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Wednesday, November 22, 2017
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“Checking Twitter…while being rushed into a bunker”: Considering fake news and nuclear warPlus: The EU is surveying its citizens on fake news; what CrossCheck learned in France; the upcoming Disinformation Action Lab. By Laura Hazard Owen. |
What We’re Reading
Discourse / Lindsay Sample
Canadian digital journalism startup Discourse is launching a local news fellowship →
For the first six months in 2018, Discourse's local news fellowship will provide support — up to $9,000 each — to three reporting fellows to carry out sustained coverage of issues facing their communities. The fellowship is intended to support reporting on energy and environmental issues, with a focus on stories to “paint a broader picture of shared experiences across the country.”
Wall Street Journal / Lara O'Reilly
Fake-ad operation used to steal from publishers is uncovered →
“The fraudsters behind the Hyphbot scheme created more than 34,000 different domain names and more than a million different URLs, many designed to attempt to fool advertisers into thinking they were buying ad inventory from big-name publishers such as the Economist, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal and CNN. It is a tactic known in the industry as ‘domain spoofing.'”
Washington Post / Paul Farhi
Why BuzzFeed teamed with a far-right figure to break the John Conyers scandal →
Cernovich, in an interview Tuesday, said it was more important for the story to be taken seriously than for him to "get the glory" by reporting it himself. Aware that his reputation could raise questions about the story's credibility, he said, he decided to pass the documents to BuzzFeed. “I knew Conyers would deny it if I broke it,” he said. “Everyone would call me fake news. . . . My thinking was: Let's keep our eye on the prize and not make this about me. Let's make this the Harvey Weinstein story about Congress.’ I knew if I gave it to BuzzFeed, it would be bulletproof.”
Poynter / Daniel Funke
Don’t put too much hope in EU legislation against fake news →
“I think governments in Europe can't do anything about fake news. It's going to have to be about enforcing their own hate speech laws online.”
HuffPost / Ashley Feinberg
At Vice, a New York Times exposé looms →
“I think by about 10 minutes in, people started to realize they just weren't going to talk about harassment at all.”
Digiday / Max Willens
Under The New York Times, Wirecutter has grown from 35 to 65 people →
Starting on Nov. 23 and rolling into next week, all 65 of those edit staffers will work in shifts to sift through a fire hose of deal offers coming from the retailers participating in America's biggest digital shopping weekend, looking for discounts on the hundreds of items its staffers have already reviewed.
Fast Company / Harry McCracken
The Washington Post: A software company? →
“Among the publications that have moved to Arc are the Los Angeles Times, Canada's Globe and Mail, the New Zealand Herald, and smaller outfits such as Alaska Dispatch News and Oregon's Willamette Week. In aggregate, sites running on Arc reach 300 million readers; publishers pay based on bandwidth, which means that the more successful they are at attracting readers, the better it is for Arc Publishing. The typical bottom line ranges from $10,000 a month at the low end up to $150,000 a month for Arc's biggest customers.”
Slate / Will Oremus
It’s time for online media to pivot from advertising →
“Giving everything away appears more than ever to be a path to commoditization and low margins, if not outright ruin.”
TechCrunch / Jon Russell
Tencent, the maker of WeChat, becomes the first Chinese tech firm valued at over $500 billion →
Entry to the half-a-trillion-dollar club — which includes Apple, Alphabet, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon — comes a week after Tencent posted a profit of 18 billion RMB ($2.7 billion) on revenue of 65.2 billion RMB ($9.8 billion) for the third quarter of 2017. Overall profit was up 69 percent year-on-year and revenue rose by 61 percent thanks to Tencent's games business.
The Splice Newsroom / Joshua Carroll
Frontier just launched Myanmar’s first local-language podcast – on Facebook →
“Podcast platforms popular elsewhere are little used in Myanmar. SoundCloud puts off many because Android users must download the app to listen, and few people in the country have iPhones. To get around that, Doh Athan can be streamed directly from Facebook, a platform that dominates Myanmar's internet.”