If you're like me, you've probably been scratching your head to divine the master plan behind a series of curious diversification plays made by TV, radio and digital audience measurement firm Nielsen over the past several years, including some big acquisitions and strategic partnerships. While it was clear that Nielsen has been hedging against digital disruption that would make its core panel-based TV ratings less relevant, it wasn't until its national fall client meeting last week that the signal started to become clear.

At a time when America seems transfixed by the negative role digital media platforms can play in the political process, a veteran political operative has kickstarted a project to leverage it in the other direction. The new platform, LawMaker.io, is just rolling out in beta, but its ambition, is to use digital technology to reinvigorate the political process by giving average Americans more of a voice in setting policy and proposing and influencing legislation, according to Democratic political consultant Amit Thakkar. "LawMaker is a micro-lobbying platform," he says, explaining, "It allows any person in the U.S. to propose ideas at …

The good news: The Association of National Advertisers practices what it preaches in a new ad campaign promoting a report promising to simplify "agency compensation to reduce costs." The bad news: The ANA should have paid for better ad agency stewardship of the programmatic ad buy, which showed up on top of the "National Security" page of inflammatory alt-right news site Breitbart.com. The ad, which was part of a programmatic buy placed by performance agency Path Interactive, was quickly pulled after @Marketeer2u spotted it and tweeted a screenshot of the placement, commenting, "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! Your ads are running on Breitbart. Fix …

That's right -- weapon of mass destruction. Hear me out. If there's anything 9/11 taught us, it's that the most insidious weapons are the ones we hand freely to our enemies. Al Qaeda ingeniously figured out how to turn our own friendly skies against us. Now Russian operatives have figured out how to turn our marketplace into a WMD against us. The destruction hasn't been as immediate as watching American jets crumble America's buildings from the outside in. That's because this type of WMD works slowly, sowing instability that crumbles us from within. Russia used -- and continues to use …

It's been more than a year since I published a column titled "How (Not) To Cover A Massacre" in the aftermath of the June 2016 Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando. It was one of several columns I've written about the inextricable connection between such acts and media, including one that followed the Sandy Hook shooting in December 2012. Since those events took place, the capacity of media to serve as an accelerant has only grown -- especially social media, which is why I modified the headline on today's column to "share" instead of "cover" a massacre.