of the Internet era.

We are connected. With everyone. All the time.

Under these conditions, there is only one limited resource in the mediasphere.

Time. Attention.

Every company is competing to maximize attention to their products. And I have recently realized that almost everyone is doing it wrong.

As one of the most famous Finnish copywriters once said to me: "A newspaper does not compete only with other newspapers. It also competes against the circus." All media competes against the other ways we can spent our time.

Attention is the raw material for any kind of profit in the media business.

Thus, it is no wonder that each media is so obsessed with being the first to tweet about an event or at least to be the second to circulate a happening. The outcome is the incredible harsh competition and pace, followed by the feeling of loss of control and information overflow.

The first step is to admit that there is a problem.

Do you recognize these symptoms of media burnout in the media?

1. The feeling that it's the responsibility of the media to tell every single detail about everything that is happening.
2. A sense of urgency and the need to tell everyone how busy one is because of symptom 1.
3. The feeling of failing to meet impossible goals, and the anxiety that follows.

The anxiety, then, leads to a short attention span, 140-character stories, inability to see the big picture and email management strategies from hell.

I first thought there is no cure to these symptoms. The thought-provoking, sense-making, reasonable journalism would be forgotten because that is not the battleground where the profits are made.

Then I realized that is not completely true. There just might be a cure.

How can we cure the Media Burnout?

I recently encountered a marvelous phenomenon called the Slow Web Movement.

The Slow Web is to web what slow food is to fast food.

The Slow Web is timely, not real-time, and it has rhythm instead of randomness. This made me think… Why is practically every online media company trying to fight over consumer time when consumers are in their most busy phase of their day: connected, reachable, anxious and very likely unable to concentrate?

As I mentioned, the competition is about attention. But it is not about attention everywhere. By everyone. All the time. Is the time spent with a piece of content on Sunday morning less valuable than time spent Monday evening?

Why not differentiate a media product by consumption time or context? "A newspaper does not compete only against other newspapers. It also competes against the circus."

The real-time competition about attention can be won by creating something more timely. Instapaper, also mentioned in the Jack Cheng's Slow Web essay, is a great example. Instapaper turns content that has to be consumed right after the click to timeless objects, which the reader can access in the moment of awareness and peace.

From real-time to timely. From fast to slow. The slow content gets, for sure, more attention.

Think about this: You are participating in a 3000-meter track race. Everyone is running as fast as one can but no one is significantly faster than the other. The catch: the winner of the competition is the one who gets the most attention.

What should you do?

Slow down.

Slow down.

No, Slow down. Really.

I don't know who holds the world record for the Cooper test, but I do know that there is a rock band vocalist in Finland who once ran 4 meters during the 12 minutes, moving all the time.

So it seems that Media Burnout is cured in the same way as any burnout. Take a deep breath. Slow down. Chill out.

Then make all those wonderful things you thought you didn't have time to do. Just do them one by one.

Remember: the nicest aspect of time is that for the time being, it gives a new second for every second spent.

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Join Scoopinion to discover slow and insightful stories.

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The discussion about privacy in the internet is stuck with black and white arguments. Truth is we don't want our data to be private. We want it to be not-public, and we want it to be kept that way safely and reliably. Combining sensitive personal data not-publicly provides immense opportunities.

Imagine if we could combine the credit card purchasing information of every Finn with their health care records. With this dataset we would instantly know what are the detailed outcomes of different diets. We might be able to spot new cancer threats. Maybe we could include the actual healthcare costs to all the food prices.

Many these kinds of datasets would benefit the society greatly. Further, it is feasible to combine these pieces of information without revealing the identities of the people fully to the public. We are doing the same with reading behaviors at Scoopinion: no one knows how an individual reader reads stories, but after putting it together the data from the whole crowd, it helps every reader.

The discussion about privacy is very black and white. Either the data is private, or it is public. While it is true that after telling a secret to someone the information is not under the control of the teller, the situation with the digital data is not fully analogous with this example.

When encountering black and white terms, it is sometimes useful to quickly apply the Greimas square (aka semiotic square) to them. If we investigate the two words, private and public, we get

• s1: private
• s2: public
• -s1: not-private
• -s2: not-public

I mentioned that the situation with digital privacy is not analogous to keeping secrets. This is due to the fact that digital data is not-public instead of just plain old private.

When you expose your personal secrets, such as your browsing behavior, to someone you trust in the internet (Facebook, anyone?), they benefit from this information more than you. They are harvesting a resource and giving you a service for that. You risk loosing your secrets and your data is not accessible to your peers and seldom to you.

What if instead of demanding privacy to our data we would accept that it is not-public we want it to be, and demand that it should be accessible to us as well?

Further, we could do more to keep it not-public. What if we would have an architecture which has privacy by design, like Tor Project has, to hide the identities of those who submit their data, especially when mashing very personal health or financial data. (Hat tip to .)

There are so many great things we can achieve with the data we already have that I feel it is a shame we kling on the "loosing your privacy" discussion. Instead of this discussion we should seek for ways to implement solutions that keep our data not-public, safely and reliably.