A UCLA-led study found that political views have a lot to do with how likely each of us are to believe information about potential threats —
In France, Google and Facebook are hoping to get ahead of the “fake news” fury that exploded in the U.S. shortly after the November presidential election. Google announced Monday it’s teaming up with media outlets from Agence France-Presse to BuzzFeed News to Le Monde on a countrywide factchecking initiative the partners are calling CrossCheck. As a part of the initiative, Facebook is also working with news organizations to reduce the amount of misinformation and hoax stories from appearing on its platform, offering up tools like CrowdTangle to help monitor election-related posts on social media and focusing on other “media literacy efforts.”
Today, we are proud to announce the launch of CrossCheck with Google News Lab. CrossCheck is a collaborative journalism verification project that aims to help the public make sense of what and who to trust in their social media feeds, web searches and general online news consumption in the coming months. Facebook will also support CrossCheck through dedicated tools and media literacy efforts that will help to explain the verification process and keep relevant audiences up to date with confirmed and disputed information relating to the election.
“Pundits tend to write off political paranoia as a feature of the fringe, a disorder that occasionally flares up until the sober center can put out the flames. They’re wrong.”
Reuters editor-in-chief instructs journalists on how to cover the new Administration
Reuters Editor-in-Chief Steve Adler is proud of the way his news organization is able to provide high-quality, fact-based journalism in oppressive places like Turkey, the Philippines, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Thailand, China, Zimbabwe, and Russia, “nations in which we sometimes encounter some combination of censorship, legal prosecution, visa denials, and even physical threats to our journalists.” Here’s his list of dos and don’ts for staffers:
When The New York Times released its earnings report this week, most of the immediate attention was on digital: The Times added 276,000 net new digital subscribers in the fourth quarter of 2016 — its best quarter since 2011, when it first launched its paywall.
To curb the spread of unreliable news, should news organizations and platforms turn to algorithms or rely on users themselves? One recent experiment suggests a potential solution could combine the two.
If small newspapers are going to survive, they’ll have to be more than passive observers to the news
The existential crisis comes at a time when the economics for much of our industry — especially newspapers — remains as challenging as ever. John Oliver’s clarion call to support organizations like ProPublica and The New York Times’ post-election subscriber surge offer faint glimmers of financial hope, but we need to ensure that the conversations we are having about the role, objectives, and future of journalism do not dissipate.
The Trump administration is different: Newsrooms seem to agree on this. Whether it’s The New York Times committing an extra $5 million to cover it, outlets like CNN beefing up investigative reporting, or Reuters pledging to use what it’s learned covering countries like China and Zimbabwe in the U.S., institutions are recognizing that the new environment demands new approaches.
The boundaries of journalism — and who gets to make it, consume it, and criticize it — are expanding
Is the Donald Trump era — an era teeming with existential uncertainty for the media — also an opportunity for reinvention? Reporters and editors from prominent news organizations waded through challenges of being journalists in the current political (and technological) climate at a Harvard University event on Tuesday evening. Speakers from outlets from The Huffington Post to the Chicago Tribune to The Weekly Standard shared a mix of measured optimism, cautionary tales, calls for greater empathy, and new resolve for the possibilities that lie ahead.
The use of mobile adblockers has overtaken desktop adblockers globally due to a sharp increase in usage in Asia, according to a study out Wednesday from PageFair. Meanwhile, in the United States, nearly 1 in 5 desktop Internet users is blocking ads, but mobile adblocking remains rare.
- Art19 is a member of Syndicated Media’s partner program. (For more info on that, check out this column.)
It’s been nearly a year since the Catholic news site Crux split off from The Boston Globe to go independent. The departure wasn’t by choice — the Globe shuttered Crux after being unable to find enough “big-ticket Catholic advertising” to sustain it — but it’s turned out well: The site is now pulling in about 1.5 million pageviews a month, roughly 20 percent higher than its traffic was at the Globe.
Google has banned 200 publishers since it passed a new policy against fake news
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