Tag: News

Replied to What Twitter Can Learn From Spotify (On my Om)

Twitter needs to change gears quickly — and it needs to start rebuilding itself now. It won’t be long before the toxicity on the platform starts to deprecate the brand itself. So far, the company seems to be set on taking the content-delivery road more traveled. Changing course could make all the difference.

I agree with Om that Twitter needs to change, I am just not sure about a Twitter as a place for content curation:

In much the same way Spotify has become a place where people experience music, Twitter could be the place where we discover, share, and consume news and other written content. And unlike Spotify, it could be a place where new, independent voices are found and build an audience.

Spotify’s reward structure doesn’t help the independents, and many smaller artists feel left out in the cold and understandably frustrated. Twitter could develop a subscription system that rewards both big and independent content creators. A system proposed earlier could be a skeletal template that satisfies both the big and the independent.

In part, this sounds like what Nuzzel offers, without the explicit organising. Interestingly, this sounds like a feed reader, I therefore wonder if that is where the opportunity lies, with things like Inoreader’s magic sort?

Liked Rupert Murdoch’s son James criticises News Corp and Fox for climate change coverage (ABC News)

“Kathryn and James’ views on climate are well established and their frustration with some of News Corp and Fox’s coverage of the topic is also well known,” a spokesperson for the couple told The Daily Beast, and later confirmed the statement’s accuracy to Reuters.

“They are particularly disappointed with the ongoing denial of the role of climate change among the news outlets in Australia, given obvious evidence to the contrary.”

Bookmarked How Rupert Murdoch Is Influencing Australia’s Bushfire Debate (nytimes.com)

And on Wednesday, Mr. Murdoch’s News Corp, the largest media company in Australia, was found to be part of another wave of misinformation. An independent study found online bots and trolls exaggerating the role of arson in the fires, at the same time that an article in The Australian making similar assertions became the most popular offering on the newspaper’s website.

It’s all part of what critics see as a relentless effort led by the powerful media outlet to do what it has also done in the United States and Britain — shift blame to the left, protect conservative leaders and divert attention from climate change.

Damian Cave discusses the roll of Rupert Murdoch and News Corp in man diverting attention away from climate change.
Replied to Idiots With Guns (Daily-Ink and Pair-a-dimes un-post-ed)

So let’s be realistic and while tolerating the ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ mantra of the networks, remove some of the poison being spread by these idiots. Take away their identity and fame… a small price they deserve to pay for taking away people’s lives.

David, this reminds me of Zeynep Tufekci call to stop feeding copycat scenarios.
Bookmarked It’s Time to Stop Pretending the Murdochs Are in the News Business (The Nation)

For Rupert and his sons, the press has always been the prime weapon in their power-seeking agenda.

Eric Alterman argues that Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is about power, not news. This is a response to the New York Times’ investigation into the battle for control at the heart of the business – something also discussed on The Daily podcast. This reminds me of dana boyd’s question of trust we are currently grappling with:

There are three key higher-order next steps, all of which are at the scale of the New Deal.

– Create a sustainable business structure for information intermediaries (like news organizations) that allows them to be profitable without the pressure of ROI.
– Actively and strategically rebuild the social networks of America.
– Find new ways of holding those who are struggling.

Bookmarked Google News is broken | Charged Tech (Charged Tech)

It’s one of the biggest traffic drivers on the web, but Google’s policies about how to get into the index are opaque, and applied at random.

Owen Williams recounts his experience in trying to have his site approved by Google News. Makes you wonder what is actually involved in being considered as ‘news’.
Replied to Episode 113: Privacy Not Included by Doug Belshaw, Dai Barnes (Today In Digital Education Podcast)

This week, Doug and Dai discuss what people get up to in autonomous vehicles, internet-era ways of working, Facebook-designed school curricula, open source culture, podcasts, information environments, and more!

I enjoyed the discussion of ‘news’. Personally, I draw upon a diet made up of aggregations, newsletters, podcasts and feeds. I have gotten to a place where I initially sift through titles and summaries to work out what is out interest and either read them or send to Pocket to read/listen or save to Huffduffer before saving them. I touched upon my filters here and my workflows here.

I wanted to clarify a comment made in response to my post. If the perception is that I sit all day at my desk reading the web, then it is wrong. I did spend time curating resources associated with Google, however I have moved departments and Google is no longer at the core of my work. Although I dip in now and then to my feed, the majority of my curation occurs out of hours on the train ride home or after the children have finally gone to bed. Rightly or wrongly, this is what I choose to spend my time with. I have little interest in gaming or watching television. I would argue that my current work does not necessarily allow the time, but rather the cognitive space to explore divergent ideas.

In regards to my newsletter, thank you for the feedback. Some food for thought moving into the new year.

Bookmarked Why the “golden age” of newspapers was the exception, not the rule by John Maxwell Hamilton; Heidi Tworek (Nieman Lab)

“In our ‘news’ today we can see the tattler, the party pamphlet, the recondite journal of opinion, the yellow rag, the journal of commerce, the sob sister, the literary journal, and the progressive muckraker.”

John Maxwell Hamilton and Heidi Tworek point out that the ‘golden years’ of newspapers between 1940 and 1980 was an anomaly in a longer, four-century history of news. In part this is a myth carried by a certain group in society:

The 1940s to 1980s were a golden age for newspaper owners to make money and journalists to make news. But they were only a golden age for a certain group of people. Many citizens — women and African-Americans, to take just two examples — often did not see themselves in news reporting and had few opportunities to shape it. It is no surprise that most of those writing the laments for times gone by are white men. Those men have long practiced such lamentations. Even in the 1980s, discussions at the American Society for Newspaper Editors were filled with a “persistent nostalgia for a mythic golden age when news was better made and better respected by the public.”

Cory Doctorow touches upon the association between newspapers and advertising in a recent interview for …

Bookmarked The platform patrons: How Facebook and Google became two of the biggest funders of journalism in the world (Columbia Journalism Review)

Both Google and Facebook may argue—and may even believe—that they simply want to help increase the supply of quality journalism in the world. But the fact remains that they are not just disinterested observers. They are multibillion-dollar entities that compete directly with media companies for the attention of users, and for the wallets of every advertising company that used to help support the business model of journalism. Their funding and assistance can’t be disentangled from their conflicted interests, no matter how much they wish it could.

Google has been really pushing into journalism lately, with the further investment of News Lab and the Digital News Initiative, as well as the ability to subscribe using your Google account. This in part seems to be in response to Facebook’s problems.
Listened TER #111 – Learning and Wellbeing with Helen Street – 29 April 2018 from Teachers’ Education Review

Links and notes coming soon! Timecodes: 00:00:00 Opening Credits 00:01:31 Intro 00:02:28 NAPLAN in the news 00:15:04 Feature Introduction 00:16:32 Off Campus – Dan Haesler 00:18:44 Dr Helen S…

Cameron Malcher provides a useful summary of the recent discussions of NAPLAN in the news:

Bookmarked Why Less News on Facebook Is Good News for Everyone by Will Oremus (Slate Magazine)

To what extent Facebook’s disruption of the media facilitated the political upheaval and polarization we’ve seen over the past several years is a question that researchers will be debating and investigating for some time. But it seems clear they’re related. And it was Facebook’s takeover of the news that gave Russian agents the tools to influence elections and civil discourse in democracies around the world.

Will Oremus discusses Facebook’s flip to prioritise the personal over corporation. This will have a significant impact on the way that news is portrayed on the site. It comes on the back of a series of changes in which Facebook has broken the back of digital news coverage:

First, by encouraging people to get news from all different sources in the same place, Facebook leveled the playing field among publishers.

Second, whereas human editors used to be trained to select and emphasize stories based on their news value, Facebook’s news feed algorithm optimized for clicks, views, likes, and shares.

This move isn’t to repair the damage done to democracy, but rather to limit the damage done to its users.

Bookmarked Inside Facebook’s Two Years of Hell (WIRED)

When social media started becoming driven by images, he bought Instagram. When messaging took off, he bought WhatsApp. When Snapchat became a threat, he copied it. Now, with all his talk of “time well spent,” it seems as if he’s trying to co-opt Tristan Harris too.

Nicholas Thompson and Fred Vogelstein disentangle the last two years in Facebook’s rise, with a particular focus on the way that they have embraced news. As with Google+, the picture is painted as to how Facebook ‘copied, then crushed’ Twitter and their hold on distributing news:

Back in 2012, the most exciting social network for distributing news online wasn’t Facebook, it was Twitter. The latter’s 140-character posts accelerated the speed at which news could spread, allowing its influence in the news industry to grow much faster than Facebook’s. “Twitter was this massive, massive threat,” says a former Facebook executive heavily involved in the decision making at the time.

So Zuckerberg pursued a strategy he has often deployed against competitors he cannot buy: He copied, then crushed. He adjusted Facebook’s News Feed to fully incorporate news (despite its name, the feed was originally tilted toward personal news) and adjusted the product so that it showed author bylines and headlines. Then Facebook’s emissaries fanned out to talk with journalists and explain how to best reach readers through the platform.

The catch with this change is that it is merely a focus on being THE platform. This therefore meant overlooking the multitude of complexities associated with ‘news’:

Facebook hired few journalists and spent little time discussing the big questions that bedevil the media industry. What is fair? What is a fact? How do you signal the difference between news, analysis, satire, and opinion? Facebook has long seemed to think it has immunity from those debates because it is just a technology company—one that has built a “platform for all ideas.”

The problem with this stance, to “never favour one kind of news”, is that “neutrality is a choice in itself.” This choice is one that can then be cajoled and manipulated:

While Facebook grappled internally with what it was becoming—a company that dominated media but didn’t want to be a media company—Donald Trump’s presidential campaign staff faced no such confusion. To them Facebook’s use was obvious. Twitter was a tool for communicating directly with supporters and yelling at the media. Facebook was the way to run the most effective direct-­marketing political operation in history.

In response to Trump’s use, the purchasing of ads and criticism for people such as Tristan Harris, Zuckerberg set out this year to right the wrongs:

One of the many things Zuckerberg seemed not to grasp when he wrote his manifesto was that his platform had empowered an enemy far more sophisticated than Macedonian teenagers and assorted low-rent purveyors of bull.

Ironically, he has now turned to the community to work as curators.

…

Along with investigations into the links between Facebook funding and research, these posts help highlight the tangled mess that we have gotten ourselves into.