But just dropping in a suite of more modern equipment won’t fix the problem in itself. Going fully digital means adapting to a different kind of news ecosystem, characterized by faster-changing, more ambiguous conditions in the operating environment, along with a higher degree of interdependence between editorial and the business than was true of the analog newsroom. The technology infrastructure needed for such an ecosystem has to reflect those circumstances and be a product of adaptability and collaborative work between the IT department and working journalists from the start.

That’s the conclusion that Australian Associated Press (AAP) came to when it decided it needed new software to run all of its editorial operations several years ago. It wasn’t just a matter of upgrading the main news production platform and legacy editorial systems that had turned into technology bottlenecks, taking up valuable time and energy in the newsroom. AAP wanted a forward-looking system that would allow news content to be described and packaged with structured data formats for improved content discovery and distribution. At the same time, the system also needed to be Lego-like in its capacity for additional system features or even new third-party services to be snapped on and off.

When AAP approached us at Sourcefabric in 2014, we had similar ideas for a new kind of open-source, flexible publishing platform, but they had not yet been encoded into a working system. The newsroom software we called Superdesk was still only a prototype. Forming a co-development partnership with a news agency like AAP represented an opportunity to “capture the journalistic DNA of a living, breathing specimen,” as our founder Sava Tatic put it at the time. The task of the 22 months that followed was to build a real-world implementation of Superdesk at AAP, with coders and engineers sitting next to reporters and editors in the newsroom.

The AAP product team in a technical meeting.

Why was that important? Vince Ryan, the lead project manager from Sourcefabric who was on site in Sydney, said it is often the case that a developer doesn’t “get” what a journalist wants to achieve by looking at only a JIRA ticket [describing a project feature or bug]. “JIRA tickets often miss essential information because the person writing the ticket leaves out what she thinks is obvious. What is obvious to a journalist is not obvious to a developer, and vice versa,” he said.

Key Lessons Learned

Having said that, we are fortunate to have several former journalists at Sourcefabric who are also conversant in software involved in the ongoing development of Superdesk.

Here are some key lessons learned from those who led the implementation at AAP.

1. Get editors and writers on board early — and keep them engaged.

“In a good project, the journalists would be involved and feel ownership from the start,” Ryan said. Before the project even launched, AAP undertook a major effort to interview people across the newsroom and in bureaux to gather requirements and feature requests. Then, a project scoping team from Sourcefabric went to AAP headquarters in Sydney to see how the newsroom worked. They held conversations with a range of people from the IT department, both developers and strategic IT planners, as well as reporters and editors. Focusing on the editorial staff’s user experience, project managers elicited feedback about what the journalists did and didn’t like about the current system. “Workflows are best defined by their users, not managers,” Ryan said. The Sourcefabric team also documented how people actually worked in the newsroom, with photos, videos and process descriptions.

All of this information went into the backlog of the project which was run according to the Agile method of software development. Agile specifies the features and functions to be built, and then iterates and refines those working items over a series of two-week development sprints. “During development I frequently had journalists come and see what we were doing and I invited their comments and input. I was in the newsroom, so it was easy to do at any time,” Ryan said.

The first lines of AAP-specific code were written in mid-2014. The Superdesk system was fully built and implemented by the middle of 2016. This was the third and final stage when the involvement of newsroom staff paid off. As the system was rolled out, journalists who had been appointed as super users helped their colleagues with the new technology. “They were leaned on heavily during the early days,” Brook Thomas, Chief Technology Officer & Operations Director of AAP, said.

The proverbial curtain comes down on a successful rollout of Superdesk at AAP HQ late 2016.

2. Get the business involved.

From our discussions with other news agencies, we’ve often heard that selling a project like this to management is not just a matter of getting budget approval, but also of framing it in terms of a business case. Those looking for a rosier picture to paint for those holding the purse strings may want to note an interesting phenomenon that has occurred at AAP: “business areas outside the newsroom are now seeking access to Superdesk,” in the words of Thomas. Why? Because it delivers an overview of the daily news agenda that translates into potential new business opportunities

In the case of one AAP business division that provides sub-editing services to other news outlets, staff can now use the system’s newsroom overview to see the stories that are in progress, who is working on them and find out when they likely to be done, making it easier to plan the process of selecting stories from the wire service and sub-editing them for onward distribution.

In another example, the PR and communications division benefits from knowing what events are upcoming and how they will be covered. And in general, both sides of a news agency benefit from greater transparency around news production. “Salespeople tend to perform better when they have a working knowledge of what it is that they are selling,” Vince Ryan said.

3. Cultivate a new mindset for digital.

A digital newsroom is not just a new set of technologies; it’s also a different way of working with content. Thomas observed that “we’ve seen our journalists adapt to web and digital concepts that were previously not a consideration with the old platform”. One of the reasons we chose the NewsML-G2 specification as the main structured data format for Superdesk is that news that was once relegated to the archive can now be re-used, packaged and distributed in novel ways. Stories can also be told with more context and rich multimedia assets.

Going forward, AAP is looking to develop a digital-native content platform based on Superdesk’s APIs that offers the full range of its news production to customers. The idea is to not only consolidate several disparate web products into a single suite, but also to reduce the friction that AAP’s customers have long experienced when trying to access and navigate to content. For some customers, they might simply opt to access content via an API, which AAP has been unable to offer comprehensively in the past.

Finally, the biggest takeaway may be that going digital means embracing the idea of newsroom systems being a permanent work in progress. As the last few years have demonstrated, the online news landscape is one of continually shifting sands. Advertising-based models can only be one part of any holistic revenue strategy, for instance, and publishers also have to be ready to embrace the emergence of even unlikely-seeming distribution platforms like Snapchat both technologically and philosophically.

News outlets have to look for common cause and areas of shared benefit with others in their ecosystem (which is also an argument in favor of open-source software). This applies both to the external view, namely with other news organizations which were previously considered either to be customers or competitors, but which may now fall into multiple categories of customer, collaborator and/or content partner. This cooperative lens is also needed internally, to overcome the “digital divide” that has often separated the tech department of a news organization and its journalists in the past. When journalists and coders sit next to each other in the newsroom, they will be able to build tools made for a shared digital future.

Anna Rohleder is a journalist who has worked in the tech industry in both Europe as well as the US. She has been involved in research and communications for companies including Gartner, SAP, Opera and Sourcefabric. As a journalist, she has written for the International Journalists’ Network, Forbes, Businessworld and LEO Weekly, among others.

The post How to Build a Digital Newsroom with Developers and Journalists Working Together appeared first on MediaShift.

For decades, “broadcast” was a one-way medium. With the adoption of social media and mobile technologies, however, that’s all changed. Making local news a participatory and relevant experience for viewers and listeners is now top of mind for local TV and radio stations across the country.

Many broadcasters are bringing in the audience into the equation – whether it’s giving them a say in the content, through polls, live Q-and-A or picking the next musical superstar, the audience is now part of the content strategy.

Going Live on Social

Newsrooms continue to experiment with Facebook Live, two years into its launch. Because Facebook puts an emphasis on inserting Facebook Live broadcasts into consumers’ news feeds while the broadcast is actually live, it’s a smart way for newsrooms to utilize the platform for breaking news content.

Meteorologists, in particular, have flocked to Facebook Live as a way to deliver breaking weather information.

“Before Facebook Live, our goal would be to post a still image or possibly a radar animation of the storm and the warning,” said Chikage Windler, the chief meteorologist at KEYE, a Sinclair-owned station in Austin. “Now, we can go live on Facebook for 30 seconds, 30 minutes or however long we need.”

A recent #ChiksChats on Facebook

In addition to breaking weather situations, Windler uses Facebook Live for nightly #ChiksChats (here’s a recent one), where she delivers the forecast and answers questions for the Facebook audience. She admits it’s a time commitment, adding an extra hour or so to her day, but she believes the connections she’s building are worth it.

Radio newsrooms are also seeing the benefits of Facebook Live with broadcasts like interactive game shows and behind-the-scenes access.

NPR hosted “Head to Head,” a series of headline-writing competitions where NPR editors went up against the Facebook audience to see whose headline reigned supreme. The last edition of the show in March 2017 produced more than 75,000 views and 200 engagements. The show took advantage of crowdsourcing – about a third of the time, the story on npr.org ended up featuring a headline from the crowd.

Also, Fresh 102.7 FM in New York, WNEW-FM, gives its Facebook audience the chance to see behind-the-scenes as its on-air personalities interview some of the biggest pop musicians in the world. The radio station, which is owned by CBS, has aired interviews of Lady Gaga, Michael Buble, Ed Sheeran and James Bay on Facebook Live. The Buble broadcast generated nearly 182,000 views, more than 4,000 reactions and 300 shares.

Non-Traditional Newscasts

Tribune Broadcasting, which owns or operates 42 stations in the United States, is using social media in a different way for morning TV news – leveraging data to figure out what people are, and will be, talking about.

Tribune has partnered with Dose, a digital media agency that specializes in analytics and sharable content, to create “Morning Dose.” The show features content that Dose has determined will connect with audiences on TV and social, based on data analytics, and will be part of that day’s social conversations. Beyond top stories and weather, “Morning Dose” features segments like “What’s Brewing,” “Bubbling Up” and “Most Ignored Story of the Day.” Personalities from Dose also make appearances on the show.

“Morning Dose” launched in June on Tribune stations in Dallas, Houston, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Miami and Portland. It also airs on Facebook Live.

Digitally Driven Competitions

TEGNA, a broadcasting company that owns or operates 46 local stations across the country, is also experimenting with more original programming as part of a new content transformation strategy.

Contestants send in one-minute videos in the “Sing Like a Star” competition.

“Sing Like a Star” is the third original show the company has produced, and it premiered in 33 TEGNA markets in September. The show marries a traditional television broadcast with digital participation from the contestants and audience. The idea for the show was sparked by the amount of digital activity tied to singing performance short clips like James Corden’s “Carpool Karaoke.” Hopeful contestants can download the Starmaker app, upload a one-minute audition and try to get votes through the app. The broadcast itself is 30 minutes each weekend, and the segments are tailored to also appease the crowd watching via mobile or social.

“What we did, because it’s a 30-minute show, is we made all of the singing performances right at one minute long,“ said Ted Eccles, the executive producer of “Sing Like a Star.” “They really hit that sweet spot for sharable content and digital viewing. Traditionally when you get a singing competition, somebody is singing a whole song or most of the song – even ‘Idol’ and ‘The Voice’ would do two- to three-minute versions of the song. We’ve found about a minute is the optimum amount of content that people like to watch on a smaller device.”

The show has received about 1,000 auditions in its first two weeks, with about 500,000 views of those auditions and 300,000 votes cast in the Starmaker app.

“Sing Like a Star” is airing on the weekends in those 33 TEGNA markets, and Eccles said they’re pleased so far with the ratings.

Dual-Screen Experiences

Another place for newsroom innovation is dual-screen experiences – turning television viewers into active participants in the broadcast while using their smartphones, tablets or computers.

TEGNA is currently partnering with Megaphone TV to use its platform for viewer participation during local news and sports broadcasts. For example, KUSA in Denver has used this technology to allow viewers to have a vote on which local topics are covered in newscasts. In addition, WFAA in Dallas regularly allows viewers of sporting events to participate in polls and quizzes through the station’s app or website.

WJLA, a Sinclair-owned station in Washington, DC, has also had success using Megaphone and similar platforms for real-time polling and audience engagement during newscasts.

“We try to incorporate viewer interactivity in every newscast,” said Simon Landau, the executive producer of digital media at WJLA. “Whether it’s showcasing social media commentary around a trending topic, photos sent in by our audience or asking a poll question, we try to engage our viewers in every show.”

Landau said the station typically focuses on breaking news, talkers and polarizing issues for audience engagement opportunities, but they’ve also seen success with big “national days,” like National Cat Day or National Pizza Day, when it comes to viewers wanting to be a part of the content.

Three-Screen Experiences

TEGNA is also focusing on the concept of three-screen experiences. According to Frank Mungeam, TEGNA’s vice president of digital content, they’re taking a more holistic approach to storytelling – where the story will ultimately be the combination of experiences the audience has with that content on television, digital and social.

“We’re looking to take a page out of the movie industry with the concept of the trailer and the movie,” Mungeam said. “In older days of broadcast, folks would say, ‘You can’t give it away. You have to save the good stuff for 5 p.m.’ What we think of with effective trailers – think “Game of Thrones” or “Star Wars” – is there anyone who saw the trailer and thought, ‘That’s all I need of that’? The trailer is content itself, and these experiences, over time on these platforms, build interest in the overall broadcast story. Our three-screen strategy is how to use those three platforms for what they do best. For social, focusing on sharable, interactive and engaging content. For digital, it’s the deep dive, the more, the extra. For broadcast, it’s great, narrative storytelling.”

Mungeam said the ultimate goal is for these experiences from one story to last for multiple days on multiple platforms – instead of airing one time on a television newscast. This strategy gives consumers a greater chance to see content, and keeps the community thinking and talking about important issues in the news.

Crowdsourcing Content

Speaking of using content on multiple platforms, StormPins, an app that originally launched as a way for Graham Media stations to collect storm photos and videos from users, has been expanded to include all kinds of user-generated content.

Using an app, viewers can drop an interactive pin on a map and attach up to 10 seconds of video or a picture – and then communicate and engage with other viewers in that area. Viewer submissions are often used on air.

Viewers send in weather photos, which KSAT runs on air. (Photo courtesy KSAT)

“When there is a weather event, we definitely get a lot of storm pictures,” said Scott Shiotani, the director of new media at KSAT, the ABC affiliate in San Antonio. “Outside of a storm event, pets would be the biggest category, followed by sunsets and landscape pictures.”

KSAT also collects rodeo pictures, high school football pictures and other user-generated content. Viewers can also get real-time, crowdsourced traffic information from the app.

From user-generated content to picking the stories that will be reported, the audience has more opportunities than ever to engage with broadcast news. As more stations, both TV and radio, begin to change content strategies, this will only continue to expand the audience’s role as participants in the programming – no matter the platform.

Note: This is a sponsored post from NAB Pilot to promote its Innovation Stories section. Read more about how broadcasters are innovating here.

Dale Blasingame is a senior lecturer in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas. He teaches digital journalism courses, including classes covering the fundamentals of digital media, web design and publishing, digital media entrepreneurship and social media analytics. Prior to teaching, Blasingame spent nine years as a TV news producer and won two regional Emmy Awards.

The post How Broadcasters Are Making Two-Way Experiences with Interactive Content appeared first on MediaShift.

Questions of ethics and transparency are growing among journalists and scholars, as media companies increasingly experiment with the power of VR and augmented reality (AR.) Both technological advances allow users to interact personally with news reports via the creation of virtual scenes viewed through headsets.

Now that misinformation is increasingly a problem for the media industry, the challenge for VR journalism is to prevent dishonest organizations and individuals from producing fake VR work and passing it off as real. Meanwhile, the high cost of creating immersive journalism is cause for concern among some media ethicists.

Is VR a Fad or the Future?

“Immersive journalism,” which brings AR or VR to journalism, was symbolically born on a chilly day in January 2012 at the Sundance Film Festival when documentary journalist Nonny de la Peña presented Hunger in Los Angeles, about the lack of food in some Los Angeles neighborhoods. Reporters described audiences there as “visibly affected.” Simply by putting on a headset, viewers could leave behind a snowy day in Park City and be transported to a warm day at a food bank in downtown L.A.

At that point, the term “VR journalism” was only used by technologists and a small circle of tech journalists pioneering efforts in the field. That August, the small startup Oculus Rift launched a Kickstarter campaign that raised $2.5 million to develop its second prototype VR headset. Two years later, Facebook bought Oculus for $2 billion. By early 2016, immersive reporting was showing up in newsrooms across the United States, including The New York Times, CNN, USA Today, The Guardian, AP.

And some projections suggest that VR could have staying power. According to UK-based consulting company CCS Insight, the global VR market will be worth over $9 billion by 2021. Goldman Sachs projects that  the combined global economic impact of VR and augmented reality (AR) will grow to $80 billion by 2025 (up from $2.5 billion in 2016).

The Ethics of VR

James Pallot, VR storytelling pioneer and co-founder of the Emblematic Group with de la Peña, faced an ethical dilemma.

In 2017, Emblematic had worked with PBS’ Frontline to create a climate change story called Greenland Melting, about the Greenland Ice Cap. The report used a hologram of the scientist Eric Rignot (professor of Earth system science at the University of California, Irvine, and a scientist at NASA) to narrate the story.

“To make the hologram, we had to bring [Rignot] to our lab in L.A.,” Pallot said in an email interview. “But we had to debate: should we wear normal clothes for the interview, since he was in L.A.? Or should he dress up in his cold-weather gear, so it would look more ‘realistic’ when you see him standing on the ice?” They ended up dressing Rignot in a light jacket.

“It may sound like a trivial question but it goes to the heart of the matter. VR has an incredible power to make you feel like you are actually ‘present’ in a different place, and you must be careful not to exploit that illusion, to let the viewer know what is real and what isn’t, and what was the process to create this illusion,” Pallot added.

In 2016, philosophy professors Michael Madary and Thomas Metzinger published a paper titled Real Virtuality: A Code of Ethical Conduct. This paper pointed out that VR is a “powerful form of both mental and behavioral manipulation” that could be tricky, “especially when commercial, political, religious, or governmental interests are behind the creation and maintenance of the virtual worlds.”

“We need more research into the psychological effects of immersive experiences, especially for children,” Madary told me. “We should inform consumers that we do not yet understand the effects of long-term immersion,” such as “whether VR can have an influence on their behavior after leaving the virtual world.”

VR can be a journalistic tool that allows consumers to transcend time and space. The Displaced, for example, is a VR documentary from 2015 produced by The New York Times Magazine. It depicts the lives of three young children refugee in Syria, Ukraine and South Sudan and allows viewers to feel like they’re present with the children. Or On the Brink of Famine, a 2016 documentary from PBS Frontline and The Brown Institute for Media Innovation, about a village in South Sudan dealing with a hunger crisis.

Douglas Rushkoff, shown here the 2013 SXSW Festival, believes VR and journalism are incompatible. (Photo by Waytao Shing/Getty Images for SXSW)

But Douglas Rushkoff, media theorist and an outspoken critic of Silicon Valley, argues that those types of VR documentaries do not qualify as journalism at all. “I think immersive media has a really limited purpose, certainly in terms of journalism and informing people. I guess you can make people feel certain ways by immersing them in certain kinds of worlds. But in most of these experiences you are just watching people who can’t see you, so in some ways it exacerbates the sense of power that privileged people can feel over less privileged people.”

VR and Fake News

One of the most troubling threats from the incursion of VR into journalism is the possibility that  fake news organizations and trolls might start producing VR fake news.

Increasingly, media theorists such as the interdisciplinary scientist Jaron Lanier and the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, Ethan Zuckerman, are calling for VR journalists to create a code of ethics.

Tom Kent — president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a U.S. government-funded broadcasting organization — was one of the first journalists who talked about the ethical challenges of VR reporting. In a 2015 Medium post, he opened the debate on ethics in VR and journalism, with a focus on fake news, long before the 2016 presidential election.

“In a few years, it may well be that virtual reality will begin to simulate news events using images of newsmakers that will be indistinguishable from the actual people,” Kent told me recently. For example, “a VR recreation of a scene involving Putin or Obama, maybe so accurate you can’t tell whether that’s the real Putin, or the real Obama, or whether they were virtually recreated.”

“People who do VR journalism need to have an ethical code, and they need to publish that code, and they need to explain their ethics,” added Kent. For example, viewers need to know if the action on the VR piece is scripted or not and whether the dialogue was captured from a real setting or scripted.

VR Can’t Support Itself Financially

A 2017 report by the Reuters Institute, VR for News: The New Reality?, delves into the cost of VR journalism. Productions are still expensive, resulting in a lack of quality content, which in turn negatively affects the potential for ad revenue, the report said.

Another study by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University found that “The cost of highly produced VR work would seem to have implications for viable business models in the short term. If the best cost comparison is with high-end TV or console game production, it is likely that currently producers and commissioners will need to produce high-end journalistic VR without an expectation of direct cost recovery from audiences or advertisers.”

Rushkoff considers VR to be nothing more than advertising, and says it cannot be part of quality journalism. “Once journalism changed from something that people purchase in order to be informed to something that advertisers pay for in order to get people’s attention,” Rushkoff said, “then all the technologies that have been deployed for journalism have way more to do with helping advertisers to spread their message than informing people.”

The real hope for VR journalism is that newsrooms could create experiences based on reality and with the same ethics of photojournalism: photos aren’t manipulated, and photographers only show what they see. In order to do so, VR journalism has to become financially independent. If it must rely solely on sponsorship from big companies to survive, Rushkoff might be proven correct.

Angelo Paura is an Italian journalist based in New York, working with Il Sole 24 Ore Usa. He writes for major Italian magazines. He studied immersive journalism for a Masters in social journalism at CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. He is focused mostly on digital cultures, new media, technology and politics. He loves empty spaces, walks on the slackline, mezcal and drawing monsters. Reach him at angelo.paura@ilsole24ore.us or @angelopaura.

The post The Ethical Challenges of Immersive Journalism appeared first on MediaShift.

Cultura Colectiva, headquartered in Mexico City, first launched its Spanish language site in 2013. The site covers arts, culture and lifestyle from a millennial Latinx perspective. In December, the company opened an office in New York City, where staffers will lead marketing initiatives and publish Cultura Colectiva +, also known as CC+, the company’s English-language site.

Sarah Vander Wal

But Cultura Colectiva didn’t always have plans to launch the sister site. In 2017, as an experiment, Cultura Colectiva’s Editor-in-Chief created an informal Facebook page where she would post the site’s stories in English to see if she could garner interest from an American audience. Soon there were 2.5 million people following the page, and it was receiving higher engagement than the Spanish-language Facebook page, according to Sarah Vander Wal, Cultura Colectiva’s Head of Brands.

“The market sought us out instead of us trying to position ourselves in the market,” Vander Wal explained.

We spoke to Vander Wal to learn more about what gave Cultura Colectiva the confidence to launch the new English site in the current market, and to see what advice she has for other digital publishers.

Use data to drive decision-making.

The key to Cultura Colectiva’s success, according to Vander Wal, is data. In fact, the company sees itself as a data company first and a media site second. That’s what distinguishes it among the cluster of digital media sites that exist right now, she said.

Cultura Colectiva developed specially-designed software that can help predict how viral a story will be. The software uses artificial intelligence to determine what a story’s headline should be and can also spit out a word cloud of related terms that should be incorporated into the story – all information that staffers use to make editorial decisions.

Without data, those editorial decisions, such as SEO keywords, headlines and more, are subject to human error, Vander Wal said.

“When it’s really data-driven, it’s a very different story – you get surprises,” she said. “Data will say where you really have to go.”

The Cultura Colectiva lobby. Photo courtesy Cultura Colectiva.

Know your audience and create content specifically for them.

The other benefit to using data is that it allows Cultura Colectiva to get to know its audience intimately. And that allows editors and writers to create content that they know its readers will enjoy.

“Use data to understand where your audience is and let that data drive your decisions,” Vander Wal said.

For example, CC+ doesn’t just translate Cultura Colectiva articles into English and repackage them. Instead, writers are creating entirely new stories for an audience that is predominantly based in the U.S. Though there is some overlap with stories that have universal appeal, the two sites do have distinct audiences.

She also noted that the Hispanic market in the U.S. is growing at a fast pace, meaning that there will be a larger audience for CC+ to reach.

“The voice needs to be created specifically for them for it to really resonate,” Vander Wal said.

Produce quality content.

Vander Wal said Cultura Colectiva’s levels of engagement have not decreased despite Facebook’s recent algorithm changes that will deprioritize posts from publishers on the News Feed. That’s because both sites produce quality content, she said.

Cultura Colectiva’s specially-designed software can also analyze sentiment, for example, of Facebook comments from readers. Emotion is what makes readers want to share a story, and when writers and editors understand why readers share a story, they can create more content to tap into those emotions, Vander Wal said.

“At the end of the day, emotion is what moves the needle in terms of engagement,” she said.

Have a distinct brand.

Vander Wal’s advice to other digital media publishers is that having a distinct brand – or voice – is critical to success, she said.

“It’s very important if you’re going to come into a very crowded field to have a voice,” she said. “No one needs another aggregator of media content. You need to have a unique voice because at the end of the day, that’s what a user seeks out.”

Bianca Fortis is the associate editor of MediaShift, a founding member of the Transborder Media storytelling collective and a social media consultant. Follow her on Twitter @biancafortis.

The post How a Mexican Publisher Used a Facebook Page, Data to Help Launch an English Site appeared first on MediaShift.

Facebook has a world of problems. Beyond charges of Russian manipulation and promoting fake news, the company’s signature social media platform is under fire for being addictive, causing anxiety and depression, and even instigating human rights abuses.

Company founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he wants to win back users’ trust. But his company’s efforts so far have ignored the root causes of the problems they intend to fix, and even risk making matters worse. Specifically, they ignore the fact that personal interaction isn’t always meaningful or benign, leave out the needs of users in the developing world, and seem to compete with the company’s own business model.

Based on The Digital Planet, a multi-year global study of how digital technologies spread and how much people trust them, which I lead at Tufts University’s Fletcher School, I have some ideas about how to fix Facebook’s efforts to fix itself.

Face-saving changes?

Like many technology companies, Facebook must balance the convergence of digital dependence, digital dominance and digital distrust. Over 2 billion people worldwide check Facebook each month; 45 percent of American adults get their news from Facebook. Together with Google, it captures half of all digital advertising revenues worldwide. Yet more people say they greatly distrust Facebook than any other member of the big five – Amazon, Apple, Google or Microsoft.

In March 2017 Facebook started taking responsibility for quality control as a way to restore users’ trust. The company hired fact-checkers to verify information in posts. Two months later the company changed its algorithms to help users find diverse viewpoints on current issues and events. And in October 2017, it imposed new transparency requirements to force advertisers to identify themselves clearly.

But Zuckerberg led off 2018 in a different direction, committing to “working to fix our issues together.” That last word, “together,” suggests an inclusive approach, but in my view, it really says the company is shifting the burden back onto its users.

The company began by overhauling its crucial News Feed feature, giving less priority to third-party publishers, whether more traditional media outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post or newer online publications such as Buzzfeed or Vox. That will leave more room for posts from family and friends, which Zuckerberg has called “meaningful social interactions.”

However, Facebook will rely on users to rate how trustworthy groups, organizations and media outlets are. Those ratings will determine which third-party publishers do make it to users’ screens, if at all. Leaving trustworthiness ratings to users without addressing online political polarization risks making civic discourse even more divided and extreme.

Personal isn’t always ‘meaningful’

Unlike real-life interactions, online exchanges can exacerbate both passive and narcissistic tendencies. It’s easier to be invisible online, so people who want to avoid attention can do so without facing peer pressure to participate. By contrast, though, people who are active online can see their friends like, share and comment on their posts, motivating them to seek even more attention.

This creates two groups of online users, broadly speaking: disengaged observers and those who are competing for attention with ever more extreme efforts to catch users’ eyes. This environment has helped outrageous, untrue claims with clickbait headlines attract enormous amounts of attention.

This phenomenon is further complicated by two other elements of social interaction online. First, news of any kind – including fake news – gains credibility when it is forwarded by a personal connection.

And social media tends to group like-minded people together, creating an echo chamber effect that reinforces messages the group agrees with and resists outside views – including more accurate information and independent perspectives. It’s no coincidence that conservatives and liberals trust very different news sources.

Users of Facebook’s instant-messaging subsidiary WhatsApp have shown that even a technology focusing on individual connection isn’t always healthy or productive. WhatsApp has been identified as a primary carrier of fake news and divisive rumors in India, where its users’ messages have been described as a “mix of off-color jokes, doctored TV [clips], wild rumors and other people’s opinions, mostly vile.” Kenya has identified 21 hate-mongering WhatsApp groups. WhatsApp users in the U.K. have had to stay alert for scams in their personal messages.

Mark Zuckerberg on a two-day visit to India in October, 2014 to promote the internet.org app, which allows people in underdeveloped areas to access basic online services. (Arun Sharma/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

Addressing the developing world

Facebook’s actions appear to be responding to public pressure from the U.S. and Europe. But Facebook is experiencing its fastest growth in Asia and Africa.

Research I have conducted with colleagues has found that users in the developing world are more trusting of online material, and therefore more vulnerable to manipulation by false information. In Myanmar, for instance, Facebook is the dominant internet site because of its Free Basics program, which lets mobile-phone users connect to a few selected internet sites, including Facebook, without paying extra or using up allotted data in their mobile plans. In 2014, Facebook had 2 million users in Myanmar; after Free Basics arrived in 2016, that number climbed to 30 million.

One of the effects has been devastating. Rumor campaigns against the Rohingya ethnic group in Myanmar were, in part, spread on Facebook, sparking violence. At least 6,700 Rohingya Muslims were killed by Myanmar’s security forces between August and September 2017; 630,000 more have fled the country. Facebook did not stop the rumors, and at one point actually shut down responding posts from a Rohingya activist group.

Facebook’s Free Basics program is in 63 developing countries and municipalities, each filled with people new to the digital economy and potentially vulnerable to manipulation.

Fighting against the business model

Facebook’s efforts to promote what might be called “corporate digital responsibility” runs counter to the company’s business model. Zuckerberg himself declared that the upcoming changes would cause people to spend less time on Facebook.

But the company makes 98 percent of its revenues from advertising. That is only possible if users keep their attention focused on the platform, so the company can analyze their usage data to generate more targeted advertising.

Our research finds that companies working toward corporate social responsibility will only succeed if their efforts align with their core business models. Otherwise, the responsibility project will become unsustainable in the face of pressure from the stock market, competitors or government regulators, as happened to Facebook with European privacy rules.

Real solutions

What can Facebook do instead? I recommend the following to fix Facebook’s fix:

1. Own the reality of Facebook’s enormous role in society. It’s a primary source of news and communication that influences the beliefs and assumptions driving citizen behavior around the world. The company cannot rely on users to police the system. As a media company, Facebook needs to take responsibility for the content it publishes and republishes. It can combine both human and artificial intelligence to sort through the content, labeling news, opinions, hearsay, research and other types of information in ways ordinary users can understand.
2. Establish on-the-ground operations in every location where it has large numbers of users, to ensure the company understands local contexts. Rather than a virtual global entity operating from Silicon Valley, Facebook should engage with the nuances and complexities of cities, regions and countries, using local languages to customize content for users. Right now, Facebook passively publishes educational materials on digital safety and community standards, which are easily ignored. As Facebook adds users in developing nations, the company must pay close attention to the unintended consequences of explosive growth in connectivity.
3. Reduce the company’s dependence on advertising revenue. As long as Facebook is almost entirely dependent on ad sales, it will be forced to hold users’ attention as long as possible and gather their data to analyze for future ad opportunities. Its strategy for expansion should go beyond building and buying other apps, like WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger, all of which still feed the core business model of monopolizing and data-mining users’ attention. Taking inspiration from Amazon and Netflix – and even Google parent company Alphabet – Facebook could use its huge trove of user data responsibly to identify, design and deliver new services that people would pay for.

Ultimately, Zuckerberg and Facebook’s leaders have created an enormously powerful, compelling and potentially addictive service. This unprecedented opportunity has developed at an unprecedented pace. Growth may be the easy part; being the responsible grown-up is much harder.

Bhaskar Chakravorti is Senior Associate Dean, International Business & Finance, Tufts University. Full disclosure: Chakravorti directs the Institute for Business in the Global Context at Tufts Fletcher School. The Institute has received funding from Mastercard, Microsoft and the Gates Foundation.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

https://theconversation.com/javascripts/lib/content_tracker_hook.js

The post How Facebook Could Really Fix Itself appeared first on MediaShift.

In another step forward for robo-journalism, a regional newspaper in Japan is rolling out an artificial intelligence system that automatically generates summaries of news articles for distribution across a range of media platforms.

The Shinano Mainichi Shimbun teamed up with Fujitsu, Japan’s largest IT services company, to create the software based on technology developed by Fujitsu Laboratories. Staff at the broadsheet have been producing summaries manually, a task that takes up to five minutes per article. The software creates summaries instantly and with greater accuracy than a different summarizing method that begins with the lead and stops when the word limit is reached, according to Fujitsu:

“The system uses a combination of natural language processing and machine learning to pick out the most salient parts of the article, scoring each sentence in terms of importance.”

During a trial, it was trained on a dataset of 2,500 articles from the newspaper as well as their manually compiled summaries.

“By pairing the original articles with the summaries and defining that as reference, or teacher data, we built an ‘important sentence extraction model’ that evaluates the content importance according to individual sentences, as well as a ‘sentence-shortening model’ that maintains sentence structure while deleting unnecessary words,” says Masato Yokota, a director at Fujitsu’s State Infrastructure and Finance Business Group.

The software can work with articles written in Japanese or English. It was built with a web API that can be easily inserted into the existing editorial workflow. A “summary” button activating the API was implemented into the editing screen for the paper’s cable TV news, Yokota said.

A screenshot of the AI system from its trial period shows the original article in Japanese (left), an automatically generated ranking of sentences by importance (center), and the summarized text (right). (Courtesy the Splice Newsroom)

Robots vs. Journalists

First published in 1873, the Shinano Mainichi Shimbun is one of Japan’s oldest dailies. Headquartered in Nagano, northwest of Tokyo, it claims a morning-edition circulation of 487,000 copies and distribution to 61% of households in Nagano Prefecture.

“The third-wave AI is set to become a trend of great relevance, and now is the time to make concerted efforts in improving the newspaper production workflow as well,” says Hiroshi Misawa, the paper’s managing director.

The Shinmai, as it’s known, plans to roll out the system in April for its cable TV news summary service, with an eye to speeding up news updates.

The summarizing AI joins a host of other automated news applications sometimes described as automated or augmented journalism. Heliograf, the Washington Post’s own news bot, produced about 300 briefs on the Rio Olympics of 2016, and has since covered U.S. elections and high school football games; it produced about 850 articles in its first year, according to Digiday. The Associated Press worked with AI firm Automated Insights to deploy software to cover earnings reports.

The Fujitsu pavillon at the Mobile World Congress 2016. (Manuel Blondeau/ AOP.Press/Corbis via Getty Images)

“Through automation, AP is providing customers with 12 times the corporate earnings stories as before (to over 3,700), including for a lot of very small companies that never received much attention,” AP global business editor Lisa Gibbs was quoted as saying in a 2017 report.

“With the freed-up time, AP journalists are able to engage with more user-generated content, develop multimedia reports, pursue investigative work and focus on more complex stories.”

Tim Hornyak is a freelance journalist based in Tokyo. He is the author of Loving the Machine: The Art and Science of Japanese Robots.

The post Here’s How One Japanese Newspaper Is Moving Robo-Journalism Forward appeared first on MediaShift.

Journalism fellowships are great opportunities for established journalists both to gain a professional support system and to grow as professionals by working on new, innovative projects.

Connor Sheets

The Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute is currently accepting proposals from individuals and organizations who want to develop projects that can better journalism. RJI offers three options: residential fellowships, during which Fellows live and work in Columbia, Mo., for 8 months; non-residential fellowships which allow Fellows to work remotely; and institutional Fellowships that allow people to continue to work in their workplace. Fellows get stipends that range from $20,000 up to $80,000 for the year.

The Institute wants to tackle big problems and offer big opportunities with practical approaches, RJI Associate Director Mike McKean explained. He said applications should describe projects that can be completed, or see substantial, measurable process, within a year’s time.

The Fellowships are competitive, with RJI typically receiving a couple hundred applications. We spoke to several Fellows from years past to see what advice they have for prospective candidates interested in applying for the 2018-2019 class.

1) Find a need.

Connor Sheets is an investigative reporter at AL.com. As part of his 2016-2017 Fellowship, he created techniques to help members of local, Alabama communities pitch stories they believe should be covered in the news.

“I knew that I was ready to apply for a fellowship because I saw a clear need – namely that many small and local newsrooms would benefit from a simple, inexpensive way to keep better tabs on their communities – and knew that I had an interesting idea about how to help address it,” Sheets said.

2) Be passionate about your project.

Conrad Jungmann

Sheets also said his application was made stronger by the fact that he was passionate about his proposed tool, and had an idea of how to bring it to fruition.

Conrad Jungmann, who led an institutional fellowship for LION Digital Media in 2014-2015, said RJI recognizes projects that have both merit and passion. He advises that prospective applicants stay true to their own journalistic mission.

“If you believe your project will have an impact on journalism and/or the business of journalism, make sure your application shows it,” he said.

3) Be clear in your application.

The more thoroughly researched and clearly written an application is, the better the likelihood it will be accepted. Linda Austin, an editor and educator who is a 2017-2018 Fellow, advises that applicants do their homework before applying. They should research what’s already been done and how their idea is different.

Linda Austin

“In addition to demonstrating commitment, that research will result in a stronger application,” she said.

Another piece of advice from Austin: Have a trusted colleague look over the application before submitting it. Sometimes a fresh set of eyes can identify key points that are missing from a proposal.

Barrett Golding, a web developer and executive producer of NPR’s Hearing Voices, created a suite of open-source WordPress plugins designed for use by journalists during his 2015-2016 Fellowship. He said that during the interview process, applicants are asked tough questions, which gives them more opportunities to expand on their written proposals.

“Show them on your application what you want to do, why it’s worth doing, and why you’re the one to do it,” Golding said.

RJI will understand what candidates are proposing if they propose it understandably, he said.

4) Go for it!

Sheets said his biggest piece of advice is to just go for it.

 When he applied for the Fellowship, he felt like he didn’t fit the profile of someone who might be awarded a fellowship as prestigious as RJI’s. But he believes that the strength of his proposal, combined with his passion, is what moved RJI to choose him for the Fellowship that year.

Barrett Golding

“If you believe you have a good enough concept, as well as the time, dedication and drive to spend much of a whole year building something really great, then you should go ahead and apply,” he said. “It certainly couldn’t hurt.”

David Cohn was a 2010-2011 Fellow, and is now the senior director at Advance Digital. During his fellowship, he worked on his innovative Spot.Us project, called “a first in crowdfunded journalism in the United States.”

Cohn echoed Sheets’ sentiments – there are zero reasons not to apply, and interested candidates who don’t apply will regret it.

“Maybe you’ll find out that you can’t do the fellowship for one reason or another, and that happens,” he said. “But if you can dream it working, then why not apply to make it happen?”

David Cohn

And Austin has advice for individuals whose proposals are not accepted, too. She recommends those applicants ask why they weren’t accepted, because they may get advice that could refashion the proposal to make it stronger. She also said it’s worth investigating multiple funding options for a project.

“If you believe in an idea, don’t give up,” she said.

For even more advice, read our story from last year about how past Fellows succeed.

The deadline to apply to the 2018-2019 class of Fellows is Jan. 31, 2018 so be sure to apply today!.

Bianca Fortis is the associate editor at MediaShift, a founding member of the Transborder Media storytelling collective and a social media consultant. Follow her on Twitter @biancafortis.

The post 4 Key Steps To Getting an RJI Fellowship appeared first on MediaShift.

This is how Twitter introduces its “Twitter Polls” feature. Twitter polls might be useful for entertainment and business, but when it comes to politics, it’s more complicated: Twitter polls are not scientific; they are not systematically conducted and therefore cannot represent public opinion. Yet surprisingly, many individuals – ordinary citizens, public officials and political leaders – treat Twitter polls as valid representation of public opinion. Whether they fail to recognize its unscientific nature or intentionally use it as a pseudo-scientific platform for promoting their views, the result is increased cacophony, misinformation and polarization in social media and beyond. Given these problems, Twitter should update its design by adding an interactive warning label, at least for politically relevant polls.

Taking Twitter Polls Seriously

Twitter polls have not been systematically studied so far, but I believe there is reason to be concerned. A cursory search of the keywords “Twitter polls” in Twitter shows countless political polls posted by ordinary citizens. Most of these posts promote users’ partisan views by getting and disseminating favorable poll results — unsurprising given that users have mostly like-minded followers on Twitter. For example, ProgressPolls is a Twitter account with 127,000 followers. ProgressPolls regularly posts polls on a range of political issues, prefaced with leading questions (see example below).

Such Twitter polls may seem harmless, but as my colleagues’ and my work shows, people give more credibility to favorable poll results, whether or not the poll is scientific. We can expect individuals to engage in such biased processing even more actively in the echo chambers of social media, where people vote, comment, re-tweet, and are exposed to Twitter poll results.

Research by various scholars, such as Tremayne and Dunwoody and Sundar and Kim, demonstrate that online user interactivity increases persuasion. In other words, the hands-on nature of Twitter polls provides more psychological involvement, and could further amplify people’s biases.

When public officials don’t get it

More worrying still is that some public officials use Twitter polls and claim that they are legitimate. President Trump tweeted a poll showing what he regarded as favorable presidential approval ratings and ignored what the systematic, traditional polls showed (he has attacked traditional polls as being “rigged”). Another example of official misuse of Twitter polls came from a UK police department in November, which was considering whether to use a controversial restraint device called a “spit hood” in arrest procedures. The Durham Constabulary set up a poll asking whether followers were in favor of the possibility. A Durham police spokeswoman told the Guardian, “We have a huge social media following and so it seems fitting that we ask for public opinion. A poll provides measurable results which can help to shape decisions.” The problem, of course, is that Twitter polls do not provide any such thing.

The credibility of traditional polls suffers as well. The ease with which users can manipulate Twitter polls —not to mention the appropriation of the term “poll” for this superficial gauging of public opinion — may lead individuals to question the validity of polling in general.

A warning in the age of the self-polling public

If any Twitter users are taking Twitter polls seriously, then journalists, academics, and social media companies need to take them seriously too.

Fortunately, there are already tools available for this: First, there is community fact-checking; ordinary social media users sometimes comment on Twitter polls highlighting their methodological problems. Second, journalists and pollsters have intervened to highlight how the pitfalls of Twitter polls, and should continue to do so.

But these expert corrections reach only a limited audience. Also, as research with my collaborators shows, expert corrections on the methodological quality of polls are not effective in eliminating people’s biases. When they are effective, it tends to be only with highly educated respondents.

We might need a different approach in the context of social media. 

Specifically, we need design-level strategies to reduce misinformation and polarization. One possibility is a small change in the Twitter polls’ interface design: Twitter could place an interactive methodological warning label at the corner of each Twitter poll before and after it is posted. It might say something like “This poll is not scientific,” or a clickable box saying “This poll’s results are NOT systematic, representative and valid,” perhaps including a link to more detailed information elsewhere.

A more targeted approach might incorporate software which detects polls with political content, and then activates a warning banner once the poll is posted. This small interface change might even contribute to the general public’s polling literacy in the long term.

Similar design hacks to fight misinformation and polarization are increasingly being adopted on other platforms. Facebook started to flag fake news stories with its fact-checking partners. They’ve also recently updated their design to provide related articles, which scholars Bode and Vraga have found to be effective in reducing misinformation. The Center for Media Engagement found that the introduction of a “Respect” button in the online comments sections can reduce partisan incivility, which the Intercept recently adopted. Likewise, Twitter should consider, or at least pilot, a warning label for polls.

Ozan Kuru is a PhD Candidate at Communication Studies and a Rackham Predoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan.

The post Why Twitter Polls Should Have a Warning Label appeared first on MediaShift.

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We’ve launched a special new annual feature called the MediaShift20, in which we recognize the top innovators in digital media for the year. We asked our community to nominate people they think should be recognized for their contributions to the industry.

After the nominations were made, the MediaShift staff then voted to create the final list. We’re excited to announce our 20 picks, a diverse group of individuals who hail all over the world, representing disciplines from investigative reporting about big data to artificial intelligence and beyond.

We have also created the EducationShift20 and MetricShift20 lists for top educators and metrics professionals, respectively.

Congratulations to the first-ever MediaShift20!

1. Stefanie Murray, Center for Cooperative Media

First up on our list is Stefanie Murray, the director of the Center for Cooperative Media at Montclair State University in New Jersey. The mission of the Center, a grant-funded organization, is to strengthen the local journalism ecosystem throughout the Garden State through partnerships, collaborations, training, product development, research and communication with more than 170 partners. She also helped shepherd the Voting Block project in New Jersey, with news organizations throughout the state helping to produce dinners for voters to understand their issues before the governor’s election last fall. Murray’s background includes working for the Ann Arbor News, the Detroit Free Press and the Tennessean. At the Tennessean, she focused on innovation and audience growth, and was selected to serve on a small Gannett-wide team that built a training program for journalists around the country.

2. Francesco Marconi, Associated Press

Francesco Marconi serves as the manager of strategy and corporate development at the Associated Press where he manages strategy and co-leads the organization’s automation and AI efforts. He’s also an Innovation Fellow at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, as well as an affiliate researcher at the MIT Media Lab’s Laboratory of Social Machines where he works on the applications of machine learning in journalism. He recently published Live Like Fiction, a book about being successful and creative, based on some of his most popular Medium blog posts. As NYC Media Lab’s Justin Hendrix wrote in his nomination for Marconi: “Francesco is relentless in his curiosity for new technology and how it might be applied in media. This year he has focused on what I think are the two biggest trends impacting the future of media: artificial intelligence and virtual and augmented reality. Francesco is a connector, across different companies and industries and communities.”

3. Lydia Polgreen, HuffPost

After 15 years at the New York Times – where she won many awards for her international coverage – Lydia Polgreen took the helm of HuffPost in December 2016 after Arianna Huffington stepped down from her role as editor-in-chief. In that year, Polgreen oversaw the publication’s name change, a site redesign and traveled on a special listening tour bus to visit 25 cities across the United States. She also ran HuffPost’s Facebook messenger bot.  In a cover story for Out, the magazine called her the “Queer black woman changing journalism.”

“You would not describe Lydia as someone who is patiently waiting for things to come her way,” Joe Kahn, managing editor for the New York Times, told Out. “She has her eyes set on various prizes, and she’s really good at making things happen for herself.”

Be sure to check out our interview with Polgreen from October on the MediaShift Podcast.

4. Berit Anderson and Brett Horvath, Scout.ai

Together Berit Anderson and Brett Horvath run Scout.ai, a social platform where users submit ideas about the future of technology and vote to predict what will happen next. Scout publishes original research, analysis and science fiction. Anderson is the CEO and editor-in-chief of the site. Formerly she worked as the managing editor of Crosscut.com, a Seattle-based news site, and at Strategic News Service, a predictive newsletter. Horvath is Scout’s head of strategy and partnerships and formerly worked on election campaigns. He also worked with foreign governments to respond to online threats and opportunities and designed the first comprehensive search tool that could search Twitter’s entire database in real-time.

5. Doug Mitchell, Next Generation Radio

Doug Mitchell has dedicated his career to supporting aspiring journalists. He founded NPR’s Next Generation Radio program, a week-long program that trains young journalists how to report for radio. His work as a mentor began in 1999 when he watched a group of NPR interns struggling. “I was right there and I’d walk across the hall and say ‘No, no, you do it this way,’” Mitchell said in an interview on the “It’s All Journalism” podcast. “I thought, nobody’s helping them, so maybe I should help them. So, I helped them finish their show that summer of ’99 and I thought, you know what, this is a really good idea. Let me see if I can carry it forward.” A supporter of diversity in media, Mitchell sits on the board of the Latino Public Radio Consortium, is a peer reviewer for the Fulbright Association and consults with the International Women’s Media Foundation. Along with ONA, Mitchell also recently helped launch the Journalism Mentorship Collaborative, which is an open network of newsrooms committed to diversifying their organizations through mentorship programs.

6. Dana Coester and Gina Martino Dahlia, 100 Days of Appalachia

100 Days of Appalachia launched a year ago with the goal of telling stories from within Appalachia, a region of the country that was suddenly getting a lot of attention after the 2016 election.

“We’re not a local media outlet and we’re not a regional media outlet. We’re a national outlet about the region and with the region,” Dana Coester, the site’s creative director and executive director, told MediaShift in December. She’s also the creative director for the WVU Media Innovation Center and runs the Innovators-in-Residence program there. Coester is directing a documentary film on Muslim identity in Appalachia.

Gina Martino Dahlia is the general manager for 100 Days in Appalachia and is the executive producer of WVU News as well as the managing director for the WVU Media Innovation Center. Previously, she has had many roles in journalism, including a TV news anchor and reporter at a CBS affiliate.

100 Days of Appalachia made our list of the Top 6 Journalism Collaborations in 2017.

7. Sumaiya and Yusuf Omar, Founders of “Hashtag Our Stories”

Wife and husband duo Sumaiya Omar, a social media consultant, and Yusuf Omar, a journalist, launched social video platform Hashtag Our Stories as a way to empower disenfranchised communities to tell their own stories through mobile video. In 2017 they set out on a world tour to meet with local communities to train them in storytelling. 

“I realized that there was a massive potential in training people on the absolute fringes of society, voices that are not being listened to, and the next billion people that will come online, in using mobile phones to tell their own stories, and to curate that into meaningful shows and content,” Yusuf Omar said in an interview.

8. Craig Silverman, BuzzFeed

Craig Silverman, BuzzFeed’s first-ever media editor, is the guy known for helping to popularize the term “fake news,” a phrase he says now makes him cringe.

“When people see the term ‘media editor,’ they probably think the coverage will be about hiring and firing, financials, new product launches and so on,” Silverman said in an interview with Fortune. “But my beat is going to be more about networked media or democratized media—platforms and networks, misinformation and the economic incentives for creating different types of content.”

Silverman, who was named in last year’s Politico50, is a powerhouse at BuzzFeed, constantly producing stories about online hoaxes, digital advertising, Facebook’s disruption of the media industry and more.

He also runs the Fake Newsletter, where he briefs readers on online rumors, fake news and misinformation. You can sign up for it here.

9. DeShuna Moore Spencer, Kweli.tv

DeShuna Moore Spencer runs Kweli.tv, an interactive video streaming network where users can watch films, documentaries, web shows and news about the African diaspora. The network won Harvard African Business Club’s New Venture Pitch Competition last year. Spencer is also the founding publisher of emPowermagazine.com, where she launched an awards program to honor community activists of color. She’s also the producer and host of the emPower Hour radio show. In 2014 she won UNITY Journalists’ NewU Start-up Competition, which included a $20,000 grant from the Ford Foundation.

10. Kate Lesniak, Publisher at Bitch Media

Kate Lesniak has been the publisher of Bitch Media, which publishes Bitch Magazine, the feminist quarterly founded in 1996, since November 2016. She previously served as the non-profit’s director of strategic engagement for eight months and as its director of development for four years prior to that. At Bitch, she helped launch features including the Weekly Reader, Feminist Snack Break and What Just Happened? As Bitch Media executive director Julie Falk wrote in her nomination: “Kate is passionate about reader engagement and about converting readers into sustaining members. In 2017, she designed and implemented a project to test whether readers who engaged with Bitch Media through Hearken would convert to membership at a higher rate. Her project demonstrated that they did.”

11. Sally Lehrman, Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University

Sally Lehrman is the director of the journalism ethics program at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. There she leads the Trust Project, a consortium of about 75 news companies that is developing transparency standards to help assess quality and credibility of journalism. She also helped launch “Trust Indicators,” to surface quality news to potentially billions of readers (here’s more background on the project). She’s won awards for her reporting on medicine, biotechnology and science policy and was a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University. She specializes in identity, race relations and gender.

12. Michelle Holmes, Alabama Media Group

Michelle Holmes has been the vice president of content for the Alabama Media Group since 2013 where she oversees editorial operations for the Birmingham News, Mobile’s Press-Register, the Huntsville Times, the Mississippi Press, AL.com and gulflive.com. In 2017 she helped launch Red Clay Media, which produces shareable videos about life in the South. Holmes also helped launch Reckon, a special Facebook page to foster tough conversations among followers. Nieman Lab’s Christine Schmidt called Reckon “Vox on the Chattahoochee.” Holmes was a 2012 Knight Fellow at Stanford University and the director of business development at UstreamTV in San Francisco, where she focused on content partnerships.

13. Simon Galperin, Community Information Districts

Simon Galperin is the director of Community Information Cooperative (CiC) an organization developing community information districts (info districts). Galperin believes it’s a model for revenue generation that can work in any community that understands the value of local news and information. Special districts already exist for services such as firefighting, water and sanitation. He’s also an engagement advocate for Groundsource.

14. Carlos Watson, OZY

Carlos Watson, a former MSNBC news anchor and journalist, launched Ozy Media, a millennial-targeted news site, in 2013. The site made headlines a year ago when it landed $10 million in funding, which it said it would use to hire more editorial staff. Past investors include Axel Springer and the Emerson Collective. He has hosted a show for PBS called “Third Rail with OZY” and has helped run an outreach project to help journalism educators.

“Part of OZY’s mission is premium journalism with broad appeal,” Watson told USA Today. “It is not a narrow niche publication.”

15. Irene McKisson, Arizona Daily Star / This Is Tucson

Irene McKisson is the editor of #ThisisTuscon, a millennial women’s lifestyle vertical at the Arizona Daily Star. She helped develop the product and manages a small team of writers who also create content for Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and an app. According to Becky Pallack at the Arizona Daily Star: “Using the lean startup process, they built #ThisIsTucson, a digital media brand with unique content, read mostly by millennial women on mobile devices. At the end of the first year, the reach is 45% of the millennial women in our local coverage area.” McKisson previously ran the Star’s social media accounts as the newsroom’s social media and audience engagement editor and trained reporters. She started at the Star 13 years ago in the sports department. She also works as an adjunct instructor at the University of Arizona School of Journalism.

16. Julia Angwin, ProPublica

Julia Angwin is a senior reporter at ProPublica where she covers big data. To explain her motivation, here’s a quote from when we interviewed her on the MediaShift Podcast in September about ProPublica’s series on Machine Bias: “I feel like we’re in this weird situation where this big data economy feels like it’s fracturing our democracy in a way I wouldn’t have envisioned in my most paranoid moments before.” She previously worked at the Wall Street Journal where she led a privacy investigative team, and won a Pulitzer Prize. MediaShift covered an event last February at NYU where she discussed her groundbreaking work on algorithms.

17. Brian Stelter, CNN

Brian Stelter started TVNewser, a blog that covered TV news, in 2004 when he was a college freshman. Six months later he sold it to Mediabistro.com for $500. Two months after graduation he joined the New York Times as a media reporter and was a contributor to the publication’s Media Decoder blog. He was featured in the 2011 documentary “Page One” about the Times. He moved to CNN in 2013 where he now hosts “Reliable Sources,” which covers the week’s top media stories, every Sunday. He also reports frequently for CNN.com (and wrote 439 stories for the site in 2016 alone), and runs a daily newsletter that rounds up the day’s media news here. In a profile in the Washington Post’s Style section last spring, Stelter’s editor Rich Barbieri described him this way: “He’s kind of a force of nature. There are reporters out there who just cannot turn their curiosity off. That’s Brian.” His show, “Reliable Sources,” won a Cronkite Award for Excellence in Television Political Journalism from the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

18. Upasna Barath, Rookie

Upasna Barath, a student at North Central College in Chicago, is a contributor to Rookie, a site for teen girls founded by fashion blogger-cum-media entrepreneur Tavi Gevinson. Barath writes monthly essays and also creates a video series called Upasna Asks where she ponders questions like “How do I break up with a friend?” and “What if I don’t like my name?”

“I don’t know who ‘2019 graduated Upasna’ is, and I don’t want to make any decisions for her yet,” she said in an interview last month about what’s in store for the future. “A very smart person named Tavi Gevinson once told me, ‘You do not have to know now.’ I don’t want to make decisions for the person I haven’t become.”

19. Janine Warner, SembraMedia

Janine Warner is a Knight Fellow at the International Center for Journalists and the co-founder of SembraMedia, which supports digital media entrepreneurs who publish in Spanish. The organization researches digital media projects, is building an online directory and is developing training programs and support services. As San Diego State’s Amy Schmitz Weiss wrote in her nomination of Warner: “Her organization has opened so many doors of opportunity and created a network that wasn’t possible before. She truly is an innovator!” Previously Warner worked as a reporter in California and served as the director of new media for the Miami Herald in the late 1990s. She’s also written several books about the internet, including several in the “For Dummies” catalog.

20. Claire Wardle, First Draft News

During her time as the research director of Columbia University’s Tow Center, Claire Wardle worked on topics such as how publishers work with platforms and what universities can learn from news organizations about innovation. She’s now a research fellow at the Shorenstein Center where she leads First Draft News. First Draft is a non-profit that focuses on how to find and verify content found on social platforms. The organization has dozens of partners, including news organizations, associations, research labs and universities. Among its projects is CrossCheck, a collaborative project which debunked fake news around the French election last year. Wardle has written about why the term “fake news” should be avoided and the created a popular graphic and explainer for different types of mis- and disinformation.

Bianca Fortis is the associate editor at MediaShift, a founding member of the Transborder Media storytelling collective and a social media consultant. Follow her on Twitter @biancafortis.

The post MediaShift20: Recognizing Digital Media’s Top Innovators appeared first on MediaShift.

In the U.S., digital ad spend reached $72 billion in 2016, and with roughly nine out of ten American adults now connected to the internet, the typical U.S. internet user is worth around $250 per year to digital advertisers.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Digital advertisers are making approximately $250 annually – roughly twice the cost of a Netflix subscription – off you and your browsing data. This might be surprising to internet users, not only because it’s a lot of money (more than is spent on TV advertising), but also because digital advertisers make this money in large part by harvesting and selling your valuable personal information. In fact, personal data is taken from you each time you visit a website in order to target you with ads in exchange for what appears to be “free” content, a lopsided transaction that puts your privacy and security at risk.

Below is a fuller explanation of the free internet’s real costs and how users can protect themselves — although national data protection laws will never be able to fully protect individuals from this type of for-profit data collection. This is especially true as companies get more sophisticated in how they use your information. For example, in May 2017, Google announced that it would begin to tie billions of credit card transactions to the online behavior of its users, which it already tracks with data from Google-owned applications like YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps and more. The program, which is indicative of what companies are incentivized to do, puts users’ privacy at risk and is the subject of a complaint against the Federal Trade Commission filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center in late July.

Websites are Tracking Your Online Behavior

From online shopping to reading the news, many Americans use the internet every day to facilitate nearly every aspect of their lives. But even just browsing the internet leaves consumers vulnerable to attacks against their privacy. Trackers that collect data on internet users’ online behavior are present on at least 79 percent of websites, according to a study by my company, Ghostery, which provides free software for safer browsing. Many of these trackers collect data to create detailed user profiles that can be bought, sold, and used by advertisers to target individuals with a never-ending stream of ads.

In collecting user data, trackers can gain access to highly personal information, not only about an individual’s browsing and shopping habits but also about her financial situation, sexual orientation, health status, political views, and religious beliefs. In fact, web tracking has become so pervasive that approximately ten percent of websites send the data they’ve collected to ten or more different companies, and 15 percent of all page loads on the internet are monitored by ten or more trackers.

And adults are not the only people whose privacy is at risk – Viacom, Mattel, JumpStart and Hasbro have recently been in hot water for contracting with advertising vendors that performed some type of persistent monitoring for targeted ads on children. They were forced to pay a combined total of $835,000 in fines.

Another alarming example: The Mayo Clinic, which provides information about HIV tests to site visitors, has many different trackers on its page. If you click on a button to arrange for an appointment with the organization, third-party companies are able to access this information – now knowing if you are taking an HIV test or being treated for the disease. And this is not an aberration; in fact, it’s quite common. Facebook was recently under fire for tracking users’ activity on health sites like the American Cancer Society.

According to a study by the Media Insight Project, a collaboration of the American Press Institute and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, 53 percent of adults pay for the news – meaning that a majority of consumers believe that publishers should be compensated for the content they are creating, and they are willing to pay for content that helps them to better understand the topics they care most about. However, in many cases, individuals are paying a much steeper price that can far exceed what they’re paying out of their wallet.

A girl playing with Hasbro’s Littlest Pet Shop. Hasbro has recently been in trouble for digital ads targeting children. (Photo by Shawn Ehlers/WireImage)

The Hidden Online Ecosystem

Even when content is available for free, there is an unseen cost associated with nearly every website a user visits. Ads are a good example of this; while most internet users understand that certain ads will interrupt their browsing experience and slow page load times, they may be willing to accept this inconvenience to obtain the content they care about.

But the full extent of this hidden ecosystem is harder to see. When websites place a piece of code on the pages of their website, they not only track which pages consumers have visited but also what specific actions they took, on this website and others.

Some trackers even use password managers like LastPass to further fingerprint a user. They do this by creating hidden or false login fields on websites that the password manager automatically fills in with email addresses and passwords. These trackers can take that information and get a more in-depth profile of an internet user.

One reason this is troubling is that the advertiser isn’t always the one doing the behind-the-scenes tracking – they often invite other third-party companies to add their own code on the website to track you as you browse the internet and retarget you accordingly. Just look at Bose, which was recently hit with a lawsuit for this practice, which creates a continuous cycle of monitoring and collection that distorts the cost of consuming content. It also imposes a significant burden on CPU and network resources to load scripts from all these different parties.

Ultimately, websites need to be more transparent about the true cost of their online content and allow individuals to determine if they are receiving enough value in this transaction.

So, What’s a Website to Do?

The most important thing that websites can do is to acknowledge the real cost of their supposedly free content. While the scales of this transaction have traditionally favored the publishers and advertisers, ad-blockers and privacy tools have provided consumers with a valuable bargaining tool.

In particular, privacy tools help users determine how much value they’re giving away when they visit a website, empowering them to decide whether or not the content is worth the cost. This opens up a possible negotiation of sorts between a website and a user.

The Future of the “Free” Internet

Some websites are already thinking about how they can empower users while also remaining financially solvent, whether it be through a tracker-free or ad-lite experiences. Through those mechanisms, we can eliminate the knowledge asymmetry that is so common today, leveling the playing field between internet users and websites. Websites must think carefully about how to reduce the asking price for users without profoundly impacting their experience.

Jeremy Tillman is Director of Product at Ghostery, which provides free software for safer browsing.

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