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Wednesday, October 10, 2018
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Venture philanthropy for local news might not be as scary as it soundsThe American Journalism Project, led by two top nonprofit news veterans, aims to propel $1 billion in annual investments to mission-driven local news outlets. By Christine Schmidt. |
What We’re Reading
Reuters / Jeffrey Dastin
The perils of building an algorithm using data from an unfair world →
“Amazon.com’s machine-learning specialists uncovered a big problem: their new recruiting engine did not like women…That is because Amazon's computer models were trained to vet applicants by observing patterns in resumes submitted to the company over a 10-year period. Most came from men, a reflection of male dominance across the tech industry. In effect, Amazon's system taught itself that male candidates were preferable.”
Ad Fontes Media
The woman behind that media bias chart you’ve probably seen is crowdfunding it now →
“[Vanessa] Otero has big plans for scaling her technology and media ranking capability to eventually provide it as real-time tool for any organization with a need to know about news source quality and bias.”
CNBC / Michelle Castillo
Some advertisers are moving half of their search budget from Google to Amazon →
Consumer intent in an Amazon search > consumer intent in a Google search. “Amazon appears to be emerging as the most credible threat to Google’s cash cow advertising business since Facebook conquered mobile advertising beginning shortly after its 2012 IPO.”
University of Florida
The University of Florida is launching a Consortium on Trust in Media and Technology →
“The CTMT…will bring together technologists and social scientists – working in areas such as communications, anthropology, psychology, political science and law – to develop creative solutions to restoring trust. The goal is to assemble a core group of at least 100 scholars, graduate students and educators…”
Philadelphia Inquirer / Jonathan Lai
Here is the Lenfest Local Lab’s first experiment — daily texts about the midterm elections →
Text “election” to 215-544-3038 and you’ll be signed up for simple, daily messages that break down what’s at stake, highlight some key races, and help you figure out where to turn to dive deeper on these issues.
MuckRock / Michael Morisy and Aron Pilhofer
MuckRock and DocumentCloud land a $250,000 grant from the News Integrity Initiative to help smooth their merger →
“Thanks to the NII grant along with an earlier grant from the Knight Foundation, we will be launching paid plans for organizations and individuals sometime in early 2019. We will be soliciting feedback, including through a user survey, and announcing the details of those plans soon.”
Cliqz / Björn Greif
The big winner in Europe’s GDPR? A little company you may have heard of named Google →
“A comparison of tracker prevalence of April against July reveals a clear picture: Especially smaller advertising trackers have significantly lost reach (which can be used as a proxy for market share). They lost between 18% and 31%. Facebook suffered a decline of just under 7%. In contrast, market leader Google was even able to slightly increase its reach (plus 1%).”
Twitter
Twitter is killing Moment creation on mobile →
“When features aren’t used as often, we'll remove them, so we can focus on building other products you'll love.” (Still works on desktop.)
Digiday / Lucia Moses
How The New York Times uses T-shirt discounts and tours to drive subscriptions →
“The Times knows people won't subscribe just because they got 15 percent off a T-shirt or trip. But the express hope is that something like the trip experience will make them feel more connected to the Times.”
Politico / Jack Shafer
An argument that The New York Times’ Trump tax story “bombed” →
“Even though the Times aggregated this piece for slow readers, produced clever video takes on the material and reprinted the original as a special section of the Sunday paper, the story has all but melted from sight.”
Columbia Journalism Review / Travis Fox
Drone journalism’s battle for airspace →
“McClatchy has 43 licensed drone pilots on staff, and CNN — which boasts nearly 30 drone pilots — launched a new unit, CNN AIR (which stands for ‘aerial imagery and reporting’), based around drone coverage.”
BuzzFeed News / Ryan Broderick
The Brazilian election offered a window into WhatsApp’s wild, sometimes fact-free world →
“What we do know is that people trust the information they see in a WhatsApp group and are more likely to read every message that comes into the platform.”
Business Insider / Kif Leswing
It looks like Apple fixed that problem with manipulation on its podcast charts →
“‘To my eyes, which hasn’t looked at the Apple Podcast platform in a good while, the charts felt distinctly… broken,’ Nicholas Quah wrote in his newsletter, Hot Pod, a sort of ‘Paris Review’ for the mattress-ad set.”