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Friday, August 17, 2018
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Does your Google News change based on whether you’re conservative or liberal?Plus: “Most of the people reviewing Burmese content spoke English.” By Laura Hazard Owen. |
What We’re Reading
The Drum / Ian Burrell
How The Sun took on The Mail online — and won →
“Direct traffic to our platform is up 21 percent year-on-year and we want that to continue growing,” Poole says. Traffic to The Sun's app, which relaunched in February, is up by 60 percent.
The Guardian / Hannah Ellis-Petersen
Malaysia scraps “fake news” law used to stifle free speech →
“Malaysia was the first country in Southeast Asia to introduce a fake news law and rights groups feared it set a worrying precedent for the region, with the Philippines, Singapore and Cambodia all claiming they too were going to table legislation tackling the problem — though none have yet been passed. Baguilat added that the decision to repeal the law ‘sends a signal to the wider region that positive human rights change is within reach.'”
The Atlantic / Scott Nover
A popular military website is attacked from the right →
“The nation's hyper-partisan political divide — encouraged by a president who calls the media ‘the enemy of the people’ — is creating tensions that can be as challenging for news startups as they are for more established newsrooms. And for a small publication covering the military, the stresses seem magnified.”
Morning Consult / Joanna Piacenza
How perceptions of news accuracy shift with outlet — and topic →
“As illustrated in other media bias research, partisans were divided over the accuracy of the headlines by outlet: Democrats were more likely to say articles attached to CNN headlines would be accurate, while Republicans said the same of Fox News.”
The Washington Post / Paul Farhi
Said something you’d like to forget? CNN’s Andrew Kaczynski won’t let it go. →
“Kaczynski's four-member group — known as KFile after its 28-year-old founder — may be the foremost practitioner of the journalistic equivalent of dumpster diving. Their reportorial MO is simple, if tedious: They dig through social-media posts, old audio and video recordings and forgotten speeches, articles and books to find troubling comments uttered or written by the people they're investigating.”
Journalism.co.uk / Marcela Kunova
Mic uses “selfie-style” video to engage audiences on Snapchat Discover →
“One of the most successful formats has been speaking directly to the camera, as a friend or family member would, making clear eye contact with the audience on Snapchat to add a degree of friendship and personal connection to the story.”
Twipe / Mary-Katharine Phillips
How adblockers can help grow your subscriptions →
“Last year Bay Area News Group, a Digital First Media company, experimented with the message to visitors it flagged as using an adblocker. While typically they had only asked for the adblocker to be turned off, now they asked to turn it off or support their journalism by subscribing. During the experiment, roughly 9 percent of all new subscribers came from this pop-up.”
About the BBC Blog / Bethan Jinkinson
How BBC Ideas, the broadcaster’s short film site, is doing six months in →
“Death is another subject which seems to be preying on our users' minds. Videos such as 'Why dying is not as bad as you think' and 'the Irish approach to death' have been really popular on social media, with millions of views and thousands of comments and shares.”