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Thursday, August 23, 2018
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Bylines on the homepage? Not The New York Times’ priority anymore in the latest homepage redesignBruised journalist egos or important missing metadata? By Christine Schmidt. |
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The Lenfest Institute is testing new products for local news, and it wants your help“If we're going to be a test kitchen, let’s cook some stuff!” By Christine Schmidt. |
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Through the looking glass, backwards: What Nieman Lab’s Predictions for Journalism 2018 tell us about where we’re headedAn academic read through a bunch of smart people’s thoughts on the near-term future for news. Here are the trends he found. By Joshua Benton. |
What We’re Reading
Medium / Ned Berke
A checklist of 11 Facebook page optimizations for small publishers →
Make sure you set your call-to-action button. Make sure you have active links in the “About Us” section. Make sure you’ve set how your page is categorized by Facebook in the About section. Try out pinned posts. Declutter your page sidebars and modules (you can change and remove items by visiting Page Settings and going to Edit Page). And more.
Global Investigative Journalism Network / Ying Chan, Siran Liang and Lizzy Huang
Investigative journalists propel #MeToo reporting at China’s universities →
“In China, public reports of sexual abuse first emerged in 2014, but until a year ago these allegations were limited to personal blogs shared on Chinese social media, such as WeChat and Weibo. These accounts were rarely, if ever, followed up by the mainstream news media.”
Columbia Journalism Review / Tamar Wilner
In Texas, a local public radio show defies the 'Google it' age →
“What do you say to people who tell you, ‘Why don't you just Google it?'” “Everybody says that, everybody I meet at parties. But the show is about more than just getting the information. It's this place where people can exchange and contribute and be a part of something.”
Columbia Journalism Review / Himanshu Gupta and Harsh Taneja
An idea for how WhatsApp can fix its misinformation problem without breaking encryption →
“If WhatsApp can identify a particular a message's metadata precisely, it can tag that message as ‘fake news’ after appropriate content moderation. It can be argued that WhatsApp can also, with some tweaks to its algorithm, identify the original sender of a fake news image, video, or text and potentially also stop that content from further spreading on its network. To identify whether a message is fake or not, we suggest that WhatsApp rely on its user community to forward suspected messages to its content moderation system.”
Digiday / Lucia Moses
Google AMP beat Facebook Instant Articles, but publishers start to question AMP's benefits →
“‘AMP had a lot of hype and promise,’ said Chris Breaux, director of data science at Chartbeat. ‘It's really good for users in providing a consistent experience in terms of page-load time. The real question is, do you see more traffic than you would have if you didn't do the implementation? The answer for two-thirds of publishers is, no.'”
BBC News / Soutik Biswas
To combat misinformation on WhatsApp, 150 government schools in India have fake news classes to teach kids about hoaxes →
“If you get a message on WhatsApp saying there will be an earthquake in Kannur tomorrow, would you believe it and share it with your friends?”
Washington Post / Margaret Sullivan
This is the moment all of Trump's anti-media rhetoric has been working toward →
“Journalists can't change the minds of those most firmly in Trump's camp, those who have decided to believe only him. That's a lost cause, and not our mission anyway. But they can stop allowing themselves to be used as tools in Trump's relentless — and successful — campaign to undermine the truth. And do so knowing that it may be too late.”
The Logic / Sean Craig
Hootsuite faces internal, customer discontent amid challenges to its core business →
"The changes have left employees questioning the future direction of the company, some longtime customers disgruntled with what they consider a product in decline, and have likely put a long-rumoured IPO — floated as an option as recently as January by CEO Ryan Holmes — on hold."