Month: May 2018

Enlarge (credit: Google / Ron Amadeo)

A report from AdAge claims that Google News will soon be going through some more changes. According to the report, Google News is getting a "new design" and will "incorporate elements of the [Google Play] Newsstand app and YouTube." The new Google News will reportedly be powered by Google's stripped-down, quick-loading AMP technology and is expected to launch at Google I/O 2018.

Google has apparently been talking to publishers about the design, and AdAge quotes one anonymous publishing executive as saying, "It's a consolidation of all the ways you can interact with news on Google...There are a lot of Google services where you find news, and what they're trying to do is bring it all under one brand."

A Google News redesign is surprising considering that the current design is less than a year old. It's unclear if the current design is just being tweaked to incorporate YouTube and Play Newsstand or if the whole thing is being scrapped and rebuilt. The report also mentions that Google News will get a new app.

Enlarge / Martin Shkreli, former CEO of Turing, smirked his way through a Congressional hearing. (credit: CSPAN)

Disgraced ex-pharmaceutical executive and hedge fund manager Martin Shkreli is now behind bars, facing a seven-year prison sentence for securities fraud. Yet the drug-price hike that initially thrust him into the public spotlight—and infamy—hasn’t budged, according to a sobering report by Kaiser Health News.

The outlet points out that the retail price for Daraprim (pyrimethamine) is still $750 a pill, up more than 5,000 percent from its previous price of $13.50 per pill. Worse yet, it’s not the only such case. In 2015 alone, more than 300 generic drugs saw prices increase by more than 100 percent.

Drug prices are “easy to raise and harder to lower, particularly if there’s no competition,” Nicholson Price of University of Michigan Law School told KHN.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto/Getty Images)

At YouTube's annual Brandcast event, the king of online video touted its reach and new celebrity-fueled projects as reasons why advertisers should invest their dollars with the web instead of television. According to CEO Susan Wojcicki, YouTube now has 1.8 billion monthly logged-in viewers. Considering that number doesn't take into account viewers who simply go to YouTube to watch videos without logging in, it means YouTube's reach continues to grow despite recent controversies surrounding its creators and how the site treats potentially offensive content.

Wojcicki didn't go into detail about any of YouTube's recent content issues, but she did highlight the importance of facing the challenges that come with such a vast, open platform. "It’s incredibly important to me and to everyone at YouTube that we grow responsibly," Wojcicki said. "There isn’t a playbook for how open platforms operate at our scale. But the way I think about it, is it’s critical that we are on the right side of history."

Wojcicki announced that YouTube aims to have more than 10,000 human moderators looking at "violative" content on the platform. In recent months, YouTube has added more humans to its moderation team, hoping to supplement the machine learning technology it uses to moderate the content on its site. These changes came as YouTube placed new restrictions on creators that are allowed to monetize content through YouTube's Partner Program, and as the company added new details to its content policies in order to flesh out the definitions of what it considers offensive and inappropriate content.