Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
Journalists fight digital decay
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE

Archives: August 2018

Some would agree! Others would disagree! But that’s the challenge of creating a simple green/red label for a news site: You’ve got to have a cut-off line somewhere, and for NewsGuard, it’s somewhere south of Fox News.
Plus: Does all our yammering about fake news make people think real news is fake?
Bruised journalist egos or important missing metadata?
“If we’re going to be a test kitchen, let’s cook some stuff!”
An academic read through a bunch of smart people’s thoughts on the near-term future for news. Here are the trends he found.
One finding: “Need-to-know material converts (related to how to live your life, understand the world), while nice-to-know (guides, arts, reviews) converts badly but is key for retention.”
Well, maybe not easily, but an NYU team is building a tool to save the entirety of a news app (including underlying libraries and frameworks), as well as a digital repository to hold them for future audiences.
“There may be two partners who think they can’t work together, but really you could have a meeting or two and talk things out and resolve some questions — and then they actually could work together.”
“A dormant, stationary Android phone…communicated location information to Google 340 times during a 24-hour period, or at an average of 14 data communications per hour.”
Users forward dubious messages to a chatbot; volunteer editors evaluate their credibility; the bot answers back to the user (and anyone wondering in the future).