I have written on journalism and media trends eariler few years ago. So it is time for update. What is the state of journalism and news publishing in 2017? NiemanLab’s predictions for 2017 are a good place to start thinking about what lies ahead for journalism. There, Matt Waite puts us in our place straight away by telling us that the people running the media are the problem.
There has been changes on tech publishing. In January 2017 International Data Group, the owner of PCWorld magazine and market researcher IDC, on Thursday said it was being acquired by China Oceanwide Holdings Group and IDG Capital, the investment management firm run by IDG China executive Hugo Shong. In 2016 Arrow bought EE Times, EDN, TechOnline and lots more from UBM.
Here are some article links and information bits on journalist and media in 2017:
Soothsayers’ guides to journalism in 2017 article take a look at journalism predictions and the value of this year’s predictions.
What Journalism Needs To Do Post-Election article tells that faced with the growing recognition that the electorate was uniformed or, at minimum, deeply in the thrall of fake news, far too many journalists are responding not with calls for change but by digging in deeper to exactly the kinds of practices that got us here in the first place.
Fake News Is About to Get Even Scarier than You Ever Dreamed article says that what we saw in the 2016 election is nothing compared to what we need to prepare for in 2020 as incipient technologies appear likely to soon obliterate the line between real and fake.
Headlines matter article tells that in 2017, headlines will matter more than ever and journalists will need to wrest control of headline writing from social-optimization teams. People get their news from headlines now in a way they never did in the past.
Why new journalism grads are optimistic about 2017 article tells that since today’s college journalism students have been in school, the forecasts for their futures has been filled with words like “layoffs,” “cutbacks,” “buyouts” and “freelance.” Still many people are optimistic about the future because the main motivation for being a journalist is often “to make a difference.”
Updating social media account can be a serious job. Zuckerberg has 12+ Facebook employees helping him with posts and comments on his Facebook page and professional photographers to snap personal moments.
Wikipedia Is Being Ripped Apart By a Witch Hunt For Secretly Paid Editors article tells that with undisclosed paid editing on the rise, Wikipedians and the Wikimedia Foundation are working together to stop the practice without discouraging user participation. Paid editing is permissible under Wikimedia Foundation’s terms of use as long as they disclose these conflicts of interest on their user pages, but not all paid editors make these disclosures.
Big Internet giants are working on how to make content better for mobile devices. Instant Articles is a new way for any publisher to create fast, interactive articles on Facebook. Google’s AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a project that it aims to accelerate content on mobile devices. Both of those systems have their advantages and problems.
Clearing Out the App Stores: Government Censorship Made Easier article tells that there’s a new form of digital censorship sweeping the globe, and it could be the start of something devastating. The centralization of the internet via app stores has made government censorship easier. If the app isn’t in a country’s app store, it effectively doesn’t exist. For more than a decade, we users of digital devices have actively championed an online infrastructure that now looks uniquely vulnerable to the sanctions of despots and others who seek to control information.
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Tomi Engdahl says:
If it smells fake, it probably is
http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/rowe-s-and-columns/4443338/If-it-smells-fake–it-probably-is
The last few months, weeks, and days have seen what appears to be a rise in “fake news,” “alternative facts,” and other such nonsense. As engineers, we know there’s no such thing as an alternative fact. For something to become a fact, it must be proven. We also know that in our world, even laws can’t be changed. Go ahead, try to change Ohm’s Law. You can’t.
Can “fake news” happen in the technical press? Yes, and it’s quite frequently sent. Fortunately, much of what is fake or insignificant news never makes it to this site nor the print publication that preceded it. That’s not to say that PR and marketing people don’t try, and they may succeed by getting unsuspecting editors to publicize their “news” or “new” product announcements, often by simply republishing press releases.
How do editors know when a new product is really new?
Another way editors spot questionable news is by how it’s written. When a release is full of superlatives such as “fastest,” or “lowest price” without backing them up with numbers, we know something isn’t kosher. I often contact companies asking for prices, even just a base price. Some try to hedge the question by saying “it depends on the configuration.”
Many companies make boasts and back them up. For example, I often see product releases that include tables with specs from a new product compared to those of competitors. The marketers know that the numbers better be right because they’re easy to check–and check we do and so do the company’s competitors and customers.
Then there’s the “technical article” that so often accompanies a new product’s release. Out of the blue, a PR person will send an article that’s what we editors call a “poof” article. It describes a problem, and then “poof,” problem solved by purchasing the company’s new product.
Marketers and PR people think that just because an article doesn’t mention the product made by the author’s company that the article isn’t a product pitch. They’re wrong. I’ve rejected many such articles over the years.
That’s not to say that we editors are perfect. Yes, I admit to once or twice accepting an article only to regret it later when the comments came in.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Danny Sullivan / Search Engine Land:
Google adds anchor button on AMP pages, to help readers see and share publishers’ real URLs — As promised, Google is making a change to how it displays Accelerated Mobile Pages, so that users can easily view and share links that lead directly to publishers’ sites rather than to Google’s copy of the content.
Google makes it easier to see and share publishers’ real URLs from AMP pages
New anchor button enables copy-and-paste of URLs directly to publisher sites.
http://searchengineland.com/google-makes-easier-see-share-publishers-real-urls-amp-pages-268699
Tomi Engdahl says:
Paul Sawers / VentureBeat:
Google, Facebook to help French newsrooms combat “fake news” ahead of presidential election — Google and Facebook are to help a host of French news organizations combat the growing scourge of fake news ahead of the upcoming French presidential election campaign.
Google and Facebook to help French newsrooms combat ‘fake news’ ahead of presidential election
http://venturebeat.com/2017/02/06/google-partners-with-french-newsrooms-to-combat-fake-news-ahead-of-presidential-election/
Google and Facebook are to help a host of French news organizations combat the growing scourge of fake news ahead of the upcoming French presidential election campaign.
With CrossCheck, Google has partnered with First Draft and Facebook to support a coalition of notable newsrooms — including Le Monde, Agence France-Presse (AFP), France Télévisions, BuzzFeed, Global Voices, and Les Echos — to help the French electorate “make sense of what and who to trust in their social media feeds, web searches, and general online news consumption,” according to David Dieudonné, Google’s News Lab lead in France.
Though it’s far from a new phenomenon, the “fake news” problem has received renewed attention in the wake of two notable political events in the past twelve months — Brexit and the U.S. presidency. The extent to which hoaxes and fake news articles influenced the outcome of those political campaigns is up for debate, but technology companies and news organizations are embracing new tools as concerns grow over the online spread of false information, or “alternative facts.”
The French presidential election takes place on April 23, 2017
Tomi Engdahl says:
Brian Stelter / CNNMoney:
Huffington Post Editor-in-Chief Lydia Polgreen says she wants the site to become a tabloid that everyone from “the janitor to the CEO” can read — Trumps escalating war with the media — Can The Huffington Post, a web site founded as a liberal answer to The Drudge Report, win over millions of Trump voters?
Huffington Post’s new editor seeks new audience — Trump voters
http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/06/media/huffington-post-lydia-polgreen-interview/
Can The Huffington Post, a web site founded as a liberal answer to The Drudge Report, win over millions of Trump voters? New editor-in-chief Lydia Polgreen believes that it can. So it is starting to try.
Liberal and conservative labels have become scrambled, in her view.
“I see us as fundamentally representing the ordinary people anywhere in the world who feel that the game is rigged; that the deck is stacked against them; who feel that the house always wins,” she said in the interview. She harkened back to the days of the “classic tabloid that everybody from the janitor to the CEO would read” and said she sees an opportunity for HuffPost to occupy a similar space in the media world.
One open question is whether HuffPost can do that. Another question is whether web surfers — like the Obama voters turned Trump voters who Polgreen cited at Harvard — will give the site a chance.
HuffPost originally categorized Trump’s campaign as “entertainment,”
Polgreen reports to CEO Jared Grusd, and both executives face the same challenge as countless other publishers: Finding new ways to boost traffic while dealing with a difficult digital advertising marketplace.
But there is no talk about trying a subscription model a la The Times. “I think it’s really clear that the Huffington Post is a mass market media play,” Polgreen said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Philip Bump / Washington Post:
Speaking to the US Central Command, Donald Trump claims that the media intentionally covers up reports of terrorist attacks — Speaking to the United States’ Central Command on Monday, President Trump went off his prepared remarks to make a truly stunning claim: The media was intentionally covering up reports of terrorist attacks.
President Trump is now speculating that the media is covering up terrorist attacks
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/02/06/president-trump-is-now-speculating-that-the-media-is-covering-up-terrorist-attacks/
“You’ve seen what happened in Paris, and Nice. All over Europe, it’s happening,” he said to the assembled military leaders. “It’s gotten to a point where it’s not even being reported. And in many cases the very, very dishonest press doesn’t want to report it. They have their reasons, and you understand that.”
It’s certainly true that not every terrorist attack receives broad coverage in the national media.
But filtering what to cover is very different than suppressing information. On any given day, local newspapers and news broadcasts decide what to spend resources on.
Trump didn’t quite say that the media was siding with the terrorists, just that the media would happily ignore terrorism if it made Trump look bad.
Trump’s relationship with the media has never been strong during his time in politics. But he’s never before tried to push the media into the “against us” circle alongside those who commit acts of terrorism — at least, not so explicitly.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jasper Jackson / The Guardian:
In an unusual move, Wikipedia editors vote to ban The Daily Mail as a source after finding it “generally unreliable”
Wikipedia bans Daily Mail as ‘unreliable’ source
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/feb/08/wikipedia-bans-daily-mail-as-unreliable-source-for-website
Online encyclopaedia editors rule out publisher as a reference citing ‘reputation for poor fact checking and sensationalism’
“This means that the Daily Mail will generally not be referenced as a ‘reliable source’ on English Wikipedia, and volunteer editors are encouraged to change existing citations to the Daily Mail to another source deemed reliable by the community. This is consistent with how Wikipedia editors evaluate and use media outlets in general – with common sense and caution.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
All generalizations are false, including this one.
- Mark Twain
News Quality Chart
http://www.allgeneralizationsarefalse.com/?p=80
Tomi Engdahl says:
Most of the Web Really Sucks If You Have a Slow Connection
https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/02/10/1255245/most-of-the-web-really-sucks-if-you-have-a-slow-connection
While it’s easy to blame page authors because there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit on the page side, there’s just as much low-hanging fruit on the browser side. Why does my browser open up 6 TCP connections to try to download six images at once when I’m on a slow satellite connection?
the best current solution for users appears to be: use w3m when you can, and then switch to a browser with ad-blocking when that doesn’t work.
Most of the web really sucks if you have a slow connection
https://danluu.com/web-bloat/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Erik Wemple / Washington Post:
Political journalists now must do the tedious job of second-grade level fact checking of Trump administration statements
The life-sucking tedium of covering official lies
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2017/02/09/the-life-sucking-tedium-of-covering-official-lies/?utm_term=.5612300def2f
Mike Allen of Axios counseled journalists to appreciate these times. “Enjoy this — soak it in,” said Allen in a chat with Breitbart News.
Sorry, but there’s not much to enjoy. This week, President Trump claimed that the murder rate had reached a 47-year high.
A good fact-checker is trained to examine public documents, legal correspondence, video archives and on and on — all in search of a verdict. The Trump people, at least, make the job much more simple.
Another truth-defying moment streamed out of Thursday’s White House briefing. Press secretary Sean Spicer was busy trying to defend the president against a reported statement from Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch that Trump’s broadsides against the judiciary — such as a tweet calling a federal jurist a “so-called judge” — are “demoralizing” and “disheartening.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Allister Heath / Telegraph:
Tim Cook says fake news is “killing people’s minds”, calls for a PSA campaign, school education, and new tools from tech companies to battle it — Tim Cook, the boss of Apple, is calling for governments to launch a public information campaign to fight the scourge of fake news, which is “killing people’s minds”.
Fake news is killing people’s minds, says Apple boss Tim Cook
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/02/10/fake-news-killing-peoples-minds-says-apple-boss-tim-cook/
In an impassioned plea, Mr Cook, boss of the world’s largest company, says that the epidemic of false reports “is a big problem in a lot of the world” and necessitates a crackdown by the authorities and technology firms.
In an exclusive interview with The Daily Telegraph, he calls for a campaign similar to those that changed attitudes on the environment to educate the public on the threat posed by fabricated online stories.
Made-up news reports trying to promote a particular agenda gained huge traction on social media in the US during the election.
“It has to be ingrained in the schools, it has to be ingrained in the public,” said Mr Cook. “There has to be a massive campaign. We have to think through every demographic.
“We need the modern version of a public-service announcement campaign. It can be done quickly if there is a will.”
“All of us technology companies need to create some tools that help diminish the volume of fake news.
“The [rise of fake news] is a short-term thing – I don’t believe that people want that at the end of the day.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Gabriel Snyder / Wired:
Inside NYT’s digital transformation: luring subscribers via Beta Group’s vertical apps, a Facebook chatbot, live video, VR, and more on top of strong journalism
How The New York Times Is Clawing Its Way Into the Future
https://www.wired.com/2017/02/new-york-times-digital-journalism/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Dan Frommer / Recode:
As Twitter gained just 2M monthly active users in the quarter of the US election, Facebook gained 72M
Twitter only grew by two million users during Trump mania — Facebook grew by 72 million
The U.S. election spectacle didn’t drive an uptick in Twitter signups — growth actually slowed.
http://www.recode.net/2017/2/9/14558890/trump-twitter-user-growth
The spectacle of the U.S. presidential election — and Donald Trump mania, specifically — was Twitter’s best material in years, and made the service a crucial source for direct news.
But as Twitter reported today in its fourth-quarter results, it didn’t translate into any spike in new user growth. Twitter grew by just two million monthly active users in the fourth quarter, finishing the year with 319 million worldwide.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nathan McAlone / Business Insider:
Former members of Google News team remember how Google News accepted sites while mitigating spam and rejecting or de-ranking unreliable and biased sources
Secret de-ranking and outwitting spammers: Recollections from inside the Google News ‘black box’
http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-the-google-news-team-2017-2?op=1&r=US&IR=T&IR=T
For the small team maintaining one of the world’s most popular news sites, the job was straightforward: weed out liars and scammers.
But amid a sea of online information and misinformation, the Google News staffers had a sometimes tricky task.
The editorial team carrying out the job was nothing like a traditional newsroom. Some members of the team had journalism bonafides, others came from the world of customer service, and still others were contractors based in India or other parts of the world.
“We were a weird, motley crew,”
As internet companies like Google and Facebook play an increasingly prevalent role in news distribution, the editorial standards and practices of the companies are increasingly under scrutiny, especially with fake news on the rise.
The Google News product, which was first released in 2002, has one major difference from Google’s standard web search engine: Only publications that have been reviewed and approved by Google’s human staffers and special news algorithms can appear in Google News. Google says it has let over 75,000 publications, from across the world, onto the platform. And Google executives have said that more than 1 billion people visit the Google News site every week.
Before Google outsourced the job completely to contractors, the team of editorial reviewers had all the perks of regular Google employees.
Here’s how the review process currently works, according to Google:
A computer algorithm performs an initial automated assessment of a site, scanning for standard signs of legitimacy, such as an “About” page.
After that, a “committee” of human reviewers look at a publisher’s site, which must get endorsed by 80% of the reviewers to gain entry onto Google News.
Fact-checking individual articles, however, was not part of the reviewer’s job.
There was “no expectation of [the] full-time US team to check facts,” one person said. “We wouldn’t really get into the question of whether it was true,” another confirmed. Google doesn’t dispute this.
Former staffers said the Google News team did not have to deal with much “fake” or “hoax” news, which seems to have only emerged as a phenomenon during the recent US Presidential campaign.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sarah Perez / TechCrunch:
Google News expands “fact check” tag for stories on web and mobile apps to Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina
Google expands fact-checked news to Brazil, Mexico & Argentina
https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/15/google-expands-fact-checked-news-to-brazil-mexico-argentina/
In October, Google announced it would begin highlighting fact-checked resources in its Google News vertical, allowing readers to more easily find links to reputable sources of factual information related to major stories. Today, Google says it’s expanding this feature to new markets, including Brazil, Mexico and Argentina.
The company had previously launched fact checks outside the U.S., with the addition of France and Germany in November of last year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mark Zuckerberg / Facebook:
Open letter outlining Facebook’s attempts to build a more inclusive community, including improving tools for reporting abuse, squashing misleading stories, more — On our journey to connect the world, we often discuss products we’re building and updates on our business.
Building Global Community
https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/building-global-community/10103508221158471/
Facebook just changed its mission, because the old one was broken
With great power comes long letters
http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/16/14642164/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-letter-mission-statement
Facebook used to repeat its mission statement so often that most tech reporters could recite it from memory: “To give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” And it’s still the mission you see when you visit the company’s Facebook page. But in a remarkable letter published today, CEO Mark Zuckerberg acknowledged the severe shortcomings and blind spots that his company’s mission created. Going forward, he said, the company will consider what happens after it connects people — and try to manage those effects for the better. “In times like these,” Zuckerberg wrote, “the most important thing we at Facebook can do is develop the social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sahil Patel / Digiday:
In the wake of the PewDiePie scandal, dozens of advertisers have been contacting YouTube analytics firms to help them police their YouTube ad campaigns — Advertisers might want more stringent ways to police YouTube content in light of the controversy surrounding YouTube’s biggest star …
On PewDiePie and the inherent difficulties in policing YouTube
http://digiday.com/agencies/pewdiepie-inherent-difficulties-policing-youtube/
Advertisers might want more stringent ways to police YouTube content in light of the controversy surrounding YouTube’s biggest star, PewDiePie, making anti-Semitic comments on several of his recent videos. Unfortunately, the problem is a lot bigger and more nuanced than PewDiePie (then again, most things are more nuanced than PewDiePie).
While Disney and YouTube are distancing themselves from Kjellberg, advertisers are worried they’ll find themselves in the crosshairs of viewers angry at Kjellberg. With 53 million subscribers on YouTube, Kjellberg had one of the most sought-after YouTube channels. In light of the allegations, dozens of advertisers have contacted YouTube analytics firms looking for more stringent ways to assess the quality of different YouTube creators and channels.
Tomi Engdahl says:
John Herrman / New York Times:
How a hands-off culture and tangible rewards for attention led to the PewDiePie scandal on YouTube, a platform with its own emerging politics
YouTube’s Monster: PewDiePie and His Populist Revolt
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/16/magazine/youtubes-monster-pewdiepie-and-his-populist-revolt.html
Felix Kjellberg, known to his fans as PewDiePie, is by far YouTube’s biggest star. His videos, a mix of video-game narration, humorous rants and commentary, have cumulatively been viewed billions of times, and more than 53 million people subscribe to his channel. He has been called “the king of YouTube” and countless variations thereon, and he has remained unchallenged on that perch for years, making millions of dollars and leveraging his popularity into outside ventures.
But Monday night, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Disney-owned Maker Studios, a longtime partner of Kjellberg’s, would no longer have anything to do with him; later, YouTube announced that it was canceling a show developed with Kjellberg, and removing his channel from its lucrative “Google Preferred” advertising program. At issue was a series of recent comedy videos. In one, he found performers on the freelance site Fiverr willing to dance and hold up a sign of the client’s choosing. He asked them to write “Death to all Jews,” and they did
As he anticipated, plenty of news outlets saw a story in his antics. Others saw something more. A post on The Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi site, marveled at Kjellberg’s performances, and wondered in disbelief if they might signal sympathy for its ideology.
It’s tempting to write off this scandal as an inscrutable product of a teen subculture, wrapped up in layers of irony and the peculiar language and aesthetics of YouTube. It is likewise easy to frame the episode as an isolated collision between offensive speech and careful sponsors. But it’s most useful to understand Kjellberg’s meltdown in the context of the vast platform on which it took place — YouTube — and the nascent strains of politics that could come to define it.
With more than a billion users, YouTube has become not merely a platform but almost a kind of internet nation-state: the host of a gigantic economy and a set of cultures governed by a new and novel sort of corporation, sometimes at arm’s length and other times up close.
In December 2016, Kjellberg’s account was about to pass 50 million subscribers — a milestone, and a record. But in his videos, he seemed to be ending the year on a pessimistic note. “It’s time for me to complain about YouTube,” he said in a video. “Again.” The platform, he suggested, had changed in a way that he found worrying, and maybe punitive.
It might seem hard to believe that anyone would want to watch a YouTube video complaining about YouTube’s internal economic politics, but more than 20 million people did (the video’s title, “DELETING MY CHANNEL AT 50 MILLION,” surely helped).
For product reviewers and gamers, for the unboxers and the how-to teachers, for the interchannel drama analysts, the bloggers, the makeup artists and the pranksters, YouTube looms large not just as a context but also as a character. The daily exigencies of life on YouTube are perhaps the only subject that cuts across every major YouTube category. Showbiz loves to make movies about showbiz, and television loves to make television about TV. YouTube has simply democratized this impulse.
It makes sense that YouTube would become home to such a performatively self-aware economy. It is, after all, one of the most mature of the major social platforms. It is extremely culturally productive, and can claim genuine stars as its own. Above all, it pays. And in the people who depend on the platform to pay their bills, it inspires a peculiar mixture of paranoia, desire, gratefulness and disdain that shows up clearly in their work.
Watch enough YouTube programming on any subject and you’ll gradually come to understand the struggles of starting and maintaining a channel.
Tomi Engdahl says:
4 Things To Know As Out-Of-Home Goes Programmatic
https://adexchanger.com/digital-out-of-home/4-things-know-home-goes-programmatic/
Billboards are lighting up with the promise of programmatic.
Out-of-home (OOH) is projected to grow almost 12% in spend by 2020 – faster than any other traditional media – thanks to opportunities in digital, according to the Outdoor Advertising Association of America. Digital OOH accounted for $2.7 billion in ad spend in the US last year.
As digital inventory grows, OOH media sellers are eyeing programmatic budgets.
“Advertisers can say, ‘I only want to advertise this creative after 4 p.m., if it’s raining and if the home team won that day,” Sriubas said. “It’s a spectacularly different way to think about OOH.”
Out-of-home advertising
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-home_advertising
Out-of-home Media Advertising (a.k.a. OOH advertising or outdoor advertising) or out-of-home media (a.k.a. OOH media or outdoor media) is advertising that reaches the consumers while they are outside their homes.
Out-of-home media advertising is focused on marketing to consumers when they are “on the go” in public places, in transit, waiting (such as in a medical office), and/or in specific commercial locations (such as in a retail venue). OOH advertising formats fall into four main categories: billboards, street, roads, highways, transit, and alternative.[1]
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why Starting With Cookies Doesn’t Make Sense For Cross-Device Tracking
https://adexchanger.com/mobile/starting-cookies-doesnt-make-sense-cross-device-tracking/
“We see many advertisers start with cookie-derived data and bridge that to mobile IDs using cross-device vendors – and to me, that doesn’t make sense,” Laband said Thursday at a company event in New York City.
Device IDs, like IDFA on iOS and Android’s advertising ID, are persistent and often used as the connective tissue to link customer activity and identifiers across devices and channels.
“These are way more persistent than a cookie ID,” Laband said.
But scale is always an issue, and in order to get there, onboarders and cross-device providers are increasingly turning to probabilistic methods to pump up their reach.
“What’s happening now is that [marketers are] taking a desktop cookie and probabilistically connecting it to a mobile user,”
Even if they’re using a cross-device vendor like Tapad, Drawbridge or Oracle’s Crosswise to make the match between a cookie and device ID, the audience that’s being created is essentially a lookalike audience, rather than a one-to-one match to a device ID.
It also makes sense to start with mobile IDs, he said, because the lifetime value of an app identifier is greater than a cookie – even a persistent cookie, which doesn’t expire when users close their browsers, but is at risk of being cleared at any time.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Margaret Sullivan / Washington Post:
Journalists have flimsy legal protections if Trump’s Department of Justice uses Espionage Act and orders them to reveal sources, a practice Obama’s DoJ started
Could reporters be hunted down if Trump goes after leakers?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/could-reporters-be-hunted-down-if-trump-goes-after-leakers/2017/02/18/a0b86f9e-f466-11e6-b9c9-e83fce42fb61_story.html?utm_term=.d891284c2e08
For those who care about press rights in America, President Trump’s words last week were stunning and disturbing.
The news media is not merely “scum,” as he has said many times before, but now “the enemy of the American People.”
“I’ve actually called the Justice Department to look into the leaks,” he said. “Those are criminal leaks.”
Add up these two elements and you get a troubling question: Will the Trump administration’s crackdown on leaks include journalists as well as their sources?
Some knowledgeable lawyers and academics say it’s unlikely.
“Right now, it’s a deviant practice, certainly not in the ordinary course of business, to subpoena a journalist,”
But, Pozen told me: “If we’re in a new paradigm, that could change.”
Why should journalists be treated any differently than any other citizens? Why shouldn’t they testify about their sources or even be prosecuted themselves when information obtained illegally is published?
Well, because the democracy is built on their ability to serve as a check on government power.
A crucial part of that is the ability to promise confidentiality to sources.
You might think the First Amendment would protect journalists from getting drawn into court.
“The protections are normative, not legal,”
Trump, meanwhile, has seen the enemy. And it is, well, us.
His media attacks apparently signal strength and resolve to his core supporters. Make no mistake: This is a calculated move on his part — and, politically, a proven winner.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Jared Keller / Pacific Standard:
To encourage media literacy and fact-checking, Wikimedia spinoff Wiki Edu invites students to write Wikipedia pages instead of traditional research papers
How Wikipedia Is Cultivating an Army of Fact Checkers to Battle Fake News
https://psmag.com/how-wikipedia-is-cultivating-an-army-of-fact-checkers-to-battle-fake-news-6e818f68e5a6#.j7jo1y7ig
The online encyclopedia has been fact checking the Internet for more than 15 years. Now it wants to bring its skeptical eye to the masses.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Adrienne LaFrance / The Atlantic:
Mark Zuckerberg’s lip service to journalism is not enough to sustain media amid Facebook’s ad revenue siphoning and hands-off view of editorial responsibility
The Mark Zuckerberg Manifesto Is a Blueprint for Destroying Journalism
Lip service to the crucial function of the Fourth Estate is not enough to sustain it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/02/the-mark-zuckerberg-manifesto-is-a-blueprint-for-destroying-journalism/517113/
It’s not that Mark Zuckerberg set out to dismantle the news business when he founded Facebook 13 years ago. Yet news organizations are perhaps the biggest casualty of the world Zuckerberg built.
There’s reason to believe things are going to get worse.
A sprawling new manifesto by Zuckerberg, published to Facebook on Thursday, should set off new alarm bells for journalists, and heighten news organizations’ sense of urgency about how they—and their industry—can survive in a Facebook-dominated world.
Facebook’s existing threat to journalism is well established. It is, at its core, about the flow of the advertising dollars that news organizations once counted on.
In this way, Facebook’s role is a continuation of what began in 1995, when Craigslist was founded. Its founder, Craig Newmark, didn’t actively aim to decimate newspapers, but Craigslist still eviscerated a crucial revenue stream for print when people stopped buying newspaper classifieds ads.
massive unbundling of news services online that would diminish the power and reach of the news, culturally, and make it more difficult to produce a profitable news product.
Zuckerberg’s memo outlines a plan for the next phase of this unbundling, and it represents an expansion of Facebook’s existing threat to the news industry.
Now, Zuckerberg is making it clear that he wants Facebook to take over many of the actual functions—not just ad dollars—that traditional news organizations once had.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Sean Spicer once said only dictatorships would ban media access
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/sean-spicer-once-said-only-dictatorships-would-ban-media-access-a7598831.html?cmpid=facebook-post
The press secretary blocked journalists from the daily briefing on Friday
In December, Spicer promised that the Trump administration would never ban press access regardless of the President’s feelings on their news coverage. When Politico’s Jake Sherman asked Mr Spicer if the new administration would limit press access, he responded by saying the media is what “makes a democracy a democracy versus a dictatorship.”
The news outlets blocked from the press briefing on Friday include organisations that President Trump has criticised by name. CNN, BBC, The New York Times, LA Times, New York Daily News, BuzzFeed, The Hill, and the Daily Mail were among the organisations banned from the meeting.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Robert Mercer: the big data billionaire waging war on mainstream media
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage
Just over a week ago, Donald Trump gathered members of the world’s press before him and told them they were liars. “The press, honestly, is out of control,” he said. “The public doesn’t believe you any more.” CNN was described as “very fake news… story after story is bad”. The BBC was “another beauty”
It was $10m of Mercer’s money that enabled Bannon to fund Breitbart – a rightwing news site, set up with the express intention of being a Huffington Post for the right.
A determined plutocrat and a brilliant media strategist can, and have, found a way to mould journalism to their own ends
A video on YouTube shows one of Cambridge Analytica’s and SCL’s employees, Brittany Kaiser, sitting on the panel at Leave.EU’s launch event.
Facebook was the key to the entire campaign, Wigmore explained. A Facebook ‘like’, he said, was their most “potent weapon”. “Because using artificial intelligence, as we did, tells you all sorts of things about that individual and how to convince them with what sort of advert. And you knew there would also be other people in their network who liked what they liked, so you could spread. And then you follow them. The computer never stops learning and it never stops monitoring.”
The danger of not having regulation around the sort of data you can get from Facebook and elsewhere is clear. With this, a computer can actually do psychology, it can predict and potentially control human behaviour. It’s what the scientologists try to do but much more powerful. It’s how you brainwash someone. It’s incredibly dangerous.
It’s no exaggeration to say that minds can be changed. Behaviour can be predicted and controlled. I find it incredibly scary
In the course of the US election, Cambridge Analytica amassed a database, as it claims on its website, of almost the entire US voting population – 220 million people – and the Washington Post reported last week that SCL was increasing staffing at its Washington office and competing for lucrative new contracts with Trump’s administration.
Tomi Engdahl says:
New York Times:
A frustrated Trump, used to controlling media with strategic tabloid leaks, ramps up attacks on an entrenched White House press corps and broader media
Trump Ruled the Tabloid Media. Washington Is a Different Story.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/25/us/politics/trump-press-conflict.html?_r=0
Tomi Engdahl says:
Benjamin Mullin / Poynter:
Interview with Mashable CCO on how beats, quality over quantity, and focus have increased unique views by 78% YoY and video views by 452% YoY to 320M/month — Last year, Mashable laid off about two-dozen employees, cutting its politics an
Mashable says it’s thriving by embracing quality journalism — and avoiding the same old Trump stories
http://www.poynter.org/2017/mashable-says-its-thriving-by-embracing-quality-journalism-and-focus-and-avoiding-the-same-old-trump-stories/449560/
Last year, Mashable laid off about two-dozen employees, cutting its politics and international reporters in a push for more video.
So, how’s that going? The reorganization of the company, which saw Chief Content Officer Gregory Gittrich replace Editor-in-Chief Jim Roberts “wasn’t an easy stretch,” Gittrich said. But Mashable has some good news — unique visitors and revenue are way up, and they’re hiring.
More specifically: Unique views of Mashable content are up 78 percent year-over-year, and revenue has increased 36 percent, the highest it’s ever been, Gittrich said. The company has surpassed 320 million monthly video views, a 452 percent increase over the previous year.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Annie Karni / Politico:
Sources: Sean Spicer warns staff against leaking to media in a meeting that included a check of phones, saying apps like Confide and Signal violate Records Act — The push includes random phone checks overseen by White House lawyers. — Press Secretary Sean Spicer is cracking …
Sean Spicer targets own staff in leak crackdown
The push includes random phone checks overseen by White House lawyers.
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/sean-spicer-targets-own-staff-in-leak-crackdown-235413
Press secretary Sean Spicer is cracking down on leaks coming out of the West Wing, with increased security measures that include random phone checks of White House staffers, overseen by White House attorneys.
The push to snuff out leaks to the press comes after a week in which President Donald Trump strongly criticized the media for using unnamed sources in stories and expressed growing frustration with the unauthorized sharing of information by individuals in his administration.
The phone checks included whatever electronics staffers were carrying when they were summoned to the unexpected follow-up meeting, including government-issued and personal cellphones.
Spicer also warned the group of more problems if news of the phone checks and the meeting about leaks was leaked to the media.
But with mounting tension inside the West Wing over stories portraying an administration lurching between crises and simmering in dysfunction, aides are increasingly frustrated by the pressure-cooker environment and worried about their futures there.
Within the communications office, the mood has grown tense.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Mike Allen / Axios:
Sources: Sean Spicer had the CIA’s director and a GOP official call reporters to discredit an NYT story on links between Trump’s campaign aides and Russia — Exclusive: Spicer arranged CIA, GOP intelligence push-back — White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer personally picked up the phone …
Exclusive: Spicer arranged CIA, GOP intelligence push-back
https://www.axios.com/exclusive-spicer-arranged-sat-in-on-cia-gop-intelligence-push-back-2288082248.html
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer personally picked up the phone and connected outside officials with reporters to try to discredit a New York Times article about Trump campaign aides’ contact with Russia, then remained on the line for the brief conversations
Tomi Engdahl says:
Politico:
Trump’s advisers and career civil servants spawn encryption boom in Washington DC, as they try to conceal communications with employees and press
Trump inspires encryption boom in leaky D.C.
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/02/trump-encryption-cybersecurity-leaks-235417
Both career employees and White House aides have taken steps to conceal their communications with colleagues or the news media.
Poisonous political divisions have spawned an encryption arms race across the Trump administration, as both the president’s advisers and career civil servants scramble to cover their digital tracks in a capital nervous about leaks.
The surge in the use of scrambled-communication technology — enabled by free smartphone apps such as WhatsApp and Signal — could skirt or violate laws that require government records to be preserved and the public’s business to be conducted in official channels, several ethics experts say. It may even cloud future generations’ knowledge of the full history of Donald Trump’s presidency.
“The operative word is accountability. You cannot hold an agency or someone accountable if records are not kept and made available,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Benjamin Mullin / Poynter:
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which broke Panama Papers story, splits off from Center for Public Integrity, citing financial reasons — Shortly after breaking the Panama Papers, an international exclusive that shed light on illegal offshore banking around the globe …
Months after breaking the Panama Papers, ICIJ is going independent
http://www.poynter.org/2017/months-after-breaking-the-panama-papers-icij-is-going-independent/450446/
Shortly after breaking the Panama Papers, an international exclusive that shed light on illegal offshore banking around the globe, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists should have been riding high.
Instead, the scrappy cross-border investigative team was facing the dreary prospect of laying staffers off due to a financial squeeze at its parent organization, the Center for Public Integrity.
“I did feel a little deflated,” said Gerard Ryle, ICIJ’s director. “Our team had achieved what had never been achieved before. And here I was, facing the prospect of having to lay off journalists that were the heroes of this story.”
Now, 10 months after breaking the Panama Papers story with hundreds of journalists around the world, ICIJ is taking its financial future into its own hands.
Tomi Engdahl says:
W3C:
W3C Web Annotation Working Group publishes data model, vocabulary, and protocol recommendations for web annotations
Three recommendations to enable Annotations on the Web
https://www.w3.org/blog/news/archives/6156
Tomi Engdahl says:
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/03/this-site-is-taking-the-edge-off-rant-mode-by-making-readers-pass-a-quiz-before-commenting/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Peter Kafka / Recode:
As Facebook begins adding “disputed” labels, a look at how Facebook took a full week to label one made-up story from a fake news site as “disputed”
Facebook has started to flag fake news stories
Coming to your feed: A “disputed” label for bogus stories
http://www.recode.net/2017/3/4/14816254/facebook-fake-news-disputed-trump-snopes-politifact-seattle-tribune
That bogus story about Donald Trump your uncle posted on Facebook? It’s still staying on Facebook.
But now it’s going to get a warning label. Eventually. Sometimes.
Facebook has started pinning a “disputed” tag on fake news, as it promised it would back in December, as part of its “we’re going to fight fake news but there’s only so much we can do” campaign.
So that’s good, right? Right. It is good for Facebook to tell its 1.9 billion users that some of the stories they may see in Facebook are bogus.
It may prevent some of them from going to a pizza place and firing their rifle.
But Facebook’s “disputed” tag also shows how gingerly the company is approaching this stuff.
Then there’s the process that Facebook needed to go through before it would attach the “disputed” label, which it spelled out last year:
Either Facebook’s users have to report the story as bogus, or Facebook’s software has to catch something odd about it.
Facebook will send the story to some of the organizations that have signed on to provide free fact-checking, like Snopes and Politifact.
If two of those fact-checkers think it’s bogus, the label goes on.
Facebook’s “hey we’re just a platform” ideology means it’s most comfortable when someone else is telling it that something’s amiss. Even though that approach has plenty of problems.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Why newspaper subscriptions are on the rise
https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/04/why-newspaper-subscriptions-are-on-the-rise/
So much for the death of the newspaper industry. A recent Nielsen Scarborough study found that more than 169 million U.S. adults now read newspapers every month, in print, online or mobile. That’s almost 70 percent of the population.
Sure, those papers can thank the incoming president for some of their new business, but this isn’t just a political story. All sorts of reader-supported publishers are enjoying a resurgence.
Tomi Engdahl says:
People hate ads. More than 80 million Americans will use ad blockers this year, costing digital media companies around $10 billion in revenue. And despite all the media industry talk about relevant “native advertising,” most of us are still drowning in pop-ups.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/04/why-newspaper-subscriptions-are-on-the-rise/
Tomi Engdahl says:
Adrianne Jeffries / The Outline:
Google’s featured snippets, presented as the “one true answer” in search and by Google Home, sometimes give false information from untrustworthy sources — The highlighted answers given prime placement over search results are often shockingly bad.
Google’s featured snippets are worse than fake news
The highlighted answers given prime placement over search results are often shockingly bad.
https://theoutline.com/post/1192/google-s-featured-snippets-are-worse-than-fake-news
For most of its history, Google did not answer questions. Users typed in what they were looking for and got a list of web pages that might contain the desired information. Google has long recognized that many people don’t want a research tool, however; they want a quick answer. Over the past five years, the company has been moving toward providing direct answers to questions along with its traditional list of relevant web pages.
Type in the name of a person and you’ll get a box with a photo and biographical data. Type in a word and you’ll get a box with a definition. Type in “When is Mother’s Day” and you’ll get a date. Type in “How to bake a cake?” and you’ll get a basic cake recipe. These are Google’s attempts to provide what Danny Sullivan, a journalist and founder of the blog SearchEngineLand, calls “the one true answer.” These answers are visually set apart, encased in a virtual box with a slight drop shadow. According to MozCast, a tool that tracks the Google algorithm, almost 20 percent of queries — based on MozCast’s sample size of 10,000 — will attempt to return one true answer.
Unfortunately, not all of these answers are actually true.
“I understand what Google is trying to do, and it’s work that perhaps requires algorithmic aid,” Shulman said in an email. “But in this instance, the question its algorithm scoured the internet to answer is simply a poorly conceived one. There have been no presidents in the Klan.”
Google needs to invest in human experts who can judge what type of queries should produce a direct answer like this, Shulman said. “Or, at least in this case, not send an algorithm in search of an answer that isn’t simply ‘There is no evidence any American president has been a member of the Klan.’ It’d be great if instead of highlighting a bogus answer, it provided links to accessible, peer-reviewed scholarship.”
Many of Google’s direct answers are correct. Ask Google if vaccines cause autism, and it will tell you they do not. Ask it if jet fuel melts steel beams, and it will pull an answer from a Popular Mechanics article debunking the famous 9/11 conspiracy theory. But it’s easy to find examples of Google grabbing quick answers from shady places.
Google added featured snippets sometime in 2014, and it’s not like the company doesn’t know about this problem.
Google has an excellent reputation, and it’s well-deserved. Mammoth forces of spammers, scammers, and other bad actors are constantly trying to manipulate Google’s search rankings, and yet they remain incredibly useful for users. Yet the company seems willing to take hits to its reputation while also promoting conspiracy theories, bigotry, and misinformation. Why?
For one thing, people really like this style of search. “It’s having a very good impact on the search results. People love them,”
In one of his company’s surveys, people said the feature they wanted most was the ability to “answer directly without having to visit another website or another app.” These quick answers are great when they’re accurate, especially if you’re on a mobile device, and they often are accurate — or at least accurate enough to satisfy the searcher.
Focusing on direct answers is also a longer-term play. The number of browser-less internet-connected devices is growing fast, and already voice-activated assistants like Amazon Echo and Google Home are penetrating the market. Google’s traditional list of search results does not translate well to voice
The fastest way for Google to improve its featured snippets is to release them into the real world and have users interact with them. Every featured snippet comes with two links in the footnote: “About this result,” and “Feedback.”
Google uses this feedback form and other algorithmic signals from users to continuously improve and refine featured snippets. Snippets change a lot, Enge said — webmasters will optimize for a query, score a featured snippet, and then lose it days later.
In theory, featured snippets will always temporarily turn up some bad answers, but the net effect would be better answers. “It’ll never be fully baked, because Google can’t tell if something is truly a fact or not,”
Tomi Engdahl says:
University of California, Berkeley, To Delete Publicly Available Educational Content
https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/03/06/206212/university-of-california-berkeley-to-delete-publicly-available-educational-content
In response to a U.S. Justice Department order that requires colleges and universities make website content accessible for citizens with disabilities and impairments, the University of California, Berkeley, will cut off public access to tens of thousands of video lectures and podcasts. Officials said making the videos and audio more accessible would have proven too costly in comparison to removing them.
Berkeley Will Delete Online Content
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/06/u-california-berkeley-delete-publicly-available-educational-content
Starting March 15, the university will begin removing more than 20,000 video and audio lectures from public view as a result of a Justice Department accessibility order.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Angus Crawford / BBC:
BBC investigates Facebook’s failure to remove sexualized images of children; Facebook reports BBC journalists to UK’s National Crime Agency
Facebook failed to remove sexualised images of children
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-39187929
Facebook has been criticised for its handling of reports about sexualised images of children on its platform.
The chairman of the Commons media committee, Damian Collins, said he had “grave doubts” about the effectiveness of its content moderation systems.
Mr Collins’ comments come after the BBC reported dozens of photos to Facebook, but more than 80% were not removed.
When provided with examples of the images, Facebook reported the BBC journalists involved to the police and cancelled plans for an interview.
It subsequently issued a statement: “It is against the law for anyone to distribute images of child exploitation.”
On its welcome page, Facebook says it does remove obscene material.
“Nudity or other sexually suggestive content” it states are not allowed on the platform.
Tomi Engdahl says:
How Anti-Science Forces Thrive On Facebook
https://www.buzzfeed.com/stephaniemlee/inside-the-internets-war-on-science?utm_term=.qb9X7zjG0#.omqmp8a2W
Welcome to the corner of the internet that’s hell-bent on convincing you that GMOs are poisonous, vaccines cause autism, and climate change is a government-sponsored hoax. The message is traveling far and wide.
Tomi Engdahl says:
FCC Chair on Trump’s War on the Press: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
https://www.wired.com/2017/03/fcc-chairman-trumps-war-press-%c2%af_%e3%83%84_%c2%af/
Media outlets critical of President Trump are used to being called “fake news.” But they have good reason to worry that the president will go beyond name-calling. He could try to use his power to retaliate against media companies that criticize him and reward those that praise him.
And, at least by the lights of a Senate hearing today, the officials tasked with protecting Americans’ access to the airwaves and the internet don’t seem eager to stand in his way.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Fighting Cyber Security FUD and Hype
http://www.securityweek.com/fighting-cyber-security-fud-and-hype
Dr. Ian Levy is technical director at the UK’s National Cyber Security Center (NCSC), which is part of GCHQ. It is fair to say that the NCSC will play a major part in defining and delivering the UK government’s cyber security policy over the next few years.
The security industry stands accused by the UK’s leading cyber security agency of over-hyping the cyber security threat to sell under-achieving products. It does this in two stages: firstly by defining the threat (by manipulating the media); and secondly by positioning its own product as the sole effective cure (by manipulating the buyer).
Manipulating the Media
The vendor/media relationship is a complex symbiosis. In the age of free news, each needs the other ― but there are well-known, if unspecified, rules. The primary rule is that the media must appear to be entirely independent of vendor influence, even when largely funded by vendor advertising.
The vendor industry is forced to manipulate the media subliminally ― and different parts of the media accept this subliminal manipulation to differing degrees.
Historically, the vendor’s primary tool has been the ‘press release’; but this is now supplemented by the vendor blog. The former is used to frame the company and its product; while the latter is used to frame the threat. The ultimate aim is to define the vendor as the sole cure for a dire threat; and to get the media to describe both in the vendor’s terms.
The serious media will genuinely seek the underlying truth in all it receives. But journalists have their own pressures: the need to write compelling copy that will attract the largest possible readership, and to do so repeatedly to very tight deadlines.
The first requirement (compelling copy) leads to the simple acceptance of new buzz words framed by the vendor to define a major new threat that it discovered, and by implication is best positioned to counter.
The second requirement (tight deadlines) is probably the primary cause of what is now known as ‘fake news’. For the most part, this is not a conspiracy to spread false rumors, but a failure to take sufficient time to check facts rather than simply trust sources.
Fake news is not new — it has existed for as long as there have been reporters.
Manipulating the Buyer
It is easy to forget that vendors are businesses, and their primary purpose is to make a profit.
“The primary goal is not to solve the security problems, but sell you a product that you think can solve your security problems.”
It is the methods used to sell the product regardless of effectiveness that worry some buyers; and the ability to see through these methods only comes with experience.
One vendor told him to use FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) to get budget to buy product. It didn’t work: “I never have and never will. The reality is the business relies on its professionals to act as such. If there is a real risk, we need to attack it. If there is perceived risk, we need to evaluate it.”
A second problem is that salesmen do not necessarily understand either the technicalities of the product they must sell, or the specific demands of the security market ― and resort to their own version of FUD or fibs to make a sale.
Marketing budgets
Surprisingly, the size of security product marketing budgets is also seen as an issue. “Vendor marketing budgets are a massive problem,” says security author Raef Meeuwisse; “especially as the largest budgets are often backing the most out of date and ineffective security technologies. It often feels like the larger the ads, the less the vendor has to sell.”
Fighting the F.U.D.
“It is the business, guided by our experience and input, which needs to make the final decision,” says Zinaich. “The fact is, more squirrels have taken out power around the globe than any hacker has to date. It is not even close. Yet, the fragile ‘House of Internet Things’ we are rapidly building is full of risk. That risk has to be managed in the light of reality, not by carnival barkers.”
There is an acceptance among security leaders that security vendors will hype the products and FUD the threat; and that it is down to the professionals’ own knowledge and experience to get to the right product for the right price for their own environment. “I’ve found the best approach is to leverage proof-of-concepts on every solution we are considering,”
The Ultimate Solution
There is no ultimate solution. Salesmen will continue to sell the products they represent rather than the correct solutions. Publications will continue to seek readers by making their news stories as ‘interesting’ as possible. The combination will always drift towards Ian Levy’s winged ninja cyber monkeys; but if Bill Burns is correct, the new Information Age may make it a self-correcting issue through the democratization of information. The new element is the citizen journalist ― the independent blogger who does not hesitate to correct the professional journalist who makes a mistake, nor criticize a product that is over-hyped or inadequate. Independent blogs will keep both publications and vendors honest.
Over time, bloggers like Harley could disarm, if not remove, the winged cyber ninja monkeys by keeping journalists honest and vendors truthful.
Tomi Engdahl says:
The Problem with “Content”
http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/problem-content?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+linuxjournalcom+%28Linux+Journal+-+The+Original+Magazine+of+the+Linux+Community%29
Tomi Engdahl says:
Zeynep Tufekci / New York Times:
WikiLeaks’ CIA document cache, which focuses on compromising devices and not apps, underscores the strength of Signal’s and WhatsApp’s encryption
The Truth About the WikiLeaks C.I.A. Cache
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/09/opinion/the-truth-about-the-wikileaks-cia-cache.html
On Tuesday morning, WikiLeaks released an enormous cache of documents that it claimed detailed “C.I.A. hacking tools.” Immediately afterward, it posted two startling tweets asserting that “C.I.A. hacker malware” posed a threat to journalists and others who require secure communication by infecting iPhone and Android devices and “bypassing” encrypted message apps such as Signal and WhatsApp.
This appeared to be a bombshell. Signal is considered the gold standard for secure communication. WhatsApp has a billion users. The C.I.A., it seemed, had the capacity to conduct sweeping surveillance on what we had previously assumed were our safest and most private digital conversations.
In their haste to post articles about the release, almost all the leading news organizations took the WikiLeaks tweets at face value.
Yet on closer inspection, this turned out to be misleading. Neither Signal nor WhatsApp, for example, appears by name in any of the alleged C.I.A. files in the cache. (Using automated tools to search the whole database, as security researchers subsequently did, turned up no hits.) More important, the hacking methods described in the documents do not, in fact, include the ability to bypass such encrypted apps — at least not in the sense of “bypass” that had seemed so alarming. Indeed, if anything, the C.I.A. documents in the cache confirm the strength of encryption technologies.
Continue reading the main story
What had gone wrong? There were two culprits: an honest (if careless) misunderstanding about technology on the part of the press; and yet another shrewd misinformation campaign orchestrated by WikiLeaks.
Let’s start with the technology. In the aftermath of Edward J. Snowden’s revelations about potential mass surveillance, there has been a sharp increase in the use of these “end to end” encryption apps, which render even the company that owns the app or phone essentially unable to read or hear the communications between the two “end” users.
Given that entities like Signal and WhatsApp cannot get access to the content of these conversations, even in response to a warrant — WhatsApp keeps logs of who talked to whom, Signal doesn’t do even that — intelligence agencies have been looking to develop techniques for hacking into individual phones. That way, they could see the encrypted communications just as individual users of the apps would.
These techniques are what the leaked cache revealed. Security experts I spoke with, however, stressed that these techniques appear to be mostly known methods — some of them learned from academic and other open conferences — and that there were no big surprises or unexpected wizardry.
In other words, the cache reminds us that if your phone is hacked, the Signal or WhatsApp messages on it are not secure. This should not come as a surprise.
If anything in the WikiLeaks revelations is a bombshell, it is just how strong these encrypted apps appear to be. Since it doesn’t have a means of easy mass surveillance of such apps, the C.I.A. seems to have had to turn its attention to the harder and often high-risk task of breaking into individual devices one by one.
Which brings us to WikiLeaks’ misinformation campaign. An accurate tweet accompanying the cache would have said something like, “If the C.I.A. goes after your specific phone and hacks it, the agency can look at its content.”
We’ve seen WikiLeaks do this before.
Back then, too, the ruse worked: Many Western journalists had hyped these non-leaks.
WikiLeaks seems to have a playbook for its disinformation campaigns. The first step is to dump many documents at once — rather than allowing journalists to scrutinize them and absorb their significance before publication. The second step is to sensationalize the material with misleading news releases and tweets. The third step is to sit back and watch as the news media unwittingly promotes the WikiLeaks agenda under the auspices of independent reporting.
The media, to its credit, eventually sorts things out — as it has belatedly started to do with the supposed C.I.A. cache.
Tomi Engdahl says:
A news app aims to burst filter bubbles by nudging readers toward a more “balanced” media diet
http://www.niemanlab.org/2017/03/a-news-app-aims-to-burst-filter-bubbles-by-nudging-readers-toward-a-more-balanced-media-diet/
In their effort to help fix the filter bubble problem, developers of news app Read Across the Aisle took inspiration from an unlikely source: exercise trackers.
Designed to help people diversify their news consumption habits, Read Across the Aisle tracks how often users read stories from roughly 20 news sources across the ideological spectrum
A slider bar at the bottom of the screen moves from left to right based on how much time users spend reading news from certain sources, and how ideologically extreme the app deems those sources to be.
The app is designed to help users escape their news consumption bubbles. When the user’s reading habits skew too far to either side, the app triggers a notification recommending that they switch things up.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Paul Farhi / Washington Post:
The presence of new partisan media organizations in the White House press pool raises questions about pool’s reliability — In an age of partisan media, the lines between “partisan” and “media” can sometimes blur. — Case in point: The pool reporter covering Vice President Pence on Thursday …
What’s a legitimate news outlet? A new face in the White House press pool raises questions.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/whats-a-legitimate-news-outlet-a-new-face-in-the-white-house-press-pool-raises-questions/2017/03/10/2c7a6922-050d-11e7-b9fa-ed727b644a0b_story.html
In an age of partisan media, the lines between “partisan” and “media” can sometimes blur.
Case in point: The pool reporter covering Vice President Pence on Thursday — that is, the reporter who supplied details about Pence’s daily activities as proxy for the rest of the press corps — was an employee of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank.
In other words, the news that reporters received about the vice president came from a journalist employed by an organization with a vested interest in the direction of White House and federal policy.
The development is unusual; the reporter, Fred Lucas, is the first member of his organization to take on pool reporting duties, which are typically handled on a rotating basis by mainstream news organizations.
While there were no objections to Lucas’s pool reports on Pence, some journalists suggested the presence of the Signal as a member of the pool crossed a symbolic line, into greater legitimacy for the partisan press.
The Daily Signal’s inclusion in the pool could set a precedent for other advocacy organizations, such as the liberal Center for American Progress, that have expanded into newsgathering.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Margaret Sullivan / Washington Post:
Lies aided by right-wing hyperpartisan media outlets require watchdogging, fact-checking, and self-examination by mainstream newsrooms — To save Tinkerbell, all you had to do was clap your hands and really, really believe in fairies. — To send a conspiracy theory on its vicious way around the world …
Pro-Trump media sets the agenda with lies. Here’s how traditional media can take it back.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/pro-trump-media-sets-the-agenda-with-lies-heres-how-traditional-media-can-take-it-back/2017/03/11/4f30f768-050a-11e7-b9fa-ed727b644a0b_story.html
To save Tinkerbell, all you had to do was clap your hands and really, really believe in fairies.
To send a conspiracy theory on its vicious way around the world, you need to do more than just believe. You need help.
Luckily for those who wanted to elect Donald Trump, that help was available during the presidential campaign, and still is. It comes from a collection of new right-wing hyperpartisan media outlets that are having a huge effect on politics.
Consider, for example, one outlandish idea from just last week: that the CIA hacked the Democratic National Committee’s emails, gave them to WikiLeaks and then framed Russia.
Business Insider traced it: from replies to the WikiLeaks Twitter account, through conservative radio and then Breitbart News, and out into the semi-mainstream — Sean Hannity on Fox News — all within 48 hours.
Once the president tweets it, it’s undeniably news, picked up everywhere and re-amplified — especially by right-wing sites.
Derek Thompson of the Atlantic called this a “conspiracy-theory feedback loop.” And a very effective one it is.
A major new study, published in Columbia Journalism Review, detailed just how influential the new media ecosystem has become, calling it a determining factor in Trump’s election.
As right-wing sites concentrated during the campaign on immigration stories — often with exaggerated or false claims about the dangers of refugees and immigrants — they also endlessly attacked Hillary Clinton over Benghazi and her use of a private email server.
These sites often traffic in “decontextualized truths, repeated falsehoods, and leaps of logic to create a fundamentally misleading view of the world,” the report said.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Nate Silver / FiveThirtyEight:
Political journalism, ripe for groupthink, produced a failure of the “wisdom of crowds” during the election, which led to an underestimation of Trump’s chances
There Really Was A Liberal Media Bubble
Groupthink produced a failure of the “wisdom of crowds” and an underestimate of Trump’s chances.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/there-really-was-a-liberal-media-bubble/
Last summer, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in what bettors, financial markets and the London-based media regarded as a colossal upset. Reporters and pundits were quick to blame the polls for the unexpected result. But the polls had been fine, more or less
The failure was not so much with the polls but with the people who were analyzing them.
The U.S. presidential election, as I’ve argued, was something of a similar case. No, the polls didn’t show a toss-up, as they had in Brexit. But the reporting was much more certain of Clinton’s chances than it should have been based on the polls.
So did journalists in Washington and London make the apocryphal Pauline Kael mistake, refusing to believe that Trump or Brexit could win because nobody they knew was voting for them? That’s not quite what Trende was arguing. Instead, it’s that political experts4 aren’t a very diverse group and tend to place a lot of faith in the opinions of other experts and other members of the political establishment. Once a consensus view is established, it tends to reinforce itself until and unless there’s very compelling evidence for the contrary position. Social media, especially Twitter, can amplify the groupthink further. It can be an echo chamber.
Surowiecki argues5 that crowds usually make good predictions when they satisfy these four conditions:
1. Diversity of opinion. “Each person should have private information, even if it’s just an eccentric interpretation of the known facts.”
2. Independence. “People’s opinions are not determined by the opinions of those around them.”
3. Decentralization. “People are able to specialize and draw on local knowledge.”
4. Aggregation. “Some mechanism exists for turning private judgments into a collective decision.”
Political journalism scores highly on the fourth condition, aggregation.
Diversity of opinion? For starters, American newsrooms are not very diverse along racial or gender lines, and it’s not clear the situation is improving much.
The political diversity of journalists is not very strong, either.
Although it’s harder to measure, I’d also argue that there’s a lack of diversity when it comes to skill sets and methods of thinking in political journalism. Publications such as Buzzfeed or (the now defunct) Gawker.com get a lot of shade from traditional journalists when they do things that challenge conventional journalistic paradigms. But a lot of traditional journalistic practices are done by rote or out of habit, such as routinely granting anonymity to staffers to discuss campaign strategy even when there isn’t much journalistic merit in it.
Independence? This is just as much of a problem. Crowds can be wise when people do a lot of thinking for themselves before coming together to exchange their views. But since at least the days of “The Boys on the Bus,” political journalism has suffered from a pack mentality.
Decentralization? Surowiecki writes about the benefit of local knowledge, but the political news industry has become increasingly consolidated in Washington and New York as local newspapers have suffered from a decade-long contraction.
All things considered, then, the conditions of political journalism are poor for crowd wisdom and ripe for groupthink. So … what to do about it, then?
Initiatives to increase decentralization would help, although they won’t necessarily be easy. Increased subscription revenues at newspapers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post is an encouraging sign for journalism, but a revival of local and regional newspapers — or a more sustainable business model for independent blogs — would do more to reduce groupthink in the industry.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Caitlin McGarry / PCWorld:
In SXSW interview Nick Denton talks about how Gawker’s Hogan coverage could have been better and the importance of conversation-driven platforms to media — “Facebook makes me despise many of my friends and Twitter makes me hate the rest of the world,” Gawker founder Nick Denton said.
Gawker founder Nick Denton believes the ‘good internet will rise up again’
The future of the web looks a lot like Reddit, Denton said.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3179772/internet/gawker-founder-nick-denton-believes-the-good-internet-will-rise-up-again.html
“Facebook makes me despise many of my friends and Twitter makes me hate the rest of the world,” Gawker founder Nick Denton said.
The publishing pioneer, who connected with fellow bloggers at South by Southwest in the early days of web publishing, returned to the festival Sunday to reflect on the demise of his company and what lies ahead for the internet in the years after Donald Trump’s presidential election. The future isn’t Facebook or Twitter, where fake news and trolls abound. Instead, it’s rooted in Reddit—or at least something like Reddit, Denton said.
Denton, whose Gawker Media Group portfolio included sites like Gizmodo, Jezebel, and Kotaku in addition to the namesake, was a champion of commenting platforms.
“[Reddit] involves the community and involves the readers,” Denton said in a Sunday conversation on-stage at SXSW with advertising executive Jeff Goodby. “You may not like many subbreddits, but there’s a vitality to it and there’s a model for what [media] could be.”
Denton also believes in news institutions like the New York Times, he said. Until recently, he found ways to stay under the Times paywall cap, which lets you read 10 free articles per month per device. He’s now paying for a subscription
A post about a celebrity led to Gawker’s downfall, but there are other stories that are far more detrimental to a journalistic enterprise. Giving a product a negative review, for example, could lead to a significant loss of ad revenue.
“An honest review of the Samsung Galaxy Note is a dangerous proposition,”
Fake news, trolls, and harassment proliferate on social networks and across forums. America feels like a nation of people who don’t understand themselves, let alone each other. News organizations struggle to publish quality journalism and make money at the same time. The internet played a huge role in this crisis, but despite it all, Denton thinks the web can be the solution to the problems it created.
“Even if we’re full of despair over what the internet has become, it’s good to remind yourself when you’re falling down some Wikipedia hole or having a great conversation with somebody online—it’s an amazing thing,“ he added. ”In the habits that we enjoy, there are the seeds for the future. That’s where the good internet will rise up again.”
Tomi Engdahl says:
Kate Conger / TechCrunch:
Under pressure from ACLU, Facebook updates its platform policies to explicitly prohibit devs from using Facebook or Instagram data in surveillance tools — In response to pressure from the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change and the Center for Media Justice …
Facebook tells developers to not use data for surveillance
https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/13/facebook-tells-developers-not-use-data-for-surveillance/
In response to pressure from the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change and the Center for Media Justice, Facebook announced today that it will clarify its developer policy to explicitly prohibit the use of Facebook or Instagram data in surveillance tools.
The ACLU has revealed several instances of developers using information gleaned from Facebook’s APIs to create surveillance tools for law enforcement, and each time, Facebook has decided to revoke access to its data. In October, reporting by the ACLU uncovered the use of data from Facebook, Instagram and Twitter in the surveillance software Geofeedia, which culled protesters’ posts from the social media platforms and sold them to law enforcement. Twitter also cut access last year to social media monitoring firms Snaptrends and Media Sonar, the latter of which tracked hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter and #IAmMikeBrown to identify activists.
Facebook has contended that this kind of surveillance is already against its policies. But its policy was revamped today to state that developers can’t “use data obtained from us to provide tools that are used for surveillance.” Twitter made a similar declaration in November.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Andrew Kirell / The Daily Beast:
Fox Business Network sees ratings surge after abandoning straight business news for politics with a right-wing voice and becoming a Trump defender
Trump Never Needed a Trump TV—He’s Got the Fox Business Network
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/03/13/trump-never-needed-a-trump-tv-he-s-got-the-fox-business-network.html
Move over, Fox News—there’s an upstart right-wing cable outlet in town that’s even more willing to carry Trump’s water. And it’s right inside the Fox building.
It turns out Donald Trump never would have needed to launch his own cable-news outlet if he’d lost the election. He already has one: It’s called the Fox Business Network.
Fox News’s sister channel, founded in 2007 as a direct competitor to CNBC, struggled for nearly a decade to gain any steam with viewers. It was only a few years ago that much of FBN was experiencing abysmal ratings, often in the single-digit thousands for its key demographic. The schedule routinely shuffled, programs were slashed wholesale, and the network constantly seemed to be grappling with an identity crisis.
That was until Trump ran for president.
Over the past two years, FBN—which employed this writer from 2009 to 2012—has experienced explosive ratings growth tracking with the ascent of the president to whom it has devoted hours and hours of unabashedly positive coverage. In 2015, it was the fastest-growing network on all of cable, raking in double- and triple-digit growth in almost all relevant ratings factors.