Late last week, Ezra Klein, a columnist at the New York Times, took a deep dive into the work of a figure with a rising media profile: David Shor, an Obama campaign alum and Democratic data analyst. Shor believes that the party is screwed (“Only he didn’t say ‘screwed’”) in terms … | Continue reading
Earlier this month, an Australian court issued a decision in a long-running defamation case of Dylan Voller, who, in 2017, filed suit against a number of Australian media outlets, including Murdoch-owned The Australian and Sky News, for comments made on their Facebook pages by ot … | Continue reading
Last week, Facebook released a report detailing some of the most popular content shared on the site in the second quarter of this year. The report is a first for the social network. Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president of integrity, described the content review as part of “a long … | Continue reading
For nearly thirteen years, Mark Sabbatini has served as the sole publisher, editor, and reporter of IcePeople, a paper covering Svalbard, a remote Norwegian archipelago in the High Arctic, for a global audience. Earlier in his career, Sabbatini worked at newspapers including the … | Continue reading
Executive summary For all the news organizations that have adopted automated journalism over the last decade or so, the COVID-19 pandemic could have been the perfect story to automate as the technology draws on structured data that can fit into predictable story frames. This repo … | Continue reading
How gambling swallowed sports media
| Continue readingThe heat wave that swept the Pacific Northwest and Western Canada in late June was an extraordinary disaster. A mass of high-pressure air over the region trapped heat there, creating a “heat dome”—a term that recurred in news coverage. In Oregon, power cables melted; in Washingto … | Continue reading
Last October, Facebook warned a group of social scientists from New York University that their research—known as the Ad Observatory, part of the Cybersecurity for Democracy Project—was in breach of the social network’s terms of service. It said the group used software to “scrape” … | Continue reading
It is a recurring theme in political circles that giant digital platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube engage in bad behavior—distributing disinformation, allowing hate speech, removing conservative opinions, and so on—in part because they are protected from legal liabi … | Continue reading
In late May, over the Memorial Day weekend, the top story on NBC’s Meet the Press was a recent vote by Republican senators to kill the prospect of an independent, fully bipartisan commission to investigate the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6. (Six Republicans backed the … | Continue reading
That Facebook can distribute dangerous amounts of misinformation around the world in the blink of an eye is not a new problem. But the attention stepped up when President Joe Biden told reporters during a White House scrum that Facebook was “killing people” by spreading disinform … | Continue reading
This article is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story. CLIMATE CHANGE AMOUNTS TO an undeclared, deeply unjust war against the global poor. Though they have emitted almost none of the heat-trapping gases that ha … | Continue reading
In the thirteen years since it was founded, Harvard University’s Nieman Lab has developed a reputation for thoughtful explorations of digital trends in journalism and incisive critiques of how reporters and editors go about their business. The Lab’s founder, Joshua Benton, and Ha … | Continue reading
In the thirteen years since it was founded, Harvard University’s Nieman Lab has developed a reputation for thoughtful explorations of digital trends in journalism and incisive critiques of how reporters and editors go about their business. The Lab’s founder, Joshua Benton, and Ha … | Continue reading
With over ten thousand athletes from more than two hundred countries, the Olympics are typically a sports writer’s dream. But with Covid protocols in Tokyo this summer, and heightened awareness that players no longer need the press to connect with their fans, is spontaneous sport … | Continue reading
In recent days, extreme heat has baked swaths of the western part of North America. Portland, Oregon, recorded its highest ever temperature on Saturday, then again on Sunday, then again on Monday. Seattle repeatedly broke its own heat record. So did the nation of Canada; yesterda … | Continue reading
Read enough social-media policies, and you’ll wonder if you’ve torn a page out of The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook. The New York Times tells its staff that if they “engage in editorializing on social media, that can undercut the credibility of the entire newsroom.” The A … | Continue reading
The difficulty of moderating the ocean of content that gets posted on social networks by billions of users every day was obvious even before former President Donald Trump’s trolling forced Facebook and other platforms to block his accounts earlier this year. Differentiating genui … | Continue reading
TV newsman Bill Moyers likes to tell the story of how Edward R. Murrow, the pre-eminent US broadcast journalist of his time, insisted on covering what became Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939. Murrow’s bosses at CBS News had other priorities; they ordered Murrow’s reporters t … | Continue reading
Last week, Jonathan Chait, of New York magazine, took the “liberal media” to task for having rushed to repudiate “the lab-leak theory”—the idea that COVID-19 may have its origins in a research institute in Wuhan, China. The theory, Chait wrote, has recently “gained more and more … | Continue reading
Yesterday, Facebook released a “threat report” on what it calls “influence operations” on its platform. The company defined influence operations as “coordinated efforts to manipulate or corrupt public debate for a strategic goal”—an apparent reference to the kinds of activity tha … | Continue reading
Hyperlinks are a powerful tool for journalists and their readers. Diving deep into the context of an article is just a click away. But hyperlinks are a double-edged sword; for all of the internet’s boundlessness, what’s found on the Web can also be modified, moved, or entirely va … | Continue reading
In a New York Supreme Court last November, the conservative website Project Veritas launched its defamation suit against the New York Times in much the same way that Veritas’s founder, James O’Keefe, launches his viral videos—with a fusillade of accusations. Among the many allega … | Continue reading
Regulating big tech has become a global preoccupation; how such regulation might affect journalism is less clear. A couple of months after the controversial Australian News Media and Digital Platform Bargaining Code came into force, requiring Google and Facebook to pay for news i … | Continue reading
Executive Summary This research report explores archiving practices and policies across newspapers, magazines, wire services, and digital-only news producers, with the aim of identifying the current state of archiving and potential strategies for preserving content in an age of … | Continue reading
If you have a printed copy of the Associated Press Stylebook, even the 2020 edition, you’re out of date. In fact, if you haven’t looked at the AP stylebook online since April 23, you’re already out of date. At this time of year, the AP usually announces some of its more importan … | Continue reading
By now, many (if not most) of us have seen the cellphone video of the murder of George Floyd by Minnesota Police officer Derek Chauvin multiple times. The video—captured by a Black teenager named Darnella Frazier while she was walking to the store with her young cousin—has featur … | Continue reading
For more than six months, federal prosecutors say, a New York man used inside information to make illegal profits in the stock market—and a core element of his alleged scheme was his interaction with Bloomberg News, which published several stories shortly after the trader arrange … | Continue reading
Axios reported on Tuesday that Substack is raising another $65 million in venture financing, which will give the newsletter-publishing platform a theoretical market value of $650 million. That’s more than ten times what it was reportedly worth when it raised its first $15-million … | Continue reading
The results of the 2020 presidential election. The alleged dangers of the COVID vaccine. Disinformation continues to have a significant effect on almost every aspect of our lives, and some of the biggest sources of disinformation are the social platforms that we spend a large par … | Continue reading
In March of 2020, the Tow Center for Digital Journalism began tracking newsroom cutbacks in the wake of the pandemic. The tracker’s map tells part of the story of journalism’s ongoing crisis: an upheaval that hurt newsrooms, journalists, and—by straining journalism’s margins—the … | Continue reading
They won the Alaska newspaper giveaway. Then the pandemic arrived.
| Continue readingThe Australian version of Facebook got decidedly less newsy a week ago, after the company blocked Australian news outlets from posting their stories to its platform, and regular users in that country from sharing news from any media outlet anywhere in the world. (Traffic to Austr … | Continue reading
Two weeks ago, protests by farmers in India turned violent, even as the country was celebrating the anniversary of its democratic constitution. As thousands marched and drove their tractors through New Delhi, police responded with tear gas and batons, and a young farmer was kille … | Continue reading
Last Tuesday, as India celebrated a national holiday commemorating its democratic constitution, thousands of farmers marched and drove their tractors through New Delhi. It was the latest in a series of protests against agricultural reforms that many farmers fear will allow large … | Continue reading
Whenever the subject of disinformation, hate speech, or harassment on social media platforms comes up, someone inevitably suggests these problems could be solved if Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram outlawed anonymity and forced users to sign up using their real names. The past we … | Continue reading
It was a relatively innocuous job ad on LinkedIn, seeking an executive editor. It said things like “our editorial mission is to be the go-to place for understanding technology, innovation, and change, as it impacts all of our lives” and “we are unapologetically pro-tech, pro-futu … | Continue reading
This month we witnessed a violent rampage at the US Capitol. In the middle of the insurrection, CNN decided a political panel was the best means of following the unfolding catastrophe. As members of Congress were on lockdown, Anderson Cooper held court with political analysts Ric … | Continue reading
More than three years after the idea was first floated by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s “oversight board” started hearing its first cases last month. Whatever the outcomes, those cases have been overshadowed by an announcement on Thursday that Facebook has sought the right to perma … | Continue reading
As a mob swarmed the Capitol building on Wednesday, images and videos of the event spread across social media in close to real time, many going viral on Twitter and Facebook before cable news networks covering the events could verify or report them. One video showed a group of ri … | Continue reading
In 1937, Sterling A. Brown, a poet and literature professor at Howard University, published a forthright essay charting the history of Black life in his hometown of Washington, DC—from the district’s early status as the “very seat and center” of the domestic slave trade through t … | Continue reading
In 1937, Sterling A. Brown, a poet and literature professor at Howard University, published a forthright essay charting the history of Black life in his hometown of Washington, DC—from the district’s early status as the “very seat and center” of the domestic slave trade through t … | Continue reading
Release the anti-Kraken! Yesterday, the press heard from a couple of Trump enablers who have been quiet for a while, and they didn’t bring good news for the president’s election denialism. At a news conference, Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, referred to “the new adm … | Continue reading
In March 2019, HuffPost sent me to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, home of the Oglala Lakota Nation in South Dakota, to cover the work of an affordable-housing program. My editors had a particular story in mind, and so I was dispatched to source the material to write it. The a … | Continue reading
In January, when scientists in China released the genetic sequence of the novel coronavirus, researchers around the world began the race to develop a vaccine. The press followed along: Updates on tiny, incremental advances in the clinical trial process—largely sourced from prepri … | Continue reading
Did a newsletter company create a more equitable media system—or replicate the flaws of the old one?
| Continue readingExecutive Summary Through much of the 20th century, the US news diet was dominated by journalism outlets that professed to operate according to principles of objectivity and nonpartisan balance. Today, news outlets that openly proclaim a political perspective—conservative, progre … | Continue reading
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, has been back in Congress this week to talk about the need to reform how social-media platforms moderate content—a realm within which Facebook is trying to establish a “best in class” reputation. New research from the Tow Center shows that the pla … | Continue reading