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Monday, November 6, 2017
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The scale of misinformation online is global. First Draft is pushing for more collaboration — and more research — as an antidote“How can we have these conversations together, instead of just being in our camps throwing insults at each other that no one is doing enough?” By Shan Wang. |
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Even automating just parts of journalists’ fact-checking efforts can speed up their work. Is this the right tool?FightHoax classifies ingested links to articles as either "Trusted," "Hoax," or "Mixed" based on seven different criteria, ranging from language quality to author’s publication history. By Demetrios Pogkas. |
What We’re Reading
Medium / James Bridle
Something is wrong on the Internet →
“Someone or something or some combination of people and things is using YouTube to systematically frighten, traumatize, and abuse children, automatically and at scale, and it forces me to question my own beliefs about the internet, at every level.”
Columbia Journalism Review / Christopher Ali and Damian Radcliffe
Eight strategies for saving local newsrooms →
“Somewhere between 45 percent and 85 percent of all original reporting is done by newspapers and then picked up by other media. While hyperlocal blogs pick up some of the slack in areas where newspapers have shuttered or been cut back, these blogs seldom replicate the breadth and depth of many print papers, and they don't usually exist in many smaller or more disadvantaged communities.”
Slate
The year in New York Times push alerts →
“We gathered all the breaking news push alerts that one outlet, the New York Times, sent from the moment Trump won until last Wednesday. Taken all together, the alerts provide a visceral snapshot of the year that was — the intense bursts of news, the slow days that seemed disorienting without a breaking story, the early morning pushes, the 5-p.m.-on-a-Friday pushes, the pushes of stories that never broke through, the pushes that were impossible to ignore.”
Digiday / Jessica Davies
Inside the Guardian’s consumer-revenue operation →
“The Guardian is now making more money from reader revenue including paid memberships and subscriptions, than advertising revenue. Since February, it has grown paying members from 200,000 to 500,000, while one-off contributions have gone from 100,000 to 300,000 equating to £7 million ($9 million) during the same time period. Half of those 300,000 contributions come from the U.S., according to the publisher.”
Reason.com / Gustavo Arellano
The death of the alt-weekly as told by an industry lifer →
“But the alts blew it. They’re even more imperiled now than the dailies, which can at least count on big-ticket advertisers too afraid to buy space in papers that drop f-bombs. Alt-weeklies find themselves in a position much like the baby boomers who launched most of them: stuck in the past, oblivious to the present, and increasingly obsolete.”
Medium / Darryl Holliday
Billionaires can’t build the news we need →
“The truth is that many of the communities most in need of accurate, representational media simply can't sustain a fully staffed news outlet that caters to their particular needs, and news in well-resourced communities is a fact of life that is largely taken for granted.”
Vouchification / Mike Fourcher
DNA Info was never a good business →
“It doesn't take a detective to figure out why DNA Info was not profitable. It was an ad supported business in two crowded markets, New York and Chicago, where it was far from the first ad buy. The sites were never crowded with ads, and their email newsletters were often filled with house ads. Their neighborhood print papers, distributed when they had an ad to run, became less and less frequent, evidence of fewer and fewer ads.”