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Thursday, August 3, 2017
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Games might be a good tool for fighting fake news. Here’s what three developers have learned“What I found to be really great about the game is how terrible at it I am and how terrible people are at it.” By Christine Schmidt. |
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Chartbeat adds subscriber analytics to its dashboard — the “single most requested feature”Do paying users behave differently than non-paying users? By Christine Schmidt. |
What We’re Reading
The Verge / Adi Robertson
Inside Patreon, the economic engine of internet culture →
“Initially known as a haven for niche creators, Patreon is increasingly funding small media empires.”
Bryan Alexander / Bryan Alexander
What’s the best venue for long-form discussion in 2017? →
“Is there a good digital platform for conducting long-form, multiple participant conversations in 2017?”
Poynter / Benjamin Mullin
How will WikiTribune actually work? Here’s the man responsible for figuring it out →
“I’m suspecting…that the major area of improvement between what WikiTribune and what others will publish is the extent of expertise almost immediately going into the story. In a sense, the community will act as a panel of experts — sometimes creating, editing and certainly influencing the direction of either individual stories or sometimes coverage entirely.”
Madeline Welsh / Medium
What are users thinking when they dismiss notifications? →
“We decided to run one (likely last) notifications experiment. We had experimented with data on the UK's constituency votes once before, around the E.U. referendum in May 2016, and we also knew that the Guardian visuals team would be publishing an interactive, which we could work with as we did for our experiment during the US presidential election.”
Wall Street Journal / Deepa Seetharaman
Facebook is trying to drown out fake news with more information →
“Starting Thursday, when Facebook's U.S. users come across popular links—including made-up news articles—in their feeds, they may also see a cluster of other articles on the same topic. The ‘related articles’ feature, which will roll out widely in the U.S. after months of testing, is part of Facebook's strategy to limit the damage of false news without censoring those posts.”
Dustin Volz / Reuters
“Hamilton 68” dashboard launches to track Russia-supported disinformation on Twitter →
“The website, supported by the German Marshall Fund, displays a “near real-time” analysis of English-language tweets from a pool of 600 Twitter accounts that analysts identified as users that spread Russian propaganda.”
NewsWhip / Liam Corcoran
Ranking: The publishers with the most Facebook traffic in July 2017 →
The top ten includes HuffPost, Buzzfeed, Fox News, Bored Panda, and India Times.
Digiday / Jessica Davies
Inside The New York Times' international programmatic strategy →
“Since Google introduced the capability, guaranteed deals with audience lists have gained momentum in the industry. The Times has tested the method, which ensures publishers only send impressions that match the buyer's target audience, with U.S. clients over the last year. Badler said the aim is to extend the capability to European clients.”
Buzzfeed / Claudia Kerner
Donald Trump launches a “real news” program on his Facebook, hosted by his daughter-in-law →
“Some people saw this as a challenge to Facebook after the social media company said it would do more to combat disinformation.”
TechCrunch / Anthony Ha
In the past year, Time Inc. has gone from 14 content management systems to just two →
“The team did a ‘huge audit’ and was ‘ruthless’ in removing things (like ad units and audience-tracking technology) that were no longer useful.”
Poynter / Daniel Funke
Public editors are seen as the “agency of democracy” in other countries — so why are they being cut in the U.S.? →
“To think that 140 characters is any way to have a really meaningful discussion around journalistic values is really not the case.”