373 Matching Annotations
  1. Apr 2024
    1. [[Marisa Kabas]] in The Handbasket - Here's the column Meta doesn't want you to see


      ᔥ[[Ben Werdmuller]] in Mastodon @ben@werd.social on Apr 06, 2024, 10:45 AM

      On Thursday I reported that Meta had blocked all links to the Kansas Reflector from approximately 8am to 4pm, citing cybersecurity concerns after the nonprofit published a column critical of Facebook’s climate change ad policy. By late afternoon, all links were once again able to be posted on Facebook, Threads and Instagram–except for the critical column." Here it is. #Media<br /> https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/kansas-reflector-meta-facebook-column-censored

    2. With permission from the Kansas Reflector, I’m sharing the column verbatim here in an attempt to sidestep Meta’s censorship. I hope you’ll share it far and wide—and I really hope Meta doesn’t block this version.

      Meta (Facebook) blocked not only the site, but the particular article, so Maria Kabas posted a copy to her site.

      https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/kansas-reflector-meta-facebook-column-censored

    1. We quote because we are afraid to-change words, lest there be a change in meaning.

      Quotations are easier to collect than writing things out in one's own words, not only because it requires no work, but we may be afraid of changing the original meaning by changing the original words or by collapsing the context and divorcing the words from their original environment.

      Perhaps some may be afraid that the words sound "right" and they have a sense of understanding of them, but they don't quite have a full grasp of the situation. Of course this may be remedied by the reader or listener not only by putting heard stories into their own words and providing additional concrete illustrative examples of the concepts. These exercises are meant to ensure that one has properly heard/read and understood a concept. Psychologists call this paraphrasing or repetition the "echo effect" (others might say parroting or mirroring) and have found that it can help to build understanding, connection, and likeability between people. Great leaders who do this will be sure to make sure that credit for the original ideas goes to the originator and not to themselves simply because they repeated it, especially in group settings where their words may have more primacy amidst their underlings.

      (I can't find it at the moment, but there's a name/tag for this in my notes? looping?)

      Beyond this, can one place the idea into a more clear language than the original? Add some poetry perhaps? Make the concept into a concrete meme to make it more memorable?

      Journalists like to quote because it gives primacy of voice to the speaker and provides the reader with the sense that they're getting the original from which they might make up their own minds. It also provides a veneer of vérité to their reportage.

      Link this back to Terrence's comedy: https://hypothes.is/a/xe15ZKPGEe6NJkeL77Ji4Q

  2. Mar 2024
    1. Ongweso Jr., Edward. “The Miseducation of Kara Swisher: Soul-Searching with the Tech ‘Journalist.’” The Baffler, March 29, 2024. https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-miseducation-of-kara-swisher-ongweso.

      ᔥ[[Pete Brown]] in Exploding Comma

    2. The long and short of it is that Swisher is not a good journalist—or, framed more generously, that she thrived in an industry with remarkably low standards for which we are still paying the price. For decades, tech journalism and criticism has primarily consisted of glowing gadget reviews, laudatory profiles, and reprinted press releases, all of it colored by Silicon Valley’s self-aggrandizing vision of itself as a laboratory of a brighter future.

      The tech press is responsible in part for a large portion of our techno-utopianism. They wore rose colored glasses and didn't ask the more probative questions they should have been asking until it was too late?

      Where was our tech Cassandra?

  3. Feb 2024
    1. Interesting that they make a distinction between documentaries, and digital storytelling in other forms. Is it simply because documentaries intersect with journalism, or is there another qualifier? It seems they are pointing out the difference due to the fact that many documentarians share stories of others, while digital storytellers, according to StoryCenter, share their own experiences.

  4. Jan 2024
    1. Trump plays the victim: Perhaps more interesting than anything he said in court — before or during his testimony — was Trump’s decision to show up in the first place. He was not bound by the court to speak at or attend the trial, at which cameras are not allowed, but did so repeatedly. His appearance on Thursday amounted to another opportunity, in Trump’s estimation, to advance the narrative that he is the victim of a broad conspiracy designed to block his return to office and damage his personal and business reputation.

      Gross speculation - terrible journalism. Just a bullet point they wanted to make.

  5. Nov 2023
  6. Oct 2023
    1. In der taz formuliert Sara Schurma 7 Schritte zu einer adäquaten Klimaberichterstattung:

      1. Kontext liefern
      2. Klima immer und überall mitdenken
      3. Strukturelle Probleme anerkennen
      4. Redaktionen mehr Fachwissen ermöglichen
      5. Verzögerungsnarrative einordnen
      6. „False Baance“ vermeiden
      7. Lösungen kritisch mitberichten

      Ihr Artikel gehört zu einem „Schwerpunkt Klima und Medien“. https://taz.de/7-Schritte-fuer-Redaktionen/!5956911/

  7. Sep 2023
    1. Jarvis, Jeff. “Moving On.” Medium. Whither News? (blog), September 2023. https://medium.com/whither-news/moving-on-4eecb1c76ce3.

      Jeff Jarvis looking back briefly on his history at CUNY's Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. An interesting snapshot of some of the pedagogical changes and programs over almost 20 years.

  8. Jul 2023
    1. 1

      Chapter 4, Section 1

      Does Winchester hold up William Howard Russell as a personal hero? There isn't very much criticism of him here in this section. Keep in mind that Winchester was a war correspondent and journalist from the United Kingdom himself, so this may go toward his own particular stripe of journalistic coverage.

    2. to recycle a familiarphrase taught at journalism schools—without fear or favor, and letthe chips fall where they may.

      Which journalism schools taught "without fear or favor"? When?

    3. Had Russell gone to Crimea with an avowed aversion to battle and aprofound sense that the whole fight was morally wrong and shouldbe brought to an immediate halt, one might fault him and declare himto be a Victorian example of modern advocacy journalism
    4. his journalism exposed military error and ineptitude only whenhe found it,
    5. There’s the power of the press for you.

      Quote from Evelyn Waugh's satire Scoop from section on Wenlock Jakes "creating" a revolution.

    6. Consider, for instance, this episode fromScoop, Evelyn Waugh’s classic satire on the occasionalwaywardness of journalism’s most celebrated and romanticizedcorps d’elite, the foreign correspondents.

      Story of William Boot and description of Wenlock Jakes who "made" (up) news.

    7. The reporter concerned, a tweedy pipe smoker named James Gibbins, waslater found to have concocted a myriad similarly implausible stories. Amongthem: A survey conducted at New York’s Algonquin Hotel showing thatwatching half an hour of As the World Turns had the same narcoleptic effect asdowning three vodka-and-tonics. A bar in Laurel, Maryland, that kept a petmonkey, with free drinks given to the first customer on whom the creature sat.Pigeons in Cornwall seen sporting human heads. Mr. Gibbins was exposed as“The Faker of Fleet Street” in an article in the Washington Post, and he wasrelieved of his job as a Mail foreign correspondent.
    8. You cannot hopeto bribe or twist,thank God! theBritish journalist.But, seeing whatthe man will dounbribed, there’sno occasion to.—Humbert Wolfe, epigram from The Uncelestial City (1930
  9. Jun 2023
    1. Die Klimawandel-Leugnung verlagert sich in konservativen Medien zunehmend vom evidence scepticism, der die Tatsache der menschlich verursachten globalen Erhitzung in Frage stellt, zum response scepticism, der die soziale Verträglichkeit der Maßnahmen gegen die Klimakrise bezweifelt. In den Mainstream-Medien sind Klimawandel-Leugnung und false bias*, die neutrale Gegenüberstellung wissenschaftlicher und klimaskeptischer Positionen, in den letzten Jahren stark zurückgegangen Der Standard stellt zusammenfassend wissenschaftliche Arbeiten zur Klimawandel-Leugnung in Massenmedien dar.

      https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000175977/die-leugnung-des-klimawandels-in-den-medien-ging-stark-zurueck

    1. In vielen Ländern, außer in Deutschland unter anderem in Spanien und in Großbritannien, werden Meteorologen, die über das zunehmend wärmere Wetter und seine Folgen und Ursachen berichten, Opfer von Hass in sozialen Medien, der bis zu Morddrohungen gehen kann. https://taz.de/Drohungen-gegen-Meteorologinnen/!5937563/

    1. All digital transitions have had losers, some of whom we may care about more than others. Musicians seem to have a raw deal in the streaming age, receiving fractions of pennies for streams when they used to get dollars for the sales of physical media. Countless regional newspapers went out of business in the move to the web and the disappearance of lucrative classified advertising. The question before society, with even a partial transition to digital books, is: Do we want libraries to be the losers?

      Will libraries have the same problems with the digital transition that music and journalism have had?

  10. Apr 2023
  11. Feb 2023
  12. Jan 2023
    1. He also collected facts about all kinds of people, including his enemies. For example, he took note of any gossip about conservative ministers who disagreed with him. He recorded their visits to prostitutes in his Memoriaelen.
    1. Selain itu, isolat virus RaTG13 memiliki nilai kekerabatan 96,1%. Virus ini ditemukan di Yunnan, Cina. Sedangkan isolat virus yang berasal dari tenggiling mempunyai nilai kekerabatan sekitar 91%. Adanya nilai kekerabatan yang tinggi ini dimungkinkan akibat dari evolusi yang telah terjadi dari nenek moyang yang sama.

      Untuk diperhatikan, artikel yang dikutip dengan judul "Probable Pangolin Origin of SARS-CoV-2 Associated with the COVID-19 Outbreak" sudah di erratum 3 tahun yang lalu (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32315626/)

      Sehingga masuk dalam jangkauan diskusi PubPeer dengan komentar sebagai berikut:

      Readers should become aware of a preprint (DOI: 10.1101/2020.05.07.077016) entitled "The SARS-CoV-2-like virus found in captive pangolins from Guangdong should be better sequenced" that provides critics to the quality of the sequence runs used in Liu et al. 2019 and also in this paper, to infer the genome sequence of Pangolin-CoV.

      This preprint states, in particular, that "I found the genome assemblies of GD/P virus of poor quality, having high levels of missing data. Additionally, unexpected reads in the Illumina sequencing data were identified. The GD/P2S dataset contains reads that are identical to SARS-CoV-2, suggesting either the coexistence of two SARS-CoV-2-like viruses in the same pangolin or contamination by the human virus".

      Penting bagi penulis untuk menambahkan informasi kebaharuan dan status riset dan temuan terbaru dari artikel yang dikutip. Semoga menjadi koreksi.

      Salam.

    1. More news organizations will realize they are in the business of impact, not eyeballs

      https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/12/more-news-organizations-will-realize-they-are-in-the-business-of-impact-not-eyeballs/

      Journalistic outlets should be in the business of creating impact and not scrounging merely for eyeballs and exposure.

      Exposure may be useful for advertising revenue with respect to surveillance capitalism, but if you're not informing along the way, not making a measurable impact, then you're not living, not making a change.

  13. Dec 2022
    1. The myth that this was caused by Craigslist or Google drives me bonkers. Throughout the 80s and 90s, private equity firms and hedge funds gobbled up local news enterprises to extract their real estate. They didn’t give a shit about journalism; they just wanted prime real estate that they could develop. And news organizations had it in the form of buildings in the middle of town. So financiers squeezed the news orgs until there was no money to be squeezed and then they hung them out to dry. There was no configuration in which local news was going to survive, no magical upwards trajectory of revenue based on advertising alone. If it weren’t for Craigslist and Google, the financiers would’ve squeezed these enterprises for a few more years, but the end state was always failure.

      danah boyd posits that journalism in the United States didn't fail as the result of Craigslist or Google, but because of hedge funds and investors acquiring them to strip out their valuable real estate.

  14. Nov 2022
    1. The Twitter blue check, for all the hate I have given Twitter over the years, is a public good. It is good, in my view, that when you read a news article or view a post, you can know with confidence it’s the journalist at that institution. It doesn’t mean they’re 100 percent right or 100 percent ethical, but it does mean that’s a person who is in some way constrained by journalism ethics.

      Twitter Blue Check as a public good

      There was some verification process behind the pre-Musk blue check, and that was of benefit to those reading and evaluating the veracity of the information. Later, Davidson points out that "journalism had outsourced that whole process...to whoever happened to work at Twitter."

    1. Ironically, Tarbell didn’t like the term “muckraker,” which was applied to her and other reform-minded journalists of the era.

      I feel like she didn't like this because it had a negative connotation. However, muckrakers were doing good, in my opinion.

    1. Science and journalism are not alien cultures, for all that they can sometimes seem that way. They are built on the same foundation — the belief that conclusions require evidence; that the evidence should be open to everyone; and that everything is subject to question. Both groups are comprised of professional sceptics. And whether it's directed towards an experiment or a breaking news story, each can appreciate the other's critical eye.
  15. Oct 2022
    1. Not surprisingly, foes of the yellow press were more eager to disparage than define. Thus were the yellow journals accused of such malevolent effects as "corrupting the young and debauching the old, championing vice and lewdness, and defying respectability and decency."39 The practice of yellow journalism was likened, moreover, to a "contest of madmen for the primacy of the sewer."40

      yellow journalism in this manner did not have good effects. It was spreading misinformation to audiences.

    1. The Journal gloated about its extravagant spending on newsgathering. Not atypical was this claim, in which the Journal disparaged its rivals, notably the New York Sun: "The reason the old journalism doesn't like the Journal is that the Journal gets the news, no matter what it costs. The Sun and its kind cannot afford to spend money since the Journal has taken their readers away from them, and the probability is they would not do so if they could afford it. They are still living in the Silurian age."16

      This is what yellow journalism was- getting the information they needed at whatever cost, eve if it meant making up some facts in order to attract readers.

    1. The overrepresentation of AfricanAmericans as poor, in and of itself, has been found to undermine support forantipoverty initiatives by activating racist and classist stereotypes about lazi-ness and lack of motivation among African Americans and people experiencingpoverty (see also Chapter 6).15
  16. Aug 2022
    1. We might learn something new, if we understood both sides.

      Allosso is using "both sides" in a broadly journalistic fashion the way it had traditionally meant in the mid to late 21st century until Donald J. Trump's overtly racist comment on Aug. 15, 2017 "you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides." following the Charlottesville, VA protests.

      Perhaps it might be useful if people quit using the "both sides" as if there were only two perspectives on an issue (for or against), when in reality there is often a spectrum of thoughts and feelings, not all mutually exclusive, about issues?

  17. Jul 2022
  18. May 2022
    1. https://www.niemanlab.org/2022/05/reader-comments-on-news-sites-we-want-to-hear-what-your-publication-does/

      I'm curious if any publications have experimented with the W3C webmention spec for notifications as a means of handling comments? Coming out of the IndieWeb movement, Webmention allows people to post replies to online stories on their own websites (potentially where they're less like to spew bile and hatred in public) and send notifications to the article that they've mentioned them. The receiving web page (an article, for example) can then choose to show all or even a portion of the response in the page's comments section). Other types of interaction beyond comments can also be supported here including receiving "likes", "bookmarks", "reads" (indicating that someone actually read the article), etc. There are also tools like Brid.gy which bootstrap Webmention onto social media sites like Twitter to make them send notifications to an article which might have been mentioned in social spaces. I've seen many personal sites supporting this and one or two small publications supporting it, but I'm as yet unaware of larger newspapers or magazines doing so.

    2. The Seattle Times turns off comments on “stories that are of a sensitive nature,” said Michelle Matassa Flores, executive editor of The Seattle Times. “People can’t behave on any story that has to do with race.” Comments are turned off on stories about race, immigration, and crime, for instance.

      The Seattle Times turns off comments on stories about race, immigration, and crime because as their executive editor Michelle Matassa Flores says, "People can't behave on any story that has to do with race."

    3. One of Nieman Lab’s most-read stories ever is “What happened after 7 news sites got rid of reader comments,” published in 2015.
    1. What did Franklin himself think about abortions? In 1728 during his early years as a printer, he generated controversy over something he would end up doing himself. According to “Benjamin Franklin: An American Life” by Walter Isaacson, he “manufactured” an abortion debate, largely because he wanted to crush a rival, but his own opinions may not have been too strong about it. Franklin wrote a series of anonymous letters for another paper to draw attention away from Samuel Keimer’s paper: The first two pieces were attacks on poor Keimer, who was serializing entries from an encyclopedia. His initial installment included, innocently enough, an entry on abortion. Franklin pounced. Using the pen names “Martha Careful” and “Celia Shortface,” he wrote letters to Bradford’s paper feigning shock and indignation at Keimer’s offense. As Miss Careful threatened, “If he proceeds farther to expose the secrets of our sex in that audacious manner [women would] run the hazard of taking him by the beard in the next place we meet him.” Thus Franklin manufactured the first recorded abortion debate in America, not because he had any strong feelings on the issue, but because he knew it would help sell newspapers.

      Benjamin Franklin manufactured the first recorded abortion debate in America to help sell his newspapers and to crush a rival.

    1. The war in Ukraine will soon be three months old. Russia's forces are still well short of the minimum objectives set out by President Vladimir Putin and in many areas the front lines are beginning to look static.

      They just don't care to reference these goals anywhere - just throwing it out there doesn't make it true.

  19. Apr 2022
    1. The historian in me always wants to look back at how this sort of media control has played out historically, so thinking about examples like William Randolph Hearst, Henry Luce, David Sarnoff, Axel Springer, Kerry Packer, or Rupert Murdoch across newspapers, radio, television, etc. might be interesting. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_proprietor

      Tim Wu's The Master Switch is pretty accessible in this area.


      On the intercultural front, the language (very careful public relations and "corporate speak") used in this leaked audio file of the most recent Twitter All Hands phone call might be fascinating and an interesting primary source for some of the questions you might be looking at on such an assignment. https://peertube.dk/w/2q8cdKR1mTCW7RyMQhcBEx

      Who are the multiple audiences (acknowledged and unacknowledged) being addressed? (esp. as they address leaks of information in the call.)

    1. What social media platforms have done, though, thanks to their increasing market dominance and their emphasis on speed, is accelerate the decline of newspapers and other traditional news sources.

      So this is a different way social media has intervened in the constellation of issues here then right? So to combat this issue, we might take different steps.

    2. reinvigorate quality journalism, including local journalism

      Call to improve journalism.

    1. Ontario health officials are reporting 807 people in hospital with COVID-19 Thursday, including 166 patients in intensive care, as the provincial positivity rate continues to rise. Thursday’s hospitalizations case count marks an increase over the 778 reported on Wednesday. Of Thursday’s hospitalizations, 182 patients are unvaccinated and 495 are fully vaccinated. The vaccination status of the remaining patients is unknown.

      This is irresponsible journalism. It implies that vaccinated people are more than twice as likely as unvaccinated people to be hospitalized for COVID.

      This totally ignores the fact that more than 4 out of 5 Ontarians are vaccinated.

  20. Mar 2022
  21. Feb 2022
    1. Several years would pass, and a new editor-in-chief would ascend, before the paper eliminated the automatic race tags, in 1961, under pressure from readers who were sick of them.
    2. At that time, The Sun was still choosing to identify Black people by race in its coverage — and only Black people — placing the tag “Negro” after individual names, even though many other newspapers had long since stopped similar practices. When a Westminster minister and seminary professor asked the paper to discard “this discriminatory practice” in 1955, according to an article in The Afro-American, the editor-in-chief flat out refused, self-righteously declaring that “the Sunpapers will not be a party to such suppression” of fact and that “the matter of what it is now fashionable to call ‘pigmentation’ is important from both the white and the Negro point of view.”
    3. But the coverage, as our editorial page later noted in 2018, “deplored the inhumanity of the perpetrators without ever really acknowledging the humanity of the victims” or the community terrorized by their brutal deaths. The ire was directed at the “poor, white trash” killers, as Mencken put it; there was no empathy for — or even real interest in — the Black victims.
    1. For all its flaws and virtues, yellow journalism exerted a powerful influence in American journalism at the turn of the twentieth century. Yellow journalism was much decried but its salient features often were emulated. The genre was appealing and distinctive in its typography, in its lavish use of illustrations, in its aggressive newsgathering techniques.

      I think this particular paragraphs highlights that all though, yellow journalism can be flawed and problematic, it has greatly impacted American journalism.

    1. What actually caused the Maine to explode -- a Spanish mine or an accident in the ship's forward ammunition magazine -- is still a mystery. A Congressional investigation at the time was inconclusive, but that didn't stop the yellow reporting. The first story in Pulitzer's New York World carried a banner headline that left little doubt about who was responsible: ''Maine Explosion Caused by Bomb or Torpedo?'' The Journal published a diagram of what it called a secret ''infernal machine'' that struck the ship like a deadly torpedo -- apparently the figment of some journalist's imagination.

      This is a primary example of "yellow journalism". Having an eye catching headline, that includes details that are either exaggerated or non-existent, that could potentially and has caused a domino effect of issues and problems, because of that dramatization.

    1. Many factors altered this plight by the close of thecentury. Possibly most significant is that journalistsbegan to flex their muscle by the 1890s. Referred to as“yellow journalism,” this style of writing derived fromdubious motives. Most notably, “yellow journalism”was magnified by the newspaper circulation battlebetween two publishers, William Randolph Hearstand Joseph Pulitzer. Graphic illustrations commis-sioned from some of the country’s most talentedartists and stories written by premiere authors andjournalists of the day exaggerated the plight of Cubansunder Spanish rule in the early 1890s and fanned theflames of war

      It's interesting to see how far back exaggeration in the media has been a relevant thing. Today we have different social media sites, blogs, and podcasts, etc. that modernly display "yellow journalism", and that's just something that I thought wasn't a thing during the 1800s and 1900s.

    1. Most writing is chasing clout, rather than insight

      As the result of online business models and SEO, most writing becomes about chasing clout and audience eyeballs rather than providing thought provoking insight and razor sharp analysis. The audience reaction has weakened with the anger reaction machines like Twitter.

      We need better business models that aren't built on hype.

    1. Founded in partnership with a team of entrepreneurial journalists who believe in a better model to create excellent content while narrowing the synapse between elite creators and their audiences.

      http://puck.news/who-is-puck/

      Another platform play of journalists banding together to find a niche space of readers.

    1. https://puck.news/

      Along with the proliferation of newsletters and paid journalism spaces, is this another in the litany of sites that do news analysis while chasing eyeballs? Is it following in the tradition of the move from hard news (or tiny amounts of it) to loud news analysis a la Fox News?

      Will we see the volume and partisanship increase in this newsletter/paywall space over the next decade until the next thing arrives?

    1. Aligning editorial mission and business model is critical.

      One of the most complex questions in journalism in the past decade or more is how can one best align editorial mission with the business model? This is particularly difficult because the traditional business model(s) have been shifting in the move to online.

    2. The old j-school saying is, “If you mother says she loves you, check it out.
    1. Nonfiction Techniques Spring 2022

      Caveat emptor. A lot of these "influencer" methods are leaving 30% or far more of their value with the platforms they're using for distribution. A better path is to build and promote your own platform and have a direct relationship with one's readers (in newsletter spaces, it's about "owning"/having your reader's email address). Some other newsletter options can be found here: https://indieweb.org/newsletter as well as methods for building and owning your own technology stack across its site. If nothing else, consider having a website where you can have a portfolio/archive of your work.

      Careful watchers of the newsletter space will notice that almost all of the highlight examples on these services are established big names with pre-existing platforms and audience. Where are the stories of the other 99.9% and how well they're doing? Who is actually making a full time living doing this without a significant leg up to start? As examples, look for major writers leaving the New York Times to set up newsletters, or people like Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg leaving The National Review to set up The Dispatch (as a newsletter platform)—it's a good bet that they're getting a better deal from Substack than the average person. The NiemanLab has some relatively good coverage of some of this space. (Their annual predictions series also has solid forward looking coverage of the journalism/technology space: https://www.niemanlab.org/collection/predictions-2022/.)

      (Apologies for lurking... 😅, but happy to chat technology/publishing with anyone interested.)

  22. Jan 2022
    1. https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1477714767854850049.html

      original thread: https://twitter.com/garwboy/status/1478003120483577859?s=20

      This takes a part Johann Hari's Guardian article Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen, but it does so mostly from a story/narrative perspective. Burnett is taking the story as a science article (it was labeled "psychology") when it's really more of a personal experience story with some nods to science.

      Sadly the story works more on the emotional side than the scientific side. It would be nice to have a more straightforward review of some of the actual science literature with some of the pros/cons laid out to make a better decision.

    1. Cons: terrible for traveling and intimidating for interview subjects. The larger the pad, the more reserved interviewees will be.

      Experience shows that the larger the note taking pad, the less forthcoming a potential interviewee will be.


      Is this a cultural thing? Is it related to attorneys using large legal pads for taking notes versus journalists using longer, thinner, and smaller notebooks?

      Is there evidence of this in journalistic contexts?

    1. IF YOU SEE SOMETHING, SAY SOMETHING You can write richard@theankler.com, with end-to-end encryption on whatsapp and Signal (messages me for the number), or on gchat at richardrushfield

      If you see something, say something is a lot over-the-top for a Hollywood rag.

  23. Dec 2021
  24. Nov 2021
    1. https://thedispatch.com/p/a-note-to-our-readers-from-steve

      Center-right journalists Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg of The Dispatch have severed ties with Fox News over a misinformation campaign from Tucker Carlson based on the January 6 events.

      Kudos to them for drawing a line on this issue.

    1. Reporter John Dickerson talking about his notebook.

      While he doesn't mention it, he's capturing the spirit of the commonplace book and the zettelkasten.

      [...] I see my job as basically helping people see and to grab ahold of what's going on.

      You can decide to do that the minute you sit down to start writing or you can just do it all the time. And by the time you get to writing you have a notebook full of stuff that can be used.

      And it's not just about the thing you're writing about at that moment or the question you're going to ask that has to do with that week's event on Face the Nation on Sunday.

      If you've been collecting all week long and wondering why a thing happens or making an observation about something and using that as a piece of color to explain the political process to somebody, then you've been doing your work before you ever sat down to do your work.

      <div style="padding:56.25% 0 0 0;position:relative;"><iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/169725470?h=778a09c06f&title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe></div><script src="https://player.vimeo.com/api/player.js"></script>

      Field Notes: Reporter's Notebook from Coudal Partners on Vimeo.

    1. Necessarily, a lot of important details are therefore excluded. But for some, this is now the only way they dare to speak out at all.

      Some may deride journalists for these sorts of grants of immunity, but based on her background I'll completely give Anne Applebaum a flier on this even though I'm also sure The Atlantic will have done additional editorial due diligence.

    1. What if it isn't news, but infotainment. I'll bet that most of these shows are talking heads doing analysis. They're really well paid bloggers talking about the days news.

  25. Oct 2021
    1. journalism historian David Mindich

      The View from Somewhere

      Hallin’s spheres

      At 11 minutes into this podcast episode, David Mindich provides an overview of Hallin’s spheres.

      Hallin divides the world of political discourse into three concentric spheres: consensus, legitimate controversy, and deviance. In the sphere of consensus, journalists assume everyone agrees. The sphere of legitimate controversy includes the standard political debates, and journalists are expected to remain neutral. The sphere of deviance falls outside the bounds of legitimate debate, and journalists can ignore it. These boundaries shift, as public opinion shifts.

      Wikipedia: Hallin's spheres

      I learned about this podcast from Sandy and Nora in their episode, Canada’s democratic deficit.

    1. three concentric spheres: consensus, legitimate controversy, and deviance

      Hallin’s spheres

      Hallin divides the world of political discourse into three concentric spheres: consensus, legitimate controversy, and deviance. In the sphere of consensus, journalists assume everyone agrees. The sphere of legitimate controversy includes the standard political debates, and journalists are expected to remain neutral. The sphere of deviance falls outside the bounds of legitimate debate, and journalists can ignore it. These boundaries shift, as public opinion shifts.

    1. The podcast focuses on the troubled history of “objectivity” and how it has been used to gatekeep and exclude people of color, queer and trans people, and people organizing for their labor rights and communities.

      I learned about this podcast through Sandy and Nora.

    1. Before starting its phased return to normal in July, the U.K. put in several months of planning, but the Korean government only embraced the idea last month and seems to lack any coherent plan.

      What sort of 'coherent plan' is necessary?

  26. Sep 2021
    1. The result is a job that feels more durable, and sustainable, than any other employment I’ve had. In the past, to lose my job might require only a bad quarter in the ad market, the loss of an ally in upper management, or the takeover of my company by some indifferent telecom company. Today, I can really only lose my job if thousands of people decide independently to “fire” me.
  27. Aug 2021
    1. The First Amendment precludes lawmakers from forcing platforms to take down many kinds of dangerous user speech, including medical and political misinformation.

      Compare social media with the newspaper business from this perspective.

      People joined social media not knowing the end effects, but now don't have a choice of platform after-the-fact. Social platforms accelerate the disinformation using algorithms.

      Because there is choice amongst newspapers, people can easily move and if they'd subscribed to a racist fringe newspaper, they could easily end their subscription and go somewhere else. This is patently not the case for any social media. There's a high hidden personal cost for connectivity that isn't taken into account. The government needs to regulate this and not the speech portion.

      Social media should be considered a common carrier and considered as such. It was an easier and more logical process in the telephone, electricity and other areas to force this as the cost of implementation for them was magnitudes of order higher. The data formats and storage for social should be standardized (potentially even in three or more formats) and that should be the common carrier imposed. Would this properly skirt the First Amendment issues?

  28. Jul 2021
    1. Which makes them similar to “commonplace”: reusable in many places. But this connotation has led to a pejorative flavor of the German translation “Gemeinplatz” which means platitude. That’s why I prefer to call them ‘evergreen’ notes, although I am not sure if I am using this differentiation correctly.

      I've only run across the German "Gemeinplatz" a few times with this translation attached. Sad to think that this negative connotation has apparently taken hold. Even in English the word commonplace can have a somewhat negative connotation as well meaning "everyday, ordinary, unexceptional" when the point of commonplacing notes is specifically because they are surprising or extraordinary by definition.

      Your phrasing of "evergreen notes" seems close enough. I've seen some who might call the shorter notes you're making either "seedlings" or "budding" notes. Some may wait for bigger expansions of their ideas into 500-2000 word essays before they consider them "evergreen" notes. (Compare: https://maggieappleton.com/garden-history and https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Evergreen_notes). Of course this does vary quite a bit from person to person in my experience, so your phrasing certainly fits.

      I've not seen it crop up in the digital gardens or zettelkasten circles specifically but the word "evergreen" is used in the journalism space) to describe a fully formed article that can be re-used wholesale on a recurring basis. Usually they're related to recurring festivals, holidays, or cyclical stories like "How to cook the perfect Turkey" which might get recycled a week before Thanksgiving every year.

    1. I've been away from my local news sources for too long apparently.

      Sad to see this one go. Perhaps there's some potential synergies to be had with other local papers and online outlets? Perhaps the staff and ideology of the Alhambra Source could be folded into something else local?

      Thoughts Wafic?

    1. It would be interesting to see what the “top news stories” looked like if you could only gather them every three months.

      I have always appreciated this sort of journalism myself. Less worry about the Fear of Missing Out, or the kneejerk reactions to the news of the day. It also gives you more perspective. CNN and Fox News breaking news underline the fact that they often don't have many facts and the rest is simply dead air.

  29. May 2021
    1. Modeled after the investigation into the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the legislation would establish an independent, 10-member commission that would make recommendations by the end of the year for securing the Capitol and preventing another insurrection.

      They are really desperate to paint this as an actual insurrection.

    1. Their care for the communities and the journalists and creators that serve them is not isolated to the people who are explicitly paid to care about such things. That sense of service permeates the whole company. Seeing that has been a unique experience.

      Care for the communities? Really?! I'm not so sure here...

      However, we’re not moving fast enough.

      I'm also a bit reticent about the We're not moving fast enough part. Sure we need to help out journalists, but usually moving fast in the social space has been a disservice to the user.

    1. This looks interesting, but not quite sure where they may be going. Looks like a company that Twitter has bought out.

  30. Apr 2021
    1. Despite mounting pressure from lawmakers and civil society organisations, Denmark is determined to push ahead with efforts to return refugees to war-torn Syria as it claims conditions in parts of the country have improved.

      I thought Reuters was supposed to be a neutral source?

    1. This looks fascinating. I'm not so much interested in the coding/programming part as I am the actual "working in public" portions as they relate to writing, thinking, blogging in the open and sharing that as part of my own learning and growth as well as for sharing that with a broader personal learning network. I'm curious what lessons might be learned within this frame or how educators and journalists might benefit from it.

    1. A tool targeted at journalists that appears to be a silo-based app for backing up/archiving articles on the web as well as providing analytics, newsletter/email functionalities, and other options.

  31. Mar 2021
    1. The United States has no real answer to these challenges, and no wonder: We don’t have an internet based on our democratic values of openness, accountability, and respect for human rights. An online system controlled by a tiny number of secretive companies in Silicon Valley is not democratic but rather oligopolistic, even oligarchic.

      Again, a piece that nudges me to thing that a local-based IndieWeb provider/solution would be a good one. Either co-op based, journalism-based, or library-based.

    1. Paywall success stories are a mix of specialized news, often catering to the ultrawealthy (WSJ), superstar news orgs focused on specific national and international news (NYT) or news with billionaire backstops (WP). The civic function of news is not met by any of these models. But reader-supported, open access news, like Canadaland and The Halifax Examiner are filling in the gaps. The co-op model is a most welcome adjunct to these success stories.

      List of business models for news.

    2. A news co-op is a news organization owned by its readers, whose membership fees pay for open access journalism – no paywall – usually organized as nonprofits (an IRS rule-change lets for-profit newspaper convert to nonprofits).

      I'm sort of wishing that we could also have social media co-ops. I suspect that there are a few on Mastodon that operate like this, but it would be interesting to see some focused around in-person communities as well.

      Why couldn't my local library run a town/city-based social media co-op?

      For this matter, why couldn't my local news co-op also run it's own social media platform?

    1. Q: Can I access my personal comment history? A: No, there will not be a way to access archived comments.

      In this instance, it's similar to a site death taking one's data off-line. This is a good reason to post one's comments on their own site first.

    2. Q: So, this means you don’t value hearing from readers?A: Not at all. We engage with readers every day, and we are constantly looking for ways to hear and share the diversity of voices across New Jersey. We have built strong communities on social platforms, and readers inform our journalism daily through letters to the editor. We encourage readers to reach out to us, and our contact information is available on this How To Reach Us page.

      We have built strong communities on social platforms

      They have? Really?! I think it's more likely the social platforms have built strong communities which happen to be talking about and sharing the papers content. The paper doesn't have any content moderation or control capabilities on any of these platforms.

      Now it may be the case that there are a broader diversity of voices on those platforms over their own comments sections. This means that a small proportion of potential trolls won't drown out the signal over the noise as may happen in their comments sections online.

      If the paper is really listening on the other platforms, how are they doing it? Isn't reading some or all of it a large portion of content moderation? How do they get notifications of people mentioning them (is it only direct @mentions)?

      Couldn't/wouldn't an IndieWeb version of this help them or work better.

    3. <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>Inquirer.com</span> in Why we’re removing comments on most of Inquirer.com (<time class='dt-published'>03/18/2021 19:32:19</time>)</cite></small>

    1. Many news organizations have made the decision to eliminate or restrict comments in recent years, from National Public Radio, to The Atlantic, to NJ.com, which did a nice job of explaining the decision when comments were removed from its site.

      A list of journalistic outlets that have removed comments from their websites.

    2. Experience has shown that anything short of 24-hour vigilance on all stories is insufficient.
    3. Racism has been a persistent presence in Inquirer comments. The Inquirer is committed to making the changes required to be an actively anti-racist news organization. Removing comments is a step in the right direction, with many more to come.
    4. Commenting on Inquirer.com was long ago hijacked by a small group of trolls who traffic in racism, misogyny, and homophobia. This group comprises a tiny fraction of the Inquirer.com audience. But its impact is disproportionate and enduring.
    1. The riot saw five people including a police officer killed and shook the foundations of American democracy. The head of the Capitol police force later resigned.

      "Killed" is a completely inappropriate word; even if we accept that Officer Sicknick was "killed" (very debatable), three of the civilians who died perished of health related problems. This is clearly bad journalism.

  32. Feb 2021
    1. A fifth night of peaceful protests to denounce the imprisonment of a Spanish rap artist once more devolved into clashes between police and the members of fringe groups who set up street barricades and smashed storefront windows Saturday night in downtown Barcelona.

      Peaceful protests devolve into violence -- does this even really make them peaceful? Bizarre, lol.

    1. You cannot measure the health of journalism simply by looking at the number of editors and reporters on the payroll of newspapers. There are undoubtedly going to be fewer of them. The question is whether that loss is going to be offset by the tremendous increase in textual productivity we get from a connected web. Presuming, of course, that we don’t replace that web with glass boxes.

      The value of journalism must take account of the increase in textual productivity gained by the interconnected Internet and not solely by the number of editors, reporters, and size or number of newspapers.

      Of course we also need to account for the signal to noise ratio created by the masses of people who can say anything they like, which can also be compounded by the algorithmic feed of social platforms that give preference to the extremes and content that increases engagement (a measure which doesn't take into account the intrinsic value of the things which are shared.)

      How can we measure and prefer the content with more intrinsic value? Similar to the idea of fast food and healthier food? How can we help people to know the difference between the types of information they're consuming.

    2. When your digital news feed doesn’t contain links, when it cannot be linked to, when it can’t be indexed, when you can’t copy a paragraph and paste it into another application: when this happens your news feed is not flawed or backwards looking or frustrating. It is broken.

      If your news feed doesn't contain links, can't be linked to, indexed, or copied and pasted, it is broken.

      How can this be tied into the five R's of Open Education Resources: Retain, Reuse, Revise, Remix and/or Redistribute content (and perhaps my Revise/Request update ideas: https://boffosocko.com/2018/08/30/the-sixth-r-of-open-educational-resources-oer/)

    1. A fairly comprehensive list of problems and limitations that are often encountered with data as well as suggestions about who should be responsible for fixing them (from a journalistic perspective).

    2. More journalistic outlets should be publishing data explainers about where their data and analysis come from so that readers can double check it.

    1. “Media companies were investing a huge amount of time, money, and effort in building out these huge audiences on social media…but at the end of the day, they’re renting those audiences from social media [companies], as opposed to owning those relationships,” Donoghue said.

      Media companies are spending huge amounts of time investing in social media, but they're also simultaneously renting their audiences back.

      Who rents a $350/month apartment and then spends $5,000 a month sprucing it up?

    1. But it shows, he said, how underhanded internet campaigns try to launder seemingly legitimate material like Mr. Vermulst’s article through a mesh of websites and fake social media accounts to give it an air of impartiality and authenticity.

      What are they even arguing? It sounds even like they are saying that Mr. Vermulst's "legitimate" article is being used to give a company an 'air of impartiality and authenticity,' and... this is somehow wrong?

      If the article is illegitimate, what is the wrong..? It's entirely separate from the fact that there apparently exists a network of bots that intends to share it.

  33. Jan 2021
    1. The same groups – including members of the popular “alt-right” Reddit forum The_Donald – used techniques that are used by reputation management firms and marketers to push their companies up Google’s search results, to ensure pro-Trump imagery and articles ranked highly.

      Obvious lie easily prevented through research -- the Donald is not Alt Right.

    1. Supporters of former President Donald Trump breached the Capitol building on January 6 and attempted to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden's electoral win, believing that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

      This cannot be representative of all of the supporters who charged in at all. Not good journalism.

    1. Journalists should also be wary of publishing raw audio leaked from Zoom meetings, particularly if the source is not sure whether audio watermarking was enabled or not.
    1. Being first may have benefits in the race for traffic and clicks. But I'm not so sure it really adds value to society. As we've seen over and over again, the quick take -- or the "hot take" -- often gets key things wrong.
    1. But brand safety requires us to do two things: 1.) keep our ads away from hate speech and 2.) fund our news ecosystem. When you know your vendors are failing at both, can you afford to look away?
  34. Dec 2020
    1. By then, according to his recent confessions, Little had already killed more than a dozen women.

      The visual story played out below (in a desktop browser) with the piling up of the newspaper articles/headlines is very clever and powerful at the same time. I really like this storytelling device.

  35. Nov 2020
    1. Dr. Tufekci’s new cause is ventilation; her vehicle is The Atlantic, which gave her a contract after she had contributed to The Times as a freelancer for many years. Ironically, just as the Times opinion department was tearing itself apart over the charge that amplifying a senator’s views could endanger protesters, the one writer who had certainly saved lives slipped out a side door.

      Good on Ben for writing about the writer that the New York Times let get away... her writing is incredibly important and we need both more of it and more like her.

    2. Politicians and the news media often expect looting and crime when disaster strikes, as they did when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005. But the reality on the ground has more to do with communal acts of generosity and kindness, she believes.

      The media get many of these sorts of frequently happening broad stories wrong so often that "On the Media" has an entire series about them: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/projects/breaking-news-consumers-handbook

    1. And because we know many different types of audiences—including those we don’t know about!—will be interested in our work, we encourage you to freely republish our work under the terms of our Creative Commons license. 

      Cool to see a journalistic enterprise publishing under a Creative Commons license.

      Also sort of fun to see a tiny bit of a Kicks Condor design ethic baked into their website. Naturally it's a tad bit more buttoned up, but that's to be expected I suppose.

    1. Becca Monteleone, a professor of disability studies at the University of Toledo. Monteleone says, historically, when people have written about individuals with intellectual and development disabilities, they’ve been “writing about rather than for or with.”

      And isn't this how we should be writing about most?

    1. Our advice to the press: Don’t seek professional safety through the even-handed, unfiltered presentation of opposing views. Which politician is telling the truth? Who is taking hostages, at what risks and to what ends?
    1. A few years ago, there was a boom of articles called “If it happened there,” imagining how the American press would cover this-or-that story if it happened in another country. How would we cover the government shutdown if it happened in another country? The Ferguson protests? The Oregon militia siege? George Floyd’s murder? Mike Bloomberg? Slate’s Joshua Keating popularized the form, but other outlets, including Vox, deployed it. The intent was to use the tropes of foreign coverage to create a sense of what the literary critic Darko Suvin called “cognitive estrangement” — severing us from the familiarity and overconfidence that can dull our awareness of extraordinary events.

      this is an interesting thought experiment

  36. Oct 2020
    1. They should see comments as part of that process. It’s not the product that matters, it’s the participation.

      Of course, reading this a decade+ along after the boom of social media, we'll now realize that it's even more than the participation. Part of it should also be where that participation occurs.

    1. Golwg360 will feature a rolling news service and will give businesses, public bodies and individuals the chance to set up their own micro-sites.

      This sounds a bit like the model that Greg McVerry and I have proposed for IndieWeb crossing with public libraries, and newspapers/journalism.

    1. However, a healthy news ecosystem doesn’t just require a thriving free press, it also needs a diversity of curators, newsletters and content discovery options that enable the weird and wonderful to surface. We want to use Nuzzel as a test kitchen to see what models works for curators as well as content creators. The simple goal is a sustainable open web where the goals of creators, curators and consumers are aligned around the best possible experience.

      This sounds exciting to me and could dovetail with efforts of many with respect to IndieWeb for Journalism.

    1. Republishing guidelines

      There was some conversation earlier today in the IndieWeb chat about comment policies, but this page presents an interesting case of repost policies.

      Is anyone doing this on their personal websites?

    1. 2019 is the year when publishers — whether big ones like Axios or the Los Angeles Times or tiny ones like mine or Judd Legum’s Popular Information — move away from letting someone else call all the shots. Or, at least, they should.

      There's already some work and movement in the IndieWeb with respect to journalism.

    1. I just wrote a long, considered, friendly, and I hope helpful comment here but -- sorry, I have to see the irony in this once again -- your system wouldn't let me say anything longer tahn 1,500 characters. If you want more intelligent conversations, you might want to expand past soundbite.

      In 2008, even before Twitter had become a thing at 180 characters, here's a great reason that people should be posting their commentary on their own blogs.

      This example from 2008 is particularly rich as you'll find examples on this page of Derek Powazek and Jeff Jarvis posting comments with links to much richer content and commentary on their own websites.

      We're a decade+ on and we still haven't managed to improve on this problem. In fact, we may have actually made it worse.

      I'd love to see On the Media revisit this idea. (Of course their site doesn't have comments at all anymore either.)

    1. But note well, my friend, that all of these people are speaking to you with intelligence, experience, generosity, and civility. You know what’s missing? Two things: First, the sort of nasty comments your own piece decries. And second: You.

      Important!

    1. It just makes sense that news outlets and libraries collaborate. That’s something we at the News Co/Lab have believed from the beginning, and it’s something we’ve seen work very well in our partnerships

      Perhaps this is a good incubator for the idea Greg McVerry and I have been contemplating in which these institutions help to provide some of the help and infrastructure for the future of IndieWeb.

    1. “Using Twitter to bypass traditional media and directly reach voters is definitely a good thing,” Newt Gingrich said, in 2009.

      Is this because it makes it easier for misdirection and outright lies to reach an audience without being checked and verified? Very likely.

    1. Regular readers of Gillmor's eJournal will recognize his commitment to user participation. "One of the things I'm sure about in journalism right now is that my readers know more than I do," he says. "To the extent that I can take advantage of that in a way that does something for everyone involved ó that strikes me as pretty cool." One fascinating aspect of Gillmor's Weblog is how he lifts the veil from the workings of the journalism profession. "There have been occasions where I put up a note saying, 'I'm working on the following and here's what I think I know,' and the invitation is for the reader to either tell me I'm on the right track, I'm wrong, or at the very least help me find the missing pieces," he says. "That's a pretty interesting thing. Many thousands more people read my column in the newspaper than online, but I do hear back from a fair number of people from the Weblog."

      Awesomely, this sounds almost exactly like something that David Fahrenthold would tell Jay Rosen about Twitter nearly 16 years later in an interview in The Correspondent.

      https://boffosocko.com/2017/11/27/pull-up-a-chair-1-jay-rosen-david-fahrenthold-the-correspondent/

    1. I take your point, but I wonder if Trump is just kryptonite for a liberal democratic system built on a free press.

      The key words being "free press" with free meaning that we're free to exert intelligent editorial control.

      Editors in the early 1900's used this sort of editorial control not to give fuel to racists and Nazis and reduce their influence.Cross reference: Face the Racist Nation from On the Media.

      Apparently we need to exert the same editorial control with respect to Trump, who not incidentally is giving significant fuel to the racist fire as well.

    1. you can then use “Sign In with Google” to access the publisher’s products, but Google does the billing, keeps your payment method secure, and makes it easy for you to manage your subscriptions all in one place.  

      I immediately wonder who owns my related subscription data? Is the publisher only seeing me as a lumped Google proxy or do they get may name, email address, credit card information, and other details?

      How will publishers be able (or not) to contact me? What effect will this have on potential customer retention?

    1. Online media, despite being so different from traditional printed media, is still trying to maximize its potential audience, and in order to do that, going for quantity over quality.
    1. Tufekci argued that, in the 21st century, a surfeit of information, rather than its absence, poses the biggest problem. “When I was growing up in Turkey, the way censorship occurred was there was one TV channel and they wouldn’t show you stuff. That was it,” she said. “Currently, in my conceptualization, the way censorship occurs is by information glut. It’s not that the relevant information isn’t out there. But it is buried in so much information of suspect credibility that it doesn’t mean anything.”
    1. “If we can differentiate those platform experiences in the right way, we can start to craft content experiences that are maybe built for the same person, but they’re in a different mindset depending on the platform they’re on,” the company’s president told Digiday.

      This is a great "if" statement here, but it's completely missing the question of how doing these things benefits the bottom line of the publication.

    2. Even publishers with the most social media-savvy newsrooms can feel at a disadvantage when Facebook rolls out a new product.

      The same goes in triplicate when they pull the plug without notice too!

    3. A common complaint we heard from publishers at all levels is that it’s difficult to build partnerships with social media platforms. They seem to be holding all the cards. Even large publishers often feel in the dark during meetings with large platform companies.

      I'm more curious why all the large media companies/publishers don't pool their resources to build a competing social platform that they own and control so the end value comes to them instead of VC-backed social silos?

    1. Some publishers are seeing a “Trump Bump” with subscriptions and donations rising post-election, and there is evidence of renewed efforts of both large and niche publishers to build audiences and revenue streams away from the intermediary platform businesses. However, it is too soon to tell if this represents a systemic change rather than a cyclical ripple.

      More likely a cyclical ripple, but one could hope...

    2. However, this is a distraction from the larger issue that the structure and the economics of social platforms incentivize the spread of low-quality content over high-quality material. Journalism with high civic value—journalism that investigates power, or reaches underserved and local communities—is discriminated against by a system that favors scale and shareability.
    3. Visit www.towcenter.org/pnp for the full report.
    1. But on the Web, stories of all kinds can show up anywhere and information and news are all mixed together. Light features rotate through prominent spots on the "page" with the same weight as breaking news, sports coverage, and investigative pieces, even on mainstream news sites. Advertorial "features" and opinion pieces are not always clearly identified in digitalspaces.

      This difference is one of the things I miss about reading a particular newspaper and experiencing the outlet's particular curation of their own stories.Perhaps I should spend more time looking at the "front page" of various news sites.

    1. That’s why it’s so important to us that we help you drive sustainable revenue and businesses.

      Compared to Facebook which just uses your content to drive you out of business like it did for Funny or Die. Reference: http://splitsider.com/2018/02/how-facebook-is-killing-comedy/

    2. People come to Google looking for information they can trust, and that information often comes from the reporting of journalists and news organizations around the world.

      Heavy hit in light of the Facebook data scandal this week on top of accusations about fake news spreading.

    1. The Digipo toolkit

      Perhaps I'm missing it, but is this not an open browser extension already? I'd love to have these pieces built as a WordPress or separate plugin. I've seen some of the pieces earlier today that look like they've been unbundled, but I'd love to have the rest...

    2. advanced query that does that: bipartisanreport.com -site:bipartisanreport.com

      a useful web search that isn't often utilized

    1. Actavis Pharma was acquired by Teva Pharmaceutical Industries in 2016, and a spokeswoman there said the company “cannot speak to any systems in place beforehand.”

      They bought out the company! Of course they can speak to systems in place beforehand! They're just choosing not to. The reporting here should make this clearer. Otherwise it should indicate exactly why they can't.

    1. The Twenty-Six Words that Created the Internet is Jeff Kosseff’s definitive history and analysis of the current fight over Section 230, the fight over who will be held responsible to forbid speech. In it, Kosseff explains how debate over intermediary liability, as this issue is called, stretches back to a 1950s court fight, Smith v. California, about whether an L.A. bookseller should have been responsible for knowing the content of every volume on his shelves.

      For me this is the probably the key idea. Facebook doesn't need to be responsible for everything that their users post, but when they cross the line into actively algorithmically promoting and pushing that content into their users' feeds for active consumption, then they do have a responsibility for that content.

      By analogy image the trusted local bookstore mentioned. If there are millions of books there and the user has choice when they walk in to make their selection in some logical manner. But if the bookseller has the secret ability to consistently walk up to children and put porn into their hands or actively herding them into the adult sections to force that exposure on them (and they have the ability to do it without anyone else realizing it), then that is the problem. Society at large would further think that this is even more reprehensible if they realized that local governments or political parties had the ability to pay the bookseller to do this activity.

      In case the reader isn't following the analogy, this is exactly what some social platforms like Facebook are allowing our politicans to do. They're taking payment from politicans to actively lie, tell untruths, and create fear in a highly targeted manner without the rest of society to see or hear those messages. Some of these sorts of messages are of the type that if they were picked up on an open microphone and broadcast outside of the private group they were intended for would have been a career ending event.

      Without this, then we're actively stifling conversation in the public sphere and actively empowering the fringes. This sort of active targeted fringecasting is preventing social cohesion, consensus, and comprimise and instead pulling us apart.

      Perhaps the answer for Facebook is to allow them to take the political ad money for these niche ads and then not just cast to the small niche audience, but to force them to broadcast them to everyone on the platform instead? Then we could all see who our politicians really are?