Social Media – MediaShift http://mediashift.org Your Guide to the Digital Media Revolution Thu, 29 Jun 2023 06:52:56 +0000 en-US hourly 1 112695528 It’s Time For Publishers To Get Bullish On SEO Once Again http://mediashift.org/2018/04/time-publishers-get-bullish-seo/ Tue, 03 Apr 2018 10:03:19 +0000 http://mediashift.org/?p=151965 A version of this article was originally published by Bibblio.org. Twitter accounts for less then 2.5 percent of traffic to publishers; Instagram and Pinterest barely supply one percent together. Currently, Facebook represents 22 percent, but its role in distributing publishers’ content has been falling dramatically for more than a year, and is only accelerating. Data […]

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]]> A version of this article was originally published by Bibblio.org.

Twitter accounts for less then 2.5 percent of traffic to publishers; Instagram and Pinterest barely supply one percent together. Currently, Facebook represents 22 percent, but its role in distributing publishers’ content has been falling dramatically for more than a year, and is only accelerating.

Data from Parse.ly, which tracks visits to more than 2,500 publishers, shows that ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, more than 40 percent of traffic to those sites came from Facebook. By the end of 2017, it was less than 26 percent. It’s still dropping. For some sites, like BuzzFeed, this is a big problem, but even if you don’t rely on social traffic to the same extent, it’s a challenge.

The chart below shows the amount of traffic coming to publishers from Google and Facebook since the beginning of 2017. It’s not just Facebook’s decline — the huge growth in Google mobile visitors is very striking. This can largely be attributed to the growing popularity of AMP, Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages format for the mobile web.

Google's mobile search is sending more traffic to publishers

Source: Chartbeat

Social traffic was never a great way to make money anyway

How much was social referral traffic really worth? As Scott Galloway points out in this great video, Audience vs. Traffic: “People don’t tune in to BuzzFeed because they’re fascinated by the journalism, they click because someone forwarded them ‘Pick some of your favorite potato dishes and we’ll tell you your best quality.’” Social referrals are fickle, hard to monetize, and disappear when Facebook changes the algorithms. They’re traffic, not an audience. Even before Facebook’s changes, BuzzFeed had apparently been seeing a decline in unique US visitors for two years.

In many ways the decline in social referrals is just the icing on a pretty unappetizing cake for traffic-dependant sites, which struggle to monetize beyond programmatic ads. Yields are declining, the use of ad-blockers is on the rise and Facebook and Google are hogging all the growth. Meanwhile, those sites that managed to build a loyal audience, like the New York Times and many special interest magazine sites, are flourishing — usually by using that loyalty to monetize in other areas like subscriptions or e-commerce.

Social traffic was never all that great for anything other than reporting big numbers. While that doesn’t change the fact that content distributed directly on platforms can be an important acquisition channel (e.g. The Economist has used Facebook as an effective way to retarget potential subscribers), that only really works if you can convert your off-site viewers into paying subscribers. Monetizing content on somebody else’s platform is really tough. Your company’s account on Instagram may have a lot of followers, but how much value is that generating, and is it going to you or the platform? As a friend likes to say: “Everyone knows National Geographic has amazing photography, but how many people remember the names of individual photographers?”

Long-term, the move away from desperately trying to drive and monetize social referral traffic is a necessary step, but right now it’s still hurting many people. So, how can you thrive despite Facebook’s continuing retreat from publishing?

The antidote to declining social traffic

One answer is Google. As the Chartbeat graphic shows, Google is quickly regaining its status as the primary source of referrals for publishers. So the main question becomes, how do you drive more large scale, organic traffic to your website via the search engine result pages (SERPs)?

Basically, you need to refocus your efforts away from social traffic and re-energize your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) team. As a quick refresher, SEO is the umbrella term for many tactics, all of which aims to optimize your content for search engine algorithms, so that you rank higher when a potential visitor asks a query. The higher you rank, the better your natural traffic becomes, and the more chances you get to convert that traffic into a loyal, revenue generating audience. However, SEO in 2018 is not the SEO you remember: Google is always tinkering with algorithms and features (like AMP), and that means the best SEO tactics constantly change. Sometimes quite radically.

What are the ranking factors that influence your SEO score most these days? Google famously doesn’t give us full transparency on ranking factors, but recently large studies by intelligence platforms such as SEMrush have shed some light into the ranking darkness. The answers probably aren’t what you expect.

The days of keyword stuffing are over

No, it’s not keywords (in the anchor, body, title or anywhere else) or backlinks. It’s your engagement metrics. The top four ranking factors are direct website visits, time on site, pages per session and bounce rate. This isn’t surprising really when you think about it: Google wants to find the ‘best’ answers for queries, so happy Google users are a key indicator for them. What they’ve worked out is that engagement indicators, like low bounce rate, high pages per session and superior dwell time, are the best signs of a good search answer. They’re also hard to game, which can’t be said for keywords and backlinks.

This all means that there is now another very obvious reason to try to increase your engagement metrics: high engagement is a virtuous cycle. More engagement directly means more new organic traffic, which in turn means a greater opportunity to monetize your site and build a loyal audience, which means higher engagement and more organic traffic.

Ranking factors analyzed

Source: SEMrush

SEMrush’s study results are backed by industry experts such as Larry Kim, Founder & CTO of WordStream. He says that “having positive website engagement metrics is critical” and he presents the data that shows the relationship between engagement rates (such as bounce rate and time on site) and rankings here.

So, yes, you shouldn’t ignore keywords and backlinks, but the biggest opportunity to increase organic traffic from Google comes directly from boosting on-site engagement metrics. This is especially true for established sites that already rank fairly well.

That leaves one question: how do you improve your SEO? If you’re already creating great content, what can you do that will impact these metrics right now?

How to effectively raise your site engagement and search traffic

SEO expert Matthew Woodward describes internal link building and content recirculation as “the most powerful SEO tactic you are not using.” Why? It increases engagement.

Internal content recommendations are the best way to help readers discover relevant content that they really want to read. This means fewer people leaving after reading just one article, more articles per session and more time on your site. Most importantly, the more of your content they explore, the more likely they’ll be to come back. Search visitors can be fickle if they’ve come looking for a particular piece of content, and often leave as soon as they’ve consumed it. You give yourself the best chance of converting them into a loyal audience member by providing other high-quality content that’s relevant to their interests.

Content recommendation is even more important when you consider that, for over half of publishers, less than 10 percent of visitors enter the site via the homepage, according to research by Parse.ly. This means your content pages also have to do the job of the homepage and help people find the next piece of interesting content.

What all this adds up to is this: the related and recommended content widgets on your content pages are the single most important performance unit you have. Measure them and optimize them!

Social media can still work great as an acquisition channel for publishers and media companies, but as a dependable traffic- and revenue-driver it’s a busted flush. You can’t rely on it to drive engaged traffic to your site, the principal source of sustainable revenue. Now that Google is the most important referral source again, SEO has a renewed importance, and the days of keyword stuffing are behind us. You should be doing everything you can to improve your user experience. An easy way to do this right now, as well as implementing tools like AMP, is great recommendations.

Mads Holmen is co-founder and CEO at Bibblio, a leading provider of personalization and content recommendation services. He’s a passionate “better web” advocate and recognized publishing industry commentator.

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]]> 151965 How Canadian Filmmakers Combined a Film + Game to Combat Gambling Addiction http://mediashift.org/2018/03/canadian-filmmakers-combined-documentary-film-interactive-game/ Tue, 27 Mar 2018 10:05:12 +0000 http://mediashift.org/?p=151764 Documentary filmmaking is hard work. Typically, producing a documentary film requires months of background research, developing a budget, creating a production outline, making a shot list, and finding cooperative characters to tell their stories — and that’s before filming even begins. A group of filmmakers in Canada took their project one step further — by […]

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]]> Documentary filmmaking is hard work. Typically, producing a documentary film requires months of background research, developing a budget, creating a production outline, making a shot list, and finding cooperative characters to tell their stories — and that’s before filming even begins.

A group of filmmakers in Canada took their project one step further — by adding an interactive game element to their project.

“Thank You For Playing,” produced by the National Film Board of Canada, is part documentary film and part web game. The game simulates how casino games that reward users with positive reinforcement can lead to gambling addiction.

In Canada, revenue from gambling is used for infrastructure, health care, social services — and even preventing and treating gambling addiction. More than 35 percent of those revenues come from individuals with a gambling problem, according to the film.

It’s a paradox that the film’s director, Andréa Cohen-Boulakia, said she found fascinating. The goal of “Thank You For Playing,” which was released in December, is to bring awareness to the public health issue of gambling addiction. The filmmakers initially intended to focus on how the casino industry targets elderly people who often have a lot of free time, money to spend and are no longer active in society.

But after spending months traveling throughout towns and provinces across Canada to do research and interview prospective characters, Cohen-Boulakia found a more compelling story: the risk of gambling addiction as a result of being in a vulnerable emotional state. She saw that, as with any vice, some individuals are more prone to addiction than others. For most gambling addicts, the addiction is the outcome — not the original source of an individual’s problems.

“People talk about this being an emotional disease,” she said. “When you’re in a place where you’re emotionally wounded, you’re much more vulnerable. That’s what this is about.”

The Interactive Game 

The film opens up with a digital version of the shell game: the viewer, now the player, is presented with three icons. The icons are quickly shuffled and the film’s narrator directs the player to watch closely in order to uncover the icon that’s in the shape of a heart.

As the game continues, there are more icons are they are shuffled faster as the game becomes more challenging.

“Now you think you’re in control,” the narrator says. “But the game is programmed to let you win just often enough to condition your behavior. What is happening is called positive reinforcement.”

The viewer can then choose to watch one of three stories, each about a different subject who is recovering from a gambling addiction. Those characters, including one subject whose three-year-old daughter had been diagnosed with leukemia, explain how they saw gambling as an escape from their personal problems. The chapters of the film are interspersed between more opportunities to play the shell game, which continues to increase in difficulty.

The slot machine-like game allows the viewer, who has now become the player, to witness firsthand the adrenaline rush and excitement that come with winning a game — as well as the desire to keep playing. That’s an especially important component to include when the three subjects of the film cannot touch a machine themselves.

Andréa Cohen-Boulakia

Merging the interactive game with the documentary film scenes proved challenging and took more than one try to get right. Cohen-Boulakia described the two pieces as different “stories.”

“We wanted it to be interesting and enriching,” she said. “How can both formats, really different formats, mix together in order to give the audience a better understanding of the issue?”

Both the game and the film had the same goal — to educate. The goal was to have the game not match the experience of the characters in the film, but to create a new parallel and connecting experience. That required a team effort between the programmers and the producers, and it’s the part of the whole project that took the longest to complete, Cohen-Boulakia said.

The Film’s Impact

Cohen-Boulakia said as an educational tool, she hopes the film will bring more awareness about addiction and lead to more open discussions about what leads someone to go down that path.

Ideally, the risk and reward aspect of playing the game can offer insight into how individual might feel while gambling. Knowing early on that someone is susceptible to addiction might prevent the kind of dramatic outcomes in which people later find themselves when they are struggling with addiction. Cohen-Boulakia had even heard stories of addicts committing suicide. 

She said schools can have stronger prevention programs and hopes even kids will watch the film and begin to think about the issue.

“I hope people will be able to look in and ask themselves if they are prone to be dependent or not,” she said. “I hope people will talk more about it.”

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

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]]> 151764 How One Newspaper Launched an Online Rap Show To Boost Sales http://mediashift.org/2018/03/how-one-newspaper-transformed-into-an-online-rap-show-to-boost-sales/ Thu, 01 Mar 2018 11:05:02 +0000 http://mediashift.org/?p=151189 A version of this piece originally appeared at The Splice Newsroom. As newspaper sales stagnated, the Phnom Penh Post began looking for ways to appeal to more young Cambodians. Koam Chanrasmey, the 28-year-old head of the newspaper’s video department, searched for inspiration. He found it in online clips of newscasters rapping the news in countries […]

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]]>

A version of this piece originally appeared at The Splice Newsroom.

As newspaper sales stagnated, the Phnom Penh Post began looking for ways to appeal to more young Cambodians.

Koam Chanrasmey, the 28-year-old head of the newspaper’s video department, searched for inspiration. He found it in online clips of newscasters rapping the news in countries like Uganda and Senegal, but felt the approach had to be carefully considered before it could be introduced to conservative Cambodia.

“Rap is not Cambodian culture, it’s African-American culture,” he says. “But we could see the increasing popularity of rap among young people, and felt it was a different way of engaging the young people with reading the news.”

“We took that idea and [decided] let’s see what we can do in Cambodia to fit the Cambodian audience.”

The Phnom Penh Post has distinct English- and Khmer-language editions, with the latter known as Post Khmer. This is also reflected in their respective social media channels. The first clip, rapped entirely in Khmer, was posted on the Post Khmer Facebook in March to a generally warm reception from its followers.

Some anonymous users reacted with negative comments, accusing the rap news presenters of “destroying Cambodian culture.” But Chanrasmey tells Splice that the team values the positive comments, which ranged from “I never thought Cambodians could do this kind of thing” to “I never consume the news except for this; I like listening and dancing to the music.”

The online rap news show had gained about two million total views, with the highest to date surpassing 200,000 for an episode focusing on the bizarre case of an immigration police officer who staged a fall in front of a barely moving car. He was dubbed the ‘Poipet flopper’ by local media and earned the ridicule of Facebook users.

“When we started with the first episode we got 40,000 views and then we kept going up to 100,000 views [per episode],” Chanrasmey says.

But despite also drawing a spike in social media followers, the experiment in news delivery went on hiatus in September. One of five shows produced by the Post video team, the rap news series failed to attract an advertiser, while others have achieved financial viability—the travel, food and ‘Who is Who’ interview segments all have regular or semi-regular sponsors.

Episodes are time-intensive to produce: over the course of a week a composer creates original backing music, editors choose the stories, and the rapper duo creates rhymes to match. By Saturday morning, shooting is underway and editing follows in the afternoon.

Young people cheer at a Hip Hop contest in Phnom Penh. (Photo by Paula Bronstein/Getty Images)

Every element is carefully considered, according to Chanrasmey, from the time of posting—“normally we get more views at noon time”—to the thumbnail that accompanies the videos, in an attempt to draw in an audience aged 22 to 35.

“We want to have both female and male [viewers], but we ended up having majority men, like 95% men,” he laments.

Anything but politics

But while Chanrasmey says the video team aims to “engage young people to look at quality news and help them to shape their future,” politics has been off limits.

Cambodia’s authoritarian Prime Minister Hun Sen has been in power for more than three decades. A government crackdown ahead of elections in July has seen the country’s opposition leader, Kem Sokha, jailed on treason charges, his political party forcibly disbanded and most of the opposition’s senior leaders flee abroad. The media has not escaped unscathed: the independent Cambodia Daily newspaper was closed down in September, while U.S.-funded radio broadcasters Radio Free Asia and Voice of America have been forced off the airwaves.

The focus of rap news, then, has been on topics such as international news, business, entertainment and crime. And while Chamrasmey hopes to revive the segments, any relaunch would have to navigate a tense political environment.

“We don’t want those kinds of feelings around the stories. We think we have another purpose, to provide positive news.”

Holly Robertson is a freelance journalist based in Cambodia and an editor for The Splice Newsroom. Her work has been published by The Washington Post, Guardian, BBC, Columbia Journalism Review and VICE, among others.

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]]> 151189 The Ethical Challenges of Immersive Journalism http://mediashift.org/2018/02/the-ethical-challenges-of-immersive-journalism/ Wed, 28 Feb 2018 11:05:16 +0000 http://mediashift.org/?p=151263 It’s the year 2028. In your virtual reality (VR) headset, where you can watch the news in an immersive, 360-degree view, the President of the United States is standing in front of you. But are you sure it’s really the president, and not a simulation reciting some troll’s script? Can you trust VR journalists to […]

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]]> It’s the year 2028. In your virtual reality (VR) headset, where you can watch the news in an immersive, 360-degree view, the President of the United States is standing in front of you. But are you sure it’s really the president, and not a simulation reciting some troll’s script? Can you trust VR journalists to be honest with audiences and follow journalistic ethics?

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

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

Is VR a Fad or the Future?

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

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

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

The Ethics of VR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VR and Fake News

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

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

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

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

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

VR Can’t Support Itself Financially

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

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

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

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

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

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]]> 151263 Federal Regulation of Social Media Would Be a Disaster For Free Speech http://mediashift.org/2018/02/federal-regulation-of-social-media-would-be-a-disaster-for-free-speech/ Thu, 22 Feb 2018 11:05:12 +0000 http://mediashift.org/?p=151147 This article was originally published on The Conversation here. Special Counsel Robert Mueller on Friday charged 13 Russians with meddling in the 2016 presidential election. The Russians’ primary tool for meddling was social media, which they used to promote Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy and denigrate Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The indictment charges that the Russians violated […]

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]]> This article was originally published on The Conversation here.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller on Friday charged 13 Russians with meddling in the 2016 presidential election. The Russians’ primary tool for meddling was social media, which they used to promote Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy and denigrate Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

The indictment charges that the Russians violated U.S. laws that forbid foreigners from spending money to influence U.S. elections.

The charges, and the confirmation that the Russians had used social media in an attempt to influence the 2016 election, is likely to fuel the call for government regulation of Twitter, Facebook and other social media outlets. When tweets and posts can hurt democracy, America should do something, right?

Wrong.

Late last year, Congress grilled Twitter, Facebook and Google about their role in allowing foreign interests to place ads and articles intended to divide the electorate and spread false information during the 2016 election.

People in and out of government are calling for federal regulation of social media.

Lay down some rules, the thinking goes, and we would be able to prevent the infestation – now alleged in Friday’s indictment – of bots and fake news from our news feeds and ads. Democracy would be saved – or, at least, foreign interference in our elections kept in check.

However, as someone who has studied and taught the First Amendment for decades, I would argue that if such regulations were enacted, the main victims would be not the purveyors of fake news, but our freedom of expression. In my view, the result would do far more damage to our democracy than any foreign misinformation campaign ever could.

Free speech being attacked from all sides

The First Amendment is under a lot of duress.

Arguably, it’s been that way since the Supreme Court’s “clear and present danger” decision in 1919, which spelled out when limits on free speech could be lawful. It not only held that the government had an obligation to stop someone from “falsely shouting fire in a theater,” but also opened the gates to all manner of government violations of the First Amendment injunction that “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”

These range from the FCC’s “Fairness Doctrine,” which was upheld by the Supreme Court, that required broadcasters to present controversial issues in a balanced way (in the FCC’s view), to the FCC’s warning to radio broadcasters in 1971 not to play songs that glorified drug use, which actually had the effect of limiting the airplay of songs that critiqued drug culture.

Indeed, with the exception of Supreme Court decisions in the Pentagon Papers case in 1971 and the Communications Decency Act in 1997, the American government has systematically increased its control of media.

The situation has gotten much worse over the past year. President Trump has tweeted about withholding the licenses of NBC affiliates and lashed out at other media not to his liking.

Although Trump’s bluster about limiting and punishing media may be easy enough to deride, the fact that he is in the White House – and has the ability to appoint FCC commissioners – means his threats must be taken seriously.

Meanwhile, a theory of philosopher Karl Popper – the “paradox of tolerance” – is being widely cited as a justification for outlawing hate speech, notwithstanding the First Amendment. From his 1945 book “The Open Society and its Enemies,” it says that tolerance defeats itself when it permits intolerant speech.

I studied Popper extensively while researching my first book, an anthology of essays about Popper’s work. There are many aspects of Popper’s philosophy to admire, but I don’t believe the “paradox of tolerance” is among them.

To ban hate speech could turn our tolerant, democratic society into precisely the kind of state that hate speech is calling for: It could open up an opportunity for all sorts of speech to be dubbed “hate speech.”

A slippery slope

When regulating fake news on social media sites, there’s the danger of the same sort of phenomenon taking place. And it’s exactly why the well-meaning hue-and-cry that the government needs to intervene and forbid social media sites from disseminating fake news or allowing accounts that are actually bots is so dangerous.

Fake news is nothing new. Centuries ago, anti-Semitic publications spread rumors that Jews murdered Christian children and drank their blood on holidays.

Over the past two years, social media have increased the amplitude and reach of fake news. But there’s also been the ascension of a political figure – Trump – who has turned the tables by labeling any unwelcome news as “fake.”

Facebook ads linked to a Russian effort to disrupt the American political process are displayed as representatives from Google, Facebook and Twitter testify before the House Intelligence Committee on Nov. 1.
(Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo)

The latter should be more than enough reason to reject calls for government censorship of fake news. After all, who’s to say a government that determines what’s “fake” won’t simply follow Trump’s lead, and suppress critical and truthful content under the guise that it’s fake?

Instead, social media networks could develop and implement algorithms for identifying and removing fake news by marshaling the same engines that spread fake news in the first place. These algorithms would not be administered by the government; rather, Facebook and other social media would be responsible.

Twitter has already made considerable progress flagging and removing accounts that spread Islamic State propaganda. There’s no reason to think that the same process can’t be applied to Russian bots seeking to inflame political discord and therein damage America’s political system.

Such self-regulation is in the best interest of these media companies. It would increase the confidence of their users in what they encounter online. It would also have the added benefit of keeping government regulators at bay.

In the end, the ultimate antidote to fake news and bots is the rationality of the human mind.

As John Milton famously urged in his “Areopagitica,” if you let truth and falsity fight it out in the marketplace of ideas, human rationality will most likely choose the truth. Regulating what can enter that marketplace could impair or destroy this process, by inadvertently keeping truth from public awareness.

Rational thinking’s ability to identify fake news is more than a Miltonian ideal: It’s been demonstrated in a carefully conducted 2015 experiment. When given a small financial incentive, the subjects were able to identify fake news as fake, even if the fake news supported the political views of the subjects.

Indeed, rationality is deeply implicit in democracy itself. You can’t have the latter without the former.

The key in combating fake news and kindred attacks on our body politic is to give our rationality maximum access to all information, including the truth. And in my view, this means resisting any attempts by government to limit the information that reaches us.

The ConversationPaul Levinson is Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University.

The ConversationThis is an updated version of an article originally published on Nov. 28, 2017. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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]]> 151147 6 Things Data Visualization Can Learn From Feminism http://mediashift.org/2018/02/6-things-data-visualization-can-learn-feminism/ Fri, 16 Feb 2018 11:04:50 +0000 http://mediashift.org/?p=150994 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 […]

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]]> 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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]]> 150994 Why ‘Dialogue Journalism’ Is Having a Moment http://mediashift.org/2018/02/why-dialogue-journalism-is-having-a-moment/ Thu, 15 Feb 2018 11:05:01 +0000 http://mediashift.org/?p=150811 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. […]

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]]> 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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]]> 150811 How Facebook Could Really Fix Itself http://mediashift.org/2018/02/facebook-really-fix/ Wed, 07 Feb 2018 11:05:30 +0000 http://mediashift.org/?p=150662 This article was originally published on The Conversation here. Facebook has a world of problems. Beyond charges of Russian manipulation and promoting fake news, the company’s signature social media platform is under fire for being addictive, causing anxiety and depression, and even instigating human rights abuses. Company founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he wants […]

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]]> This article was originally published on The Conversation here.

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

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

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

Face-saving changes?

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

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

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

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

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

Personal isn’t always ‘meaningful’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Addressing the developing world

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

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

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

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

Fighting against the business model

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

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

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

Real solutions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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]]> 150662 An Experiment in Live Fact-Checking the State of the Union Speech by Trump http://mediashift.org/2018/02/an-experiment-in-live-fact-checking-the-state-of-the-union/ Mon, 05 Feb 2018 11:05:16 +0000 http://mediashift.org/?p=150558 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 […]

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]]> 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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]]> 150558 Lessons From ‘The Wall,’ USA Today Network’s Collaboration on Border Security http://mediashift.org/2018/02/lessons-from-the-wall-usa-today-networks-collaboration-on-border-security/ Thu, 01 Feb 2018 11:05:52 +0000 http://mediashift.org/?p=150436 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 […]

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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 <fill in the blank>.

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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