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Friday, June 1, 2018
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WhatsApp is a black box for fake news. Verificado 2018 is making real progress fixing that.“Instead of using broadcast to spread our debunks, we opted for an individual relationship.” By Laura Hazard Owen. |
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How Zimbabwe’s Magamba TV produces political satire for a new social media-connected generation“On the one hand, we know that quite a few government ministers actually watch our stuff….So these dudes, they do watch it, to get a sense of what young people are thinking.” By Samm Farai Monro. |
What We’re Reading
Facebook
Facebook is getting rid of its HIGHLY CONTROVERSIAL Trending module →
“We introduced Trending in 2014 as a way to help people discover news topics that were popular across the Facebook community. However, it was only available in five countries and accounted for less than 1.5% of clicks to news publishers on average. From research we found that over time people found the product to be less and less useful.”
Columbia Journalism Review / Pete Vernon
Roseanne’s comments received 16 times the coverage of the study estimating Hurricane Maria’s toll at 4,600 deaths in Puerto Rico →
"I've gotten three times as many breaking news emails today about 'Roseanne' getting cancelled than I have about the death toll in Puerto Rico being 70 times higher than we thought," Wisconsin Public Radio host Brady Carlson tweeted Tuesday.
Poynter / TOM STITES
TechCrunch / Sarah Perez
Apple is set to announce its own “digital health” features in iOS 12 on Monday →
“If Apple were to avoid the topic, it would be the odd one out at this point.”
CityLab / Kriston Capps
Cities where newspapers closed saw government costs increase “as a result of the lack of scrutiny over local deals” →
Paul Gao, an associate professor of finance at the University of Notre Dame and one of the paper's authors, was inspired to look into the issue after an episode of "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver" about the news industry. "He was focused on two things: consolidation of national news media and closure of local news media. John Oliver's show really gave us the prompt for the phenomenon, and we started thinking about it from an economist's point of view."
Wall Street Journal / Deepa Seetharaman and Lukas I. Alpert
Facebook and publishers are nearing deals on news shows for Watch →
“The company has offered some publishers between $1 million and $3 million for one-year contracts, according to people involved in the discussions. But some publishers have balked at the terms while others have been turned off by Facebook's shifting strategy, people familiar with the discussions said.”
Columbia Journalism Review / Gabriel Snyder
“I was trying to not have a job:” Do journalists make good entrepreneurs? →
“One thing that transfers from being a journalist or an editor directly into running a business is your sense that you can find the answer to a question, that you can do the research and get to the bottom of something.”
The New York Times / Rukmini Callimachi and Michael Slackman
Why The New York Times collected ISIS' internal documents, and what happens next →
“Dear Sam, I understand how this looks from here. Put yourself on a battlefield, where almost everything around you has been destroyed and turned to rubble, and the only authority for any distance is the Iraqi military.”