PoliticalShift – MediaShift

How EconoFact Advocates for Truth in an Anti-Fact Era

Bianca Fortis — Wed, 04 Apr 2018 10:05:21 +0000

Born of a desire to insert actual facts into the heated debates surrounding the 2016 U.S. presidential election, EconoFact was launched in January 2017.

A project from the Edward R. Murrow Center for a Digital World at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, EconoFact seeks to lay out complex domestic policy issues in an easy-to-read memo-style format. Since its launch, the site has published more than 100 pieces of policy analysis that are designed to be evergreen.

The topics that are covered most often include hot button issues like immigration and trade. But the site covers a variety of issues, including college funding and endowments, explained Edward Schumacher-Matos, the site’s publisher and co-executive editor and a visiting professor at the Fletcher School.

We spoke to Schumacher-Matos to learn more about the site and the difficulties of advocating for facts in an anti-truth era.

Q&A

Tell us about EconoFact and how the project got started.

Edward Schumacher-Matos: I was working on a project called Iceberg, a global online publication that features pieces of analysis by experts in different parts of the world. Michael [Klein, professor at the Fletcher School] came in to see me. He was quite disturbed about the election and the tone that had transpired. In talking with colleagues, they were upset that so many basic facts that they know about economic and social policies were not being discussed or used by either candidate. It was a frustrating experience. Trump in particular had little command or even respect for policy. The Hillary campaign misused facts, but Trump was the bigger violator. So we tried to figure out what to do.

With social media you can have your own voice – it’s just a matter of how you organize it and go about trying to promote it. We thought, great, we can do something by launching a site that explains domestic policy. But is this just another site for opinion of which there’s so much? How can we distinguish this and make it different?

I teach opinion writing. When you are trying to argue a point of view, you should be explanatory and put the facts first. There’s this idea of structured journalism that we’ve been playing around with. Could you build a common body of stories that includes all the facts, and each new fact is just a short update? And then you’d link it back to the base. You can break the story into facts and do that as long as we all agree on that common base of knowledge. None of us has been able to make that work. The New York Times, the BBC and Reuters have played around with this. Academic institutions have also tried to do it, but it hasn’t worked. But this is what inspired us, because it forces the facts to be first and the information is delivered in a memo style.

How do you choose the topics you cover?

Schumacher-Matos: We have a weekly editorial meeting. We have an editor, Miriam Wasserman, who works out of Ann Arbor, Michigan. She’s a Fletcher grad. She worked at the Boston Federal Reserve Bank as an editor of their magazine and has held other jobs in journalism. Michael is the executive editor. He’s the real inspiration and editorial leader. I’m more like the publisher. Michael put together the network of economists. On Monday mornings we talk and look at what’s in the news and what we think is going to be in the news.

Edward Schumacher-Matos

Do you go back and update older memos?

Schumacher-Matos: We haven’t had to. But yes, we will, if f it requires updating. In the future we’ll probably have to do more of that.

Who is your target audience?

Schumacher-Matos: Influencers, journalists and policymakers. If we had the money, we would try to break out and try to have a social media engagement strategy. But in the meantime we keep growing organically.

We want to get to what we describe as “an NPR audience” – an informed public audience. NPR’s audience is half Democrats and half Republicans. We do not want to be pigeonholed with just one political tribe – we really want to appeal to all sides and bring down the tone of the debate and talk about the facts. When you’re looking at a problem, what are some of the logical, rational ways of solving it? There may be more than one way, but let’s at least agree on the facts first.

What are some of the challenges in running the project?

Schumacher-Matos: Our biggest challenge is to keep trying to grow the audience. We’re convinced the editorial formula is excellent, and we see the response we get from people when they come into contact with us. Everybody gets it. Everybody’s tired of all the extreme opinions and the shouting. We don’t really have to explain what we’re trying to do.

How do you vet the economists that you work with?

Schumacher-Matos: Michael’s the guy who does that. We want the economists to feel some attachment, some loyalty to the project. I think we’ve done that. Clearly, we can’t pay them. I wish we could. If we had the money we could. We’re trying to raise money.

A graphic from a recent EconoFact story about high school students having trouble attending colleges that are further away.

What kind of impact do you hope to have, and how do you measure that?

Schumacher-Matos: We’re getting picked up more and more by the news media. We’re getting quoted more. That’s growing. You begin seeing who’s seeing it. We’re quoted on the radio a lot too. It’s hard to measure how you are affecting policy. That’s a longer-term measure. We just have to keep at it. We think we are having an impact. We see people in Congress reaching out to us and following up if they want more information. They talk to the economists. We want to reach out more to state governments and regionalmedia as a way to provide information at that level. There’s a lot of information available in New York and Washington, but what about the rest of the country? We also try to make the memos as accessible and readable as possible, so you don’t have to be an expert to understand them.

How do you deal with the issue of trust in a time when so many people are so anti-fact? There are people who think that if something is coming from a news organization or a university, it can’t be trusted. How do you address that?

Schumacher-Matos: We deal with it through our tone and how we write. We allow zero demonizing or criticising of other groups and other points of view. We try to have a very sober, clear and open tone that we hope strikes an empathetic chord that reaches everyone, no matter what your point of view might be. And we do not telegraph that we’re part of one tribe trying to do battle with another tribe. We try to stay away from that. That’s part of the structured memo format and the “facts first” thing. You’ll see no critical adjectives about somebody else or about political leaders. We focus on the facts, not on political fighting or trying to score points.

What are your future plans?

Schumacher-Matos: In addition to looking at publishing and distribution partnerships, finding ways to grow our audience. We need funding to allow us to do that. So far we’ve done very well organically. And we’re looking again at the original Iceberg project. EconoFact focuses on domestic issues, but maybe we can take some of those pieces and repurpose them internationally. Some of them won’t be appropriate but some of them well.

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.

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Journalists Covering White Supremacists Must Weigh Risks to Selves and Families

Avi Asher-Shapiro — Mon, 19 Mar 2018 10:05:37 +0000

A version of this post originally appeared on CPJ’s website.

Michael Edison Hayden was one of the first foreign journalists on the ground after the Nepalese earthquake in 2015. The “ground was still shaking” when he arrived, he said. He’s reported from the disputed territory between India and Pakistan in Kashmir, and gone door-to-door in Phoenix, searching for a mass killer. But, Hayden said, reporting on the far-right white identity movement in the U.S. has been his most traumatic professional experience.

The Newsweek reporter said he has become accustomed to anonymous threats – both veiled and explicit – and has weathered a deluge of menacing messages about his family, including an incident in which his parents’ home address was circulated on far-right chat rooms. Late last year, he saw an anonymous post in an online forum urging someone to throw a molotov cocktail through his parents’ window.

Conversations CPJ had with over a dozen editors, reporters and journalism security experts show that Hayden’s experience is not an outlier. The work takes a concerted emotional toll, and is replete with digital and at times, physical, threats – threats that are especially challenging for freelancers and newsrooms with young or green staff, and without dedicated security and digital experts.

An Expanded Beat

White supremacist movements have always been a force in American political life. But when a number of media-savvy, well-organized leaders of these groups explicitly embraced Donald Trump during the 2016 election, newsrooms began assigning more reporters to the story. The beat took on an added urgency last year, after a man taking part in a protest over the removal of a Confederate statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, drove his car through a crowd of counter protesters, killing a young woman.

“It’s become more necessary to have reporters trained to be able to cover this movement,” Samhita Mukhopadhyay, who has written extensively about online harassment, told CPJ. Mukhopadhyay, the executive editor at Teen Vogue, said she is wary of the impact the beat has on reporters. “I’m always asking, who would be the best person to do something like that with the least amount of hard damage? Who has the experience to do something like that and come out unscathed?” she said. “It’s shocking the rate at which people covering this beat aren’t protecting themselves.”

Mukhopadhyay said she sees parallels between the treatment of reporters covering white nationalism and the broader experience of harassment that female writers face. Covering these activists brings a further risk, since reporters often must make direct contact with members of those movements.

A journalist at a major publication, who requested that their name be withheld, told CPJ that the leader of a white supremacist group they were profiling said he had obtained the address of the journalist’s parents. The journalist told CPJ they believe the leader was suggesting that he could turn “the scrutiny of him into scrutiny of me.” The journalist did not receive any reprisal for the reporting but said the threat remains a source of fear.

Coping with Threats, Fear and Guilt

Hayden had a similar experience when reporting on a prominent neo-Nazi figure, Andrew Auernheimer. After Newsweek published the article, followers of Auernheimer encouraged one another on social media to contact Hayden’s elderly parents, the reporter said. He then began to receive online threats that referred to his parents by name.

The journalist said he reported the threats to law enforcement, which took some measures to protect his family, but the incident affected him. “There’s a tremendous amount of guilt,” Hayden said. “By reporting on this, am I going to get someone in my family killed?”

Many legacy and large digital newsrooms have security staff to help prepare reporters but the pressures of digital journalism – compulsively sharing online and directly engaging with critics and readers – and a proliferation of freelancers can be at odds with what some security experts say are best practices.

Jason Reich

“A lot of young reporters haven’t thought about this until we sat them down,” Jason Reich, the global head of security at BuzzFeed, told CPJ. He said he advises reporters to draw a clear line between their personal and professional online presence. Personal information – Instagram posts from a favorite brunch place, family photos, or pictures of partners – should be kept private.

Amid a deluge of intimidating emails, direct messages and calls, a security team can also help a reporter distinguish between threats that are disturbing but unlikely to cross into physical harm, and those that appear to be more worrying.

Newsrooms should expect to be in touch with law enforcement and prepare accordingly, Reich said, adding, “How many editors know which precinct their offices sit in? I would suggest that newsrooms maintain a relationship with federal and local law enforcement – prepare before your reporters get threatened.”

‘A Unique Kind of Trauma’

A reporter covering the far-right beat can receive dozens – often hundreds – of emails, messages, and at times phone calls after publishing a story that rankles activists online. This can be especially brutal for women and minority writers. Hayden, who is of Arab descent, said he is often called the N-word.

Talia Lavin, who is Jewish, told CPJ that after she wrote a piece for The New Yorker about a neo-Nazi website struggling to find a domain to host it, her address was posted online and she began to receive messages from people fantasizing about hurting her. “They don’t see me as an equal, besides calling me a kike whore, they don’t need to be addressing me as a person,” said Lavin.

Accustomed to such harassment online, Lavin said she didn’t alert her editors, and instead tried to move on. But, she says, newsroom leaders should be aware of what the beat could entail. “They should be sensitive to the psychological impact of these stories,” she told CPJ. “It’s a unique kind of trauma.”

Several of the reporters with whom CPJ spoke said it is difficult to navigate the overlapping digital and physical worlds of these movements and the associated risks. Part of this includes being able to determine when threatening language is deployed with a degree of irony, and when it could be serious.

Some reporters feel as if the threats could leap off the internet at any moment. Jared Holt, a reporter for the progressive website Right Wing Watch, told CPJ that after writing a piece about the how white supremacists, or members of the so-called alt-right, infiltrated YouTube, he got the impression he was being followed outside his workplace. The address was previously circulated among anonymous accounts on Twitter in response to his other articles. But, after his YouTube piece, the online threats ratcheted up. Holt said he started to vary his route home after getting the impression that a man was following him. “Fortunately, these people are a lot nastier on the internet, than they are in real life,” he said.

Inciting Mobs on Twitter and Gab

Part of the problem, reporters told CPJ, is that while many in the far right see the media as a necessary megaphone, a story or reporter’s style can incite a mob on Twitter or the right-wing site Gab, a chat network similar to Twitter. “They are very attuned to how much hurt they can cause,” Jack Smith IV, who primarily covers white nationalism for Mic, told CPJ, adding, “There is nothing like the most sophisticated online hate operation the world has ever seen deciding like you are public enemy number one.”

This was the case with Andy Downing from the Columbus Alive, a local paper with a circulation of 35,000. When he and his colleague Joel Oliphint wrote a profile last year of Andrew Anglin, the owner of the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer who grew up in a Columbus suburb, Anglin posted photos of the reporters and their families, including children, on his site, alongside images of their homes and vehicles. The two received more than a hundred emailed threats, in addition to physical mail, Downing said. Downing added that he told the local police, who started to keep a closer eye on the journalists’ homes.

“I didn’t sleep well, every sound you hear at night, you’re up like a shot,” Downing said.

Before publishing, Downing said he took steps to protect his privacy: he added two-step verification to his devices and set his social media to private. But, Downing said, he didn’t think to tell his family to do the same, and images from those accounts were eventually circulated, alongside property records that can be obtained via public records searches or by paying one of the many online data-brokers that sell such information.

Downing said he would still approach the published Anglin piece the same way but added that he’d think twice before writing a follow-up. “It is an effective deterrent,” he told CPJ. Reich, the security expert at BuzzFeed, said such reactions are understandable, adding, “I’ve seen reporters paralyzed with self-censorship.”

The Risk at Rallies

Journalists covering the movement’s rallies, which sometimes lead to clashes between white nationalists and anti-fascist (antifa) activists, face further risks. The Press Freedom Tracker (a project of which CPJ is a partner) has documented an assault by an antifa activist on a reporter attempting to take photos at a rally in Berkeley in August year. And reporters who have covered the rallies say the white nationalists sometimes use threatening or intimidating behavior. Luke O’Brien, who covers white nationalism for HuffPost, told CPJ, “Editors in Washington, D.C. and New York, they struggle I think to apprehend the degree of instability there is in these situations.”

Counterprotest at White Lives Matter march in Tennessee. Photo by Scott Olson / Getty Images

At a “White Lives Matter” event in Tennessee in the fall of 2017, O’Brien says a mostly uneventful rally quickly became dangerous. After he left the protest in a rental car with some antifa activists, a black GMC began following his car aggressively, swerving across double-yellow lines to stay on his tail, O’Brien said. At one point, one of O’Brien’s passengers pulled out a gun. The reporter, who published an account of the incident, said he was eventually able to lose the tail, but the moment helped him clarify the very real risks of his job.

Despite the dangers, editors and reporters told CPJ that there is increased pressure from newsroom leaders to cover white nationalism, in part, because readers find stories about extremists tantalizing, reporting can be done quickly online, and the coverage generates a lot of clicks. But Mukhopadhyay, the editor at Teen Vogue, says that outlets should resist the impulse to view far-right movements as a revenue strategy. “It downplays the importance of this historic moment, to say, that’s a really good click rate for us,” she told CPJ. “And I would like to think most newsrooms feel that way too.”

Avi Asher-Schapiro is CPJ’s U.S. correspondent. Avi is a former staffer at Vice News, International Business Times, and Tribune Media, and an independent investigative reporter who has published in outlets including The Atlantic, The Intercept, and the New York Times.

A version of this post originally appeared on CPJ’s website. The Committee to Protect Journalists is a New York-based, independent, non-profit organization that works to safeguard press freedom worldwide. You can learn more at CPJ.org or follow the CPJ on Twitter @pressfreedom or on Facebook here.

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6 Things Data Visualization Can Learn From Feminism

Paxtyn Merten — Fri, 16 Feb 2018 11:04:50 +0000

This story originally appeared on Storybench: Tools, Tips and Takeaways on Digital Storytelling From Northeastern University’s School of Journalism.

It’s about time to infuse feminism into data science and visualization. At least, that’s what Emerson data visualization and civic tech professor Catherine D’Ignazio says based on her research into what an intersectional feminist perspective on data could look like.

“We’re in this moment when big data and visualization are being heralded as powerful new ways of producing knowledge about the world,” D’Ignazio said at a recent talk hosted by the Northeastern University Visualization Consortium. “So whenever anything has lots of power and is valued very widely by society, we just want to interrogate that a little more and say ‘Is it being valued equally?’ and ‘Is it benefitting all people equally?’”

She and her research partner found that the field has major problems with inequality, inclusion and quantification. Those who have the resources to collect, store, maintain, analyze and derive insight from large amounts of data are generally corporations, governments and universities. This creates an imbalance between who data is about and who has access to that data.

D’Ignazio says this issue is compounded by the fact that women and people of color are underrepresented in data science and technical fields in general, a trend that is worsening. She also highlights skewed quantity and quality of data that is collected about various groups of people. For instance, there are very detailed datasets on gross domestic product and prostate function, but very poor datasets on hate crimes and the composition breast milk.

“Even when there is institutional and political will to collect data, data on sensitive topics — such as domestic violence, war crimes, sexual assault — is often highly flawed because there is powerful incentives for institutions and individuals not to report, not to collect, not to come forward,” she said.

So how do we take a feminist perspective on the design of visualizations? D’Ignazio cited six points that might bring us there.

1) Examine power and aspire to empowerment

A big part of instilling feminism in data studies is to think critically about who makes visualizations and reflect on what strategies for teaching and engagement could broaden the data community.

“Data viz is uniquely suited, I think, to addressing the intersectional and structural forces that shape our current power imbalances,” D’Ignazio said. “But the key thing is that it has to be in the hands of people who are not blind to those power imbalances. It has to be in the hands of the people who see those and see those worthy of mapping.”

When a group of white male researchers partnered with poor, inner-city black youth in Michigan to work on data visualization, for instance, the result was a revealing map of where commuters run over black children — a topic that may not have been looked at more closely without the collaboration.

“This idea of examining power means basically just tuning your subjects and form of data visualization to explicitly focus on systems of inequality,” D’Ignazio said. “This idea of examining power raises this idea of perspective — so data visualization by whom, for whom, with whose data and with whose values?”

2) Embrace pluralism

“Objectivity is stronger when there are multiple perspectives at the table,” D’Ignazio said to launch this bullet point in her list. Every person’s view is a partial view, so an important first step is to minimize the focus on organized visualizations and welcome multiple perspectives in the design process.

She pointed to the anti-eviction mapping project in San Francisco, an ongoing project mapping the housing crisis in the Bay city. With no singular ‘big viewpoint’ visualization and more than 80 visualizations nested on its homepage, the website is messy. But that is part of the point.

“Their website is not only about the output,” D’Ignazio said, “but it’s also about the collective organizing and the movement building and teaching people along the way in their community about how to collect data, how to produce maps and how to use those maps situated in that context to advocate for tenants’ rights and other things like that.”

A map from the Detroit Geographic Expedition and Institute (Courtesy MIT Center for Civic Media)

3) Consider context

The idea of considering context means to determine data’s context even when it’s not provided — a practice that is important to getting any story right.

“There’s this idea that with enough data, the data can speak for itself,” D’Ignazio explained. “But data doesn’t speak for itself. It can’t. And it’s important that it doesn’t speak for itself, in particular with data that relates to people who are not members of the dominant group.”

For example, data about sexual assault on college campuses collected through the Clery Act, which mandates colleges publicly report annual campus crime statistics, would indicate that Williams College in Massachusetts has rampant sexual assault problems while Boston University has relatively few cases.

Emerson’s Catherine D’Ignazio

“The truth is actually probably closer to the opposite of that statement, but you can’t know that without understanding the context of the data,” D’Ignazio says, explaining that when students investigated the phenomenon they found some schools had higher rates of reported sexual assault because they had more resources devoting to enabling survivors to come forward.

4) Legitimize affect and embodiment

Though traditional wisdom pertaining to data visualization emphasizes simplicity and condemns embellishments, feminist theory and contemporary visualization research shows that this minimalist approach is “basically just wrong,” D’Ignazio said.

“Humans beings are not a pair of disembodied eyes attached to a brain, but we’re actually these bodies and we think and we feel and we like to laugh, we like to be surprised by things, we like to listen to stories, we like to be affected by the world.”

So, by expanding the idea of what counts as data visualization and what senses those visualizations tune into, the data field can have a broader impact with more visceral and memorable messages.

5) Represent uncertainty

The key point D’Ignazio makes here is that the data community needs better methods for showing the limitations of knowledge and representing uncertainty. Relating to feminism, this circles back to the idea that knowledge is partial, so any given visualization does not represent the whole picture.

“Our current conventions of visualization work against showing uncertainty,” she said. “Things like clean lines and shapes reinforce this idea that data visualization is always true.” So, a feminist approach to data visualization looks at ways to make people feel the uncertainty, whether through using sketched lines instead of clean lines or movement and animation to show different scenarios.

6) Make the work visible

Finally, D’Ignazio said that the labor of collecting, cleaning, curating and storing data, as well as analyzing and producing data visualizations, is often rendered invisible. Brainstorming ways to make this labor visible is essential for making it equally accessible to the public.

A feminism-driven approach to data viz is especially important now considering the massive power the field has. Data looks true, it looks whole, it looks scientific and it contributes to an appearance of neutrality, D’Ignazio said. She cited feminist researcher Donna Haraway, who characterized this power as “the god trick,” or seeing everything from no perspective: Data is “the view from nowhere.”

But D’Ignazio cautioned that this view is dangerous: “We have to remember that the view from nowhere is always a view from somewhere, and it’s usually the view from the body that’s regarded as the default.”

Paxtyn Merten is a journalism student at Northeastern University.

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Why ‘Dialogue Journalism’ Is Having a Moment

Tiffany Lew — Thu, 15 Feb 2018 11:05:01 +0000

Turn on the TV today, and chances are you’ll see political commentators sparring. Log on to Twitter and you’ll see the latest heated tweet from President Trump. We’re living in a time of overwhelming connection thanks to the interwebs, but chances are, we’re not nearly as connected to those those who don’t hold similar beliefs.

In a polarizing moment when trust in media and the government is low, a number of new projects, now sometimes called “dialogue journalism,” from organizations including Spaceship Media, Hello Project and the Seattle Times are focusing on bridging communities and pushing diverse viewpoints.

Dialogue journalism, a term coined by Spaceship Media, uses engagement projects to tap into nuanced audiences, providing them with a platform—such as a Facebook group or a video call—to encourage sometimes difficult conversations. Journalists are present to help guide the dialogue, fact check and use the platforms as a launch pad for stories.

These projects attempt to use journalism to bring together a diverse set of backgrounds, whether it’s race, voting preferences, sex, geographical location, or other factors. Rather than focusing on “coastal elites,” they aim to reflect a spectrum of thoughts and experiences amongst a wide range of Americans.

Creating New Dialogues

It’s not everyday that you see Trump voters from Alabama and Clinton voters from California in the same, direct conversation. That’s what Spaceship Media did in one of its first projects.

Spaceship Media, which launched after Trump’s election, organizes those private conversations in Facebook groups, by partnering with various news organizations, as a part of their seven-step system of dialogue journalism. Within those private groups, journalists fact check to keep any claims on track and objective and help steer the conversation. They then follow up with published articles (e.g. from the partner publications) on what participants learned or larger topics that came from the group. The conversation doesn’t stop within the private Facebook group, but rather, it’s used for story ideas.

“We’ve bet on that people do want to talk across difference,” says Jeremy Hay, a co-founder of Spaceship Media. “People want to engage with people who they have different beliefs and opinions from, and journalism can play an important role in making sure that happens.”

They brought together these two groups (of 50 women) who are often pitted against one another, and put them in a private Facebook group. Spaceship Media organized a callout in the Alabama Media Group publications and social channels, and networked in the Bay Area with the help of a freelancer who did outreach via social media channels. In the Facebook group, they talked about issues ranging from immigration to Black Lives Matter to abortion to holiday traditions.

“When people take these experiences where they can’t talk to their cousins, aunts, or in the workplace, it doesn’t feel good for anyone,” says Eve Pearlman, a co-founder of Spaceship Media. “So by using journalism to create these extended dialogues, we give people a place [a private Facebook group], which feels much better.

When the Facebook group closed at the end of the month-long project, the majority of them created their own to further the discussion. While nobody changed their minds about their choice of candidate, the women began to see why those from other states may hold such different views. For instance, health care costs have risen more rapidly in Alabama under the Affordable Care Act than they have in California. Support for the ACA was high amongst the California women, but was a major concern for Alabama women. “Those numbers you posted were out of control,” said Monica Rowden, a Bay Area clinical social worker, said in a discussion about healthcare premiums.

Building Empathy

The Seattle Times created a one-off multimedia project, “Under Our Skin,” that grew out of journalists’ questions about how they cover race in a climate of police shootings and protests dominating the headlines.

The goal was to “foster a conversation around race and the varied perspectives Americans have,” says Michele Matassa Flores, managing editor of the Seattle Times. They hoped people would “open their minds and question their own attitudes.”

It features in-studio videos of 18 people of different racial backgrounds talking about their reactions to terms, such as “institutional racism,” “all lives matter,” and “white fragility,” with the aim to create a feel of a conversation amongst strangers.

For instance, responses to the phrase, “all lives matter,” elicited nuanced reactions. “That’s white privilege,” says Tariqa Waters, a black visual artist. Whereas Mark Olsen, a white student at Northwest University says, “I think some people perceive it (Black Lives Matter) as not being helpful; people walking on the freeways and smashing things.”

The project has been used in classrooms, workplaces, churches and government agencies and more. It won an Online News Association award for Explanatory Reporting at a medium-sized newsroom, which considers the quality of the journalism and the digital production and design of the coverage. The judges said “the material allowed the audience to come at things from all different angles in a clear engaging way.”

The “Under Our Skin” Seattle Times feature (Image courtesy the Seattle Times)

Focusing on Overlooked Communities

Sometimes, the process of organizing groups of people can get complicated. Yvonne Leow, a journalist and the founder of Hello Project and GoatTalks, partnered with AJ+ in the aftermath of Trump’s election for a series of videos that virtually brought together people of different backgrounds to discuss various topics that were being covered in AJ+ videos, including the election, homelessness and North Korea. The project, which received a $15,000 grant from the Jim Bettiger Newsroom Innovation Fund to partner with AJ+, featured direct, 20-minute, one-on-one private video calls so that people would feel safe having honest conversations. These strangers were organized via google forms shared through AJ+’s large digital audience.

“I was seeing a lot of divisive rhetoric from both sides and more importantly, realizing the bubble I was in,” says Leow. “I was interested in seeing other perspectives and if other people were also interested in that.”

“The goal was to give the audience a chance to take the conversation out of the comments, and then have them fill out a survey afterward to see if this changed their minds, or was more effective or interesting than arguing in the comments,” says Alexia Underwood, previously a senior producer at AJ+ who helped organize the project.

However, scheduling these strangers to find overlapping time to sit down and talk big ideas proved to be a problem: Not enough people signed up and even when people were successfully matched, oftentimes, they wouldn’t show up. They weren’t able to move forward with the next phase of the project—a media product out of the conversations.

“There was the question of how we were going to use this information in the newsroom; was there a production component or information gathering component,” says Underwood. “Could the surveys be used to learn something intrinsic or interesting about our audience, or were they there simply to provide a value add to users who enjoyed the AJ+ video experience and wanted a further opportunity to chat about it with a stranger? Because the logistical side of things never panned out, we weren’t really able to move forward very far with the project, but I think that if the logistics hurdles were a little lower, then it could in theory be an interesting conversation forum about issues that our audience cared about.”

Another learning experience for Leow was realizing the importance of knowing the community you’re serving.

“It’s much more about the quality than the quantity or the scale,” she says. “It’s about walking away with that connection, not just the arbitrary comment. The goal to see each other as people, and less as usernames.”

They drew upon a potentially large audience, but the community they were serving wasn’t obvious and focused enough. Something more targeted and impactful, says Leow, would be bringing Bay Area people together to discuss homelessness and the housing crisis, for instance. She realized that sometimes journalism work can make a bigger impact with a smaller, more defined audience.

What’s Next For Dialogue Journalism

Spaceship Media is currently working on a larger-scale project, The Many, which will also take place in a closed Facebook group, but will focus the conversation on thousands of women across the country with personal stories and political discussions.

Leow is currently helming By the Bay, with the goal of demystifying local issues and politics. Topics include how you pass a law in San Francisco and why the city is facing such a housing crisis. They’re still building the tool, but users will be allowed to contribute facts in order to create “hubs of local information.”

“I can’t say this is something that needs to be done over and over again, because who knows what will happen 10 years from now,” says Leow. “But I think the idea is to tap into their [community] needs and think of ways to better serve them.”

UPDATE (2/20/18): After the publication of this story, we received a note from the co-founders of Spaceship Media, Eve Pearlman and Jeremy Hay, who asked us to clarify that Dialogue Journalism is Spaceship Media’s seven-step process of creating, moderating and reporting on journalism-supported conversations across social and political fault lines. You can read more about the genesis of Dialogue Journalism in this Neiman Lab story.

Tiffany Lew is a multimedia journalist based in California. Her work has appeared in publications including AJ+, Mic, Scholastic, Fusion, Frommer’s, and The Hechinger Report. She’s a graduate of Columbia Journalism School. Follow her on Twitter: @tiffjlew

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Netizen Report: The Rising Cost of Cameroon’s Internet Shutdowns

Global Voices Advocacy Netizen Report Team — Tue, 06 Feb 2018 11:05:26 +0000

The Advox Netizen Report offers an international snapshot of challenges, victories, and emerging trends in Internet rights around the world.

Two digital rights NGOs are suing the Cameroonian government for imposing an internet shutdown on the country’s two Anglophone regions for more than three months in 2017, just before both regions planned to make a symbolic declaration of independence. Besides imposing the long-term internet shutdown (along with several shorter shutdowns of platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp), the government deployed security forces who clashed violently with Anglophone activists.

The two NGOs leading the lawsuit, Internet Sans Frontières and Access Now, aim to not only seek reparations for the shutdown, but also help counter the growing trend of using internet shutdowns for political gain.

Peter Micek, General Counsel of Access Now, said of the suit, “Cameroon’s courts have the opportunity to set a global precedent in favor of human rights and the rule of law. By declaring the government’s shutdown order a discriminatory, unnecessary, and disproportionate decree, issued under flawed procedures, the court can provide remedy to Cameroonians and light a path for victims of shutdowns elsewhere.”

The Collaboration on International ICT Policy in East and Southern Africa (CIPESA) estimates that internet shutdowns in 2017 cost the Cameroonian economy USD $1.67 million per day.

More recently, the Philippine National Telecommunications Commission approved a request by the National Police to shut down mobile services during the Dinagyang festival in the Visayas island region on January 27-28, 2018.

In January 2018 alone, similar network shutdowns were imposed during the Feast of the Black Nazarene, Sinulog, and Ati-atihan festivals, writes the Foundation for Media Alternatives (FMA).

The FMA opposes network shutdowns because they violates the right of free expression and access to information, not to mention access to communication networks, which are vital to public safety. The non-profit group also notes there is little evidence that this tactic leads to greater security.

Hundreds arrested in Turkey for criticizing military operations on social media

Turkey’s Interior Ministry announced on January 29 that authorities had arrested and detained 311 people that it had identified as having made social media comments criticizing Turkish military efforts to push a Kurdish militia out of Syria’s northern Afrin region. Among the detainees, who authorities say were spreading “terrorist propaganda,” are journalists, activists and opposition politicians.

Thai woman faces criminal charges for sharing a BBC story on Facebook

Chanoknan Ruamsap, an anti-junta activist and member of the New Democracy Group, received a police summons on January 18 indicating that she was being charged under Thailand’s notoriously harsh lèse majesté or “royal insult” law for sharing a BBC article profiling King Vajiralongkorn. She had shared the article in December 2016. Upon reckoning with the maximum prison sentence that she could face — 15 years behind bars — the young woman elected to flee the country. She told independent news outlet Prachatai, “I had less than 30 minutes to decide whether to stay or to leave. What is difficult is the fact that I won’t return after this journey.”

Myanmar man faces police intimidation in real life, hate speech on Facebook

A Myanmar man is facing threats online after being arrested arbitrarily by the police and posting about it on Facebook. Police responded with a Facebook post in which they accused the man of fabricating the incident and revealed his name and religion, which is Islam. Given ethno-religious tensions in Myanmar, this left him vulnerable to further online abuse. Though the station has since deleted the post, hate speech comments directed at the man have become more prominent in recent days. Yangon Police say they will conduct an investigation in response.

#MeToo China

Photo of China by Lei Han on Flickr and used with Creative Commons license.

The #MeToo movement is catching on in China despite the censorship of phrases like “anti-sexual harassment” on social media platforms. Following the dismissal of prominent Beihang University professor Chen Xiaowu over multiple allegations of sexual misconduct, students and alumni from dozens of universities across China are advocating to establish official policies against sexual misconduct in universities (which are very uncommon in China) using the hashtag, #EveryoneIn. Though similar calls have been made in years past, no concrete policies have been introduced thus far.

St. Lucia launches nationwide free WiFi network

On January 24, the government of St. Lucia announced the installation phase of the Government Island-Wide Network—a USD $4 million project to establish public internet access across the Caribbean island. The network will provide free or low-cost wireless connection in public areas for both residents and visitors. The project is a partnership with the government of Taiwan, which is contributing USD $3.28 million in funding. The network is expected to be installed within three months.

WiFi spies in Buenos Aires’ subway system

A new investigative piece by Vice Argentina shows that while the public WiFi network of Buenos Aires’ subway system is indeed free of charge, it collects a barrage of personal data about the user, including the person’s name, home address, phone number, national ID number, geolocation data and — depending on their device settings — potentially much more, including photographs.

Strava is tracking fitness — and a whole lot more

The Strava app. Photo by Tracy A. Woodward/The Washington Post via Getty Images

When the company that owns the fitness tracker app Strava published a series of heat maps showing where its users were most active, it inadvertently revealed the locations of secret military bases. The company says that the data was made public because users allowed the app to capture this information, arguing that they ought to have “opted out” of tracking while in military zones. The Guardian also reported that the Strava website “allows users to drill down into the tracked runs to find the names of individuals”, raising additional personal privacy concerns.

Want more Twitter followers? You can buy them from Devumi.

A New York Times investigation into the obscure US-based company Devumi examines the dark underbelly of social media identity fraud. The firm sells bot accounts to anyone who wishes to “exert influence” in their social network and appears to have used the names, profile pictures, and other personal data of actual Twitter users to create more than 50K fraudulent accounts that it then sells for profit.

New Research

Spying on a Budget: Inside a Phishing Operation with Targets in the Tibetan Community – The Citizen Lab
Digital Deceit: The Technologies Behind Precision Propaganda on the Internet– New America Foundation
Fit Leaking: When a fitbit blows your cover – John Scott-Railton

The Netizen Report is produced by Global Voices Advocacy. Afef Abrougui, Ellery Roberts Biddle, Marianne Diaz, Mohamed ElGohary, Rohith Jyothish, Leila Nachawati, Karolle Rabarison, Elizabeth Rivera, Nevin Thompson andSarah Myers West contributed to this report.

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An Experiment in Live Fact-Checking the State of the Union Speech by Trump

Bill Adair — Mon, 05 Feb 2018 11:05:16 +0000

A version of this piece ran at the Duke Reporters’ Lab.

Except for the moment when we almost published an article about comedian Kevin Hart’s plans for his wedding anniversary, the first test of FactStream, our live fact-checking app, went remarkably smoothly.

FactStream is the first in a series of apps we at the Duke Reporters’ Lab are building as part of our Tech & Check Cooperative. We conducted a beta test during Tuesday’s State of the Union address that provided instant analysis from FactCheck.org, PolitiFact and Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post Fact Checker. Overall, the app functioned quite well, with only 2 glitches and mainly positive feedback.

Our users got 32 fact-checks during the speech and the Democratic response. Some were links to previously published checks while others were “quick takes” that briefly explained the relative accuracy of Trump’s claim.

When President Trump said “we enacted the biggest tax cuts and reforms in American history,” users got nearly instant assessments from FactCheck and PolitiFact.

“It is not the biggest tax cut,” said the quick take from FactCheck.org. “It is the 8th largest cut since 1918 as a percentage of gross domestic product and the 4th largest in inflation-adjusted dollars.”

PolitiFact’s post showed a “False” Truth-O-Meter and linked to an October fact-check of a nearly identical claim by Trump. Users of the app could click through to read the October check.

Many of the checks appeared on FactStream seconds after Trump made a statement. That was possible because fact-checkers had an advance copy of the speech and could compose their checks ahead of time.

Working Out the Kinks

We had two technical glitches – and unfortunately both affected Glenn. One was a mismatch of the URLs for published Washington Post fact-checks that were in our database, which made it difficult for him to post links to his previous work. We understand the problem and will fix it.

The other glitch was bizarre. Last year we had a hiccup in our Share the Facts database that affected only a handful of our fact-checks. But during Tuesday’s speech we happened to hit one when Glenn got an inadvertent match with an article from the Hollywood rumor site Gossip Cop, another Share the Facts partner. So when he entered the correct URL for his own article about Trump’s tax cut, a fact-check showed up on his screen that said “Kevin Hart and Eniko Parrish’s anniversary plans were made up to exploit the rumors he cheated.”

Oops!

Fortunately Glenn noticed the problem and didn’t publish. (Needless to say, we’re fixing that bug, too.)

What’s Ahead For FactStream

This version of FactStream is the first of several we’ll be building for mobile devices and televisions. This one relies on the fact-checkers to listen for claims and then write short updates or post links to previous work. We plan to develop future versions that will be automated with voice detection and high-speed matching to previous checks.

We had about 3,100 people open FactStream over the course of the evening. At the high point we had 1,035 concurrently connected users.

Our team had finished our bug testing and submitted a final version to Apple less than 48 hours before the speech, so we were nervous about the possibility of big crashes. But we watched our dashboard, which monitored the app like a patient in the ICU, and saw that it performed well.

Feedback

Our goal for our State of the Union test was simple. We wanted to let fact-checkers compose their own checks and see how users liked the app. We invited users to fill out a short form or email us with their feedback.

The response was quite positive. “I loved it — it was timely in getting ‘facts’ out, easy to use, and informative!” Also: “I loved FactStream! I was impressed by how many fact-checks appeared and that all of them were relevant.”

We also got some helpful complaints and suggestions:

Was the app powered by people or an algorithm? We didn’t tell our users who was choosing the claims and writing the “quick takes,” so some people mistakenly thought it was fully automated. We’ll probably add an “About” page in the next version.

More detail for Quick Takes. Users liked when fact-checkers displayed a rating or conclusion on our main “stream” page, which happened when they had a link to a previous article. But when the fact-checkers chose instead to write a quick take, we showed nothing on the stream page except the quote being checked. Several people said they’d like some indication about whether the statement was true, false or somewhere in between. So we’ll explore putting a short headline or some other signal about what the quick take says.

Better notifications. Several users said they would like the option of getting notifications of new fact-checks when they weren’t using the app or had navigated to a different app or website. We’re going to explore how we might do that, recognizing that some people may not want 32 notifications for a single speech.

An indication the app is still live. There were lulls in the speech when there were no factual claims, so the fact-checkers didn’t have anything new to put on the app. But that left some users wondering if the app was still working. We’ll explore ways we can indicate that the app is functioning properly.

Bill Adair is the Knight Professor for the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University and the director of the Duke Reporters’ Lab. He is the creator of Pulitzer Prize-winning website PolitiFact and worked for 24 years as a reporter and editor at the Tampa Bay Times. He is the author of The Mystery of Flight 427: Inside a Crash Investigation.

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Lessons From ‘The Wall,’ USA Today Network’s Collaboration on Border Security

Dale Blasingame — Thu, 01 Feb 2018 11:05:52 +0000

A version of this piece previously appeared on Medium via the Center for Cooperative Media.

When it comes to collaboration, newsrooms often have mental barriers to overcome. Concerns such as who will be in charge, lack of focus and general disinterest or distrust of working with others are some of the most common issues that come into play.

But one of the largest journalism collaborations of 2017 — based on a proposed physical barrier — proved that working together can produce stronger results. That collaboration yielded The Wall, a project that involved the Arizona Republic, USA Today and journalists in the USA Today Network from around the country. Together, they spent six months reporting on core questions about Donald Trump’s push for a wall along the 2,000 miles of the United States border with Mexico. The project was a massive feat of organization, communication and journalistic cooperation that taught participants crucial lessons in coalition-building, including the importance of goal-setting, getting the right mix of skill sets on your team, and embracing the roller coaster ride to come.

When Nicole Carroll, the editor and vice president of news at The Arizona Republic, joined her reporting staff at a Donald Trump rally in Arizona in the fall of 2016, one particular thing stood out while her group was standing in the press corral: the repeated chants of “Build the Wall!”

They noticed the chants didn’t just sound like a slogan — they seemed to be a true, motivating factor for so many people at the rally.

“We wondered how much people really understood (or didn’t) about the border itself, the current fencing on the border, the reality of the terrain and distance involved,” said Josh Susong, news director at the Arizona Republic who served as a lead content editor for The Wall. “We began brainstorming some specific stories that would answer these questions from specific locations, a list that grew as other southwest newsrooms joined the team.

“We were confident most of the country had never seen the border and didn’t know about life in cities near it. Our questions evolved into a process of seeking out unknown stories from the border and unintended consequences of border security and a border wall.”

A helicopter carrying the USA TODAY NETWORK team takes off from Lajitas International Airport in Texas as it continues its journey along the border. (USA TODAY NETWORK)

A multi-platform project

The Wall featured a variety of different storytelling methods: print publication, digital publication, documentary videos, virtual reality, an interactive map, podcasts, chatbots, live storytelling nights and a newsletter. The journalists boarded a helicopter to fly, film and observe every foot of the border with Mexico, from Texas to California. They also drove the entire border.

Reporters and photographers interviewed everyone from human smugglers to families and farmers along the border. They spent time with Border Patrol agents, vigilantes and ranchers. Story topics included deaths of those attempting to cross the border, deaths of agents protecting the border, drug trafficking and concerns of Native Americans along the border. The newsrooms also dug into the effects of the wall on prices of goods like produce, and found out from a smuggler that a new border wall will allow him to charge more for his services.

The audience can watch aerial footage collected of every foot of land along the border, explore the most current and comprehensive map of current border fencing and visit Big Bend National Park and other spots along the border with a Vive VR headset.

Susong said the idea for storytelling on multiple platforms was a goal from the very beginning. Annette Meade, Innovation Manager in the Gannett Innovation Lab, was a lead project manager who helped track all the technical elements of the project and ensure the technology efforts matched the content efforts.

In all, the project included a fully interactive map with about 20 hours of aerial footage of the border, a seven-chapter story about the journey, 14 additional stories about the consequences of the wall, 14 mini-documentaries and an explanation of the history of the border itself.

Special immersive views of key points along the border were built for virtual reality using the HTC Vive system. The project staff talked about the stories behind the stories in a 10-part podcast series that featured an interactive chatbot that could automatically send listeners more details about a story. And the audience joined the conversation for live storytelling events in three states.

Building a coalition

The first planning note about the project went out on December 30, 2016. Editors at USA Today Network’s southwestern properties, led by Carroll, helped flesh out the project idea and generated a list of likely storylines to pursue.

Two months were spent pitching and refining ideas with all stakeholders, including people in editorial, digital, video, marketing, advertising and corporate communications. Detailed documentation, including an 80-page deck, was put together for Carroll and others to help pitch and explain the project to the people who worked in all those different parts of the organization, and whose expertise and support would be needed.

In total on its credits page, The Wall lists nearly 130 individuals who contributed to the project, including reporters, photographers, graphic artists, videographers and designers.

Reporting came from more than 30 journalists in the field, primarily from USA Today Network’s newsrooms in Palm Springs; Phoenix; Las Cruces, New Mexico; El Paso and Corpus Christi, Texas; with more support from newsrooms in Ventura, California; Detroit; and D.C., Susong said.

The Wall also involved a documentary editor and executive producer from Detroit, who led the video process. The network’s emerging tech lab spearheaded the VR process. The digital team included developers and staff in Virginia, New York and elsewhere. The project did have help from outside the network — Jam3, a digital design and development agency, assisted with early work envisioning the framework and digital navigation. Aerial Filmworks managed the helicopter shoot. Finally, Arizona State University students were hired to help review the aerial footage. An in-house development team then linked the map to the video.

Arizona Republic photographer Michael Chow (left) and reporter Dennis Wagner (right) interview rancher John Ladd at the border. (USA TODAY NETWORK)

Taking advantage of the network

The Wall, according to Susong, was perhaps the company’s biggest example yet of the strength of the company’s national network of journalists. He said the Arizona Republic had collaborated before on many things, particularly breaking news, but never anything on this scale.

One of the first tasks was developing the project idea with editors in all of the southwestern locations. Local editors brought in the staff they knew were best qualified to use local connections to help determine local storylines.

While reporting in the field, the majority of the work was done in teams — partly because they were capturing documentary video. Each visuals team had at least two people, plus at least one local reporter. Most of the field shooting was done by four visuals staffers from the Arizona Republic.

“We weren’t parachuting in to do this story,” Carroll said. “We live and work here. Many times, our journalists got access and interviews because they were local. For example, we were having a hard time getting access to the border patrol in southern New Mexico. Our reporter from Las Cruces made the request and the team got in. She grew up in New Mexico’s Bootheel area, and had been covering the area for years.”

Communication for collaboration

As you might imagine with a project of this size, communication was key. Some of the technology used included:

Developers did much of their work using Slack.
Some teams used Basecamp work groups to stay connected.
The project used a shared spreadsheet to determine budgets for content. It listed every possible piece of content in all of their various forms, including every fence photo with geo-coordinates. Susong said the spreadsheet had 20 tabs and thousands of lines of entries by the end of the project.
Project leaders from across the country held regular conference calls during the year of planning and reporting. At first, the calls were every two weeks but that changed to weekly and almost daily as launch date approached. Susong said one of the most important parts of these calls was to know for sure who owned a decision on the content — issues like whether a story lived or was killed, whether there was time to shoot more interviews, and progress of digital features.
Video editors and producers shared physical hard drives to complete work. The dozens of hours of aerial footage alone had to be downloaded and processed to these hard drives during overnight hours each night while the helicopter wasn’t flying. The drives were then shipped or driven back to the newsroom. Susong said the logistics were intense, and Emmanuel Lozano, a video producer, ran this process — which included flying and driving the entire trip.

Editorial process and launch

Story text was edited inside the network’s proprietary CMS by the local editor for that reporter on-site, but Susong worked with those editors to set the theme and structure of each story. He also served as a second editor to make sure the pieces of content shared a common editorial style and voice.

A similar model was used for other platforms. With video, for instance, Kathy Kieliszewski, photo and video director at the Detroit Free Press who served as the executive producer for The Wall videos, helped set the theme and standards.

Stories ultimately went through one of the network’s top copy editors, Melissa Galbraith, a digital producer at the Arizona Republic. Galbraith also wrote most of the cutlines for the hundreds of photos and, along with Susong, wrote most of the display copy for the stories.

Carroll and Kevin Poortinga, the vice president of innovation at Gannett, along with Susong and Meade, met twice at USA Today’s headquarters with leaders from across the network who were helping to support and promote The Wall, including the graphic artists who built the map, the virtual reality team, social media managers, print and digital planners, and many more. In addition to the many other points of coordination, the in-person check-ins were critical.

“These series of connecting points helped keep many people in the loop on what the project was about, what was coming and how they could support it and promote it when it was finished,” Susong said.

In print, all of the USA Today Network’s 109 newspapers nationwide ran a version of the project launch story on their front page.

After that, all the network’s newsrooms were free to use as much of the content as they could. The Arizona Republic ran every word produced over the course of two weeks. The Corpus Christi, Palm Springs and El Paso newspapers ran most or all of the stories in their pages as well. USA Today ran most of the pieces in its print edition, including a double-truck print version of the map.

This screenshot shows the landing page for the project The Wall, at thewall.usatoday.com.

Online, every newsroom in the country featured the same digital pieces, which were all housed at thewall.usatoday.com. Some were featured on the home pages of local sites. In addition, the network’s storytelling studio coordinated three live storytelling nights, which took place in Phoenix, Indio, Calif., and El Paso, Texas, where men and women from across the southwest shared their first-person experiences of living on the border.

Cost and metrics

Cost is always a consideration when working on a project of this size. The Arizona Republic declined to disclose much money was spent on the year of reporting, but Susong said the network did receive more than $30,000 in grants to complete some components.

With so many moving parts, tracking success of the project was another challenge. Susong said the short-term, quantitative goal was to hit 5 million pageviews, which they’ve already surpassed and are now closer to 6 million pageviews.

In a collaboration this detailed, it could have been easy to lose direction. Carroll said they often had conversations about the scope of the project, but they always insisted on staying focused on the wall — not immigration, DACA or any other related issue in the news. The coalition also celebrated short-term wins like getting a key interview or solving a technical issue.

In the end, a project of this scale was only possible because of combining resources and working together with others.

“There is power in collaboration,” Carroll said. “We were able to do far more together than we could have ever attempted as individual organizations.”

Lessons learned

We asked leaders of The Wall to share some of the key lessons they learned from the collaboration that will help them in such projects in the future. Here’s what they said:

Nicole Carroll, vice president/news and executive editor, The Arizona Republic and AZCentral.com:

Have a clear goal, and make sure everything you do supports that goal. In this case, we wanted to educate America about the impact, cost and feasibility of a border wall. We wanted to be as transparent as possible, so people could see the information for themselves and hear directly from those impacted. As we made decisions, this gave us guideposts: “Should we/could we map every piece of the current fence?” (Yes, this educates our audience.) “How can we be more transparent?” (Let’s do behind-the-scenes podcasts.)

Be mindful about the team. Projects like this are powerful career-development and skill-building opportunities. We made sure to have a mix of veteran and newer journalists, from many different areas and backgrounds, to have diverse voices and approaches, to give opportunities to a wide group of people.

Annette Meade, innovation director, Gannett Innovation Lab:

Understand the skill sets and experience of the people who are working on the project and make sure that tasks/timelines match up with those skills. If you have a person on the team who is less experienced or new to this kind of project work, build time in to allow them to learn along the way. Check in with them as often as needed and embrace the fresh viewpoints or ideas that they can bring to the process.

Tap resources from around your organization. Your core team is likely to be relatively small, and they won’t know everything about everything. Pull in the best people you know to address specific areas, like SEO.

Allow enough time for QA/testing. Anticipate the worst-case scenario, where development gets backed up a few days (or more), and plan accordingly when you build in QA time. Then just to be safe, add in a little more time. We seldom see projects that allow too much time for QA/testing; it’s usually just the opposite.

Kevin Poortinga, vice president, innovation, USA Today Network/Gannett:

New long-distance relationships: Rough but so worth it. Not only did we wrestle with multiple time zones, we also wrestled with new-to-each- other work styles (and this was without the benefit of in-person happy hours to talk it out). We prevailed, and we’re so much better off now for future projects, as it immensely eases that outreach going forward. In this company, we should all fight to rotate who we work with at least a few times each year to extend our networks.

On such a large project involving so many players and stakeholders, it’s going to be a roller coaster of an experience. As much as you want the process to be a smooth, straight A-to-Z ride from both a process and people perspective, it’s going to look a lot more like this:

It’s best to be upfront about this, and set expectations about how you’ll have the necessary discussions along the way.

Josh Susong, senior news director, The Arizona Republic/AZCentral.com:

Appoint one person to know the location of all the digital/visual media.We relearn the value of this on every big project we do. In this case it was Emmanuel Lozano. Whoever it is, somebody needs to own knowing where every visual thing lives, to feed the many designers, developers, social planners, etc., who are all looking for the one last extra image of .

Kathy Kieliszewski, photo and video director, Detroit Free Press

When producing a documentary, a lot of time is spent on pre-production — building sources, navigating new territory and chopping through red tape. With this film, we were able to leap past that in a lot of ways by utilizing the institutional knowledge of the network’s news organization along the border. That’s given us an incredible leg-up in telling the stories of how the proposed border wall could impact those communities.

The Wall was awarded a $7,000 grant by the Center for Cooperative Media as part of an open call to fund collaborative reporting project, which was made possible with support from Rita Allen Foundation and Democracy Fund.

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.

About the Center for Cooperative Media: The Center is a grant-funded program of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. The Center is supported with funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and Democracy Fund. Its mission is to grow and strengthen local journalism, and in doing so serve New Jersey residents. For more information, visit CenterforCooperativeMedia.org.

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Netizen Report: Can Brazil’s Government Use Google to Manipulate Public Opinion?

Global Voices Advocacy Netizen Report Team — Tue, 30 Jan 2018 11:05:42 +0000

The Advox Netizen Report offers an international snapshot of challenges, victories, and emerging trends in Internet rights around the world.

A January 12 article on the website of O Globo, one of Brazil’s most widely read daily newspapers, alleges that Brazil’s government is seeking to work with Google to customize search results for Brazilian users, based on their location and possibly other characteristics.

According to the O Globo article, which did not name its sources, the government is hoping to tailor search results related to a controversial pension reform bill, which the Congress is scheduled to vote on in the near term. Google has made no public statements on the matter.

O Globo reports that members of President Michel Temer’s administration met Google representatives in early January to discuss the viability of directing users’ queries to official content produced by the government. According to the article: “It would work more or less like this: a rural worker who searches ‘pension reform’ would see content that explains that this category of worker won’t be affected by the current version of the bill.”

The highly unpopular pension reform bill is the boldest component of Temer’s austerity package, which is aimed at keeping the public deficit under control. Since late 2016, the government has been struggling to secure support for the bill in Congress, and has since proposed a more moderate version of the bill. The stakes are even higher now as lawmakers worry that approving such an unpopular bill will hurt their chances of re-election in October.

If Google were to agree to such a proposal, the company would undercut its own previous arguments about the service it provides. In numerous court challenges, including multiple cases in Brazil, Google’s lawyers have argued that the search engine is a “neutral intermediary,” a algorithmic system designed to show users “relevant” information, according to a set of (highly subjective) metrics intended to determine relevance.

The idea also raises significant questions about the reach of Brazil’s Marco Civil da Internet, or Civil Framework for the Internet. Passed in 2015, shortly before the impeachment process began for former President Dilma Rousseff, the law protects network neutrality by prohibiting “discrimination or degradation of traffic for commercial purposes while permitting it for emergency and public calamity situations.” It does not explicitly address content discrimination for political purposes.

Ethiopia’s ruling coalition is paying people to promote its agenda — and harass its opponents

Photo of Ethiopia by mariusz kluzniak on Flickr and used with Creative Commons license.

A series of government documents and chat logs, leaked by sources suspected to be inside the regime, reveal that the Ethiopian government is paying social media commenters to influence online conversations in the government’s favor. Among the documents is a list of individuals and the precise amounts of money paid to them for pro-government and anti-opposition postings. Most of the people on the list are already government employees. The revelations are consistent with increasingly aggressive pro-government, anti-opposition online campaigns, which have coincided with a rise in online hate speech online and persecution of independent journalists.

Mexican regulators threaten community phone network over fee waiver

Indigenous Community Telecommunications, Mexico’s first and only association of community indigenous service providers, may be forced to stop operating after being charged one million pesos by Mexico’s national communications regulator for the radio frequencies it uses. Indigenous Community Telecommunications requested an exemption from payment as they are not-for-profit and have no commercial use, which was accepted as part of their initial licensing agreement. One year after they began operations, their request for exemption from the fee was denied. The group is challenging the resolution.

Social media gag order extends to university employees in Jammu and Kashmir

This week, faculty and staff at the University of Jammu, in the northern Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, learned that a 2017 regulation restricting state employees from certain types of speech on social media will extend to university employees as well. The 2017 regulation indicates that “no government employee shall engage in any criminal, dishonest, immoral or notoriously disgraceful conduct on social media which may be prejudicial to the government.”

Iran has an Access to Information law — and Rouhani wants to start using it

The protests in Iran that broke out in late December could open an opportunity for the government to put into practice the country’s Access to Information law, which was passed in 2009, but has yet to be fully implemented. In the wake of the protests, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani gave a speech on the importance of transparency in governance, arguing, “We have no way other than clarity for rooting out corruption; we must all go inside a glass room so that people can see every measure we take.”

Sinking ship succumbs to censorship under Germany’s anti-hate speech law

Photo of Germany by Moyan Brenn on Flickr and used with Creative Commons license.

Twitter blocked the account of satirical magazine Titanic under the newly implemented German anti-hate speech law, NetzDG. The magazine’s account was shut down for 48 hours after it republished a deleted post parodying the anti-Muslim tweets of a far-right German politician, according to Columbia Journalism Review. The law gives social media platforms 24 hours to remove posts reported by users as being illegal.

UK plans to fight disinformation, somehow

The UK government is setting up a dedicated national security task force to counter disinformation spread by state actors, amid an investigation of claims that Russia interfered in the 2016 Brexit referendum campaign. No further details have yet been revealed about the operations of the new unit.

The NSA is listening more carefully than we thought

A new report from The Intercept reveals that the US National Security Agency has technology that can identify people by the sound of their voices, which is captured in a unique file called a “voiceprint.” The report draws on classified documents dating from 2004 to 2012, and indicates that US intelligence agencies have been using the technology in counterterrorism operations since as early as the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. The report raises legal concerns about the right to privacy, particularly as voice identifiers are a unique form of biometric data.

UN says more people need internet access, especially women

The United Nations Broadband Commission announced new targets for 2025 to support the expansion of global internet access, with the ultimate aim of connecting the 50% of the world who are currently offline. The 2025 targets urge countries to establish national broadband plans, make internet access more affordable and increase opportunities to build digital skills.

The commission also lowered the threshold for internet access “affordability” from 5% to less than 2% of monthly gross national income (GNI) per capita, reflecting increased sensitivity to income inequality. These proportions were first proposed by the Alliance for Affordable Internet in their 2016 Affordability Report. The targets also call for gender equality in all areas of internet use, acknowledging that women and girls are among the groups least likely to benefit from the digital economy.

New research

Dependent Yet Disenfranchised: The Policy Void that Threatens the Rights of Mobile Users in Arab States – Afef Abrougui / SMEX
Internet Freedoms in Palestine: Mapping of Digital Rights Violations and Threats– 7amleh

The Netizen Report is produced by Global Voices Advocacy. Afef Abrougui, Ellery Roberts Biddle, Mohamed ElGohary, Rohith Jyothish, Inji Pennu, Karolle Rabarison, Elizabeth Rivera, Taisa Sganzerla, and Sarah Myers West contributed to this report.

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Netizen Report: Yemini Human Rights Blogger Hisham Al-Omeisy Freed

Global Voices Advocacy Netizen Report Team — Tue, 23 Jan 2018 10:30:23 +0000

The Advox Netizen Report offers an international snapshot of challenges, victories, and emerging trends in Internet rights around the world.

Yemeni blogger and journalist Hisham Al-Omeisy was freed and reunited with his family in Yemen on January 15, after being detained for more than five months by Houthi forces. Security officers from the Houthi-controlled National Security Bureau arrested Al-Omeisy in August 2017 in the capital Sana’a.

With more than 35,000 Twitter followers, Al-Omeisy had been actively tweeting and blogging about the humanitarian crisis and violations committed by both warring parties. Prior to his arrest, he had analyzed and spoken about the conflict to international media including the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, Deutsche Welle, NPR and TRT World.

While in custody, he was unable to communicate with a lawyer or his wife and two young sons.

Though family and friends rejoice at his return, they worry for the many other Yemenis who have been subjected to enforced disappearance, either at the hands of either Houthis or the Saudi-led coalition fighting against them.

Reacting to Al-Omeisy’s release, fellow blogger and journalist Afrah Nasser tweeted:

As much as I’m overjoyed Hisham @omeisy was released, my heart aches for all the other forcibly disappeared young men by Houthis, who have no media profile, whose names we never know, whose mothers & sisters @ @abducteesmother plead everyday to release them.. #yemen

— Afrah Nasser (@Afrahnasser) January 15, 2018

Pakistani journalist attacked after being harassed for social media criticism

Renowned Pakistani journalist and vocal social media user Taha Siddiqui was attacked in Islamabad by several armed men who attempted to abduct him. Although Siddiqui escaped with no serious injuries, the assailants took his laptop, mobile phone and passport. Siddiqui had been very critical of the military establishment on social media. In May 2017, he was summoned by the counter-terrorism wing of the civilian Federal Investigation Agency and asked to submit his laptop for forensic tests. Siddiqui filed a complaint against the agency, which was upheld by Islamabad High Court.

Philippines seeks to ban independent news site, berated by Duterte

Philippines’ President Rodrigo Duterte inspects the honour guards during the commemoration of the 121st death anniversary of the country’s national hero Jose Rizal. NOEL CELIS/AFP/Getty Images

The Philippine Securities and Exchange Commission revoked the license to operate from Rappler, a news and social media site. The January 11 SEC decision asserts that Rappler is “violating the constitutional and statutory Foreign Equity Restriction in Mass Media” for receiving donations from the Omidyar Network, a foundation created by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.

While the Philippine Constitution limits mass media ownership and control to Filipino-owned corporation, it does not prohibit monetary donations from foreign foundations. Rappler is a 100 percent Filipino-owned and managed company.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte went after Rappler in his July 2017 State of the Nation address, charging that the site is “fully owned by Americans.”

The UAE is banning VoIP services — and a petition against the ban

After blocking multiple web services that offer free voice and video calling — including Skype, WhatsApp and Viber — UAE authorities are now stifling residents’ attempts to protest the ban. In late December 2017, Mostafa Amr mounted a petition asking the country’s telecommunications regulator, along with lead telecommunications providers Etisalat and Du, to reinstate VoIP service in the UAE. This week, authorities blocked the web-based platform Change.org, where the petition was hosted.

Written in the first person, the petition urges authorities to reconsider the block in order to help families stay connected through affordable communication services. Amr writes:

VoIP is crucial and needed for many families who are living in the United Arab Emirates and need to contact their loved ones who are living outside of the UAE. There are so many residents in the UAE who have family members and loved ones who live off-seas and an easy, and free way to contact them and keep in touch is via VoIP.

Egyptian media regulator goes after journalists on Facebook

The head of Egypt’s National Media Council said in a public statement that journalists should be liable for messages they post on Facebook. Makram Mohammed Ahmed said, “If Facebook is a publication platform for everyone, then anything published on it, whether insult or defamation, will be scrutinized. And if a complaints reached the Supreme Council for Media Regulation, we will look into it and issue a decision immediately.”

Visiting Chongqing? Watch where you look.

The southwestern city of Chongqing, China recently launched a pilot program for facial recognition technology called “Xue Liang”, meaning “Sharp Eyes”. The program combines video surveillance data collected from security cameras on the streets and residential compounds with China’s “Police Cloud”, which contains a vast store of personal data for all Chinese citizens including their identity numbers and machine-readable photographs.

Pakistani intelligence agency bashes Bitcoin

In an obligatory report to the Pakistani parliament — which was delayed by nearly a year — the Federal Investigation Agency asked the government to criminalize the use of Bitcoin and make this a punishable, offense under Pakistan’s 2016b Electronic Crimes Act.

Vladimir Putin has already won the March 2018 election (according to the internet)

Russian President Vladimir Putin raises a glass in Moscow on December 28,2017 in Moscow, Russia. (Photo by Mikhail Svetlov/Getty Images)

For about 20 minutes on January 15, a Russian-language Google search of “elections 2018″ resulted in a snapshot of the analogous Wikipedia article, which declared Vladimir Putin the winner of the yet-to-be-held election. This curious error came about thanks to Google’s search result technology, which sometimes features information from Wikipedia or other websites that are likely to answer the user’s query. In this case, Wikipedia’s Russian site had briefly listed Putin as the winner, an error that was resolved shortly after the news went viral on social media.

Amid protests, Psiphon reports record downloads from Iran

The censorship circumvention tool Psiphon has reported a 20-fold increase in users since protests erupted across Iran at the end of 2017. Hugely popular web platforms and apps including Telegram and Instagram have been periodically blocked since, leaving Iranians suddenly unable to communicate on these platforms without using special tools — like Psiphon — to get around the block. The app now serves eight to ten million daily users from Iran.

New Research

Community networks: The internet by the people, for the people – Getulio Vargas Foundation, Brazil
Voice, visibility and variety of viciousness: A Malaysian study on women’s lived realities on social media – Association for Progressive Communications

The Netizen Report is produced by Global Voices Advocacy. Afef Abrougui, Ellery Roberts Biddle, Mohamed ElGohary, Rohith Jyothish, Weiping Li, Karlo Mikhail Mongaya, Karolle Rabarison, and Juke Carolina Rumuat contributed to this report.

The post Netizen Report: Yemini Human Rights Blogger Hisham Al-Omeisy Freed appeared first on MediaShift.

Netizen Report: Fearful of ‘Fake News,’ Lawmakers in France, Brazil Want to Limit Free Speech Before Elections

Global Voices Advocacy Netizen Report Team — Wed, 17 Jan 2018 11:04:22 +0000

The Advox Netizen Report offers an international snapshot of challenges, victories, and emerging trends in Internet rights around the world.

The specter of “fake news” is still looming large and the power of internet companies to control and capitalize on news distribution seems to grow greater by the day. This has democratic leaders around the world scrambling to rein in free speech laws and to distinguish between the motivations behind online news and information — whether they be political power, money, or the simple free exchange of ideas.

In early December 2017, Brazil’s government established a council to monitor and possibly order the blocking of false news reports on social media ahead of the 2018 presidential elections. The news swiftly raised concerns about censorship among the public.

In its first meeting, the council proposed to create a tool through which users could file reports to the council of news that appeared suspicious.

The council has not explained how this system would interface with social media companies, which are the only entities capable of removing content or accounts propagating “fake news”. Members say they are negotiating support from social media companies, but it remains unclear where this will lead.

Previous attempts at such control have yielded mixed results. When Facebook introduced a “report fake news” feature in December 2016, many users reported fake content as part of an effort to discredit information or ideas with which they disagreed, even when those ideas were based on verified facts.

Across the Atlantic, French President Emmanuel Macron announced new measures targeting “fake news” that will mandate content deletion, censorship of websites that spread false news, and the closure of accounts of infringing users, following judicial orders.

In addition, a new bill before the French Congress that is intended to target sponsored content on social media platforms. If adopted it would require social media platforms to ‘’make public the identity of sponsors and of those who controls them,” and to impose limits on the amount of money paid to sponsor such content.

The law’s purpose is to “protect democratic life,” according to Macron.

In both France and Brazil, it remains unclear precisely how government actors will compel social media companies to identify and/or remove such content at this scale.

Vietnam hires thousands of workers to go after “wrongful views” online

Colonel General Nguyen Trong Nghia, deputy chairman of the General Political Department of the People’s Army of Vietnam, announced at a December 25, 2017 meeting that the military has created a special force tasked with “combating wrongful information and anti-state propaganda.” The special force already has 10,000 workers.

Photo of an internet cafe in China by eviltomthai on Flickr and used with Creative Commons license.

China censored more than 100,000 websites in 2017 for ‘harmful’ content

China’s state-run Xinua news agency reported on January 8 that approximately 128,000 websites were censored in China in 2017 due to “harmful” content, including news from “unauthorized” sources, material said to threaten “social stability”, and pornography. Most recently, Cyberspace Administration officials penalized the popular Toutiao news aggregator app, which they said had illegally distributed news content without having obtained necessary permissions from the authorities.

Chinese courts hear challenges against censorship, surveillance

A Beijing court agreed to hear a case addressing the media regulator’s censorship of LGBTQ content online. In June 2017, the China Netcasting Services Association sparked outrage when it issued new rules banning online content that depicts “abnormal sexual relations or behaviour,” including homosexuality. The lawsuit—filed by 30-year-old Fan Chunlin from Shanghai—challenges the media regulator to provide a legal basis for the description of homosexuality as “abnormal.” The court is expected to deliver a ruling within the next six months.

In Jiangsu province, a court agreed to hear a challenge by a consumer rights group against Baidu, one of China’s largest internet companies. The Jiangsu Provincial Consumer Protection Committee charges that Baidu products, including its mobile app and web browser,are accessing users’ messages, phone calls, contacts and other data without their consent.

Indonesian drone aids censorship instead of surveillance

Indonesia’s Ministry of Communications and Informatics has deployed a new program that is intended to enhance the process of blocking “negative” content on the internet by using artificial intelligence. Known as “Cyber Drone 9,” the program combines new technical tools (which do not actually include drones) with a team of staff who will monitor “negative” content identified by the software and decide whether it should be censored.

Visiting the US? You might have to hand over your mobile phone.

Photo of Vietnam by guido da rozze on Flickr and used with Creative Commons license.

United States border agents reportedly searched 30,200 devices in 2017 for both inbound and outbound travelers, in comparison to 19,051 in 2016. The U.S. agency of Customs and Border Protection issued new guidelines requiring devices be unlocked on request and authorizing agents to copy and save information that they obtain through travelers’ mobile phones, among other measures.

Internet and mobile phone penetration are rising everywhere — except in Venezuela

The Venezuelan news and commentary site El Estimulo published an in-depth report(in Spanish) on falling rates of internet and mobile phone connectivity in Venezuela. The article highlights International Telecommunication Union statistics showing that mobile phone penetration has dropped from 102% in 2012 (a number reflecting individuals with multiple mobile phones) to 87% in 2016, and also charts damage to subterranean internet infrastructure that the state has failed to repair. The article quotes Global Voices author Marianne Diaz:

The increasing deterioration of infrastructure is neither coincidental nor accidental. It is the result of decisions and policies implemented by power structures. The end result is that it is making citizens suffer the consequences of infrastructural decay and the state is not upholding its obligations to guarantee access to basic services…

Tunisia’s biometric ID bill is dead, for now

The Tunisian government withdrew a proposed law on January 9 that would have imposed a national biometric identification scheme for all Tunisian citizens. The withdrawal was due in part to an influx of requests and amendments proposed by the parliamentary commission of rights and freedoms, many of which were drawn from citizen input.

New Research

Information Not Found: The “Right to Be Forgotten” as an Emerging Threat to Media Freedom in the Digital Age – Center for International Media Assistance

The Netizen Report is produced by Global Voices Advocacy. Afef Abrougui, Ellery Roberts Biddle, Marianne Diaz, Oiwan Lam, James Losey, Karolle Rabarison, Elizabeth Rivera, Juke Carolina Rumuat, Nevin Thompson and Sarah Myers Westcontributed to this report.

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