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Thursday, March 29, 2018
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This is the next major traffic driver for publishers: Chrome’s mobile article recommendations, up 2,100 percent in one yearIt’s already driving almost as many visits as Twitter, and publishers have no idea why their stories get chosen (or don’t). By John Saroff. |
What We’re Reading
TechCrunch / Josh Constine
Facebook starts fact checking photos and videos and is preemptively blocking millions of fake accounts per day →
"We're trying to develop a systematic and comprehensive approach to tackle these challenges, and then to map that approach to the needs of each country or election" chief security officer Alex Stamos says.
Lenfest Institute / Joseph Lichterman
Meet the local “news militia” covering East Lansing, Michigan →
"In the same way that if you have to have a militia during a revolutionary war, it makes the people realize that what you really want is a professional army," said Alice Dreger, the publisher of East Lansing Info. "They're much better. They're better trained, they're better protected, and they're better for the country. That's why I think the militia model works, it convinces people that professional armies of journalists are better. That's what you ultimately want."
Twitter / Julia Angwin
Why Facebook's announcement that it is shutting down relationships with data brokers is a big deal →
An explainer from a ProPublica investigative journalist.
Global Editors' Network / Freia Nahser
Think lithely, step lively: Greg Barber on newsroom tools at the Washington Post →
What makes a good newsroom bridge?
BuzzFeed / Pranav Dixit
Facebook is getting grilled in India as elections draw near →
“India's Ministry of Information and Technology issued a notice to Facebook on Wednesday asking five questions, including how Facebook planned to prevent its platform from being exploited to influence elections in India, Facebook's largest market outside the US with over 240 million users. Facebook's deadline to respond is April 7. Last Friday, the Ministry of Information and Technology issued a similar notice to Cambridge Analytica asking whether the firm collected data on Facebook's Indian users.”
ICFJ / Cassandra Balfour and Alexsandra Canedo
ICFJ is recruiting full-time fellows to work in newsrooms across the world on expanding the reach of fact-checking →
“Modeled on ICFJ's Knight Fellowship program, TruthBuzz will embed experts in newsrooms to help reporters adopt compelling storytelling methods that improve the reach and impact of fact-checking and help ‘inoculate’ audiences against false or misleading information. The fellowship is only open to English-speaking media professionals already working in one of the target countries: Brazil, India, Indonesia, Nigeria and the U.S.”
ABC News / Sonya Gee and Flip Prior
Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s news bot integrated Hearken to collect reader questions ahead of election day →
Questions were collected in real time through the tool and being integrated into the live TV broadcast on election night. Throughout the campaign, around 20 per cent of questions came in via the bot. On election night, 48 per cent of questions came through from there.