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Wednesday, December 12, 2018
 | Tech will do for information overload what it did for mindfulness“While there are a handful of very good digital reading tools (Pocket, Flipboard, Kindle), the next wave of products will be built to deliver a better news consumption experiences.” By Manoush Zomorodi. |
 | Forget deepfakes: Misinformation is showing up in our most personal online spaces“Maybe I’m being too technologically determinist. Maybe this type of content won’t have a disproportionate impact. But the problem is I don’t think we have the ten years we need in order to wait for the longitudinal studies to be carried out.” By Claire Wardle. |
 | Think 2018 was bad? Wait until you see 2019“I think the end of 2018 is the top of the rollercoaster track. The descent, which we are not ready for, is going to involve a lot of screaming as we hurtle towards Brexit in 2019 and the 2020 U.S. elections.” By james Wahutu. |
 | Influencers become the new liberated power in Africa“I believe 2019 is the year that a majority of young disenfranchised Africans and digital influencers will use the power of hashtag movements to demand greater responsibility from their leaders.” By Joel Konopo. |
 | Tech shouldn’t be the only field pollinating “news nerds”“What can we learn from artists about conveying emotional truths that drive human decision-making? In a world of growing tribalism and skepticism about reported facts, helping people understand the world increasingly means helping people understand others’ feelings as well as their reasoning.” By Robin Kwong. |
 | The nationalization of political news will accelerate“In this election cycle, the old saying that ‘the real presidential campaign begins after Labor Day’ might refer to 2019, not 2020.” By Joshua Darr. |
 | The year of the loyal reader“For years, we’ve seen news websites chasing bigger and bigger traffic gains. But the truth is driveby traffic is basically worthless.” By Emma Carew Grovum. |
 | Platforms will have to help rebuild trust in news“There may be only one thing about which Donald Trump’s administration and the Democrats who just took control of the House can agree: Tech platforms have enormous power that has to be tamed.” By Adam Smith. |
 | Quality and reliability are the new currencies for publishers“In many ways, these are basic things — standards of journalism that have been around for centuries — but in today’s media environment, they are beginning to matter to readers and publishers more than ever.” By Matt Skibinski. |
 | The year we step back from the platform“Let’s replace the shadows that Twitter and Facebook and Google have been on the media with some business-model fundamentals. As 2018 has shown, they’ve offered us a lot more heartache than it feels like they’re actually worth.” By Ernie Smith. |
 | Simplify and redistribute“I’m trying to be honest about what really matters about what we do as journalists and stop caring about the rest.” By Sarah Alvarez. |
 | The pendulum starts to swing back“Donald Trump’s media diet, which is frozen in the 1980s, has pulled perceptions of the whole media industry — publishers, advertisers, politicians — into a kind of time warp.” By Ben Smith. |
 | It finally sinks in that some people aren’t white“Who exactly do we mean when we say ‘we’?” By Jenée Desmond-Harris. |
 | Our information systems aren’t broken — they’re working as intended“The media landscape is overrun with toxic narratives and polluted information not because our systems are broken, but because our systems are working.” By Whitney Phillips. |
 | Building a digital hospice“There is a semi-atemporality to web interfaces, which means that even a publication that hasn’t been updated in years might look like it’s still active. That irresolute state communicates to future readers that no one cared to treat it well in its final days. Perhaps no cared about it ever.” By Joanne McNeil. |
 | Three ways national media will further undermine trust“It’s not that journalists shouldn’t engage in fact-checking, nor is it that journalists should avoid presenting facts as verifiable and trustworthy claims about the world — it’s that they shouldn’t be so obnoxious about it.” By Nikki Usher. |
 | Fight the urge to run away from social media“The bad guys — the fake-news makers, bots, trolls, and scammers — will gladly take over the community organizer roles we leave vacant. They’re pretty good at this sort of thing.” By Mandy Jenkins. |
 | More transparency around newsroom decisions“Readers are paying attention — that’s what you want, isn’t it? — and they now have the tools to push back and to challenge our decisions.” By Nicholas Jackson. |
 | A focus on problems, not platforms“Most users have lost trust in the breaking news products out there, and breaking news alerts have become an annoyingly sneaky way for companies to hit short-term wins.” By Dheerja Kaur. |
 | A pullback from platforms and a focus on product“For news products to compete with the platforms they must engage readers to the same extent, recognizing the bar of UX is set in the minds of the reader across everything they experience on the internet, not just other publications.” By Josh Schwartz. |
 | Interactive ads will be the new face of display advertising“Ad impressions and CTR numbers will become things of the past sooner than you think.” By Tushar Banerjee. |
What We’re Reading
Columbia Journalism Review / Mia Shuang Li
Google’s Dragonfly will intensify surveillance on journalists in China →
“Assuming Chinese journalists use Dragonfly for research the same way journalists outside the country use Google, these laws mean the Chinese state will be able to learn how journalists discover a story, establish contact with sources, and report the story out. Then the state can prosecute anyone with involvement in the process at their discretion.”
American Press Institute
Apply for funds to help start 2019 with better newsroom analytics →
“News organizations who want to prioritize audience-driven storytelling and simplify their analytics with easy-to-use dashboards can now take advantage of subsidized access to the Metrics for News software and services provided by the American Press Institute.” The funding comes from Knight.
Slate / Rebecca Onion
2018 was a year of fantastic history threads on Twitter. Here’s a look back at the best. →
“Every time major news broke this year, the best place to find historians' perspectives on the latest Trump calumny or #MeToo revelation was on Twitter, where their carefully argued threads were going viral.”
Washingtonian / Andrew Beaujon
Has Washington media reached peak newsletter? →
“If the prospect of yet another blast of news and analysis dinging your in-box makes you want to run screaming into the Potomac, you're probably not the target audience for this latest newsletter, which rather than being aimed at DC insiders is targeting a more mainstream audience.”
BuzzFeed / Charlie Warzel
The big question after Silicon Valley’s tech hearings: What’s the point? →
“It took more than two hours before Pichai was asked about YouTube's vast repository of slanderous conspiratorial videos. His lackluster reply — ‘We always think that there is more to do’ — went unchallenged by even the simplest of follow-ups. When Pichai noted that roughly 400 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute, no one bothered to ask how Google could ever possibly police it. There were no questions about YouTube's recommendation algorithms or about YouTube as a vector of radicalization.”
ProPublica / ProPublica
ProPublica picks 14 newsrooms and investigative projects for year 2 of its local reporting network →
One of them is “MLK50: Justice Through Journalism” in Memphis, Tennessee, by 2016 Nieman Fellow Wendi Thomas.
The Washington Post / Joby Warrick and Anton Troianovski
Agents of doubt: How a powerful Russian propaganda machine chips away at Western notions of truth →
“The disinformation campaigns now emanating from Russia are of a different breed [than Cold War propaganda], said intelligence officials and analysts. Engineered for the social media age, they fling up swarms of falsehoods, concocted theories and red herrings, intended not so much to persuade people but to bewilder them.”
Digiday / Max Willens
Why product manager is the new pivotal role at publishers →
“Nearly a year into its first head of product Julia Beizer's reign, Bloomberg Media has grown its number of product managers from 10 to 14; Vox Media now employs 10 product managers, up from seven last year, after adding three to look after facets of Concert, its ad network, and Chorus, its CMS; and over the past two years, the Washington Post has tripled the number of product managers it employs, attaching one to every single internal and external project it operates.”
Teen Vogue / Linley Sanders
A look at Borderzine, Flint Beat, and The Colorado Independent — three nonprofit news outlets run by young women →
“‘In reality, the Flint water crisis is just one of the many issues that the city faces,’ Jiquanda tells Teen Vogue. ‘We listen to the community. I don't tell them what their issues are. I'm from Flint, born and raised, and I don't tell them what they need. They tell me what they need, and that is how we shape the content in our newsroom.'”