373 Matching Annotations
  1. Oct 2020
    1. Anyone can open up Twitter and instantly know what the world is gabbing about from minute to minute, all day long, across thousands of electronic sources that are instantly available all over the globe.

      But we don't get the journalistic criticism of the coverage, who's doing it better, who's more thorough, etc. We're still missing that.

    1. Among the many phenomena we’d tentatively attribute, in large part, to the trend: the rise of sharebait (nee clickbait) and the general BuzzFeedification of traditional media; the Internet hoax-industrial complex, which only seems to be growing stronger; and the utter lack of intelligent online discourse around any remotely complicated, controversial topic.

      sharebait BuzzFeedification Internet hoax-industrial complex

      Priceless!

    1. “Solutions journalism’ is another promising trend that answers some of the respondents’ sense of helplessness in the face of the barrage of crisis coverage.62
    2. Some (36%) said they agreed that the threat of “‘fake news’ had made them distrust the credibility of any news.” Almost half (45%) lacked confidence with discerning “real news” from “fake news,” and only 14% said they were “very confident” that they could detect “fake news.”

      These numbers are insane!

    3. YouTube (54%), Instagram (51%) or Snapchat (55%)

      I'm curious to know which sources in particular they're using on these platforms. Snapchat was growing news sources a year ago, but I've heard those sources are declining. What is the general quality of these sources?

      For example, getting news from television can range from PBS News Hour and cable news networks (more traditional sources) to comedy shows like Stephen Colbert and The Daily Show with Trevor Noah which have some underlying news in the comedy, but are far from traditional sources.

    1. He suggests that struggling sites like Salon begin broadening their content offerings by hosting user-created Weblogs, creating a sort of farm system for essayists. "Salon could highlight the best ones on page one and invest time and effort in the ones that are inspiring and exceptional."

      This is a rough sketch of something I've been thinking that newspapers and media outlets should have been doing all along. If they "owned" social media, we might all be in a better place socially and journalistic-ally than if advertising driven social media owned it all.

    2. media organizations would do well to incorporate them into their Web sites as an important new addition to the journalistic toolkit.
    1. We analyzed our Disqus data and we found that roughly 17,400 comments were made on our site in 2019, but 45% came from just 13 people. That data tells us that social media, email, phone calls, letters to the editor, our Crosscut events and an occasional visit to the newsroom are far better tools for us to hear about your concerns, story ideas, feedback and support.

      The Disqus data statistics here are fascinating. It also roughly means that those 13 people were responsible for 600+ comments on average or roughly 2 a day every day for the year. More likely it was a just a handful responsible for the largest portion and the others tailing off.

      Sadly missing are their data about social media, email, phone, and letters to the editor which would tell us more about how balanced their decision was. What were the totals for these and who were they? Were they as lopsided as the Disqus numbers?

    2. In the meantime, stay in touch with Crosscut by: Liking us on Facebook  Following us on Twitter  Following us on Instagram Chatting with us on Reddit Signing up for one (or all) of our newsletters 

      It seems like they've chose a solution for their community that boils down to pushing the problem(s) off onto large corporations that have shown no serious efforts at moderation either?

      Sweeping the problem under the rug doesn't seem like a good long term answer. Without aggregating their community's responses, are they really serving their readers? How is the community to know what it looks like? Where is it reflected?

      I wonder what a moderated IndieWeb solution for them might look like?

    1. Worse than the hackers are the competent journalists and site creators that are making legitimate content online, but get seduced by the SEO dark side into thinking they need to create content for Google instead of for their readers. It dumbs-down the content, which turns off your real audience, which ultimately makes you less valuable to advertisers. If you want to know why there’s so much remnant advertising on online news sites, it’s because you’re treating the stories like remnants already.
    1. We have to recognize that prior to Web 2.0 and social media, “the media” often connoted “mass media,” broadcast from the few to the many.

      One of the issues we're seeing is that mass media still exists within platforms like Facebook and Google, the problem is that the "gatekeepers" now have vastly different structure and motivation. The ostensible gatekeeper now is an algorithm that puts all it' emphasis on velocity, stickiness, shareability, and the power of anger (which pushes clicks, likes, and shares). Thus the edge content is distributed far and wide rather than the "richest" and most valuable content that a democracy relies on for survival. Mass media is still with us, we've just lost the value of the helmsperson controlling the direction of the rudder.

    1. we’re committing $300 million toward meeting these goals.

      I'm curious what their internal projections are for ROI?

    2. we drove 10 billion clicks a month to publishers’ websites for free.

      Really free? Or was this served against ads in search?

    1. Kinney’s team worked with Southern Vermont reporter Howard Weiss-Tisman on his social media presence and community engagement strategies to better reach his audience — and, in turn, increase donations.

      This does seem like a solid avenue to pursue and I've yet to see something like it myself in the wild. Having hosts make "asks" through social media directly could be highly invaluable as it adds an additional personal touch.

    1. Publishers of all sizes are trying to figure out how to leverage these new platforms as user behavior on each platform evolves. On top of all this, the platforms themselves are rapidly changing. It can often feel like no one is on steady ground.
    2. Legacy publishers need to leverage distributed content to grow their audience and survive this wave.

      Growing audience is certainly laudable, but this is an odd blanket statement which is going to need some significant supporting evidence for the how, why, and how will these legacy publishers benefit?

    3. Cheddar

      On April 30, 2019, Cheddar announced an agreement to be bought by the cable company Altice USA for $200 million in cash. Altice purchase Cheddar to bolster its news. When the deal closes, Jon Steinberg would become Altice News president overseeing Cheddar plus Altice USA's News 12 Networks and i24 News. --via Wikipedia) referencing The Hollywood Reporter

    4. It could mean working closely with a platform itself to beta test new products and features. Companies like CNN, The New York Times and The Washington Post have signed on as Facebook media partners and have collectively produced hundreds of Facebook Live broadcasts, for instance. Other brands such as The Wall Street Journal, Cosmopolitan, ESPN and more have teamed up with Snapchat to produce content for Snapchat Discover, Snapchat’s media portal.

      It's been almost 2 1/2 years since this was published. I'm curious if the group has revisited this white paper to evaluate how these methods have worked over time.

      Prima fascia evidence would indicate that most major publications that have gone all-in on some of these experiments have only lost out on them following the pivots that social silos have made since. A good example is the large number of publishers that went in on Facebook video related products only to have Facebook completely abandon them. It's not a partnership if the publication has no recourse when the social platform abandons them.

      I seem to recall that several online pubflishers were essentially forced to completely shutter following social platforms pivoting unexpectedly.

    1. The furore over Fake News is really about the seizures caused by overactivity in these synapses - confabulation and hallucination in the global brain of mutual media. With popularity always following a power law, runaway memetic outbreaks can become endemic, especially when the platform is doing what it can to accelerate them without any sense of their context or meaning.

      One might think that Facebook could easily analyze the things within their network that are getting above average reach and filter out or tamp down the network effects of the most damaging things which in the long run I suspect are going to damage their network overall.

    1.  recording it all in a Twitter thread that went viral and garnered the hashtag  #PlaneBae.

      I find it interesting that The Atlantic files this story with a URL that includes "/entertainment/" in it's path. Culture, certainly, but how are three seemingly random people's lives meant to be classified by such a journalistic source as "entertainment?"

    1. Chris Hayes, who anchors MSNBC’s 8 pm newscast and is among the most thoughtful, civic-minded journalists in the industry, referenced a Will Ferrell joke from Anchorman 2 on his podcast, saying, “What if instead of telling people the things they need to know, we tell them what they want to know?” That is, he says, “the creation story of cable news.”
    1. The lesson, again, and again: Unique voices supported by subscribers point a way forward.
    2. Check out the Times or the Post these days, though, and it is a different world. Stories of greatest import can sometimes stay atop phone screens for much of the day.

      And isn't this how it happened in print, which just didn't change because of the medium instead of editorial?

    1. Why can't there be more sites with solid commentary like this anymore? Do the existence of Twitter and Facebook mean whe can't have nice things anymore?

    1. Methodology To determine the link between heat and income in U.S. cities, NPR used NASA satellite imagery and U.S. Census American Community Survey data. An open-source computer program developed by NPR downloaded median household income data for census tracts in the 100 most populated American cities, as well as geographic boundaries for census tracts. NPR combined these data with TIGER/Line shapefiles of the cities.

      This is an excellent example of data journalism.

    1. The American Bible Society, t he American Sunday School Union, and the American Tract Society were all established in this period, and they each used the printing press to besiege the nation with Bibles, t racts, pictures, and picture cards t hat would help to create a strong, unified, J esus-centered national i dentity. A good tract “should be entertaining,” announced the American Tract Society in 1824. “ There must be something to allure the listless to read.”

      This is also the same sort of cultural movement to happen to journalism with Hard Copy in the early 1980's.

    2. As part of t he renewed effort t o promote uplift suasion, a group of f ree Blacks established the nation’s first Black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, with its headquarters i n New York City.

      first Black newspaper

    1. A fun thing to watch for on news sites is when a draft of an article is submitted with an initial slug and title. Later, the title is changed but the slug is left untouched. This can result in some fun situations where the headline of an article has been made more subtle - but the slug retains some fairly blunt language.
    1. The smartest outlets are starting to see themselves as a community of communities - which is the only way to effectively scale a community.

      This again makes me wonder if it wouldn't be a smarter idea to have social media built and maintained by news/journalistic organizations, part of whose goal is community.

    1. Alex Rushmer is a Cambridge-based chef, food writer and owner of the restaurant Vanderlyle. The original version of this article was published on his blog

      POSSE to newspaper!

      h/t Kevin Marks

    1. It wasn’t just that the headlines, free-floating, decontextualized motes of journalism ginned up to trigger reflexive mouse clicks, had displaced the stories. It was that the whole organizing structure of the newspaper, its epistemological architecture, had been junked. The news section (with its local, national, and international subsections), the sports section, the arts section, the living section, the opinion pages: they’d all been fed through a shredder, then thrown into a wind tunnel. What appeared on the screen was a jumble, high mixed with low, silly with smart, tragic with trivial. The cacophony of the RSS feed, it’s now clear, heralded a sea change in the distribution and consumption of information. The new order would be disorder.

      How can we design against this sort of disorder?

    2. Third, content collapse puts all types of information into direct competition. The various producers and providers of content, from journalists to influencers to politicians to propagandists, all need to tailor their content and its presentation to the algorithms that determine what people see. The algorithms don’t make formal or qualitative distinctions; they judge everything by the same criteria. And those criteria tend to promote oversimplification, emotionalism, tendentiousness, tribalism — the qualities that make a piece of information stand out, at least momentarily, from the screen’s blur.

      This is a terrifically painful and harmful thing. How can we redesign a system that doesn't function this way?

    1. One thing that using this tool has highlighted for me is that there are a lot of things happening in our community every day, between news, announcements, events and other stuff. If you only rely on what your social media service of choice has decided is worth knowing because it’s generating clicks or discussion, you’re likely to miss something important. Also, do you really want to get your news crammed in between cat videos and political rants from distant acquaintances?
    1. We need citizens to be equipped to navigate the world around us. Because good journalism is great for democracy but a citizenry equipped to meet the challenges of democracy is necessary for democracy.
    2. On the right — that’s what democracy looks like. At City Bureau we believe the future of journalism looks more like this. It’s made of networks, it’s collaborative, it practices radical transparency and it equips people to be makers.

      This chart is very reminiscent of a similar chart I saw just this morning that was looking at the differences between unicorns and zebras within an economic framing.

    1. This week, host Bob Garfield did a piece ostensibly about the problems newspaper sites have with website comments. Unfortunately it just came out sounding like another old journalist kvetching about how everyone on the net is an idiot. You can listen to the story here.

      Here's the new link to the audio: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/episodes/131068-july-25-2008

      Here's the link to a version of the site in August 2008 with the commentary, which makes a fascinating rabbit hole to go down: https://web.archive.org/web/20080907233914/http://www.onthemedia.org/episodes/2008/07/25/segments/104537

    1. In the last few months I actually came across Derek's side of the story and so I dug back into archives (literally archive.org) to find the original show and catch the blog post conversation around this controversy. I particularly recall Ira and Jeff Jarvis' conversations. Somehow I didn't see Kevin's portion of the conversation in the comments sections of the others, but I'm glad to have it pop up just a few weeks later to complete the circle.

      Of the group, Kevin, as usual, provides some of the best analysis, but he also adds in a huge amount of additional context by way of links.

      Society seems to have ripped itself open recently and I can't help but think that we're going to need some strong tummelers and heavy work to allow everyone to speak, be heard, and create some change. Kevin's piece here may be a good starting point.

      Perhaps this is the piece some of our mainstream media have been missing from a journalistic perspective? For too long they've acted as aggregators and filters, but perhaps they should be spending a larger portion of their time doing some tummeling work on our behalf?

    1. the event in Miami on Inauguration Day (site:www.sourcewatch.com OR site:www.factcheck.org OR site:hoax-slayer.com OR site:www.truthorfiction.com OR site:opensecrets.org OR site:www.politifact.com OR site:snopes.com OR site:www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/ OR site:digipo.io)

      just this piece makes this a powerful little tool!

    1. Update, 11:22 Eastern: Weiss has posted a letter of resignation addressed to Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger on her website. In it, she denounces the Times for fostering an atmosphere of stifling conformity and accuses her now-former colleagues of bullying:

      Having your own website is a must, particularly when you've just left one of the biggest platforms on the planet and still need to have a platform to reach your audience and the world.

    1. Today’s leading-edge content tools are integrated context, collaboration and insight machines. We’re moving from unidirectional publishing of articles to organizing all our work and closing the feedback loop with our customers. I call this “full-stack publishing”.

      This sounds a little bit like what the IndieWeb is building for itself!

  2. Sep 2020
    1. I’ve been thinking about that a lot, about how we can’t cover sports right now, or ever, as an individual and separate thing because sports are the gift we get for making our society as just and fair as possible. Right now, we’re seeing that multiplied a hundred times, because you have athletes who are feeling the urgency and have the power to come out and say what they believe politically. ESPN was saying just a few years ago that they wouldn’t cover politics at all. Now there’s no choice there. It’s been made really clear by the athletes, the people who play the sports, that they don’t want that distinction there themselves. So, who are we to decide that it must be imposed?

      Or cooking, members of the NYT Cooking Club cough or singing, members of Eric Whitacre's Virtual Choirs ...

  3. Aug 2020
    1. Published:

      Publicado seis meses después de recibido en editorial.

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  4. Jul 2020
  5. Jun 2020
    1. News can no longer be (only) about the mass update. Stories need to be targeted to those who might be able to improve the situation. And journalism’s products — which are more than its stories — must be designed to facilitate this. News needs to be built to engage curiosity about the world and the problems in it — and their solutions. People need to get lost in the news like they now get lost in Wikipedia and Facebook. There must be comprehensive stories that get the interested but uninformed up to speed quickly. Search and navigation must be improved to the point where satisfaction of curiosity is so easy it becomes a reflex. Destination news sites need to be more extensively hyperlinked than almost anything else (and not just insincere internal links for SEO, but links that are actually useful for the user.) The news experience needs to become intensely personal. It must be easy for users to find and follow exactly their interests, no matter how arcane. Journalists need to get proficient at finding and engaging the audience for each story. And all of this has to work across all modes of delivery, so it’s always with us. Marketers understand this; it’s amazing to me that the news industry has been so slow to catch on to multi-modal engagement.

      everything would work perfectly if we had all of these and people are actually rational and diligent with infinite resource.

  6. May 2020
    1. They only thought in terms of lockdowns vs business as usual, but failed to consider a third option: that people engage in social distancing voluntarily when they realise lives are at stake and when authorities recommend them to do so.

      I find it interesting that the author felt the need to include "and when authorities recommend they do so."

      Absolutely unnecessary. At best, a sop. In truth, untrue.

      People engaged in social distancing voluntarily when they believed their lives were at stake. Full stop. And they did not / do not when they don't.

      Infantalizing other people is the modern hobby of journalism.

  7. Apr 2020
    1. But recent events have made me question the prudence of releasing this information, even for research purposes. The arrest and aggressive prosecution of Barrett Brown had a marked chilling effect on both journalists and security researchers.
  8. Oct 2019
  9. Sep 2019
    1. Initially, Chanel Miller did not want the world to know her name. If the world didn't know her name, it would mean that she had never been found half-naked behind a Stanford University dumpster "with her underwear six inches away from her bare stomach." It would mean that she had never been sexually assaulted by a stranger.

      Strong delayed lead. The writer chose to tell the story before she jumped into the news. This method grabs the reader and is very affective.

  10. Aug 2019
    1. "primer for developing and improving technological methods to help promote trust and accuracy, especially on the web and involving news reporting." W3C Credible Web Community Group

  11. Jul 2019
    1. Big banks beat profit expectations but warning signs grow

      Note: article is an update to a previous report on large US Banks - https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-goldman-sachs-results/goldman-sachs-profit-beats-estimates-boosted-by-strong-equities-trading-idUKKCN1UB1B3?il=0

      Heading analysis

      1. clear and concise- The headline isn't misleading and clearly illustrates to the reader what the article is about
      2. Catches the readers attention- Headline summarises the article concisely but does not elaborate upon what the warning signs are, encouraging the reader to read on to find out what these signs are.
      3. Does not use any unfamiliar technical jargon or abbreviations
  12. May 2019
    1. Elon Musk, with a $2.3 billion package

      More accurately: $0 package, UNLESS value of company goes up 18 fold, to $650 billion, at which point it seems fair to let him have 0.5% of that....

      Makes one wonder if the other pay packages are equally misrepresented, here, and perhaps the entire conclusion is flawed.

    1. The pay package Tesla promised to Elon Musk was so large, we had to add an extra dimension to the chart below to display it accurately

      It would be relevant here and should be mentioned that Elon Musk's compensation is conditioned on enormous growth of the company, and he receives nothing if that does not happen.

  13. Mar 2019
    1. Data journalism produced by two of the nation’s most prestigious news organizations — The New York Times and The Washington Post — has lacked transparency, often failing to explain the methods journalists or others used to collect or analyze the data on which the articles were based, a new study finds. In addition, the news outlets usually did not provide the public with access to that data

      While this is a worthwhile topic, I would like to see more exploration of data journalism in the 99.99999 percent of news organizations that are NOT the New York Times or the Washington Post and don't have the resources to publish so many data stories despite the desperate need for them across the nation. Also, why no digital news outlets included?

    2. Worse yet, it wouldn’t surprise me if we saw more unethical people publish data as a strategic communication tool, because they know people tend to believe numbers more than personal stories. That’s why it’s so important to have that training on information literacy and methodology.”

      Like the way unethical people use statistics in general? This should be a concern, especially as government data, long considered the gold standard of data, undergoes attacks that would skew the data toward political ends. (see the census 2020)

    3. fall short of the ideal of data journalism

      Is this the ideal of data journalism? Where is this ideal spelled out, and is there any sign that the NYT and WaPo have agreed to abide by this ideal?

  14. Dec 2018
    1. Peter Jukes on problems with BBC news.

      The BBC has a duty to 'inform' but absolutely no obligation to reflect widespread but evidence-free opinions about  MMR vaccines, global warming, fake moon landings, 911 inside jobs, or Obama's birth certificate. The natural and logical corollary to this duty to inform is an obligation to fight misinformation. 

      And what bigger story could there be this year - where is the duty to inform is most pressing - than the subversion of democracy by overspending, illegal coordination and potential foreign funding of the most important constitutional vote in our lifetimes?

      . . .

      This constant political pressure makes the corporation risk-averse, and probably even more so with a subject like Brexit which begs big questions about the future of the country and its national security.  Because of its hierarchical structure and special funding, there is a constant danger that senior BBC execs see their political masters as their most important customers rather than the license-fee paying public. 

  15. Nov 2018
  16. Oct 2018
    1. Literary association PEN America has filed a lawsuit against Trump for using government power to harass the press.

  17. Jul 2018
    1. Here’s the message it sent to the people on Reddit, according to one commenter:

      This links not to the quote that comes after, but the admission that he was trolling. The journalists here are lying and they know that they are lying.

    2. “Nobody at Arenanet is safe from the hand of Reddit. We’re literally running the company now, they’re in fear of the very users they seek to consort with ... The moment a dev steps out of line or try to talk back to a player, guess what, they’ll know we got their hands on their throat and we can squeeze any time we like.”

      The post that is cited here is a troll. It is obvious from the text, but the user later on admitted it as well.

      The admission: http://archive.is/UIZ5N<br> Analysis: https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/8x1ptz/confirmation_that_the_reddit_will_fire_you_post/

  18. Jun 2018
    1. Reporting, and therefore repeating, Trump’s tweets just gives him more power. There is an alternative. Report the true frames that he is trying to pre-empt. Report the truth that he is trying to divert attention from. Put the blame where it belongs. Bust the trial balloon. Report what the strategies are trying to hide.

  19. May 2018
    1. Sally Lehrman, senior director of the journalism ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, leads its signature Trust Project, a complex international collaboration that she began building in 2015 to strengthen public confidence in the news through accountability and transparency.

      Check out this shout out from the American Press Institute.

  20. Mar 2018
    1. Para mejorar la trazabilidad no sólo de las afirmaciones de los políticos, sino de los procesos que contribuyen a las labores de verificación, valdría la pena no sólo mencionar "hackatón" de verificación, sino las fuentes y productor originales creados por el grupo y dónde están hospedados, pues se dispuso de una infraestructura abierta para ello, que va más allá de la hackathon misma y prexistía antes de iniciar.

      Para mayor información sobre la misma se puede consultar en:

      http://holonica.net/doku.php/factocol:6

    1. Fact-checking at The New Yorker an excerpt from The Art of Making Magazines: On Being an Editor and Other Views from the Industry

  21. Jan 2018
    1. good news sources have significant processes and resources dedicated to promoting accuracy, and correcting error.

      This might be a good time for such organizations to document -- and publish -- their playbooks.

    1. He believes it’s far more valuable to practice old-school journalism by sending a reporter to a county board meeting than to try to mine data from a government website.

      The gathering, sifting, and reformulation of what's said at that meeting, and what's written in supporting documents connected to that meeting, is a workflow that can be massively improved in ways that have nothing to do with data journalism.

      This shouldn't be an either/or scenario, either a "data-driven" reporter of the future or an "analog" luddite who processes the board meeting. These are complementary workflows, ideally supported by task-appropriate digital tools.

    2. it was simply too difficult “to take reporters off the assembly line.”

      Don't.

      Instead, enhance the UX of the assembly line.

    3. This includes a lack of technical understanding and ability and an unwillingness to break reporting habits that could create time and space to experiment.

      If the activation threshold for experiments is (or is perceived to be) too high, then let's find ways to lower it.

  22. Dec 2017
    1. Learn more. Often, writers lack self-confidence because deep down, they realize there’s something they don’t know. And they’re trying to fake it without that knowledge. It could be how to write in blog format, or how to get really great quotes from sources, or how to write strong query letters. If you sense your nervousness stems from a knowledge gap, fill it.

      Yeah -- this is a good one.

    2. calling publications that post full-time job ads and asking if they use freelancers. I found a new, $1-a-word market that way.
    3. If you have self-confidence that you’re a strong writer, you become an unstoppable force. You keep going until you make top dollar.
  23. Nov 2017
    1. Indeed, part of what sets Coates apart from other journalists or public intellectuals is that he tells his audience that historians’ works need to be consulted if they want to understand American history. Like any good high-school math student, Coates shows his work, illustrating which history books lead him to his conclusions.

      This would seem like a no brainer to me. We should demand it of journalists and public intellectuals.

  24. Oct 2017
    1. Ifthat’sthecase,wequestionwhetherthereshouldbeadifferentlabelforcuratorsandaggregatorsfortworeasons.Aswehaveargued,digitalactsinvolvedoingsomethingthroughvariousactionsnotconfinedtolanguagebutincludingimagesandsoundsaswellasthecoding,linking,andclassifyingofcontent.Second,theseactionsresignifyquestionsofanonymity,extensity,traceability,andvelocity.Theyenablethedisseminationofnewswithanonymityatalmostinstantaneousspeedthroughnumerousnetworks,andtheyleavetracesalongtheway.Asweshallnowargue,thisisindeedadistinctlycyberspaceenactmentofcitizenwitnessing
    2. ‘citizenjournalismunderstandspeopleashavingpoliticalroles,interestsandrelationships,andasactivelyinterestedinsharingnewstheydeemrelevant.Itunderstands,orperhapsintuits,thataknee-jerkdefinitionofallformsofjournalismasacquiringanddistributinginformationmissesthepoint.’

      La ventaja de términos neutralizantes como "datos" es que permiten convocar públicos distintos, sin pensar en su condición de profesional o amateur, o la disciplina particular desde la que se vinculan a los datos. Esta por ejemplo, es una ventaja que se aprecia en eventos locales, como "Datos y Guaros", si bien también hay que atravesar las diferencias entre las formas de actuar y comprender de cada uno de los lugares desde donde se proviene.

    3. BoletteBlaagaard,forexample,arguesthatthecontributionofcitizenjournalismhasbeentochallengetheostensibleobjectivityofprofessionaljournalism.[4]Shearguesthatincreatingajournalisticobjectivity,professionaljournalismportrayedaknowingsubjectthatisdetached,unemotional,neutral,unbiased,andindependent.Bycontrast,citizenjournalism’scontributionhasbeentodemonstratethatpassionate,attached,affective,andbiasedyetfairreportingcanresultfromjournalisticsubjectivity

      [...] ‘[O]nce we acknowledge the social construction of news, why should we then reject alternative journalism simply because it is not subject to the same normative and epistemological limits of mainstream journalism?’

      Esta también es la postura de la tesis. El rigor no tiene que ver con la "neutralidad", sino con la trazabilidad y transparencia, a pesar de que supone una postura apasionada y políticamente comprometida del investigador.

    4. Fromourperspective,participationisasubmissive(thoughnotobedient)actinorbywhichacitizensubjectperformsaclaim.Thereoughttobesomethingbroaderthanconnectingittojournalismalonetocharacterizeactsbywhichcitizensproduceknowledgeaboutevents.Moreover,theassociationoftheterm‘citizen’withthisrathersubmissiveparticipationoverlookstheradicalpotentialofthefigureofthecitizensubjectasanagentofsubmissionandsubversionandthussubjectofpower
    5. thismomentsignalledthattheInternetwaslooseningthegripofprofessionaljournalismontheproductionanddisseminationofnewsandtruthtelling.Sincethen,muchhasbeenwrittenonwhetherthisisindeedthecaseorwhetherprofessionaljournalismhasnowconsolidateditsgrip.Butthereisnodoubtthathoweveritisdefined—alternativejournalism,citizen’smedia,citizenjournalism,democraticmedia,andradicalmedia—somethingnewisafootinjournalistictruthtellingandknowledgeproductionthroughcyberspace.
  25. Sep 2017
    1. Their path to that goal just looks—well, sounds—a bit different. It’s less a reinvention of the wheel, more a technological advancement. “The successful long-form print piece, the successful television documentary, the successful podcast will all be built around storytelling and narratives of people who are affected by what’s being investigated,” says Stephen Smith, executive editor and host of APM Reports.

      The medium will change, the basics of journalism and storytelling have not. Now all we need is CNN to do more storytelling and use AJ+ for some source material.

    1. First, FOIA provided accessible tools to put abstract ideas into practice. Everyday citizens started to attach various political notions to these activities. Second, information flowed into a journalistic ecosystem that was prepared to process and interpret it for everyday citizens. Information obtained through FOIA was being interpreted in stories that changed public opinion (Leff etal., 1986). Third, ability for individuals to request information led to alternate uses for activ-ists, public interest groups, and non-profit organizations.

      Interesante ver cómo se conectan el periodismo y el activismo. Una necesidad de dicha conexión ya había sido establecida en la entrada sobre los Panamá Papers.

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  26. Jul 2017
    1. Haberman is in Trump’s head so deep she could be his psychiatrist, and she has had extraordinary access to the president and the administration. She is a regular commentator on TV about life “inside the castle.”

      This is absolutely incredible and profound. As an old school wannabee journalist, I applaud these efforts. If only the Charlotte Observer would lower their prices to about $5 a month for digital, I would subscribe, even on my income.

  27. Jun 2017
    1. 50,000 documents from a financial services provider in Malta – emails, contracts, documents, invoices – were leaked some months ago to the German magazine Der Spiegel. Together with an Excel file listing 53,247 Malta companies and their shareholders, leaked to the news magazine portal The Black Sea last September, they have become The Malta Files.

      Learn more about MaltaFiles and projects of the EICnetwork here: https://eic.network/projects/malta-files

    1. In total it was 13 media organizations and 49 journalists collaborating on #MaltaFiles. Here is the exact list of the media involved: L'Espresso, Le Soir, NRC, DER SPIEGEL, The Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism / TheBlackSea.eu, Mediapart, Politiken, NewsWeek Serbia, El Mundo, Expresso, Dagens Nyheter, Malta Today, The Intercept and Agência Sportlight.

    1. 13 journaux européens

      Media involved: L'Espresso, Le Soir, NRC, DER SPIEGEL, The Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism / TheBlackSea.eu, Mediapart, Politiken, NewsWeek Serbia, El Mundo, Expresso, Dagens Nyheter, Malta Today, The Intercept and Agência Sportlight.

    1. durch verschiedene Medienhäuser

      In total it was 13 media organizations and 49 journalists collaborating on #MaltaFiles. Here is the exact list of the media involved: L'Espresso, Le Soir, NRC, DER SPIEGEL, The Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism / TheBlackSea.eu, Mediapart, Politiken, NewsWeek Serbia, El Mundo, Expresso, Dagens Nyheter, Malta Today, The Intercept and Agência Sportlight.

  28. May 2017
    1. Did the writer engage with anyone who disagrees? Did they call a senator whose legislation bugs them? Did they try to grasp what the president-elect was doing, or merely repeat one of his more outrageous statements? If it's a broadcast interview, was the guest presented with genuine opposing views and challenged to answer? Those who wrestle with opposing arguments do you a service and often improve their own arguments.

      This is a double-edged sword in traditional media - the need to get both sides of the argument. It is important for balanced and factual reporting, but it can also be problematic as it frames both sides as having equal importance in an issue. Think of the debate about climate change. In the name of journalistic fairness, a mainstream reporter may often feel obliged to get the opinion of a climate change denier to balance the story. This often gives the impression that the deniers are of equal weight on the issue. Could lead the general public to believe that climate change is a devisive issue since there are 2 sides, despite the fact that 99% of the science and research is weighted towards climate change. Should both sides be given equal weight in journalism? Could this actually help to create an environment of skepticism about facts? Making all facts seem debatable?

  29. Apr 2017
    1. Google is adding a Fact Check feature to Google Search and Google News. When fact checks are available from one or more approved publishers, they will appear in the search results.

      One requirement for publishers to be cited is to use the schema.org ClaimReview markup, or the Share the Facts widget.

    1. Dave Winer is concerned that news organizations are too eager to work with platforms like Facebook and Twitter. They can't be independent there. They belong on the open web.

  30. Mar 2017
    1. We’ve designed our products to meet essential needs of journalism through effective online communities.

      Mozilla, Knight, NYT, WaPo collaboration.

  31. Feb 2017
    1. Jay Rosen on the challenges journalists face under Trump, and several suggested countermeasures. An important one is making direct connections with common people and listening to their concerns, which will help build trust.

  32. Jan 2017
    1. never mind that fake news is neither new (forgery, quackery, and conspiracy theorizing are not recent inventions) nor exclusively right-leaning. The new form it has taken in readily sharable social media, however, has made it easy for conventional media to excuse themselves from responsibility for how the election was covered.

      "Fake news" was a small factor, compared to mainstream media treating Trump as a legitimate candidate, and sensationalizing hacked emails that contained nothing significant.

  33. Dec 2016
    1. Fact-based journalism now competes with false information for our attention while our cities and citizens become both more connected by technology and more divided by ideology and income. The values reflected in lines of code, whether it be at the ATM, when we search on internet or drive a car, are already affecting what we think, what we do and what information we share with those around us.
      • Putin's hackers stole emails. Wikileaks published them.
      • News media covered the emails like a breaking scandal, while giving little attention to how and why the emails were stolen.
      • Before that, Republicans made as much noise as they could about Benghazi, and Clinton using a private email server. News media could hardly have been more helpful to them if they were all owned outright by the Republican party.
      • News media treated Trump like a serious candidate, rather than the lying, idiot lowlife that he is.
      • Days before election day, James Comey announces, maybe possibly kind of, more emails from Clinton's private server discovered on Anthony Weiner's laptop. News media covers it enthusiastically. In a few days, Comey announces there was nothing new. How about that.

      Dave Pell's main point here is that news media wouldn't produce crap if people didn't eat it up.

      But we aren't all eating the crap. I don't think there's much we can do about the people who do. Many of them aren't being fooled by the lies and sensationalism. They're just choosing to "believe" what they want to "believe". (Though the number actually fooled was probably far more than enough to win the election for Trump.)

      We need to give as much support as we can to responsible journalism and commentary. And maybe we can collectively discourage media from producing crap by making sure they know that millions of us are angered by it. Maybe there should be independent journalists as a branch of government, tasked with choosing what the people should know, and granted privileges similar to those that members of Congress have.

    1. Dave Pell points out that Trump's "grab her by the pussy" video was the big news on 7 October -- the same day the New York Times reported that U.S. intelligence acknowledged that Russia was responsible for the DNC hacks. The latter should have been the main story that day, but it wasn't.

    1. http://digipo.io/doku.php<br> The Digital Polarization Initiative<br> "The primary purpose of this wiki is to provide a place for students to fact-check, annotate, and provide context to the different news stories that show up in their Twitter and Facebook feeds. It's like a student-driven Snopes, but with a broader focus: we don't aim to just investigate myths, but to provide context and sanity to all the news – from the article about voter fraud to the health piece on a new cancer treatment."

  34. Nov 2016
    1. Journalism faces an 'existential crisis' in the Trump era, Christine Amanpour

      As all the international journalists we honor in this room tonight and every year know only too well: First the media is accused of inciting, then sympathizing, then associating -- until they suddenly find themselves accused of being full-fledged terrorists and subversives. Then they end up in handcuffs, in cages, in kangaroo courts, in prison

      ...

      First, like many people watching where I was overseas, I admit I was shocked by the exceptionally high bar put before one candidate and the exceptionally low bar put before the other candidate.

      It appeared much of the media got itself into knots trying to differentiate between balance, objectivity, neutrality, and crucially, truth.

      ...

      The winning candidate did a savvy end run around us and used it to go straight to the people. Combined with the most incredible development ever -- the tsunami of fake news sites -- aka lies -- that somehow people could not, would not, recognize, fact check, or disregard.

      ...

      The conservative radio host who may be the next white house press secretary says mainstream media is hostile to traditional values.

      I would say it's just the opposite. And have you read about the "heil, victory" meeting in Washington, DC this past weekend? Why aren't there more stories about the dangerous rise of the far right here and in Europe? Since when did anti-Semitism stop being a litmus test in this country?

    1. But as managing editor of the fact-checking site Snopes, Brooke Binkowski believes Facebook’s perpetuation of phony news is not to blame for our epidemic of misinformation. “It’s not social media that’s the problem,” she says emphatically. “People are looking for somebody to pick on. The alt-rights have been empowered and that’s not going to go away anytime soon. But they also have always been around.”

      The misinformation crisis, according to Binkowski, stems from something more pernicious. In the past, the sources of accurate information were recognizable enough that phony news was relatively easy for a discerning reader to identify and discredit. The problem, Binkowski believes, is that the public has lost faith in the media broadly — therefore no media outlet is considered credible any longer. The reasons are familiar: as the business of news has grown tougher, many outlets have been stripped of the resources they need for journalists to do their jobs correctly.

      The problem is not JUST social media and fake news. But most of the false stories do not come from mainstream media. The greatest evils of mainstream media are sensationalism, and being too willing to spin stories the way their sources want them to.

    1. America is in great danger. Not just potential, but already upon us. And most of the media (especially television) is acting like nothing unusual has happened.

      Imagine a category-five hurricane was bearing down on the East Coast with a 30 percent chance of making landfall, but the evening news treated it as a remote threat. Then imagine the forecast changed to 100 percent. Then imagine the news sent a reporter and cameraman to the coast for a beachfront live shot, with the storm just over the horizon. Then imagine that they devoted their airtime to commenting on the beauty of the ocean and the talent of the surfers.

      That is basically what has happened over the course of the past week, except that the hurricane is Donald Trump’s presidency, and the East Coast is all of us—America and the world.

    1. I avoid putting my students in high-risk situations, but this does not mean avoiding teaching digital literacy.

      This is something important to consider especially since I teach journalism. By default students need to learn how to deal with public comments. We try to ease into this arena of writing in a public space and avoiding controversy.

  35. Oct 2016
    1. “Among millennials, especially,” [Ross] Douthat argues, “there’s a growing constituency for whom rightwing ideas are so alien or triggering, leftwing orthodoxy so pervasive and unquestioned, that supporting a candidate like Hillary Clinton looks like a needless form of compromise.”

      ...

      “I don’t see sufficient evidence to buy the argument about siloing and confirmation bias,” Jeff Jarvis,a professor at the City University of New York’s graduate school of journalism said. “That is a presumption about the platforms – because we in media think we do this better. More important, such presumptions fundamentally insult young people. For too long, old media has assumed that young people don’t care about the world.”

      “Newspapers, remember, came from the perspective of very few people: one editor, really,” Jarvis said. “Facebook comes with many perspectives and gives many; as Zuckerberg points out, no two people on Earth see the same Facebook.”

  36. Sep 2016
    1. In theory the editorial writers speak for the publisher. In practice the publisher does not routinely tell them what to say or even see their copy in advance. In this case I have on good authority that neither the publisher, Fred Ryan, nor the owner, Jeff Bezos, had any idea that this editorial was coming. I would be very surprised to learn that either of them agrees with the proposition that our principal stories on the NSA should not have been published. For sure I can tell you that this is not the position of the newsroom’s leadership or any reporter I know. Marty Baron, the executive editor, has said again and again how proud he is of the paper’s coverage of Ed Snowden and the NSA.

      -- Barton Gellman

    1. Readers are thus encouraged to examine and critique the model. If they disagree, they can modify it into a competing model with their own preferred assumptions, and use it to argue for their position. Model-driven material can be used as grounds for an informed debate about assumptions and tradeoffs. Modeling leads naturally from the particular to the general. Instead of seeing an individual proposal as “right or wrong”, “bad or good”, people can see it as one point in a large space of possibilities. By exploring the model, they come to understand the landscape of that space, and are in a position to invent better ideas for all the proposals to come. Model-driven material can serve as a kind of enhanced imagination.

      This is a part where my previous comments on data activism data journalism (see 1,2 & 3) and more plural computing environments for engagement of concerned citizens on the important issues of our time could intersect with Victor's discourse.

  37. Aug 2016
    1. of course those people are not going to be receptive to the message coming from the people who view them with contempt and scorn. I think that is why Brexit won, and I think that is the real danger of Trump winning.
    2. I see my role as being a corrective to whatever consensus emerges that I don’t think is being subjected to enough critical scrutiny.
  38. Jun 2016
    1. Title: The Reluctant Memoirist | New Republic

      Keywords: south korea, north korea, korean origin, investigative journalism, gathering information, push back, adoptive home, returned home

      Summary: After six months, I returned home with 400 pages of notes and began writing.<br>Something caught my eye: Below the title—Without You, There Is No Us: My Time With the Sons of North Korea’s Elite—were the words, “A Memoir.”<br>I immediately emailed my editor.<br>I later learned that memoirs in general sell better than investigative journalism.<br>I tried to push back.<br>“You only wish,” my agent laughed.<br>As the only journalist to live undercover in North Korea, I had risked imprisonment to tell a story of international importance by the only means possible.<br>The content of my work was what really mattered, I told myself.<br>The evangelical organization wanted to protect its close ties to the North Korean regime and the country’s future leaders.<br>The code of ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists states that reporters should “avoid undercover or other surreptitious methods of gathering information unless traditional, open methods will not yield information vital to the public.” It is hard to imagine any subject more vital to the public, or more impervious to open methods, than the secretive, nuclear North Korea; its violations against humanity, the United Nations has declared, “reveal a State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world.” My greatest concern had been for my students, and I had followed well-established journalistic practices to ensure that they would not be harmed.<br>They called me “deeply dishonest” for going undercover.<br>My inbox began to be bombarded with messages from strangers: “Shame on you for putting good people in harm’s way for your gain.” One morning, I woke up to a Twitter message that read, simply: “Go fuck yourself.”<br>The ethics of her choice cast doubt on her reliability (another de facto peril of memoir), and her fear of discovery appears to have colored her impressions and descriptions with paranoia and distrust.”<br>My book was being dismissed for the very element that typically wins acclaim for narrative accounts of investigative journalism.<br>The backlash extended well beyond the media.<br>Why did people with no real experience of North Korea feel such a passionate need to dismiss my firsthand reporting and defend one of the world’s most murderous dictatorships?<br>Orientalism reigns.<br>What struck me was not whether the review was positive, but the selection of the reviewer, a former TV columnist of Korean origin, whose only past book-length nonfiction was on South Korean popular culture.<br>As an Asian female, I find that people rarely assume I’m an investigative journalist; even after I tell them, they often forget.<br>Such gender discrimination can manifest either positively or negatively.<br>“If I had written a highly detailed book about being embedded with a troop,” she said, “the magnitude of the actual legwork would have been recognized.” Yet she also believes that great literary journalism combines the heart and the brain.<br>I would like to report that I took the reaction to my book in stride, that I weathered all the accusations and dismissals with patience, that I understood their causes and effects.<br>In immigrant ghettos, I learned that in my adoptive home, my skin was considered yellow, the color of the forsythia that had bloomed around my childhood home back in South Korea.<br>This is why I risked going into North Korea undercover: because I could not be consoled while the injustice of 25 million voiceless people trapped in a modern-day gulag remains part of our society.<br>Here I am telling my story to you, the reader, essentially to beg for acknowledgment: I am an investigative journalist, please take me seriously.<br>

  39. May 2016
    1. HALL: For the most part, the rules were basically you have to collaborate. So what they did was create kind of an internal Facebook page - for a lack of a better reference - where we all created groups. We joined groups, and then we would post as we researched, so we had one system in which we did the research, another where we posted what we were finding. And what was remarkable about it - this was what - in the truest sense collaboration. If I found something from India or Russia that I thought looked of interest, you know, you'd find somebody. You'd spend a little time looking at it. You'd go do an Internet search and see if you can find a footprint of this person anywhere. And then if you found that you'd post it. You might post some corresponding links. And particularly in some of the Latin American countries where resources are pretty slim and many of them are under threat, we are able to do a lot of the groundwork for them that then they could run with.

      I wonder what this system is that allowed the journalists to collaborate in groups on the documents: sharing links, notes, etc. I didn't see it detailed in the writeup at The Source.

      Perhaps it's Nuix, but it sounds like more than a system for ocr, indexing, etc.

      Just an aside, it's kind of weird that the Source article doesn't even mention Nuix. Perhaps there were different teams working with different technologies?

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31suMWkgdo4

  40. Apr 2016
    1. TL;DR: Patricia Hswe and I wrote an article for American Libraries and the editors added some quotes from a vendor talking about their products without telling us. We asked them to fix it and they said no.

      The article is "Special Report: Digital Humanities in Libraries", American Libraries Jan/Feb 2016, and the vendor is Gale/Cengage.

    2. In my former job, I learned that much of what we think of as “news” is actual paid advertising. Segments on local TV, articles in newspapers and magazines, and even national news has paid portions that are not always called out as such. I’ve stopped trusting a lot of reporting because of knowing how much money is probably changing hands to make those segments come to life. Part of my job was scripting and writing articles that would then be presented in “editorial” fashion — that is, without any acknowledgement of our paid placement there.
    1. Gamergate is just the tip of the iceberg

      Ugh. The need for hype is well-understood but there’s something really offputting when journos start comparing extreme situations and claim that one is worse than another.

    2. But it’s clear that there’s one thing News Genius hasn’t taken into consideration while evolving its business model: a very real potential for

      Not so clear, no.

    1. I watch as their networks expand, and as followers find one another as they voice ever more extreme opinions.

      This is the first time in a long time (maybe ever) that I've felt sympathy for the downfall of traditional journalism. Social media as a kind of echo chamber is really scary and almost sounds like a science fiction story.

  41. Feb 2016
    1. if we were to ask people whether clicking on a “like” button next to a short video clip is identical to leaving a detailed comment, the answer would probably be a clear “no.”

      Sequencing calls to action from liking to commenting.

    2. Social activity on a website can increase users’ commitment to the site and willingness to pay for its services.

      So social engagement increases brand loyalty.

      Seems like that could be a key to Medium's success.

    3. When the tasks that users were prompted to engage in were not presented in increasing order of effort level, users tended to donate and participate less than when tasks were ordered that way.

      Awareness of a user's lifecycle from exploring to adoption to megauser is key.

    4. “calls to action,” issued at different points in time
    1. Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics

      • Seek truth and report it
      • Minimize harm
      • Act independently
      • Be accountable and transparent
    1. According to numbers from the American Journalism Review and the Pew Research Center, less than a third of U.S. newspapers have a reporter present at the statehouse (either full- or part-time) and almost no local television stations assign a reporter to state politics.

      Net result: the public’s awareness of and access to the activities of state government is vanishing, at the same time that the decisions made by state-level actors are having greater effects on American lives.

      The first step towards righting this asymmetry is access, and there’s a good idea out there you need to know about: State Civic Networks are state-based, non-profit, independent, nonpartisan, “citizen engagement” online centers, and they should exist in every state. (Think C-SPAN, but way better, and focusing on statehouses.)

  42. Jan 2016
    1. The explicit right to a free press it seems to me, though I’m no constitutional scholar, should translate today to an infrastructure not only for publishing information but for protecting those publishing, providing, or consuming it, as well as those financially supporting its publication. Just as the rights to speech, assembly, and petition should translate to online infrastructure in which discourse at all levels is protected and groups can meaningfully express their views (let alone the fourth amendment right to protection of your own information). With these essential rights, a democracy can function and use its mechanism of governance to create new rights and protections.
    1. there's a case to be made that citizens providing feedback on actual policy is just as important than who they elect.

      In some J-Schools, this case is hard to make as journalists claim they're the ones through whom this process happens.

    1. the journalistic fetish for ‘impartiality’, which frequently means that anyone who has a strong opinion is ‘biased’, so ‘equal time’ is given to the ‘two sides’, without considering the possibility that if one side is a small minority who the experts are all strongly opposed to it might be because they are, you know, wrong.

      In any reporting on a controversy in science or technology a journalists job is first and foremost to find out whether there’s overwhelming support for one side among experts and if there is to report that straightforwardly.

      I don't know enough about bitcoin to have an opinion about this controversy. Regardless of that, this is a very good point. "Impartial" shouldn't mean giving equal credence and equal time to fringe viewpoints -- unless they are coming from some noteworthy experts with strong evidence.

      Mike Belshe, CEO of BitGo, says they need to increase the blockchain size immediately.<br> http://belshe.com/2016/01/18/bitcoin-blocksize-and-the-future/

    1. Petition President Obama to pardon alleged whistleblower Jeffrey Sterling. He was convicted on the basis of exchanging emails and phone calls with a reporter, with no evidence of what was discussed? These conversations took place in 2002-2004, but they didn't decide to press charges until December 2010?

      http://en.rsf.org/united-states-jeffrey-sterling-latest-victim-of-18-09-2015,48366.html<br> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Alexander_Sterling

    1. Megan Cossey<br> Tips for fact checking your writing:<br> * Verify every fact, no matter how insignificant.<br> * Find out which sources are regarded the most highly in the field you are writing about.<br> * If you can't verify it, delete it.

    1. Honestly, there are very few that don’t make me fear for humanity. But I would say some of the more evolved, entrenched conspiracy theories have been particularly mind-boggling to me – things like Jade Helm or Sandy Hook truthers. I mean, these people have constructed a truly nightmarish fantasyland for themselves. How do we address that? How do we continue to dialogue with them?
    2. For me, what has become far more frustrating is a certain unwillingness to believe the debunk. I would see readers share links to the column on Facebook, telling their friends that a story or rumor they had posted wasn’t true. And the friends would come back with something like “you trust the Washington Post, that liberal rag???!?!?” It’s like a total unwillingness to engage with actual evidence.
    3. A lot has changed. For one thing, hoax news has become industrialized on a scale that it never was before. There are dozens of websites, most less than 18 months old, that exist only to propagate real-looking fake news stories. On top of that, as I say in the column, it feels like the tenor of fake news has changed. Where once these hoax stories were merely sensational or ridiculous – like your standard clickbait, basically – many now exist to exploit preconceived notions and biases. (Needless to say, that’s not a development that’s confined to fake-news sites or Internet hoaxers, either – it’s a problem we see across a wide swath of Internet media.)

      As well as talk radio and most television news.

    1. Essentially, he explained, institutional distrust is so high right now, and cognitive bias so strong always, that the people who fall for hoax news stories are frequently only interested in consuming information that conforms with their views — even when it’s demonstrably fake.

      Fake "news" sites and some bloggers have noticed that people will click links to controversial stories -- even if they are completely fabricated. So they make shit up, and idiots read it and share it.

    1. Finding [Silk Road founder Ross] Ulbricht really boiled down to this: a bunch of Google searches done by an investigator for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).<br> . . .<br> His preferred tool: Google. Particularly the advanced search option that lets you focus in on a date range.<br> . . .<br> Alford couldn’t be at Ulbricht’s arrest, but he did receive a plaque. The NYT reports that Alford’s superiors had it inscribed with this quote from Sherlock Holmes: "The world is full of obvious things which nobody by chance ever observes."

  43. Dec 2015
    1. Churchill said that you must be a liberal when you are young or you don’t have a heart. But you must become a conservative when you get older or you don’t have a brain.
    1. 8) Who is A. Karma Flitit in the real world?

      S. Mitra Kalita seems likely -- but I don't understand why S was replaced with F in the anagram.

    2. 6) Holmes said that after 1982 he began working in finance under an assumed name. What name do you think he used?

      "BA", aka Len Bakerloo, is Brooke Allen.<br> http://brookeallen.com/pages/publications

      He is obviously a master of disguise

    3. 7) Holmes talks about various monographs that he published while working in finance. The titles were changed slightly but can you still find them?

      How to Tell the Difference between Good People and Nice People When Making Hiring Decisions http://qz.com/88168/how-to-hire-good-people-instead-of-nice-people/

      How Colleges Get Away with Being Evil http://qz.com/164356/why-business-schools-charge-so-much-and-pay-their-teachers-so-little/

      How To Make A Fortune While Appearing to Not Ask for Any Money http://qz.com/77020/the-secret-to-a-higher-salary-is-to-ask-for-nothing-at-all/

    4. To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex.

      This is the opening line from A Scandal in Bohemia, the first of the Holmes short stories published in The Strand Magazine.

    5. “You appear to be astonished,” he said, smiling at my expression of surprise. “Now that I do know it I shall do my best to forget it.” “To forget it!” “You see,” he explained, “I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

      This is word for word from chapter 2 of A Study in Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes story. Watson was shocked that Holmes claimed ignorance of the solar system.

      "But the Solar System!" I protested.

      "What the deuce is it to me?" he interrupted impatiently; "you say that we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."

    6. 27) What were the exact words on my fortune?
    7. What was the name of the camera Holmes used that might help Alzheimer’s patients

      Based on this article, the camera is probably the SenseCam, and the journal might be Scientific American or Memory. I don't yet know which article he was referring to. Holmes says the article includes a picture of the Chinese restaurant.

    8. 25) Sherlock was able to guess the last digit of the lucky lottery number on my fortune. How did he do it?

      He Googled: "41 53 11 16 17"<br> including the quotation marks. I only get one result.

      But this is lucky. I couldn't find anything for the numbers on the other fortune.

    9. f) I left out a question labeled b. What is your best guess as to what it could have been?

      b) What is the difference between proposition and proof?

      Holmes lists these pairs in the same order.

    10. 16) Sherlock said that he was not born as Sherlock Holmes but rather someone else. What was his birth name? What country was he born in?

      That must be Nikolai Lobachevsky (1 Dec 1792 - 24 Feb 1856), born in Russia, whose portrait appears on this webpage.

      In Holmes canon, Watson was only 3 years old in February 1856, and he first met Holmes in 1881. But maybe Watson's biography was also faked to avoid explaining why he wasn't aging.

    11. what might that kind of journalism be called
  44. May 2015
    1. an infamous number conundrum

      One of the central problems in these articles is the glaring lack of math. These personal choices and the environment they have set up for themselves tells us rather only the minuscule part of the story!

  45. Mar 2015
    1. Links, thoughts and research into using drones, UAVs or remotely piloted vehicles for journalism at the Drone Journalism Lab at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's College of Journalism and Mass Communications.
  46. Feb 2015
    1. The disaggregation of news in the Internet age has inverted this relationship, and made news outlets hypersensitive to the interests of their readers. This is a positive development. It’s good that the media covers stories that its constituents are interested in and want to read about. It’s good when news outlets are connected to the communities they serve.

      I'm not so sure this is the case across the board. Our desires don't always serve us.

      I sometimes do want gatekeepers to prevent me from hurting myself.

      I don't know how to translate this into advice for the next generation of media, though.

  47. Oct 2014
    1. Dennoch stellt Krautreporter den bislang anspruchsvollsten und ernstzunehmendsten Versuch dar, verlagsunabhängig auf einem soliden Fundament, mit einer beeindruckenden Crew und einem integrierten Geschäftsmodell, guten digitalen Journalismus in Deutschland zu machen.

      Netzwertig.com über krautreporter.de: hoffnungsvoll.