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Friday, February 15, 2019
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How can local TV news fix its young person problem? Maybe it needs to look more like Vox“While remixing the stories did not resonate every time, we did see positive results on the group of hard news stories where we altered the storytelling approach.” By Laura Hazard Owen. |
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If Facebook wants to stop the spread of anti-vaxxers, it could start by not taking their ad dollars"You have nothing to be ashamed of for your parents not vaccinating you. It wasn't something you researched and decided against, you were just doing the whole 'being a kid' thing." By Laura Hazard Owen. |
What We’re Reading
Nieman Lab / Joshua Benton
Monday is the deadline for an Abrams Nieman Fellowship for Local Investigative Reporting →
“Funded by the Abrams Foundation, this fellowship will fund up to three Nieman Fellowships for U.S. journalists who cover news in areas of the United States where resources are scarce. The fellowship additionally will fund up to nine months of fieldwork at the fellow's home news organization after two semesters at Harvard — or in the case of freelance journalists, a newsroom partner.”
The Guardian / Alex Hern
A new AI fake-news generator may be “too dangerous to release” →
“Feed it the first few paragraphs of a Guardian story about Brexit, and its output is plausible newspaper prose, replete with ‘quotes’ from Jeremy Corbyn, mentions of the Irish border, and answers from the prime minister's spokesman.”
CNN / Stephanie Busari
How fake news was weaponized in Nigeria’s elections →
“As denials go, it was extraordinary and more than a little surreal. The sitting president of Africa’s largest democracy was forced to refute repeated claims that he had died and a clone was now running his office.”
The Journal of Politics / Yanna Krupnikov and Adam Seth Levine
Big scary statistics aren’t very good at changing people’s minds about an issue →
“…evidence that simply conveys the overall size of the problem — such as the total number of people affected — may also undermine engagement by leading people to conceptualize it in terms of large masses of nameless and faceless individuals.”
The Verge / Nilay Patel
The Verge’s YouTube channel is being brigaded after it sought (but then retracted) copyright strikes against other videos →
“This is all pretty disappointing, especially since I had retracted the strikes and none of the people involved thought it important to simply ask me about it. I hope everyone involved can take a moment and think about making sure they actually know what they think they know, and the value of communicating directly instead of simply reacting.”
The Atlantic / Taylor Lorenz
It’s impossible to follow a conversation on Twitter →
“The theoretical benefit of being on Twitter, a broadcast-based open social network, is to talk with other people and follow their conversations, even ones that don't include you. Somehow, in 2019, the product has degraded to the point where this has become impossible. It's like running through a public square shouting at people, trying to start a dialogue while getting jostled by a crowd.”
Wall Street Journal / Benjamin Mullin
Private-equity firm Great Hill Partners in talks to buy Gizmodo Media Group →
“Earlier this week, Univision said it took an impairment charge of more than $120 million for Gizmodo Media Group in its fourth-quarter earnings, but added that the sites still had value for the right buyer.”
Recode / Kurt Wagner
You still can’t edit your tweets, but you may soon be able to “clarify” them →
“You would just show the clarification, you would be able to retweet the clarification, so it always carries around with it that context. That's one approach. Not saying that we are going to launch that but those are the sorts of questions we are going to ask.”
Pacific Standard / Mark Oprea
The spread of fake news has had deadly consequences in Mexico. Meet the people trying to stop it. →
“High-minded, fearless fact-checkers like her — often volunteering on their own time — had been introducing a much-needed, fresh media standard for reporting the facts in Mexico.”
Flashes & Flames / Colin Morrison
The Financial Times is apparently thinking about buying The Information →
“The 900k-subscribers FT (for which Lessin has sometimes expressed admiration) likes her strategy and has been discussing ways it could help to accelerate the growth, especially in Asia.”
Digiday / Max Willens
With new tools, podcast publishers are exploring consumer revenue models →
“On Thursday, Feb. 7, Substack, a newsletter subscription platform used by writers including Bill Bishop and Matt Taibbi, announced Substack Audio, which emails private podcasts to subscribers. This past Tuesday, Slate unveiled a product called Supporting Cast, which allows users to pay and subscribe to a private podcast feed with just a handful of clicks.”
Washington Post / Tony Romm
The U.S. government and Facebook are negotiating a record, multibillion-dollar fine for the company’s privacy lapses →
“For the FTC, a significant punishment levied against Facebook could represent a new era of scrutiny for Silicon Valley companies after years of privacy missteps. To date, the largest fine the FTC has imposed on a tech giant for breaking an agreement with the government to safeguard consumers' data was a $22.5 million penalty that Google paid to settle a probe over in 2012.”
Quartz / Avery Erwin
“You still love the internet deep down. You just hate the way it has been mobilized, weaponized.” →
“Find out about content farms. Find out about click farms. Find out just how much of the internet is fake. The metrics. The businesses. The content. The people. It's all fake. It's like Fight Club, except now you're buying things you don't need with money you don't have to impress people that don't actually exist.”
The Lenfest Institute for Journalism / Joseph Lichterman
How German nonprofit site Correctiv built a tool to enable community-powered investigations →
“With the Who Owns Your City? project, for example, participants were asked to upload their leases to the database and to then give Correctiv permission to pull the records from the land registry in their name. For the schools series, Correctiv asked students, parents, and teachers to upload documents that show definitively that classes were cancelled.”
GroundSource / Sara Catania
How Chalkbeat connected with people it didn’t know to listen to the unheard narrative →
“‘When we started this project there was already solid research about the impact of school transience and how it affected kids and classrooms in general,’ she said. But two things were missing: the classroom-level details that described the impact in a narrative way, and why so many Detroit families were making the choice to switch schools, often not once, but multiple times.”