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Since Tuesday’s election, there’s been a lot of finger pointing, and many of those fingers are pointing at Facebook, arguing that their newsfeed algorithms played a major role in spreading misinformation and magnifying polarization. Some of the articles are thoughtful in their criticism, others thoughtful in their defense of Facebook, while others are full of the very misinformation and polarization that they hope will get them to the top of everyone’s newsfeed. But all of them seem to me to make a fundamental error in how they are thinking about media in the age of algorithms. Consider Jessica Lessin’s argument in The Information: "I am deeply, deeply worried about the calls I am hearing, from journalists and friends, for Facebook to intervene and accept responsibility for ensuring citizens are well-informed and getting a balanced perspective…. Facebook promoting trustworthiness sounds great. Who isn’t in favor of accepting responsibility and ferreting out misinformation? But major moves on Facebook’s part to mediate good information from bad information would put the company in the impossible position of having to determine “truth,” which seems far more objective than it really is. Moreover, it would be bad for society.” My response: Facebook crossed this river long ago. Once they got into the business of curating the newsfeed rather than simply treating it as a timeline, they put themselves in the position of mediating what people are going to see. They became a gatekeeper and a guide. This is not an impossible position. It’s their job. So they’d better make a priority of being good at it....
A new report from Pew Research Center shows an increase in the number of people in the United States getting their news from social media platforms. The report revealed that more than 62 percent said they get news on social media, which is about a 13 percent increase since 2012.OK, what else is new? Facebook is becoming more like Twitter as a news source.That might be your reaction to what is already a clear trend of people turning to social media for their news. But what does that mean for media outlets? We dig into the numbers here to translate them into actionable insights....
Business Wire’s 2015 Media Survey is now available and it offers startling results about how journalists see the future of news media. The landscape of media is changing – new platforms and new styles. The New York Times is an institution but it didn’t start off as one. How will we be referring to BuzzFeed decades from now? Will the two seemingly different lines of media style intersect at some point in the future? These questions are part of the debate regarding the future of media and journalists are split.
According to an article published in The Guardian back in 2013, BuzzFeed is described as an, “irreverent US news and entertainment website taking the social web by storm” and investor Kazz Lazerow, co-founder of Buddy Media, described the website as “the defining media company for the social age.”
Only a few years ago, BuzzFeed represented the wave of change the digital age brought upon news media and that wave has only continued to grow. Now, BuzzFeed is challenging traditional forms of news, jockeying to become the standard of journalism.
When asked to decide between The New York Times style and the BuzzFeed style, journalists made clear that while the classical form isn’t going anywhere, it will have to share its place at the top....
On Monday, The New York Times ran something of a rant in the business section about the impact of social media on quality journalism, with writer Ravi Somaiya saying in part: “[a]s more readers move toward online social networks, and as publishers desperately seek scale to bring in revenue, many [newspapers] have deplored a race toward repetitive, trivial journalism, so noisy that it drowns out more considered work." Joshua Topolsky, a founder of The Verge, added this means that the news industry “must churn out stories that are the equivalent of blockbuster superhero franchises, with mass-audience appeal, but light on nuance and creative risk,” according to Somaiya. "I think that we have, in trying to attack the totality of possible eyeballs on the Internet, lost the things that make publications great,” Topolsky added....
Journalism + Design, the latest program at the The New School in New York City is teaching journalists how to think like designers, and designers how to think like journalists. With a curriculum co-developed by Ideo, the undergraduate program kicked off this semester teaching students how to harness design and design thinking in news.
This interdisciplinary collaboration between Parsons, the New School’s design college, and the liberal-arts-focused Eugene Lang College, will be the first-ever undergrad journalism program at the New School. “The idea was to combine the rigorous critical thinking of a great liberal arts college with the creative design thinking of a great design school,” Program Director Heather Chaplin tells Co.Design. The experimental new program was funded in part by a $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation, which funds innovation in journalism.
The program--which the creators refer to as being in beta--launched with six classes on topics like “Visualizing Data,” though for the time being, students can also take applicable classes, like web design, at Parsons or at Eugene Lang. In addition to regular faculty, guest editors and designers participate in classes, and each semester more informal “pop-up classes” will taught by working journalists like John Keefe, a data news editor at WNYC who’s teaching a class--in the style of a cooking show--on how to make maps....
A few months ago, noted investor Marc Andreessen proclaimed his bullish-ness about the state of the news industry, predicting it would grow 100 times. It was a nervy claim to make, in a time when snackable content is all the rage and virality is the most coveted status in media.
So no one was surprised when he personally funded some of that growth; his venture firm Andreessen Horowitz was the sole investor in BuzzFeed’s stunning $50 million round announced last month. The news got the media and tech worlds buzzing (sorry) once again about what constitutes journalism in the digital age and how to best serve audiences growing consistently hungrier for content.As a sixth-generation journalist and one who has studied, written, and worked in many forms of journalism, I was particularly fond of Andreessen’s prediction — and that he followed it up by putting his money where his mouth is.
I’d argue though that the smartest bets in media are going to be companies that fulfill the best values of traditional journalism through the means and necessities of the new digital landscape. The biggest winners will be those who combine old-school news-gathering methods with the distribution technology that makes sites like BuzzFeed such powerhouses....
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Try to imagine getting the latest news by chatbot? If you can think it, you can ask for breaking news from CNN using Amazon Echo. That’s right. It’s the latest news brought to you by CNN chatbot. CNN launches chatbot news CNN has done a great job of delivering the news on TV and new social media channels. In fact, it has a 40-person dedicated digital team ready to deliver chatbot news according to a Lost Remote post by Max Willens:...
No need to seek out the news. Today, we can just click around on cat videos and find it by accident. A poll released Thursday by the Pew Research Center found that a majority of Americans (62%) now get news from social media. That includes 66% of Facebook FB -0.10% users — a big deal because more than two-thirds of Americans are on Facebook. The math works out to about 44% of all Americans getting news from Facebook. It’s a number that could scare users angered by the recent censorship controversy. In early May, a staffer accused Facebook of preventing conservative stories from appearing in the small Trending Topics section that appears to the right of the main News Feed column. Facebook has denied it has a bias, but that hasn’t stopped the conservative backlash. Liberals, too, have complained about the power that Facebook has over the news media. Well, it turns out that that social media does have a lot of influence when it comes to how people get their news. It’s not just Facebook. On Reddit and Twitter TWTR +5.59%, 70% and 59% of users, respectively, say they use their networks to find news....
In July, I shared preliminary results of a study on how readers perceive and learn from online news stories. The upshot: Better-designed stories are better for readers.
As Paul Bolls and I began to design our study, I conducted phone interviews with more than a dozen editors and designers. I asked them how they think about making their work memorable and comprehensible, and how they tested what worked best. Their responses share a few broad themes.
First, digital design is not as evolved as print design. The print newspaper offers the ability to communicate hierarchies of salience and context, all of which the standard Web article template lacks.
Second, for many of them, Web analytics do not play a major role in their day-to-day decision-making. Page views and other metrics are tracked, but beyond limited A/B testing — picking winners based on traffic — analytics do not guide major editorial decisions.
Third, while they seek to make stories and infographics as understandable as possible, memorability is not a major focus. It cannot be measured, and so it generally is not considered....
The growth of social media has changed the way news organisations cover conflicts around the world, but traditional journalistic values are still vital.
These, at least, were the main conclusions from a panel at the Web Summit conference in Dublin this morning, featuring representatives from Time, Vice News and News Corporation-owned social curation service Storyful.
“I’m not sure that the task of journalism has changed that much: we still send journalists to unearth stories and break news. But Twitter is our competition, and we have faced up to that reality,” said Matt McAllester, Europe editor for Time....
Student editor's response: "I’m so scared and excited I could pee my pants."
Medium now has Substance. The popular publishing platform recently started hosting Substance, a new student publication at Mt. San Antonio College that doubles as a totally reinvented version of The Mountaineer campus newspaper.
It is the first college media outlet to operate primarily on Medium. Substance adviser and MSAC j-prof extraordinaire Toni Albertson describes the arrangement as nothing less than “the perfect merge of tech and college journalism.”
In a bravura announcement yesterday about the merger, Albertson explained that the impetus behind it was two-fold — mounting staff frustration at the print production routine and growing reader ennui toward the print edition....
The future of news might be difficult to predict, but by looking at successful consumer apps and the broader news industry, we can start to develop a picture of what a truly next-generation news industry could look like.
Despite the recent flurry of activity like Jeff Bezos buying the Washington Post and investing in Business Insider, Pierre Omidyar starting First Look, Flipboard’s acquisition of Zite, and new products like Facebook Paper and Yahoo News Digest, fundamental questions remain about the future of news: 1. How will news products grow and retain large 7-day-a-week customer bases? 2. How will news products make money? 3. How will news products address the content discovery problem? 4. What’s the demarcation between the future of publishers and next-gen news product companies?
If we examine what’s working in consumer products and news more broadly, we can make educated guesses about some of these questions and get a sense of where the future of news is headed....
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In a compelling argument, Tim O'Reilly says Facebook is obliged to maintain editorial oversight of content.