 |
Tuesday, August 21, 2018
 |
When it comes to user data, are we done catching Google red-handed?“A dormant, stationary Android phone…communicated location information to Google 340 times during a 24-hour period, or at an average of 14 data communications per hour.” By Christine Schmidt. |
 |
Line is another chat app rife with spam, scams, and bad information. The volunteer-supported Cofacts is fact-checking them in the openUsers forward dubious messages to a chatbot; volunteer editors evaluate their credibility; the bot answers back to the user (and anyone wondering in the future). By Kirsten Han. |
 |
Alphabet soup: Will the merger of PRX and PRI shift the competitive landscape of public radio (and podcasting)?Plus: A wave of new releases for the fall, an up-and-down week for My Favorite Murder, and SB Nation goes big on local sports podcasts. By Nicholas Quah. |
What We’re Reading
The Verge / Russell Brandom
Google is developing an experimental podcast app called Shortwave →
“Called Shortwave, the new app was revealed by a trademark filing…which describes it as ‘allow[ing] users to search, access, and play digital audio files, and to share links to audio files.'”
News and Observer / Luke DeCock
He had an opportunity to join The Athletic, but he’s staying at The News & Observer →
“I wish The Athletic the best. More jobs for people in my line of work is a good thing, and a little healthy competition is as well. They have hired some of my really good friends, longtime and valued colleagues and people I don't know but whose work I deeply respect. But they can't do what we do: Cover a community from top to bottom with the kind of depth and analysis you can't get from two minutes on TV and the expertise your neighbor posting on Nextdoor doesn't have.”
BuzzFeed News / Alex Kantrowitz
Facebook advertisers will no longer be able to hide their ads from people interested in “Islamic culture,” “Passover,” and more →
“Facebook is planning to remove more than 5,000 ad targeting options in an effort to prevent discriminatory advertising. The bulk of the 5,000 targeting options, slated for removal by this fall, could be used as proxies by advertisers looking to identify and exclude ethnic and religious groups.”
Washington Post / Elizabeth Dwoskin
Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to one →
“The score is one measurement among thousands of new behavioral clues that Facebook now takes into account as it seeks to understand risk. Facebook is also monitoring which users have a propensity to flag content published by others as problematic and which publishers are considered trustworthy by users. It is unclear what other criteria Facebook measures to determine a user's score, whether all users have a score and in what ways the scores are used.”
Axios / Sara Fischer
Fake news 2.0: The propaganda war gets sophisticated →
“Now that platforms are prioritizing the removal of millions of fake accounts, bad actors are looking to hijack real accounts to avoid detection.”
World Magazine / Charissa Crotts, Elizabeth Rieth, Isaiah Johnson
How Liberty University is censoring its student newspaper →
As an administrator told the journalists: “Your job is to keep the LU reputation and the image as it is. … Don't destroy the image of LU. Pretty simple. OK? Well you might say, ‘Well, that's not my job, my job is to do journalism. My job is to be First Amendment. My job is to go out and dig and investigate, and I should do anything I want to do because I'm a journalist.’ So let's get that notion out of your head. OK?”
The Intercept / Sam Biddle
Facebook suspended a leftist Latin American news network Telesur and gave three different reasons why →
“A Facebook customer support agent told the network that the suspension appeared to be due to a technical glitch. The next day, Facebook wrote Telesur again, this time saying that the company's engineers had conducted ‘several tests’ and assured the outlet that ‘technicians’ continued to look for an answer. On Wednesday, after a 48-hour blackout, Facebook wrote once more to say the page had been suspended due to a mysterious ‘instability on the platform,’ which had now been corrected.”
The Idea / Atlantic Media / Mollie Leavitt
A Q&A with Elisabeth Goodridge, editorial director of newsletters at the New York Times →
“If we make sure that we provide stellar products that people will actually want to open, again, that inbox is a very intimate space, it's also a very crowded space, so we need to give them, and habituate them to something that they value, so that they open it up day in and day out. So that's the number one goal, for us, is optimizing these newsletters so we can make them amazing, and number two, launch newsletters people will open. It's considering not only writing a great subject line, all the way down to understanding what's the footer experience.”
The Verge / Nick Statt
A fake Twitter ad campaign encourages users to be more skeptical on social media →
"Don't Believe Every Tweet made the rounds early this morning, fooling tech critics and reporters into thinking Twitter had launched a marketing effort centered on its own inability to police fake and misleading information. The project includes a Twitter account, a YouTube video featuring comedian Greg Barris, and a website, complete with fake quotes from Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.”
Poynter / Ren LaForme
How one journalist built a free resource that has already coached hundreds of women in journalism →
“Digitalwomenleaders.com, created by Katie Hawkins-Gaar, is a platform that facilitates a free 30-minute coaching session with any mentor who’s available. It’s first come, first serve and free to any woman working in journalism. All the coaches are doing this on a volunteer basis. I built and am updating the site on a pro bono basis so it’s just like a big gift to the journalism community.”
TheWrap / Jon Levine
The Los Angeles Times poaches veteran New York Times editor Sewell Chan →
“Under new owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, the LA Times moved to expansive new offices in El Segundo and added a raft of marquee hires like Chan, who will serve as deputy manager editor under the paper’s top editor Norm Pearlstine. The Times plans to expand coverage on all fronts, including Hollywood, sports, food, and the environment.”
The Atlantic / Scott Nover
The Sunday shows have a renewed sense of purpose, thanks to Donald Trump →
“At one point, the president would record and watch all five Sunday shows, host of Meet the Press Chuck Todd told me. ‘I remember Corey [Lewandowski] telling me a story about how it took up half his Sunday,’ Todd said, referring to Trump's former campaign manager. The president "fast forwards, but he watches all five." Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders didn't respond to an email about how the president's Sunday-morning viewing habits have evolved.”
Poynter / Kristen Hare
What are your ideas for helping local news? →
Give subscriptions to local papers and sites or donate to local non-profit news orgs as gifts. Could you pay local journalists or newsrooms to rewrite a version for you instead of aggregating it? Local newsrooms, how can you partner up with each other? And more: Get in touch if you have other ideas.
Washington Post / Margaret Sullivan
Editorials defending the press are a nice start. What's really needed is a more practical kind of collaboration →
“One example is the way hundreds of news organizations banded together recently to push back against a new policy of Facebook's: to treat the paid promotions of news articles on political topics as if they were political advertising. The pushback resulted in Facebook's pledge to reconsider the policy that threatened to confuse news with advertising for the platform's billions of users. These instances make you think: What if?”