The growing stream of reporting on and data about fake news, misinformation, partisan content, and news literacy is hard to keep up with. This weekly roundup offers the highlights of what you might have missed.
“The unflattering light of conventional eastern European stereotypes.” Let’s not pretend we’re being completely neutral when we write about foreign fake news factories like those in Macedonia, writes Lalage Harris in The Calvert Journal (h/t Adrian Chen).
Since its early days, Quartz has built its brand on in part on infusing coding into its reporting. Now, the organization is close to making it easier for other organizations to bring a similar spirit to their own newsrooms.
At the Online News Association conference next month, Quartz plans to unveil a suite of Slack-based tools designed to simplify the process of creating bots to follow certain pages or data. With the tool, a local crime reporter, could, for example, create a bot that monitors the local police department’s website and alerts them whenever there’s an update. Technology and finance reporters could do the same with bots that monitor SEC filings. Quartz is building the tools, which it teased last year, thanks to the $250,000 grant it got from the Knight Foundation in late 2016.
How would Gawker be covering the Trump era were it still around in 2017? It’s a question on the minds of many today, a year to the day after CEO Nick Denton announced the site was shutting down.
That question is tied up in the larger one about how Gawker, a site with significant numbers of both detractors and supporters, should be remembered. One take that’s getting a lot of attention is this Washington Post tribute by University of Maine professor Michael J. Socolow, who accurately concluded that Gawker’s legacy in death is just as complicated as its journalistic was role in life.
The BBC World Service already publishes in 28 languages around the world. On Monday, it makes a foray into unusual territory: launching a full-fledged news service delivered in Nigerian Pidgin, a largely oral language spoken widely both in Nigeria and in countries across West and Central Africa.
Last May Digital Content Next, a trade organization that represents many of the big digital media companies, launched TrustX, a curated, automated ad-buying marketplace designed to offer advertisers a more consistent, brand-safe way to purchase ad innovatory. Nearly thirty digital publishers — including Hearst, Conde Nast, Vox Media, and Time Inc. — joined the effort, hoping to aid in the attempt to rebuild trust in the digital advertising ecosystem.
In 2017, the one thing every digital-native news outlet needs is a newsletter (not an app)
Newsletter > Apple News > podcast > app: In terms of how digital-native news outlets get their information out, the newsletter wins. That’s according to a digital news fact sheet from Pew Research Center, released Monday. It looks at 36 news outlets that originated online and have at least 10 million unique visitors per month (list of outlets, from 247sports.com to Vox.com, here).
Facebook is paying its factcheckers now (and giving them more work). Facebook rolled out an update this week that will surround popular articles in the News Feed with related articles — “part of Facebook’s strategy to limit the damage of false news without censoring those posts,” reports The Wall Street Journal’s Deepa Seetharaman. The article also notes that Facebook has started paying its factchecking partners (like Snopes and PolitiFact), who “will start seeing more articles in their queues.”
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