Mediaboss Marketing

The action-camera company grew fast, and crashed hard. Now it's trying to pick itself back up -- by thinking a lot smaller.

November21, 201915+ min read

This story appears in the December 2019 issue ofEntrepreneur. Subscribe

This past August, 40 influencers from 19 countries left their homes with camera in hand. Their mission: Film themselves from the moment they stepped out the door, onward to the airport, and en route to the remote Western Australia town of Broome. Theyd charge into the ocean, do bike flips, and ride camels on the beach. And then theyd race to stitch the footage together into a montage and submit it for a contest by 11:59 p.m.

The next morning, the influencers are surprisingly bright-eyed, sitting in a conference room, waiting to learn who made the best video. I know you guys are curious to know who got the award, says Devon DiPietro, head of community at the action-camera company GoPro, which organized the event. But there were so many good submissions that were not ready to announce it yet.

The influencers nod. They know theyre good. So does GoPro, which is why the company spent a lot of money bringing them here. With any luck, the influencers will now help the company make a lot of money.

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This big bash in Broome is what GoPro calls its Creator Summit, and its the pinnacle event in an ongoing effort to fix its business. GoPro never had trouble with exposure -- the brands name is synonymous with first-person action footage. But its had an on-and-off relationship with profitability. In 2014, its stock topped out at $93.85. Then the company stumbled, and it lost more than $700 million between 2016 and 2019. This year, its stock price dipped below $3.50. If youd invested $10,000 at GoPros peak, you wouldnt have enough cash to buy its flagship camera. (It goes for about $400.)

Now GoPro is going through the same process countless companies do at every stage of business: Its rethinking exactly who its target audience is -- and how to appeal to them. Thats why, over the next four days, the influencers GoPro has brought to Australia will ride boats and Jet Skis, snorkel through a flooded mangrove forest, and swim with sharks. Theyll take mud baths, buzz the coastline in floatplanes, and document a schedule of activities GoPro believes its core users thirst for. The company foots the bill and has put up an additional $10,000 in prize money to reward these influencers during an array of challenges. In return, the creators will post 566 times, generating 30 million impressions and 1.8 million social engagements.

Will that generate revenue? It just might. Youre seeing a real turnaround in their core business, says Andrew Uerkwitz, a senior tech analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. Theyre actually going to turn a profit this year.

But first, the influencers need their validation. A little later this first morning, DiPietro finally announces who made the best video. Congratulations, Nick Pescetto! she says.

Pescetto, an Italian influencer with gorgeous sun-fried dreadlocks and a quarter-million social-media followers, steps up to accept his award. With one hand, he shakes DiPietros hand. With the other, he holds a GoPro, rotating it between his own grinning face and the applause of his peers.

Image Credit: @davidoc by @chrisrogers

Everybody likes to see the champ fall from grace, says GoPro founder and CEO Nick Woodman. Its We love you! We love you! And then you slip up and theyre on you with daggers, stabbing you to death.

If its not immediately clear, GoPro is the Julius in this allegory. Before the brands assassination, it was widely held up as a shining example of entrepreneurial glory.

The origin story is well-told. In 2002, during a five-month surfing trip through Australia and Indonesia, Woodman, then 26, began fidgeting with a strap that would allow him to rig a waterproof camera to his wrist. If he could document his time in the barrel -- what surfers call the inside of a wave -- it might help him go pro. (Get it?) So he raised some money from his parents, put in $30,000 of his own savings, created a 35-millimeter camera with a strap on it, and sold his first unit in 2004 for $19.99.

A natural salesman, Woodman drove up and down the coast, pitching his camera to surf and skate shops. They understood the appeal. Before GoPro, unless you had a photographer following you around, nobody had footage of themselves doing anything active, says Woodman. It was always the before and after photos in the parking lot. Growth was steady, thanks to trade shows and athletes using the cameras, but the real pop came in 2006 when GoPro launched its first digital camera. Sales topped $800,000. As the cameras improved in functionality, so did profits. In late 2009, it sold a camera called the HD Hero that brought in$64 million over the course of 2010.

The following year, GoPro raised $88 million in venture funding and was valued at $400 million. When it went public in 2014, it had 25,000 specialty retail accounts. Those were the good days, says Todd Ballard, GoPros chief marketing officer. It felt like everything we touched turned to gold.

In truth, it was a lot of fools gold.

In the companys IPO documents, GoPro acknowledged that virtually all of its revenue came from selling cameras and accessories -- but instead of calling itself a consumer electronics company, it claimed that it could become an exciting new media company. It had secured Xbox and Virgin America as distribution partners, and it was working on original content that it hoped to monetize with advertising, sponsorships, and increased camera sales.

People were like, Damn! Thats a great idea! says Uerkwitz. It got GoPro a lot of attention. GoPro declines to reveal specifics on how much it spent on its media division, but it was a pretty big spend, says Woodman. We had a very large team of filmers and editors, including sports, lifestyle, and reality-style scripted divisions. The year before the company went public, GoPros operating expenses were $263 million. In 2016, it spent $835 million -- three times as much. But no serious content was released with any regularity. The project flopped.

Meanwhile, as part of a growth promise to investors, GoPro launched entry-level cameras designed to steal market share from point-and-shoots and DSLRs. We started getting greedy as an organization, says Ballard. It drove us to think, How do we get soccer moms to buy our cameras? How do we get everybody to buy our cameras?

Related:How This Ex-Con Started From Nothing to Build a 7-Figure Business

Thats not to say this is an inherently bad strategy. Companies need to grow, which can mean expanding their audience. In books and podcasts, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman advises founders to ignore the needs of their early, core customers in favor of appealing to their future scale customers. And when the extreme racing company Tough Mudder looked to expand its offerings, appealing beyond its hard-core base to attract everyday athletes, it approached the project carefully -- but determinedly. What I didnt want to be seen doing was somehow diluting the brand, says Tough Mudder cofounder and former CEO Will Dean. So he acted slowly, introducing new, easier races at the same time he introduced harder, more extreme races. For inspiration, Dean turned to a Harvard Business Review case study on Porsche, which went through this same issue. In 2003, Porsche launched the midpriced Cayenne SUV to attract its own soccer moms, and some high-end drivers got grumpy. Porsche had to convince its core fans that the brand would still deliver on their expectations of exclusivity --which it did in part by taking some of its earnings from the SUV and investing it in making new, expensive sports cars.

But GoPro wasnt as delicate. Scroll back far enough in the companys Instagram feed and youll find evidence of how it approached its mass-market effort --through photos of sunsets, sleeping cats, and babies eating cookies. None of this attracted the soccer moms, but it did push GoPros core user away. Even Woodman lost interest. I stopped paying attention to our own Instagram feed and YouTube channel, he says. I thought they were lame. If youre a 22-year-old whos really getting after it and youre seeing this type of marketing, youre like, Is this my brand?

In 2016, GoPro released a $1,099 drone called the Karma, but it was bedeviled by reports of battery problems and crashes. It seemed like a metaphor.

Image Credit: @josh_neuman1

The GoPro decline came fast. It laid off 450 people in 2016. Rumors swirled that the founder and CEO was unable to carry his company. There was a period where it really bothered me, he says about the headlines. It was like, Can you guys get off it now?

But GoPro had a reason for hope. Even as it bled cash, it still owned the action-camera market. Since going public, the company has sold at least 4.3 million cameras annually. No other company has come close. Sony tried and failed, Garmin tried and failed, Xiaomi tried and failed -- and those three companies are all much larger than GoPro, says Uerkwitz. (Today, GoPro captures roughly 95 of every 100 dollars spent on action cameras in the U.S.)

So it kept developing cameras. In the spring of 2018, it was preparing to launch a new one called the Hero7 Black. This camera would improve upon previous editions with a seemingly magic feature that turns shaky camera footage -- the kind you get by mounting a camera to a surfboard or a helmet -- into a buttery-smooth motion picture. It was an impressive technological leap, but when Woodman reviewed the proposed marketing, he hated it. It was super safe and boring, he says.

Chasing the mass market was threatening GoPros identity. It had been ignoring its core customers in favor of what LinkedIns Hoffman would call scale customers -- but what if its extreme sports users actually were its scale customers? Thats when Woodman had an epiphany. Nick was like: Dude, were not doing this anymore, says Ballard. We need to go back to what we stand for. The company wouldnt be about appealing to broad audiences or making so much of its own content. It would be about enabling the most adventurous people on the planet to capture -- and share! -- their own accomplishments. It would double down on them.

Back in 2015, GoPro had launched an awards program that encouraged users to submit videos and photos for a chance to earn up to $5,000. GoPro then used the best stuff in its marketing and social media. The strategy was more cost-effective than paying an in-house media team to capture footage all over the world. But more important, it created a community of travelers, producers, and athletes who began to see GoPro as another way to make money doing what they love. Since its launch, the awards program had paid out roughly $3 million, and now supplies roughly 70 percent of GoPro posts on social media.

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The users who submit to the awards program make up what Woodman calls the tip-of-spear consumers -- the people going into surf and skate shops 10 years ago. These were the people Woodman wanted to reengage. So he told his staff to rethink the creative launch of the Hero7, as well as everything that came after it. That was a pivotal time, says Ballard. We needed to hear that from him.

Prior to this revelation, GoPros most recent camera was launched with a nearly five-minute marketing video opening on a couple running hand-in-hand through a park. The cameras technology was not discussed.

By contrast, under Woodmans new (but old!) direction, the fall 2018 launch of the Hero7 featured fast music and quick cuts. Users received a full technology rundown in two minutes: stabilization, voice-command features, the ability to speed up and slow down footage. You see a rocket blasting away from Earth and motorbikes hitting dirt jumps while graphics like HDR and 1080p240 flash across the screen.

The marketing campaign was coupled with GoPros biggest award incentive yet -- a million-dollar challenge that produced one superhot sizzle reel shot entirely on the Hero7. From 25,000 customer submissions, GoPro chose 56 award recipients, and the average payout was just under $18,000.

During its first week on sale, the Hero7 became the fastest-selling GoPro ever. In the first half of 2019, the company earned 2.2 million new social media followers, a 41 percent increase compared with the first half of 2018. In June, GoPros YouTube channel set a single-month record with 46 million unique views.

Woodman was right. Now it was time to dig in deeper. The company invested more heavily in an insights-and-analytics team -- which, unlike before, could now explore the needs of its narrowly focused users. GoPro was going to learn exactly what they wanted. And then it would do whatever it could to please themincluding taking 40 of them to Australia.

Image Credit: @fredfalco

The Australia trip is an influencers dream -- the camera equipment, the beach, two pools, a yoga studio. Between the on-camera explorations, GoPro hosts breakout sessions on Photoshop, video editing, and personal branding. And then, on the last day of the summit, the group is brought together inside a coffee shop, in front of a deli case with a crocodiles head inside. For the first time in days, theyre told to turn off their cameras. In advance of this moment, theyve all signed NDAs.

This is GoPros big payoff for the trip. Its about to reveal two new cameras: the next-level Hero8 Black and the 360-degree Max.

The Hero8 is a nod to everyone here, says Jeremy Hendricks, a GoPro senior product marketing manager. Its a nod to the pros.

At first, the new camera looks just like the old one. Its a black box. But then Hendricks unfolds a pair of concealed tabs, which extend from the bottom of the camera like stumpy legs.

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The influencers immediately understand. With previous GoPros, in order to clip the camera to a helmet mount or extendable selfie stick, users had to first snap it into a finicky plastic frame, which had tabs on the bottom. But now, with the Hero8 update, these tabs will be built directly into the camera -- there when you need them, hidden when you dont. You guys! says Hendricks. No more frames!

Hendricks is confident in his delivery, because those flip-out tabs solve for a pain point specifically identified by GoPros insights and analytics teams. The influencers erupt.

Folding fingers! says Tim Humphreys, a pro snowboarder. Keep talking dirty to us!

GoPro sure will, because when people like Humphreys love GoPro, more seem to follow. After three years of losses, the company is expecting 6 to 9 percent growth in 2019. But it still has a lot of work to do. Core users are once again sweet on the brand, but investors are still sour. After a second-quarter earnings call during which the company reported international growth, margin growth, and a million new social media followers, GoPros stock price actually dropped.

You have to remember that there were multiple years of mis-execution, and investors got burned, says Nikolay Todorov, an analyst at Longbow Research. These guys have done quite a good job at stabilizing the ship. But its going to take some time for investor sentiment to shift.

The stock recovered, but then in October it dropped again -- this time 20 percent -- when GoPro reported a late-stage production delay on the Hero8. The camera was originally slated to launch in the third quarter but instead was bumped to the fourth. Thats crippling for a company that pins almost all its success to one flagship product --and indicates that despite all the lessons GoPro has learned in the past few years, its still got work to do.

What investors want in a consumer electronics company, according to Uerkwitz, is a deeper bench. Garmin, Apple, Logitech: They all have diverse product portfolios. But GoPros previous efforts to diversify crash-landed (sometimes literally). So what the company needs to do is hold the line, hit its targets, and wait for investors to come around.

Woodman understands this. Weve got to deliver consistent profitability and growth, he says. GoPro has more than three years of product launches mapped out, and its immediate goal is to simply continue blowing the minds of its core users. Then, who knows? If we identify a big enough market opportunity, absolutely well go and build additional hardware, says Woodman. He takes a pause. But youve got to be really careful that you dont spread yourself too thin.

So for now, GoPro just wants to geek out. Back in Australia, Hendricks walks the influencers through a suite of modular accessories that will snap onto the Hero8 to provide lighting, a shotgun microphone, and a rotating screen that allows vloggers to see themselves talking into the camera. He shows off its new stabilization capabilities, HDR upgrades, and functionality that allows users to speed up and slow down footage on the fly. The influencers ask questions and speculate about the creative ways theyll deploy the new features. And when the presentation is done, they exit the coffee shop and walk right onto the hovercraft --a literal hovercraft --waiting for them outside.

They turn their cameras back on. Everyone has work to do.

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Can GoPro Reinvent Itself... By Going Back to Its Past? - Entrepreneur

For observers of the media, there are few spectacles more dispiriting than the way the press covers presidential campaigns. Rather than digging into what really matters, such as the candidates experience, leadership ability and positions on important issues, reporters focus on controversies, attacks on one another, gotcha moments and, of course, polls, polls and more polls.

Now a study conducted by the School of Journalism at Northeastern University has quantified just how bad things are. Looking at about 10,000 news articles from 28 ideologically diverse news outlets published between March and October, my colleagues and I found that coverage of the Democratic candidates tracks with the ebbs and flows of scandals, viral moments and news items.

Our findings were posted last week at Storybench, a vertical published by the School of Journalism that covers media innovation. The data analysis was performed by Aleszu Bajak with an assist from John Wihbey. Among the key points in our report:

The televised debates have driven some of the issues-based coverage. For instance, mentions of the candidates positions on immigration and health care increased during and immediately after the debates but then quickly subsided.

Kirsten Gillibrand made reproductive choice one of her signature issues and after she dropped out of the race, that issue faded from media coverage. Similarly, coverage of gun control was tied mainly to Beto ORourkes now-defunct campaign. LGBTQ rights and climate change have been virtually ignored.

The Ukraine story has dominated recently coverage of the Democratic candidates, with much of it focused on President Trumps false accusations that Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden acted corruptly.

Of course, to some extent the media cant help but be reactive. It would be irresponsible not to cover what the candidates are saying about themselves and each other. But the press urge to chase controversies at the expense of more substantive matters shows that little has been learned since its disastrous performance four years ago.

As Thomas Patterson of Harvards Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy wrote in an analysis of the 2016 campaign, coverage of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump was unrelentingly negative, creating the impression that the controversy over Clintons emails was somehow equivalent to massive corruption at Trumps charitable foundation, his racist remarks and his boasting about sexual assault as revealed on the infamous Access Hollywood tape.

The real bias of the press is not that its liberal, Patterson wrote. Its bias is a decided preference for the negative.

It doesnt have to be that way. Earlier this year, New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen proposed campaign coverage built around a citizens agenda. Rosen proposed that news organizations should identify their audience, listen to what they believe the candidates should be focusing on, and cover the race accordingly.

Given a chance to ask questions of the people competing for office, you can turn to the citizens agenda, Rosen wrote on his influential blog, Press Think. And if you need a way of declining the controversy of the day, there it is. The agenda you got by listening to voters helps you hold to mission when temptation is to ride the latest media storm.

Some coverage of presidential politics has been quite good. Quality news organizations such as The New York Times and The Washington Post have published in-depth articles on challenges the candidates have overcome and how that helps shape their approach to governing. The Boston Globe has been running a series called Back to the Battleground in which it has reported on four key states that unexpectedly went with Trump in 2016. Reports aimed at making sense of the Ukraine story, explaining Elizabeth Warrens Medicare for All plan and the like are worthy examples of campaign journalism aimed at informing the public. But such efforts tend to be overshadowed by day-to-day horse-race coverage.

The latest poll-driven narrative is the rise of Pete Buttigieg, whos emerged as the clear frontrunner in Iowa, according to a Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom survey. You can be sure that hell be watched closely at this weeks televised debate. Will his rivals attack him? Will he fight back? Can he take the heat?

Little of it will have much to do with what kind of president Buttigieg or any of the other candidates would be. The horse race is paramount. Whos up, whos down and the latest controversies are what matter to the political press.

The data my Northeastern colleagues have compiled provides a measurement of how badly political coverage has run off the rails. Whats needed is a commitment on the part of the media to do a better job of serving the public interest.

WGBH News contributor Dan Kennedys blog, Media Nation, is online at dankennedy.net.

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A Northeastern Study Takes The Measure Of Our Controversy-Driven, Poll-Obsessed Political Coverage - wgbh.org

The very nature of social media intermediaries prevents any neat separation of best parts from their worst. (Image: Getty/Thinkstock)

In 1996, the cyberlibertarian activist, poet and essayist John Perry Barlow pronounced a Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. He poignantly stated: We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity. Over two decades since, this seems nave. Worldwide scandals such as Cambridge Analytica, Russias 2016 US election meddling, YouTubes algorithmic propensity to serve up neo-Nazi propaganda and Twitters failure to police white supremacists, have progressively populated our news and conversations. In our own backyard, just recently, as the anti-Muslim #___ (total boycott of Muslims) continued to trend, Twitters silence was deafening. Virtual and real social spaces have tied themselves into knots of multiple and variegated levels. Let us not forget the power WhatsApp wields in channeling hate and fear mongering. In extreme cases, people have been killed by mobs as a result.

Online platforms, as defined by media studies scholars like Jos van Dijck and Thomas Poell, are socio-technical architectures to facilitate interaction and communication between users by collecting, processing, and circulating data. They make possible public activity outside the purview of government institutions, instrumentalising new terms or notions like participatory culture and the sharing or collaborative economy. Many scholars have highlighted the power of social media in empowering individuals and societies to effectively assume roles as producers of public goods and services, as well as to act as autonomous and responsible citizens. In his book Social Media: A Critical Introduction, Christian Fuchs, however, excavates how in capitalist societies, the Internet is controlled by people who primarily aim to monetise active users and commodify data. A participatory democracy, he argues, can never be truly so.

The Indian government, meanwhile, fearing unimaginable disruption to democratic polity, aims for a new set of Internet regulations by January 2020. With internet service providers, search engines and social media platforms, guidelines are being framed. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY), in its affidavit filed with the Supreme Court, stated that although technology has led to economic growth and societal development, hate speech, fake news, public order, anti-national activities, defamatory postings, and other unlawful activities using internet/social media platforms have exponentially been on the rise.

Of many demands, MeitY proposes legal amendments asking intermediaries to trace origins of fake messages and locate them within 72 hours of any government agency requisitioning concerned information. Facebook and WhatsApp, with over 250 and 400 million active users each across India, are currently sparring with the Modi government over the irreconcilable dilemma of national security versus users privacy and freedom of speech. But, obviously, the Internet is not a purely national phenomenon. India is a reflection of what is already global unease. Legislations, policy briefs, debates and deliberations are underway across the world to devise the most effective model for online content management. The EU, for instance, addresses this through continent-wide measures like General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), or regional ones attempting to regulate social media companies role in spreading harmful content, to the relatively stronger penalty statutes on actors who are not compliant.

However, empirical evidence is stacked against efficacy of such measures. The question must then lie somewhere in how civil society appropriates social media. Until very recently, the onus of safeguarding public values was on government institutions. However, economic liberalisation and privatisation of public institutions and services, combined with the advancement of digital technologies and dominance of intermediaries for general purposes like social communication (Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp) to specific platforms in sectors like transportation and hospitality (Uber, Airbnb), demonstrates and, continues to foretell fundamental shifts. Service delivery aside, they transform peoples lives integrally. With these changes, the compositions of public values are altering not just individual self-interests, but also collective aspirations of societies.

The very nature of social media intermediaries prevents any neat separation of best parts from their worst. Although the whole world, including Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg, agrees that there is a need for more government regulation of the Internet, no one knows how or to what extent. Major roadblocks exist in governments being able to safeguard democracy from social media rotting. Executive action still pending, however, contemporary scholarship has helped in bringing out some of the key obstacles to such action in the European context. Natali Helberger, Jo Pierson & Thomas Poell, for instance, discuss this in a 2017 article, when these concerns were on the rise. Such sustained and ongoing research is significant in, at least, providing valuable insights into the larger problem(s).

First, dominant online platforms are US-based transnational corporations. They take global architectural decisions, with the sole intention of commodification and datafication of peoples voices, which becomes the fodder for profits. Although these platforms pose as mere hosts or facilitators of circulated content, we need to be attentive to how they are vitally constitutive to generate public values. Their roles in constructing non-human infrastructures geared to enhance user engagement by spreading viral content, cannot be overlooked.

This brings out the second issue, the black-boxed nature of non-human architectures and underlying algorithms running them. From a user perspective, the selection process by algorithms occurs through techno-commercial strategies. Its opacity baffles experts struggling to successfully decipher why specific algorithms behave the way they do. This has prevented attempts to even identify or problematise, let alone solve, algorithmic bias. A seemingly simple solution would be complete transparency to ensure that the decisions being made can be independently evaluated. However, this is also untenable due to several social implications the loss of privacy of information generators or owners and, the darker possibility of algorithms being manipulated by certain groups to their own advantage. It, further, negates salability of algorithms for the often-for-profit companies that develop them.

Third, the instrumentalities of actions and impacts between users and platforms is entangled. Not just platforms, but also active users on them play a role in constructing or eroding of public values. However, it is clear that the power between users and platforms is unequal, not least because of the platforms internal, and invisible, murkiness. The question of where the responsibility of the platform ends and that of user starts is a notoriously difficult one. Users themselves determine and influence what kind of content they upload, share and choose to be exposed to, even if only through their selection of friends or reading behavior, which morph into fodder for a platforms algorithms. In other words, many problems with diversity or consumer protection on online platforms are, at least to an extent, user driven. For similar reasons, at least part of the remedy potentially lies with the users.

In conclusion, there is a need for cooperative responsibility in the realisation of public values in societal sectors, centered on online platforms. Governments alone can never come up with magic-bullet solutions. It is exigent to be conscious of social mores or responsibilities for the realisation of key public values, such as respect for diversity and civility, across stakeholders platforms, governments and users. Shrill cries for transparency cannot even begin to dismantle such a complex issue. However, thinking about ways to best implement a culture of tolerance, transparency and accountability, offline through modes like education and interpersonal civic orientation could be a vital step in the right direction.

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Can governments control social media? Or can users? - The Indian Express

Democracy is in trouble, despite popular uprisings and dynamic social movements in Lebanon, Hong Kong and across Europe and Latin America.

Scholars say countries across the globe are experiencing a rise in autocratic rule, with declines in democratic ideals and practice. Autocratic rule also known as authoritarianism is when one leader or political party exercises complete power to govern a country and its people.

The year 2008 was when democracy peaked, according to a prominent democracy advocacy group, Freedom House. Thats when the world had the highest percentage ever of fully free countries, at 46.1%.

That declined to 44.1% in 2018, though full or partial democracy is still the most common form of governance.

Definitions of democracy vary. All citizens in a democracy have the ability to vote in elections, which should be free and fair. Independent media, freedom of speech and assembly and the rule of law feature in most contemporary perceptions of democracy.

Democratic declines are most notable in the regions with the worlds largest concentration of democracies. That includes Europe, North America and Latin America.

One example: The United States in 2018 was rated a flawed democracy, dropping from 21st to 25th place among 167 countries and territories.

In the old days, autocrats often came to or retained power through military coups and violent crackdowns. Now the shift from democracy to autocracy is slower and less obvious.

While control over security forces remains essential in the autocratic playbook, overt strong-arm tactics arent.

I spent more than 15 years with the United Nations, where I advised governments and democracy advocates on how to strengthen the rule of law, human rights and democratic governance. Im now a scholar of international law.

Ive learned that todays leaders with authoritarian tendencies arent just interested in using brute force to rise to power.

They are smarter, more resilient and can adjust their methods to take account of new developments, like modern technologies and a globalized economy.

Here are some of the newest tactics used by would-be authoritarians:

The mainstay of todays authoritarianism is strengthening your power while simultaneously weakening government institutions, such as parliaments and judiciaries, that provide checks and balances.

The key is to use legal means that ultimately give democratic legitimacy to the power grab. Extreme forms of this include abolishing presidential term limits, which was done in China; and regressive constitutional reforms to expand presidential power, like in Turkey.

Restrictions on funding and other bureaucratic limitations silence the ability of the people to hold accountable those in power. More than 50 countries have passed laws that stifle citizen groups. Democracies have also jumped on this bandwagon. Limitations on permits for public protest, detention of protesters and excessive use of force to break up demonstrations are frequently used tools.

Economic growth and prosperity are critical to retaining elite or oligarchical support for autocratic leaders. Whether through state-owned businesses, media conglomerates or more sophisticated connections between governments and free-market corporations, money and politics, translated into government favors for the rich, can be a toxic mix for democracy.

Ironically, popular distaste with elite corruption is so high that modern autocratic populists, such as President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, have even risen to power on anti-corruption promises.

Most would-be autocratic leaders today exploit existing tensions within complex societies in order to solidify their support.

In many places, fears of migrants and refugees have fueled resurgent nationalism, driving policies like U.K.s Brexit. In India, religiously based nationalism has maintained the power of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Blaming external forces for a countrys problems, such as Hungarian leader Viktor Orbans demonization of George Soros, a Hungarian-born philanthropist who supports democracy-building, is also common.

While propaganda and state-owned media is not new, control of modern technology and information has become a key battleground.

China has developed sophisticated technologies to censor and prevent the circulation of unwanted information and to track individuals in society.

Russia is at the vanguard of state media control at home while generating misinformation abroad. Many smaller countries have used internet blackouts to block organizing and communicating by social movements.

Damaging the opposition parties, while not completely destroying them, is now essential. Infiltrating parties, co-opting members and using pure scare tactics are some possible actions in the autocrats playbook. This serves the purpose of retaining a target for pseudo-political competition while also stymieing the potential for new, more democratic forces to gain traction.

Mostly gone are the days of vote-rigging and vote-buying as a path to power. Would-be autocrats have found cleverer ways to tilt the playing field in their favor. These new tactics include hampering media access, gerrymandering, changing election and voter eligibility rules and placing allies on electoral commissions.

Some autocratic leaders continue to use traditional strong-arm tactics, like declaring states of emergency, to enable further repression.

Since 2001, using the threat of terrorism or organized crime has played well for furthering autocratic rule. President Rodrigo Dutertes drug war, which seems to have resulted in thousands dead in the Philippines, is one illustration.

Since an attempted coup in 2016 up until 2018, for example, Turkey was under a state of emergency which enabled President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to jail and persecute academics, government officials, media and human rights advocates.

Todays autocratic rulers are not keeping to themselves.

Using the international stage and their growing economic prowess, countries like China are spreading their influence through funding initiatives such as the Belt and Road to build infrastructure across Asia to Europe. Theyre hiring professional consultants to advise and lobby foreign capitals for policies that reinforce their power.

Characterized as autocratic learning by scholars, national authorities from Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Belarus, Syria and other places are developing and exchanging models for containing threats of social movements and the so-called color revolutions.

International meetings and intergovernmental clubs can provide a platform for exchange. For example, Prime Minister Hun Sen of Cambodia has successfully rallied neighbor governments to help oppress opposition to his rule using the regional organization ASEAN. Government officials in Malaysia recently blocked Cambodian opposition members from returning to their country via Malaysia.

Some experts claim the world is at a tipping point where decreasing faith in democracy will drive the dominance of autocracy globally.

The social movements of today inspire some hope that civil society a key ingredient for democracy though under pressure, is fighting the trend.

Nonetheless, strengthening democracy across the globe will prove impossible if even the most established democracies today fall prey to the tactics of would-be autocrats.

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During an impeachment hearing Tuesday, Republican Rep. Devin Nunes praised the reporting of a veteran investigative journalist whose work had proven to be a problem for the Democrats and the media.

That journalist is John Solomon, formerly of the Hill and currently a Fox News contributor. Republicans like Nunes have relied on Solomons work during the impeachment inquiry to build the case that Trump was right to be concerned about former Vice President Joe Bidens actions in Ukraine and those of his son, Hunter Biden, and to argue that the real scandal is how the Obama administration tried to get the Ukrainian government to cover up corruption.

But Solomons journalism, particularly on the subject of Ukraine, has been proven to be false, repeatedly. Solomon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Substantial reporting from outlets including ProPublica and the Daily Beast show that Solomon spread disinformation about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and the former US Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch. In his work, he effectively laundered dirt provided to him by Donald Trumps attorney, Rudy Giuliani, producing articles that directly led to a whistleblower report alleging that Trump, based on Solomons false assertions, demanded the Ukrainian government investigate the Bidens or risk losing military aid.

The foremost allegation made by Solomon was published by the Hill in March, when Solomon interviewed the former Ukrainian prosecutor Yuri Lutsenko. In the interview, he accused then-US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch of giving him a do-not-prosecute list to stop investigations into corruption. The accusation was proved false, and was ultimately recanted by Lutsenko himself but by then, it was too late.

The falsehood had made it into the right-leaning media ecosystem, where other false allegations surfaced, like that Yovanovitch was anti-Trump and told Ukrainians to ignore him because he would soon be impeached. She was fired from her post in May of this year.

Trump was seemingly laser-focused on Yovanovitch, even referencing her in his infamously perfect call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as being bad news. But Yovanovitchs real crime appears to have been standing in the way of Rudy Giuliani, and, more importantly, his efforts to investigate Joe Biden on behalf of the presidents reelection efforts, according to statements made by the former mayor to the Wall Street Journal.

As Republicans continue to dig in on impeachment, Solomon represents a media figure with mainstream credentials those supportive of Trump can use to burnish their views and their defenses of the president. But ironically, its Solomon, and Solomons misinformation stemming from Giuliani and others, that is responsible for the impeachment inquiry in the first place.

This spring, John Solomon, then the executive vice president of digital at the Hill, posted an interview with former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuri Lutsenko, whom Solomon introduced as a hero who spent two years in prison for battling Russian aggression.

But that interview was actually part of a long-running smear campaign by Giuliani aimed at undermining the Ukrainian ambassador to help Trump.

As my colleague Andrew Prokop reported:

According to the accounts of other witnesses who have testified in the impeachment inquiry, Yovanovitch was highly respected among her colleagues. But she ran afoul of two powerful people: Trumps personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and Ukraines prosecutor general (under the previous administration) Yuri Lutsenko.

In an apparent effort to win President Trumps favor, Lutsenko and Giuliani began discussing the possibility that the Ukrainian prosecutor general could launch investigations into Trumps enemies. Hed investigate Burisma (the Ukrainian natural gas company whose board included Hunter Biden) as well as purported Ukrainian interference in the 2016 US presidential election.

But Yovanovitch got in the way. When Lutsenko asked the US embassy to set up meetings with FBI or Justice Department officials, she objected, saying thats not the typical way these things are handled. Instead, she encouraged him to meet with the FBIs legal attach in Kyiv. I dont think he really appreciated it, she told investigators.

Solomons interview made a blockbuster (and false) assertion: Yovanovitch had given Lutsenko a do-not-prosecute list that included a founder of an anti-corruption group, Anti-Corruption Action Centre (AntAc). That group, according to Solomon, was funded by Hungarian-American billionaire (and conservative boogeyman) George Soros.

Solomon wrote that the implied message to Ukraines prosecutors was clear: Dont target AntAC in the middle of an America presidential election in which Soros was backing Hillary Clinton to succeed another Soros favorite, Barack Obama, Ukrainian officials said.

But there was no do-not-prosecute list, which Lutsenko himself admitted a few weeks later. AntAc was funded by a host of entities, including donations from Ukrainian citizens and the European Union; the United States; the governments of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and the Czech Republic; alongside the Open Society Foundations, a Soros-developed grantmaking group. Lutsenko didnt spend time in prison in retaliation for his efforts against Russia he was sent to prison for embezzlement and abuse of office, two years before Russia became making incursions into Ukraine.

And in other articles for the Hill, Solomon made more false assertions about perceived enemies of Trump.

For example, he wrote that Joe Biden had pressured Ukraine to remove former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin in order to shut down an investigation into Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company whose board included Bidens son, Hunter Biden. Those allegations were turned into a 30-second attack ad for the Trump campaign on Facebook, viewed more than five million times. But former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said that Bidens demand for Shokins firing was not at all improper and Biden was hardly alone in wanting Shokin, who was reportedly engaged in corrupt behavior, removed.

Solomon further wrote that a so-called black ledger that showed off-the-books payments made to former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort by a pro-Russian political party payments that resulted in Manaforts resignation from the campaign was fake. But that ledger is absolutely real.

In summary, Solomon falsely asserted that Democrats worked with Ukrainian officials to help spread falsehoods about Trump campaign officials and quash investigations into Joe Bidens son, and that Yovanovitch had kept Ukrainian officials who might blow the whistle on the alleged scheme from entering the country. But none of that was true.

Solomons work relied heavily on information fed to him by Rudy Giuliani, who orchestrated, in the words of senior State Department official George Kent, a campaign ... full of lies and incorrect information aimed at getting rid of Yovanovitch by connecting her to George Soros and a conspiratorial effort to help Hillary Clinton win the 2016 election a theory that former National Security Council official Fiona Hill told Congress earlier this month seemed based on the falsehood that George Soros rules the world and, you know, basically controls everything.

Giuliani sent a host of memos containing misinformation to Solomon. As Jeremy Peters and Kenneth Vogel of the New York Times detailed:

In an interview, Mr. Giuliani said he turned to Mr. Solomon earlier this year with a cache of information he believed contained damaging details about Mr. Biden, his son, Hunter Biden, and the special counsel Robert S. Mueller IIIs investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. I really turned my stuff over to John Solomon, Mr. Giuliani said. I had no other choice, he added, asserting that Obama-era officials still infected the Justice Department and wouldnt have diligently investigated the information he had compiled.

So I said heres the way to do it Im going to give it to the watchdogs of integrity, the fourth estate, he said.

Giulianis interest in smearing Yovanovitch centered on her refusal to permit a politically motivated investigation into the Bidens. But Giuliani also worked with two Ukrainian businessmen, Lev Parnas and his partner, Igor Fruman, to spread disinformation about Joe Biden and Yovanovitch, and they had motivations of their own.

As detailed by the New York Times in October, Mr. Parnas and Mr. Fruman boasted that they had worked with Mr. Giuliani to force the recall this spring of the American ambassador to Ukraine, Marie L. Yovanovitch, partly because Parnas believed Yovanovitch was getting in the way of his work in the oil industry. (Both have recently been indicted on campaign finance charges.)

Remember that Solomon interview with Lutsenko, in which Lutsenko said that he had received a do-not-prosecute list from the American ambassador? Parnas set up the interview, and according to ProPublica, watched the interview from the control booth.

More concerningly, Solomon was introduced to Parnas by his personal attorneys, Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, who had worked with Giuliani previously and, according to Fox News, were helping the former New York City mayor to get oppo research on Biden.

It was diGenova who was the source of the smear against Yovanovitch regarding her anti-Trump status, saying on Sean Hannitys Fox News show in March, The current United States ambassador Marie Yovanovitch has bad mouthed the president of the United States to Ukrainian officials and has told them not to listen or worry about Trump policy because hes going to be impeached. More recently, hes claimed that George Soros controls a majority of the State Department.

When Solomon wrote that piece alleging that Yovanovitch had given Lutsenko a do-not-prosecute list, he sent a draft first, to three people: Parnas, diGenova, and Toensing.

As a result of investigations into the validity of Solomons work, Solomons columns were shifted from news to opinion in 2018. The editor-in-chief of the Hill announced Monday that his work is now being reviewed, updated, and in some cases, corrected by the papers staff. And members of Congress have decried his work as having no veracity whatsoever.

But Solomon stands by his stories, and even told Fox News he was considering targeted legal action against those who criticize him.

Controversy isnt exactly new for Solomon, whose previous reporting at larger outlets seems to have focused on blockbuster stories that lacked blockbuster facts. Or as the Washington Posts then-ombudsman Deborah Howell put it, a gotcha without the gotcha.

One example: when he wrote a front-page story for the Washington Post in 2007 about the sale of former Democratic vice-presidential candidate John Edwardss home. One Washington Post reader said of the story, I read it three times and could not figure out why it was a news story, let alone a front-pager. Whats worse was that the placement, the headline and the tone of the story clearly implied that former senator Edwards had done something sleazy.

As the Columbia Journalism Review detailed in 2012:

As a reporter for the AP and The Washington Post, he dug up his share of genuine dirt, but he also was notorious for massaging facts to conjure phantom scandals. In 2006, for instance, Solomon and fellow AP writer Sharon Theimer tried to tie now-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to disgraced super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff. The piece hinged on a series of meetings Reid had with Abramoffs staff to discuss a pending minimum-wage bill and gifts from Abramoff associates who opposed several casino-expansion projects. What it failed to mention is that Reid stuck to his longstanding position on both issuesmeaning that any implications of influence peddling were bogus.

Solomons career in journalism saw him at the Associated Press and the Washington Post in the 1990s and early 2000s before he became editor-in-chief of the Washington Times. There, he tasked himself with making the conservative-leaning newspaper the Washington Times more objective; using the term gay instead of homosexual, for example.

In 2008, he told the Washington City Paper of his work at the Washington Times, The only point I have made with the reporters and editors who write for the news pages is there must be a bright line between opinion and editorializing that rightfully belongs on the op-ed and commentary pages and the fair, balanced, accurate, and precise reporting that must appear in the news sections of the paper.

Solomon left the Washington Times in 2009 over financial issues, but returned in 2013 after a time spent as executive editor at the Center for Public Integrity a tenure marked by no small degree of controversy, particularly over Solomons efforts to turn the Center into a daily reporting outfit (one that would pay a firm run by Solomon roughly 4 million dollars a year in commission, based on that firms projections).

But Solomon had a real talent for boosting traffic and getting attention, which became his focus when he left the Washington Times to go to Circa, a mobile news app that shut down in 2015 before being relaunched that same year by Sinclair Broadcasting Group, a right-leaning company perhaps best known for requiring outlets to run specific pro-Trump promotional segments.

Solomon became Circas chief operating officer. It was at Circa where Solomon gained the attention of some of the rights biggest names, like Sean Hannity, for reporting alongside Sara Carter on how Michael Flynn was mistreated. Or how the real Russia investigation should focus on collusion between Hillary Clinton and the Department of Justice and alleged anti-Trump bias in intelligence services.

That line of argument didnt gain him much credence among many journalists one conservative writer told me that Solomon was known to have credibility issues that required readers to find a secondary source for any of his scoops. But in 2017, he joined The Hill, a paper that launched in 1994 and describes itself as the newspaper for and about Congress, breaking stories from Capitol Hill, K Street and the White House. I reached out to the editors at the paper, and will update if and when I hear back.

At The Hill, Solomons work continued to focus on exclusive stories that tended to fall apart under scrutiny, like the Uranium One allegations against Hillary Clinton, or ones that werent very exclusive at all, like a piece alleging that an attorney had sought donor cash for two women who accused Trump of sexual harassment (the attorney in question, Lisa Bloom, had set up a public GoFundMe for one of the alleged victims, which is not unusual).

But it was Solomons work on Ukraine work based largely on misinformation given to him by Rudy Giuliani and associates of Giuliani, including his own attorneys that made the biggest impact. Because it was that work that led to a whistleblower complaint focused on allegations that Trump, working with Rudy Giuliani, was pressuring [Ukraine] to investigate one of the Presidents main domestic political rivals by withholding military aid.

In the White Houses partial transcript of a July 25 call between President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump refers directly to assertions made by John Solomon:

If you could speak to him that would be great. The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news so I just want to let you know that. The other thing, theres a lot of talk about Bidens son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it It sounds horrible to me.

Despite it now being called into question, John Solomons work remains an issue, in large part because it is still taken as fact among some right-leaning pundits and, clearly, the president himself.

On Friday, for example, conservative pundit Glenn Beck alleged that Yovanovitch should be held for perjury when she asserted during sworn testimony that she did not give Lutsenko a do-not-prosecute list. His source?

Award-winning investigative journalist John Solomon.

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