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BREAKING: The ways people hear about big news these days; “into a million pieces,” says source
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June 1, 2018, 10:26 a.m.
Audience & Social
LINK: medium.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Christine Schmidt   |   June 1, 2018

At the GEN Summit in Portugal, Emily Bell teased research from Columbia’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism conducted over the past two years on the relationship between technology platforms and journalism. (The full results will be announced in two weeks.) The research draws on surveys from over a thousand American and Canadian respondents, 94 percent of which were local newsrooms. The American Press Institute helped develop the surveys, and NORC at the University of Chicago conducted them.

“Newsrooms feel distrustful of social media,” Bell said. “But if you look at data of how they’re using platforms we’ll see a different picture.”

One key finding:

There’s also this meaty chart of how publishers have been using (27!) platforms during the Tow Center’s research period (and more previewed charts in GENSummit’s writeup here):

Bell also said that the vast majority of newsrooms see Facebook as the “key villain” in the misinformation/fake news battle, but “interestingly, Google’s cultivation of the journalism community seems to be paying off.”

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