Despite widespread fears that social media and other forms of algorithmically-filtered services (like search) lead to filter bubbles, we know surprisingly little about what effect social media have on people’s news diets.
Data from the 2017 Reuters Institute Digital News Report can help address this. Contrary to conventional wisdom, our analysis shows that social media use is clearly associated with incidental exposure to additional sources of news that people otherwise wouldn’t use — and with more politically diverse news diets.
This matters because distributed discovery — where people find and access news via third parties, like social media, search engines, and increasingly messaging apps — is becoming a more and more important part of how people use media.
The United States recently elected an unusual president. And to go with the times, Americans are exhibiting some behaviors in media consumption that are, if not unusual, then at least different from those of people in other countries.
That’s one of the recurring findings in a report out Thursday from Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report 2017 surveyed more than 70,000 people in 36 countries about their digital news consumption. (Countries included in the report for the first time this year: Slovakia, Croatia, Romania, Taiwan, Hong King, Malaysia, Singapore, Argentina, Chile, and Mexico.)
Bloomberg Businessweek gets a two-tiered paywall, a substantial price increase, and a new look
Bloomberg Businessweek has a big new interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook — and it would really like you to pay to read it. Businessweek launched a two-tiered metered paywall (and a resdesigned site, app, and weekly print magazine) Thursday. There’s also “a new regionalized email newsletter,” Daily IQ, only for subscribers.
They put in danger their private and professional lives to reveal the embezzlement and irregularities they discover in their workplaces, yet whistleblowers do not enjoy the protection they deserve. But things in Europe are now starting to shift
It’s no secret, of course, that many news organizations are struggling to find sustainable business models, finance ambitious reporting, and build trust with audience. And while many startups over the years have attempted to deal with these issues, a new platform said Wednesday it was looking to address these challenges with a new type of technology: blockchain.
Here’s how the startup, Civil (not to be confused with commenting platform Civil), explained themselves in a Medium post:
Is The Economist left- or right-wing? Why are The Economist’s writers anonymous? Why does The Economist call itself a newspaper?
Readers have a lot of questions about the 173-year-old magazine — ahem, newspaper — and The Economist is using Medium to help answer them. In December, the magazine’s social media team launched Inside The Economist, a Medium blog created to offer readers a behind-the-scenes look at its writing, reporting and production processes.
By Ryan Watts, Alexandra Ma and Nic Dias
While journalists are now focused on how to debunk disinformation, much less is written about how to monitor what people are discussing on social media, and where and how quickly inaccurate information is spreading. Yet there are a variety of tools available that can (1) help journalists track online conversations in real time and (2) be incorporated into workflows for fact-checking and verifying stories.
As part of the Full Fact/First Draft UK Election Project, we monitored a large number of online conversations for 33 days. Here we offer a short description of our day-to-day operations to serve as a blueprint for journalists looking to respond swiftly to newsworthy conversations and to stem the flow of misinformation.
When the election was called on April 18, we weren’t planning on taking part. It seemed pretty hard to organise something useful by June 8 and, having deployed the CrossCheck team to monitor the French election, our evaluation at the time was that misinformation was even less likely to spread in the UK than it had across the channel.
But by May 1, we’d changed our minds. Reflecting on the 67 stories we debunked during the CrossCheck project convinced us of two things:
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