Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now
The reality is that journalists are ultimately professional middlemen, standing between informers and the rest of us, and adding their own spin along the way. Middlemen are not necessarily a bad thing, as we certainly don’t all have time to synthesize the facts on our own, and great journalists make the relevant facts more accessible - but this cri... See more
Liora's Musings • How Citizen Journalism & Education Reform Can Save Us from Bad Science
On January 20, 2017, Time magazine seems to inadvertently prove the point when one of its reporters, Zeke Miller, erroneously reports that incoming president Trump has removed a bust statue of Martin Luther King from the Oval Office. The incendiary claim is born of a bias that used to be verboten in responsible journalism: Miller later explained th
... See moreSharyl Attkisson • The Smear: How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What You Think, and How You Vote
I like to say that I write about media generally and journalism specifically because the industry is a canary in the coal mine when it comes to the impact of the Internet: text shifted from newsprint to the web seamlessly, completely upending the industry’s business model along the way.Of course I have a vested interest in this shift: for better or... See more
Ben Thompson • The IT Era and the Internet Revolution
As a result, the news and information ecosystem that is so important to a functioning democracy and civil society has suffered a double whammy. First, as we have seen, the social media platforms’ recommendation engines have promoted misinformation and disinformation. Second, we have now seen how programmatic advertising has provided financial suppo
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