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The media becomes an activist for democracy
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Dec. 7, 2011, noon
LINK: thenextweb.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Joshua Benton   |   December 7, 2011

Bill Lefurgy, digital initiatives program manager, on its deal to archive all public tweets:

We firmly believe that we have to do this kind of thing because we anticipate that we’ll be bringing in large data sets again into the future. We don’t know specifically what, but certainly there’s no sign of data getting smaller or less complicated or less interesting…

There have been studies involved with what are the moods of the public at various times of the day in reaction to certain kinds of news events. There’s all these interesting kinds of mixing and matching that can be done using the tweets as a big set of data.

It’ll be interesting to see what sorts of data-anonymization policies get set in place before researchers dig in.

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The media becomes an activist for democracy
“We cannot be neutral about this, by definition. A free press that doesn’t agitate for democracy is an oxymoron.”
Embracing influencers as allies
“News organizations will increasingly rely on digital creators not just as amplifiers but as integral partners in storytelling.”
Action over analysis
“We’ve overindexed on problem articulation, to the point of problem admiring. The risk is that we are analyzing ourselves into inaction and irrelevance.”