Archives: 2018

Laura Hazard OwenMarch 2, 2018
Disinformation spread online is so disorienting that it’s messing with the researchers who study it
Plus: Outrage-tweeting is a dangerous thing, and why we have to teach students not to be “trust misers.”
Laura Hazard OwenMarch 1, 2018
Canada’s new budget gives $50 million to local journalism in underserved communities — but publishers want more
Christine SchmidtMarch 1, 2018
By mass-texting local residents, Outlier Media connects low-income news consumers to useful, personalized data
“I was not satisfied with covering low-income communities for a higher-income audience. I wanted to cover issues for and with low-income news consumers.”
Ricardo BiltonMarch 1, 2018
An AI editor and story summaries are helping Compass News become a go-to app for non-news junkies
“If you go to any news site, at least half the headlines require a huge amount of assumed knowledge. Thats fine if you’re a journalist who spends a lot of time reading the news but it’s not if you are an average person who checks the news once a day for five minutes. We’re building for that second group.”
Laura Hazard OwenFebruary 28, 2018
News in a disintegrating reality: Tow’s Jonathan Albright on what to do as things crash around us
“The kinds of things that I often see could literally be stopped by one person. I mean: 4chan trending on Google during the Las Vegas shooting? How that even happened, I have no idea, but I do know that one person could have stopped that.”
Shan WangFebruary 28, 2018
For social publisher LittleThings, Facebook’s “prioritization of friends/family content over publishers was the last straw”
Jeff IsraelyFebruary 28, 2018
How photojournalism can survive the digital revolution (and your short attention span)
“How many photographs have crossed your screen today? Dozens? Hundreds? How many have you looked at? How many did you really see?”
Mazin SidahmedFebruary 27, 2018
What The Guardian has learned trying to build a more intelligent story format — one that knows what you know
Like Circa before it, The Guardian aims to atomize a big breaking story into its individual parts — and then be smart about showing you the right ones at the right time.
Christine SchmidtFebruary 27, 2018
Facebook’s support for local news subscriptions is one move in the larger dance between publishers and platforms
Nicholas QuahFebruary 27, 2018
Podcast publishers, start preserving your stuff. (This podcast will tell you how.)
Plus: Anchor relaunches (and where are we with social audio?), a McDonald’s podcast is an utterly fascinating artifact, and more media pariahs move to podcasts (this time, it’s Logan Paul).
Ricardo BiltonFebruary 26, 2018
Here are a few details about WNYC’s Gothamist revival (and one big question)
Gothamist is back (yay!), but DNAinfo is not (boo!). Here’s what we’ve learned about the public radio bid to bring the site back.
Christine SchmidtFebruary 26, 2018
Can social Stories work for news organizations — without putting them on a platform?
“We don’t see AMP Stories as a fun side project. We believe it will become a core part of our toolbox,” says The Washington Post’s lead product manager.
Laura Hazard OwenFebruary 23, 2018
Scroll, the $5/month news subscription startup, signs up The Atlantic, Business Insider, Fusion Media Group, Slate, and others
Ricardo BiltonFebruary 23, 2018
With in-article chat bots, BBC is experimenting with new ways to introduce readers to complex topics
“For us, this is a way to let people read and ask questions at their own pace, instead of having them read through long screens of text. Often people aren’t engaged in stories because they haven’t had the right context.”
Laura Hazard OwenFebruary 23, 2018
Can we keep media literacy from becoming a partisan concept like fact checking?
Plus: Screen time debates, and what the data says about kids and smartphones.
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